Linux fréttir

Regulator reviews wholesale telecoms markets and decides healthy fiber is its biggest concern

Britain's telecoms watchdog is giving itself a pat on the back for overseeing the UK's fiber broadband rollout thus far, so doesn't want to rock the boat by making any drastic changes to the regulations at this point, despite admitting there is no effective competition for BT.…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday walked back comments he made in January, when he cast doubt on whether useful quantum computers would hit the market in the next 15 years. From a report: At Nvidia's "Quantum Day" event, part of the company's annual GTC Conference, Huang admitted that his comments came out wrong. "This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong," Huang said. In January, Huang sent quantum computing stocks reeling when he said 15 years was "on the early side" in considering how long it would be before the technology would be useful. He said at the time that 20 years was a timeframe that "a whole bunch of us would believe." In his opening comments on Thursday, Huang drew comparisons between pre-revenue quantum companies and Nvidia's early days. He said it took over 20 years for Nvidia to build out its software and hardware business. He also expressed surprise that his comments were able to move markets, and joked he didn't know that certain quantum computing companies were publicly traded. "How could a quantum computer company be public?" Huang said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With only BASIC knowledge to fall back on, and a typing pool in tears, the OFF switch looked very attractive

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that tells your stories of tech support jobs performed under stress, duress, and all sorts of mess.…

Made up revenue and pretended to use non-existent data

The former CEO of Kubient, an advertising tech company that developed a cloudy product capable of detecting fraudulent ads, has been jailed for fraud.…

Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI attempted to purchase hundreds of millions of arrest records including social security numbers, mugshots, and even email addresses to incorporate into its product, 404 Media reports. From the report: For years, Clearview AI has collected billions of photos from social media websites including Facebook, LinkedIn and others and sold access to its facial recognition tool to law enforcement. The collection and sale of user-generated photos by a private surveillance company to police without that person's knowledge or consent sparked international outcry when it was first revealed by the New York Times in 2020. New documents obtained by 404 Media reveal that Clearview AI spent nearly a million dollars in a bid to purchase "690 million arrest records and 390 million arrest photos" from all 50 states from an intelligence firm. The contract further describes the records as including current and former home addresses, dates of birth, arrest photos, social security and cell phone numbers, and email addresses. Clearview attempted to purchase this data from Investigative Consultant, Inc. (ICI) which billed itself as an intelligence company with access to tens of thousands of databases and the ability to create unique data streams for its clients. The contract was signed in mid-2019, at a time when Clearview AI was quietly collecting billions of photos off the internet and was relatively unknown at the time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plus: Customer info stolen from 'parental control' software slinger SpyX; F-35 kill switch denied

Infosec newsbytes Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions pitches its tools as helping governments and law enforcement agencies to catch criminals and terrorists, but a fresh Citizen Lab report claims its software has been used to target journalists, activists, and other civilians.…

Power outage means no flights for 24 hours. And chaos. Lots of chaos

London’s Heathrow Airport will close on Friday after a fire in an electricity substation it relies on caused a power outage - but nearby datacenters seem not to be unaffected.…

President Trump signed a long-expected executive action on Thursday calling on U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities." From a report: "We're going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs," Trump said. "And this is a very popular thing to do, but much more importantly, it's a common sense thing to do, and it's going to work, absolutely." The move has been expected since early February, when the White House revealed its intentions but withheld the action until after McMahon's Senate confirmation. It now arrives more than a week after the Trump administration has already begun sweeping layoffs at the Education Department. According to the administration's own numbers, Trump inherited a department with 4,133 employees. Nearly 600 workers have since chosen to leave, by resigning or retiring. And last week, 1,300 workers were told they would lose their jobs as part of a reduction in force. That leaves 2,183 staff at the department -- roughly half the size it was just a few weeks ago. The order instructs McMahon to act "to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law," an acknowledgement that the department and its signature responsibilities were created by Congress and cannot legally be ended without congressional approval. That would almost certainly require 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to overcome a Democratic filibuster.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slop-making machine will feed unauthorized scrapers what they so richly deserve, hopefully without poisoning the internet

Cloudflare has created a bot-busting AI to make life hell for AI crawlers.…

LG is shutting down Art Lab, its NFT marketplace for TVs. From a report: In a notice posted to its website, LG says it has made the "difficult decision" to close the platform on June 17th. LG launched its Art Lab app during the NFT craze in 2022, billing it as a way to "buy, sell and enjoy high-quality digital artwork" from your TV. It added new digital art to the platform through "groundbreaking" NFT drops, which users could purchase by scanning a QR code to complete transactions through Wallypto, LG's crypto wallet app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Feds want harsher sentence for Paige Thompson, who pinched 100M customer records

Paige Thompson, the perpetrator of the Capital One data theft, may be sent back behind bars after an appeals court ruled her sentence of time served plus probation was too lenient.…

Broken commitment to deliver hyped Intelligence upgrade branded false advertising

Apple on Wednesday was sued in a US federal court for allegedly misrepresenting the AI capabilities of its Siri personal digital assistant.…

Scientists at Zhejiang University have created the world's smallest LED display, featuring pixels just 90 nanometers wide -- roughly the size of a typical virus and too tiny to be seen with optical microscopes. The breakthrough, described in Nature this week, uses perovskite semiconductors that maintain brightness even at microscopic scales, giving them an advantage over conventional LEDs. The research team, led by Baodan Zhao, also demonstrated a larger display with pixels measuring about 100 micrometers (human hair width) that successfully rendered images including a spinning globe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So much for that vacation

A US Department of Defense electrical engineer has turned his world upside down after printing 155 pages from 20 documents, all of which were marked top secret and classified, from his DoD workspace, brought them home with him – and was collared on his way to Mexico.…

A United States District Court judge has approved a settlement between HP and customers who sued the company for firmware updates that prevented printers from working with non-HP ink cartridges. The class-action lawsuit, filed in December 2020, alleged HP "wrongfully compels users" to buy only HP ink by issuing updates that block competitors' cartridges. Under the settlement, HP admits no wrongdoing and won't pay monetary damages to affected customers, though it will pay $5,000 each to the three plaintiffs and $725,000 in attorneys' fees. HP has agreed to allow users of specific printer models impacted by the November 2020 update to decline firmware updates containing "Dynamic Security" features -- HP's term for technology that blocks cartridges using non-HP chips. The settlement applies only to 21 specific printer models, leaving numerous other HP printers subject to Dynamic Security restrictions. HP has previously paid millions in similar cases in Europe, Australia, and California related to printer bricking.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tough Euro privacy rules include requirement for accurate info, watchdog told in formal complaint

​A Norwegian man was shocked when ChatGPT falsely claimed in a conversation he murdered his two sons and tried to kill a third - mixing in real details about his personal life.…

Google is introducing an AI-powered update to Gmail search that prioritizes "most relevant" results based on recency, frequent contacts, and most-clicked emails. The feature aims to help users more efficiently locate specific messages in crowded inboxes. The update is rolling out globally to personal Google accounts, with business accounts to follow at an unspecified date. Users will have the option to toggle between the new AI-powered "most relevant" search and the traditional reverse chronological "most recent" view.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions equipping classrooms with laptops, yet students have fallen further behind on essential skills, Michael Bloomberg argues. With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading. Bloomberg notes technology's classroom push came from technologists and government officials who envisioned tailored curricula. Computer manufacturers, despite good intentions, had financial interests and profited substantially. The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them. Studies confirm traditional methods -- reading and writing on paper -- remain superior to screen-based approaches. Devices distract students, with research showing up to 20 minutes needed to refocus after nonacademic activities. As some districts ban smartphones during school hours, Bloomberg suggests reconsidering classroom computer policies, recommending locked carts for more purposeful use and greater transparency for parents about screen time. Technology's promise has failed while imposing significant costs on children and taxpayers, he writes. Bloomberg calls for a return to books and pens over laptops and tablets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new AI system called Aardvark could deliver weather forecasts as accurate as those from advanced public weather services but run on desktop computers, according to a project unveiled Thursday and published in Nature. Developed by the UK's Alan Turing Institute with partners including Cambridge University, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Microsoft, Aardvark aims to make sophisticated forecasting accessible to countries with fewer resources, particularly in Africa. The system has already outperformed the US Global Forecast System on many variables in testing. Project leader Richard Turner noted the system is "completely open source" and not planned for commercialization by Microsoft.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Palming off the blame using an ‘unknown’ best practice didn’t go down well either

In patching the latest critical remote code execution (RCE) bug in Backup and Replication, software shop Veeam is attracting criticism from researchers for the way it handles uncontrolled deserialization vulnerabilities.…