At Amazon's annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd's attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon's CEO, called it the Snowmobile, and said the company would be using the truck to help customers speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities. Less than eight years later, the semi is out of commission. From a report: As of March, AWS had removed Snowmobile from its website, and the Amazon unit has stopped offering the service, CNBC has confirmed. The webpage devoted to AWS' "Snow family" of products now directs users to its other data transport services, including the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized device that can be equipped with fast solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone.

An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company has introduced more cost-effective options for moving data. Clients had to deal with power, cooling, networking, parking and security when they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson said.

In the view of Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios, artificial intelligence will eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media," reports the New York Times: VandeHei says the only way for media companies to survive is to focus on delivering journalistic expertise, trusted content and in-person human connection. For Axios, that translates into more live events, a membership program centered on its star journalists and an expansion of its high-end subscription newsletters. "We're in the middle of a very fundamental shift in how people relate to news and information," he said, "as profound, if not more profound, than moving from print to digital." "Fast forward five to 10 years from now and we're living in this AI-dominated virtual world — who are the couple of players in the media space offering smart, sane content who are thriving?" he added. "It damn well better be us."

Axios is pouring investment into holding more events, both around the world and in the United States. VandeHei said the events portion of his business grew 60% year over year in 2023. The company has also introduced a $1,000-a-year membership program around some of its journalists that will offer exclusive reporting, events and networking. The first one, announced last month, is focused on Eleanor Hawkins, who writes a weekly newsletter for communications professionals. Her newsletter will remain free, but paying subscribers will have access to additional news and data, as well as quarterly calls with Hawkins... Axios will expand Axios Pro, its collection of eight high-end subscription newsletters focused on specific niches in the deals and policy world. The subscriptions start at $599 a year each, and Axios is looking to add one on defense policy...

"The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that," VandeHei said....VandeHei said that although he thought publications should be compensated for original intellectual property, "that's not a make-or-break topic." He said Axios had talked to several AI companies about potential deals, but "nothing that's imminent.... One of the big mistakes a lot of media companies made over the last 15 years was worrying too much about how do we get paid by other platforms that are eating our lunch as opposed to figuring out how do we eat people's lunch by having a superior product," he said.
"VandeHei said Axios was not currently profitable because of the investment in the new businesses," according to the article.

But "The company has continued to hire journalists even as many other news organizations have cut back."

China's push to replace foreign technology is now focused on cutting American chip makers out of the country's telecoms systems. From a report: Officials earlier this year directed the nation's largest telecom carriers to phase out foreign processors that are core to their networks by 2027, a move that would hit American chip giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, people familiar with the matter said. The deadline given by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology aims to accelerate efforts by Beijing to halt the use of such core chips in its telecom infrastructure. The regulator ordered state-owned mobile operators to inspect their networks for the prevalence of non-Chinese semiconductors and draft timelines to replace them, the people said.

In the past, efforts to get the industry to wean itself off foreign semiconductors have been hindered by the lack of good domestically made chips. Chinese telecom carriers' procurements show they are switching more to domestic alternatives, a move made possible in part because local chips' quality has improved and their performance has become more stable, the people said. Such an effort will hit Intel and AMD the hardest, they said. The two chip makers have in recent years provided the bulk of the core processors used in networking equipment in China and the world.

An anonymous reader shares a PC Gamer report: PCI Express 7.0 is coming. But don't feel as though you need to start saving for a new motherboard anytime soon. The PCI-SIG has just released the 0.5 version, with the final version set for release in 2025. That means supporting devices are not likely to land until 2026, with 2027-28 likely to be the years we see a wider rollout. PCIe 7.0 will initially be far more relevant to the enterprise market, where bandwidth-hungry applications like AI and networking will benefit. Anyway, it's not like the PC market is saturated with PCIe 5.0 devices, and PCIe 6.0 is yet to make its way into our gaming PCs.

PCI Express bandwidth doubles every generation, so PCIe 7.0 will deliver a maximum data rate up to 128 GT/s. That's a whopping 8x faster than PCIe 4.0 and 4x faster than PCIe 5.0. This means PCIe 7.0 is capable of delivering up to 512GB/s of bi-directional throughput via a x16 connection and 128GB/s for an x4 connection. More bandwidth will certainly be beneficial for CPU to chipset links, which means multiple integrated devices like 10G networking, WiFi 7, USB 4, and Thunderbolt 4 will all be able to run on a consumer motherboard without compromise. And just imagine what all that bandwidth could mean for PCIe 7.0 SSDs. In the years to come, a PCIe 7.0 x4 SSD could approach sequential transfer rates of up to 60GB/s. We'll need some serious advances in SSD controller and NAND flash technologies to see speeds in that range, but still, it's an attractive proposition. Further reading: PCIe 7.0 first official draft lands, doubling bandwidth yet again.

President Joe Biden has become the first sitting U.S. president to post on a decentralized networking protocol. As reported by The Verge, President Biden's Threads account "has begun using Meta's ActivityPub integration," which allows for content, data, and followers to be ported between networks -- the basis that makes up the "fediverse." From the report: The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan. Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse -- and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts -- as those features weren't part of Threads' integration when it opened up beta testing last month. But his posts are available, and he'll see likes coming in from there. Or whoever is running the Presidential Threads account will, anyway.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: VMware by Broadcom will deliver a significant update to its flagship Cloud Foundation bundle in the middle of this year and follow it up with a major update early in 2025. Both releases will show off Broadcom's plan to make the package easier to implement and operate, and hopefully assuage customer concerns about price rises. More on that later. First, the updates. One release is currently scheduled to debut in July, according to Paul Turner, vice-president of product management and the leader of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. The release will allow use of a single license key for all the components of Cloud Foundation, improve OAuth support as a step towards single sign-on across the VMware range, and add an NSX overlay that will allow implementation of software-defined networks without requiring IP address changes.

Turner explained those features as exemplifying the sort of simplification VMware by Broadcom thinks is needed to make Cloud Foundation easier to implement. A bigger release Turner hopes will debut in early 2025 -- though he would commit to only a H1 launch -- will be a "unified" release in which more of VCF is better integrated. Today, Turner admitted, VMware customers may have implemented vSphere and the Aria management suite, but might still need or choose discrete storage for each. Future VCF releases will increasingly unify the products so that silos aren't needed. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president for VMware by Broadcom's cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing, told The Register the release will be called VCF 9 and will represent "the fullest expression of Broadcom's vision for product integration." "When customers deploy VCF there are seams -- when they deploy networking and storage, they feel like they do not have a unified developer or operator experience," Shenoy admitted. VCF 9 will tidy that sort of thing up and make the process "seamless." Buyers can also expect improved log file analysis, the ability to acquire templates from a marketplace and adopt them as PaaS, and plenty more.

Turner and Shenoy told The Register that the two releases are hoped to make VCF adoption easier, and by doing so demonstrate the value of the bundle. Today, they argue, would-be hybrid cloud adopters using VCF are in reality integrating siloed products -- which doesn't prove the value of the vStack well. VCF 9's planned integrations, they argue, should demonstrate the power of the stack and the wisdom of Broadcom's decision to create a VMware unit dedicated to VCF. That team, they explained, means developers for each of the bundle's components work together on a unified experience, rather than to create their own product. It may also demonstrate the value of VMware by Broadcom's new licenses – which some users have complained are considerably more expensive now that subscriptions are required, and products are only sold in bundles. Sylvain Cazard, president of Broadcom Software for Asia-Pacific, told The Register that complaints about higher prices are unwarranted since customers using at least two components of VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation will end up paying less. He also noted that the new pricing includes support, which VMware didn't include previously.

Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called "Project Ghostbusters." Gizmodo: Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn't private at all. "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them," said Mark Zuckerberg in an email to three Facebook executives in 2016, unsealed in Meta's antitrust case on Saturday. "It seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them... You should figure out how to do this."

Thus, Project Ghostbusters was born. It's Meta's in-house wiretapping tool to spy on data analytics from Snapchat starting in 2016, later used on YouTube and Amazon. This involved creating "kits" that can be installed on iOS and Android devices, to intercept traffic for certain apps, according to the filings. This was described as a "man-in-the-middle" approach to get data on Facebook's rivals, but users of Onavo were the "men in the middle."

Meta's Onavo unit has a history of using invasive techniques to collect data on Facebook's users. Meta acquired Onavo from an Israeli firm over 10 years ago, promising users private networking, as most VPNs do. However, the service was reportedly used to spy on rival social media apps through tens of millions of people who downloaded Onavo. It gave Facebook valuable intel about competitors, and this week's court filings seem to confirm that. A team of senior executives and roughly 41 lawyers worked on Project Ghostbusters, according to court filings. The group was heavily concerned with whether to continue the program in the face of press scrutiny. Facebook ultimately shut down Onavo in 2019 after Apple booted the VPN from its app store.

BleepingComputer reports on "a new denial-of-service attack dubbed 'Loop DoS' targeting application layer protocols."

According to their article, the attack "can pair network services into an indefinite communication loop that creates large volumes of traffic." Devised by researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz-Center for Information Security, the attack uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and impacts an estimated 300,000 host and their networks. The attack is possible due to a vulnerability, currently tracked as CVE-2024-2169, in the implementation of the UDP protocol, which is susceptible to IP spoofing and does not provide sufficient packet verification. An attacker exploiting the vulnerability creates a self-perpetuating mechanism that generates excessive traffic without limits and without a way to stop it, leading to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on the target system or even an entire network. Loop DoS relies on IP spoofing and can be triggered from a single host that sends one message to start the communication.

According to the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) there are three potential outcomes when an attacker leverages the vulnerability:

— Overloading of a vulnerable service and causing it to become unstable or unusable.
— DoS attack on the network backbone, causing network outages to other services.
— Amplification attacks that involve network loops causing amplified DOS or DDOS attacks.

CISPA researchers Yepeng Pan and Professor Dr. Christian Rossow say the potential impact is notable, spanning both outdated (QOTD, Chargen, Echo) and modern protocols (DNS, NTP, TFTP) that are crucial for basic internet-based functions like time synchronization, domain name resolution, and file transfer without authentication... The researchers warned that the attack is easy to exploit, noting that there is no evidence indicating active exploitation at this time. Rossow and Pan shared their findings with affected vendors and notified CERT/CC for coordinated disclosure. So far, vendors who confirmed their implementations are affected by CVE-2024-2169 are Broadcom, Cisco, Honeywell, Microsoft, and MikroTik.

To avoid the risk of denial of service via Loop DoS, CERT/CC recommends installing the latest patches from vendors that address the vulnerability and replace products that no longer receive security updates. Using firewall rules and access-control lists for UDP applications, turning off unnecessary UDP services, and implementing TCP or request validation are also measures that can mitigate the risk of an attack. Furthermore, the organization recommends deploying anti-spoofing solutions like BCP38 and Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF), and using Quality-of-Service (QoS) measures to limit network traffic and protect against abuse from network loops and DoS amplifications.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schneidafunk for sharing the article.

"Microsoft confirmed that a memory leak introduced with the March 2024 Windows Server security updates is behind a widespread issue causing Windows domain controllers to crash," BleepingComputer reported Thursday.

Friday Microsoft wrote that the issue "was resolved in the out-of-band update KB5037422," only available via the Microsoft Update Catalog. (The update "is not available from Windows Update and will not install automatically.")

BleepingComputer reported the leak only affected "enterprise systems using the impacted Windows Server platform," and home users were not affected. But Microsoft confirmed it impacted all domain controller servers with the latest Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022 updates: As BleepingComputer first reported on Wednesday and as many admins have warned over the last week, affected servers are freezing and restarting unexpectedly due to a Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process memory leak introduced with this month's cumulative updates.

"Since installation of the March updates (Exchange as well as regular Windows Server updates) most of our DCs show constantly increasing lsass memory usage (until they die)," one admin said.

"Our symptoms were ballooning memory usage on the lsass.exe process after installing KB5035855 (Server 2016) and KB5035857 (Server 2022) to the point that all physical and virtual memory was consumed and the machine hung," another Windows admin told BleepingComputer.
The leak "is observed when on-premises and cloud-based Active Directory Domain Controllers service Kerberos authentication requests," Microsoft wrote. "Extreme memory leaks may cause LSASS to crash, which triggers an unscheduled reboot of underlying domain controllers..."

"We strongly recommend you do not apply the March 2024 security update on DCs and install KB5037422 instead..."

Readers waspleg and SpzToid shared the following report: Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent.

Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a professional networking app that integrated with Glassdoor last July. This acquisition meant that every Glassdoor user was automatically signed up for a Fishbowl account. And because Fishbowl requires users to verify their identities, Glassdoor's terms of service changed to require all users to be verified.

Ever since Glassdoor's integration with Fishbowl, Glassdoor's terms say that Glassdoor 'may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties. We may also use personal data you provide to us via your resume(s) or our other services.' This effort to gather information on Fishbowl users includes Glassdoor staff consulting publicly available sources to verify information that is then used to update Glassdoor users' accounts.

Last month, the only known surviving copy of 32-bit OS/2 from Microsoft was purchased for $650. "Now, two of the internet's experts in getting early PC operating systems running today have managed to fire it up, and you can see the results," reports The Register. From the report: Why such interest in this nearly third-of-a-century old, unreleased OS? Because this is the way the PC industry very nearly went. This SDK came out in June 1990, just one month after Windows 3.0. If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared. There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different. The surprise here is that we can see a glimpse of this world that never happened. The discovery of this pre-release OS shows how very nearly ready it was in 1990. IBM didn't release its solo version until April 1992, the same month as Windows 3.1 -- but now, we can see it was nearly ready two years earlier.

That's why Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum called his look The Future That Never Was. He uncovered a couple of significant bugs, but more impressively, he found workarounds for both, and got both features working fine. OS/2 2 could run multiple DOS VMs at once, but in the preview, they wouldn't open -- due to use of an undocumented instruction which Intel did implement in the Pentium MMX and later processors. Secondly, the bundled network client wouldn't install -- but removing a single file got that working fine. That alone is a significant difference between Microsoft's OS/2 2.0 and IBM's version: Big Blue didn't include networking until Warp Connect 3 in 1995.

His verdict: "The 6.78 build of OS/2 2.0 feels surprisingly stable and complete. The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work." Over at Virtually Fun, Neozeed also took an actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0, carefully recreating that screenshot from PC Magazine in May 1990. He even managed to get some Windows 2 programs running, although this preview release did not yet have a Windows subsystem. On his Internet Archive page, he has disk images and downloadable virtual machines so that you can run this yourself under VMware or 86Box.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies -- at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing. As luck would have it, that combo is present in Intel's current-generation desktop processors -- 14th-gen Core, aka Core Ultra, aka "Meteor Lake." All models feature a GPU, NPU, and can handle Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) that speed some -- surprise! -- neural networking tasks, and the DP4a instructions that help GPUs to process video.

Because AI PCs are therefore just PCs with current processors, Intel doesn't consider "AI PC" to be a brand that denotes conformity with a spec or a particular capability not present in other PCs. Intel used the "Centrino" brand to distinguish Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, and did likewise by giving home entertainment PCs the "Viiv" moniker. Chipzilla still uses the tactic with "vPro" -- a brand that denotes processors that include manageability and security for business users. But AI PCs are neither a brand nor a spec. "The reason we have not created a category for it like Centrino is we believe this is simply what a PC will be like in four or five years time," Hallock told The Register, adding that Intel's recipe for an AI PC doesn't include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds. "There are cases where a very large LLM might require 32GB of RAM," he noted. "Everything else will fit comfortably in a 16GB system."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Linus Torvalds has released version 6.8 of the Linux Kernel. "So it took a bit longer for the commit counts to come down this release than I tend to prefer," Torvalds wrote on the Linx kernel mailing list on Sunday, "but a lot of that seemed to be about various selftest updates (networking in particular) rather than any actual real sign of problems."

"And the last two weeks have been pretty quiet, so I feel there's no real reason to delay 6.8." So he delivered it, ending his own speculation that this cut of the kernel might need an eighth release candidate. Torvalds found time to note what he described as "a bit of random git numerology" as when work ended on this version of the kernel the git repository used to track it contained 9.996 million objects."

"This is the last mainline kernel to have less than ten million git objects," Torvalds wrote. "Of course, there is absolutely nothing special about it apart from a nice round number. Git doesn't care," he added. Fair enough -- especially as noted that other trees, such as linux-next, have well and truly passed ten million objects.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A technology company that routes millions of SMS text messages across the world has secured an exposed database that was spilling one-time security codes that may have granted users' access to their Facebook, Google and TikTok accounts. The Asian technology and internet company YX International manufactures cellular networking equipment and provides SMS text message routing services. SMS routing helps to get time-critical text messages to their proper destination across various regional cell networks and providers, such as a user receiving an SMS security code or link for logging in to online services. YX International claims to send 5 million SMS text messages daily. But the technology company left one of its internal databases exposed to the internet without a password, allowing anyone to access the sensitive data inside using only a web browser, just with knowledge of the database's public IP address.

Anurag Sen, a good-faith security researcher and expert in discovering sensitive but inadvertently exposed datasets leaking to the internet, found the database. Sen said it was not apparent who the database belonged to, nor who to report the leak to, so Sen shared details of the exposed database with TechCrunch to help identify its owner and report the security lapse. Sen told TechCrunch that the exposed database included the contents of text messages sent to users, including one-time passcodes and password reset links for some of the world's largest tech and online companies, including Facebook and WhatsApp, Google, TikTok, and others. The database had monthly logs dating back to July 2023 and was growing in size by the minute. In the exposed database, TechCrunch found sets of internal email addresses and corresponding passwords associated with YX International, and alerted the company to the spilling database. The database went offline a short time later.

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The Register has been running a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. There is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors never really took off (despite being vastly superior to microkernels), along with the ongoing development of 9Front.
From the article: Plan 9 was in some way a second implementation of the core concepts of Unix and C, but reconsidered for a world of networked graphical workstations. It took many of the trendy ideas of late-1980s computing, both of academic theories and of the computer industry of the time, and it reinterpreted them through the jaded eyes of two great gurus, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and their students) — arguably, design geniuses who saw their previous good ideas misunderstood and misinterpreted.

In Plan 9, networking is front and center. There are good reasons why this wasn't the case with Unix — it was being designed and built at the same time as local area networking was being invented. UNIX Fourth Edition, the first version written in C, was released in 1973 — the same year as the first version of Ethernet.

Plan 9 puts networking right into the heart of the design. While Unix was later used as the most common OS for standalone workstations, Plan 9 was designed for clusters of computers, some being graphical desktops and some shared servers...

Because everything really is a file, displaying a window on another machine can be as simple as making a directory and populating it with some files. You can start programs on other computers, but display the results on yours — all without any need for X11 or any visible networking at all.

This means all the Unixy stuff about telnet and rsh and ssh and X forwarding and so on just goes away. It makes X11 look very overcomplicated, and it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft.

Reddit has filed its initial public offering (IPO) with the SEC on Thursday. "The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol 'RDDT,'" reports CNBC. From the report: Its market debut, expected in March, will be the first major tech initial public offering of the year. It's the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019. Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023, up 20% from the $666.7 million it brought in the previous year, according to the filing. The social networking company's core business is reliant on online advertising sales stemming from its website and mobile app.

The company, founded in 2005 by technology entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, said it has incurred net losses since its inception. It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, compared with a net loss of $158.6 million the year prior. [...] Reddit said it plans to use artificial intelligence to improve its ad business and that it expects to open new revenue channels by offering tools and incentives to "drive continued creation, improvements, and commerce." It's also in the early stages of developing and monetizing a data-licensing business in which third parties would be allowed to access and search data on its platform.

For example, Google on Thursday announced an expanded partnership with Reddit that will give the search giant access to the company's data to, among other uses, train its AI models. "In January 2024, we entered into certain data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years," Reddit said, regarding its data-licensing business. "We expect a minimum of $66.4 million of revenue to be recognized during the year ending December 31, 2024 and the remaining thereafter." On Wednesday, Reddit said it plans to sell a chunk of its IPO shares to 75,000 of its most loyal users.

Microsoft is developing a new network card that could improve the performance of its Maia AI server chip and potentially reduce the company's reliance on chip designer Nvidia, The Information reported on Tuesday. Reuters: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tapped Pradeep Sindhu, who co-founded networking gear developer Juniper Networks, to spearhead the network card effort, the report said citing a person with knowledge of the matter. Microsoft acquired Sindhu's server chip startup, Fungible, last year. The new network card is similar to Nvidia's ConnectX-7 card, which the chip developer sells alongside its graphic processor units (GPUs), the report added. The equipment could take more than a year to develop and, if successful, could lessen the time it takes for OpenAI to train its models on Microsoft servers as well as make the process less expensive, according to the report.

A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project... for the public good." From a report: His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities," writes Maxim Dounin, and will be "free from arbitrary corporate actions." Dounin is one of the earliest and still most active coders on the open source Nginx project and one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc., a company created in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. Nginx is now used on roughly one-third of the world's web servers, ahead of Apache.

Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking firm F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sysoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, Internet firm Rambler, claimed that it owned the rights to Nginx's source code, as it was developed during Sysoev's tenure at Rambler (where Dounin also worked). While the criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the implications of a Russian company's intrusion into a popular open source piece of the web's infrastructure caused some alarm. Sysoev left F5 and the Nginx project in early 2022. Later that year, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, F5 discontinued all operations in Russia. Some Nginx developers still in Russia formed Angie, developed in large part to support Nginx users in Russia. Dounin technically stopped working for F5 at that point, too, but maintained his role in Nginx "as a volunteer," according to Dounin's mailing list post.

Dounin writes in his announcement that "new non-technical management" at F5 "recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects. In particular, they decided to interfere with security policy nginx uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers' position." While it was "quite understandable," given their ownership, Dounin wrote that it means he was "no longer able to control which changes are made in nginx," hence his departure and fork.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGate: Cisco, the San Jose-based networking and telecommunications giant, is laying off 5% of its workforce. The company announced the cuts in a Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside its quarterly earnings report. Based on the company's reported head count, the layoffs will hit at least 4,000 workers. Cisco wrote in the filing that the cuts are aimed to "realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas."

Most of the cuts will go through this quarter, per the filing. Cisco estimated that severance payments and other termination benefits will cost the company $800 million. In a statement to SFGATE on Wednesday, Cisco spokesperson Robyn Blum cited "the cautious macro environment, our customers continuing to absorb high levels of product inventory, and ongoing weakness in the Service Provider market," as reasons for the layoff.

"The care of our people is a top priority, and we will provide impacted employees with career support and market-competitive severance packages," the statement continued.

Mark Tyson reports via Tom's Hardware: A serial burglar in Edina, Minnesota is suspected of using a Wi-Fi jammer to knock out connected security cameras before stealing and making off with the victim's prized possessions. [...] Edina police suspect that nine burglaries in the last six months have been undertaken with Wi-Fi jammer(s) deployed to ensure incriminating video evidence wasnâ(TM)t available to investigators. The modus operandi of the thief or thieves is thought to be something like this:

- Homes in affluent areas are found - Burglars carefully watch the homes - The burglars avoid confrontation, so appear to wait until homes are empty - Seizing the opportunity of an empty home, the burglars will deploy Wi-Fi jammer(s) - "Safes, jewelry, and other high-end designer items," are usually taken

A security expert interviewed by the source publication, KARE11, explained that the jammers simply confused wireless devices rather than blocking signals. They usually work by overloading wireless traffic âoeso that real traffic cannot get through,â the news site was told. [...] Worryingly, Wi-Fi jamming is almost a trivial activity for potential thieves in 2024. KARE11 notes that it could buy jammers online very easily and cheaply, with prices ranging from $40 to $1,000. Jammers are not legal to use in the U.S. but they are very easy to buy online.