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Watt's the problem? Not enough energy to win the arms race?

US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that aims to ensure American AI leadership doesn't lag because of shoddy energy infrastructure.…

More than 150 Nobel and World Food prize laureates have signed an open letter calling for "moonshot" efforts to ramp up food production before an impending world hunger catastrophe. From a report: The coalition of some of the world's greatest living thinkers called for urgent action to prioritise research and technology to solve the "tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand." Big bang physicist Robert Woodrow Wilson; Nobel laureate chemist Jennifer Doudna; the Dalai Lama; economist Joseph E Stiglitz; Nasa scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig; Ethiopian-American geneticist Gebisa Ejeta; Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank; Wole Soyinka, Nobel prize for literature winner; and black holes Nobel physicist Sir Roger Penrose were among the signatories in the appeal coordinated by Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food prize laureate and US special envoy for global food security. Citing challenges including the climate crisis, war and market pressures, the coalition called for "planet-friendly" efforts leading to substantial leaps in food production to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. The plea was for financial and political backing, said agricultural scientist Geoffrey Hawtin, the British co-recipient of last year's World Food prize. [...] The world was "not even close" to meeting future needs, the letter said, predicting humanity faced an "even more food insecure, unstable world" by mid-century unless support for innovation was ramped up internationally.

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Attorney Jennifer Scullion on allegations of algorithmic suppression of competition

Interview Price fixing – an agreement between competitors to set price levels – has been illegal under the US Sherman Antitrust Act since 1890.…

Programmers have found ways to run the 1993 first-person shooter Doom on an array of unexpected platforms, and now a PDF file joins that list. Developer ading2210's DoomPDF project shows the game operating within a document format primarily designed for static content display. The creator says he drew inspiration from pdftris, another PDF-based game port by Thomas Rinsma.

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Fewer giant deals, but many more smaller ones, in bit barn feeding frenzy

Datacenter merger activity soared to new heights in 2024, with $57 billion in deals closed over the 12 months. If you're looking for a reason, you guessed it: anticipated gains around generative AI. …

Five wildfires in Los Angeles have already burned more than 10,000 structures, threatening to upend California's fragile balance between climate risk and home insurance. The Palisades Fire has damaged or destroyed more than 5,000 buildings in an area that liability experts had previously identified as one of three particularly vulnerable regions in the state. JPMorgan Chase estimates insured damages could reach $20 billion, positioning this as likely the costliest wildfire in U.S. history. The crisis comes as California's insurance market struggles, with seven of the 12 biggest home insurers having limited their coverage in the state over the past two years. The state-backed insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan, now faces exposure of up to $458 billion, while holding only $200 million in surplus cash reserves and $2.5 billion in reinsurance. Gusts of up to 100 miles per hour have fanned the flames, with more than 57,000 structures in severe danger and more than 150,000 people under evacuation.

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38-year veteran Edward Screven led technology and architecture decisions since Sun merger

One of Oracle's longest-serving senior team members, chief corporate architect Edward Screven, has announced plans to retire on a comfortable sum.…

Meta is cutting roughly 5% of its staff through performance-based eliminations and plans to hire new people to fill their roles this year, according to a company memo. From a report: As of September, Meta employed about 72,000 people, so a 5% reduction could affect roughly 3,600 jobs. "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in the note posted to an internal message board and reviewed by Bloomberg News. "We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year," he said, "but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

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U.K. public sector and critical infrastructure organizations could be banned from making ransom payments under new proposals from the U.K. government. From a report: The U.K.'s Home Office launched a consultation on Tuesday that proposes a "targeted ban" on ransomware payments. Under the proposal, public sector bodies -- including local councils, schools, and NHS trusts -- would be banned from making payments to ransomware hackers, which the government says would "strike at the heart of the cybercriminal business model." This government proposal comes after a wave of cyberattacks targeting the U.K. public sector. The NHS last year declared a "critical" incident following a cyberattack on pathology lab provider Synnovis, which led to a massive data breach of sensitive patient data and months of disruption, including canceled operations and the diversion of emergency patients. According to new data seen by Bloomberg, the cyberattack on Synnovis resulted in harm to dozens of patients, leading to long-term or permanent damage to their health in at least two cases.

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Double digit reduction only served to 'stimulate some interest'

Microsoft and its close circle of OEMs slashed the price of Copilot+ PCs being sold into Europe in Q4, an analyst confirmed to The Register, yet it still didn't make the impact hoped.…

Tech workers at major U.S. companies are earning thousands of dollars by referring job candidates they've never met, creating an underground marketplace for employment referrals at firms like Microsoft and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg. One tech worker cited in the report earned $30,000 in referral bonuses after recommending over 1,000 strangers to his employer over 18 months, resulting in more than six successful hires. While platforms like ReferralHub charge up to $50 per referral, Goldman Sachs and Google said such practices violate their policies. Google requires referrals to be based on personal knowledge of candidates.

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Third front opened amid continued scrutiny from US and European regulators

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the latest regulator investigating Google's position in the search and search advertising business.…

'Let's not do this again please'... days before release date

Intel and AMD engineers have stepped in at the eleventh to deal with a code contribution from a Microsoft developer that could have broken Linux 6.13 on some systems.…

Packages removed, vendor said to have apologized to AI code editor as onlookers say it could have been a test

Updated Developer security company Snyk is at the center of allegations concerning the possible targeting or testing of Cursor, an AI code editor company, using "malicious" packages uploaded to NPM.…

He could buy 49,766 and a half MacBook Pros with that

Apple supremo Tim Cook bagged an 18 percent pay rise in 2024, taking his total compensation to $74.6 million, according to a regulatory filing.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Benj Edwards: While worrying about AI takeover might seem like a modern idea that sprung from War Games or The Terminator, it turns out that a similar concern about machine dominance dates back to the time of the American Civil War, albeit from an English sheep farmer living in New Zealand. Theoretically, Abraham Lincoln could have read about AI takeover during his lifetime. On June 13, 1863, a letter published (PDF) in The Press newspaper of Christchurch warned about the potential dangers of mechanical evolution and called for the destruction of machines, foreshadowing the development of what we now call artificial intelligence—and the backlash against it from people who fear it may threaten humanity with extinction. It presented what may be the first published argument for stopping technological progress to prevent machines from dominating humanity. Titled "Darwin among the Machines," the letter recently popped up again on social media thanks to Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. The author of the letter, Samuel Butler, submitted it under the pseudonym Cellarius, but later came to publicly embrace his position. The letter drew direct parallels between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the rapid development of machinery, suggesting that machines could evolve consciousness and eventually supplant humans as Earth's dominant species. "We are ourselves creating our own successors," he wrote. "We are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race." In the letter, he also portrayed humans becoming subservient to machines, but first serving as caretakers who would maintain and help reproduce mechanical life—a relationship Butler compared to that between humans and their domestic animals, before it later inverts and machines take over. "We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man... we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them... in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals," he wrote. The text anticipated several modern AI safety concerns, including the possibility of machine consciousness, self-replication, and humans losing control of their technological creations. These themes later appeared in works like Isaac Asimov's The Evitable Conflict, Frank Herbert's Dune novels (Butler possibly served as the inspiration for the term "Butlerian Jihad"), and the Matrix films. "Butler's letter dug deep into the taxonomy of machine evolution, discussing mechanical 'genera and sub-genera' and pointing to examples like how watches had evolved from 'cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century' -- suggesting that, like some early vertebrates, mechanical species might get smaller as they became more sophisticated," adds Ars. "He expanded these ideas in his 1872 novel Erewhon, which depicted a society that had banned most mechanical inventions. In his fictional society, citizens destroyed all machines invented within the previous 300 years."

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That niche forum running for 20 years – get ready, there's work to do

Analysis A little more than two months out from its first legal deadline, the UK’s Online Safety Act is causing concern among smaller online forums caught within its reach. The legislation, which came into law in the autumn of 2023, applies to search services and services that allow users to post content online or to interact with each other.…

Linux distros that don't exist, but we wish did

Analysis In an overcrowded field full of distributions, there are still many empty gaps. The Register would like to point in the direction of a few.…

Stronger proposals may also see private sector applying for a payment 'license'

A total ban on ransomware payments across the public sector might actually happen after the UK government opened a consultation on how to combat the trend of criminals locking up whole systems and taxpayers footing the bill.…

A new ransomware group called Codefinger targets AWS S3 buckets by exploiting compromised or publicly exposed AWS keys to encrypt victims' data using AWS's own SSE-C encryption, rendering it inaccessible without the attacker-generated AES-256 keys. While other security researchers have documented techniques for encrypting S3 buckets, "this is the first instance we know of leveraging AWS's native secure encryption infrastructure via SSE-C in the wild," Tim West, VP of services with the Halcyon RISE Team, told The Register. "Historically AWS Identity IAM keys are leaked and used for data theft but if this approach gains widespread adoption, it could represent a significant systemic risk to organizations relying on AWS S3 for the storage of critical data," he warned. From the report: ... in addition to encrypting the data, Codefinder marks the compromised files for deletion within seven days using the S3 Object Lifecycle Management API â" the criminals themselves do not threaten to leak or sell the data, we're told. "This is unique in that most ransomware operators and affiliate attackers do not engage in straight up data destruction as part of a double extortion scheme or to otherwise put pressure on the victim to pay the ransom demand," West said. "Data destruction represents an additional risk to targeted organizations." Codefinger also leaves a ransom note in each affected directory that includes the attacker's Bitcoin address and a client ID associated with the encrypted data. "The note warns that changes to account permissions or files will end negotiations," the Halcyon researchers said in a report about S3 bucket attacks shared with The Register. While West declined to name or provide any additional details about the two Codefinger victims -- including if they paid the ransom demands -- he suggests that AWS customers restrict the use of SSE-C. "This can be achieved by leveraging the Condition element in IAM policies to prevent unauthorized applications of SSE-C on S3 buckets, ensuring that only approved data and users can utilize this feature," he explained. Plus, it's important to monitor and regularly audit AWS keys, as these make very attractive targets for all types of criminals looking to break into companies' cloud environments and steal data. "Permissions should be reviewed frequently to confirm they align with the principle of least privilege, while unused keys should be disabled, and active ones rotated regularly to minimize exposure," West said. An AWS spokesperson said it notifies affected customers of exposed keys and "quickly takes any necessary actions, such as applying quarantine policies to minimize risks for customers without disrupting their IT environment." They also directed users to this post about what to do upon noticing unauthorized activity.

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