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UK and US customers stuck waiting after fleet management SaaS vendor took affected environments offline

A cybersecurity incident has knocked FleetWave into a "major outage" across the UK and US after Chevin Fleet Solutions pulled parts of its SaaS platform offline and left customers scrambling for answers.…

BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools like OpenSnitch and various command line utilities exist, but none provided the same simple experience of seeing which process is connecting where and blocking it with a click. The Linux version uses eBPF for kernel level traffic interception, with core components written in Rust and a web based interface that can even monitor remote Linux servers. During testing on Ubuntu, the developer noticed the system was relatively quiet on the network. Over the course of a week, only nine system processes made internet connections. By comparison, macOS reportedly showed more than one hundred processes communicating externally. Applications behave similarly across platforms though. Launching Firefox immediately triggered telemetry and advertising related connections, while LibreOffice made no network connections at all during testing. The early release is meant primarily as a transparency tool to show what software is doing on the network rather than a hardened security firewall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sam Altman's datacenter dreams hit a wall of watts and wonkery, cooling Britain's AI ambitions

OpenAI is pausing its planned Stargate datacenter project in the UK just months after announcing it, citing the regulatory environment and cost of energy as reasons for putting it on hold.…

Malicious PDFs abuse legit features to harvest system data and decide which victims get a 2nd-stage payload

Hackers have been quietly exploiting what appears to be a zero-day in Adobe Acrobat Reader for months, using booby-trapped PDFs to profile targets and decide who's worth fully compromising.…

No emails, no warnings, no humans – just bots, catch-22s, and a 60-day appeals queue

Microsoft says that it will work on how it communicates with developers after two leading open source figures were suddenly locked out of their accounts, leaving them unable to sign updates.…

Memory costs were already through the roof - now freight's spiking too, and budget systems face extinction

America's war with Iran is jacking up the pressure on computing markets already struggling with memory shortages and component cost inflation, meaning buyers should brace themselves for even higher prices this year.…

Wash your mouth out with digital soap

Apple Intelligence, the personal AI system integrated into newer Macs, iPhones, and other iThings, can be hijacked using prompt injection, forcing the model into producing an attacker-controlled result and putting millions of users at risk, researchers have shown.…

Departure may accelerate further AI-centric moves for programming tools

Julia Liuson, president of Microsoft's developer division (DevDiv), will resign at the end of June, though she will continue in an advisory role.…

The core product is solid and priced fairly

I've spent over a decade telling anyone who'd listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday – which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share – I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it.…

Attackers slipped into the process and redirected funds, leaving the company scrambling to recover the cash

UK-listed oil and gas outfit Zephyr Energy plc has admitted a cyber incident siphoned off roughly £700,000 after a single payment to a contractor was quietly redirected to an attacker-controlled account.…

A federal appeals court denied Anthropic's bid to temporarily block the Pentagon's blacklisting, meaning the company remains shut out of Defense Department contracts while the case continues, even though a separate court has allowed other federal agencies to keep using Claude for now. CNBC reports: "In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government," the appeals court said in its decision. "On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict. For that reason, we deny Anthropic's motion for a stay pending review on the merits." With the split decisions by the two courts, Anthropic is excluded from DOD contracts but is able to continue working with other government agencies while litigation plays out. Defense contractors will be prohibited from using Claude in their work with the agency, but they can use it for other cases. [...] In the ruling on Wednesday, the court acknowledged that Anthropic "will likely suffer some degree of irreparable harm absent a stay," but that the company's interests "seem primarily financial in nature." While the company claimed the DOD was standing in the way of its right to free speech, "Anthropic does not show that its speech has been chilled during the pendency of this litigation," the order said. Because of the harm Anthropic is likely to suffer, the appeals court said "substantial expedition is warranted." An Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement after the ruling that the company is "grateful the court recognized these issues need to be resolved quickly" and that it's "confident the courts will ultimately agree that these supply chain designations were unlawful." "While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI," Anthropic said.

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DSIT hiring directors general with packages reaching £260K plus pension

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is recruiting three directors general to lead aspects of the UK government's digital work, all on pay in excess of the prime minister's salary.…

As if the backlog, the bugs, and the chatbot fixes weren't enough

Capita has limited the online functionality of its Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS) member portal after confirming an "issue" briefly exposed the personal data of public sector workers.…

Home Office hopes tech will help cops target hotspots as ministers push to halve offenses

The British government is spending £15 million over the next three years to improve crime mapping in England and Wales, partly to allow more targeted policing of knife crime.…

Court of Appeal hearing in ValueLicensing dispute may shape parallel proceedings

The Microsoft and ValueLicensing legal tussle will enter an appeals phase this month, attracting the attention of a multibillion-pound class action against the Windows giant.…

Even fitness equipment is vulnerable to mischief makers these days

PWNED Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we share war stories from IT soldiers who shot themselves – or watched someone else shoot themselves – in the foot. Today's tale shows that even when you're setting up something as simple as fitness gear, there's no excuse for leaving security credentials lying around.…

The time is maybe

Quantum computing exists in a sort of superposition with regard to cryptography – it's both a pending threat and a technology of no immediate consequence for decryption.…

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's foldable iPhone is still "on track" for a September unveiling alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. 9to5Mac reports: The report notes that Apple's stock took a hit earlier today after Nikkei Asia indicated the iPhone Fold was having serious production issues. Clearly, sources within Apple were motivated to share positive news via Gurman. Not long ago, Gurman himself said that he was expecting an iPhone Fold release date that was a little bit later than iPhone 18 Pro. That's still very possible, but it sounds like Apple is internally feeling optimistic about its targeted September launch. The report continues: "While the complexity of the new display and materials may limit initial supply for several weeks, Apple is currently operating with a plan to put the device on sale around the same time -- or very soon after -- the new non-foldable models, the people said." Gurman adds an important qualifier: "Still, the release is six months away and production has yet to ramp up. That means the timing isn't final."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere's authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents (PDF) -- far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%. The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide "the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair" of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment's software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday's settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward. The report notes that a judge's approval of the settlement is still required but likely to happen. John Deere also faces another lawsuit by the U.S. FTC, accusing the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You were the chosen one! It was said that you would destroy the proprietary models, not join them!

Nearly two years after extolling the virtues of open source AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is singing a different tune. …