Secure-by-default... if your pockets are deep enough

Microsoft has come under fire for charging for security add-ons despite the company's own patchy record when it comes to vulnerabilities and breaches.…

AMD's GPUOpen team today released the Radeon GPU Profiler 2.1 software that now sports interoperability with the Radeon GPU Analyzer...

An anonymous reader shares a report: It used to be that you could pay for a retail version of Windows 11 and expect it to be ad-free, but those days are apparently finito. The latest update to Windows 11 (KB5036980) comes out this week and includes ads for apps in the "recommended" section of the Start Menu, one of the most oft-used parts of the OS. "The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps," according to the release notes. "These apps come from a small set of curated developers." The app suggestions are enabled by default, but you can restore your previously pristine Windows experience if you've installed the update, fortunately. To do so, go into Settings and select Personalization > Start and switch the "Show recommendations for tips, app promotions and more" toggle to "off."

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Senior execs making $150K+ will still have to abide by them, but they fall away for everyone else

The US Chamber of Commerce is saying it will sue the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for officially banning noncompete clauses in employment contracts across America.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Diamonds may be forever but they are also seriously on sale. Natural rough diamond prices have collapsed 26 per cent in the past couple of years. Tepid US and Chinese demand for diamond jewellery hasn't helped. But most ring fingers point at the increasing popularity of cheaper laboratory grown diamonds (LGD). This fracturing of the diamond market is set to last. After a brief pandemic-era boom in diamond jewellery, miners are battling to whittle down oversupply of gems. Anglo-American's De Beers, along with Russia's Alrosa, control two-thirds of the rough diamond supply. DeBeers this week said its rough sales dropped 23 per cent in the first quarter. It is not enough. While rough stone inventory has stabilised of late, polished diamond stocks remain high. At more than $20bn at the end of 2023, these were near five-year highs, up a third since the end of 2022, according to Bank of America. Worse, as LGDs have taken market share, their prices have declined too, to about 15 per cent or less of their natural counterparts. Diamond miners spent years maintaining that romantic buyers would prefer the allure of rare, natural stones. It increasingly appears they were wrong. Synthetic diamonds are nothing new, having appeared about 70 years ago mostly for industrial purposes. But in the past decade LGDs have taken off. In 2015, LGD supply barely featured as a rival to natural stones. By last year it was more than 10 per cent of the global diamond jewellery market, according to specialist Paul Zimnisky. This has created a competitive frenzy among producers. LGDs' lower costs have enabled them to slash prices. In October, WD Lab Grown Diamonds, America's second-largest maker of synthetics, filed for bankruptcy. It has since had to shift its business away from retail towards industrial customers.

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What's that? Q1 was better than expected? Pump those shares

Another Boeing whistleblower has come forward to report problems at his former employer, but that doesn't seem to have upset shareholders, who sent shares skyward on news of a quarter bearing fewer losses than expected.…

President Joe Biden signed a foreign aid package that includes a bill that would ban TikTok if China-based parent company ByteDance fails to divest the app within a year. The Verge: The divest-or-ban bill is now law, starting the clock for ByteDance to make its move. The company has an initial nine months to sort out a deal, though the president could extend that another three months if he sees progress. While just recently the legislation seemed like it would stall out in the Senate after being passed as a standalone bill in the House, political maneuvering helped usher it through to Biden's desk. The House packaged the TikTok bill -- which upped the timeline for divestment from the six months allowed in the earlier version -- with foreign aid to US allies, which effectively forced the Senate to consider the measures together. The longer divestment period also seemed to get some lawmakers who were on the fence on board.

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One of the leading-edge benefits of Fedora Linux is that it always ships with the most up-to-date open-source compiler toolchains at release. For their spring releases each year, it typically means shipping with a GCC compiler that isn't even officially released as stable yet. With this week's release of Fedora 40, it's shipping with GCC 14.0.1 as the development version that will culminate with the inaugural GCC 14 stable release in the coming weeks. Plus Fedora 40 has all of the other latest GNU toolchain components and then over on the LLVM side is with the current LLVM 18 stable series. For those curious how GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 performance is looking, here is a wide range of C/C++ benchmarks carried out on Fedora Workstation 40 using a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by the Zen 4 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.

The firm 'fessed up to staff misconduct and avoided criminal liability

A company contracted to manage an Amarillo, Texas nuclear weapons facility has to pay US government $18.4 million in a settlement over allegations that its atomic technicians fudged their timesheets to collect more money from Uncle Sam.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Qualcomm is cheating on the Snapdragon X Plus/Elite benchmarks given to OEMs and the press. SemiAccurate doesn't use these words lightly but there is no denying what multiple sources are telling us. [...] Then there were the actual 'briefings' for the X Pro SoC. To call them pathetic is giving them more than their due. The deck was 11 slides, three of which were empty/fluff, five 'benchmark' slides with woefully inadequate disclosure, and two infographic summary slides. The last was the slide below with the 'deep technical' stats [screenshots in the linked article], much of which we told you about last week. And more. The rest of the 'disclosure' for Snapdragon X Pro was a list of features that all fall under the guise of exactly what you would expect. The rest was filled with deep 'details' like the GPU capabilities of 3.8TFLOPS. That's it. No specs, no capabilities, no nothing. It was truly pathetic. But wait there is more, or less really, with statements like it having AV1 encode and decode. Trivialities like frame rates and resolutions were seemingly not needed for such technical briefs. See what we mean by pathetic? Those 10 cores are arranged how again? That 42MB of cache is what level? Shall I go on about the bare minimum basics or do you get the point now? SemiAccurate was planning to ask Qualcomm about their cheating on benchmarks at the promised briefing but, well, they lied to us and cut us out of the pathetic bits they did brief on. We honestly would have liked to know why they were cheating but we kind of think they will do their usual response to bad news and pretend it never happened like last time. If they actually do explain things we will of course update this article as we always do.

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Privacy Sandbox slips into 2025 after challenges from UK authorities

Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is being postponed to 2025 amid wrangling with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).…

A new AMD Linux kernel patch queued today via "x86/urgent" for routing into the Linux 6.9 development kernel expands the range of recognized CPU model IDs for upcoming Zen 5 processors...

Their holiday options are now far more restricted

The US has charged and sanctioned four Iranian nationals for their alleged roles in various attacks on US companies and government departments, all of whom are claimed to have worked for fake companies linked to Iran's military.…

Nvidia, in a blog post: To help customers make more efficient use of their AI computing resources, NVIDIA today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Run:ai, a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider. Customer AI deployments are becoming increasingly complex, with workloads distributed across cloud, edge and on-premises data center infrastructure. Managing and orchestrating generative AI, recommender systems, search engines and other workloads requires sophisticated scheduling to optimize performance at the system level and on the underlying infrastructure. Run:ai enables enterprise customers to manage and optimize their compute infrastructure, whether on premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. The deal is valued at about $700 million.

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Nashville 'ticked all the boxes' for Big Red's employees, says founder Ellison

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has confirmed that the tech giant plans to move its global headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee.…

Who cares that net profit slid 55%? Not Wall Street

In a dynamic first quarter, Elon Musk's Tesla contended with a terrorist organization, survived an arson attempt, and fiercely competed with hybrid car makers, all against a backdrop of falling prices as competition for electric vehicle customers intensified.…

Longtime Slashdot reader sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up, Sopwith, is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors. "The game involves piloting a Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy buildings while avoiding fire from enemy planes and various other obstacles," reads the Wiki page. "Sopwith uses four-color CGA graphics and music and sound effects use the PC speaker. A sequel with the same name, but often referred to as Sopwith 2, was released in 1985." You can play Sopwith in your browser here.

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DNF 4.20 was released this morning by Red Hat as a stepping stone toward the upcoming DNF5 package manager...

CISPE says concessions 'solve nothing'

Updated  Euro cloud trade body CISPE has hit back at concessions offered by Broadcom over VMware licensing, saying these do not address key issues that led it to lobby the European Commission into investigating.…

Directive places requirements on gizmo vendors, but still needs formal approval

The European Parliament has adopted the right-to-repair directive with 584 votes in favor and three against, making repairing goods more accessible and cost-effective.…