Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who runs the semiconductor industry's most valuable company, said the US is as much as 20 years away from breaking its dependence on overseas chipmaking. From a report: Huang, speaking at the New York Times's DealBook conference in New York, explained how his company's products rely on myriad components that come from different parts of the world -- not just Taiwan, where the most important elements are manufactured. "We are somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence," he said. "It's not a really practical thing for a decade or two."

The outlook suggests there's a long road ahead for a key Biden administration objective -- bringing more of the chipmaking industry to US shores. The president has championed bipartisan legislation to support the building of manufacturing facilities here. And many of the biggest companies are planning to expand their US operations. That includes Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Nvidia's top manufacturing partner, as well as Samsung and Intel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A prolific espionage hacking group with ties to China spent over two years looting the corporate network of NXP, the Netherlands-based chipmaker whose silicon powers security-sensitive components found in smartphones, smartcards, and electric vehicles, a news outlet has reported. The intrusion, by a group tracked under names including "Chimera" and "G0114," lasted from late 2017 to the beginning of 2020, according to Netherlands national news outlet NRC Handelsblad, which cited "several sources" familiar with the incident. During that time, the threat actors periodically accessed employee mailboxes and network drives in search of chip designs and other NXP intellectual property. The breach wasn't uncovered until Chimera intruders were detected in a separate company network that connected to compromised NXP systems on several occasions. Details of the breach remained a closely guarded secret until now.

NRC cited a report published (and later deleted) by security firm Fox-IT, titled Abusing Cloud Services to Fly Under the Radar. It documented Chimera using cloud services from companies including Microsoft and Dropbox to receive data stolen from the networks of semiconductor makers, including one in Europe that was hit in "early Q4 2017." Some of the intrusions lasted as long as three years before coming to light. NRC said the unidentified victim was NXP. "Once nested on a first computer -- patient zero -- the spies gradually expand their access rights, erase their tracks in between and secretly sneak to the protected parts of the network," NRC reporters wrote in an English translation. "They try to secrete the sensitive data they find there in encrypted archive files via cloud storage services such as Microsoft OneDrive. According to the log files that Fox-IT finds, the hackers come every few weeks to see whether interesting new data can be found at NXP and whether more user accounts and parts of the network can be hacked."

NXP did not alert customers or shareholders to the intrusion, other than a brief reference in a 2019 annual report. It read: "We have, from time to time, experienced cyber-attacks attempting to obtain access to our computer systems and networks. Such incidents, whether or not successful, could result in the misappropriation of our proprietary information and technology, the compromise of personal and confidential information of our employees, customers, or suppliers, or interrupt our business. For instance, in January 2020, we became aware of a compromise of certain of our systems. We are taking steps to identify the malicious activity and are implementing remedial measures to increase the security of our systems and networks to respond to evolving threats and new information. As of the date of this filing, we do not believe that this IT system compromise has resulted in a material adverse effect on our business or any material damage to us. However, the investigation is ongoing, and we are continuing to evaluate the amount and type of data compromised. There can be no assurance that this or any other breach or incident will not have a material impact on our operations and financial results in the future."

Some Pixel 8 Pro owners have noticed circular bumps in several places on the screen that look to be the result of something pressing up against the underside, which is soft and fragile, of the 6.7-inch OLED panel. From a report: A statement from the company today acknowledges how "some users may see impressions from components in the device that look like small bumps" in specific conditions. Google says there is "no functional impact to Pixel 8 performance or durability," which does line up with all current reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, a collaborative whiteboard app maker called "tldraw" made waves online by releasing a prototype of a feature called "Make it Real" that lets users draw an image of software and bring it to life using AI. The feature uses OpenAI's GPT-4V API to visually interpret a vector drawing into functioning Tailwind CSS and JavaScript web code that can replicate user interfaces or even create simple implementations of games like Breakout. "I think I need to go lie down," posted designer Kevin Cannon at the start of a viral X thread that featured the creation of functioning sliders that rotate objects on screen, an interface for changing object colors, and a working game of tic-tac-toe. Soon, others followed with demonstrations of drawing a clone of Breakout, creating a working dial clock that ticks, drawing the snake game, making a Pong game, interpreting a visual state chart, and much more.

Tldraw, developed by Steve Ruiz in London, is an open source collaborative whiteboard tool. It offers a basic infinite canvas for drawing, text, and media without requiring a login. Launched in 2021, the project received $2.7 million in seed funding and is supported by GitHub sponsors. When The GPT-4V API launched recently, Ruiz integrated a design prototype called "draw-a-ui" created by Sawyer Hood to bring the AI-powered functionality into tldraw. GPT-4V is a version of OpenAI's large language model that can interpret visual images and use them as prompts. As AI expert Simon Willison explains on X, Make it Real works by "generating a base64 encoded PNG of the drawn components, then passing that to GPT-4 Vision" with a system prompt and instructions to turn the image into a file using Tailwind. You can experiment with a live demo of Make It Real online. However, running it requires providing an API key from OpenAI, which is a security risk.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft will soon let Windows 11 users in the European Economic Area (EEA) disable its Bing web search, remove Microsoft Edge, and even add custom web search providers -- including Google if it's willing to build one -- into its Windows Search interface. All of these Windows 11 changes are part of key tweaks that Microsoft has to make to its operating system to comply with the European Commission's Digital Markets Act, which comes into effect in March 2024. Microsoft will be required to meet a slew of interoperability and competition rules, including allowing users "to easily un-install pre-installed apps or change default settings on operating systems, virtual assistants, or web browsers that steer them to the products and services of the gatekeeper and provide choice screens for key services."

Alongside clearly marking which apps are system components in Windows 11, Microsoft is also responding by adding the ability to uninstall the following apps: Camera, Cortana, Web Search from Microsoft Bing in the EEA, Microsoft Edge in the EEA, and Photos. Only Windows 11 users in the EEA will be able to fully remove Microsoft Edge and the Bing-powered web search from Windows Search. Microsoft could easily extend this to all Windows 11 users, but it's limiting this extra functionality to EEA markets to comply with the rules.

In EEA markets -- which includes EU countries and also Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway -- Windows 11 users will also get access to new interoperability features for feeds in the Windows Widgets board and web search in Windows Search. This will allow search providers like Google to extend the main Windows Search interface with their own custom web searches. Microsoft will allow EEA machines to remove the Bing results, so Google could provide its own search results here and effectively become the default if a user has uninstalled Bing. "If the user has more than one search provider installed, Windows Search will show the last one used when opened," explains Aaron Grady, partner group product manager for Windows, in a statement to The Verge.

Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: A new report from a data recovery company now points the finger at design and manufacturing flaws as the underlying issue with the recent flood of SanDisk Extreme Pro failures that eventually spurred a class action lawsuit. It became clear in May that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB SSDs suffered from sudden data loss; at this point, the company promised a firmware update to owners of the 4TB models. However, the 2TB and 3TB models also suffer from the same issue, and Western Digital did not promise any firmware updates for these drives.

Markus Hafele, Managing Director of Attingo, a data recovery company, told FutureZone that the problem lies in hardware, not firmware, which could explain the lack of corrective firmware updates for those models and SanDisk's continued silence about the source of the issues. Attingo, which has been in the data recovery business for over 25 years, normally sees these failed SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs at least once a week. The problem appears to be rather complex. According to HÃfele, the components used in these SSDs are too big for the circuit board, causing weak connections (i.e., high impendence and high temperatures) and making them prone to breaking. He also says that the soldering material used to attach these components is prone to forming bubbles and breaking easily.

It remains unknown whether the cause is cheap solder, the componentry, or both contribute to the issues observed. However, newer revisions of these SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs seem to have been modified with extra epoxy resin to secure the oversized components. This suggests that Western Digital might know about the hardware problems. Nevertheless, these newer models are still failing, thus sending data recovery service customers to firms like Attingo. According to the head of Attingo, the issue seems to be affecting multiple product lineups, including both SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD as well as the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD.

A a report from TechSpot says AMD has recently increased its market share in the CPU sector for desktops, laptops, and servers: According to Mercury Research (via Tom's Hardware), AMD gained 5.8% unit share in desktops, 3.8% in laptops, and 5.8% in servers. In terms of revenue share, Team Red gained 4.1% in desktops, 5.1% in laptops, and 1.7% in servers. The report does not mention competitors by name, but the global PC industry only has one other major CPU supplier, Intel, which has a major stake in all the market segments.

While Intel and AMD make x86 processors for PCs, Qualcomm offers Arm-based SoCs for Windows notebooks, but its market share is minuscule by comparison. So, while the report doesn't say anything about the market share of Intel or Qualcomm, it is fair to assume that most of AMD's gains came at Intel's expense.
Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

Velcroman1 writes: Overclocking master Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch surfaced on Tom's Hardware to detail his work with liquid nitrogen to set a slew of new world records with Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh" CPUs. They include 15 world records with the Core i7-14700K and eight records with the Core i5-14600K, along with four records with the Core i9-14900K, spanning benchmarks from Cinebench to wPrime and H265.

"My top speeds were 7,730.11 MHz on all cores on the 14900K, 7,859.05 MHz on the 14600K and 7,600 MHz on the 14700K," writes Splave. "All of these achieved in Cinebench R23 while using Liquid Nitrogen cooling." "At the end of a week of playing around, I broke the 8-core Cinebench record at a crazy 7.73 GHz on all cores," concludes Splave. "Overall, these CPUs potentially OC better than their predecessors and cost the same. It was a rather refreshing refresh, I would say."

Next April a new LTS Ubuntu arrives, and alongside it will be a whole new immutable desktop edition. At this year's Ubuntu conference in Riga, Latvia, Canonical revealed more details about its forthcoming immutable desktop distro. From a report: Core Desktop is not the next version of Ubuntu itself. Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren't going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors. Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04. Ubuntu Core is Canonical's Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays. It is an immutable distro, meaning that the root filesystem is read-only and there's no conventional package manager.

Rather than being a basis for customization, like a conventional Linux, the idea is that immutable distros are rolled out and updated more like a phone or tablet OS: there's a single fixed and heavily tested OS image, and it's deployed onto the devices out in the field without modification. Updates are monolithic: a whole fresh image is pushed out, and all the OS components are upgraded in a single operation to the same combination. That isn't unique. Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE's next-gen enterprise OS ALP. As well as the well-known ChromeOS, another immutable desktop is the educational distro Endless OS.

[...] Canonical believes it has some unique new angles. Core Desktop is constructed as additional layers on top of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, and like Core, it's entirely built with a single packaging system: Ubuntu's Snap. While Snap remains controversial, it does have some compelling advantages over both SUSE and Red Hat's tooling. SUSE's transactional_update tool, while simpler than its rivals in implementation, requires a snapshot-capable filesystem, meaning that its immutable distros must use Btrfs. While it has many admirers, the number and the contents of the orange and red cells in the feature tables here in its own documentation reflect the FOSS desk's serious reservations about Btrfs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's plenty of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about electric cars and the potential risk of battery fires, but the regular old 12 V battery is responsible for Toyota issuing a recall for more than 1.8 million cars this week. Toyota says the problem is due to differences in the sizes of replacement batteries -- some have smaller tops than others, and if a smaller-top battery isn't held in properly by its clamp, the battery could move under hard cornering, letting the positive terminal contact the clamp, causing a short-circuit and possible fire risk.

The problem affects 2013-2018 RAV4s -- about 1,854,000 of them, according to Toyota. The official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety recall notice has not yet been posted, but NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has had an open case looking into the problem since February 2021, after 11 complaints about "non-crash thermal events" starting in the engine bays of RAV4s. Toyota says that it's working on a new hold-down clamp, battery tray, and positive terminal cover. Once those are ready, the automaker will replace those components for free. The automaker says owners should be contacted about the recall by late December.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The head of the Russian department responsible for identifying threats to the "stability, security and integrity" of the internet, has revealed the extent of the Kremlin's VPN crackdown. Former FSO officer Sergei Khutortsev, a central figure in Russia's 'sovereign internet' project, confirmed that 167 VPN services are now blocked along with over 200 email services. Russia is also reported as stepping up measures against protocols such as OpenVPN, IKEv2 and WireGuard. [...]

An in-depth report published by TheIns.ru has details of the monitoring/blocking system reportedly deployed in Russia, how much it costs (4.3 billion rubles/$43 million in 2020, 24.7 billion rubles/$247 million for 2022-2024), and the names of the companies supplying the components. The publication also obtained original documents that apparently show some of the protocols Russia initially intended to block. They include older VPN protocols IPSec, L2TP, and PPTP, plus the BitTorrent protocol still widely used today. The full report on the system, which reveals the use of Intel chips/chipsets in 965 servers manufactured by Huawei and already purchased by Russia, plus another 2400+ servers for 2023/24, is available here.

Google says it'll issue a system update to fix a major storage bug in Android 14 that has caused some users to be locked out of their devices. Ars Technica reports: Apparently one more round of news reports was enough to get the gears moving at Google. Over the weekend the Issue tracker bug has been kicked up from a mid-level "P2" priority to "P0," the highest priority on the issue tracker. The bug has been assigned to someone now, and Googlers have jumped into the thread to make official statements that Google is looking into the matter. Here's the big post from Google on the bug tracker [...]. The highlights here are that Google says the bug affects devices with multiple Android users, not multiple Google accounts or (something we thought originally) users with work profiles. Setting up multiple users means going to the system settings, then "Multiple users," then "Allow multiple users," and you can add a user other than the default one. If you do this, you'll have a user switcher at the bottom of the quick settings. Multiple users all have separate data, separate apps, and separate Google accounts. Child users are probably the most popular reason to use this feature since you can lock kids out of things, like purchasing apps.

Shipping a Google Play system update as a quick Band-Aid is an interesting solution, but as Google's post suggests, this doesn't mean the problem is fixed. Play system updates (these are alternatively called Project Mainline or APEX modules) allow Google to update core system components via the Play Store, but they are really not meant for critical fixes. The big problem is that the Play system updates don't aggressively apply themselves or even let you know they have been downloaded. They just passively, silently wait for a reboot to happen so they can apply. For Pixel users, it feels like the horse has already left the barn anyway -- like most Pixel phones have automatically applied the nearly 13-day-old update by now. Users can force Play system updates to happen themselves by going to the system settings, then "Security & Privacy," then "System & updates," then "Google Play system update." If you have an update, you'll be prompted to reboot the phone. Also note that this differs from the usual OS update checker location, which is in system settings, then "System," then "System update." The system update screen will happily tell you "Your system is up to date" even if you have a pending Google Play system update. It would be great to have a single location for OS updates, Google Play System/Mainline updates, and app updates, but they are scattered everywhere and give conflicting "up to date" messages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications. Under the new agreement, 23andMe will provide GSK with one year of access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research, 23andMe said in a statement Monday. The genetic-testing company will also provide data-analysis services to GSK.

23andMe is best known for its DNA-testing kits that give customers ancestry and health information. But the DNA it collects is also valuable, including for scientific research. With information from more than 14 million customers, the only data sets that rival the size of the 23andMe library belong to Ancestry.com and the Chinese government. The idea for drugmakers is to comb the data for hints about genetic pathways that might be at the root of disease, which could significantly speed up the long, slow process of drug development. GSK and 23andMe have already taken one potential medication to clinical trials: a cancer drug that works to block CD96, a protein that helps modulate the body's immune responses. It entered that testing phase in four years, compared to an industry average of about seven years. Overall, the partnership between GSK and 23andMe has produced more than 50 new drug targets, according to the statement.

The new agreement changes some components of the collaboration. Any discoveries GSK makes with the 23andMe data will now be solely owned by the British pharmaceutical giant, while the genetic-testing company will be eligible for royalties on some projects. In the past, the two companies pursued new drug targets jointly. GSK's new deal with 23andMe is also non-exclusive, leaving the genetic-testing company free to license its database to other drugmakers.

iFixit has started selling genuine replacement parts for Microsoft Surface devices. From a report: The company now offers SSDs, batteries, screens, kickstands, and a whole bunch of other parts for 15 Surface products. Some of the devices on that list include the Surface Pro 9, Surface Laptop 5, Surface Go 4, Surface Studio 2 Plus, and others. You can check out the entire list of supported products and parts in this post on Microsoft's website. In addition to supplying replacement parts, iFixit also offers disassembly videos and guides for each product, as well as toolkits that include things like an opening tool, tweezers, drivers, and more.

Tereza Pultarova reports via Space.com: Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky. [...] A study published earlier this year found that stars are disappearing from the sky at an average rate of 10% per year. This trend affects even the world's most remote observatories. Germany-based startup StealthTransit recently tested a solution to this growing issue. "Unfortunately, this problem haunts almost all observatories today," Vlad Pashkovsky, StealthTransit's founder and CEO, told Space.com in an email. "Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles]. This means that virtually every observatory on Earth either already needs, or will need in the future 10 years, protection from the light of large cities."

StealthTransit's solution relies on three components: A simple device that makes LED lights flicker at a very high frequency that is imperceptible to the human eye, a GPS receiver, and a specially designed shutter on the telescope's camera that can blink in sync with the LED lights. The GPS technology guides the telescope's shutter to open only during the fleeting moments when the LED lights are switched off. The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%. "We can say that the telescope was seeing almost a dark sky at this time," Pashkovsky said. "The important thing about our technology is that it makes all kinds of lights astronomy-friendly, including outdoor advertising and indoor lighting in apartments, offices and stores."

The technology could filter out lights from nearby towns and villages as well as those surrounding the observatory itself. It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology. The most expensive element of the DarkSkyProtector system is the telescope shutter, which needs to be lightweight and agile enough to blink about 150 times per second. StealthTransit tested the prototype shutter on a 24-inch-wide (60 centimeters) telescope and hopes to make the technology available for larger telescopes. Although StealthTransit's technology is not yet ready for commercial use, Pashkovsky said, the firm hopes to have a product fit for the world's best telescopes in five to seven years.

While the tech in virtual reality headsets has "undoubtedly gotten better," iFixit says "repair is getting left off of designers' priority lists." In a recent teardown video, the DIY repair site disassembled Meta's Quest 3 headset to find that it's not super repairable," giving it a repairability score of 4 out of 10 due the absence of manuals, OEM spare parts, and "any sign of repairability considerations whatsoever." The Register reports: As the iFixit team tore into the headset, the first major failure from a repairability perspective was the "extremely complicated procedure of replacing the lithium polymer battery pack." "Replacing the battery in the Quest 3 is as difficult as it was in the Quest 2, and far more difficult than the Quest Pro." That said, the batteries in the controllers are AAs rather than the lithium-ion cells of the Quest Pro, so it's a win there.

Faced with a multitude of screws and the lack of a service manual, iFixit stripped the headset back to its bare components, revealing the new time of flight sensor -- essential for hand and controller tracking as well as mapping out the space around the user -- and, beyond the fan, the mainboard. The Quest 3 is powered by a Snapdragon 8, the XR2 Gen2. According to iFixit: "Leaked benchmarks suggest that this newer SoC improves on the XR2+ found in the Quest Pro both in terms of performance and power efficiency."

However, it is the battery that disappoints. Although it is a standard unit so theoretically replaceable, iFixit noted: "It's taken me three Fixmats, a single tray of plastic, and very careful organizing of about 50 screws to get this far." Yikes. Not really a user-serviceable part at all. [...] Overall, the team gave the device a provisional 4 out of 10 in its teardown, principally due to the absence of manuals, OEM spare parts, and "any sign of repairability considerations whatsoever." But hey, at least you can swap out the AAs in the controllers when they die.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: New York residents eyeing a new 3D printer may soon have to submit a criminal background check if a newly proposed state bill becomes law. The recently introduced legislation, authored by state senator Jenifer Rajkumar, aims to snub out an increasingly popular loophole where convicted felons who would otherwise be prohibited from legally buying a firearm instead simply 3D print individual components to create an untraceable "ghost gun." If passed, New York would join a growing body of states placing restrictions on 3D printers in the name of public safety.

The New York bill, called AB A8132, would require a criminal history background check for anyone attempting to purchase a 3D printer capable of fabricating a firearm. It would similarly prohibit the sale of those printers to anyone with a criminal history that disqualifies them from owning a firearm. As it's currently written, the bill doesn't clarify what models or makes of printers would potentially fall under this broad category. The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a "device capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model." "Three-dimensionally printed firearms, a type of untraceable ghost gun, can be built by anyone using a $150 three-dimensional printer," Rajkumar wrote in a memorandum explaining the bill. "This bill will require a background check so that three-dimensional printed firearms do not get in the wrong hands."

The NYPD has reported a 60% increase in seized ghost guns over the past two years. Meanwhile, on a national level, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives reported a 1083% increase in ghost gun recoveries from 2017-2021, figures they say are likely underreported.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu: The System Monitor app Ubuntu comes with does an okay job of letting you monitor system resources and oversee running processes — but it does look dated... [T]he app's graphs and charts are tiny, compact, and lack the glanceability and granular-detail that similar tools on other systems offer.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ace System Monitor alternatives available on Linux, with the Rust-based Resources being the latest tool to the join the club. And it's a real looker... Resources shows real-time graphs showing the utilisation of core system components... You can also see a [sortable and searchable] list of running apps and processes, which are separated in this app.
It's also possible to select a refresh interval "from very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast (though tempting to select, 'very fast' can increase CPU usage)." And selecting an app or process "activates a big red button you can click to 'end' the app/process (a submenu has options to kill, halt, or continue the app/process instead)..."

"If you don't like the 'Windows-iness' of Mission Center — which you may have briefly spotted it in my Ubuntu 23.10 release video — then Resources is a solid alternative."

"A recent analysis accounting for nearly 1.2 million open source software projects primarily across four major ecosystems found that only about 11% of projects were actively maintained," reports InfoWorld: In its 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain report, published October 3, software supply chain management company Sonatype assessed 1,176,407 projects and reported an 18% decline this year in actively maintained projects. Just 11% of projects — 118,028 — were receiving active maintenance.

The report also found some new projects, unmaintained in 2022, now being maintained.

The four ecosystems included JavaScript, via NPM; Java, via the Maven project management tool; Python, via the PyPI package index; and .NET, through the NuGet gallery. Some Go projects also were included. According to the report, 18.6% of Java and JavaScript projects that were being maintained in 2022 are no longer being maintained today.
Other interesting findings:

• Nearly 10% reported security breaches due to open source vulnerabilities in the past 12 months.

• Use of AI and machine learning software components within corporate environments surged 135% over the last year.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Neowin: The various versions of Windows have used Kerberos as its main authentication protocol for over 20 years. However, in certain circumstances, the OS has to use another method, NTLM (NT LAN Manager). Today, Microsoft announced that it is expanding the use of Kerberos, with the plan to eventually ditch the use of NTLM altogether.

In a blog post, Microsoft stated that NTLM continues to be used by some businesses and organizations for Windows authentication because it "doesn't require local network connection to a Domain Controller." It also is "the only protocol supported when using local accounts" and it "works when you don't know who the target server is." Microsoft states:

These benefits have led to some applications and services hardcoding the use of NTLM instead of trying to use other, more modern authentication protocols like Kerberos. Kerberos provides better security guarantees and is more extensible than NTLM, which is why it is now a preferred default protocol in Windows. The problem is that while businesses can turn off NTLM for authentication, those hardwired apps and services could experience issues. That's why Microsoft has added two new authentication features to Kerberos.
Microsoft's blog post calls it "the evolution of Windows authentication," arguing that "As Windows evolves to meet the needs of our ever-changing world, the way we protect users must also evolve to address modern security challenges..." So, "our team is building new features for Windows 11."

• Initial and Pass Through Authentication Using Kerberos, or IAKerb, "a public extension to the industry standard Kerberos protocol that allows a client without line-of-sight to a Domain Controller to authenticate through a server that does have line-of-sight."

• A local Key Distribution Center (KDC) for Kerberos, "built on top of the local machine's Security Account Manager so remote authentication of local user accounts can be done using Kerberos."

• "We are also fixing hard-coded instances of NTLM built into existing Windows components... shifting these components to use the Negotiate protocol so that Kerberos can be used instead of NTLM... NTLM will continue to be available as a fallback to maintain existing compatibility."

• "We are also introducing improved NTLM auditing and management functionality to give your organization more insight into your NTLM usage and better control for removing it."

"Reducing the use of NTLM will ultimately culminate in it being disabled in Windows 11. We are taking a data-driven approach and monitoring reductions in NTLM usage to determine when it will be safe to disable."