Google's grip on the nearly $300 billion search advertising business is loosening. From a report: For years, the tech giant has seemed invincible in this corner of the ad market, which is the foundation of its business. Now, rivals are beginning to eat into its lead, and new offerings -- fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence and social video -- threaten to reshape the landscape. TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video platform, has recently started allowing brands to target ads based on users' search queries -- a direct challenge to Google's core business.

Perplexity, an AI search startup backed by Jeff Bezos, plans to introduce ads later this month under its AI-generated answers. Until now, it has made revenue mostly from a $20-a-month subscription offering that grants access to more-powerful AI technology. The new initiatives add to the pressure on Google from the rise of Amazon.com, which has taken a chunk of search ad spending. Many consumers begin product searches on the e-commerce platform.

Google's share of the U.S. search ad market is expected to drop below 50% next year for the first time in over a decade, according to the research firm eMarketer. Amazon is expected to have 22.3% of the market this year, with 17.6% growth, compared with Google's 50.5% share and its 7.6% growth.

"Dozens of Fortune 100 organizations" have unknowingly hired North Korean IT workers using fake identities, generating revenue for the North Korean government while potentially compromising tech firms, according to Google's Mandiant unit. "In a report published Monday [...], researchers describe a common scheme orchestrated by the group it tracks as UNC5267, which has been active since 2018," reports The Record. "In most cases, the IT workers 'consist of individuals sent by the North Korean government to live primarily in China and Russia, with smaller numbers in Africa and Southeast Asia.'" From the report: The remote workers "often gain elevated access to modify code and administer network systems," Mandiant found, warning of the downstream effects of allowing malicious actors into a company's inner sanctum. [...] Using stolen identities or fictitious ones, the actors are generally hired as remote contractors. Mandiant has seen the workers hired in a variety of complex roles across several sectors. Some workers are employed at multiple companies, bringing in several salaries each month. The tactic is facilitated by someone based in the U.S. who runs a laptop farm where workers' laptops are sent. Remote technology is installed on the laptops, allowing the North Koreans to log in and conduct their work from China or Russia.

Workers typically asked for their work laptops to be sent to different addresses than those listed on their resumes, raising the suspicions of companies. Mandiant said it found evidence that the laptops at these farms are connected to a "keyboard video mouse" device or multiple remote management tools including LogMeIn, GoToMeeting, Chrome Remote Desktop, AnyDesk, TeamViewer and others. "Feedback from team members and managers who spoke with Mandiant during investigations consistently highlighted behavior patterns, such as reluctance to engage in video communication and below-average work quality exhibited by the DPRK IT worker remotely operating the laptops," Mandiant reported.

In several incident response engagements, Mandiant found the workers used the same resumes that had links to fabricated software engineer profiles hosted on Netlify, a platform often used for quickly creating and deploying websites. Many of the resumes and profiles included poor English and other clues indicating the actor was not based in the U.S. One characteristic repeatedly seen was the use of U.S-based addresses accompanied by education credentials from universities outside of North America, frequently in countries such as Singapore, Japan or Hong Kong. Companies, according to Mandiant, typically don't verify credentials from universities overseas. Further reading: How Not To Hire a North Korean IT Spy

As of September 11th, Russia has blocked access to OONI Explorer, citing concerns over circumvention tools. This block affects Russian users' ability to access not only circumvention data but also the extensive dataset on global internet censorship that OONI provides. From a blog post: OONI Explorer is one of the largest open datasets on internet censorship around the world. We first launched this web platform back in 2016 with the goal of enabling researchers, journalists, and human rights defenders to investigate internet censorship based on empirical network measurement data that is contributed by OONI Probe users worldwide. Every day, we publish new measurements from around the world in real-time.

Today, OONI Explorer hosts more than 2 billion network measurements collected from 27 thousand distinct networks in 242 countries and territories since 2012. Out of all countries, OONI Probe users in Russia contribute the second largest volume of measurements (following the U.S, where OONI Probe users contribute the most measurements out of any country). This has enabled us to study various cases of internet censorship in Russia, such as the blocking of Tor, the blocking of independent news media websites, and how internet censorship in Russia changed amid the war in Ukraine.

In this report, we share OONI data on the blocking of OONI Explorer in Russia.

Messaging app Telegram will provide users' IP addresses and phone numbers to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests, according to Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov. From a report: The platform changed its terms of service to deter criminals from abusing it, Durov said in a post on Telegram Monday. The move comes less than a month after his arrest in France, where he faces charges of alleged complicity in the spread of child sexual abuse materials.

The move represents a marked difference from Telegram's approach to government requests for data and its reputation for lax moderation. The United Arab Emirates-based platform has been notoriously non-responsive to takedown requests from governments around the world, and often ignored requests for information about suspected criminals.

Ukraine has banned use of Telegram on official devices used by state officials, military personnel and critical workers because it believes its enemy Russia can spy on both messages and users, a top security body said on Friday. Reuters: The National Security and Defence Council announced the restrictions after Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's GUR military intelligence agency, presented the Council with evidence of Russian special services' ability to snoop on the platform, it said in a statement. But Andriy Kovalenko, head of the security council's centre on countering disinformation, posted on Telegram that the restrictions apply only to official devices, not personal phones.

Telegram is heavily used in both Ukraine and Russia and has become a critical source of information since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But Ukrainian security officials had repeatedly voiced concerns about its use during the war. Based in Dubai, Telegram was founded by Russian-born Pavel Durov, who left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with demands to shut down opposition communities on his social media platform VKontakte, which he has sold.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Walmart customers will soon have the option to pay directly from their bank accounts with instant transfers for online purchases. The enhanced feature is a flash point in the escalating tensions between merchants and the card networks setting the fees for payment processing. The world's largest retailer has offered pay-by-bank through Walmart Pay since earlier this year. Until now, the transactions were akin to digital checks and took roughly three days to finalize when being processed through The Automated Clearing House, the same network often used for bill payments or paycheck deposits. Soon, customers opting for pay-by-bank transactions will see the purchase reflected in their bank account balance instantly -- and Walmart will receive the funds immediately. [...]

Walmart's upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv's NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House's Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve's FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow. The instant pay-by-bank product will be available for online checkout on Walmart.com. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer already has customers set up a profile when they shop online. If they opt to add pay-by-bank as a payment option on their profile, they will enter their bank login credentials to connect their account. Fiserv's AllData platform connects with their bank clients and vendors including Plaid, MX, Akoya and Finicity to link and authenticate consumer accounts. With this instant pay-by-bank product, consumers will avoid stacked pending transactions, which can open them up to the risk of overdraft or non-sufficient fund fees from their bank. "When the transaction processes as a real time payment, customers get immediate access to see that payment come through, I see it hit my account and I can properly budget," said Jamie Henry, vice president of emerging payments at Walmart. "It's not as if I've got this phantom payment out there that's going to take place a couple days down the road."

China's internet regulator has proposed a strict regime that will, if adopted, require digital platforms to label content created by AI. From a report: The Cyberspace Administration of China announced its draft plan, which will require platforms and online service providers to label all AI-generated material with a visible logo and with metadata embedded in relevant files. The draft proposes that logos appear in several locations in a text, image, video, or audio file. In audio files, Beijing wants a voice prompt to inform listeners about AI-generated content at the start and end of a file -- and, as appropriate, mid-file too. Software that plays audio files will also need to inform netizens when they tune in to AI content.

Video players can get away with just posting notices about the content at the start, end, and relevant moments during a clip. Netizens who post AI-generated content will be required to label it as such. If they use generation tools provided by a platform, they'll be required to identify themselves -- and a log of their activities will be retained for six months. Some labels denoting AI-made content will be applied dynamically, based on metadata embedded in AI-generated content.

Wired published some thoughts from Hans Peter Brondmo, the former head of "Google's seven-year mission to give AI a robot body".

An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios: Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google's robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired...

Everyday Robotics spent seven years and a small Google fortune developing a one-armed robot on a wheeled platform. By the time Google pulled the plug on the project in February 2023, the robots were helping clean up researchers' desks and sorting trash during the daytime; in the evening, they were improvising dances. [Google hired a professional dancer as an artist-in-residence who teamed with "a few other engineers" to build an AI algorithm trained on the dancer's choreography preferences...]

Google founder Larry Page — favored moving directly to "end to end" (e2e) learning, where you'd hand robots a general task and they'd be able to figure out how to execute it. That, Page felt, was a goal worthy of a moonshot. But it also turned out to be out of reach. "I have come to believe," Brondmo writes, "it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks...." ["Building robots that perform useful services — like cleaning up and wiping all the tables in a restaurant, or making the beds in a hotel — will require both AI and traditional programming for a long time to come. In other words, don't expect robots to go running off outside our control, doing something they weren't programmed to do, anytime soon."]

The bottom line: So far, robot hype is outpacing robot reality. Boston Dynamics' back-flipping humanoid and quadruped bots have wowed YouTube viewers — but you wouldn't want to let them anywhere near your office or home.
It's an interesting look back. "My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired," Brondmo writes: Andy "the father of Android" Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their "spare time...." I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs' famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.

Eight and a half years later — and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI — it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on "minimum viable products" and VCs' general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things...

When I arrived, the lab had already hatched Waymo, Google Glass, and other science-fiction-sounding projects like flying energy windmills and stratospheric balloons that would provide internet access to the underserved... [But] in January 2023, two months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, Google shut down Everyday Robots, citing overall cost concerns. The robots and a small number of people eventually landed at Google DeepMind to conduct research. In spite of the high cost and the long timeline, everyone involved was shocked.
They'd tackled the problem with earnestness. ("[S]even robots working for months to learn how to pick up a rubber duckling? That wasn't going to cut it... So we built a cloud-based simulator and, in 2021, created more than 240 million robot instances in the sim.ma")

Brondmo adds this his mother had advanced Parkinson's disease, and hoped that one day robots could support her. "Our frequent conversations toward the end of her life convinced me more than ever that a future version of what we started at Everyday Robots will be coming. In fact, it can't come soon enough.

"So the question we are left to ponder becomes: How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned."

Nvidia is banking on its software expertise and broad GPU ecosystem to stay ahead in the fiercely competitive AI chip market, CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with Goldman Sachs Wednesday. Huang pointed to NVIDIA's large base of installed GPUs and their software compatibility as key strengths.

Huang highlighted three key elements of Nvidia's competitive moat: a large installed base of GPUs across multiple platforms, the ability to enhance hardware with software like domain-specific libraries, and expertise in building rack-level systems. The CEO said Nvidia's chip design prowess, noting the company has developed seven different chips for its upcoming Blackwell platform.

These comments come as Nvidia faces increasing competition from rivals. Addressing supply chain concerns, Huang said NVIDIA has sufficient in-house intellectual property to shift manufacturing if necessary without significant disruption. The company plans to begin shipping Blackwell-based products in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, with volume production ramping up in fiscal 2026, according to Huang.

From the note that Goldman Sachs sent to its clients: 1) Accelerated Computing: Mr. Huang highlighted his long-held view that Moore's Law was no longer delivering the rate of innovation it had in the past and, as such, was driving computation inflation in Data Centers. Further, he noted that the densification and acceleration of the $1 trillion data center infrastructure installed base alone would drive growth over the next 10 years, as it would deliver material performance improvement and/or cost savings.

2) Customer ROI: Mr. Huang noted that we have hit the end of transistor scaling that enabled better utilization rates and cost reductions in the previous virtualization and cloud computing cycles. He explained that, while using a GPU to augment a CPU will drive an increase in cost in absolute terms (~2x) in the case of Spark (distributed processing system and analytics engine for big data), the net cost benefit could be as large as ~10x for an application like Spark given the speed up of ~20x. From a revenue generation perspective, Mr. Huang shared that hyperscale customers can generate $5 in rental revenue for every $1 spent on Nvidia's infrastructure, given sustained strength in the demand for accelerated computing.

Following the arrest of its CEO Pavel Durov last month, the encrypted messaging service said it has disabled some "outdated" and "misused" features used by anonymous users. The Verge reports: The first changes to the app following his arrest in France last month affect its built-in blog posts and a "People Nearby" location-based feature. [...] Durov's first post-arrest statement Thursday said, "Telegram's abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That's why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard." He also said that during the four-day interview after his arrest, "I was told I may be personally responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn't receive responses from Telegram."

Telegram has since reworked some of its language surrounding private chats and moderation and followed up with these new updates. It's also adding Star giveaways and enabling a reading mode for its in-app browser. "While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities creates a bad image for the entire platform," Durov's message says. "That's why this year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise."

Durov says the service has stopped new media uploads to its standalone blogging tool, Telegraph, because it was "misused by anonymous actors." Telegram has also removed its People Nearby feature, which lets you find and message other users in your area. Durov says the feature has "had issues with bots and scammers" and was only used by less than 0.1 percent of users. Telegram will replace this feature with "Businesses Nearby" instead, allowing "legitimate, verified businesses" to display products and accept payments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: I've been videochatting with Mixael Swan Laufer for about 30 minutes about an exciting discovery when he points out that to date, the best way he's been able to bring attention to his organization is "the old school method of me performing a bunch of federal felonies on stage in front of a bunch of people." I stop him and ask: "In this case, what are the felonies?" "Well, the list is pretty long," he said. Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do "right to repair for your body." Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves' had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it. [...]

Crucially, unlike other medical freedom organizations, Four Thieves isn't suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin, isn't shilling random supplements, and doesn't have any sort of commercial arm at all. Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves. "We don't invent anything, really," Laufer said. "We take things that are on the shelf and hijack them. We like to take something established, and be like 'This works, but you can't get it.' Well, here's a way to get it." A slide at his talk reads "Isn't this illegal? Yeah. Grow up." Four Thieves has developed a suite of open-source tools to help achieve its goal. The core tool, Chemhacktica, is a software platform that uses machine learning to map chemical pathways for synthesizing desired molecules. It suggests potential chemical reactions, identifies precursor materials, and checks their availability for purchase.

The other is Microlab, an open-source controlled lab reactor built from affordable, off-the-shelf components costing between $300 and $500. It uses Chemhacktica's suggested pathways to create medications, and detailed instructions for building and operating the Microlab are provided. Additionally, the company developed a drag-and-drop recipe system called Apothecarium that generates executable files for the Microlab, offering step-by-step guidance on producing specific medications.

Laufer told 404 Media: "I am of the firm belief that we are hitting a watershed where economics and morality are coming to a head, like, 'Look: intellectual property law is based off some ideas that came out of 1400s Venice. They're not applicable and they're being abused and people are dying every day because of it, and it's not OK.'"

Further reading: Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine (Motherboard; 2018)

Microsoft has decided to donate the Mono Project to the developers of Wine, FOSS that allows Windows applications to run on Unix-like operating systems. "Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications," notes GameOnLinux's Liam Dawe. "It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime."

"Wine already makes use of Mono and this move makes sense with Microsoft focusing on open-source .NET and other efforts," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "Formally handing over control of the upstream Mono project to WineHQ is a nice move by Microsoft rather than just letting the upstream Mono die off or otherwise forked." Microsoft's Jeff Schwartz announced the move on the Mono website and in a GitHub post: The Mono Project (mono/mono) ('original mono') has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016. The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024. We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono - GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.

Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork. We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.

Thank you to all the Mono developers!

Six months after going public, Reddit "is winning over advertisers," reports Bloomberg, "by showing that it's different than other internet platforms, which often rely on users' identities and personal information to target ads." Instead, Reddit is targeting people based on their interests, relying on the site's [100,000+] deeply detailed communities — called subreddits — to match advertisers with potential customers... Early returns on that strategy have been promising. The text-based site easily surpassed expectations in its first two earnings reports this year, disclosing strong sales and better-than-expected projected growth. The stock is up 66% from its $34 initial public offering price in March.

Beyond targeting subreddits, the company also can use specific keywords to sell what it calls conversation ads. If a Redditor in r/HydroHomies — a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users — asks for advice about a specific brand of water bottle, an ad for that exact product could appear next to that user's post. These conversation ads are the fastest-growing ad format on the platform, the company said. They also give marketers a chance to appear in subreddits where customers are already talking about them...

Despite being around for close to 20 years, Reddit only started investing heavily in its advertising business in 2018, and is now hoping that marketers and investors are ready to acknowledge the site has grown up. Executives often point to its unique form of content moderation as proof that it's a safer place for brands than other sites. Reddit largely relies on a group of more than 60,000 human moderators — users who volunteer to serve as a sort of content police — to flag or take down unsavory content. On top of that, the site has a voting system so users can rate the quality of content. "From everything we're seeing, they have a level of brand safety and content safety for advertisers that is very comparable to most other social platforms," said Jack Johnston, senior social innovation director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, which buys ads on Meta, Pinterest, X and Reddit. "That wasn't necessarily the case a couple years ago."

Those improvements have paid dividends. Reddit recently signed new content partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the majority of Reddit's advertising revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies. Last year, the site made close to $800 million in ad sales, and counts marquee brands like Toyota, Disney, Samsung and Ulta Beauty among its advertisers. This year, analysts expect Reddit's overall advertising business to eclipse $1.1 billion in revenue and see the company reaching $2 billion in sales as soon as 2027, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To get there, Reddit will need to court smaller marketers, too. The company makes more than 25% of its revenue from just 10 advertisers, meaning any unexpected pullback from a key partner could have a significant impact on the company's business, said Dan Salmon, lead analyst at New Street Research. "This army of small businesses — that's the most important thing for all of those platforms, for Reddit, for Pinterest, for X," he said...

Advertisers large and small say they're already planning to spend more on Reddit in the coming quarters.
The article points out that more than 90 million people visit Reddit each day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Security flaws in your computer's firmware, the deep-seated code that loads first when you turn the machine on and controls even how its operating system boots up, have long been a target for hackers looking for a stealthy foothold. But only rarely does that kind of vulnerability appear not in the firmware of any particular computer maker, but in the chips found across hundreds of millions of PCs and servers. Now security researchers have found one such flaw that has persisted in AMD processors for decades, and that would allow malware to burrow deep enough into a computer's memory that, in many cases, it may be easier to discard a machine than to disinfect it. At the Defcon hacker conference tomorrow, Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, researchers from the security firm IOActive, plan to present a vulnerability in AMD chips they're calling Sinkclose. The flaw would allow hackers to run their own code in one of the most privileged modes of an AMD processor, known as System Management Mode, designed to be reserved only for a specific, protected portion of its firmware. IOActive's researchers warn that it affects virtually all AMD chips dating back to 2006, or possibly even earlier.

Nissim and Okupski note that exploiting the bug would require hackers to already have obtained relatively deep access to an AMD-based PC or server, but that the Sinkclose flaw would then allow them to plant their malicious code far deeper still. In fact, for any machine with one of the vulnerable AMD chips, the IOActive researchers warn that an attacker could infect the computer with malware known as a "bootkit" that evades antivirus tools and is potentially invisible to the operating system, while offering a hacker full access to tamper with the machine and surveil its activity. For systems with certain faulty configurations in how a computer maker implemented AMD's security feature known as Platform Secure Boot -- which the researchers warn encompasses the large majority of the systems they tested -- a malware infection installed via Sinkclose could be harder yet to detect or remediate, they say, surviving even a reinstallation of the operating system. Only opening a computer's case, physically connecting directly to a certain portion of its memory chips with a hardware-based programming tool known as SPI Flash programmer and meticulously scouring the memory would allow the malware to be removed, Okupski says. Nissim sums up that worst-case scenario in more practical terms: "You basically have to throw your computer away." In a statement shared with WIRED, AMD said it "released mitigation options for its AMD EPYC datacenter products and AMD Ryzen PC products, with mitigations for AMD embedded products coming soon."

The company also noted that it released patches for its EPYC processors earlier this year. It did not answer questions about how it intends to fix the Sinkclose vulnerability.

"Sonos is delaying two hardware releases originally planned for later this year as it deploys an all-hands-on-deck approach to fixing the app," writes The Verge's Chris Welch. The company released a redesigned mobile app on May 7th that has been riddled with flaws and missing features. Sonos also entered the crowded headphone market in May with the launch of its Ace headphones, but it was immediately "overshadowed" by problems with the new Sonos app, according to Sonos CEO Patrick Spence. The Verge reports: "I will not rest until we're in a position where we've addressed the issues and have customers raving about Sonos again," Spence said during the afternoon earnings call. "We believe our focus needs to be addressing the app ahead of everything else," he continued."This means delaying the two major new product releases we had planned for Q4 until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and our partners expect from Sonos." One of those two products is almost certainly Sonos' next flagship soundbar, codenamed Lasso, which I revealed last month. "These products were ready to ship in Q4," Spence said in response to a question on the call.

He also went in-depth on the app issues and how Sonos plans to fix them. Spence remains adamant that overhauling the app and its underlying infrastructure "was the right thing to do" for the company's future; the new app "has a modular developer platform based on modern programming languages that will allow us to drive more innovation faster," he said. But Spence also now acknowledges that the project was rushed. "With the app, my push for speed backfired," he said. "As we rolled out the new software to more and more users, it became evident that there were stubborn bugs we had not discovered in our testing. As a result, far too many of our customers are having an experience that is worse than what they previously had." [...]

For now, Sonos is turning to some longtime experts for help. "I've asked Nick Millington, the original software architect of the Sonos experience, to do whatever it takes to address the issues with our new app," Spence said. Sonos board member Tom Conrad is helping to oversee the app improvement effort and "ensure" things stay on the right track.

Zack Whittaker reports via TechCrunch: A cyberattack on Mobile Guardian, a U.K.-based provider of educational device management software, has sparked outages at schools across the world and has left thousands of students unable to access their files. Mobile Guardian acknowledged the cyberattack in a statement on its website, saying it identified "unauthorized access to the iOS and ChromeOS devices enrolled to the Mobile Guardian platform." The company said the cyberattack "affected users globally," including in North America, Europe and Singapore, and that the incident resulted in an unspecified portion of its userbase having their devices unenrolled from the platform and "wiped remotely." "Users are not currently able to log in to the Mobile Guardian Platform and students will experience restricted access on their devices," the company said.

Mobile device management (MDM) software allows businesses and schools to remotely monitor and manage entire fleets of devices used by employees or students. Singapore's Ministry of Education, touted as a significant customer of Mobile Guardian on the company's website since 2020, said in a statement overnight that thousands of its students had devices remotely wiped during the cyberattack. "Based on preliminary checks, about 13,000 students in Singapore from 26 secondary schools had their devices wiped remotely by the perpetrator," the Singaporean education ministry said in a statement. The ministry said it was removing the Mobile Guardian software from its fleet of student devices, including affected iPads and Chromebooks.

America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a new open-source software tool called Dioptra for testing the resilience of machine learning models to various types of attacks.

"Key features that are new from the alpha release include a new web-based front end, user authentication, and provenance tracking of all the elements of an experiment, which enables reproducibility and verification of results," a NIST spokesperson told SC Media: Previous NIST research identified three main categories of attacks against machine learning algorithms: evasion, poisoning and oracle. Evasion attacks aim to trigger an inaccurate model response by manipulating the data input (for example, by adding noise), poisoning attacks aim to impede the model's accuracy by altering its training data, leading to incorrect associations, and oracle attacks aim to "reverse engineer" the model to gain information about its training dataset or parameters, according to NIST.

The free platform enables users to determine to what degree attacks in the three categories mentioned will affect model performance and can also be used to gauge the use of various defenses such as data sanitization or more robust training methods.

The open-source testbed has a modular design to support experimentation with different combinations of factors such as different models, training datasets, attack tactics and defenses. The newly released 1.0.0 version of Dioptra comes with a number of features to maximize its accessibility to first-party model developers, second-party model users or purchasers, third-party model testers or auditors, and researchers in the ML field alike. Along with its modular architecture design and user-friendly web interface, Dioptra 1.0.0 is also extensible and interoperable with Python plugins that add functionality... Dioptra tracks experiment histories, including inputs and resource snapshots that support traceable and reproducible testing, which can unveil insights that lead to more effective model development and defenses.
NIST also published final versions of three "guidance" documents, according to the article. "The first tackles 12 unique risks of generative AI along with more than 200 recommended actions to help manage these risks. The second outlines Secure Software Development Practices for Generative AI and Dual-Use Foundation Models, and the third provides a plan for global cooperation in the development of AI standards."

Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news.

Italian app developer Bending Spoons has bought file-sharing platform WeTransfer, the companies said in a joint statement on Wednesday, as the Milan-based tech company presses ahead with a string of deals for software firms. From a report: The deal, for which financial details were not disclosed, is the fifth acquisition this year by Bending Spoons, which in February raised $155 million through a capital increase, taking the company's valuation to $2.55 billion. [...] The WeTransfer service enables its users to transfer large files online. It has 600,000 subscribers and 80 million monthly active users, according to data included in the statement. WeTransfer is the latest of several acquisitions by Bending Spoons. It bought note-taking service Evernote in November 2022.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX announced on Saturday a controversial plan to "socialize" the $230 million loss from its recent security breach among all its customers, a move that has sent shockwaves through the local crypto community.

The Mumbai-based firm, which suspended all trading activities on its platform last week following the cyber attack that compromised nearly half of its reserves in India's largest crypto heist, has outlined a strategy to resume operations within a week or so while implementing a "fair and transparent socialized loss strategy" to distribute the impact "equitably" among its user base.

WazirX will "rebalance" customer portfolios on its platform, returning only 55% of their holdings while locking the remaining 45% in USDT-equivalent tokens. This will also impact customers whose tokens were not directly affected by the breach, with the company stating that "users with 100% of their tokens in the 'not stolen' category will receive 55% of those tokens back."

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Only 14 percent of Oracle Java subscribers plan to stay on Big Red's runtime environment, according to a study following the introduction of an employee-based subscription model. At the same time, 36 percent of the 663 Java users questioned said they had already moved to the employee-based pricing model introduced in January 2023. Shortly after the new model was implemented, experts warned that it would create a significant price hike for users adopting it. By July, global tech research company Gartner was forecasting that those on the new subscription package would face between two and five times the costs compared with the previous usage-based model.

As such, among the 86 percent of respondents using Oracle Java SE who are currently moving or plan to move all or some of their Java applications off Oracle environments, 53 percent said the Oracle environment was too expensive, according to the study carried out by independent market research firm Dimensional Research. Forty-seven percent said the reason for moving was a preference for open source, and 38 percent said it was because of uncertainty created by ongoing changes in pricing, licensing, and support. [...]

To support OpenJDK applications in production, 46 percent chose a paid-for platform such as Belsoft Liberica, IBM Semeru, or Azul Platform Core; 45 percent chose a free supported platform such as Amazon Corretto or Microsoft Build of OpenJDK; and 37 percent chose a free, unsupported platform. Of the users who have already moved to OpenJDK, 25 percent said Oracle had been significantly more expensive, while 41 percent said Big Red's licensing had made it somewhat more expensive than the alternative. The survey found three-quarters of Java migrations were completed within a year, 23 percent within three months.