Linux computer vendor System76 shared some news in a recent blog post. "We prefer to disable the Intel Management Engine wherever possible to reduce the amount of closed firmware running on System76 hardware. We've resolved a coreboot bug that allows the Intel ME (Management Engine) to once again be disabled."

Phoronix reports that the move will "benefit their latest Intel Core 13th Gen 'Raptor Lake' wares as well as prior generation devices." Intel ME is disabled for their latest Raptor lake laptops and most older platforms with some exceptions like where having a silicon issue with Tiger Lake. System76 has also added a new firmware setup menu option for enabling/disabling UEFI Secure Boot. The motivation here with making it easier to toggle Secure Boot is for allowing Windows 11 support with SB active while running System76 Open Firmware.

ARM has joined the Linux Foundation's Open Programmable Infrastructure project, "a community-driven initiative focused on creating a standards-based open ecosystem for next-generation architectures and frameworks" based on programmable processor technologies like DPUs (Data Processing Units) and IPUs (Infrastructure Processing Units).

From the Linux Foundation's announcement: Launched in June 2021 under the Linux Foundation, the project is focused on utilizing open software and standards, as well as frameworks and toolkits, to enable the rapid adoption of DPUs. Arm joins other premier members including Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, Nvidia, Red Hat, Tencent, and ZTE. These member companies work together to create an ecosystem of blueprints and standards to ensure that compliant DPUs work with any server.

DPUs are used today to accelerate networking, security, and storage tasks. In addition to performance benefits, DPUs help improve data center security by providing physical isolation for running infrastructure tasks. DPUs also help to reduce latency and improve performance for applications that require real-time data processing. As DPUs create a logical split between infrastructure compute and client applications, the manageability of workloads within different development and management teams is streamlined.

"Arm has been contributing to the OPI Project for a while now," said Kris Murphy, Chair of the OPI Project Governing Board and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. "Now, as a premier member, we are excited that they're bringing their leadership to the Governing Board and expertise to the technical steering committee and working groups. Their participation will help to ensure that the DPU components are optimized for programmable infrastructure solutions."

"Across network, storage, and security applications, DPUs are already proving the power efficiency and capex benefits of specialized processing technology," said Marc Meunier, director of ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm and member of OPI Governing Board. "As a premier member of the OPI project, we look forward to contributing our expertise in heterogeneous computing and working with other leaders in the industry to create solution blueprints and standards that pave the way for successful deployments."

"The DPU market offers an opportunity for us to change how infrastructure services can be deployed and managed," Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. "With collaboration across software and hardware vendors representing silicon devices and the entire DPU software stack, the OPI Project is creating an open ecosystem for next generation data centers, private clouds, and edge deployments."

Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund that manages assets worth around $300 billion, has cut the pay of staff involved in its FTX investment that soured after the crypto exchange collapsed. From a report: An independent team conducted an internal review of the investment and found that although there was no misconduct by its investment team, the team and senior management "took collective accountability and had their compensation reduced," Temasek said Monday. It did not detail the amount of compensation cut. Temasek had invested $275 million in FTX and FTX U.S. and wrote off all of its investments to zero after Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto group filed for bankruptcy in November. Temasek had taken a 1% stake in FTX International and a 1.5% stake in FTX U.S. as part of its investments.

"An independent report looking into the development of NASA's new moon rocket has found significant cost overruns and delays that could harm the agency's plans to put astronauts back on the moon," reports Space.com.

Their article cites specifically "increases in costs related to contracts awarded to Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman for SLS's propulsion systems," citing a 50-page report published Thursday by NASA's Inspector General: Altogether, the four contracts for the rocket's booster and engine were initially projected to cost $7 billion over a span of 14 years, but are now projected to cost at least $13.1 billion over nearly 25 years. "NASA continues to experience significant scope growth, cost increases, and schedule delays on its booster and RS-25 engine contracts, resulting in approximately $6 billion in cost increases and over 6 years in schedule delays above NASA's original projections," the report found.

These significant increases were caused by a variety of long-standing, interrelated management issues impacting both the SLS development campaign and the wider Artemis program, the report notes, including "some of which represent potential violations of federal contracting requirements." The use of heritage RS-25 engines and boosters from the space shuttle and Constellation programs for the new SLS rocket was intended to bring significant cost and schedule savings over developing new systems. But the "complexity of developing, updating, and integrating new systems along with heritage components proved to be much greater than anticipated," according to the report.

To remedy this, the report makes a number of recommendations to NASA management to increase transparency, accountability and affordability of the SLS booster and engine contracts, including switching from "cost-plus" awards towards a fixed-price contract structure. However, the assessment still finds the enormous cost of SLS hard to manage for NASA and damaging to its long term "Moon to Mars" plans. "Without greater attention to these important safeguards, NASA and its contracts will continue to exceed planned cost and schedule, resulting in a reduced availability of funds, delayed launches, and the erosion of the public's trust in the Agency's ability to responsibly spend taxpayer money and meet mission goals and objectives — including returning humans safely to the moon and onward to Mars."
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared the article along with a YouTube video with excerpts from recently released high-resolution video of the rocket's last launch.

Bitwarden, the popular open-source password management program, has launched Bitwarden Passwordless.dev, a developer toolkit for integrating FIDO2 WebAuthn-based passkeys into websites and applications. The New Stack reports: Bitwarden Passwordless.dev uses an easy-to-use application programming interface (API) to provide a simplified approach to implementing passkey-based authentication with your existing code. This enables developers to create seamless authentication experiences swiftly and efficiently. For example, you can use it to integrate with FIDO2 WebAuthn applications such as Face ID, fingerprint, and Windows Hello. Enterprises also face challenges in integrating passkey-based authentication into their existing applications. Another way Bitwarden Passwordless.dev addresses this issue is by including an admin console. This enables programmers to configure applications, manage user attributes, monitor passkey usage, deploy code, and get started instantly.

"Passwordless authentication is rapidly gaining popularity due to its enhanced security and streamlined user login experience," said Michael Crandell, CEO of Bitwarden. "Bitwarden equips developers with the necessary tools and flexibility to implement passkey-based authentication swiftly and effortlessly, thereby improving user experiences while maintaining optimal security levels."

The Washington Post notes a trend at U.S. colleges like the University of Maryland: "booming enrollment in computer science and plummeting student demand for the humanities." The number of students nationwide seeking four-year degrees in computer and information sciences and related fields shot up 34 percent from 2017 to 2022, to about 573,000, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The English-major head count fell 23 percent in that time, to about 113,000. History fell 12 percent, to about 77,000... In 2010, arts and humanities majors of all kinds outnumbered the computer science total at the University of Maryland more than 4 to 1. Now the university counts about 2,400 students majoring in arts and humanities — a collection of disciplines that fill an entire college — and about 3,300 in computer science...

As with many schools, the University of Maryland is searching for a new academic equilibrium to simultaneously handle rising demand for tech credentials and preserve what appear to be vulnerable pillars of the humanist tradition. New majors, such as "immersive media design," are arising to bridge technology and humanities as departments in older fields push to stay competitive. The ferment has fed debate about the purpose of college, the value of degrees and how much career prospects — rather than passion for learning — shape the academic paths that students take. Some schools have taken radical steps. Marymount University, a Catholic institution in Northern Virginia, decided in February to phase out history and English majors, citing low enrollment and a responsibility to prepare students "for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future." St. Mary's University of Minnesota made a similar announcement last year. There is no sign that more prominent colleges and universities will follow suit...

Computer science, a base for exploring artificial intelligence and other topics, is not the only hot subject these days. Data science has taken off over the past decade. So has nursing. Business, management and marketing have enduring appeal. In a time of economic upheaval, avoiding debt and landing a good job are top goals for many students. Value matters. "Public confidence in college paying off is being questioned at a higher rate than ever before," Michael Itzkowitz, former director of the federal College Scorecard, wrote in an email. "Some of this has to do with rising tuition costs. Some of this was influenced by the pandemic, where many students were questioning the cost they were paying to learn from their home computer, rather than being on a physical college campus."

Bandcamp is music streaming platform helping fans support independent musicians. And Bandcamp United describes itself as "a union of workers at Bandcamp — we are project managers, we are engineers, we are designers, we are vinyl campaign managers, we are support staff, we are editors and writers..."

Friday Bandcamp United issued this statement: Today, a majority of eligible Bandcamp workers voted 31-7 in favor of forming Bandcamp United, a union represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU). The vote results now await certification by the National Labor Relations Board, with a collective bargaining process to follow.

Below is a joint statement from Bandcamp co-founder Ethan Diamond and Bandcamp United:

â "Bandcamp United and Bandcamp management are committed to working together to continue to advance fair economic conditions for our workers and the artists who rely on us. We look forward to negotiating with an open mind and working in good faith to promote the best interests of all of our staff and the artist and label community we serve."

Vice Media has filed for bankruptcy, "punctuating a yearslong descent from a new-media darling to a cautionary tale of the problems facing the digital publishing industry," writes Lauren Hirsch and Benjamin Mullin via the New York Times. The media company was once valued at $5.7 billion back in 2017. From the report: The bankruptcy will not interrupt daily operations for Vice's businesses, which in addition to its flagship website include the ad agency Virtue, the Pulse Films division and Refinery29, a women-focused site acquired by Vice in 2019. A group of Vice's lenders, including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, is in the leading position to acquire the company out of bankruptcy. The group has submitted a bid of $225 million, which would be covered by its existing loans to the company. It would also take over "significant liabilities" from Vice after any deal closes. A sale process follows next. The lenders have secured a $20 million loan to continue operating Vice and then, if a better bid does not emerge, the group that includes Fortress and Soros will acquire Vice.

Investments from media titans like Disney and shrewd financial investors like TPG, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars, will be rendered worthless by the bankruptcy, cementing Vice's status among the most notable bad bets in the media industry. Like some of its peers in the digital-media industry, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media, Vice and its investors bet big on the rising power of social media networks like Facebook and Instagram, anticipating they would deliver a tide of young, upwardly mobile readers that advertisers craved. Though readers came by the millions, new media companies had trouble wringing profits from them, and the bulk of digital ad dollars went to the major tech platforms.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A passenger walks up to an airport security checkpoint, slips an ID card into a slot and looks into a camera atop a small screen. The screen flashes "Photo Complete" and the person walks through -- all without having to hand over their identification to the TSA officer sitting behind the screen. It's all part of a pilot project by the Transportation Security Administration to assess the use of facial recognition technology at a number of airports across the country. "What we are trying to do with this is aid the officers to actually determine that you are who you say who you are," said Jason Lim, identity management capabilities manager, during a demonstration of the technology to reporters at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

The effort comes at a time when the use of various forms of technology to enhance security and streamline procedures is only increasing. TSA says the pilot is voluntary and accurate, but critics have raised concerns about questions of bias in facial recognition technology and possible repercussions for passengers who want to opt out. The technology is currently in 16 airports. In addition to Baltimore, it's being used at Reagan National near Washington, D.C., airports in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Jose, and Gulfport-Biloxi and Jackson in Mississippi. However, it's not at every TSA checkpoint so not every traveler going through those airports would necessarily experience it.

Three companies "supplied millions of fake public comments to influence a 2017 proceeding by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to repeal net neutrality rules," announced New York's attorney general this week.

Their investigation "found that the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or consent," as well as "widespread fraud and abusive practices" Collectively, the three companies have agreed to pay $615,000 in penalties and disgorgement. This is the second series of agreements secured by Attorney General James with companies that supplied fake comments to the FCC... As detailed in a report by the Office of the Attorney General, the nation's largest broadband companies funded a secret campaign to generate millions of comments to the FCC in 2017. These comments provided "cover" for the FCC to repeal net neutrality rules. To help generate these comments, the broadband industry engaged commercial lead generators that used advertisements and prizes, like gift cards and sweepstakes entries, to encourage consumers to join the campaign.

However, nearly every lead generator that was hired to enroll consumers in the campaign instead simply fabricated consumers' responses. As a result, more than 8.5 million fake comments that impersonated real people were submitted to the FCC, and more than half a million fake letters were sent to Congress. Two of the companies, LCX and Lead ID, were each engaged to enroll consumers in the campaign. Instead, each independently fabricated responses for 1.5 million consumers. The third company, Ifficient, acted as an intermediary, engaging other lead generators to enroll consumers in the campaign. Ifficient supplied its client with more than 840,000 fake responses it had received from the lead generators it had hired.

The Office of the Attorney General's investigation also revealed that the fraud perpetrated by the various lead generators in the net neutrality campaign infected other government proceedings as well. Several of the lead generation firms involved in the broadband industry's net neutrality comment campaigns had also worked on other, unrelated campaigns to influence regulatory agencies and public officials. In nearly all of these advocacy campaigns, the lead generation firms engaged in fraud. As a result, more than 1 million fake comments were generated for other rulemaking proceedings, and more than 3.5 million fake digital signatures for letters and petitions were generated for federal and state legislators and government officials across the nation.

LCX and Lead ID were responsible for many of these fake comments, letters, and petition signatures. Across four advocacy campaigns in 2017 and 2018, LCX fabricated consumer responses used in approximately 900,000 public comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Similarly, in advocacy campaigns between 2017 and 2019, Lead ID fabricated more than half a million consumer responses. These campaigns targeted a variety of government agencies and officials at the federal and state levels...

LCX and its principals will pay $400,000 in penalties and disgorgement to New York and $100,000 to the San Diego District Attorney's Office.
Thanks to Slashdot reader gkelley for sharing the news.

TV providers in the U.S. collectively lost 2.3 million customers in the first quarter of 2023. "With the Q1 decline, total pay-TV penetration of occupied U.S. households (including for internet services like YouTube TV and Hulu) dropped to 58.5% -- its lowest point since 1992," reports Variety, citing a report from MoffettNathason. "As of the end of Q1, U.S. pay-TV services had 75.5 million customers, down nearly 7% on an annual basis." From the report: Cable TV operators' rate of decline in Q1 reached -9.9% year over year, while satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network fell -13.4%. In addition, so-called "virtual MVPDs" (multichannel video programming distributors) lost 264,000 customers in Q1, among the worst quarters to date for the segment. "The picture is not one that suggests that a plateau in the rate of decline is coming any time soon," Moffett wrote.

Comcast, the largest pay-TV provider in the country, dropped 614,000 video customers in Q1 -- the most of any single company -- to stand at 15.53 million at the end of the period. Asked about dwindling video business on the company's earnings call, David Watson, president and CEO of Comcast Cable, acknowledged the reality of cord-cutting and said the operator's approach is "to not subsidize unprofitable video relationships." He added, "We'll fight hard, whether it's acquisition, base management or retention. So it's important to us, but we have figured out a way to manage it financially."

Google's YouTube TV was the only provider tracked by MoffettNathanson that picked up subs in Q1, adding an estimated 300,000 subscribers in the period (to reach about 6.3 million) and netting 1.4 million subscribers over the past year. Hulu, meanwhile, has barely grown over the past three years (and loss about 100,000 live TV subs in Q1), Moffett noted, while FuboTV lost 160,000 subscribers in North America in the first quarter to mark its worst quarterly loss on record. MoffettNathason argues that the "pay TV floor" is between 50 million and 60 million U.S. homes. "As things stand, we expect cord-cutting to grow even worse and the long-theorized 'floor' to be breached."

Epic Games has released a new update for Unreal Engine 5 that allows it to run natively on Apple Silicon. With the recent update, Mac users will no longer have to rely on Rosetta technology in order to run the software, resulting in a significant boost in performance on M1 and M2 Macs. Engadget reports: There's more news for Apple users as well. Epic unveiled a new iPad app (below) for virtual productions that works with the Unreal Engine's ICVFX (In-Camera VFX) editor. It offers "an intuitive touch-based interface for stage operations such as color grading, light card placement, and nDisplay management tasks from anywhere within the LED volume," the company said. In other words, it lets DPs, VFX folks and others tweak lighting and more on virtual sets from a simple, portable interface.

Other new features introduced with the Unreal Engine 5.2 update include a "Procedural Content Generation framework" that lets you populate large scenes with the Unreal Engine assets of your choice, making it faster to build large worlds. And another feature called Substrate allows material creation with more control over the look and feel of objects used in in real-time applications like games or for linear content creation. Epic demonstrated that using its previous Rivian demo, giving a metallic-looking paint job to the R1T electric pickup.

At Google I/O on Wednesday, Google said that all Gmail users in the U.S. will soon be able to discover if their email address has been found on the dark web. The dark web report security feature will roll out over the coming weeks, and will be expanded to select international markets. BleepingComputer reports: Once enabled, it will allow Gmail users to scan the dark web for their email addresses and take action to protect their data based on guidance provided by Google. For instance, they'll be advised to turn on two-step authentication to protect their Google accounts from hijacking attempts. Google will also regularly notify Gmail users to check if their email has been linked to any data breaches that ended up on underground cybercrime forums.

"Dark web report started rolling out in March 2023 to members across all Google One plans in the United States, providing a simple way to get notified when their personal information was discovered on the dark web. "Google One's dark web report helps you scan the dark web for your personal info -- like your name, address, email, phone number and Social Security number -- and will notify you if it's found," said Google One Director of Product Management Esteban Kozak in March when the feature was first announced. The company says all the personal info added to the profile can be deleted from the monitoring profile or by removing the profile in the dark web report settings.

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang, writing for New Yorker: So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey -- a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100 -- and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to "turbocharge" sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as "capital's willing executioners": if you want something done but don't want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don't want to be blamed for doing what's necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it's just doing what âoethe algorithmâ says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: NextGen Healthcare, a U.S.-based provider of electronic health record software, admitted that hackers breached its systems and stole the personal data of more than 1 million patients. In a data breach notification filed with the Maine attorney general's office, NextGen Healthcare confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of 1.05 million patients, including approximately 4,000 Maine residents. In a letter sent to those affected, NextGen Healthcare said that hackers stole patients' names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers. "Importantly, our investigation has revealed no evidence of any access or impact to any of your health or medical records or any health or medical data," the company added. TechCrunch asked NextGen Healthcare whether it has the means, such as logs, to determine what data was exfiltrated, but company spokesperson Tami Andrade declined to answer.

In its filing with Maine's AG, NextGen Healthcare said it was alerted to suspicious activity on March 30, and later determined that hackers had access to its systems between March 29 and April 14, 2023. The notification says that the attackers gained access to its NextGen Office system -- a cloud-based EHR and practice management solution -- using client credentials that "appear to have been stolen from other sources or incidents unrelated to NextGen." "When we learned of the incident, we took steps to investigate and remediate, including working together with leading outside cybersecurity experts and notifying law enforcement," Andrade told TechCrunch in a statement. "The individuals known to be impacted by this incident were notified on April 28, 2023, and we have offered them 24 months of free fraud detection and identity theft protection." NextGen was also the victim of a ransomware attack in January this year, adds TechCrunch. The stolen data, including employee names, addresses, phone numbers and passport scans, appears to be available on the dark web.

Amid broader venture-capital doldrums, it is boom times for startups touting generative artificial intelligence tech. From a report: Before their startup had customers, a business plan or even a formal name, former Google AI researchers Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani were fielding interest from investors eager to back the next big thing in artificial intelligence. At Google, Ms. Parmar and Mr. Vaswani were among the co-authors of a seminal 2017 paper that helped pave the way for the boom in so-called generative AI. Earlier this year, only weeks after striking out on their own, they raised funds that valued their fledgling company -- now called Essential AI -- at around $50 million, people familiar with the company said. While most of Silicon Valley's venture-capital ecosystem remains in the doldrums, investors this year have been pouring funds into companies like Essential specializing in generative AI systems that can create humanlike conversation, imagery and computer code. Many of the companies getting backing are new and unproven.

Analysts at research firm PitchBook predict that venture investment in generative AI companies will easily be several times last year's level of $4.5 billion. That is driven in part by Microsoft's $10 billion investment in January into OpenAI, the startup behind the wildly popular ChatGPT bot. In comparison, such investment totaled $408 million in 2018, the year OpenAI released the initial version of the language model powering ChatGPT. Entrepreneurs and their backers are hoping generative AI will change business activities from movie production to customer service to grocery delivery. PitchBook estimates the market for such AI applications in enterprise technology alone will rise to $98 billion in 2026 from nearly $43 billion this year. As with the recently ended bull run of broader startup investing, though, investors often are jumping into AI startups even when it isn't clear how they will make a profit -- especially since the computational power required to train AI services can sometimes amount to tens of millions of dollars a year or more. The sudden influx of capital is also encouraging many AI researchers, some without management or operations experience, to start their own companies, adding to competition.

Vice Media Group is planning to sell to investors for about $400 million -- a fraction of its once high-flying $5.7 billion valuation back in 2017. The investors include Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, according to the Wall Street Journal. Variety reports: Cash-strapped Vice Media has been searching for a buyer over the past year, to no avail. In February, Nancy Dubuc announced her exit as CEO after almost five years. The company subsequently appointed longtime execs Bruce Dixon and Hozefa Lokhandwala as co-CEOs. Under the proposed sale to "senior lenders," Fortress "plans to find a role for Vice co-founder Shane Smith," who is executive chairman and previously served as CEO prior to Dubuc's hire.

The bankruptcy and sale would "wipe out" most of Vice's other shareholders, including TPG Group and James Murdoch (who invested in the company via his Lupa Systems investment firm), per the Journal report. Vice has been unable to pay many of its vendors and recently secured a $30 million "lifeline" from Fortress, the Journal previously reported. Last week, the New York Times reported that Vice Media was preparing for bankruptcy after being unable to find a buyer. It announced a series of layoffs and said it was pulling the plug on "Vice News Tonight."

AMD has posted its first quarterly loss in years due to weak sales of processors for client PCs. From a report: Overall, AMD's chip sales dropped 64%. AMD's data center and gaming hardware shipments remained strong and were flat year-over-year, which is quite an achievement given the slowing purchases of servers and weak demand for gaming hardware among consumers. While AMD's management expects the CPU market to start recovering in the second half of the year, the company's outlook for Q2 is not that optimistic.

In the first quarter of FY2023, AMD's revenue amounted to $5.353 billion, which is a 9% decrease compared to the same period in the previous year and a slight decrease compared to the previous quarter. Unfortunately, the company slipped into the red with a $139 million net loss as compared to a $786 million net income in Q1 FY2022. Additionally, AMD's gross margin decreased from 48% in Q1 FY2022 to 44% in Q1 FY2023. [...] AMD's results were a mixed bag as all of the company's business units except its Client Computing business remained more or less flat compared to the first quarter of FY2022, and even remained profitable. In fact, AMD's Data Center unit even managed to modestly increase its revenue, yet its profitability declined.

The Guardian reports: The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China's first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men's and women's titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West.
After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four "rapid chess" games — with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competition was still tied after three games, but in the final match 30-year-old Ding capitalized on mistakes and "time management" issues by Ian Nepomniachtchi. Ding's triumph means China holds both the men's and women's world titles, with current women's champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title against compatriot Lei Tingjie in July... Ding had leveled the score in the regular portion of the match with a dramatic win in game 12, despite several critical moments — including a purported leak of his own preparation. The Chinese grandmaster takes the crown from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who defeated Nepomniachtchi in 2021 but announced in July he would not defend the title again this year...

[Ding] had only been invited to the tournament at the last minute to replace Russia's Sergey Karjakin, whom the international chess federation banned for his vocal support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ding ranks third in the FIDE rating list behind Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi.
It's the second straight world-championship defeat for Nepomniachtchi, the Guardian reports: "I guess I had every chance," the Russian world No 2 says. "I had so many promising positions and probably should have tried to finish everything in the classical portion. ... Once it went to a tiebreak, of course it's always some sort of lottery, especially after 14 games [of classical chess]. Probably my opponent made less mistakes, so that's it."
Ding wins €1.1 million, The Guardian reports — also sharing this larger story: "I started to learn chess from four years old," Ding says. "I spent 26 years playing, analyzing, trying to improve my chess ability with many different ways, with different changing methods. with many new ways of training."

He continues: "I think I did everything. Sometimes I thought I was addicted to chess, because sometimes without tournaments I was not so happy. Sometimes I struggled to find other hobbies to make me happy. This match reflects the deepness of my soul."

This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system "without abstractions or overhead," according to the project's web page. "All underlying infrastructure — including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath — is treated equally; while existing abstractions, APIs, drivers, low-level overhead, and other open software are simplified. DENT unites silicon vendors, ODMs, SIs, OEMs, and end users across all verticals to enable the transition to disaggregated networks."

Or, as the Linux Foundation, the operating system provides "a flexible and customizable platform for network administrators to manage their networks." DENT provides access to open source-based switches at a lower cost and with more flexibility compared to proprietary switches with locked ecosystems. Network wiring closets in many facilities--including retail stores, warehousing, remote locations, enterprises, and small and mid-sized businesses--are often small, requiring a compact solution for network management. Additionally, staff expertise may be limited, and branch-office switches from leading suppliers can require costly contracts. DENT can be easily deployed on white-box hardware in small spaces, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for network management. As a result, DENT deployment can significantly enhance network management in a wide range of environments, providing greater efficiency, reliability, and scalability...

DentOS enables Amazon's Just Walk Out Technology to connect and manage thousands of devices like cameras, sensors, entry and exit gates, and access points on the network edge.