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No evidence of exploitation … yet

A 13-year-old critical flaw in Redis servers, rated a perfect 10 out of 10 in severity, can let an authenticated user trigger remote code execution.…

Deforestation is draining color from butterfly populations in Brazil. Researchers studying butterflies in the state of EspÃrito Santo found 31 species in natural forests but only 21 in eucalyptus plantations. The plantation communities were dominated by brown-colored species. Roberto GarcÃa-Roa, part of the research project, said the colors on butterfly wings have been designed over millions of years. Lead researcher Maider Iglesias-Carrasco from the University of Copenhagen observed a general feeling of emptiness in the plantations. Ricardo Spaniol from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul discovered in 2019 that the most colorful Amazonian species often disappear first after deforestation, probably because of the loss of native vegetation and increased exposure to predators. Eucalyptus plantations cover at least 22 million hectares around the world. Spaniol's research found that forested Amazon habitats regenerating for 30 years after use as cattle pasture showed a remarkable increase in butterfly color diversity.

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Altman promises copyright holders a cut of video revenue, if he ever figures out how to make some.

analysis OpenAI's new Sora 2 video generator has become the most popular free app in Apple's App Store since launching last week. It has also drawn ire from Hollywood studios and anyone whose characters and storylines appear in the user-generated content without their explicit permission. Now CEO Sam Altman says rightsholders will be getting greater control over how their properties are used - and may even be paid. …

Deloitte will partially refund payment for an Australian government report that contained multiple errors after admitting it was partly produced by AI [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The Big Four accountancy and consultancy firm will repay the final instalment of its government contract after conceding that some footnotes and references it contained were incorrect, Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations said on Monday. The department had commissioned a A$439,000 ($290,300) "independent assurance review" from Deloitte in December last year to help assess problems with a welfare system for automatically penalising jobseekers. The Deloitte review was first published earlier this year, but a corrected version was uploaded on Friday to the departmental website. In late August the Australian Financial Review reported that the document contained multiple errors, including references and citations to non-existent reports by academics at the universities of Sydney and Lund in Sweden. The substance of the review and its recommendations had not changed, the Australian government added. The contract will be made public once the transaction is completed, it said.

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European labor regulations enacted nearly a century ago now impose costs on companies that discourage investment in disruptive technologies. An American firm shedding workers incurs costs equivalent to seven months of wages per employee. In Germany the figure reaches 31 months. In France it reaches 38 months. The expense extends beyond severance pay and union negotiations. Companies retain unproductive workers they would prefer to dismiss. New investments face delays of years as dismissed employees are gradually replaced. Olivier Coste, a former EU official turned tech entrepreneur, and economist Yann Coatanlem tracked these opaque restructuring costs and found that European firms avoid risky ventures because of them. Large companies typically finance ten risky projects where eight fail and require mass redundancies. Apple developed a self-driving car for years before abandoning the effort and firing 600 employees in 2024. The two successful projects generate profits worth many times the invested sums. This calculus works in America where failure costs remain low. In Europe the same bet becomes financially unviable. European blue-chip firms sell products that are improved versions of what they sold in the 20th century -- turbines, shampoos, vaccines, jetliners. American star firms peddle AI chatbots, cloud computers, reusable rockets. Nvidia is worth more than the European Union's 20 biggest listed firms combined. Microsoft, Google, and Meta each fired over 10,000 staff in recent years despite thriving businesses. Satya Nadella called firing people during success the "enigma of success." Bosch and Volkswagen recently announced layoffs with timelines stretching to 2030.

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Dropping descenders to achieve a perfect baseline

Nostalgia fans rejoice – a new monospaced display font has made its debut, and this time every glyph shares the same baseline height with no descenders to interfere with the character flow.…

Big Four consultancy billed Canberra top dollar, only for investigators to find bits written by a chatbot

Deloitte has agreed to refund part of an Australian government contract after admitting it used generative AI to produce a report riddled with fake citations, phantom footnotes, and even a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgment.…

Crime group claims to have already doled out $1K to those in it 'for money and for the love of the game'

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters has launched an unusual crowdsourced extortion scheme, offering $10 in Bitcoin to anyone willing to help pressure their alleged victims into paying ransoms.…

Fortune tested the AI Friend necklace for two weeks and found it struggled to perform its basic function. The $129 pendant missed conversations entirely during the author's breakup call and could only offer vague questions about "fragments" when she tried to ask for advice. The device lagged seven to ten seconds behind her speech and frequently disconnected. The author had to press her lips against the pendant and repeat herself multiple times to get coherent replies. After a week and a half the necklace forgot her name and later misremembered her favorite color. The startup has raised roughly seven million dollars in venture capital for the product and spent a large portion on eleven thousand subway posters across the MTA system. Sales reached three thousand units but only one thousand have shipped. The company brought in slightly under four hundred thousand dollars in revenue. The startup told Fortune he deliberately "lobotomized" the AI's personality after receiving complaints. The terms of service require arbitration in San Francisco and grant the company permission to collect audio and voice data for AI training.

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Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries about how the immune system regulates itself. The three researchers split 11 million Swedish kroner ($1.17 million). Their work identified regulatory T cells and the FOXP3 gene that controls them. Dr. Sakaguchi spent more than a decade solving a puzzle about the thymus. He discovered that the immune system has a backup mechanism to stop harmful cells from attacking the body's own tissues. Dr. Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell found the specific gene responsible for this process while studying mice that developed severe autoimmune disease. More than 200 clinical trials are now underway based on their research. Cancers attract regulatory T cells to block immune attacks. Researchers are developing drugs to turn the immune system against these cancer cells. In autoimmune diseases, regulatory T cells are missing or defective. The FOXP3 gene provides a starting point for drugs that teach the immune system to stop attacking itself.

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6GW chip pact sends AMD stock soaring, Nvidia has a rival for Altman biz love

AMD and OpenAI have forged a 6 gigawatt agreement to power OpenAI’s AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs.…

OpenAI and AMD announced a multibillion-dollar partnership on Monday for AI data centers running on AMD processors. OpenAI committed to purchasing 6 gigawatts worth of AMD's MI450 chips starting next year through direct purchases or through its cloud computing partners. AMD chief Lisa Su said the deal will result in tens of billions of dollars in new revenue over the next half-decade. OpenAI will receive warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares at 1 cent per share, representing roughly 10% of the chip company. The warrants will be awarded in phases if OpenAI hits certain deployment milestones. The partnership marks AMD's biggest win in its quest to disrupt Nvidia's dominance among AI semiconductor companies. Mizuho Securities estimates that Nvidia controls more than 70% of the market for AI chips.

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Musk space biz: 'Anyone else that wants to use the spectrum must coordinate with us first'

EchoStar says it has met the regulatory conditions to maintain the spectrum it is selling to Musk's rocketeers.…

Ransomware crooks utterly fail to find moral compass

First they targeted a preschool network, now new kids on the ransomware block Radiant Group say they've hit a hospital in the US, continuing their deplorable early cybercrime careers.…

gem.coop server promises continuity after Ruby Central’s takeover of key repos

A team including maintainers removed without notice from the RubyGems.org project has formed the Gem Cooperative and created a new gem server called gem.coop, compatible with RubyGems.…

Under the sea, under the sea... bit barnacle's better, down where it's wetter, take it from me

China is persevering with underwater datacenters - a deployment off the coast near Shanghai is expected to save on the energy costs of cooling compute infrastructure thanks to ocean currents.…

Outsourcing your helpdesk always seems like a good idea – until someone else's breach becomes your problem

Discord has confirmed customers' data was stolen – but says the culprit wasn't its own servers, just a compromised support vendor.…

Vibe coding tools "are transforming the job experience for many tech workers," writes the Los Angeles Times. But Gartner analyst Philip Walsh said the research firm's position is that AI won't replace software engineers and will actually create a need for more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it..." The idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding [Walsh said]... "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like." "Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers," the article points out. "In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' — ages 22-25 — in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve nearly 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier." And yet Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code, doesn't even use the term vibe coding. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

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No confirmed date but workers expected to return in the coming days

Jaguar Land Rover is readying staff to resume manufacturing in the coming days, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Reg.…

Big Red rushes out patch for 9.8-rated flaw after crooks exploit it for data theft and extortion

Oracle rushed out an emergency fix over the weekend for a zero-day vulnerability in its E-Business Suite (EBS) that criminal crew Clop has already abused for data theft and extortion.…