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Submission + - Elon Musk just spent $185 million on a mysterious AI data center deal in Memphis (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Elon Muskâ(TM)s AI ambitions appear to be getting even bigger after a mysterious SpaceX subsidiary reportedly bought the Colossus I xAI data center property in Memphis for $185 million. The 217-acre facility, already tied to xAI operations, represents another sign that the AI arms race is increasingly becoming a battle over physical infrastructure rather than just software models. GPUs, power delivery, cooling, networking, and datacenter ownership are quickly becoming strategic assets as companies race to scale AI systems.

Oddly, the press release never identifies which SpaceX subsidiary actually purchased the property. It also refers to âoeX-AIâ as a subsidiary of SpaceX, which is not how xAI has traditionally been described publicly. Whether that wording reflects legal restructuring, corporate overlap, or simply sloppy PR language is unclear, but it adds to the growing sense that Muskâ(TM)s companies are becoming more interconnected behind the scenes.

Submission + - 'Underminr' CDN Vulnerability Hides Malicious Traffic Behind Trusted Domains (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Threat actors are exploiting a vulnerability dubbed "Underminr"i n shared content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure to hide connections to malicious domains. Researchers say the vulnerability could impact roughly 88 million domains and can bypass DNS filtering and protective DNS controls, potentially enabling stealthy command-and-control communications and other evasive attacks.

Submission + - Air France, Airbus guilty of corporate manslaughter in 2009 Air France 447 crash (bbc.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: The Paris Appeals Court found that both Air France and Airbus were "solely and entirely responsible" for the crash of Air France 447 over Atlantic Ocean which killed 228 people on June 1, 2009. The court overturned a lower court's April 2023 ruling which had cleared both companies. Both companies were fined the maximum of €225,000. While both companies blamed the cause of the accident on pilot error, prosecutors contend that poor training and failing to fix an known flaw led to the accident. In the accident analysis identified a root cause of the accident was pitot tubes which iced up during certain flying conditions. That icing caused erratic air speed readings fluctuating between low to supersonic within seconds of each other. Those conflicting readings led to a chain of confusing errors and warnings from the flight system including a stall warning. The plane was stalling however the flying pilot's (PF) attempted to climb out of a stall by pulling back actually caused the plane to stall into the ocean.

While not in the official report, a contributing factor noted by experts is the design of Airbus cockpits. One issue is the electronic fly-by-wire controls where the physical position of certain controls like the throttle does not match the input in the system. In this case, the autopilot had lowered the thrust output during flight, but it could not move the throttle position. The throttle position appeared that plane had more thrust than it did. In the Airbus cockpit, joysticks are used instead of a control yoke. The joysticks are symmetric in the layout of the cockpit in that the pilot on the left has the joystick on the left and the pilot on the right has their joystick on the right. The joysticks are also not linked to provide feedback to each other. The other pilot (pilot in command or PIC) could not know the PF was trying to climb unless he was looking directly at the PF's hands. The PIC realized the error too late to overcome the stall.

As for responsibility, Airbus had identified an icing problem on their Airbus 320 model planes and recommended those pitot tube be replaced as early as September 2007. Air France 447 was an Airbus 330, and Air France delayed replacing the pitot tubes until further recommendations. However, Air France themselves recorded had nine incidents between May 2008 and March 2009 on Airbus 330/340 planes where the pitot tubes failed due to icing conditions. Air France found six unreported incidents after the AF447 crash.

While the cockpit situation was confusing, crash investigators faulted the pilots for failing to follow procedures which would have been to first re-establish controls after the autopilot turned off. After the accident, pilot training now includes scenarios like AF447 where there is conflicting warnings. Also there was more emphasis placed on manually flying instead of relying on the autopilot.

Submission + - AMD (Xilinx) changes FPGA dev tool licensing, excludes Linux in free tier

Submitted by Sun
Sun writes: AMD has announced a change to the way they are licensing Vivado, their FPGA development tool. The spotlight of their announcement is the shift to yearly subscription instead of a one-time license.

Unsurprisingly, they are phrasing it as an improvement, saying "Annual subscriptions offer lower entry cost and continuous access to the latest updates."

Hidden between the lines of the announcement, however, is the change to the free of charge tier. AMD is adding more devices to be supported in this tier, which is supposedly the carrot. The stick, however, is the removal of certain debug features.

The thing that's likely to hit the hobbist community the worst, however, is that the free tier will now not be available on Linux.

AMD are saying that old licenses are still in effect, so it appears that if you hurry to install Vivado now, you'd still be able to use it moving forward. It is not clear, however, whether it'll still be possible to install Vivado 2025.2 after Vivado 2026.1 becomes available.

Comment Re:most dedicated fans? (Score 1) 41

by SirSlud (#66154588) Attached to: Spotify Will Start Reserving Concert Tickets For Fans

Obviously they mean the fans "listening to the artist the most on Spotify" because that's obviously the behaviour they're incentivizing with this program.

Although this just feels like it's creating up an incentive for scalpers to setup bots to listen to Spotify. If the scalper-bots are plausible deniably "legitimate traffic" in terms of being to charge those impressions back to advertisers, Spotify can probably live with that.

I don't think anybody reading that release would think, "Oh, Spotify and LiveNation are acting so selflessly in the interests of fans and artists" but in what other language can you expect them to couch it in? It's marketing.

Submission + - GitHub's Internal Repos breached through employee's use of VS Code Extension (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Himmy32
Himmy32 writes: GitHub has announced on X that their internal repositories have been breached through a compromised VS Code Extension on an employee's workstation. Bleeping Computer reported that the attack is linked to TeamPCP who have been in the news for a recent campaign affecting Checkmarx, Trivy, SAP, TanStack, and Bitwarden. The group appears to be attempting to sell the stolen code on cybercrime forums.

Comment amazing (Score 5, Insightful) 132

by SirSlud (#66152103) Attached to: Minnesota Becomes First State To Ban Prediction Markets

It's hilarious to see a federal government sue a state for banning an insanely unregularly shitshow.

"Minnesota banning prediction markets is like trying to ban the New York Stock Exchange,"

This is your future, United States. Just the dumbest shit spoken imaginable, in the service of protecting the freedom of separating people from their money, 24/7, backed up by an administration who nakedly wants dumb people to do dumb things - oh, the ways in which such policy posture enriches them personally? Totally unrelated.

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