Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website.

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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...

China's Baidu says its AI chatbot "Ernie Bot" has amassed more than 200 million users as it seeks to remain China's most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot amid increasingly fierce competition. From a report: The number of users has roughly doubled since the company's last update in December. The chatbot was released to the public eight months ago. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's API is being used 200 million times everyday, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that many times a day. The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can regulators keep up?

Microsoft has confirmed a $1.5 billion investment in G42, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) AI biz.…

Enhanced data density and speed upgrades, though challenges in endurance remain

Micron is now mass producing 232-layer QLC NAND, claiming it's the first memory manufacturer to break the 200-layer mark in QLC chips.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors indicted a Nebraska man on charges he perpetrated a cryptojacking scheme that defrauded two cloud providers -- one based in Seattle and the other in Redmond, Washington -- out of $3.5 million. The indictment, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and unsealed on Monday, charges Charles O. Parks III -- 45 of Omaha, Nebraska -- with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions in connection with the scheme. Parks has yet to enter a plea and is scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Omaha on Tuesday. Parks was arrested last Friday. Prosecutors allege that Parks defrauded "two well-known providers of cloud computing services" of more than $3.5 million in computing resources to mine cryptocurrency. The indictment says the activity was in furtherance of a cryptojacking scheme, a term for crimes that generate digital coin through the acquisition of computing resources and electricity of others through fraud, hacking, or other illegal means. Details laid out in the indictment underscore the failed economics involved in the mining of most cryptocurrencies. The $3.5 million of computing resources yielded roughly $1 million worth of cryptocurrency. In the process, massive amounts of energy were consumed. [...] Prosecutors didn't say precisely how Parks was able to trick the providers into giving him elevated services, deferring unpaid payments, or failing to discover the allegedly fraudulent behavior. They also didn't identify either of the cloud providers by name. Based on the details, however, they are almost certainly Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. If convicted on all charges, Parks faces as much as 30 years in prison.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following the launch of the Ryzen 8000G series processors earlier this year as well as the Ryzen 8840 series mobile processors, AMD has now announced the associated "PRO" parts for business customers.

First glimpse at attack financials reveals huge pain

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.…

Plans to plant $12B bitbarn where homegrown renewables hope once lived

US private equity investor Blackstone has plans for a £10 billion ($12.45 billion) hyperscale datacenter in northern England on a site formerly owned by battery startup Britishvolt.…

At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org...

In addition to Vulkan explicit sync under X11, another merge request hitting Mesa 24.1 overnight that's worth mentioning is the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver now supporting VK_EXT_image_compression_control...

$62 million settlement plan challenged over payments to progressive nonprofits

Google's plan to pay $62 million to settle allegations that it tracked people even when their Location History setting was switched off may have to be renegotiated based on several objections.…

With the new security mitigation for the "Native BHI" Spectre vulnerability affecting even the recent Intel processors, a number of Phoronix readers have been curious about the performance impact of the mitigation. Over the past week I've been running some benchmarks on recent Intel CPUs to better look into any performance implications...

Consultancy tasked with helping local services get on board

The UK's health department has awarded global consultancy KPMG an £8.5 million ($10.5 million) contract to help implement the controversial Federated Data Platform (FDP) at a local level.…

YouTube has updated its policies to no longer allow "third-party apps to turn off ads." The Verge reports: This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you'll get to view videos interruption-free. "We only allow third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms of Service," YouTube says. "When we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers." To get around this, YouTube once again suggests signing up for the ad-free YouTube Premium.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Khronos Group on Monday released OpenXR 1.1 as the latest version of this industry standard for open, cross-platform development for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) devices...