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Creating a sexually explicit "deepfake" image is to be made an offence under a new law in the UK, the Ministry of Justice has announced. The Guardian: Under the legislation, anyone who creates such an image without consent will face a criminal record and an unlimited fine. They could also face jail if the image is shared more widely. The creation of a deepfake image will be an offence regardless of whether the creator intended to share it, the department said. The Online Safety Act, introduced last year, has already criminalised the sharing of deepfake intimate images, whose creation is being facilitated by advances in artificial intelligence. The offence will be introduced through an amendment to the criminal justice bill, which is making its way through parliament. Laura Farris, the minister for victims and safeguarding, said the creation of deepfake sexual images was "unacceptable irrespective of whether the image is shared."

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What a twist!

MGM Resorts wants the FTC to halt a probe into last year's ransomware infection at the mega casino chain – because the watchdog's boss Lina Khan was a guest at one of its hotels during the cyberattack.…

A crypto wallet maker claimed this week that hackers may be targeting people with an iMessage "zero-day" exploit -- but all signs point to an exaggerated threat, if not a downright scam. From a report: Trust Wallet's official X (previously Twitter) account wrote that "we have credible intel regarding a high-risk zero-day exploit targeting iMessage on the Dark Web. This can infiltrate your iPhone without clicking any link. High-value targets are likely. Each use raises detection risk." The wallet maker recommended iPhone users to turn off iMessage completely "until Apple patches this," even though no evidence shows that "this" exists at all. The tweet went viral, and has been viewed over 3.6 million times as of our publication. Because of the attention the post received, Trust Wallet hours later wrote a follow-up post. The wallet maker doubled down on its decision to go public, saying that it "actively communicates any potential threats and risks to the community."

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EFF lambastes latest 'lazy and deliberately malicious move'

YouTube says it will intentionally cripple the playback of its videos in third-party apps that block its ads.…

Jetson module can efficiently process computational fluid dynamics models

Analysis  Researchers in China have reportedly demonstrated how a low-cost Nvidia Jetson module could theoretically be used to direct a hypersonic weapon.…

The United States Senate is poised to vote on legislation this week that, for the next two years at least, could dramatically expand the number of businesses that the US government can force to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant. From a report: Some of the nation's top legal experts on a controversial US spy program argue that the legislation, known as the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), would enhance the US government's spy powers, forcing a variety of new businesses to secretly eavesdrop on Americans' overseas calls, texts, and email messages. Those experts include a handful of attorneys who've had the rare opportunity to appear before the US government's secret surveillance court. The Section 702 program, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was established more than a decade ago to legalize the government's practice of forcing major telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on overseas calls in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On the one hand, the government claims that the program is designed to exclusively target foreign citizens who are physically located abroad; on the other, the government has fiercely defended its ability to access wiretaps of Americans' emails and phone conversations, often years after the fact and in cases unrelated to the reasons the wiretaps were ordered in the first place. The 702 program works by compelling the cooperation of US businesses defined by the government as "electronic communications service providers" -- traditionally phone and email providers such as AT&T and Google. Members of the House Intelligence Committee, whose leaders today largely serve as lobbyists for the US intelligence community in Congress, have been working to expand the definition of that term, enabling the government to force new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the government's behalf.

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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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