Regulators in the UK are weighing a cap on some of the fees that Visa and Mastercard charge local merchants for each card transaction, seeking to rein in charges that have risen fivefold since Brexit. From a report: After a monthslong review, the UK's Payment Systems Regulator said it's concerned that the payment giants have no effective competition, especially when it comes to the interchange fees they charge UK merchants when a consumer carrying a card issued by a bank in the European Economic Area makes an online purchase. For now, the PSR is proposing to restore those fees to the pre-Brexit levels of 0.3% of a purchase price for credit cards and 0.2% for debit cards. For credit cards, those fees have risen in recent years to as high as 1.5% and the PSR estimated that the increases cost UK businesses as much as $250 million last year. The two companies have been under fire from a bevy of regulators and lawmakers around the world for the fees they charge. While it usually amounts to just pennies per purchase, the fees do add up: US merchants spent a record $160.7 billion on swipe fees last year, up 16.7% from 2021, according to the Nilson Report, an industry publication.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Two years after the Log4Shell vulnerability in the open source Java-based Log4j logging utility was disclosed, circa one in four applications are dependent on outdated libraries, leaving them open to exploitation. Research from security shop Veracode revealed that the vast majority of vulnerable apps may never have updated the Log4j library after it was implemented by developers as 32 percent were running pre-2015 EOL versions. Prior investigations from Veracode also showed that 79 percent of all developers never update third-party libraries after first introducing them into projects, and given that Log4j2 -- the specific version of Log4j affected by the vulnerability -- dates back to 2014, this could explain the large proportion of unpatched apps. A far smaller minority are running versions that were vulnerable at the time of the Log4j vulnerability's disclosure in December 2021. Only 2.8 percent are still using versions 2.0-beta9 through 2.15.0 -- post-EOL versions that remain exposed to Log4Shell, the industry-coined moniker of the vulnerability's exploit. Some 3.8 percent are still running version 2.17, a post-patch version of the Java logger that's not exposed to Log4Shell attacks, but is vulnerable to a separate remote code execution (RCE) bug (CVE-2021-44832). The researchers believe this illustrates a minority of developers that acted quickly when the vulnerability was first disclosed, as was the advice at the time, had returned to older habits of leaving libraries untouched. Altogether, just shy of 35 percent remain vulnerable to Log4Shell, and nearly 40 percent are vulnerable to RCE flaws. The EOL versions of Log4j are also vulnerable to three additional critical bugs announced by Apache, bringing the total to seven high and critical-rated issues. "At a surface level, the numbers above show that the massive effort to remediate the Log4Shell vulnerability was effective in mitigating risk of exploitation of the zero-day vulnerability. That should not be surprising," said Chris Eng, chief research officer at Veracode. "The bigger story at the two-year anniversary, however, is that there is still room for improvement when it comes to open source software security. If Log4Shell was another example in a long series of wake-up calls to adopt more stringent open source security practices, the fact that more than one in three applications currently run vulnerable versions of Log4j shows there is more work to do. "The major takeaway here is that organizations may not be aware of how much open source security risk they are exposed to and how to mitigate it."

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Despite being valued at $86 billion by private investors, OpenAI reported $44,485 in revenue in 2022, almost entirely from investment income. CNBC reports: That's from the nonprofit parent's 990 filing with the Internal Revenue Service, a form that has to be filled out by organizations wishing to maintain their tax-exempt status. Federal standards don't require audited financial statements from nonprofits. In its home state of California, OpenAI was able to avoid submitting audited financials for 2022 because the foundation's stated revenue was below the $2 million reporting threshold. The last time OpenAI filed with the state was 2017, when revenue was $33.2 million, or more than 700 times what the foundation reported for 2022. For all its talk of openness, OpenAI's financials remain a black box. Created as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI launched a so-called capped-profit entity in 2019, enabling it to raise billions of dollars in outside funding and attain attributes of a tech startup, such as the ability to hand out equity to employees. The for-profit side of the house went on to develop ChatGPT, the chatbot that took the world by storm late last year and kicked off the generative AI boom. [...] Thad Calabrese, a professor of public and nonprofit financial management at New York University, said OpenAI's current status is confusing, and is unlike anything he has seen in the nonprofit world. He said OpenAI could give up its nonprofit status, and he cited the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which in 1994 allowed associated nonprofit medical insurance plans to switch into for-profit entities. "There's no real need to have the nonprofit," Calabrese said. "If you want to be a startup, be a startup." Regarding OpenAI's reporting with the IRS, he said "fundamentally you can't really get a holistic sense of these organizations when you don't have consolidated financial statements."

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More than 190 governments at the United Nations climate conference approved an agreement Wednesday calling for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, an accord that bridged differences between big energy-producing nations and countries that want to completely phase out coal, oil and natural gas. From a report: The deal, the result of all-night talks, calls for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner." It says the shift to clean energy for the global economy should accelerate this decade with the aim of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Scientists say that is crucial to fulfilling the Paris accord, the landmark climate agreement that calls for governments to attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures. The deal marks the first time a U.N. climate agreement has called for governments to cut back on all fossil fuels.

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For the first time, scientists have discovered nuclear fission occurring amongst the stars, supporting the idea that neutron stars create "superheavy" elements when they collide, which then break down via nuclear fission to birth rare elements. Space.com reports: Nuclear fission is basically the opposite of nuclear fusion. While nuclear fusion refers to the smashing of lighter elements to create heavier elements, nuclear fission is a process that sees energy released when heavy elements split apart to create lighter elements. Nuclear fission is pretty well known, too. It's actually the basis of energy-generating nuclear power plants here on Earth -- however, it had not been seen occurring amongst the stars before now. The team of researchers led by North Carolina State University scientist Ian Roederer searched data concerning a wide range of elements in stars to discover the first evidence that nuclear fission could therefore be acting when neutron stars merge. These findings could help solve the mystery of where the universe's heavy elements come from. Scientists know that nuclear fusion is not just the primary source of energy for stars, but also the force that forges a variety of elements, the "heaviest" being iron. The evidence of nuclear fission discovered by [Matthew Mumpower, research co-author and a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory] and the team comes in the form of a correlation between "light precision metals," like silver, and "rare earth nuclei," like europium, showing in some stars. When one of these groups of elements goes up, the corresponding elements in the other group also increases, the scientists saw. The team's research also indicates that elements with atomic masses -- counts of protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus -- greater than 260 may exist around neutron star smashes, even if this existence is brief. This is much heavier than many of the elements at the "heavy end" of the periodic table. "The only plausible way this can arise among different stars is if there is a consistent process operating during the formation of the heavy elements," Mumpower said. "This is incredibly profound and is the first evidence of fission operating in the cosmos, confirming a theory we proposed several years ago." "As we've acquired more observations, the cosmos is saying, 'hey, there's a signature here, and it can only come from fission.'" The research was published in the journal Science.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from REVE News: The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects, for the first year on record, combined electricity generation from wind and solar to surpass generation from coal in 2024. EIA expects solar generation in 2024 to increase 39% (228 kilowatthours) from 2023, driven by continued increases in solar capacity. "Renewables, particularly solar photovoltaics, are growing rapidly and making large contributions to electricity generation," DeCarolis said. EIA expects natural gas prices to be $2.77 per million British thermal units this winter, about 23% lower than previously forecast. The winter season is off to a warmer-than-expected start, so U.S. households are consuming less natural gas for heat than expected. The lower natural gas consumption is also contributing to rising U.S. natural gas inventories, which typically results in lower prices. "We're seeing record domestic natural gas production paired with lower-than-expected natural gas demand, and we expect that is going to push prices lower this winter season," DeCarolis said. EIA will publish its next STEO on January 9, 2024, including the agency's first forecasts for the energy sector through 2025. The full report is available on the EIA website.

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An artificial intelligence campaign volunteer named Ashley is being used to call thousands of Pennsylvania voters on behalf of Democrat Shamaine Daniels, "ushering in a new era of political campaigning in which candidates use technology to engage with voters in ways increasingly difficult to track," reports Reuters. From the report: Like a seasoned campaign volunteer, Ashley analyzes voters' profiles to tailor conversations around their key issues. Unlike a human, Ashley always shows up for the job, has perfect recall of all of Daniels' positions, and does not feel dejected when she's hung up on. "This is going to scale fast," said 30-year-old Ilya Mouzykantskii, the London-based CEO of Civox, the company behind Ashley. "We intend to be making tens of thousands of calls a day by the end of the year and into the six digits pretty soon. This is coming for the 2024 election and it's coming in a very big way. ... The future is now." For Daniels, the tool levels the playing field: as the underdog, she is now armed with another way to understand voters better, reach out in different languages (Ashley is fluent in over 20), and conduct many more "high bandwidth" conversations. Mouzykantskii said he is fully aware of the potential downsides, and does not intend to take any venture capital funding which might entice him to prioritize profits over ethics. Mouzykantskii and his co-founder Adam Reis, former computer science students at Stanford and Columbia Universities respectively, declined to disclose the exact generative AI models they are using. They will only say they use over 20 different AI models, some proprietary and some open-source. Thanks to the latest generative AI technologies, Reis was able to build the product almost entirely on his own, whereas several years ago it would have taken a team of 50 engineers several years to do so, he said. The report notes that there are "few legal guardrails" regulating this particular use of AI. "No rules directly apply to what Civox is doing. Federal Trade Commission regulations ban telemarketers from making robocalls to people on the Do Not Call Registry, but the list does not apply to political calls -- and Civox's activity, with its 'personalized' messages, does not qualify as robocalling."

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For the first time, Netflix has released a comprehensive report of what people watched on the platform over a six month period. It includes hours viewed for every title, the premiere date for any Netflix show and movie, and whether a title was available globally. From the Hollywood Reporter: The list includes worldwide viewing for more than 18,000 movies and seasons of TV (18,214, to be exact) between January and June. Those 18,214 titles all had at least 50,000 hours of viewing over those six months, encompassing about 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, vp strategy and analysis Lauren Smith told reporters during a presentation of the data on Tuesday. It is the deepest dive into viewing that Netflix (or any other streamer) has ever made public. Among the highlights: The Night Agent was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023, racking up 812.1 million hours of viewing. Season two of Ginny & Georgia was second at 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean drama The Glory (622.8 million hours). Wednesday ranked fourth at 507.7 million hours of viewing, despite being released in November 2022. The company is using total hours viewed in this report as a way to measure engagement by its users rather than the "view" formula (total viewing hours divided by running time) it employs to compare titles in its weekly top 10 lists. Original series and movies dominate the top of the chart, but Smith said the split between original and licensed titles was more even: About 55 percent of viewing was for originals and 45 percent was for licensed shows and films. Suits, which dominated the Nielsen U.S. streaming charts for much of the summer and fall, had a combined 599 million hours of viewing worldwide on Netflix across all nine seasons. The show's first season ranked highest, coming in 67th place with 129.1 million hours. At the other end, a little more than 20 percent of the titles on Netflix's list (3,813 in all) had very little viewing. The company rounded them to 100,000 hours but they would fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours -- barely a drop in the streamer's more than 100 billion total hours of viewing for the six months. The full "What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report" can be downloaded here.

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Last month, Futurism noticed Sports Illustrated was publishing AI-generated articles under fake author biographies. Although the magazine removed the articles in question and released a statement blaming the issue on a contractor, it wasn't enough to quell the widespread backlash. Today, Sports Illustrated's publisher, Arena Group, fired the sports media outlet's CEO. The Hill reports: The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated, said Monday that its board of directors had moved to fire CEO Ross Levinsohn. The board took the action to "improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company," the company said. Manoj Bhargava will serve as Arena Group's interim chief executive officer effective this week. Levinsohn was the CEO of Arena Group since 2019 and previously was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is including new Stolen Device Protection in iOS 17.3 that requires authentication through Face ID or Touch ID to perform certain actions. The Verge reports: The new feature appears to come in response to the concerns raised in previous reports by The Wall Street Journal describing how thieves watch their victims type in their iPhone passcodes and then steal their devices. This gives thieves access to a trove of personal and financial information stored on the device, allowing them to lock victims out of their iCloud accounts and spend thousands of dollars using saved payment information. If you opt in to the feature, you would have to verify your identity with face or fingerprint biometrics when doing things like viewing your saved passwords in iCloud Keychain, applying for a new Apple Card, factory resetting your device, using saved payment methods in Safari, and turning off Lost Mode. This way, thieves wouldn't be able to steal your information even if they have your phone and the passcode. For even more sensitive actions, like changing your Apple ID password, changing your iPhone passcode, or turning off Find My, the new Stolen Device Protection feature adds an additional hurdle if the device is somewhere other than locations you often frequent, like at home or in the office. It requires you to not only verify your identity with Face ID or Touch ID but also wait one hour and then repeat the authentication process again.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft wants to use nuclear energy to power its artificial intelligence operations. And in order to help cut the red tape required to make that happen, Microsoft plans to use AI. From a report: A Microsoft team has spent months building an AI trained on nuclear regulations and licensing requirements to help the tech giant fill out all the applications it needs to build its own power plants. This typically takes years and millions, but Microsoft is urgently looking for more power to bring next-generation AI to life. That's because the larger the model and the more capable it becomes, the more power it requires. Microsoft today reflects the sensibilities of its founder, Bill Gates, in that the company believes in carbon-neutral energy sources -- and, like Gates who himself invests in nuclear power innovation, the company seems to see more potential in nuclear than other renewable sources of energy. "If we're going to do that carbon-free, we're going to need all the tools in the tool kit," Michelle Patron, Microsoft's senior director of sustainability policy, told the Journal.

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Politico reports that the climate bill passed in America in 2022 "has ignited a new zeal among leaders around the world for the kind of winner-picking, subsidy-flush governing that has been out of fashion in many countries for the past 40 years." The bill's "mix of lavish support for clean energy technologies and efforts to box out foreign competitors is also promoting a kind of green patriotism — and even some politicians on the right, at least outside the U.S., say that's a climate message they can sell." [The bill] is having a real-world impact as investors shift their money to the U.S. from abroad, hungry to take advantage of the tax breaks. In July, for example, Swiss solar manufacturer Meyer Burger canned plans to build a factory in Germany, choosing Arizona instead. That has left political leaders across the world with a choice: Grinch and grumble about the United States' sudden clean industry favoritism, or follow suit... Even the United States' favorite pals on the global stage have felt rattled by the sudden diversion from decades of free trading. But in the U.K., European Union and Australia, many leaders are now working on their own versions. Some examples of upcoming climate actions: - Australia's Labor party "has budgeted $1.3 billion in spending this year on green hydrogen projects and around $660 million on moving the economy toward electricity rather than fossil fuels." - The EU will "start operating a border tariff on high-carbon products in 2026, which seeks to keep hold of its heavy industries even as they pay an increasingly punitive price for polluting to the EU Emissions Trading System." - The UK Labour party plans messaging "that casts the green energy transition as a national mission which can create jobs in former industrial communities." - In the U.S. the White House says its bill will spur closer to $700 billion — or even $1 trillion — in green incentives over 10 years. "As the White House sees it, the jump means the tax credits for priorities such as homegrown clean power and electric vehicles have proven more popular than initially anticipated." Taken together, all the bills "reflect the urgency of the problem," Politico argues, "by aiming to transform the economy at a pace the market can't deliver on its own." "We are in the middle of a climate crisis because firms couldn't do the job of decarbonizing," said Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the progressive think tank Roosevelt Institute. "The climate crisis is the world's biggest market failure ever and it's going to take really strong public investment."

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ScreenRant reports that on December 4, "Godzilla Minus One" was the #1 movie in the crucial U.S./Canada "domestic" market (which also includes Guam and Puerto Rico). But the next week was even more impressive, reports Forbes, retaining most of its box office figure with "an incredibly strong 90% hold across the three-day Friday-Saturday-Sunday frame, for what appears to be the best second weekend hold for a wide release in 2023." Through the week, Godzilla Minus One topped the North American charts four out of five weekdays on overwhelmingly positive word of mouth. Good buzz grew through the week as more viewers and critics saw and recommend the film... Godzilla Minus One is already the highest grossing Japanese live-action release of all time in the U.S. The film is a final contender for the Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects, and is widely expected to be one of the final official nominees. CinemaBlend believes the movie should be nominated for this year's Best Picture award at the Oscars. With a total of 105 critical reviews (at the time of this writing), Godzilla Minus One has a Tomatometer score of 97%... Godzilla has literally been a metaphor for the atomic bomb since the very beginning. However, Godzilla Minus One isn't as concerned with that idea. Instead, the story is all about sacrifice as well as the hope we have for future generations. It's a story of coming together and living for today, so that our children can be inspired to want to live for tomorrow. The Takashi Yamazaki-helmed feature doesn't present a story about destruction, but rather one about wanting peace and finding conducive ways to deal with trauma. I know you might not believe me if you haven't seen it yet, but the film is just as deep and "important" as Oppenheimer and, for that, it should be nominated. They argue the movie manages to be both "a layered film" and "a popcorn flick... "it's more than JUST a film featuring a giant reptile This one actually has something to say."

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David Shepardson reports via Reuters: U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she expects to make around a dozen semiconductor chips funding awards within the next year, including multi-billion dollar announcements that could drastically reshape U.S. chip production. She announced the first award on Monday -- $35 million to a BAE Systems facility in Hampshire to produce chips for fighter planes from the "Chips for America" semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program approved by Congress in August 2022. "Next year we'll get into some of the bigger ones with leading-edge fabs," Raimondo told reporters. "A year from now I think we will have made 10 or 12 similar announcements, some of them multi-billion dollar announcements." In an interview with Reuters, Raimondo said that the number of awards could go higher than 12. She said she wants the percentage of semiconductors produced in the United States to rise from about 12% to closer to 20% -- though that is still down from 40% in 1990 -- and to have at least two "leading-edge" U.S. manufacturing clusters. In addition, she wants the U.S. to have cutting-edge memory and packaging production and to "meet the military's needs for current and mature" chips. Raimondo noted that the U.S. currently does not have any cutting-edge manufacturing production and wants to get that to about 10%.

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Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Miklos Daniel Brody, a cloud engineer, was sentenced to two years in prison and a restitution of $529,000 for wiping the code repositories of his former employer in retaliation for being fired by the company. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announcement, Brody was fired on March 11, 2020, from First Republic Bank (FRB) in San Francisco, where he worked as a cloud engineer. The court documents state that Brody's employment was terminated after he violated company policies by connecting a USB drive containing pornography to company computers. Following his dismissal, Brody allegedly refused to return his work laptop and instead used his still-valid account to access the bank's computer network and cause damages estimated to be above $220,000. "Among other things, Brody deleted the bank's code repositories, ran a malicious script to delete logs, left taunts within the bank's code for former colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their names," describes the U.S. DOJ announcement. "He also emailed himself proprietary bank code that he had worked on as an employee, which was valued at over $5,000." After the incident, Brody falsely reported to the San Francisco Police Department that the FRB-issued laptop had been stolen from his car. He continued to uphold this story when interviewed by United States Secret Service agents following his arrest in March 2021. Eventually, in April 2023, Brody pleaded guilty to lying about the laptop and to two charges concerning violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In addition to the two-year prison term and the payment of the restitution, Brody will serve three years of supervised release.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: [H]ow do we feed ourselves without further damaging the planet or worsening rising levels of hunger? This year's United Nations climate summit has confronted this question like never before. For the first time there is a broad acknowledgment that the food agenda is aligned with the climate fight across the board," said Ed Davey of the World Resources Institute, who worked with organizers of the summit, known as COP28, on its food agenda. [...] More than two-thirds of the world's countries endorsed an agreement to retool the global food system, though it's vague, lacks concrete targets, and is nonbinding. The United Nations food agency issued a landmark report laying out what it would take to align the global food system with the goal to limit average global temperature rise to manageable levels. The United States and the United Arab Emirates together committed about $17 billion toward agricultural innovations to address climate change. [...] The F.A.O. road map means doing different things in different countries. In North America, food experts said, it means nudging citizens to eat less meat and dairy, which produce high emissions. In countries of sub-Saharan Africa, it means increasing agricultural productivity. Every country must cut food loss and waste. "We are at this reckoning point where we have to move away from pure awareness raising and actually start changing habits," Yvette Cabrera, a food waste expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. Road maps, of course, are only that until someone starts following the directions. In this case, that's up to national governments. That's where the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action comes in. It commits countries to including agricultural emissions in their next round of climate targets, in 2025. It contains no other targets or timelines, nor prescribes any specific policies. So far, 154 countries have signed on. India, which has long been sensitive to any global accords that impact food security, was a holdout. One measure of the coming food fight is that it's unclear whether there's any appetite to include agricultural emissions targets in the main agreement, which is the subject of bitter negotiations at the moment. The latest draft does not include them.

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Five years after founding Atari in 1972, Nolan Bushnell started work on a chain of pizza restaurants with singing animatronic robots and videogames — called Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre. While 600 of the restaurants still operate today, "the company is in the process of remodeling its more than 400 U.S. locations," reports the Los Angeles Times, "and the last 30 or so remaining animatronic bands are being shown the door in favor of interactive dance floors and large screens that feature Chuck E. and pals in animated form." That is, they're being evicted everywhere but Northridge, Los Angeles... The goal — or hope — for the company is to have at least one location that can serve both new generations as well as nostalgia hunters, especially fans of animatronic figures. Animatronics have long been the stars of themed entertainment, at least as long as Disneyland has been putting mechanical creatures in its rides and shows. In the '80s and '90s, theme parks began switching to screen-based entertainment to mirror blockbuster movies, but today animatronics have been making a comeback. The recent makeover, for instance, of Disneyland's Adventureland Treehouse came with the addition of multiple animatronic figures, and Universal Studios' Super Nintendo World is full of mechanical kinetic energy from an assortment of characters. Additionally, this year's video game-inspired movie "Five Nights at Freddy's" is centered on a haunted pizzeria where the animatronics become sentient. The film is indicative of the cult fandom that has long existed around Chuck E. Cheese and its former competitor Showbizz Pizza Place, as evidenced by the documentary "The Rock-afire Explosion," which charts the pizza and animatronic band wars of the '80s... Restaurant franchise's CEO David McKillips says the company is acknowledging not just changing technological tastes but the realities of maintaining animatronic groups, which are programmed in Texas but maintained locally. "These are decades old, and we have a dedicated technician at every single location who spends a fair amount of time making sure the animatronics are working properly," McKillips says, adding that "it's a fairly complex issue" to keep the bands up and running. The animatronic band's final restaurant hopes to become a tourist destination offering "retro glory," according to the article. (The robots are still powered by floppy disks.) And there are fans who still fondly remember the singing robots, judging by an episode of the Simpsons where Homer hunts down the last animatronic robots that sang in a 1970s chain of pizza parlors — titled "Do Pizza Bots Dream of Electric Guitars" Unfortunately, in the episode Homer has to compete with a reboot-minded J. J. Abrams...

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According to Reuters, Ukraine's biggest mobile network was hit by "what appeared to be the largest cyber attack of the war with Russia so far," severing mobile and internet services for millions of people and knocking out the air raid alert system in parts of Kyiv. From the report: Kyivstar has 24.3 million mobile subscribers - more than half of Ukraine's population - as well as over 1.1 million home internet subscribers. Its CEO Oleksandr Komarov said the attack was "a result of" the war with Russia, although he did not say which Russian body he believed to be responsible, and that the company's IT infrastructure had been "partially destroyed." "(The attack) significantly damaged (our) infrastructure, limited access, we could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy's access," Komarov said. A source close to Ukraine's cyber defense also said that Russia was suspected to be the source of the attack, but no specific group had been identified. "It's definitely a state actor," said the source, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the issue, adding that data cable interception showed "a lot of Russian controlled traffic directed at these networks." "There's no ransom. It's all destruction. So it's not a financially motivated attack," said the source. Ukrainian officials said that air raid alert systems in more than 75 settlements in the central Kyiv region were affected by the cyber attack. Komarov said two databases containing customer data had been damaged and were currently locked. "The most important thing is that the personal data of users has not been compromised," Kyivstar said in its statement, promising to compensate customers for loss of access to services. Meanwhile, Ukraine's defense intelligence director (GUR) said it infected thousands of servers belonging to Russia's state tax service with malware, and destroyed databases and backups. "According to GUR's statement published Tuesday, the attack led to the 'complete destruction' of the agency's infrastructure," reports The Record. "GUR claimed they destroyed configuration files 'which for years ensured the functioning of Russia's tax system.'"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: While the video game industry had already largely given up on E3 -- once the largest video game trade show in the industry and the biggest video game showcase event of the year -- there was always the chance it would return after multiple years of cancellations. However, in a statement to The Washington Post today, E3's organizer confirmed that the show is permanently canceled. "We know it's difficult to say goodbye to such a beloved event, but it's the right thing to do given the new opportunities our industry has to reach fans and partners," Stanley Pierre-Louis, the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the nonprofit trade organization that ran E3, told the Post. Pierre-Louis alluded to the biggest reason for E3's precipitous collapse and ultimate demise: game developers and publishers had increasingly moved away from the event in order to put on their own less costly showcases targeted directly to fans, rather than the industry insiders and journalists that E3 typically catered to. The last E3 was held in 2019. The 2020 event was canceled due to the pandemic, only to return as a digital showcase in 2021. A virtual-only event was scheduled to take place the following year but was canceled, with promises that it would return in 2023. Then, that was canceled, with a possible 2024 return date. Now, it's been confirmed that E3 is never coming back.

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Ed Targett reports via The Stack: Broadcom is killing off VMware's on-premises perpetual licenses -- and getting set to strong-arm VMware customers onto subscriptions, by also ending the sale of Support and Subscription renewals for such customers. VMware described this to customers as part of its plan to "complete the transition of all VMware by Broadcom solutions to subscription licenses." "We are [also] ending the sale of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings beginning today" SVP Krish Prasad said in a FAQ. VMware perpetual licenses were described by its own Office of the CTO earlier this year in a short blog as its "most renowned licenses." The on-premises licenses for the virtualization software come with a license key, with SnS separately licensing users for support and software updates. Perpetual license keys never expire but the SnS lapses and now will not, seemingly, be renewed -- meaning that customers reluctant to shift to an alternative licensing model will be left without support or updates. VMware customers "may continue using perpetual licenses with active support contracts. We will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments. We encourage customers to review their inventory of perpetual licenses, including Support Services renewal and expiration dates," Broadcom said rather menacingly, on December 10. The company is also announcing a new "bring-your-own-subscription license option, providing license portability to VMware validated hybrid cloud endpoints running VMware Cloud Foundation," it added, without initially sharing details.

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