An industry group representing the world's biggest mobile phone operators announced a new united interface that will give developers universal access to all of their networks, speeding up the delivery of new services and products. From a report: The GSMA will introduce the portal, called Open Gateway, at its annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday, its Director General Mats Granryd said in an interview. AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Group are among the 21 GSMA members that will use the interface. "We have the phenomenal reach down to the base station and out into your pocket," Granryd said. "And that's what we're trying to make available for the developer community to ultimately benefit you as a consumer or you as a business."

From an opinion piece in the Register: Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies — Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft....

Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were calculated using Google Big Query analysis of PushEvents on public GitHub data. The company found that Microsoft and Google were neck-and-neck for the top spot. Red Hat is in third place, followed by Intel, then AWS, just ahead of IBM.... Red Hat is following closely behind and is currently contributing more commits than Google, with 125,012 in Q4 2022 compared to Google's 94,961. Microsoft is ahead of both, with 128,247 commits. However, regarding contributed staff working on projects, Google is leading the way with 5,757 compared to Microsoft's 5,513 and Red Hat's 3,656....

Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven CTO and co-founder, commented: "An unexpected result of our research was seeing Amazon overtake IBM to become the fifth biggest contributor." They "came late to the open source party, but they're now doubling down on its open source commitments and realizing the benefits that come with contributing to the open source projects its customers use." So, yes, open source certainly started with individual contributors, but today, and for many years before, it's company employees that are really making the code....

Aiven is far from the only one to have noticed that companies are now open source's economic engine. Jonathan Corbet, editor-in-chief of Linux Weekly News (LWN), found in his most recent analysis of Long Term Support Linux Kernel releases from 5.16 to 6.1 that a mere 7.5 percent of the kernel development, as measured by lines changed, came from individual developers. No, the real leaders were, in order: AMD; Intel; Google; Linaro, the main Arm Linux development organization; Meta; and Red Hat.
The article also includes this thought-provoking quote from Aiven CTO's. "Innovation is at the heart of the open source community, but without a strong commitment from companies, the whole system will struggle.

"We can see that companies are recognizing their role and supporting all who use open source."

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: .NET 8, the next planned version of the Microsoft's open source software development platform, is set to emphasize Linux accommodations as well as cloud development and containers.

A first preview of .NET 8 is available for download at dot.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS, Microsoft said on February 21. A long-term support (LTS) release that will be supported for three years, .NET 8 is due for production availability in November, a year after the release of predecessor .NET 7.

The new .NET release will be buildable on Linux directly from the dotnet/dotnet repository, using dotnet/source-build to build .NET runtimes, tools, and SDKs. This is the same build used by Red Hat and Canonical to build .NET. Over time, this capability will be extended to support Windows and macOS. Previously, .NET could be built from the source, but a "source tarball" was required from the dotnet/installer.
"We are publishing Ubuntu Chiseled images with .NET 8," adds Microsoft's announcement.

And when it comes to the .NET Monitor tool, "We plan to ship to dotnet/monitor images exclusively as Ubuntu Chiseled, starting with .NET 8. That's notable because the monitor images are the one production app image we publish."

CRN reports: Prominent incident response firm Mandiant disclosed Tuesday that it responded to 15 percent fewer ransomware incidents last year. The statistic was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Mandiant, which is owned by Google Cloud, confirmed the stat in an email to CRN.

The WSJ report also included several other indicators that 2022 was a less successful year for ransomware. Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike told the outlet that the average ransom demand dropped 28 percent last year, to $4.1 million, from $5.7 million the year before. The firm reportedly pinned the decline on factors including the arrests of ransomware gang members and other disruptions to the groups last year, as well as the drop in the value of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. CrowdStrike confirmed the stat to CRN.
Their article also cites a blog post from Chainalysis, the blockchain data platform, which estimated that 2022's total ransomware revenue "fell to at least $456.8 million in 2022 from $765.6 million in 2021 — a huge drop of 40.3%." And that blog post cites the Chief Claims Officer of cyber insurance firm Resilience, who also specifically notes "signs that meaningful disruptions against ransomware actor groups are driving lower than expected successful extortion attempts," including arrests and recovery of extorted cryptocurrency by western law enforcement agencies.

From the Wall Street Journal: After ballooning for years, the amount of money being paid to ransomware criminals dropped in 2022, as did the odds that a victim would pay the criminals who installed the ransomware.... "It reflects, I think, the pivot that we have made to a posture where we're on our front foot," Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in an interview. "We're focusing on making sure we're doing everything to prevent the attacks in the first place."

The hacking groups behind ransomware attacks have been slowed by better company security practices. Federal authorities have also used new tactics to help victims avoid paying ransom demands.... And the FBI said last month that it disrupted $130 million in potential ransomware profits last year by gaining access to servers run by the Hive ransomware group and giving away the group's decryption keys — used to undo the effects of ransomware — for free.

In the fall, about 45 call-center operators were laid off by former members of a ransomware group known as Conti, according to Yelisey Bohuslavskiy, chief research officer with the threat intelligence firm Red Sense LLC. They had been hired as part of a scam to talk potential victims into installing remote-access software onto networks that would then be infected by ransomware, but the call centers ended up losing money, he said.

Companies have also stepped up their cybersecurity practices, driven by demands from insurance underwriters and a better understanding of the risks of ransomware following high-profile attacks. Companies are spending more money on business continuity and backup software that allow computer systems to restart after they have been infected. With improved backups, U.S. companies are better at bouncing back from ransomware attacks than they were four years ago, according to Coveware Inc., which helps victims respond to ransomware intrusions and has handled thousands of cases. Four years ago, 85% of ransomware victims wound up paying their attackers. Today that number is 37%, according to Coveware Inc. Chief Executive Bill Siegel.

More than a quarter of Google's full-time workforce is in its cloud unit, reports CNBC. And now Google is asking cloud employees and partners "to share their desks and alternate days with their desk mates starting next quarter, citing 'real estate efficiency.'" The new desk-sharing model will apply to Google Cloud's five largest U.S. locations — Kirkland, Washington; New York City; San Francisco; Seattle; and Sunnyvale, California — and is happening so the company "can continue to invest in Cloud's growth," according to an internal FAQ recently shared with cloud employees and viewed by CNBC. Some buildings will be vacated as a result, the document noted.

"Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler," the internal document stated, noting they expect employees to come in on alternate days so they're not at the same desk on the same day. "Through the matching process, they will agree on a basic desk setup and establish norms with their desk partner and teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared environment." The FAQ says employees may come in on other days, but if they're in on an unassigned day, they will use "overflow drop-in space."

Internally, leadership has given the new seating arrangement a title: "Cloud Office Evolution" or "CLOE," which it describes as "combining the best of pre-pandemic collaboration with the flexibility" of hybrid work. The new workspace plan is not a temporary pilot, the document noted. "This will ultimately lead to more efficient use of our space," it said.
A Google spokesperson said they'd conducted pilot programs and surveys "to explore different hybrid work models," CNBC reports, with the results showing employees "value guaranteed in-person collaboration when they are in the office, as well as the option to work from home a few days each week." So they've devised their new system to combine "the best of pre-pandemic collaboration with the flexibility and focus we've all come to appreciate from remote work, while also allowing us to use our spaces more efficiently."

The article points out that Google Cloud is currently not profitable, and "is still losing hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter — $480 million in the fourth quarter, although that was nearly half of the loss a year prior."

An internal FAQ warns that affected employees are now expected to have "conversations about how they will or will not decorate the space, store personal items, and tidiness expectations."

Thanks to Slashdot reader RUs1729 for sharing the story.

"Microsoft has struck a 10-year deal to bring "Call of Duty" and other Activision games to Nvidia's gaming platform, if the Xbox maker is allowed to complete its much-contested $69 billion acquisition of Activision," reports Reuters. It comes hot on the heels of a 10-year deal with Nintendo that guarantees Nintendo players will get Activision games on the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity. Reuters reports: Regulators and competitors like Sony have come out hard against the proposed Microsoft-Activision tie-up, and a Nvidia deal could allay concerns by ensuring more ways for consumers to get games controlled by Microsoft. [...] Microsoft President Brad Smith told a news conference on Tuesday he was now more optimistic of getting the Activision acquisition done after the Nvidia deal and a similar arrangement with Nintendo.

Phil Eisler, vice president and general manager of Nvidia's GeForce Now segment, said that titles such that "Call of Duty" will not be available on Nvidia's service unless Microsoft acquires Activision but that other Microsoft-owned titles such as "Minecraft" are covered immediately under the 10-year license agreement. "We were a little concerned about it at the beginning," Eisler said of the Microsoft-Activision deal. "But then we reached out to Microsoft, and they were very open about wanting to enable cloud gaming and work with us on a 10-year license agreement. So over time, they made us more and more comfortable with it."

Eisler said Nvidia is not paying Microsoft for access to the titles, which has been the chip company's practice with other gaming companies such as "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. Instead, Nvidia's 25 million customers will need to pay Nvidia for access to its cloud gaming platform and pay Microsoft for its games. Nvidia said it now supports the Xbox maker's bid to purchase Activision, but the deal could still be a hard sell with regulators. Smith said he hoped that rival Sony will consider doing the same type of deal with Nvidia.

The U.S. Department of Defense secured an exposed server on Monday that was spilling internal U.S. military emails to the open internet for the past two weeks, TechCrunch reported Tuesday. From a report: The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft's Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data. [...] But a misconfiguration left the server without a password, allowing anyone on the internet access to the sensitive mailbox data inside using only a web browser, just by knowing its IP address.

[...] The server was packed with internal military email messages, dating back years, some of which contained sensitive personnel information. One of the exposed files included a completed SF-86 questionnaire, which are filled out by federal employees seeking a security clearance and contain highly sensitive personal and health information for vetting individuals before they are cleared to handle classified information.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, on Tuesday said it is collaborating with startup Hugging Face, a software development hub, to make it easier to carry out artificial intelligence work in Amazon's cloud. From a report: While new generative AI services like chat-based search engines from Microsoft and Alphabet's Google have captured the public's imagination, tech companies such as AWS are also vying behind the scenes to supply the tools and services that software developers will need to weave similar technology into their own products. AWS, the biggest cloud computing provider, already offers tools to help developers create AI-based software, including proprietary computing chips for raining AI algorithms on huge amounts of data at lower cost than rivals to services that reduce how much time it takes to create a chatbot or other AI products.

Microsoft has partnered with web3 infrastructure provider Ankr to offer a node service for enterprises in need of blockchain data access. From a report: The two firms will work together on a new node hosting service in Microsoft's Azure cloud marketplace, with tailored memory and bandwidth specifications for blockchain nodes. The enterprise node deployment service would enable web3 projects or developers to deploy smart contracts, relay transactions and read or write blockchain data, according to a company release. "Our partnership with Ankr will enable developers and organizations to access blockchain data in a reliable and secure way as they explore how web3 can address real-world business challenges," said Rashmi Misra, Microsoft's general manager for AI and emerging technologies in the release. "Together, we are building a robust web3 infrastructure layer."

"IBM is the latest tech giant to unveil its own "AI supercomputer," this one composed of a bunch of virtual machines running within IBM Cloud," reports the Register: The system known as Vela, which the company claims has been online since May last year, is touted as IBM's first AI-optimized, cloud-native supercomputer, created with the aim of developing and training large-scale AI models. Before anyone rushes off to sign up for access, IBM stated that the platform is currently reserved for use by the IBM Research community. In fact, Vela has become the company's "go-to environment" for researchers creating advanced AI capabilities since May 2022, including work on foundation models, it said.

IBM states that it chose this architecture because it gives the company greater flexibility to scale up as required, and also the ability to deploy similar infrastructure into any IBM Cloud datacenter around the globe. But Vela is not running on any old standard IBM Cloud node hardware; each is a twin-socket system with 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors configured with 1.5TB of DRAM, and four 3.2TB NVMe flash drives, plus eight 80GB Nvidia A100 GPUs, the latter connected by NVLink and NVSwitch. This makes the Vela infrastructure closer to that of a high performance compute site than typical cloud infrastructure, despite IBM's insistence that it was taking a different path as "traditional supercomputers weren't designed for AI."

It is also notable that IBM chose to use x86 processors rather than its own Power 10 chips, especially as these were touted by Big Blue as being ideally suited for memory-intensive workloads such as large-model AI inferencing.
Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the story.

America's Federal Trade Commission "has long been dwarfed by Silicon Valley titans like Google and Apple, each staffed with thousands of engineers and technologists," notes the Washington Post.

"But FTC leaders are hoping combining and expanding their forces into a dedicated tech unit will help them keep up with the rapid advancements across the industry — and to keep it in check." The creation of the office will increase the number of technologists on staff by roughly a dozen, up from the current 10 — more than doubling the agency's capacity, officials said. In an exclusive interview announcing the move, FTC Chief Technology Officer Stephanie Nguyen said the unit will work with teams across the agency's competition and consumer protection bureaus to investigate potential misconduct and bring cases against violators. "Actually being able to have staff internally to approach these matters and help with subject matter expertise is critical," said Nguyen, who will lead the office.

The announcement arrives at a critical juncture. Federal regulators are dialing up investigations into tech behemoths like Amazon and waging blockbuster legal battles against Microsoft and Facebook parent company Meta. While Nguyen declined to discuss specific probes or cases, she said the new technology office will work directly on both the agency's investigative and enforcement efforts to "strengthen and support our attorneys" as they look to tackle alleged abuses across the economy. "The areas ... we will focus on is to work on cases," she said.... Nguyen said, the new team of technologists could help the agency refine the subpoenas it issues companies to get at the heart of their business models, or to strike a settlement that gets closer to "the root cause of the harm" taking place.
Republican Commissioner Christine Wilson, who Tuesday announced plans to resign "soon," voted in favor of creating the office, joining with the other commissioners in a unanimous vote.

The office's core mission will have three key areas, reports FedScoop: "strengthening and supporting law enforcement investigations, advising commission staff on policy and research initiatives, and highlighting market trends."

"For more than a century, the FTC has worked to keep pace with new markets and ever-changing technologies by building internal expertise," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. "Our office of technology is a natural next step in ensuring we have the in-house skills needed to fully grasp evolving technologies and market trends as we continue to tackle unlawful business practices and protect Americans."

Read on for more details about the new office.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A team of engineers studying the 500-year-old, backward writings of Leonardo da Vinci have found evidence that the Italian polymath was working out gravity a century before its foundations were established by Galileo Galilei. The team's findings come from a revisit of the Codex Arundel, a compilation of documents written by da Vinci that detail various experiments and personal notes taken down in the latter 40 years of his life. The codex is freely accessible online courtesy of the British Museum. The team's research is published in the MIT Press journal Leonardo. Mory Gharib, an engineer at Caltech, said he stumbled across the writings in 2017 when looking for some of da Vinci's work on flow in hearts. Though the codex was written over a long span of da Vinci's later years, Gharib suspects the gravitational musings were written sometime in the last 15-or-so years of his life. Gharib recruited co-author Flavio Noca, a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, to translate the Italian's backward writing on the subject.

Da Vinci understood some fundamentals of objects in motion. He wanted to make an experiment testing how the motion of a cloud would correspond to the hail it produced, if the cloud's velocity and any changes to it corresponded with the falling hail's velocity. In lieu of control of the weather, da Vinci substituted a pitcher for the cloud and sand or water for the hail. Reliable clocks weren't available until about 140 years after da Vinci's death in 1519, the researchers note, so the inventor was forced to substitute the constant of time with space: by assuming that the time it took each water/sand particle to fall from the pitcher was constant, he just kept the pitcher at the same height throughout the tests. Da Vinci's sketch shows the positions of the falling material over the course of its trajectory toward the ground. By drawing a line through the position of the material at each instance in time, da Vinci realized that a triangle could be formed, with the drawn line being the hypotenuse. By changing the acceleration of the pitcher over the course of the experiment, one would change the shape of the triangle. Leonardo knew that the falling material would accelerate and that the acceleration is downward. What he wasn't wholly certain on -- hence the experiment -- was the relationship between the falling material's acceleration and the pitcher's acceleration.

In one particular case, when the pitcher's motion was accelerated to the same rate as the falling material being affected by gravity, an equilateral triangle was formed. Literally, as Da Vinci noted, an "Equatione di Moti" or an "equalization of motions." The researchers modeled da Vinci's experiment and found that the polymath was wrong in his understanding of the relationship between the falling object and time. "What we saw is that Leonardo wrestled with this, but he modeled it as the falling object's distance was proportional to 2 to the t power [with t representing time] instead proportional to t squared," said Chris Roh, a researcher at Cornell University and a co-author of the researcher, in a Caltech release. "It's wrong, but we later found out that he used this sort of wrong equation in the correct way." The team interpreted tick marks on da Vinci's sketches as data points the polymath made based on his eyeballing of the experiment in action. In lieu of a timepiece, da Vinci found the gravitational constant to nearly 98% accuracy.

Microsoft has outlined how users running Apple Silicon-based Macs can utilize Windows 11 in a new support document published today. The document explains how users running Mac devices with either M1 or M2 chips can use Windows 11, either via the cloud or using a local virtualization such as Parallels Desktop. From a report: Unfortunately, the document makes no mention of installing Windows 11 natively on Apple Silicon hardware. Apple's legacy Bootcamp application, which previously allowed Mac users to install Windows into its own bootable partition on a Mac, was removed when Apple transitioned to ARM processors. As of now, Microsoft points to Windows 365 as a potential solution for running Windows 11 on a Mac, using its enterprise service to stream a Windows 11 PC from the cloud. [...] For those users, Microsoft also mentions Parallels Desktop as a viable alternative. Version 18 of Parallels Desktop is now officially authorized to run Windows 11 on ARM on a Mac with M1 or M2 processors. This is the only way to officially run Windows 11 on ARM locally on a Mac with Apple Silicon.

Community Health Systems (CHS), one of the largest healthcare providers in the United States with close to 80 hospitals in 16 states, confirmed this week that criminal hackers accessed the personal and protected health information of up to 1 million patients. TechCrunch reports: The Tennessee-based healthcare giant said in a filing with government regulators that the data breach stems from its use of a popular file-transfer software called GoAnywhere MFT, developed by Fortra (previously known as HelpSystems), which is deployed by large businesses to share and send large sets of data securely. Community Health Systems said that Fortra recently notified it of a security incident that resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of patient data. "As a result of the security breach experienced by Fortra, protected health information and personal information of certain patients of the company's affiliates were exposed by Fortra's attacker," according to the filing by Community Health Systems, which was first spotted by DataBreaches.net. The healthcare giant added that it would offer identity theft protection services and notify all affected individuals whose information was exposed, but said there had been no material interruption to its delivery of patient care.

CHS hasn't said what types of data were exposed and a spokesperson has not yet responded to TechCrunch's questions. This is CHS' second-known breach of patient data in recent years. The Russia-linked ransomware gang Clop has reportedly taken responsibility for exploiting the new zero-day in a new hacking campaign and claims to have already breached over a hundred organizations that use Fortra's file-transfer technology -- including CHS. While CHS has been quick to come forward as a victim, Clop's claim suggests there could be dozens more affected organizations out there -- and if you're one of the thousands of GoAnywhere users, your company could be among them. Thankfully, security experts have shared a bunch of information about the zero-day and what you can do to protect against it. Security researcher Brian Krebs first flagged the zero-day vulnerability in Fortra's GoAnywhere software on February 2.

"A zero-day remote code injection exploit was identified in GoAnywhere MFT," Fortra said in its hidden advisory. "The attack vector of this exploit requires access to the administrative console of the application, which in most cases is accessible only from within a private company network, through VPN, or by allow-listed IP addresses (when running in cloud environments, such as Azure or AWS)."

A former Google employee said the company has lost its way, writing in a recent blog post that Google is inefficient, plagued by mismanagement and paralyzed by risk. Praveen Seshadri joined the Alphabet-owned company at the start of 2020 when Google Cloud acquired AppSheet, which Seshadri co-founded. He left in January, according to his LinkedIn profile. CNBC reports: Seshadri argued it's a "fragile moment" for Google, particularly because of the recent pressures it is facing to compete with Microsoft's artificial intelligence initiatives. Seshadri said Google's problems are not rooted in its technology, but in its culture. "The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems," Seshadri said. "They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called 'Ads' that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement."

Instead of working to serve customers, Seshadri argued most employees ultimately serve other Google employees. He described the company as a "closed world" where working extra hard isn't necessarily rewarded. Seshadri said feedback is "based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work." Seshadri said Google is hyper-focused on risk and that "risk mitigation trumps everything else." Every line of code, every launch, nonobvious decisions, changes from protocol and disagreements are all risks that Googlers have to approach with caution, Seshadri wrote. He added that employees are also "trapped" in a long line of approvals, legal reviews, performance reviews and meetings that leave little room for creativity or true innovation.

"Overall, it is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for," Seshadri wrote "The people who are inclined to fight on behalf of customers or new ideas or creativity soon learn the downside of doing so." Seshadri said Google has also been hiring at a rapid pace, which makes it difficult to nurture talent and leads to "bad hires." Many employees also believe the company is "truly exceptional," Seshadri said, which means that a lot of antiquated internal processes continue to exist because "that's the way we do it at Google." Seshadri said Google has a chance to turn things around, but he doesn't think the company can continue to succeed by merely avoiding risk. He argues that Google needs to "lead with commitment to a mission," reward people who fight for "ambitious causes" and trim the layers of middle management. "There is hope for Google and for my friends who work there, but it will require an intervention," he wrote.

Security camera company Arlo is reversing course on its controversial decision to apply a retroactive end-of-life policy to many of its popular home security cameras. The Verge reports: On Friday, Arlo CEO Matthew McRae posted a thread on Twitter, announcing that the company will not remove free storage of videos for existing customers and that it is extending the EOL dates for older cameras a further year to 2025. He also committed to sending security updates to these cameras until 2026. The end-of-life policy was due to go into effect January 1st, 2023, and removed a big selling point -- seven-day free cloud storage -- for many Arlo cams. McRae now says all users with the seven-day storage service will "continue to receive that service uninterrupted." But he did note that "any future migrations will be handled in a seamless manner," indicating there are changes coming still.

The thread did not provide details on specific models other than using the Arlo Pro 2 as an example of a camera that will now EOL in 2025 instead of 2024, as previously announced, with security updates continuing until 2026. There was also no update on the plans to remove other features, such as email notifications and E911 emergency calling, or whether "legacy video storage" will remain. The EOL policy applied to the following devices: Arlo Gen 3, Arlo Pro, Arlo Baby, Arlo Pro 2, Arlo Q, Arlo Q Plus, Arlo Lights, and Arlo Audio Doorbell.

Twilio on Monday announced plans to cut around 17% of its workforce, or roughly 1,500 jobs based on the 8,992 employees reported as of Sept. 30, 2022, in a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Twilio announced the layoffs in a blog post shared on the company's website. From a report: The announcement came after the cloud communications software maker already laid off around 11% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan in September. In an email to employees, CEO Jeff Lawson said the additional cuts were driven by the need to reorganize Twilio in order to succeed. "These changes hurt," Lawson wrote. "The weeks ahead will be about processing all this change and working together to acclimate to our new structure." Lawson said Twilio is forming two business units to help the company spend less and become more efficient. One unit, Twilio Data & Applications, will be led by Elena Donio, and the second unit, Twilio Communications, will be led by Khozema Shipchandler. Lawson said that when executives were looking at these two business units, it was clear the company had gotten "too big," particularly in communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Australian government will examine surveillance technology used in offices of the defense department, Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Thursday, amid reports that Chinese-made cameras installed there posed a security risk. "This is an issue and ... we're doing an assessment of all the technology for surveillance within the defense (department) and where those particular cameras are found, they are going to be removed," Marles told ABC Radio in an interview. Opposition lawmaker James Paterson said his own audit had revealed almost 1,000 units of equipment by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Dahua Technology Co -- two partly state-owned Chinese firms -- were installed across more than 250 Australian government offices.

Paterson, the shadow minister for cyber security and countering foreign interference, urged the government to urgently come up with a plan to remove all such cameras. Marles said the issue was significant though adding: "I don't think we should overstate it." Hikvision said it was "categorically false" to represent the company as a threat to Australia's national security as it could not access the video data of end users, manage end-user databases or sell cloud storage in Australia. "Our cameras are compliant with all applicable Australian laws and regulations and are subject to strict security requirements," a spokesperson said in an emailed response.

If you have Wyze cameras or a Wyze home security system, you will need to make other arrangements to monitor your property from 12AM PT to 2AM PT tomorrow morning. The Verge reports: The smart home company sent an email to its customers this week stating that system maintenance on February 8th at 12AM PT will impact every feature of the system that relies on the app or website. That includes being able to alert Noonlight, the professional monitoring company Wyze uses for its Sense security system, about a potential break-in. Not only will your security system be down, but if you use Wyze cameras to keep an eye on things going bump in the night, you'll have to stay awake. Wyze cameras won't be able to upload any video to the cloud or send alerts for motion or other events to the app.

While it's a good thing that Wyze is giving customers a heads-up, the flip side is that everyone is getting a heads-up. It's posting a sign that any location using this equipment will be unprotected between these hours, with basically no notice to create a backup plan or take other precautions, depending on your security concerns. It's also worrisome that the professional security customers have paid for and rely on can be completely disabled for "maintenance."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The country of Saudi Arabia has scrounged up several billion dollars in investments from major tech companies, which are interested in building cloud computing centers in the region. According to Reuters, the Saudi Minister of Communication and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha discussed the investments at LEAP, an international technology conference that began today in Riyadh, the country's capital city. Players like Microsoft and Oracle are investing billions of dollars into the country, with Microsoft forking over $2.1 billion while Oracle invests $1.5 billion. Huawei, a Chinese tech company, is also investing a reported $400 million.

"The investments... will enhance the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's position as the largest digital market in the Middle East and North Africa," Alswaha said at LEAP, as quoted by Reuters. While the timeline of these investments is not clear, Oracle told Reuters that its funds will be distributed over several years. Alswaha is tempting these companies with government contracts, and while details are scant, it's likely that Saudi Arabia is giving them prime real estate for a low cost to build their cloud computing centers in Riyadh. "The investments are a part of Saudi Arabia's planned pivot away from oil and toward tech, which the country is calling Vision 2030," adds Gizmodo. "That pivot is already underway as Tonomus, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's own architecture, engineering, and sustainability amalgamation called NEOM made a $1 billion investment in artificial intelligence and the metaverse."

One of the three areas of Neom that has been officially announced and underway is The Line, "a linear city with Utopian vistas straight out of a Hollywood movie," reported CNBC last October. "Composed of two parallel skyscrapers that cut right through the desert for 170 kilometers from the coast to the mountains, The Line will be 200 meters wide and soar to a height of 500 meters (higher than most of the world's towers) -- and for an added surreal touch, will be encased on all sides with gigantic mirrors."