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UK Economy Emerges From Recession

Slashdot - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 4:02pm
The U.K. economy has emerged from recession as gross domestic product rose 0.6% in the first quarter, official figures showed Friday, beating expectations. From a report: Economists polled by Reuters had forecast growth of 0.4% on the previous three months of the year. The U.K. entered a shallow recession in the second half of 2023, as persistent inflation continued to hurt the economy. Although there is no official definition of a recession, two straight quarters of negative growth is widely considered a technical recession. The U.K.'s production sector expanded by 0.8% in the period from January to March, while construction fell by 0.9%. On a monthly basis, the economy grew by 0.4% in March, following 0.2% expansion in February. In output terms, the services sector -- crucial to the U.K. economy -- grew for the first time since the first quarter in 2023, the Office for National Statistics said. The 0.7% growth was mainly driven by the transport services industry which saw its highest quarterly growth rate since 2020.

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FBI Working Towards Nabbing Scattered Spider Hackers, Official Says

Slashdot - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 3:23pm
The U.S. FBI is working towards charging hackers from the aggressive Scattered Spider criminal gang who are largely based in the U.S. and western countries and have breached dozens of American organisations, a senior official said. From a report: The young hackers grabbed headlines last year when they broke into the systems of casino-operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment locking up the companies' systems and demanding hefty ransom payments. From health and telecom companies to financial services, they have hacked a range of organisations over two years, piling pressure on law enforcement agencies to thwart them. "We are working towards charging individuals where we can with criminal conduct, in this case, largely around the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," Brett Leatherman, the FBI's cyber deputy assistant director, told Reuters in an interview. The group was a rare alliance of hackers in Western countries with veteran cybercriminals from eastern Europe, he said on the sidelines of the RSA Conference in San Francisco Wednesday. "Often we don't see that mingling of geographical hackers working together outside the confines of like hacktivism, for example," he said. Security researchers have tracked Scattered Spider since at least 2022 and say the group is far more aggressive than other cybercrime gangs - skilled especially at hijacking the identities of IT helpdesk staff to penetrate into company networks. Caesars paid around $15 million to free its systems from the hackers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's Brad Smith summoned by Homeland Security committee over 'cascade' of infosec failures

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 3:01pm
Major intrusions by both China and Russia leave a lot to be answered for

The US government wants to make Microsoft's vice chair and president, Brad Smith, the latest tech figurehead to field questions from a House committee on its recent cybersecurity failings.…

Will Chatbots Eat India's IT Industry?

Slashdot - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 2:42pm
Economist: What is the ideal job to outsource to AI? Today's AIs, in particular the Chatgpt-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. This happens to be the forte of giant existing outsourcing businesses -- India's information-technology companies. Seven of them, including the two biggest, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, collectively laid off 75,000 employees last year. The firms say this reduction, equivalent to about 4% of their combined workforce, has nothing to do with ai and reflects the broader slowdown in the tech sector. In reality, they say, ai is an opportunity, not a threat. Business services are critical to India's economy. The sector employs 5m people, or less than 1% of Indian workers, but contributes 7% of GDP and nearly a quarter of total exports. Simple services such as call centres account for a fifth of those foreign revenues. Three-fifths are generated by it services such as moving data to the computing cloud. The rest comes from sophisticated processes tailored for individual clients. Capital Economics, a research firm, calculates that an extreme case, in which ai wiped out the industry entirely and the resources were not reallocated, would knock nearly one percentage point off annual GDP growth over the next decade in India. In a likelier scenario of "a slow demise," the country would grow 0.3-0.4 percentage points less fast. The simplest jobs are the most vulnerable. Data from Upwork, a freelancing platform, shows that earnings for uncomplicated writing tasks like copy-editing fell by 5% between Chatgpt's launch in November 2022 and April 2023, relative to roles less affected by ai. In the year after Dall-e 2, an image-creation model, was launched in April 2022, wages for jobs like graphic design fell by 7-14%. Some companies are using AI to deal with simple customer-service requests and repetitive data-processing tasks. In April K. Krithivasan, chief executive of TCS, predicted that "maybe a year or so down the line" chatbots could do much of the work of a call-centre employee. In time, he mused, AI could foretell gripes and alleviate them before a customer ever picks up the phone.

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Linux 6.10 Adding TPM Bus Encryption & Integrity Protection

Phoronix - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 2:34pm
Linux 6.10 is introducing support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM2) encryption and integrity protections to prevent active/passive interposers from compromising them. This follows a recent security demonstration of TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker being demonstrated. TPM sniffing attacks have also been demonstrated against Linux systems too, thus the additional protections be made with Linux 6.10 to better secure TPM2 modules...

Intel Takes Open-Source Hyperscan Development To Proprietary Licensed Software

Phoronix - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 2:07pm
While Intel can be praised for their dozens (or likely by now, hundreds) of open-source projects they maintain and countless other existing open-source software projects they actively contribute to and are covered by Phoronix on a near-daily basis, not everything there is open-source. Intel is a wonderful and leading open-source promoter but occasionally there are closed-source blobs or questionable moves such as today: Intel is taking their Hyperscan library development from BSD-licensed open-source software to now the Intel Proprietary License moving forward...

GhostStripe attack haunts self-driving cars by making them ignore road signs

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 2:04pm
Cameras tested are specced for Baidu's Apollo

Six boffins mostly hailing from Singapore-based universities say they can prove it's possible to interfere with autonomous vehicles by exploiting the machines' reliance on camera-based computer vision and cause them to not recognize road signs.…

Streaming is Cable Now

Slashdot - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 2:00pm
An anonymous reader shares a report: Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max are teaming up for a new bundle this summer, Netflix is focused on the WWE and celebrity boxing, Disney Plus is getting ESPN, and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Max could get a price hike. A familiar refrain emerged around all this news: streaming is becoming cable TV all over again and getting crummier in the process. And it's true! When streaming first emerged, it was a beautiful alternative to piracy, which was very convenient and very illegal, and cable, which was festooned with ads and weighed down by channels you were paying for and didn't want. Streaming gave you a world of content on demand for a fraction of the cost of cable. But that experience was never sustainable. Content costs money to make, and companies are apparently obligated to "increase revenue" and "make profit." This means Netflix spending billions of dollars a year on content isn't necessarily sustainable unless it's adding new users and monetizing them through some combination of ads and increasing subscription fees for stuff that used to be free, like sharing an account or streaming in 4K.

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China's SMIC sounds alarm on price wars from silicon surplus

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 1:30pm
Competition heats up while profits cool down

Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) is the latest to warn of a potential oversupply in the global market, saying there is an increasingly fierce price war for less advanced silicon in its domestic arena.…

'Four horsemen of cyber' look back on 2008 DoD IT breach that led to US Cyber Command

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 1:00pm
'This was a no sh*tter'

RSAC  A malware-laced USB stick, inserted into a military laptop at a base in Afghanistan in 2008, led to what has been called the worst military breach in US history, and to the creation of the US Cyber Command.…

The Most Detailed 3D Reconstruction of Human Brain Tissue

Slashdot - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 1:00pm
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Imagine exploring the intricate world within a single cubic millimeter of human brain tissue. It might seem insignificant, but within that tiny space lies a universe of complexity -- 57,000 individual cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and a staggering 150 million synapses, the junctions where neurons communicate. All this information translates to a mind-boggling 1,400 terabytes of data. That's the kind of groundbreaking achievement researchers from Harvard and Google have just accomplished. Leading the charge at Harvard is Professor Jeff Lichtman, a renowned expert in brain structure. Partnering with Google AI, Lichtman's team has co-created the most detailed 3D reconstruction of a human brain fragment to date. This intricate map, published in Science, offers an unprecedented view of the human temporal cortex, the region responsible for memory and other higher functions. Envision a piece of brain tissue roughly half the size of a rice grain but magnified to reveal every cell and its web of neural connections in vivid detail. This remarkable feat is the culmination of nearly a decade of collaboration between Harvard and Google. Lichtman's expertise in electron microscopy imaging is combined with Google's cutting-edge AI algorithms. [...] The newly published map in Science reveals previously unseen details of brain structure. One such discovery is a rare but powerful set of axons, each connected by up to 50 synapses, potentially influencing a significant number of neighboring neurons. The team also encountered unexpected structures, like a small number of axons forming intricate whorls. Since the sample came from a patient with epilepsy, it's unclear if these formations are specific to the condition or simply uncommon occurrences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok becomes first platform to require watermarking of AI content

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 12:30pm
The deepfake dystopia we’ve been waiting for has already arrived

TikTok intends to begin labelling AI-generated images and videos uploaded to its video-sharing service.…

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 12:00pm
Sometimes your own invention just isn't enough anymore

Interview  The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS.…

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 11:15am
Someone in marketing may be getting fired for this

Comment  "This is who we are, this is what we stand for," said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs shortly before he relaunched the company in 1997 with its iconic Think Different marketing campaign. This week, the consumer tech giant showed the world its true colors and some were not impressed.…

Linux 6.9 Features Many Great Improvements For Both Intel & AMD

Phoronix - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 10:57am
Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.9 kernel should be released as stable on Sunday. It's been a fairly quiet week so Linux 6.9 stable will likely happen as opposed to going through an extra week with a 6.9-rc8 candidate. With this spring 2024 kernel there are many great features and improvements, especially for modern Intel and AMD platforms...

Vulkan 1.3.285 Released With New Extension From Valve VKD3D-Proton Developer

Phoronix - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 10:40am
The Vulkan API 1.3.285 spec revision is out today with a handful of fixes/clarifications and another new extension developed by Valve engineering...

Rocky Linux 9.4 Released For RHEL 9.4 Derived Distribution

Phoronix - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 10:33am
Building off last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 (RHEL 9.4) has been AlmaLinux 9.4 and now the other notable community-focused downstream: Rocky Linux 9.4...

Did IBM make a $6.4B blunder by buying HashiCorp?

El Reg - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 10:30am
Terraform maker's programs are ideal fit for Big Blue, but why splash out when the software's free and open?

Opinion  In some ways, IBM paying a cool $6.4 billion for HashiCorp makes perfect sense. HashiCorp's infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool Terraform is very popular and would work well with Red Hat Ansible. And, yes, I've heard the joke about how if you put them together, you'd get "Terrible."…

SDL3 Adds PipeWire Camera Support

Phoronix - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 10:26am
Adding to the growing list of features coming with the SDL3 release for this hardware/software abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games and other software is PipeWire camera capturing support...

Intel Updates Its PyTorch Build With More Large Language Model Optimizations

Phoronix - Fri, 10/05/2024 - 10:19am
Intel has released their Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.3 to succeed their earlier v2.1 derived extension. With this updated extension targeting PyTorch 2.3, Intel is rolling out more optimizations around Large Language Models (LLMs)...