Talk about going round the (South) Bend

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is adding $11 billion of datacenter capacity in St Joseph County outside South Bend, Indiana, the cloud giant announced Thursday.…

Following copyright takedown requests from Nintendo, the popular physics sandbox game Garry's Mod said it would be pulling all of its Nintendo-related add-ons. "Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo's content and what they allow and don't allow is up to them," said the developers in a post on Steam. "They don't want you playing with that stuff in Garry's Mod -- that's their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can. This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through." The Verge reports: The takedown requests mean Garry's Mod will have to remove a huge swath of Nintendo-related maps and other items. Over the years, player-made content on Garry's Mod has allowed players to do things like turn Super Mario 64 into a first-person shooter or even explore Hyrule as Link. Since there is just so much Nintendo-related content on Garry's Mod, developers are asking the community to remove any infringing work they've uploaded.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of "foreign malicious actors." Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others. [...] Under the proposed rule, Customer Identification Programs (CIPs) operated by IaaS providers must collect information from both existing and prospective customers, i.e. those at the application stage of opening an account. The bare minimum includes the following data: a customer's name, address, the means and source of payment for each customer's account, email addresses and telephone numbers, and IP addresses used for access or administration of the account. What qualifies as an IaaS is surprisingly broad: "Any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or "trial" offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of "managed" products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and "unmanaged" products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer." And it doesn't stop there. The term IaaS includes all 'virtualized' products and services where the computing resources of a physical machine are shared, such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). It even covers 'baremetal' servers allocated to a single person. The definition also extends to any service where the consumer does not manage or control the underlying hardware but contracts with a third party for access. "This definition would capture services such as content delivery networks, proxy services, and domain name resolution services," the proposal reads. The proposed rule, National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities, will stop accepting comments from interested parties on April 30, 2024.

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Athletics boss accused of deep-faking Baltimore school principal

Baltimore police have arrested Dazhon Leslie Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School (PHS), for allegedly impersonating the school's principal using AI software to make it seem as if he made racist and antisemitic remarks.…

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Canonical released today Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) as the latest version of its popular Linux-based operating system featuring some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software. Powered by Linux kernel 6.8, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS features the latest GNOME 46 desktop environment, an all-new graphical firmware update tool called Firmware Updater, Netplan 1.0 for state-of-the-art network management, updated Ubuntu font, support for the deb822 format for software sources, increased vm.max_map_count for better gaming, and Mozilla Thunderbird as a Snap by default. It also comes with an updated Flutter-based graphical desktop installer that's now capable of updating itself and features a bunch of changes like support for accessibility features, guided (unencrypted) ZFS installations, a new option to import auto-install configurations for templated custom provisioning, as well as new default installation options, such as Default selection (previously Minimal) and Extended selection (previously Normal)."

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If your interest didn't pique enough when the former Nouveau lead developer joined NVIDIA and sent out a big patch series for this originally-reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA kernel driver, here's another plot twist: another NVIDIA engineer opening a merge request adding to the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver...

Cash to go out as refunds to punters

The FTC today announced it would be sending refunds totaling $5.6 million to Ring customers, paid from the Amazon subsidiary's coffers.…

As part of my ongoing benchmarking of the newly-released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux distribution, today's focus is looking at the high-end Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktops while comparing the performance across Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for dozens of workloads.

Jeff Lawson, the cofounder of cloud computing company Twilio, appears to have purchased the satirical news website The Onion from G/O Media. Business Insider reports: A trust linked to Lawson is behind a San Francisco-based company called Global Tetrahedron, which shares the name of a fictional evil megacorporation in a long-running Onion gag, business records show. G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller confirmed the sale of The Onion to Global Tetrahedron in an email Thursday to staff, first reported by New York Times journalist Katie Robertson. "This company is made up of four digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy based content," Spanfeller wrote. "The site's new owners have agreed to keep The Onion's entire staff intact and in Chicago, something we insisted be part of the deal." When asked about the purchase, Lawson replied: "What's The Onion?" Then, "What's a Tetrahedron?"

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This year already marks ten years since the introduction of RHEL 7. While the Red Hat Enterprise Linux support period is typically 10 years, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 they have decided to extend that by up to four years with Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS)...

Fintech giant Stripe announced on Thursday that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. TechCrunch reports: This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable. Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday's news has no customer names attached to it. On Wednesday the company unveiled a long list of other launches, the most significant update being that Stripe, for the very first time, would let customers integrate competing payment providers with Stripe's other financial services tooling. Thursday's nod to expanding crypto support is also part of that bigger strategy to open up its walled garden. A brief timeline of Stripe's dance with crypto underscores the tricky line that Stripe has walked over the years when it comes to cryptocurrency. True to its disruptive roots as a fintech, the company has wanted to be in the middle of the conversation around how blockchain-based technologies will affect financial services. But it runs the risk of subverting its bigger business and positioning as a stable and sensible financial powerhouse if it dabbles too deeply or for too long in periods of instability. The company processed $1 trillion in transactions last year, and it's still growing; it is currently worth $65 billion on paper.

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As app boss vows to nuke America's divest-or-ban law in the courts

Between shutting down or selling TikTok, owner ByteDance would prefer doing the former.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to restore regulations that expand government oversight of broadband providersand aim to protect consumer access to the internet, a move that will reignite a long-running battle over the open internet. Known as net neutrality, the regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and are aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President Donald J. Trump, and have proved to be a contentious partisan issue over the years while pitting tech giants against broadband providers. In a 3-to-2 vote along party lines, the five-member commission appointed by President Biden revived the rules that declare broadband a utility-like service regulated like phones and water. The rules also give the F.C.C. the ability to demand broadband providers report and respond to outages, as well as expand the agency's oversight of the providers' security issues. Broadband providers are expected to sue to try to overturn the reinstated rules. The core purpose of the regulations is to prevent internet service providers from controlling the quality of consumers' experience when they visit websites and use services online. When the rules were established, Google, Netflix and other online services warned that broadband providers had the incentive to slow down or block access to their services. Consumer and free speech groups supported this view. There have been few examples of blocking or slowing of sites, which proponents of net neutrality say is largely because of fear that the companies would invite scrutiny if they did so. And opponents say the rules could lead to more and unnecessary government oversight of the industry.

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Law responds again to pings

The FCC voted Thursday to restore America's net neutrality rules, nearly seven years after they were taken offline.…

Pulumi's CEO on new products and that other Infrastructure as Code company

Interview  Infrastructure as code biz Pulumi has updated its eponymous Deployments product with drift detection and automated clean-up for an untidy reality.…

TikTok owner ByteDance would prefer shutting down its loss-making app rather than sell it if the Chinese company exhausts all legal options to fight legislation to ban the platform from app stores in the U.S., Reuters reported Thursday, citing sources. From the report: The algorithms TikTok relies on for its operations are deemed core to ByteDance overall operations, which would make a sale of the app with algorithms highly unlikely, said the sources close to the parent. TikTok accounts for a small share of ByteDance's total revenues and daily active users, so the parent would rather have the app shut down in the U.S. in a worst case scenario than sell it to a potential American buyer, they said. A shut-down would have limited impact on ByteDance's business while the company would not have to give up its core algorithm, said the sources, who declined to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media. It said late on Thursday in a statement posted on Toutiao, a media platform it owns, that it had no plan to sell TikTok, in response to an article by The Information saying ByteDance is exploring scenarios for selling TikTok's U.S. business without the algorithm that recommends videos to TikTok users.

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Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). From a report: New limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric plants are the Biden administration's most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation's second-largest contributor to the climate crisis. The rules are a key part of Joe Biden's pledge to eliminate carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and economy-wide by 2050. The rule was among four separate measures targeting coal and natural gas plants that the EPA said would provide "regular certainty" to the power industry and encourage them to make investments to transition "to a clean energy economy." They also include requirements to reduce toxic wastewater pollutants from coal-fired plants and to safely manage so-called coal ash in unlined storage ponds. The new rules "reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, protect communities from pollution and improve public health -- all while supporting the long-term, reliable supply of the electricity needed to power America forward," the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, told reporters at a White House briefing.

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Suspects in Portugal and the US said to have laundered over $100M

Two men alleged to be co-founders of cryptocurrency biz Samourai Wallet face serious charges and potentially decades in US prison over claims they owned a product that facilitated the laundering of over $100 million in criminal cash.…

As expected, the Wayland 1.23 Alpha release is now available as this next Wayland release looks to officially roll-out toward the end of May...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners is out with a report on how iPhone activations compare to Android in the US. The latest data shows a notable drop over the last year bringing Apple's US smartphone market share of new activations back in time six years. CIRP shared its new iPhone report on its Substack this morning. The firm notes that while it believes Apple's installed smartphone base is higher than the recent share of US smartphone activations, the latter has taken a dive. As shown below, the metric peaked at 40% for Q1 and Q2 in 2023 with Apple seeing a decline to 33% of new smartphone activations in the US as of Q1 2024, says CIRP. That means 2 out of 3 new smartphone activations in the US are Android devices. Per CIRP's data, Apple hasn't seen numbers that low since 2017.

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