Microsoft Layoffs, Nokia Layoffs, and Proprietary/Blackbox TCO
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LinkedIn and Stack Overflow Lay Off Employees
This comes after LinkedIn had already presented a restructuring [sic] plan in May that affected 716 employees.
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YLE ☛ Nokia announces plans to axe up to 14,000 jobs, around 450 in Finland
Nokia announced a massive savings programme aimed at slashing costs and trimming the workforce after disappointing quarterly results.
The telecommunications networks firm said that it was aiming to reduce payroll by up to 14,000 jobs as part of a drive to reduce costs by between 800 and 1.2 billion euros by 2026.
By the end of that cost-cutting programme, the company would have between 72,000 and 77,000 workers, compared to the current 86,000.
Kauppalehti reported on Thursday that some 447 jobs are threatened in Finland.
Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark said that decisions to cut jobs were the most difficult to make.
"The most difficult business decisions to make are the ones that impact our people," said Lundmark.
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The Strategist ☛ The impact of artificial intelligence on cyber offence and defence
Even the best defensive advances have been quickly overtaken by greater leaps made by attackers, who have long had the systemic advantage in cyberspace. As security expert Dan Geer said in 2014, ‘Whether in detection, control or prevention, we are notching personal bests, but all the while the opposition is setting world records’. Most dishearteningly, many promising defences—such as ‘offensive security’ to crack passwords or scan networks for vulnerabilities—have ended up boosting attackers more than defenders.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Detects License Plates with AI
When the Raspberry Pi detects a license plate tag, it parses it through OpenCV and a few other tools to get the exact string for the license plate. This is then sent to a website called Reg Check. This is an open-source API that allows users to search for license plate tags across several European countries.
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The Register UK ☛ Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS
Earlier this month, Statcounter figures put Windows 11 usage still some way behind Windows 10. As a reminder, Windows 10 took approximately two years to overtake the previous dominant player, Windows 7. Windows 11 (launched October 2021)… not so much.
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New York Times ☛ Maybe We Will Finally Learn More About How A.I. Works
The answer, when it comes to the large language models that firms like OpenAI, Google and Meta have released over the past year: basically nothing.
These firms generally don’t release information about what data was used to train their models, or what hardware they use to run them. There are no user manuals for A.I. systems, and no list of everything these systems are capable of doing, or what kinds of safety testing have gone into them. And while some A.I. models have been made open-source — meaning their code is given away for free — the public still doesn’t know much about the process of creating them, or what happens after they’re released.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Unidentified attackers breach tens of thousands of Cisco devices
Cisco issued a security advisory Monday warning of “active exploitation” of its IOS XE software but did not share details on the scale of the issue. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability would grant an attacker “full control of the compromised device” and allow “possible subsequent unauthorized activity,” the Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence group said in the alert.
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CBS ☛ Marine veteran says he was arrested, charged after Hertz falsely accused him of stealing rental car: "It was hell"
"The facts remain unchanged: Mr. Gober rented a car from Hertz for one day. He kept the car for over three months without payment. Hertz reached out repeatedly to Mr. Gober regarding its car, including by email, texts, phone calls, and certified mail. Mr. Gober ignored all of Hertz's outreach, save one phone call during which he hung up on a Hertz representative when asked to return the vehicle. Ultimately, Hertz reported its car stolen."
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[Old] CBS ☛ Hertz customers claim they were arrested, some jailed and even held at gunpoint after false theft reports
Fritz Jekel filed a similar case in 2019 and at the time asked Hertz whether there were any other lawsuits for false arrests and similar claims. He said he got back a database, containing over 300 claims filed, going all the way back to 2008-2016.
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Jim Nielsen ☛ LLMs and Naming Things
In Simon’s talk around practical use of LLMs, he quotes the famous saying about there being two hard problems in computer science: 1) cache invalidation and 2) naming things.
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The Register UK ☛ Paying for WinRAR in all the wrong ways - Russia and China hitting ancient app
According to a blog post on Monday, TAG has spotted Russian and Chinese-linked teams \ making use of CVE-2023-38831, which was discovered by researchers from Group-IB over the summer and patched in WinRAR version 6.23, released in early August.
Despite having been patched months ago, "many users still seem to be vulnerable," TAG noted.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple MacBook Sales Drop 30% in 2023 Despite 15-inch Air Launch: Report
According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's Mac shipments hit a speed bump during 2023, despite the launch of a larger MacBook Air earlier this year. The 15-inch MacBook Air was seen as a much-needed entry into the popular 15-inch class of notebooks. However, shipments reportedly sputtered after a sales burst during the back-to-school period (shipment estimates have been revised downward by 20 percent for the year).
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Windows TCO
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Security Week ☛ Finland Charges Psychotherapy [Cracker] With Extortion
In the 2018 breach of the Finnish firm Vastaamo, which oversaw dozens of psychotherapy centers throughout the Nordic nation, the private treatment records of tens of thousands of patients were stolen.
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Data Breaches ☛ Cuba ransomware gang demands $1.9 million for decryption key; Rock County refuses
WCLO reports an update to the ransomware attack experienced by Rock County, Wisconsin in September after they were attacked by the Cuba ransomware gang: [...]
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