Apple's iPadOS 18 update is no longer available after some iPad Pro owners found that it bricked their devices. MacRumors reports: There are reports on Reddit from iPad Pro users who had an interruption in the installation process, leading to an iPad that refused to turn on. A total replacement was required for affected users. Not all M4 iPad Pro owners have had an issue installing the update, and it could be linked to installing the new iOS 17.7 update before installing iOS 18. Apple will make the software available again when the underlying problem has been addressed.

Salesforce is unveiling a pivot in its AI strategy this week at its annual Dreamforce conference, now saying that its AI tools can handle tasks without human supervision and changing the way it charges for software. From a report: The company is famous for ushering in the era of software as a service, which involves renting access to computer applications via a subscription. But as generative AI shakes up the industry, Salesforce is rethinking its business model for the emerging technology. The software giant will charge $2 per conversation held by its new "agents" -- generative AI built to handle tasks like customer service or scheduling sales meetings without the need for human supervision.

The new pricing strategy also seeks to protect Salesforce if AI contributes to future job losses and business customers have fewer workers to buy subscriptions to the company's software. Salesforce is even leaning into the employee-replacement potential of the new technology. Its new AI agents will let companies increase their workforce capacity during busy periods without having to hire additional full-time employees or "gig workers," Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said Tuesday during a keynote speech at the company's annual Dreamforce conference.

IBM has acquired Kubecost, a FinOps startup that helps teams at companies like Allianz, Audi, Rakuten, and GitLab monitor and optimize their Kubernetes clusters with a focus on efficiency and, ultimately, cost. From a report: Tuesday's announcement follows IBM's $4.3 billion acquisition of Apptio in 2023, another company in the FinOps space. In previous years, we also saw IBM acquire companies like cloud app and network management firm Turbonomic and application performance management startup Instana. Now with the acquisition of KubeCost, IBM continues this effort to bolster its IT and FinOps capabilities as enterprises increasingly look to better manage their increasingly complex cloud and on-prem infrastructure.

China's internet regulator has proposed a strict regime that will, if adopted, require digital platforms to label content created by AI. From a report: The Cyberspace Administration of China announced its draft plan, which will require platforms and online service providers to label all AI-generated material with a visible logo and with metadata embedded in relevant files. The draft proposes that logos appear in several locations in a text, image, video, or audio file. In audio files, Beijing wants a voice prompt to inform listeners about AI-generated content at the start and end of a file -- and, as appropriate, mid-file too. Software that plays audio files will also need to inform netizens when they tune in to AI content.

Video players can get away with just posting notices about the content at the start, end, and relevant moments during a clip. Netizens who post AI-generated content will be required to label it as such. If they use generation tools provided by a platform, they'll be required to identify themselves -- and a log of their activities will be retained for six months. Some labels denoting AI-made content will be applied dynamically, based on metadata embedded in AI-generated content.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: In a candid keynote chat at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds shared his thoughts on kernel development, the integration of Rust, and the future of open source. Dirk Hohndel, Verizon's Open Source Program Office head and Torvalds friend, moderated their conversation about the Linux ecosystem. Torvalds emphasized that kernel releases, like the recent 6.11 version, are intentionally not exciting. "For almost 15 years, we've had a very good regular cadence of releases," he explained. With releases every nine weeks, this regularity aims for timeliness and reliability rather than flashy new features. The Linux creator noted that while drivers still make up the bulk of changes, core kernel development continues to evolve. "I'm still surprised that we're doing very core development," Torvalds said, mentioning ongoing work in virtual file systems and memory management. [...]

Shifting back to another contentious subject -- maintainer burnout and succession planning -- Hohndel observed that "maintainers are aging. Strangely, some of us have, you know, not quite as much or the right hair color anymore." (Torvalds interjected that "gray is the right color.") Hohndel continued, "So the question that I always ask myself: Is it about time to talk about there being a mini-Linus?" Torvalds turned the question around. True, the Linux maintainers are getting older and people do burn out and go away. "But that's kind of normal. What is not normal is that people actually stay around for decades. That's the unusual thing, and I think that's a good sign." At the same time, Torvalds admitted, it can be intimidating for a younger developer to join the Linux kernel team "when you see all these people who have been around for decades, but at the same time, we have many new developers. Some of those new developers come in, and three years later, they are top maintainers."

Hohndel noted that "to be the king of Linux, the main maintainer, you have to have a lot of experience. And the backup right now is Greg KH (Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the stable Linux kernel), who is about the same age as we are and has even less hair." True, Torvalds responded, "But the thing is, Greg hasn't always been Greg. Before Greg, there's been Andrew {Morton) and Alan (Cox). After Greg, there will be Shannon and Steve. The real issue is you have to have a person or a group of people that the development community can trust, and part of trust is fundamentally about having been around for long enough that people know how you work, but long enough does not mean to be 30 years." Hohndel made one last comment: "What I'm trying to say is, you've been doing this for 33 years. I don't want to be morbid, but I think in 33 years, you may no longer be doing this?" Torvalds, making motions as though he was using a walker, replied, "I would love to still do this conference with you." The report notes the contention around the integration of Rust, highlighted by the recent departure of Rust for Linux maintainer Wedson Filho. Despite resistance from some devs who prefer C and are skeptical of Rust, Torvalds remains optimistic about Rust's future in the kernel.

He said: "Rust is a very different thing, and there are a lot of people who are used to the C model. They don't like the differences, but that's OK. In the kernel itself, absolutely nobody understands everything. I don't. I rely heavily on maintainers of various subsystems. I think the same can be true of Rust and C. I think it's one of our strengths in the kernel that we can specialize. Clearly, some people just don't like the notion of Rust and having Rust encroach on their area. But we've only been doing Rust for a couple of years, so it's way too early to say Rust is a failure."

Meanwhile, Torvalds confirmed that the long-anticipated real-time Linux (RTLinux) project will finally be integrated into the kernel with the upcoming release of Linux 6.12.

Microsoft has abandoned plans to overhaul its Edge browser interface, scrapping the design choice unveiled in February 2023. The redesign -- featuring a sleeker look with rounded tab buttons and increased blur effects -- aimed to give Edge a distinct identity as the company pushed into AI services. The new design never officially launched and the company has no intention to launch it later, according to Microsoft-focused news outlet Windows Central.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Windows Central that the company is moving away from the rounded tabs concept. Some elements of the redesign will remain, including webpage borders and a repositioned user button, but the majority of the proposed changes have been shelved. The decision marks a retreat from Microsoft's efforts to visually differentiate Edge from Google Chrome and align it with Windows 11's design language.

Last October Slashdot reported on René Rebe's discovery of a random illegal instruction speculation bug on AMD Ryzen 7000-series and Epyc Zen 4 CPUs — which Rebe discussed on his YouTube channel.

But this week's YouTube episode had a different ending, reports Tom's Hardware... Two days ago, tech streamer and host of Code Therapy René Rebe was streaming one of many T2 Linux (his own custom distribution) development sessions from his office in Germany when he abruptly had to remove his microphone and walk off camera due to the arrival of police officers. The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back...

[T]he police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email. Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don't also live in Germany.
Rebe has been contributing to Linux "since as early as 1998," according to the article, "and started his own T2 SD3 Embedded Linux distribution in 2004, as well." (And he's also a contributor to many other major open source projects.)

The article points out that Linux and other communities "are compelled by little-to-no profit motive, so in essence, René has been providing unpaid software development for the greater good for the past two decades."

In 2015 Amazon purchased chip designer Annapurna Labs, remembers IEEE Spectrum, "and proceeded to design CPUs, AI accelerators, servers, and data centers as a vertically-integrated operation."

The article argues that while AMD, Nvidia, and other big-name processor companies may also want to control the full stack (purchasing server, software, and interconnect companies) — Amazon Web Services "got there ahead of most of the competition." (IEEE Spectrum interviews Ali Saidi, technical lead for the AWS Graviton series of CPUs, and Rami Sinno, director of engineering at Annapurna Labs, on "the advantage of vertically-integrated design — and Amazon-scale...") Sinno: I was working at Arm, and I was looking for the next adventure, looking at where the industry is heading and what I want my legacy to be. I looked at two things: One is vertically integrated companies, because this is where most of the innovation is — the interesting stuff is happening when you control the full hardware and software stack and deliver directly to customers.

And the second thing is, I realized that machine learning, AI in general, is going to be very, very big. I didn't know exactly which direction it was going to take, but I knew that there is something that is going to be generational, and I wanted to be part of that. I already had that experience prior when I was part of the group that was building the chips that go into the Blackberries; that was a fundamental shift in the industry. That feeling was incredible, to be part of something so big, so fundamental. And I thought, "Okay, I have another chance to be part of something fundamental."

[...] At the end of the day, our responsibility is to deliver complete servers in the data center directly for our customers. And if you think from that perspective, you'll be able to optimize and innovate across the full stack. It might not be at the transistor level or at the substrate level or at the board level. It could be something completely different. It could be purely software. And having that knowledge, having that visibility, will allow the engineers to be significantly more productive and delivery to the customer significantly faster. We're not going to bang our head against the wall to optimize the transistor where three lines of code downstream will solve these problems, right...?

We've had very good luck with recent college grads. Recent college grads, especially the past couple of years, have been absolutely phenomenal. I'm very, very pleased with the way that the education system is graduating the engineers and the computer scientists that are interested in the type of jobs that we have for them.
It's an interesting glimpse into the unique world of designing chips at Amazon.

Graviton technical lead Saidi: I've been here about seven and a half years. When I joined AWS, I joined a secret project at the time. I was told: "We're going to build some Arm servers. Tell no one...

"In chip design, there are many different competing optimization points. You have all of these conflicting requirements, you have cost, you have scheduling, you've got power consumption, you've got size, what DRAM technologies are available and when you're going to intersect them... It ends up being this fun, multifaceted optimization problem to figure out what's the best thing that you can build in a timeframe. And you need to get it right."

An anonymous reader shared this report from DevClass: A report from developer-focused analyst Redmonk finds "there does not seem to be a clear link between moving from an open source to proprietary license and increasing the company's value."

Senior analyst Rachel Stevens studied the question of whether the companies that changed from open source to proprietary licenses have since reported better financial positions. In particular, she looked at MongoDB, which changed from AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License) to its SSPL (Server Side Public License) in 2018; Elastic Co, which changed from Apache 2 to SSPL or Elastic License in early 2021; HashiCorp, which changed from MPL (Mozilla Public License 2.0) a year ago, and Confluent, which checked from Apache 2 to its own Confluent Community License in 2018.

The report is too recent to take account of Elastic's reversion to AGPL; and the financial impact of that is of course yet to be known, though it is perhaps unlikely that the switch back would have been made if the company considered it detrimental to its finances. Rather, Elastic's latest licensing change reinforces the view that proprietary licenses are not necessarily more profitable... All the companies studied increased their revenue after their license change, Stevens said, but added that the rate of change was similar to that before the change...

MongoDB stated in 2018 that "once an open source project becomes interesting or popular, it becomes too easy for the cloud vendors to capture all the value and give nothing back to the community." Six years later, it remains the case that the large cloud vendors are highly profitable, but that these companies who changed their license are not. In February this year, Bruce Perens, creator of the 1998 Open Source Definition, described open source as "a great corporate welfare program" and not at all what he had intended...

The new Redmonk report suggests that such license manoeuvres are neither fatal nor beneficial to the finances of the companies involved — though there are so many caveats that it is impossible to draw firm conclusions.
The report's final sentence concludes that "there does not seem to be a clear link between moving from an open source to proprietary license and increasing the company's value."

"New malicious software packages tied to the North Korean Lazarus Group were observed posing as a Python coding skills test for developers seeking a new job at Capital One, but were tracked to GitHub projects with embedded malware," reports SC magazine: Researchers at ReversingLabs explained in a September 10 blog post that the scheme was a follow-on to the VMConnect campaign that they first identified in August 2023 in which developers were lured into downloading malicious code via fake job interviews.
More details from The Hacker News These packages, for their part, have been published directly on public repositories like npm and PyPI, or hosted on GitHub repositories under their control. ReversingLabs said it identified malicious code embedded within modified versions of legitimate PyPI libraries such as pyperclip and pyrebase... It's implemented in the form of a Base64-encoded string that obscures a downloader function, which establishes contact with a command-and-control server in order to execute commands received as a response.

In one instance of the coding assignment identified by the software supply chain firm, the threat actors sought to create a false sense of urgency by requiring job seekers to build a Python project shared in the form of a ZIP file within five minutes and find and fix a coding flaw in the next 15 minutes. This makes it "more likely that he or she would execute the package without performing any type of security or even source code review first," Zanki said, adding "that ensures the malicious actors behind this campaign that the embedded malware would be executed on the developer's system."
Tom's Hardware reports that "The capacity for exploitation at that point is pretty much unlimited, due to the flexibility of Python and how it interacts with the underlying OS. This is a good time to refer to PEP 668 which enforces virtual environments for non-system wide Python installs."

More from The Hacker News Some of the aforementioned tests claimed to be a technical interview for financial institutions like Capital One and Rookery Capital Limited, underscoring how the threat actors are impersonating legitimate companies in the sector to pull off the operation. It's currently not clear how widespread these campaigns are, although prospective targets are scouted and contacted using LinkedIn, as recently also highlighted by Google-owned Mandiant.

Samba is "a free software re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol," according to Wikipedia. And now the Samba project "has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German Sovereign Tech Fund to advance the project," writes Jeremy Allison — Sam (who is Slashdot reader #8,157 — and also a long standing member of Samba's core team): The investment was successfully applied for by [information security service provider] SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing Samba's security, scalability, and functionality.

The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem.

The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.

All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running and gitlab MRs will appear soon!
Back in 2000, Jeremy Allison answered questions from Slashdot readers about Samba.

Allison is now a board member at both the GNOME Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy, a distinguished engineer at Rocky Linux creator CIQ, and a long-time free software advocate.

OpenAI's latest models have "meaningfully" increased the risk that AI will be misused to create biological weapons [non-paywalled link], the company has acknowledged. From a report: The San Francisco-based company announced its new models, known as o1, on Thursday, touting their new abilities to reason, solve hard maths problems and answer scientific research questions. OpenAI's system card, a tool to explain how the AI operates, said the new models had a "medium risk" for issues related to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons -- the highest risk that OpenAI has ever given for its models. The company said it meant that the technology has "meaningfully improved" the ability of experts to create bioweapons. AI software with more advanced capabilities, such as the ability to perform step-by-step reasoning, pose an increased risk of misuse in the hands of bad actors, according to experts.

Can AI kill the enterprise software app industry that's led by companies such as Salesforce and Workday? The Information: That's the trillion-dollar question at the heart of recent comments from the CEO of Klarna, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who's made a name for himself -- and drawn some skepticism too -- as a chief cheerleader of OpenAI's software. In the latest example from a couple of weeks ago, Siemiatkowski told investors in his buy now, pay later firm that it's shutting down a lot of the enterprise software apps it uses, including some run by the above-mentioned CRM and HR firms, because it can replicate them with AI. SeekingAlpha picked up those comments, which went viral in recent days.

The idea behind the comments is the following: Conversational AI can understand natural-language commands and be ordered to write software code, so companies can cheaply and quickly build customized apps that do most of the things that traditional enterprise apps can do, especially if most of what those apps do is manage corporate data. Siemiatkowski expanded on the comments in a Wednesday X post, saying he wasn't looking to primarily save money on software license fees "even though that is nice upside."

The tax agency again delays a vital software upgrade, at the cost of billions. WSJ's Editorial Board: Taxpayers endure drudgery to file on time each year, but the tax collectors seem less concerned with deadlines. A new Internal Revenue Service database, more than a decade in the making, will be delayed another year. And its cost is billions of dollars and climbing. The IRS told the press this week that it won't replace its Individual Master File until the 2026 tax year, at the earliest. That falls short of Commissioner Danny Werfel's goal of launching a new system in time for 2025 taxes, and the delay could mean another year of grief for countless taxpayers. The file is the digital silo in which more than 154 million tax files are held, and keeping it up-to-date helps to enable speedy, accurate refunds.

The code that powers the database was written in the 1960s by IBM engineers at the same time their colleagues worked on the Apollo program. The system runs on a nearly extinct computer language known as Cobol, and though it retains its basic functionality, maintaining it requires bespoke service. By 2018 the IRS had only 17 remaining developers considered to be experts on the system. The agency has sought and failed to overhaul or replace the database since the 1980s. It spent $4 billion over 14 years to devise upgrades, but it canceled that effort in 2000 "without receiving expected benefits," according to the Government Accountability Office.

The costs continue to mount. IRS spending on operating and maintaining its IT systems has risen 35% in the past four years, to $2.7 billion last year from $2 billion in 2019. These costs will "likely continue to increase until a majority of legacy systems are decommissioned," according to a report last month by the agency's inspector general. Each year major upgrades are pushed back adds a larger sum to the final tab. The IRS usually pleads poverty as an excuse for failing to stay up-to-date. Yet Congress gave the agency billions of extra dollars through the Inflation Reduction Act to fund a speedy database overhaul. Since 2022 it has spent $1.3 billion beyond its ordinary budget to modernize its business systems. Taxpayers will have to wait at least another year to see if that investment has paid off.

The FDA on Thursday approved the first hearing aid software for Apple's latest AirPods Pro earbuds. According to Apple, the feature will be pushed to eligible devices through a software update in the coming weeks. The Washington Post reports: The move, which comes two years after the FDA first approved over-the-counter hearing aids, could help more Americans with hearing loss start getting help, the FDA said in a statement. The feature works by amplifying some sounds, such as voices, while minimizing others, such as ambient noise. Users can take a hearing test in the Apple Health app, and their AirPods will adjust sound level automatically based on the results. The feature is only available on the AirPods Pro 2, which cost $249.

The FDA says it tested Apple's hearing aid feature in a clinical study with 118 subjects who believed they had mild or moderate hearing loss. The study found that people who set up their AirPods using Apple's hearing test noticed similar benefits as people who had a professional set up the earbuds. Over-the-counter hearing aids are best for people with mild to moderate hearing loss, audiologists say, many of whom don't seek treatment. [...] However, consumer earbuds aren't a good solution for people with severe hearing loss, experts maintain, and most over-the-counter hearing devices will still require a trip to the audiologist for some fine tuning.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable. Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks. "In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."

Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so that if either fails, the whole drive dies. There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that "If the disk platters spin and aren't damaged," it can access the content.

But "if it spins" is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no partial recovery option available. "It's so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there," Koszela says. "Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything's in order. And both of them are bricks." "Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.," writes Hacker News user abracadaniel in a discussion post about the article. "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you'd expect."

Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman reports: There are many reasons why you may want to sideload apps on your Android phone, but there are also good reasons why developers would want to block sideloading. A sideloaded app won't contribute to the developer's Play Store metrics, for one, but it also prevents the developer from curating which devices can use their app. Improperly sideloaded apps can also crash due to missing assets or code, or they might be missing certain features because you installed the wrong version for your device. Whatever the reason may be, developers who want to stop you from sideloading their apps now have an easier way to do so thanks to the Play Integrity API.

The Google Play Integrity API is an interface that helps developers "check that interactions and server requests are coming from [their] genuine app binary running on a genuine Android device." It looks for evidence that the app has been tampered with, that the app is running in an "untrustworthy" software environment, that the device has Google Play Protect enabled, and more. If you've heard of or dealt with SafetyNet Attestation before on a rooted phone, then you're probably already familiar with Play Integrity, even if not by that name. Play Integrity is the successor to SafetyNet Attestation, only it comes with even more features for developers.

As is the case with SafetyNet Attestation, developers call the Play Integrity API at any point in their app, receive what's called an integrity verdict, and then decide what they want to do from there. Some apps call the Play Integrity API when they launch and block access entirely depending on what the verdict is, while others only call the API when you're about to perform a sensitive action, so they can warn you that you shouldn't proceed. The Play Integrity API makes it easy for apps to offload the determination of whether the device and its software environment are "genuine," and with the latest update to the API, apps can now easily determine whether the person who installed them is "genuine" as well. "As Google continues to bolster Play Integrity's detection mechanisms and add new features, it's going to become harder and harder for power users to justify rooting Android," concludes Rahman. "At the same time, regular users will be better protected from potentially risky and fraudulent interactions, so it's clear that Play Integrity will continue to be adopted by more and more apps."

Nvidia is banking on its software expertise and broad GPU ecosystem to stay ahead in the fiercely competitive AI chip market, CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with Goldman Sachs Wednesday. Huang pointed to NVIDIA's large base of installed GPUs and their software compatibility as key strengths.

Huang highlighted three key elements of Nvidia's competitive moat: a large installed base of GPUs across multiple platforms, the ability to enhance hardware with software like domain-specific libraries, and expertise in building rack-level systems. The CEO said Nvidia's chip design prowess, noting the company has developed seven different chips for its upcoming Blackwell platform.

These comments come as Nvidia faces increasing competition from rivals. Addressing supply chain concerns, Huang said NVIDIA has sufficient in-house intellectual property to shift manufacturing if necessary without significant disruption. The company plans to begin shipping Blackwell-based products in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, with volume production ramping up in fiscal 2026, according to Huang.

From the note that Goldman Sachs sent to its clients: 1) Accelerated Computing: Mr. Huang highlighted his long-held view that Moore's Law was no longer delivering the rate of innovation it had in the past and, as such, was driving computation inflation in Data Centers. Further, he noted that the densification and acceleration of the $1 trillion data center infrastructure installed base alone would drive growth over the next 10 years, as it would deliver material performance improvement and/or cost savings.

2) Customer ROI: Mr. Huang noted that we have hit the end of transistor scaling that enabled better utilization rates and cost reductions in the previous virtualization and cloud computing cycles. He explained that, while using a GPU to augment a CPU will drive an increase in cost in absolute terms (~2x) in the case of Spark (distributed processing system and analytics engine for big data), the net cost benefit could be as large as ~10x for an application like Spark given the speed up of ~20x. From a revenue generation perspective, Mr. Huang shared that hyperscale customers can generate $5 in rental revenue for every $1 spent on Nvidia's infrastructure, given sustained strength in the demand for accelerated computing.

Oracle missed the tech industry's move to cloud computing last decade and ended up an also-ran. Now the AI boom has given it another shot. WSJ: The 47-year-old company that made its name on relational database software has emerged as an attractive cloud-computing provider for AI developers such as OpenAI, sending its long-stagnant stock to new heights. Oracle shares are up 34% since January, well outpacing the Nasdaq's 14% rise and those of bigger competitors Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google.

It is a surprising revitalization for a company many in the tech industry had dismissed as a dinosaur of a bygone, precloud era. Oracle appears to be successfully making a case to investors that it has become a strong fourth-place player in a cloud market surging thanks to AI. Its lateness to the game may have played to its advantage, as a number of its 162 data centers were built in recent years and are designed for the development of AI models, known as training.

In addition, Oracle isn't developing its own large AI models that compete with potential clients. The company is considered such a neutral and unthreatening player that it now has partnerships with Microsoft, Google and Amazon, all of which let Oracle's databases run in their clouds. Microsoft is also running its Bing AI chatbot on Oracle's servers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For years, Google has faced complaints about how it dominates the online advertising market. Many of the concerns stem from the internet giant's suite of software known as Google Ad Manager, which websites around the world use to sell ads on their sites. The technology conducts split-second auctions to place ads each time a user loads a page. The dominance of that technology has landed Google in federal court. On Monday, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia will preside over the start of a trial in which the Department of Justice accuses the company of abusing control of its ad technology and violating antitrust law (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source).

It would be Google's second antitrust trial in less than a year. In August, a federal judge ruled in a separate case that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search, a major victory for the Justice Department. The new trial is the latest salvo by federal antitrust regulators against Big Tech, testing a century-old competition law against companies that have reshaped the way people shop, communicate and consume information. Federal regulators have also filed antitrust lawsuits against Apple,Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, saying those companies have also abused their power. Google's vice president for regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said in a blog post on Sunday that the Justice Department was "picking winners and losers in a highly competitive industry."

"With the cost of ads going down and the number of ads sold going up, the market is working," she said. "The DOJ's case risks inefficiencies and higher prices -- the last thing that America's economy or our small businesses need right now."