An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: John Binns, a U.S. citizen who has been incarcerated in Turkey, is linked to the massive data breach of metadata belonging to nearly all of AT&T's customers that the telecommunications giant announced on Friday, three sources independently told 404 Media. [...] As 404 Media reported in January, Binns has already been indicted for allegedly breaking into T-Mobile in 2021 and selling stolen data on more than 40 million people. Now, he is allegedly connected to the latest breach against AT&T, which the company said it detected in April.

The AT&T data was lifted from a Snowflake instance, a data warehousing tool, AT&T told 404 Media. Snowflake has been at the center of a series of massive and high profile breaches, including Ticketmaster and Santander. In a blog post published in June which covered a threat actor targeting Snowflake instances, cybersecurity company Mandiant said the threat actor, which it dubs UNC5537, "comprises members based in North America, and collaborates with an additional member in Turkey." In its breach announcement, AT&T said authorities had already apprehended one of the people involved in the breach. Binns was recently arrested and detained in Turkey, The Desk reported in May. That report, which is the last public information about his whereabouts, says he was detained following an extradition request from the U.S. Before he was arrested, Binns told 404 Media in January that he had "reasons to not be concerned" about being extradited.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket was grounded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday after one broke apart in space and doomed its payload of Starlink satellites, the first failure in more than seven years of a rocket relied upon by the global space industry. Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites on a shallow orbital path where they will soon reenter and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

The attempt to reignite the engine "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote early on Friday on his social media platform X, using an industry acronym for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion. The Falcon 9 will be grounded until SpaceX investigates the cause of the failure, fixes the rocket and receives the agency's approval, the FAA said in a statement. That process could take several weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the failure and SpaceX's plan to fix it. Musk said SpaceX was updating the software of the Starlink satellites to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric re-entry. "Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it's worth a shot," Musk said.

The satellites' altitude is so shallow that Earth's gravity is pulling them 3 miles (5 km) closer toward the atmosphere with each orbit, SpaceX later said, confirming they would inevitably "re-enter Earth's atmosphere and fully demise." SpaceX said the second stage's failure occurred after engineers detected a leak of liquid oxygen, a propellant. The mishap occurred on Falcon 9's 354th mission. It was the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its customer payload, an Israeli communications satellite. The failure "breaks a success streak of more than 300 straight missions," notes Reuters.

"We knew this incredible run had to come to an end at some point," Tom Mueller, SpaceX's former vice president of propulsion who designed Falcon 9's engines. "... The team will fix the problem and start the cycle again."

DVD kiosk-rental business Redbox is all set to close the shutter. LowPass: The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case of Redbox's corporate parent Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment granted the debtors request to convert it from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, effectively paving the way for shutting down the company and liquidating its assets. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment's CEO Bart Schwartz, who had only joined the company two weeks ago, stepped down this morning for unrelated reasons, according to the attorney representing the debtors in the case.

Companies use Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases to reorganize, allowing them to continue to operate while they rid themselves of debt, while a Chapter 7 bankruptcy generally results in a trustee selling off company assets to pay creditors, and winding down the company. "There is no means to continue to pay employees, pay any bills, otherwise finance this case. It is hopelessly insolvent," United States bankruptcy judge Thomas Horan determined during a hearing Wednesday, adding: "Given the fact that there may also be at least the possibility of misappropriation of funds that were held in trust for employees, there is more than ample reason why this case should be converted. So I am going to grant the motion." The firm operates a network of 24,000 DVD rental kiosks.

General Motors will pay nearly $146 million in penalties to the U.S. government, reports the Associated Press, "because 5.9 million of its older vehicles do not comply with emissions and fuel economy standards." The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement Wednesday that certain GM vehicles from the 2012 through 2018 model years did not comply with federal fuel economy requirements. The penalty comes after the Environmental Protection Agency said its testing showed the GM pickup trucks and SUVs emit over 10% more carbon dioxide on average than GM's initial compliance testing claimed.

The EPA says the vehicles will remain on the road and cannot be repaired. The GM vehicles on average consume at least 10% more fuel than the window sticker numbers say, but the company won't be required to reduce the miles per gallon on the stickers, the EPA said... GM said in a statement that it complied with all regulations in pollution and mileage certification of its vehicles. The company said it is not admitting to any wrongdoing nor that it failed to comply with the Clean Air Act...

The enforcement action involves about 4.6 million full-size pickups and SUVs and about 1.3 million midsize SUVs, the EPA said. The affected models include the Chevy Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade and Chevy Silverado. About 40 variations of GM vehicles are covered. GM will be forced to give up credits used to ensure that manufacturers' greenhouse gas emissions are below the fleet standard for emissions that applies for that model year, the EPA said. In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GM said it expects the total cost to resolve the matter will be $490 million. Because GM agreed to address the excess emissions, EPA said it was not necessary to make a formal determination regarding the reasons for the excess pollution.
According to the article, David Cooke, senior vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, "said it's possible that GM owners could sue the company because they are getting lower gas mileage than advertised."

The article also notes that in 2014, Hyundai and Kia "entered into a settlement in which they had to pay a $100 million civil penalty to end a two year investigation into overstated gas mileage on window stickers of 1.2 million vehicles."

John Timmer reports via Ars Technica: On Tuesday, the people managing the ITER experimental fusion reactor announced (PDF) that a combination of delays and altered priorities meant that its first-of-its-kind hardware wouldn't see plasma until 2036, with the full-energy deuterium-tritium fusion pushed back to 2039. The latter represents a four-year delay relative to the previous roadmap. While the former is also a delay, it's due in part to changing priorities.

ITER is an attempt to build a fusion reactor that's capable of sustaining plasmas that allow it to operate well beyond the break-even point, where the energy released by fusion reactions significantly exceeds the energy required to create the conditions that enable those reactions. It's meant to hit that milestone by scaling up a well-understood design called a tokamak. But the problem has been plagued by delays and cost overruns nearly from its start. At early stages, many of these stemmed from changes in designs necessitated by a better and improved understanding of plasmas held at extreme pressures and temperatures due to better modeling capabilities and a better understanding of the behavior of plasmas in smaller reactions.

The latest delays are due to more prosaic reasons. One of them is the product of the international nature of the collaboration, which sees individual components built by different partner organizations before assembly at the reactor site in France. The pandemic, unsurprisingly, severely disrupted the production of a lot of these components, and the project's structure meant that alternate suppliers couldn't be used (assuming alternate suppliers of one-of-a-kind hardware existed in the first place). The second problem relates to the location of the reactor in France. The country's nuclear safety regulator had concerns about the assembly of some of the components and halted construction on the reactor.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: With dozens of millions of monthly visits, Animeflix positioned itself as one of the most popular anime piracy portals. The site also has an active Discord community of around 35k members, who actively participate in discussions, art competitions, even a chess tournament. While rightsholders take no offense at these side-projects, the site's core business was streaming pirated videos. That hasn't gone unnoticed; last December Animeflix was listed as one of the shutdown targets of anti-piracy coalition ACE.

Whether these early enforcement efforts were responsible for the site's closure is unclear. In May, rightsholders increased the pressure through the High Court of India, obtaining a broad injunction that effectively suspended Animeflix's main domain name; Animeflix.live. This follow-up action didn't seem to hurt the site too much. It simply moved to new domains, Animeflix.gg and Animeflix.li, informing its users that the old domain name had become "unavailable." Yesterday, the site became unreachable again, initially returning a Cloudflare error message. This time, the domain wasn't the problem but, for reasons unknown, the team decided to shut down the site without prior notice.

"It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Animeflix. After careful consideration, we have decided to shut down our service effective immediately. We deeply appreciate your support and enthusiasm over the years." "Thank you for being a part of our journey. We hope the joy and excitement of anime continue to brighten your days through other wonderful platforms," the Animeflix team adds. The Animeflix team doesn't provide any insight into its reasoning, but it's clear that keeping a site like that online isn't without challenges. And, when a pirate site shuts down, voluntarily or not, copyright issues typically play a role. It's clear that rightsholders were keeping an eye on the site, and were actively seeking out options to take it offline. That might have played a role in the shutdown decision but without more information from the team, we can only speculate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, known for his enthusiastic energy and salesmanship, is now richer than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. This is the first time Ballmer has surpassed Bill Gates in wealth. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Steve Ballmer is now the sixth-richest person in the world with a $157.2 billion net worth.

Steve Ballmer surpassed Bill Gates for two reasons: - Ninety percent of Steve Ballmer's wealth is in Microsoft stock. Ballmer remains the single largest individual shareholder of Microsoft stock. Microsoft's stock continues its strong growth momentum and is up 21% this year alone.
- Bill Gates diversified his portfolio through Cascade Investment. Therefore, his other investments did not yield the returns that Microsoft stock would have provided. "[T]he Bloomberg Billionaires Index only considers an individual's current personal wealth," notes the report. It doesn't take into consideration each of the executives' various charitable donations, such as Gates' $60 billion donation to the Gates Foundation or Ballmer's million-dollar donations to major universities in the U.S.

Nearly half of Americans are using third-party antivirus software and the rest are either using the default protection in their operating system -- or none at all. From a report: In all, 46 percent of almost 1,000 US citizens surveyed by the reviews site Security.org said they used third-party antivirus on their computers, with 49 percent on their PCs, 18 percent using it on their tablets, and 17 percent on their phones. Of those who solely rely on their operating system's built-in security -- such as Microsoft's Windows Defender, Apple's XProtect, and Android's Google Play -- 12 percent are planning to switch to third-party software in the next six months.

Of those who do look outside the OS, 54 percent of people pay for the security software, 43 percent choose the stripped-down free version, and worryingly, three percent aren't sure whether they pay or not. Among paying users, the most popular brands were Norton, McAfee, and Malwarebytes, while free users preferred -- in order -- McAfee, Avast, and Malwarebytes. The overwhelming reason for purchasing, cited by 84 percent of respondents, was, of course, fear of malware. The next most common reasons were privacy, at 54 percent, and worries over online shopping, at 48 percent. Fear of losing cryptocurrency stashes from wallets was at eight percent, doubled since last year's survey.

Brandon Vigliarolo reports via The Register: American healthcare provider Geisinger fears highly personal data on more than a million of its patients has been stolen -- and claimed a former employee at a Microsoft subsidiary is the likely culprit. Geisinger on Monday announced the results of a probe into a November computer security breach, placing the blame on Microsoft-owned Nuance Communications for not cutting off one of its employees' access to corporate files after that person was fired. The Pennsylvania-based healthcare giant uses Nuance as an IT provider. We're told that after the Microsoft-owned entity terminated one of its workers, that staffer two days later may have accessed and taken copies of sensitive records on a huge number of Geisinger patients -- for reasons as yet unknown.

Geisinger -- which says it operates 13 hospitals and has more than 600,000 members -- said it discovered the improper access on November 29, informed Nuance, and the IT supplier immediately cut off the former employee from the healthcare group's data before involving police. "Because it could have impeded their investigation, law enforcement investigators asked Nuance to delay notifying patients of this incident until now," Geisinger claimed, explaining why only now this is coming to light. "The former Nuance employee has been arrested and is facing federal charges." It's not immediately clear if or what charges have been laid -- we've asked Geisinger for details.

Speech recognition firm Nuance performed its own probe, according to Geisinger, and determined that the former employee may have stolen information on a million-plus people. That info would include birth dates, addresses, hospital admission and discharge records, demographic information, and other medical data. The ex-employee didn't swipe insurance or other financial information, the multi-billion-dollar healthcare group stated. "We continue to work closely with the authorities on this investigation, and while I am grateful that the perpetrator was caught and is now facing federal charges," Geisinger chief privacy officer Jonathan Friesen alleged, adding: "I am sorry that this happened."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Last week, an in-depth investigative report from JBTC revealed that Korean Internet provider KT, formerly known as Korea Telecom, distributed malware onto subscribers' computers to interfere with and block torrent traffic. File-sharing continues to be very popular in South Korea, but operates differently than in most other countries. "Webhard" services, short for Web Hard Drive, are particularly popular. These are paid BitTorrent-assisted services, which also offer dedicated web seeds, to ensure that files remain available.

Webhard services rely on the BitTorrent-enabled 'Grid System', which became so popular in Korea that ISPs started to notice it. Since these torrent transfers use a lot of bandwidth, which is very costly in the country, providers would rather not have this file-sharing activity on their networks. KT, one of South Korea's largest ISPs with over 16 million subscribers, was previously caught meddling with the Grid System. In 2020, their throttling activities resulted in a court case, where the ISP cited 'network management' costs as the prime reason to interfere. The Court eventually sided with KT, ending the case in its favor, but that wasn't the end of the matter. An investigation launched by the police at the time remains ongoing. New reports now show that the raid on KT's datacenter found that dozens of devices were used in the 'throttling process' and they were doing more than just limiting bandwidth.

When Webhard users started reporting problems four years ago, they didn't simply complain about slow downloads. In fact, the main concern was that several Grid-based Webhard services went offline or reported seemingly unexplainable errors. Since all complaining users were KT subscribers, fingers were pointed in that direction. According to an investigation by Korean news outlet JBTC, the Internet provider actively installed malware on computers of Webhard services. This activity was widespread and effected an estimated 600,000 KT subscribers. The Gyeonggi Southern Police Agency, which carried out the raid and investigation, believes this was an organized hacking attempt. A dedicated KT team allegedly planted malware to eavesdrop on subscribers and interfere with their private file transfers. [...] Why KT allegedly distributed the malware and what it precisely intended to do is unclear. The police believe there were internal KT discussions about network-related costs, suggesting that financial reasons played a role.

A new Gallup survey released Tuesday found cost and work conflicts are the top reasons Americans choose to discontinue their higher education. From a report: In the poll, 87 percent said cost was a "very" or "moderately" important reason for pursuing further institutional study, while 81 percent pointed to work conflicts. The other two leading reasons were the time it takes to complete a degree at 73 percent and lack of remote options at 70 percent. Cost tops the list among all demographic groups, including across racial and ethnic lines.

"For many of these Americans, their time enrolled in these courses represents significant opportunity costs and financial investment. Given that they lack a degree or credential to show for their time enrolled, they are often worse off than if they never enrolled to begin with," Gallup said. Colleges prices have been surging for decades, with some estimating a 180 percent increase between 1980 and 2020. The cost of Ivy League schools is nearing $90,000 a year, and the average student debt held in the U.S. sits around $30,000. "Today, approximately 41.9 million Americans have some college experience but no degree or credential. The percentage of Americans who have taken some college courses, but who have stopped out and not completed their degree or credential, has increased significantly over the past five years," Gallup found.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli shares his report from BetaNews: The PC community is abuzz with Qualcomm's recent announcement of its Snapdragon X Elite SoC, a powerhouse chipset that promises to revolutionize the performance and energy efficiency of laptops and tablets. While Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs are set to feature this advanced processor, Linux enthusiasts have reasons to celebrate as well. You see, TUXEDO Computers is bringing this cutting-edge technology to the Linux world with its upcoming ARM notebook, positioning it as a strong competitor to Windows 11 Copilot+ devices.

In a recent update, TUXEDO Computers revealed its ambitious project of developing an ARM notebook powered by the Snapdragon X Elite SoC from Qualcomm. This announcement has generated significant excitement, as it presents a viable alternative to traditional x86 notebooks, offering comparable performance with lower energy consumption, directly challenging the dominance of Windows 11 Copilot+... Benchmarks suggest that the Snapdragon X Elite can not only rival but potentially surpass Apple's M2 SoCs, boasting higher energy efficiency. TUXEDO's preliminary tests confirm these impressive claims, setting the stage for a fierce competition with Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs.
"We recently presented a prototype of the ARM notebook we are working on at the Computex computer trade fair in Taiwan," according to TUXEDO's announcement.

"On the software side, a port of TUXEDO OS with KDE Plasma to the ARM platform is our goal for this project running internally under the working title Drako...

"It is quite conceivable that an ARM notebook from TUXEDO will be under your Christmas tree in 2024... If you have subscribed to our newsletter, you will be the first to know."

Friday the Python Software Foundation published several blog posts about this year's "Python Language Summit" May 15th (before PyCon US), which featured talks and discussions by core developers, triagers, and Python implementation maintainers.

There were several lightning talks. One talk came from the maintainer of the PyO3 project, offering Rust bindings for the Python C API (which requires mapping Rust concepts to Python — leaving a question as to how to map Rust's error-handling panic! macro). There was a talk on formalizing the PEP prototype process, and a talk on whether the Python team should have a more official presence in the Apple App Store (and maybe the Google Play Store). One talk suggested changing the formatting of error messages for assert statements, and one covered a "highly experimental" project to support structured data sharing between Python subinterpreters. One talk covered Python's "unsupported build" warning and how it should behave on platforms beyond Python's officially supported list.

Python Foundation blog posts also covered some of the longer talks, including one on the idea of using type annotations as a mechanism for transformers. One talk covered the new interactive REPL interpreter coming to Python 3.13.

And one talk focused on Python's security model after the xz-utils backdoor: Pablo Galindo Salgado, Steering Council member and the release manager for Python 3.10 and 3.11, brought this topic to the Language Summit to discuss what could be done to improve Python's security model... Pablo noted the similarities shared between CPython and xz-utils, referencing the previous Language Summit's talk on core developer burnout, the number of modules in the standard library that have one or zero maintainers, the high ratio of maintainers to source code, and the use of autotools for configuration. Autotools was used by [xz's] Jia Tan as part of the backdoor, specifically to obscure the changes to tainted release artifacts. Pablo confirmed along with many nods of agreement that indeed, CPython could be vulnerable to a contributor or core developer getting secretly malicious changes merged into the project.

For multiple reasons like being able to fix bugs and single-maintainer modules, CPython doesn't require reviewers on the pull requests of core developers. This can lead to "unilateral action", meaning that a change is introduced into CPython without the review of someone besides the author. Other situations like release managers backporting fixes to other branches without review are common.
Much discussion ensued about the possibility of altering workflows (including pull request reviews), identity verification, and the importance of post-incident action plans. Guido van Rossum suggested a "higher bar" for granting write access, but in the end "Overall it was clear there is more discussion and work to be done in this rapidly changing area."

In another talk, Hugo van Kemenade, the newly announced Release Manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15, "started the Language Summit with a proposal to change Python's versioning scheme. The perception of Python using semantic versioning is a source of confusion for users who don't expect backwards incompatible changes when upgrading to new versions of Python. In reality almost all new feature releases of Python include backwards incompatible changes such as the removal of "dead batteries" where PEP 594 marked 19 modules for removal in Python 3.13. Calendar Versioning (CalVer) encompasses a wide array of different versioning schemes that have one property in common: using the release date as part of a release's version... Hugo offered multiple proposed versioning schemes, including:

- Using the release year as minor version (3.YY.micro, "3.26.0")
- Using the release year as major version (YY.0.micro, "26.0.0")
- Using the release year and month as major and minor version (YY.MM.micro, "26.10.0")

[...] Overall the proposal to use the current year as the minor version was well-received, Hugo mentioned that he'd be drafting up a PEP for this change.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google must face trial on U.S. antitrust enforcers' claim that the internet search juggernaut illegally dominates the online advertising technology market, a federal judge ruled on Friday. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, denied Google's motion during a hearing, according to court records. Google had argued for a win without a trial, saying that antitrust laws do not block companies from refusing to deal with rivals and that regulators had not accurately defined the ad tech market. Court papers did not specify what reasons the judge provided at the hearing. Motions like the one Google filed are only granted where a judge determines there is no factual dispute to send to trial. Last year, the U.S. Justice department and eight states sued Google, calling for the break up of the search giant's ad-technology business over alleged illegal monopolization of the digital advertising market.

Reuters reports: A special uranium fuel planned for next-generation U.S. nuclear reactors poses security risks because it could be used without further enrichment as fissile material in nuclear weapons, scientists said in an article published on Thursday. The fuel, called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, is enriched to levels of up to 20%, compared with about 5% for the fuel that powers most existing reactors.

Until recently it was made in commercial amounts only in Russia, but the United States wants to produce it to fuel a new wave of reactors... "This material is directly usable for making nuclear weapons without any further enrichment or reprocessing," said Scott Kemp, one of five authors of the peer-reviewed article in the journal Science. "In other words, the new reactors pose an unprecedented nuclear-security risk," said Kemp, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former science adviser on arms control at the State Department. A bomb similar in power to the one the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 could be made from 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) or less of 19.75% enriched HALEU, the article said. "Designing such a weapon would not be without its challenges, but there do not appear to be any convincing reasons why it could not be done," it said.

The authors said if enrichment is limited to 10% to 12%, the supply chain would be far safer with only modest costs...

TerraPower, a company backed by Bill Gates that has received funding from the [U.S.] Energy Department, hopes to build its Natrium nuclear plant in Wyoming by 2030 to run on HALEU. TerraPower in late 2022 delayed Natrium's launch date by at least two years to 2030 due to a lack of HALEU. A TerraPower spokesperson said Natrium will use HALEU as it allows more efficient energy production and reduces nuclear waste volumes. "TerraPower has made reduction of weapons risks a foundational principle" the spokesperson said, adding that its fuel cycle eliminates the risk of proliferation.
Reuters notes that America's 2022 climate legislation "included $700 million for a HALEU availability program including purchasing the fuel to create a supply chain for planned high-tech reactors."

But the study's authors argue that if it becomes a standard reactor fuel, it could eliminate the distinction between peaceful and nonpeaceful nuclear programs — in countries around the world.

Thanks to Slashdot reader locater16 for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After acquiring VMware, Broadcom swiftly enacted widespread changes that resulted in strong public backlash. A new survey of 300 director-level IT workers at companies that are customers of North American VMware provides insight into the customer reaction to Broadcom's overhaul. The survey released Thursday doesn't provide feedback from every VMware customer, but it's the first time we've seen responses from IT decision-makers working for companies paying for VMware products. It echos concerns expressed at the announcement of some of Broadcom's more controversial changes to VMware, like the end of perpetual licenses and growing costs. [...] Every person surveyed said that they expect VMware prices to rise under Broadcom. In a March "User Group Town Hall," attendees complained about "price rises of 500 and 600 percent," according to The Register. We heard in February from ServeTheHome that "smaller" cloud service providers were claiming to see costs grow tenfold. In this week's survey, 73 percent of respondents said they expect VMware prices to more than double. Twelve percent of respondents expect a price hike of 301 to 500 percent. Only 1 percent anticipate price hikes of 501 to 1,000 percent. "At this juncture post-acquisition, most larger enterprises seem to have a clear understanding of how their next procurement cycle with Broadcom will be impacted from a pricing and packaging standpoint," the report noted.

Further, 95 percent of survey respondents said they view Broadcom buying VMware as disruptive to their IT strategy, with 46 percent considering it extremely or very disruptive. Widespread concerns about cost and IT strategy help explain why 99 percent of the 300 respondents said they are concerned about Broadcom owning VMware, with 46 percent being "very concerned" and 30 percent "extremely concerned." Despite widespread anxiety over Broadcom's VMware, most of the respondents said they will likely stay with VMware either partially (43 percent of respondents) or fully (40 percent). A smaller percentage of respondents said they would move more workloads to the public cloud (38 percent) or a different hypervisor (34 percent) or move entirely to the public cloud (33 percent). This is with 69 percent of respondents having at least one contract expiring with VMware within the next 12 months. [...] Top reasons cited for considering abandoning VMware partially or totally were uncertainty about Broadcom's plans, concerns about support quality under Broadcom, and changes to relationships with channel partners (each named by 36 percent of respondents). Following closely was the shift to subscription licensing (34 percent), expected price bumps (33 percent), and personal negative experiences with Broadcom (33 percent). Broadcom's history with big buys like Symantec and CA Technologies also has 32 percent of people surveyed considering leaving VMware. "The emotional shock has started to metabolize inside of the Broadcom customer base, but it's metabolized in the form of strong commitment to mitigating the negative impacts of the Broadcom VMware acquisition," said Kyle Campos, CTPO for CloudBolt Software, the company that commissioned the study.

He warned that Broadcom could see backlash continue "for months and even years to come."

Adobe is facing backlash over new Terms of Service language amid its embrace of generative AI in products like Photoshop and customer experience software. The ToS, sent to Creative Cloud Suite users, doesn't mention AI explicitly but includes a reference to machine learning and a clause prohibiting AI model training on Adobe software. From a report: In particular, users have objected to Adobe's claims that it "may access, view, or listen to your Content through both automated and manual methods -- using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience," which many took to be a tacit admission both of surveilling them and of training AI on their content, even confidential content for clients protected under non-disclosure agreements or confidentiality clauses/contracts between said Adobe users and clients.

A spokesperson for Adobe provided the following statement in response to VentureBeat's questions about the new ToS and vocal backlash: "This policy has been in place for many years. As part of our commitment to being transparent with our customers, we added clarifying examples earlier this year to our Terms of Use regarding when Adobe may access user content. Adobe accesses user content for a number of reasons, including the ability to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features, such as Photoshop Neural Filters and Remove Background in Adobe Express, as well as to take action against prohibited content. Adobe does not access, view or listen to content that is stored locally on any user's device."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung isn't waiting around for Oura to file any patent claims over its forthcoming smart ring. Instead, it's preemptively filed its own suit against Oura, seeking a "declaratory judgment" that states the Galaxy Ring doesn't infringe on five Oura patents. The suit alleges that Oura has a pattern of filing patent suits against competitors based on "features common to virtually all smart rings." In particular, the suit references sensors, electronics, batteries, and scores based on metrics gathered from sensors. The case lists instances in which Oura sued rivals like Ultrahuman, Circular, and RingConn, sometimes before they even entered the US market. For those reasons, Samsung says in the suit that it anticipates being the target of an Oura suit.

A new article in the Washington Post argues that a phenomenon called "Quiet vacationing" has "joined 'quiet quitting' and 'quiet firing' as the latest (and least poetic) scourge of the modern workplace.

"Also known as the hush trip, workcation, hush-cation, or bleisure travel — you get the idea — quiet vacationing refers to workers taking time off, even traveling, without notifying their employers." Taking advantage of work-from-anywhere technology, they are logging in from hotels, beaches and campgrounds, sometimes using virtual backgrounds and VPNs to cover their tracks.

Given the difficulty many employers already have trusting remote workers to be productive anywhere outside the office, you can bet they are not keen on the idea of their employees pretending to have their head in the game while their toes are in the sand. But employers also have legitimate legal reasons for keeping tabs on their employees' location when they're on the clock. "Evil HR Lady" Suzanne Lucas, writing in Inc. magazine, recently highlighted the many tax, employment, business-operation and security laws that focus on an employee's location. Workers secretly performing their jobs in other states or countries can trigger compliance headaches for their employers, Lucas notes, giving the hypothetical of an employee seeking workers' compensation after sustaining an injury while on unauthorized travel....

As with declines in birthrates, home purchases and demand for mined diamonds, the quiet-vacationing trend is being attributed primarily, though not exclusively, to millennial workers. But before launching into generational finger-pointing and stereotyping, it's worth taking a look at why they might feel the need to take their PTO on the DL. The U.S. Travel Association in a 2016 report proclaimed millennials to be a generation of "work martyrs," entering the workforce around the time average U.S. vacation usage began declining and mobile technology began enabling round-the-clock attachment to jobs... The work-vacation boundaries most premillennial workers took for granted growing up have gone the way of defined-benefit pensions and good tomatoes.

Inadequate paid leave is another driving force. The United States continues to be the only nation among its industrialized economic peers that does not guarantee paid vacation, sick leave or holidays for all workers, leaving such benefits to the discretion of employers. Workers with limited PTO — whether new to the workforce or stuck in lower-paying, low-benefit industries — generally want to keep as much paid leave banked as possible, especially if they may need it for unpredictable emergencies like illness or caretaking. If you can preserve those precious hours by packing your laptop alongside your flip-flops, why wouldn't you?
The article also mentions employers who begrudge vacation and employees who fear "becoming a target for future cost-cutting..."

The retraction rate for European biomedical-science papers increased fourfold between 2000 and 2021, a study of thousands of retractions has found. Nature: Two-thirds of these papers were withdrawn for reasons relating to research misconduct, such as data and image manipulation or authorship fraud. These factors accounted for an increasing proportion of retractions over the roughly 20-year period, the analysis suggests. "Our findings indicate that research misconduct has become more prevalent in Europe over the last two decades," write the authors, led by Alberto RuanoâRavina, a public-health researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Other research-integrity specialists point out that retractions could be on the rise because researchers and publishers are getting better at investigating and identifying potential misconduct. There are more people working to spot errors and new digital tools to screen publications for suspicious text or data. Scholarly publishers have faced increased pressure to clear up the literature in recent years as sleuths have exposed cases of research fraud, identified when peer review has been compromised and uncovered the buying and selling of research articles. Last year saw a record 10,000 papers retracted. Although misconduct is a leading cause of retractions, it is not always responsible: some papers are retracted when authors discover honest errors in their work.