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Experts warn not to take leaks lightly as years-long compromises could remain undetected

Thousands of email addresses included in the Belsen Group's dump of FortiGate configs last week are now available online, revealing which organizations may have been impacted by the 2022 zero-day exploits.…

Chips and software giant Broadcom says it's 'flexible and open' on licensing terms, but customers disagree

VMware users continue to be unhappy with licensing changes since the virtualization giant was acquired by Broadcom, and are now complaining that they are being forced into three-year commitments when renewing vSphere licenses.…

Microsoft's absence from OpenAI's Stargate announcement follows months of tension between the companies and signals a new era in which the longtime partners will be less reliant on each other. From a report: At a White House press conference, the ChatGPT maker announced Stargate, a venture with Oracle and tech investor SoftBank. The new company plans to spend up to $500 billion building new data centers in the U.S. to help power OpenAI's development. The assembled leaders -- OpenAI's Sam Altman, Oracle's Larry Ellison, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son and President Trump -- discussed how AI could create jobs and even cure cancer. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was thousands of miles away, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The developments show how the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership that helped trigger the generative-AI boom is drifting apart as each company focuses on its own evolving needs. In the months leading up to the announcement, the two sides had been haggling over what to do about OpenAI's seemingly insatiable appetite for computing power and its contention Microsoft couldn't fulfill it even though their agreement didn't allow OpenAI to easily switch to others, said people familiar with the discussions. OpenAI is almost entirely reliant on Microsoft to provide it with the data centers it needs to build and operate its sophisticated AI software. That has been part of their agreement since Microsoft first invested in 2019. With the success of ChatGPT, OpenAI's need for computing power surged. Its executives have said ending the exclusive cloud contract could be crucial to compete with rival AI developers that don't have the same constraints.

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Shares slide at 'most profitable' company in Korea as world worries over geopolitics

Market uncertainty and fears around trade protectionism are overshadowing SK hynix's latest earnings, with its shares sliding despite revenue doubling for the financial year just completed.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: E-commerce giant Amazon.com is exiting its operations in the Canadian province of Quebec, leading to the loss of about 1,700 full-time jobs, the company said on Wednesday, prompting Ottawa to express its unhappiness. The online retailer will phase out operations across seven sites in the province -- the only location in Canada with unionized Amazon employees -- over the next two months. It will return to a third-party delivery model, relying on local small businesses, similar to its approach before 2020. "Following a recent review of our Quebec operations, we've seen that returning to a third-party delivery model ... will allow us to provide even more savings to our customers," Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait said. The move will affect approximately 250 seasonal workers. Amazon will offer affected employees a package including up to 14 weeks' pay and "transitional benefits such as job placement resources," Agrait added. "This is not the way business is done in Canada," said Federal Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne. "There is no doubt that the closings announced today are part of an anti-union campaign against CSN and Amazon employees," said CSN president Caroline Senneville in a statement. "This move contradicts the provisions of the Quebec Labour Code, which we will strongly oppose," Senneville added.

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As Microsoft, Apple, and Google switch the tech on by default, what happened to asking for permission first?

Opinion Copilot in Microsoft 365 and Apple Intelligence on iDevices are the latest examples of the tech industry's obsession with making services opt-out rather than opt-in.…

CMA flexes its new Strategic Market Status muscles

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching Strategic Market Status (SMS) investigations into both Apple and Google, probing the duo's control of their respective mobile ecosystems.…

Coming soon to April's TrueNAS SCALE release, dubbed 'Fangtooth'

The latest version of OpenZFS offers RAID expansion, plus faster data deduplication donated by iXsystems. The code will be available very soon in the beta of TrueNAS SCALE 25.04.…

Plus: 'Largest-ever' duff traffic tsunami clocks in at 5.6 Tbps

In addition to Chinese spies invading organizations' networks and ransomware crews locking up sensitive files, botnets blasting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can still cause a world of hurt — and website downtime — and it's quite likely your competitors are to blame.…

A federal district court has ruled that backdoor searches of Americans' private communications collected under Section 702 of FISA are unconstitutional without a warrant. "The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute 'separate Fourth Amendment events' and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required," reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "Now, that has been officially decreed." Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares the report: Hasbajrami involves a U.S. resident who was arrested at New York JFK airport in 2011 on his way to Pakistan and charged with providing material support to terrorists. Only after his original conviction did the government explain that its case was premised in part on emails between Mr. Hasbajrami and an unnamed foreigner associated with terrorist groups, emails collected warrantless using Section 702 programs, placed in a database, then searched, again without a warrant, using terms related to Mr. Hasbajrami himself. The district court found that regardless of whether the government can lawfully warrantlessly collect communications between foreigners and Americans using Section 702, it cannot ordinarily rely on a "foreign intelligence exception" to the Fourth Amendment's warrant clause when searching these communications, as is the FBI's routine practice. And, even if such an exception did apply, the court found that the intrusion on privacy caused by reading our most sensitive communications rendered these searches "unreasonable" under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US person's 702 data.

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And the government thinks that AI and taking shackles off big tech will help? God help Britain

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, the number of tech firms incorporated in the UK has declined, with a shrinking economy, as well as high inflation and interest rates causing a slump in business confidence.…

Nailed just 15% of assigned tasks

A service described as "the first AI software engineer" appears to be rather bad at its job, based on a recent evaluation.…

Answers on a postcard to what 'Microcode Signature Verification Vulnerability' might mean

AMD has confirmed at least some of its microprocessors suffer a microcode-related security vulnerability, the existence of which accidentally emerged this month after a fix for the flaw appeared in a beta BIOS update from PC maker Asus.…

Scientists have detected cosmic "chorus waves" resembling bird chirps over 62,000 miles from Earth, a region where such waves have never been observed. "Scientists still aren't sure how the perturbations happen, but they think Earth's magnetic field may have something to do with it," reports the Associated Press. From the report: The chorus has been picked up on radio antennas for decades, including receivers at an Antarctica research station in the 1960s. And twin spacecraft -- NASA's Van Allen Probes -- heard the chirps from Earth's radiation belts at a closer distance than the newest detection. The latest notes were picked up by NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale satellites, launched in 2015 to explore the Earth and sun's magnetic fields. The new research was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Chorus waves have also been spotted near other planets including Jupiter and Saturn. They can even produce high-energy electrons capable of scrambling satellite communications. "They are one of the strongest and most significant waves in space," said study author Chengming Liu from Beihang University in an email. The newfound chorus waves were detected in a region where Earth's magnetic field is stretched out, which scientists didn't expect. That raises fresh questions about how these chirping waves form. "It's very captivating, very compelling," Jaynes said. "We definitely need to find more of these events."

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What? Why? Xi wants people spending, so has extended a subsidy scheme to phones, tabs, and smartwatches

If you want a cheap iPhone, China’s the place to be right now thanks to a government subsidy scheme that means resellers are discounting the devices to make sure Beijing helps to pick up the bill.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Department of Homeland Security has terminated all members of advisory committees, including one that has been investigating a major Chinese hack of large US telecom firms. "The Cyber Safety Review Board -- a Department of Homeland Security investigatory body stood up under a Biden-era cybersecurity executive order to probe major cybersecurity incidents -- has been cleared of non-government members as part of a DHS-wide push to cut costs under the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the matter," NextGov/FCW reported yesterday. A memo sent Monday by DHS Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman said that in order to "eliminate[e] the misuse of resources and ensur[e] that DHS activities prioritize our national security, I am directing the termination of all current memberships on advisory committees within DHS, effective immediately. Future committee activities will be focused solely on advancing our critical mission to protect the homeland and support DHS's strategic priorities." The memo said advisory board members terminated this week "are welcome to reapply." The Cyber Safety Review Board's list of members included security experts from the private sector and lead cybersecurity officials from multiple government agencies. "The CSRB was 'less than halfway' done with its Salt Typhoon investigation, according to a now-former member," wrote freelance cybersecurity reporter Eric Geller, who quoted an anonymous source as saying the Cyber Safety Review Board's review of Salt Typhoon is "dead." The former member was also quoted as saying, "There are still professional staff for the CSRB and I hope they will continue some of the work in the interim." The Cyber Safety Review Board operates under (PDF) the DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), notes Ars. The review board previously investigated a 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange Online and more recently has been investigating how the Chinese hacking group called Salt Typhoon infiltrated major telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T.

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Consumer spending on apps is projected to reach $150 billion globally in 2024, up 13% from the prior year. According to Sensor Tower's annual "State of Mobile" report, it's being fueled by a 200% surge in spending on generative AI apps like ChatGPT and Gemini, which collectively drew $1.1 billion. TechCrunch reports: If this rate of growth is sustained, this category of apps could move into the top 10 by consumer spending within a year, the firm notes. Though the release of new AI models, like OpenAI's GPT-4o last summer, helped drive app revenue up to record numbers at times, consumer demand for AI apps was consistent throughout the year -- not only during these peak surges. As a result, consumers spent nearly 7.7 billion hours using AI apps in 2024, while apps mentioning "AI" were also downloaded 17 billion times in the year. ChatGPT alone reached 50 million monthly active users -- faster than Temu, Disney+, or YouTube Music, for comparison. This indicates there's still a growing appetite for AI apps and those with AI features.

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Old flaws that keep causing trouble haunt Big Red

Oracle has delivered its regular quarterly collection of patches: 603 in total, 318 for its own products, and another 285 for Linux code it ships.…

Google Fiber has confirmed that it has started construction in Las Vegas and Clark County, with its fiber internet service expected to be available "later this year." The Verge reports: On Wednesday, Google also confirmed that it's piloting simplified, "lifestyle-based" plans in Alabama and Tennesee, which were first spotted last month. The new $70 / month Core 1 Gig, $100 / month Home 3 Gig, and $150 / month Edge 8 Gig plans replace the 1 Gig, 2 Gig, 5 Gig, and 8 Gig plans that GFiber widely offers. These new plans are also launching in all of the locations where GFiber is currently available in Arizona and North Carolina, GFiber spokesperson Sunny Gettinger tells The Verge. They're coming to most of GFiber's remaining cities within the next month, too.

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LinkedIn has been sued by Premium customers alleging the platform disclosed private messages to third parties without consent to train generative AI models. The lawsuit seeks damages for breach of contract and privacy violations, accusing LinkedIn of attempting to minimize scrutiny over its actions. Reuters reports: According to a proposed class action filed on Tuesday night on behalf of millions of LinkedIn Premium customers, LinkedIn quietly introduced a privacy setting last August that let users enable or disable the sharing of their personal data. Customers said LinkedIn then discreetly updated its privacy policy on Sept. 18 to say data could be used to train AI models, and in a "frequently asked questions" hyperlink said opting out "does not affect training that has already taken place." This attempt to "cover its tracks" suggests LinkedIn was fully aware it violated customers' privacy and its promise to use personal data only to support and improve its platform, in order to minimize public scrutiny and legal fallout, the complaint said. The lawsuit was filed in the San Jose, California, federal court on behalf of LinkedIn Premium customers who sent or received InMail messages, and whose private information was disclosed to third parties for AI training before Sept. 18. It seeks unspecified damages for breach of contract and violations of California's unfair competition law, and $1,000 per person for violations of the federal Stored Communications Act. LinkedIn said in a statement: "These are false claims with no merit."

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