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Submission + - DOGE Approved to Transfer Labor Dept Data Using PuTTY (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: NBC is reporting that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has received approval from the Labor Department to use software that could allow it to transfer vast amounts of data out of Labor’s systems, according to records seen by NBC News and interviews with two employees.

The approval for Musk’s team to use the remote-access and file-transfer software, known as PuTTY, has alarmed some of the Labor Department’s career employees. Musk, the head of DOGE, has dispatched subordinates throughout the government to radically overhaul or dismantle federal agencies with the backing of President Donald Trump.

Many of the details around DOGE’s actions have remained secret, though it has moved to gain access to large swaths of data held in the computer systems of individual agencies.

Concerns include the alleged use of artificial intelligence to analyze federal data and the alleged use of a computer server not familiar to government employees.

Transferring government data outside established protocols could have high stakes for anyone whose information is in those databases, because of the chance that more people would have access to their information than originally intended, increasing chances of a breach.

Two employees interviewed said that they considered the authorization to be a red flag because the DOGE members were new arrivals who, in their view, lacked sufficient vetting and experience for the access they were getting.

“We don’t know who they are, and we’re giving them free rein to extract whatever they want,” one employee said. “This is completely opposite of what we’d do to protect privacy.”

Submission + - Taiwan Restricts Russia, Belarus To CPUs Under 25 MHz Frequency (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From now on, Russian and Belarusian entities can only buy CPUs operating at below 25 MHz and offering performance of up to 5 GFLOPS from Taiwanese companies. This essentially excludes all modern technology, including microcontrollers for more or less sophisticated devices. Due to restrictions imposed on exports to Russia by the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union, leading Taiwanese companies were among the first to cease working with Russia after the country started full-scale war against Ukraine in late February. This week Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) formally published its list of high-tech products that are banned from exportation to Russia and Belarus, which prevents all kinds of Taiwan-produced high-tech devices as well as tools used to make chips (whether or not they use technologies originated from the U.S., U.K., or E.U., which were already covered by restrictions) to be exported to the aggressive nation. [...]

Starting today, Russian entities cannot buy chips that meet one of the following conditions from Taiwanese companies, reports DigiTimes:

— Has performance of 5 GFLOPS. To put it into context, Sony's PlayStation 2 released in 2000 had peak performance of around 6.2 FP32 GFLOPS.
— Operates at 25 MHz or higher.
— Has an ALU that is wider than 32 bits.
— Has an external interconnection with a data transfer rate of 2.5 MB/s or over.
— Has more than 144 pins.
— Has basic gate propagation delay time of less than 0.4 nanosecond.

In addition to being unable to buy chips from Taiwanese companies, Russian entities will not be able to get any chip production equipment from Taiwan, which includes scanners, scanning electron microscopes, and all other types of semiconductor tools that can be used to make chips locally or perform reverse engineering (something that the country pins a lot of hopes on).

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