An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Flock Safety, whose drones were once reserved for police departments, is now offering them for private-sector security, the company announced today, with potential customers including including businesses intent on curbing shoplifting.Companies in the US can now place Flock's drone docking stations on their premises. If the company has a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly beyond visual line of sight (these are becoming easier to get), its security team can fly the drones within a certain radius, often a few miles.

"Instead of a 911 call [that triggers the drone], it's an alarm call," says Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now directs Flock's drone program. "It's still the same type of response." Kauffman walked through how the drone program might work in the case of retail theft: If the security team at a store like Home Depot, for example, saw shoplifters leave the store, then the drone, equipped with cameras, could be activated from its docking station on the roof. "The drone follows the people. The people get in a car. You click a button," he says, "and you track the vehicle with the drone, and the drone just follows the car." The video feed of that drone might go to the company's security team, but it could also be automatically transmitted directly to police departments.

The defense tech startup Epirus has developed a cutting-edge, cost-efficient drone zapper that's sparking the interest of the US military. Now the company has to deliver. The company says it's in talks with large retailers but doesn't yet have any signed contracts. The only private-sector company Kauffman named as a customer is Morning Star, a California tomato processor that uses drones to secure its distribution facilities. Flock will also pitch the drones to hospital campuses, warehouse sites, and oil and gas facilities. It's worth noting that the FAA is currently drafting new rules for how it grants approval to pilots flying drones out of sight, and it's not clear if Flock's use case would be allowed under the currently proposed guidance.

Spotify says it has has removed over 75 million fraudulent tracks in the past year as it works to combat "AI slop," deepfake impersonations, and spam uploads. Variety reports: Its new protections include a policy to police unauthorized vocal impersonation ("deepfakes") and fraudulent music uploaded to artists' official profiles; an enhanced spam filter to prevent mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short tracks designed to fraudulently boost streaming numbers and payments. The company also says it's collaborating with industry partners to devise an industry standard in a song's credits to "clearly indicate where and how AI played a role in the creation of a track."

"The pace of recent advances in generative AI technology has felt quick and at times unsettling, especially for creatives," the company writes in a just-published post on its official blog. "At its best, AI is unlocking incredible new ways for artists to create music and for listeners to discover it. At its worst, AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push 'slop' into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers. The future of the music industry is being written, and we believe that aggressively protecting against the worst parts of Gen AI is essential to enabling its potential for artists and producers."

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Spotify VP and Global Head of Music Product Charlie Hellman said, "I want to be clear about one thing: We're not here to punish artists for using AI authentically and responsibly. We hope that they will enable them to be more creative than ever. But we are here to stop the bad actors who are gaming the system. And we can only benefit from all that good side if we aggressively protect against the bad side."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A viral app called Neon, which offers to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell that data to AI companies, has rapidly risen to the ranks of the top-five free iPhone apps since its launch last week. The app already has thousands of users and was downloaded 75,000 times yesterday alone, according to app intelligence provider Appfigures. Neon pitches itself as a way for users to make by providing call recordings that help train, improve, and test AI models. But now Neon has gone offline, at least for now, after a security flaw allowed anyone to access the phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts of any other user, TechCrunch can now report.

TechCrunch discovered the security flaw during a short test of the app on Thursday. We alerted the app's founder, Alex Kiam (who previously did not respond to a request for comment about the app), to the flaw soon after our discovery. Kiam told TechCrunch later Thursday that he took down the app's servers and began notifying users about pausing the app, but fell short of informing his users about the security lapse. The Neon app stopped functioning soon after we contacted Kiam. TechCrunch found that the app's backend services didn't properly restrict access, allowing any logged-in user to request and receive data belong to other users. This included call transcripts, raw call recordings, and sensitive metadata, including phone numbers, the date/time of calls, and their durations.

Microsoft has disabled the Israeli Defense Ministry's access to certain services and subscriptions, after finding evidence that the ministry used the tech company's cloud services to surveil Gaza citizens. WSJ adds: The software company made the move after an internal investigation indicated Israel's Defense Ministry used Microsoft's Azure cloud services for surveillance, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company probe is ongoing. "As employees, we all have a shared interest in privacy protection, given the business value it creates by ensuring our customers can rely on our services with rock solid trust," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Thursday on Microsoft's company website.

Smith said Microsoft's investigation was guided by the company's "longstanding protection of privacy as a fundamental right." Microsoft opened the probe after the Guardian, the British news organization, reported in August that Israel used Azure to store data on Gaza civilians and surveil them. The issue has been the source of protests at the company.

Accenture has reduced its global workforce by more than 11,000 in the past three months and warned staff that more would be asked to leave if they cannot be retrained for the age of AI. From a report: The IT consulting group on Thursday detailed an $865 million restructuring programme and an outlook for the year ahead that reflects continuing sluggish corporate demand for consulting projects and a clampdown on spending within the US federal government.

"We are exiting on a compressed timeline people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need," chief executive Julie Sweet told analysts on a conference call. The company employed 779,000 people at the end of August, it said, down from 791,000 three months earlier, after beginning a round of lay-offs that will continue until the end of November. It did not say how many jobs had gone directly as a result of the restructuring, but said severance payments and other costs totalled $615 million in the quarter just ended and would be $250 million more in the current three-month period.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When the COVID-19 pandemic forced kids to stay home, educators flocked to VMware, and thousands of school districts adopted virtualization. The technology became a solution for distance learning during the pandemic and after, when events such as bad weather and illness can prevent children from physically attending school. However, the VMware being sold to K-12 schools today differs from the VMware that existed before and during the pandemic. Now a Broadcom business, the platform features higher prices and a business strategy that favors big spenders. This has created unique problems for educational IT departments juggling restrictive budgets and multiple technology vendors with children's needs.

Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware's vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware.

However, like many of VMware customers, the Indiana school district was priced out of VMware after Broadcom's acquisition of the company. The IT director said the district received a quote that was "three to six" times higher than expected. This came as the school district is looking to manage changes in education-related taxes and funding over the next few years. As a result, the district's migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects, including ones aimed at improving curriculum. For instance, the Indiana district has been trying to bolster its technology curriculum, the IT director said. One way is through a summer employment program for upperclassmen that teaches how to use real-world IT products, like VMware and Cisco Meraki technologies. The district previously relied on VMware-based virtual machines (VMs) for creating "very easily and accessible" test environments for these students. But the school is no longer able to provide that opportunity, creating a learning "barrier," as the IT director put it. The IT director told Ars that dealing with a migration could be "catastrophic in that that's too much work for one person," adding: "It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms -- maybe before they were anticipating -- or paying exorbitant prices that have skyrocketed for absolutely no reason. Nothing on the software side has changed. It's the same software. There's no features being added. Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side."

Cloudflare blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack against a European network infrastructure company, which peaked at 22.2 Tbps and 10.6 Bpps. The hyper-volumetric attack has been linked to the Aisuru botnet and lasted just 40 seconds, but was double the size of the previous record. SecurityWeek reports: Cloudflare told SecurityWeek that the attack was aimed at a single IP address of an unnamed European network infrastructure company. Cloudflare has yet to determine who was behind the attack, but believes it may have been powered by the Aisuru botnet, which was also linked earlier this year to a massive 6.3 Tbps attack on the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. Aisuru has been around for more than a year. The botnet is powered by hacked IoT devices such as routers and DVRs that have been compromised through the exploitation of known and zero-day vulnerabilities.

According to Cloudflare, the 22 Tbps attack was traced to over 404,000 unique source IPs across over 14 ASNs worldwide. "Based on internal analysis using a proprietary system, the source IPs were not spoofed," the company explained. The security firm described it as a UDP carpet bomb attack targeting an average of 31,000 destination ports per second, with a peak of 47k ports, all of a single IP address. Cloudflare revealed in July that the number of DDoS attacks it blocked in the first half of 2025 had already exceeded all the attacks mitigated in 2024.

Jaguar Land Rover has halted production for nearly a month following a major cyberattack, costing an estimated 30,000 vehicles and billions in lost revenue. "The company said on Tuesday that production would be halted for another week until at least October 1, which increased concerns that a full return to production could be months away," reports The Times. From the report: David Bailey, professor of business economics at Birmingham University, said the JLR statement did not commit to reopening production on October 1 and even if it did "it's not going to be back to normal, but phased production start with some lines opening before others, as we saw after the Covid closure back in 2020." He said: "It's 24 days [shutdown] as of September 24. So that is roughly 1,000 cars a day, 24,000 cars not produced. So by then, that's about 1.7 billion pounds in lost revenue. By October 1, it will be a hit to revenue of something like 2.2 billion pounds. It's pretty massive. JLR can get through, but they're going to be burning through cash this month."

Bailey also raised concerns that smaller companies further down the supply chain lacked the cash reserves to withstand the shutdown. The company directly employs more than 30,000 people, and it is estimated that approximately 200,000 workers in the supply chain depend on work from JLR. "The union has said that in some cases, staff have been told to go and apply for universal credit. There are firms I know that have applied for bank loans to keep going. But even then, you know they're approaching the limit of what they do. There's an added knock-on effect that some of the suppliers also supply other car assemblers, Toyota or Mini. So some of those are concerned that bits of the supply chain may go under and affect them as well, because the industry is so connected. One way or another, the government's going to take a hit. Either through some sort of emergency support, whether that's furlough or emergency short-term loans or through unemployment benefit, if this carries on."

There has been uncertainty over the extent of the cyberattack and exactly how the company has been affected, as well as who is responsible for it. According to one source, some JLR staff were still unable last week to access the Slack messaging system through the company's "one sign on" system. The JLR statement added: "We have made this decision to give clarity for the coming week as we build the timeline for the phased restart of our operations and continue our investigation."

Microsoft has successfully tested a microfluidic cooling system that removed heat up to three times better than cold plates currently used in datacenters. The technology etches tiny channels directly into silicon chips, allowing cooling liquid to flow directly onto the heat source. In lab tests announced September 23, 2025, the system reduced the maximum temperature rise inside GPUs by 65%. The channels, roughly the width of human hair, were optimized using AI to create bio-inspired patterns resembling leaf veins.

Microsoft collaborated with Swiss startup Corintis on the design. The cooling fluid can operate at temperatures as high as 70C (158F) while maintaining effectiveness. The company demonstrated the technology on servers running Microsoft Teams services, where the improved cooling enables overclocking during demand spikes that occur when meetings start on the hour and half-hour. Microsoft is investigating incorporating microfluidics into future generations of its first-party chips as the company plans to spend over $30 billion on capital expenditures this quarter.

iFixit's teardown of Apple's iPhone Air reveals a device dominated by its battery, which occupies approximately two-thirds of the internal space while critical components including the logic board cluster at the top. The battery matches the component used in Apple's iPhone Air MagSafe battery pack and can be swapped between devices.

The top-heavy component layout addresses the bendgate vulnerability that damaged logic boards in previous thin iPhone models when pressure was applied to the device's middle section. Despite the iPhone Air's thinner profile, iFixit awarded it a 7 out of 10 repairability score, citing reduced component layering that provides more direct access to the USB-C connector, battery, and other serviceable parts compared to standard iPhone models. The dual-entry system further contributes to the device's serviceability.

The U.S. General Services Administration has approved Meta's AI system Llama for use by federal agencies, declaring that it meets government security and legal standards. Reuters reports: "It's not about currying favor," [said Josh Gruenbaum, the GSA's procurement lead, when asked whether tech executives are giving the government discounts to get President Donald Trump's approval]. "It's about that recognition of how do we all lock in arms and make this country the best country it could possibly be." Federal agencies will be able to deploy the tool to speed up contract review or more quickly solve information technology hiccups, among other tasks, he said.

Microsoft is working on bringing support for setting a video as your desktop wallpaper on Windows 11. From a report: Hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, the feature lets you set an MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V, or MKV file as your wallpaper, which will play the video whenever you view the desktop.

For many years, users have wanted the ability to set a video as a desktop background. It's a feature that many Linux distributions support, and macOS also supports the ability to set a moving background as your lock screen. Windows Vista did support setting videos as your wallpaper, but only as part of the Ultimate SKU via a feature called DreamScene.

Last week the Guardian reported on "thousands of AI workers contracted for Google through Japanese conglomerate Hitachi's GlobalLogic to rate and moderate the output of Google's AI products, including its flagship chatbot Gemini... and its summaries of search results, AI Overviews." "AI isn't magic; it's a pyramid scheme of human labor," said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. "These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable...." Ten of Google's AI trainers the Guardian spoke to said they have grown disillusioned with their jobs because they work in siloes, face tighter and tighter deadlines, and feel they are putting out a product that's not safe for users... In May 2023, a contract worker for Appen submitted a letter to the US Congress that the pace imposed on him and others would make Google Bard, Gemini's predecessor, a "faulty" and "dangerous" product
This week Google laid off 200 of those moderating contractors, reports Wired. "These workers, who often are hired because of their specialist knowledge, had to have either a master's or a PhD to join the super rater program, and typically include writers, teachers, and people from creative fields." Workers still at the company claim they are increasingly concerned that they are being set up to replace themselves. According to internal documents viewed by WIRED, GlobalLogic seems to be using these human raters to train the Google AI system that could automatically rate the responses, with the aim of replacing them with AI. At the same time, the company is also finding ways to get rid of current employees as it continues to hire new workers. In July, GlobalLogic made it mandatory for its workers in Austin, Texas, to return to office, according to a notice seen by WIRED...

Some contractors attempted to unionize earlier this year but claim those efforts were quashed. Now they allege that the company has retaliated against them. Two workers have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were unfairly fired, one due to bringing up wage transparency issues, and the other for advocating for himself and his coworkers. "These individuals are employees of GlobalLogic or their subcontractors, not Alphabet," Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement...
"Globally, other AI contract workers are fighting back and organizing for better treatment and pay," the article points out, noting that content moderators from around the world facing similar issues formed the Global Trade Union Alliance of Content Moderators which includes workers from Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the news.

Writing in Communications of the ACM, former Go tech lead Russ Cox warns we need to keep improving defenses of software supply chains, highlighting "promising approaches that should be more widely used" and "areas where more work is needed." There are important steps we can take today, such as adopting software signatures in some form, making sure to scan for known vulnerabilities regularly, and being ready to update and redeploy software when critical new vulnerabilities are found. More development should be shifted to safer languages that make vulnerabilities and attacks less likely. We also need to find ways to fund open source development to make it less susceptible to takeover by the mere offer of free help. Relatively small investments in OpenSSL and XZ development could have prevented both the Heartbleed vulnerability and the XZ attack.
Some highlights from the 5,000-word article:

• Make Builds Reproducible. "The Reproducible Builds project aims to raise awareness of reproducible builds generally, as well as building tools to help progress toward complete reproducibility for all Linux software. The Go project recently arranged for Go itself to be completely reproducible given only the source code... A build for a given target produces the same distribution bits whether you build on Linux or Windows or Mac, whether the build host is X86 or ARM, and so on. Strong reproducibility makes it possible for others to easily verify that the binaries posted for download match the source code..."

• Prevent Vulnerabilities. "The most secure software dependencies are the ones not used in the first place: Every dependency adds risk... Another good way to prevent vulnerabilities is to use safer programming languages that remove error-prone language features or make them needed less often..."

• Authenticate Software. ("Cryptographic signatures make it impossible to nefariously alter code between signing and verifying. The only problem left is key distribution...") "The Go checksum database is a real-world example of this approach that protects millions of Go developers. The database holds the SHA256 checksum of every version of every public Go module..."

• Fund Open Source. [Cox first cites the XKCD cartoon "Dependencies," calling it "a disturbingly accurate assessment of the situation..."] "The XZ attack is the clearest possible demonstration that the problem is not fixed. It was enabled as much by underfunding of open source as by any technical detail."

The article also emphasized the importance of finding and fixing vulnerabilities quickly, arguing that software attacks must be made more difficult and expensive.

"We use source code downloaded from strangers on the Internet in our most critical applications; almost no one is checking the code.... We all have more work to do."

Near Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, the Five Stones coffee shop advertised for a barista a few months ago — and started getting resumes from "people who listed Microsoft and other tech companies," writes the Wall Street Journal: The applicants typically had master's degrees and experience in graphic design or marketing roles, Andrews said — sometimes senior ones. They were applying to jobs at Five Stones that would pay Redmond's minimum wage, $16.66 an hour. Five Stones hasn't yet hired such candidates because the coffee shop gives priority to more traditional entry-level baristas, like high-schoolers...

[Microsoft and Amazon] have laid off more than 46,000 employees since 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks workforce reductions. That represents 85% of layoffs by Seattle-area tech companies... As Amazon and Microsoft have made cuts — and other local tech firms including Expedia and Redfin have followed suit — the effects have rippled through Seattle's other business sectors. Weakness in payroll and sales tax contributed to a projected $146 million shortfall in revenue over the next two years. Restaurant and retail spending is down in the business and shopping districts surrounding Amazon's and Microsoft's campuses, with total transactions falling by as much as 7% in some popular areas in the past year, according to data from Square. In the first half of 2025, around 450 restaurants closed in Seattle, or about 16% of its total. "At the halfway point of the year, we've already seen as many closures as we'd usually see in a full year," said Anthony Anton, chief executive officer of the Washington Hospitality Association.

Uber driver Juan Prado made six figures in 2021, often shuttling passengers in town for job interviews and doing frequent drop-offs near downtown tech offices. Now, he said, demand is much lower. "There are moments where you can be online, and in certain areas, it shows nothing...." Seattle tech firms are asking for significantly fewer job placements than years ago, said Noelle McDonald, senior vice president at recruiting company Aquent, which counts Amazon and Microsoft as clients. Hiring windows have lengthened and open roles receive around 10 times as many applications.
And of course, "Commercial real-estate vacancies stand at a record high as offices built to accommodate a boom sit empty... "

While some laid-off employees launched their own startups, "the outlook for many tech workers is dour as companies invest in software tools they can use to streamline teams," the article points out. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella "has said the company is increasingly looking to AI to perform coding and other tasks once done by people," while in June, Amazon "said its workforce would shrink going forward."

The Shai-Hulud malware campaign impacted hundreds of npm packages across multiple maintainers, reports Koi Security, including popular libraries like @ctrl/tinycolor and some packages maintained by CrowdStrike. Malicious versions embed a trojanized script (bundle.js) designed to steal developer credentials, exfiltrate secrets, and persist in repositories and endpoints through automated workflows.
Koi Security created a table of packages identified as compromised, promising it's "continuously updated" (and showing the last compromise detected Tuesday). Nearly all of the compromised packages have a status of "removed from NPM". Attackers published malicious versions of @ctrl/tinycolor and other npm packages, injecting a large obfuscated script (bundle.js) that executes automatically during installation. This payload repackages and republishes maintainer projects, enabling the malware to spread laterally across related packages without direct developer involvement. As a result, the compromise quickly scaled beyond its initial entry point, impacting not only widely used open-source libraries but also CrowdStrike's npm packages.

The injected script performs credential harvesting and persistence operations. It runs TruffleHog to scan local filesystems and repositories for secrets, including npm tokens, GitHub credentials, and cloud access keys for AWS, GCP, and Azure. It also writes a hidden GitHub Actions workflow file (.github/workflows/shai-hulud-workflow.yml) that exfiltrates secrets during CI/CD runs, ensuring long-term access even after the initial infection. This dual focus on endpoint secret theft and backdoors makes Shai-Hulud one of the most dangerous campaigns ever compared to previous compromises.
"The malicious code also attempts to leak data on GitHub by making private repositories public," according to a Tuesday blog post from security systems provider Sysdig: The Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) has been monitoring this worm's progress since its discovery. Due to quick response times, the number of new packages being compromised has slowed considerably. No new packages have been seen in several hours at the time...
Their blog post concludes "Supply chain attacks are increasing in frequency. It is more important than ever to monitor third-party packages for malicious activity."

Some context from Tom's Hardware: To be clear: This campaign is distinct from the incident that we covered on Sept. 9, which saw multiple npm packages with billions of weekly downloads compromised in a bid to steal cryptocurrency. The ecosystem is the same — attackers have clearly realized the GitHub-owned npm package registry for the Node.js ecosystem is a valuable target — but whoever's behind the Shai-Hulud campaign is after more than just some Bitcoin.

alternative_right writes: Austria's armed forces have switched from Microsoft's Office programs to the open-source LibreOffice package. The reason for this is not to save on software license fees for around 16,000 workstations. "It was very important for us to show that we are doing this primarily (...) to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure and (...) to ensure that data is only processed in-house," emphasizes Michael Hillebrand from the Austrian Armed Forces' Directorate 6 ICT and Cyber.

This is because processing data in external clouds is out of the question for the Austrian Armed Forces, as Hillebrand explained on ORF radio station O1. It was already apparent five years ago that Microsoft Office would move to the cloud. Back then, in 2020, the decision-making process for the switch began and was completed in 2021.

Valve is dropping support for Steam running on 32-bit versions of Windows, starting January 1, 2026. A report adds and comments: Steam has been available on Windows for more than two decades and, therefore, was built with 32-bit systems in mind. Today, every modern computer is 64-bit, with compatibility layers built in to support older 32-bit apps. So, even though 32-bit apps have carried forward, there's really no place for 32-bit operating systems anymore -- which is why Valve is axing support for them.

Security researcher Dirk-jan Mollema discovered two vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Entra ID identity platform that could have granted attackers administrative access to virtually all Azure customer accounts worldwide. The flaws involved legacy authentication systems -- Actor Tokens issued by Azure's Access Control Service and a validation failure in the retiring Azure Active Directory Graph API.

Mollema reported the vulnerabilities to Microsoft on July 14. Microsoft released a global fix three days later and found no evidence of exploitation. The vulnerabilities would have allowed attackers to impersonate any user across any Azure tenant and access all Microsoft services using Entra ID authentication. Microsoft confirmed the fixes were fully implemented by July 23 and added additional security measures in August as part of its Secure Future Initiative. The company issued a CVE on September 4.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has responded to Borderlands 4 performance complaints by calling the game "a premium game made for premium gamers." Pitchford claimed customer service reports for performance issues represent "less than one percent of one percent" of players and told critics to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

The game holds a Mixed rating on Steam despite reaching 300,000 concurrent players Sunday, a franchise record. Gearbox recommends DLSS and frame generation for 60+ fps at 1440p even on powerful hardware. Pitchford compared running the game on older hardware to driving "a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor."