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ICO makes example of outsourcing giant over sluggish cyber response

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued a £14 million ($18.6 million) penalty to outsourcing giant Capita following a catastrophic 2023 cyberattack that exposed the personal data of 6.6 million people.…

Germany's northernmost state bins Outlook – and tens of thousands of Redmond licenses

Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany, has finally concluded one element of a long-running project to eject Microsoft from its infrastructure by giving Exchange Server the boot.…

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched the LibrePhone Project, an initiative to create a fully free and open-source mobile operating system that eliminates proprietary firmware and binary blobs. From the FSF: "Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones. ... Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS." The project site can be found here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ESG kicked like a 'toxic political football' amid greenwashing

Canalys Forums 2025 US President Donald Trump released a wrecking ball that smashed through environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies stateside – and it's now swinging across the Atlantic, according to analysts.…

Think tank cautions that without job cuts or capital savings, the math doesn't add up

UK government's plans to save £45 billion through the application of AI in the public sector lack clarity and are based on broad-brush assumptions, Members of Parliament have heard.…

And which will crash, repeatedly, until users learn how to handle it safely

Column Steve Jobs probably didn't remember how many times he skinned his knees learning to ride a bike before describing a personal computer as a "bicycle for the mind." Jobs' point was that both tools help us to go further, faster, with just a little extra effort.…

A new study shows that common baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) can survive Mars-like conditions, including meteorite shock waves and toxic perchlorate salts found in Martian soil. Phys.org reports: Published in PNAS Nexus, Purusharth I. Rajyaguru and colleagues subjected Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is a widely used model yeast, to shock waves and perchlorates. The authors chose the yeast in part because it has already been studied in space. When stressed, yeast, humans, and many other organisms form ribonucleoprotein (RNP) condensates, structures made of RNA and proteins that protect RNA and affect the fates of mRNAs. When the stressor passes, the RNP condensates, which include subtypes known as stress granules and P-bodies, disassemble. The authors simulated Martian shock waves at the High-Intensity Shock Tube for Astrochemistry (HISTA) housed in the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. Yeast exposed to 5.6 Mach intensity shock waves survived with slowed growth, as did yeast subjected to 100 mM sodium salt of perchlorate (NaClO4) -- a concentration similar to that in Martian soils. Yeast cells also survived exposure to the combined stress of shock waves and perchlorate stress. In both cases, the yeast assembled RNP condensates. Shock waves induced the assembly of stress granules and P-bodies; perchlorate caused yeast to make P-bodies but not stress granules. Mutants incapable of assembling RNP condensates were poor at surviving the Martian stress condition. Transcriptome analysis identified specific RNA transcripts perturbed by Mars-like conditions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the Agentic Enterprise, 'AI doesn’t replace people, it elevates them'

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff heralded the arrival of the agentic era during his keynote at the CRM giant's annual Dreamforce conference.…

Plus: Adobe, SAP, Ivanti offer treats, not tricks

Spooky season is in full swing, and this extends to Microsoft's October Patch Tuesday with security updates for a frightful 175 Microsoft vulnerabilities, plus an additional 21 non-Microsoft CVEs. And even scarier than the sheer number of bugs: three are listed as under attack, with three others publicly known, and 17 deemed critical security holes.…

America's main cybersecurity agency has lost almost 1,000 people this year

The Trump administration has continued to cut staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and is reportedly reassigning others, further imperiling the US' cybersecurity posture. …

Laptop maker's apolitical endorsement of politically contentious projects meets resistance

Six days ago, upgradeable laptop maker Framework tried to convince its fractious user community to live in a "big tent" after a Debian developer objected to the company's sponsorship of Hyprland and its social media promotion of Omarchy, with both projects associated with politically polarizing viewpoints.…

New clusters to feature 800,000 Nvidia Blackwell and 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450X GPUs

Oracle on Tuesday revealed it would field more than 18 zettaFLOPS worth of AI infrastructure from Nvidia and AMD by the second half of next year.…

Maybe this will bring in some actual profit?

OpenAI has mitigated ChatGPT behavior that might exacerbate users' mental health issues, claims CEO Sam Altman, so the natural next step is to make ChatGPT act more human again - complete with the ability to generate "erotica for verified adults."…

To the slop trough, kiddos!

Not content to shove Copilot into every corner of the enterprise it can think of, Microsoft has announced plans to force feed AI to students across its home state of Washington. …

Crims turned trusted mapping software into a hideout - no traditional malware required

A Chinese state-backed cybergang known as Flax Typhoon spent more than a year burrowing inside an ArcGIS server, quietly turning the trusted mapping software into a covert backdoor.…

This relatively affordable AI workstation isn’t about going fast; it’s about doing everything well enough

hands on Nvidia bills its long-anticipated DGX Spark as the "world's smallest AI supercomputer," and, at $3,000 to $4,000 (depending on config and OEM), you might be expecting the Arm-based mini-PC to outperform its less-expensive siblings.…

University team picks up voice calls, texts, and corporate data from orbit with off-the-shelf kit

Updated Geostationary satellites are broadcasting large volumes of unencrypted data to Earth, including private voice calls and text messages as well as consumer internet traffic, researchers have discovered.…

Users left wondering whether to fork it or forget it as another FOSS project bites the dust

The KuzuDB embedded graph database, open source under the MIT license, has been abandoned by its creator and sponsor Kùzu Inc, leaving its community pondering whether to fork or find an alternative.…

Japan's beer behemoth still mopping up after ransomware spill that disrupted deliveries and delayed results

Asahi's cyber hangover just got worse, with the brewer now admitting that personal information may have been tapped in last month's attack.…

Protesters slam forced obsolescence outside Microsoft's office

Updated Campaigners staged a protest outside Microsoft's Brussels office yesterday over the company's decision to end support for Windows 10.…