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SpzToid writes: Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid in the first weeks of 2024. What's going on?
Last year was, by all accounts, a bloodbath for the tech industry, with more than 260,000 jobs vanishing — the worse 12 months for Silicon Valley since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s.
Executives justified the mass layoffs by citing a pandemic hiring binge, high inflation and weak consumer demand.
Now in 2024, tech company workforces have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, inflation is half of what it was this time last year and consumer confidence is rebounding.
Yet, in the first four weeks of this year, nearly 100 tech companies, including Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and Salesforce have collectively let go of about 25,000 employees, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks the technology sector.
The software giant said the APT group, known as Midnight Blizzard/Nobelium, used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts.
quonset writes: In December of 2023, Ukraine discovered Russian hackers were able to infiltrate Ukrainian telecom giant Kyivstar since at least May of 2023. The Russians were then able to disable access for millions of Ukrainians for days.
In response, Ukrainian hackers took down a Moscow ISP for days as well as deleting critical information from the ISP.
This same group, known as Blackjack, has continued its operations by stealing plans and information for 500 Russian military sites located in both Russia and occupied Ukraine.
This data includes the maps of more than 500 Russian military bases across Russia and in regions in Ukraine that Putin has occupied. This includes military headquarters for the Russian Army, air-defense installations, and weapons arsenals.
"Critically important information about Russian military facilities that have already been completed, are at the stage of construction/reconstruction, or are planned for construction, was transferred to the Security and Defense Forces of Ukraine," the GUR said on its website.
The GUR added that, as part of Blackjack's cyber operation, all the stolen data was deleted from seven Russian servers. Ukraine's news agency Interfax said the hackers also disabled 150 computers.
"In fact, Russian special construction workers were left without the entire array of data and backup copies of information. Now they will have to build new facilities by memory," sources in Ukraine's law enforcement told local publication Ukrinform.
CanuckinSPAAAAACE writes: "Chinese company Betavolt has announced an atomic energy battery for consumers with a touted 50-year lifespan. The Betavolt BV100 will be the first product to launch using the firm’s new atomic battery technology, constructed using a nickel -63 isotope and diamond semiconductor material. Betavolt says that its nuclear battery will target aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots – and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging."
An anonymous reader writes: In an unmarked laboratory stationed between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is hunting for the next billion-dollar drug. The group, bankrolled with $500 million from some of the wealthiest families in American business, has created a stir in the world of academia by dangling seven-figure paydays to lure highly credentialed university professors to a for-profit bounty hunt. Its self-described goal: to avoid the blockages and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and discover scores of new drugs (at first, for cancer and brain disease) that can be produced and sold quickly.
Braggadocio from start-ups is de rigueur, and plenty of ex-academics have started biotechnology companies, hoping to strike it rich on their one big discovery. This group, rather boastfully named Arena BioWorks, borrowing froma Teddy Roosevelt quote, doesn’t have one singular idea, but it does have a big checkbook. “I’m not apologetic about being a capitalist, and that motivation from a team is not a bad thing,” said the technology magnate Michael Dell, one of the group’s big-money backers. Others include an heiress to the Subway sandwich fortune and an owner of the Boston Celtics.
The wrinkle is that for decades, many drug discoveries have not just originated at colleges and universities, but also produced profits that helped fill their endowment coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for one, has said it earned hundreds of millions of dollars for research into mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19. Under this model, any such windfall would remain private. [...]
The five billionaires backing Arena include Michael Chambers, a manufacturing titan and the wealthiest man in North Dakota, and Elisabeth DeLuca, the widow of a founder of the Subway chain. They have each put in $100 million and expect to double or triple their investment in later rounds. In confidential materials provided to investors and others, Arena describes itself as “a privately funded, fully independent, public good.” Arena’s backers said in interviews that they did not intend to entirely cut off their giving to universities. Duke turned down an offer from Mr. Pagliuca, an alumnus and board member, to set up part of the lab there. Mr. Dell, a major donor to the University of Texas hospital system in his hometown, Austin, leased space for a second Arena laboratory there. Dr. Schreiber said it would require years — and billions of dollars in additional funding — before the team would learn whether its model led to the production of any worthy drugs. “Is it going to be better or worse?” Dr. Schreiber said. “I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot.”
Audio produced byPatricia Sulbarán.
An anonymous reader writes: A Dutch engineer recruited by the country’s intelligence services used a water pump to deploy the now-infamous Stuxnet malware in an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a two-year investigation conducted by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. Stuxnet, whose existence came to light in 2010, is widely believed to be the work of the United States and Israel, its goal being to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by compromising industrial control systems (ICS) associated with nuclear centrifuges. The malware, which had worm capabilities, is said to have infected hundreds of thousands of devices and caused physical damage to hundreds of machines.
De Volkskrant’s investigation, which involved interviews with dozens of people, found that the AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, recruited Erik van Sabben, a then 36-year-old Dutch national working at a heavy transport company in Dubai. Van Sabben was allegedly recruited in 2005 — a couple of years before the Stuxnet malware was triggered — after American and Israeli intelligence agencies asked their Dutch counterpart for help. However, the Dutch agency reportedly did not inform its country’s government and it was not aware of the full extent of the operation. Van Sabben was described as perfect for the job as he had a technical background, he was doing business in Iran and was married to an Iranian woman.
It’s believed that the Stuxnet malware was planted on a water pump that the Dutch national installed in the nuclear complex in Natanz, which he had infiltrated. It’s unclear if Van Sabben knew exactly what he was doing, but his family said he appeared to have panicked at around the time of the Stuxnet attack. [...] Michael Hayden, who at the time was the chief of the CIA, did agree to talk to De Volkskrant, but could not confirm whether Stuxnet was indeed delivered via water pumps due to it still being classified information. One interesting piece of information that has come to light in De Volkskrant’s investigation is that Hayden reportedly told one of the newspaper’s sources that it cost between $1 and $2 billion to develop Stuxnet.
wiggles writes: Whenever chaos engulfs a proprietary technology relied on by millions, the default knee-jerk reaction from many seems to be: “Hey, let’s see what the open source world has to offer.”
Case in point: X’s (Twitter) steady demise since Elon Musk took over last year led many to search for more “open” alternatives, be it Mastodon or Bluesky.
This scenario became all too familiar throughout 2023, as established technologies relied on by millions hit a chaos curve, making people realize how beholden they are to a proprietary platform they have little control over.
The OpenAI fiasco in November, where the ChatGPT hit-maker temporarily lost its co-founders, including CEO Sam Altman, created a whirlwind five days of chaos culminating in Altman returning to the OpenAI hotseat. But only after businesses that had built products atop OpenAI’s GPT-X large language models (LLMs) started to question the prudence of going all-in on OpenAI, with “open” alternatives such as Meta’s Llama-branded family of LLMs well-positioned to capitalize.
Even Google seemingly acknowledged that “open” might trump “proprietary” AI, with a leaked internal memo penned by a researcher that expressed fears that open source AI was on the front foot. “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI,” the memo noted.
Bruce66423 writes: Along with some of the items that will be available, there's also a discussion of the history of the law, along with criticism from economists who argue that it gives almost no income to the copyright owners, but does postpone the creativity that often bursts into new life when the copyright expires.
