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UnitedHealth, parent company of ransomware-besieged Change Healthcare, says the total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million. From a report: That's on top of the amount in advance funding and interest-free loans UnitedHealth provided to support care providers reeling from the disruption, a sum said to be north of $6 billion. In its results for the quarter ended March 31, filed today, UnitedHealth stated that the total impact on the company from the attack in Q1 was $0.74 per share, which is expected to rise to a sum between $1.15 and $1.35 per share by the end of the year. The remediation efforts spent on the attack are ongoing, so the total costs related to business disruption and repairs are likely to exceed $1 billion over time, potentially including the reported $22 million payment made to the ALPHV/BlackCat-affiliated criminals behind the attack. It's a charge that eclipsed that of casino group MGM, which didn't pay a ransom following an attack on its systems last year, and which faces recovery costs of $100 million to rebuild its systems and paying for the fallout from outages, operational disruptions, allegedly leaked data and more.

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A good PR move opines community member

AI-generated and assisted code contributions are no longer allowed in the Gentoo Linux distribution.…

Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union starting Tuesday. Developers who opt in -- and who meet Apple's criteria, including app notarization requirements -- will be able to offer iPhone apps for direct download to EU users from their own websites. From a report: It's a massive change for a mobile ecosystem that otherwise bars so-called "sideloading." Apple's walled garden stance has enabled it to funnel essentially all iOS developer revenue through its own App Store in the past. But, in the EU, that moat is being dismantled as a result of new regulations that apply to the App Store and which the iPhone maker has been expected to comply with since early last month. In March, Apple announced that a web distribution entitlement would soon be coming to its mobile platform as part of changes aimed at complying with the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA). The pan-EU regulation puts a set of obligations on in-scope tech giants that lawmakers hope will level the competitive playing field for platforms' business users, as well as protecting consumers from Big Tech throwing its weight around.

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That other processor company really wants you to use AI at work

AMD has brought its 4 nm Hawk Point and Phoenix APUs to business users in the form of the Ryzen Pro 8040 series for laptops and Ryzen Pro 8000 series for desktops.…

Paramount penguin forces more robust whitespace handling

Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has made the use of indentation in kernel config files more ambiguous – intentionally to weed out inferior parsers.…

The Justice Department is preparing to sue Live Nation as soon as next month [non-paywalled link], an antitrust challenge that could spur major changes at the biggest name in concert promotion and ticketing. WSJ: The agency is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Ticketmaster parent in the coming weeks that would allege the nation's biggest concert promoter has leveraged its dominance in a way that undermined competition for ticketing live events, according to people familiar with the matter. The specific claims the department would allege couldn't be learned. The federal government opted out of trying to block Live Nation and Ticketmaster's 2010 tie up. Since then, the company has faced accusations of exorbitant ticket fees, flawed customer service and anticompetitive practices from lawmakers, regulators and state attorneys general. Critics of the merger say it has stifled competition in ticketing and that the company should be broken up. Live Nation's size and power in concert promotion, ticketing and venues are at the heart of a Justice Department investigation that began in 2022. The investigation gained momentum in November 2022 after Ticketmaster crashed during a fan presale to Taylor Swift's "Eras Tour."

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Computer says you're single

A simple misclick at a London law firm led to a surprise divorce for an unsuspecting couple.…

Robotics firm Boston Dynamics, owned by Hyundai, has retired its humanoid robot Atlas after a decade, despite significant funding pouring into the category. TechCrunch adds: Boston Dynamics has been focused on commercializing technologies for a number of years now. Hyundai's 2021 acquisition of the firm, coupled with the appointment of Rob Playter as its second-ever CEO, has further accelerated that path. Given the tremendous interest around companies like Agility, Figure, 1X and Apptronik, it stands to reason that -- at the very least -- the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company has -- at the very least -- seriously explored the commercial humanoid category. Boston Dynamics was, of course, well ahead of the current humanoid robotics curve. Last July marked the 10th anniversary of the bipedal robot's debut. The company teamed with DARPA for Atlas' early development, leading the robot to be heavily incorporated into challenges of the era.

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No prizes for guessing the victims

A Nebraska man will appear in court today to face charges related to allegations that he defrauded cloud service providers of more than $3.5 million in a long-running cryptojacking scheme.…

For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there's also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system...

Need to send to more than 2,000 external recipients in 24 hours? Time to start looking for an alternative

For the first time, Microsoft will apply daily restrictions to Exchange Online in an effort to staunch the flow of spam from the service.…

Microsoft's Beijing-based research group published a new open source AI model on Tuesday, only to remove it from the internet hours later after the company realized that the model hadn't gone through adequate safety testing. From a report: The team that published the model, which is comprised of China-based researchers in Microsoft Research Asia, said in a tweet on Tuesday that they "accidentally missed" the safety testing step that Microsoft requires before models can be published. Microsoft's AI policies require that before any AI models can be published, they must be approved by the company's Deployment Safety Board, which tests whether the models can carry out harmful tasks such as creating violent or disturbing content, according to an employee familiar with the process. In a now-deleted blog post, the researchers behind the model, dubbed WizardLM-2, said that it could carry out tasks like generating text, suggesting code, translating between different languages, or solving some math problems.

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No breach responsible for employee contact info getting out, says T-Mo

T-Mobile US employees say they are being sent text messages that offer them cash to perform illegal SIM swaps for supposed criminals.…

Film data researcher Stepehen, writing on his blog: This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as 'based on real-life events' in this analysis.) Other sources include fictional books/articles (8.9%), previous movies (11.8%), stage productions (including plays, musicals, and dance performances) (1.5%), and TV/Web shows (0.9%). In the chart below, 'Other' includes myths, legends, poems, songs, games, toys, and more. How has this changed over the years? Forty years ago, about the same proportion of movies being made were original screenplays as they are today. That's quite surprising -- both because I assume that many people expected it to be lower in recent years, but also because little stays the same in the film industry over such a long period of time. But when we look at a time series by year, we can see that it hadn't plateaued. During the late 1990s and 2000s, original screenplays declined markedly and only rose again in the 2010s.

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Judge to hear software vendor's effort to dismiss discrimination case next month

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) says a claim against Workday should be allowed to continue, arguing the HR and finance software vendor may qualify as an employment agency because of the way its AI tool screens applicants.…

SonicSpike shares a report: The quest to return rock materials from Mars to Earth to see if they contain traces of past life is going to go through a major overhaul. The US space agency says the current mission design can't return the samples before 2040 on the existing funds and the more realistic $11bn needed to make it happen is not sustainable. Nasa is going to canvas for cheaper, faster "out of the box" ideas. It hopes to have a solution on the drawing board later in the year. Returning rock samples from Mars is regarded as the single most important priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades. Just as the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo astronauts revolutionised our understanding of early Solar System history, so materials from the Red Planet are likely to recast our thinking on the possibilities for life beyond Earth.

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Who needs aircon when you have NASA to punch holes through your home?

NASA has confirmed that a piece of space junk that crashed through a Florida home in March was a fragment of a discarded ISS battery pallet.…

Last month the Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders such as AWS, Google Cloud, Snap, Oracle, and others formed Valkey as an open-source Redis fork following Redis moving to Redis Source Available License v2 and SSPL v1 licensing. Today they've released Valkey 7.2.5 as the first stable release for this open-source Redis fork...

Social engineering patterns spotted across range of popular projects

Open source groups are warning the community about a wave of ongoing attacks targeting project maintainers similar to those that led to the recent attempted backdooring of a core Linux library.…

It's been three weeks since the Plasma 6.0.3 point release while today KDE has shipped Plasma 6.0.4 as its April bug-fix release...