Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the bunches-of-bytes department: 1,000 petabytes.
A million terabytes.
One quintillion bytes (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000).

That's the amount of storage reported by users of the Ceph storage solution (across more than 3,000 Ceph clusters).

The Ceph Foundation is a "directed fund" of the Linux Foundation, providing a neutral home for Ceph, "the most popular open source storage solution for modern data storage challenges" (offering an architecture that's "highly scalable, resilient, and flexible"). It's a software-defined storage platform, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation.

And Friday they announced the release of Ceph Squid, "which comes with several performance and space efficiency features along with enhanced protocol support."

Ceph has solidified its position as the cornerstone of open source data storage. The release of Ceph Squid represents a significant milestone toward providing scalable, reliable, and flexible storage solutions that meet the ever-evolving demands of digital data storage.

Features of Ceph Squid include improvements to BlueStore [a storage back end specifically designed for managing data on disk for Ceph Object Storage Daemon workloads] to reduce latency and CPU requirements for snapshot intensive workloads. BlueStore now uses RocksDB compression by default for increased average performance and reduced space usage. [And the next-generation Crimson OSD also has improvements in stability and read performance, and "now supports scrub, partial recovery and osdmap trimming."]

Ceph continues to drive the future of storage, and welcomes developers, partners, and technology enthusiasts to get involved.

Ceph Squid also brings enhancements for the CRUSH algorithm [which computes storage locations] to support more flexible and cost effective erasure coding configurations.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the one-plus-one-equals-one department: "For the first time in at least a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into a single organism," reports the Independent:

The process, called primary endosymbiosis, has only happened twice in the history of the Earth, with the first time giving rise to all complex life as we know it through mitochondria. The second time that it happened saw the emergence of plants. Now, an international team of scientists have observed the evolutionary event happening between a species of algae commonly found in the ocean and a bacterium...

The process involves the algae engulfing the bacterium and providing it with nutrients, energy and protection in return for functions that it could not previously perform — in this instance, the ability to "fix" nitrogen from the air. The algae then incorporates the bacterium as an internal organ called an organelle, which becomes vital to the host's ability to function.

The researchers from the U.S. and Japan who made the discovery said it will offer new insights into the process of evolution, while also holding the potential to fundamentally change agriculture. "This system is a new perspective on nitrogen fixation, and it might provide clues into how such an organelle could be engineered into crop plants," said Dr Coale.

Two papers detailing the research were published in the scientific journals Science and Cell.

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.
Posted by Kotaku Staff from Kotaku
Fallout 76 is getting plenty of attention in the wake of the hugely popular Amazon show, and we’re happy to see it. Also, we reflect on Final Fantasy 16's DLC now that Clive’s journey is truly at an end, and recommend a fresh new Zelda-like that’s also a twin-stick shooter. Enjoy!

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the chipping-away department: "Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry," writes CNBC. But now "it's struggling to stay relevant."

Intel's long-awaited turnaround looks farther away than ever after the company reported dismal first-quarter earnings. Investors pushed the shares down 9% on Friday to their lowest level of the year. Although Intel's revenue is no longer shrinking and the company remains the biggest maker of processors that power PCs and laptops, sales in the first quarter trailed estimates. Intel also gave a soft forecast for the second quarter, suggesting weak demand... Intel is the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year, down 37%.

Meanwhile, the two best-performing stocks in the index are chipmaker Nvidia and Super Micro Computer, which has been boosted by surging demand for Nvidia-based artificial intelligence servers. Intel, long the most valuable U.S. chipmaker, is now one-sixteenth the size of Nvidia by market cap. It's also smaller than Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and AMD. For decades, it was the largest semiconductor company in the world by sales, but suffered seven straight quarters of revenue declines recently, and was passed by Nvidia last year.

Intel's problems "are decades in the making," according to CNBC, suggesting that one turning point was Apple's decision not to use Intel's chips in its iPhone. Now nearly every smartphone built uses Arm chips built by Apple and Qualcomm, while Apple's huge orders for TSMC chips "provided the cash to annually upgrade the manufacturing equipment at TSMC, which eventually surpassed Intel."
Around 2017, mobile chips from Apple and Qualcomm started adding AI parts to their chips called neural processing units, another advancement over Intel's PC processors. The first Intel-based laptop with an NPU shipped late last year.

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Posted by AzT from TFW2005


TFNation makes another guest announcement: writer and artist Andrew Wildman. Wildman has been involved in the Transformers since the days of the Marvel UK comics, providing art for some of the most iconic moments and faces in narrative robot history. He was also at the pencils for later stories, such as Dreamwave’s The War Within, Panini’s Armada, and several covers for early IDW’s Infiltration, along with returning to the first Marvel storylines in Transformers: ReGeneration One. Stay tuned to the 2005 boards and the TFNation blog for more details as they are revealed.

The post Andrew Wildman To Attend TFNation 2024 appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the open-Windows department: "Kremlin-backed hackers have been exploiting a critical Microsoft vulnerability for four years," Ars Technica reported this week, "in attacks that targeted a vast array of organizations with a previously undocumented tool, the software maker disclosed Monday.

"When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October 2022 — at least two years after it came under attack by the Russian hackers — the company made no mention that it was under active exploitation."

As of publication, the company's advisory still made no mention of the in-the-wild targeting. Windows users frequently prioritize the installation of patches based on whether a vulnerability is likely to be exploited in real-world attacks.

Exploiting CVE-2022-38028, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to gain system privileges, the highest available in Windows, when combined with a separate exploit. Exploiting the flaw, which carries a 7.8 severity rating out of a possible 10, requires low existing privileges and little complexity. It resides in the Windows print spooler, a printer-management component that has harbored previous critical zero-days. Microsoft said at the time that it learned of the vulnerability from the US National Security Agency... Since as early as April 2019, Forest Blizzard has been exploiting CVE-2022-38028 in attacks that, once system privileges are acquired, use a previously undocumented tool that Microsoft calls GooseEgg. The post-exploitation malware elevates privileges within a compromised system and goes on to provide a simple interface for installing additional pieces of malware that also run with system privileges. This additional malware, which includes credential stealers and tools for moving laterally through a compromised network, can be customized for each target.

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Posted by Kotaku Staff from Kotaku
This week’s gaming news saw Helldivers 2 continue its efforts at world domination, Fallout 4's big next-gen patch cause problems as well as fix them, and much more.

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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the pixel-privacy department: Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users' photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it was adding a new clause to its Terms & Conditions that would grant it the rights to upload users' content to "train, develop, and improve software, algorithms, and machine-learning models." Users were given 30 days to opt out by removing all their content from EyeEm's platform. Otherwise, they were consenting to this use case for their work.

At the time of its 2023 acquisition, EyeEm's photo library included 160 million images and nearly 150,000 users. The company said it would merge its community with Freepik's over time. Despite its decline, almost 30,000 people are still downloading it each month, according to data from Appfigures. Once thought of as a possible challenger to Instagram -- or at least "Europe's Instagram" -- EyeEm had dwindled to a staff of three before selling to Freepik, TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden previously reported. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, hinted at the company's possible plans for EyeEm, saying it would explore how to bring more AI into the equation for creators on the platform. As it turns out, that meant selling their work to train AI models. [...]

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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the other-worldly-cartography department: Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Nature: The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has released the highest-resolution geological maps of the Moon yet. The Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe, which took more than 100 researchers over a decade to compile, reveals a total of 12,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 rock types, along with other basic geological information about the lunar surface. The maps were made at the unprecedented scale of 1:2,500,000. The CAS also released a book called Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon, comprising 30 sector diagrams which together form a visualization of the whole Moon. [...] China will use the maps to support its lunar ambitions and Liu says that the maps will be beneficial to other countries as they undertake their own Moon missions. Three spacecraft have launched aiming for the Moon so far this year, and in May, China intends to send a craft to collect rocks from the Moon's far side.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the what-to-expect department: An anonymous reader quotes a report published last week by Physics World: Researchers at the Dutch quantum institute QuTech in Delft have announced plans to build Europe's first 100-quantum bit (qubit) quantum computer. When complete in 2026, the device will be made publicly available, providing scientists with a tool for quantum calculations and simulations. The project is funded by the Dutch umbrella organization Quantum Delta NL via the European OpenSuperQPlus initiative, which has 28 partners from 10 countries. Part of the 10-year, 1 billion-euro European Quantum Flagship program, OpenSuperQPlus aims to build a 100-qubit superconducting quantum processor as a stepping stone to an eventual 1000-qubit European quantum computer.

Quantum Delta NL says the 100-qubit quantum computer will be made publicly available via a cloud platform as an extension of the existing platform Quantum Inspire that first came online in 2020. It currently includes a two-qubit processor of spin qubits in silicon, as well as a five-qubit processor based on superconducting qubits. Quantum Inspire is currently focused on training and education but the upgrade to 100 qubits is expected to allow research into quantum computing. Lead researcher from QuTech Leonardo DiCarlo believes the R&D cycle has "come full circle," where academic research first enabled spin-off companies to grow and now their products are being used to accelerate academic research.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the money-please department: The FTC is issuing more than $5.6 million in refunds to Ring customers as part of a privacy settlement. The Associated Press reports: In a 2023 complaint, the FTC accused the doorbell camera and home security provider of allowing its employees and contractors to access customers' private videos. Ring allegedly used such footage to train algorithms without consent, among other purposes. Ring was also charged with failing to implement key security protections, which enabled hackers to take control of customers' accounts, cameras and videos. This led to "egregious violations of users' privacy," the FTC noted.

The resulting settlement required Ring to delete content that was found to be unlawfully obtained, establish stronger security protections and pay a hefty fine. The FTC says that it's now using much of that money to refund eligible Ring customers. According to a Tuesday notice, the FTC is sending 117,044 PayPal payments to impacted consumers who had certain types of Ring devices -- including indoor cameras -- during the timeframes that the regulators allege unauthorized access took place. Eligible customers will need to redeem these payments within 30 days, according to the FTC -- which added that consumers can contact this case's refund administrator, Rust Consulting, or visit the FTC's FAQ page on refunds for more information about the process.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the not-looking-good department: In its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Microsoft reported a 30% drop in Xbox console sales, after reporting a 30% drop last April. "It blamed the nosedive on a 'lower volume of consoles sold' during the start of 2024," reports Kotaku. From the report: In February, Grand Theft Auto VI parent company Take-Two claimed in a presentation to investors that there were roughly 77 million "gen 9" consoles in people's homes. It didn't take fans long to do the math and speculate that Microsoft had only sold around 25 million Xbox Series X/S consoles to-date. That puts it ahead of the GameCube but behind the Nintendo 64, at least for now. Given the results this quarter as well, it doesn't seem like Game Pass and Starfield have moved the needle much. Maybe that will change once Call of Duty, which Microsoft acquired last fall along with the rest of Activision Blizzard, finally makes its way to Game Pass. Diablo IV only just arrived on the Netflix-like subscription platform this month. But given the fact that the fate of Xbox Series X/S appears to be locked in at this point, it's easy to see why Microsoft is looking at other places it can put its games.

Sea of Thieves, the last of four games in this initial volley to come to PS5, dominated the PlayStation Store's top sellers list last week on pre-orders alone. CEO Satya Nadella specifically called this out during a call with investors, noting that Microsoft had more games in the top 25 best sellers on PS5 than any other publisher. "We are committed to meeting players where they are by bringing great games to more people on more devices," he said. If players there continue to flock to the live-service pirate sim, it's not hard to imagine Microsoft bringing another batch of its first-party exclusives to the rival platform. Whether that means more recent blockbusters like Starfield or the upcoming Indiana Jones game will someday make the journey remains to be seen.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the significant-wins department: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned a prior district court decision, lifting the injunction that blocked New York's law mandating that ISPs offer $15 broadband plans to low-income families. Ars Technica reports: The ruling (PDF) is a loss for six trade groups that represent ISPs, although it isn't clear right now whether the law will be enforced. For consumers who qualify for means-tested government benefits, the state law requires ISPs to offer "broadband at no more than $15 per month for service of 25Mbps, or $20 per month for high-speed service of 200Mbps," the ruling noted. The law allows for price increases every few years and makes exemptions available to ISPs with fewer than 20,000 customers.

"First, the ABA is not field-preempted by the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996), because the Act does not establish a framework of rate regulation that is sufficiently comprehensive to imply that Congress intended to exclude the states from entering the field," a panel of appeals court judges stated in a 2-1 opinion. Trade groups claimed the state law is preempted by former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules. Pai's repeal placed ISPs under the more forgiving Title I regulatory framework instead of the common-carrier framework in Title II of the Communications Act.

2nd Circuit judges did not find this argument convincing: "Second, the ABA is not conflict-preempted by the Federal Communications Commission's 2018 order classifying broadband as an information service. That order stripped the agency of its authority to regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet, and a federal agency cannot exclude states from regulating in an area where the agency itself lacks regulatory authority. Accordingly, we REVERSE the judgment of the district court and VACATE the permanent injunction."
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the stay-vigilant department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A new campaign tracked as "Dev Popper" is targeting software developers with fake job interviews in an attempt to trick them into installing a Python remote access trojan (RAT). The developers are asked to perform tasks supposedly related to the interview, like downloading and running code from GitHub, in an effort to make the entire process appear legitimate. However, the threat actor's goal is make their targets download malicious software that gathers system information and enables remote access to the host. According to Securonix analysts, the campaign is likely orchestrated by North Korean threat actors based on the observed tactics. The connections are not strong enough for attribution, though. [...]

Although the perpetrators of the Dev Popper attack aren't known, the tactic of using job lures as bait to infect people with malware is still prevalent, so people should remain vigilant of the risks. The researchers note that the method "exploits the developer's professional engagement and trust in the job application process, where refusal to perform the interviewer's actions could compromise the job opportunity," which makes it very effective.
Posted by from MMO Champion
Mythic+ Dungeon Adjustments - April 26, 2024

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

With hotfixes that are now live, we’ve made the following adjustments to Mythic+ dungeons:

Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr

Timer increased by 1 minute.

Neltharus

Chargath, Bane of Scales

Fiery Focus’s Fire damage reduced by 25%.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the would-you-look-at-that department: The free tax filing pilot from the IRS that rolled out in 12 states last month saved filers an estimated $5.6 million in tax preparation fees for federal returns, said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. CNBC reports: This season, more than 140,000 taxpayers successfully filed returns using IRS Direct File, a free tax filing pilot from the IRS, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the IRS. Direct File surveyed more than 15,000 users, around 90% of whom rated their experience as "excellent," the agencies reported.

"We have not made a decision about the future of Direct File," Werfel said, noting the agency still needs to analyze data and get feedback from a "wide variety of stakeholders." The IRS plans to release a more detailed report about the Direct File pilot "in the coming days," he added. If Direct File were expanded for the next season, the program could add additional states and tax situations, according to a senior IRS official. The agency expects to decide the future of Direct File later this spring, Werfel said.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the moving-away-from-Microsoft department: Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives' Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC.

Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive's parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives' internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn't require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn't just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers. [...]

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Posted by Mechafire from TFW2005


Just in time for the weekend, we have some more product intel coming to us by way of TFW’s Jtprime17, this time concerning two upcoming figure packs. Check out the details below and then let us know what you think in the discussion thread. Tra Decepticon Commander 3 Pck Voy Starscream, Shockwave & Soundwave (This is a Hasbro item that’s separate from Takara’s Nemesis Bridge) Product Number: F9913 Tra Gen SS Multipack ROTF 15th Autobot Multipack. (LDR Jetfire, Voy Optimus & 2 unknown Deluxes) Product code: G0294

The post New Product Info Found: Decepticon Commander & ROTF Anniversary Packs appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the take-private-deals department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Darktrace is set to go private in a deal that values the U.K.-based cybersecurity giant at around $5 billion. A newly formed entity called Luke Bidco Ltd., formed by private equity giant Thoma Bravo, has tabled an all-cash bid of $7.75 per share, which represents a 44% premium on its average price for the three-month period ending April 25. However, this premium drops to just 20% when juxtaposed against Darktrace's closing price Thursday, as the company's shares had risen 20% to 5.18 pounds in the past month.

Founded out of Cambridge, U.K., in 2013, Darktrace is best known for AI-enabled threat detection smarts, using machine learning to identify abnormal network activity and attempts at ransomware attacks, insider attacks, data breaches and more. The company claims big-name customers including Allianz, Airbus and the city of Las Vegas. After raising some $230 million in VC funding and hitting a private valuation of $1.65 billion, Darktrace went public on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021, with an opening-day valuation of $2.4 billion. Its shares hit an all-time high later that year of 9.45 pounds and plummeted to an all-time low of 2.29 pounds last February. But they had been steadily rising since the turn of the year and hadn't fallen below 4 pounds since the beginning of March.

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Posted by Ethan Gach from Kotaku
As its name suggests, Manor Lords is a city builder about managing a medieval village. You help it grow, fight off bandits, and eventually take part in larger military campaigns. But none of it amounts to a hill of beans if you can’t get families to move in and help your society grow, and some players seem to be…

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