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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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Energy think tank Ember found that major growth in wind and solar helped push global electricity production past this milestone in 2023.

Its authors say that this rapid growth has brought the world to a crucial turning point where fossil fuel generation starts to decline.

“You also have the invasion of Ukraine which increased the sense of urgency around transitioning to clean power and getting off relying on fossil fuels - not just coal but also gas, and particularly from Russia.

Plans were put in place to help individual member states reach renewable energy targets and deploy technologies at a national scale.

“Certainly you can’t ignore that there was some demand [based] impact on the decrease in use of fossil fuels, but also there was a significant role of wind and solar replacing it.”

Normally this would have meant that the clean energy capacity added around the world last year would have caused fossil fuel generation to drop by 1.1 per cent.

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As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

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The Register reports that security researchers at Pen Test Partners recently got access to a British Airways 747, after the airline decided to retire its fleet following a plummet in travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

The team was able to inspect the full avionics bay beneath the passenger deck, with its data center-like racks of modular black boxes that perform different functions for the plane.

Pen Test Partners discovered a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive in the cockpit, which is used to load important navigation databases.

A cybersecurity professor discovered a buffer overflow exploit onboard a British Airways flight last year.

It’s more of a traditional network like you’d find inside an office building, and some of the latest airliners even receive software updates over the air.

Boeing only just resumed production of its troubled 737 Max airplane after software glitches led to two fatal crashes that killed a total of 346 passengers and crew members.

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If you’re on Mastodon, you might notice new author bylines appearing alongside articles — including those from The Verge.

Click on the byline, and you’ll jump directly to the author’s fediverse account, allowing you to track their work wherever it’s posted.

You can see how author bylines appear beneath articles in this post, which links you to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko’s profile.

It can also lead to a person’s profile on Threads, Flipboard, WordPress with ActivityPub, PeerTube, and others.

Mastodon is working to open up the feature to more outlets, too, but it currently requires “manual review” to prevent “malicious sites framing users as their authors.” However, Mastodon plans on launching “a self-serve system” to manage the sites authors can appear from in the future.

Even though it’s not widely rolled out just yet, it does seem like a neat way to quickly find out who wrote an article and check out their other work across multiple platforms.

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We’re told this “irregularity” was spotted inside TeamViewer’s corporate IT environment on Wednesday, and that the biz immediately called in reinforcements in the form of cyber security investigators, implemented “necessary remediation measures,” and activated its incident response team and processes, according to an announcement on Thursday.

The words “TeamViewer” and “security breach” will make a lot of people’s blood run cold given how pervasively it is used – in homes, organizations, and businesses – so a compromise of the platform could be devastating.

TeamViewer spokesperson Maria Gordienko declined to answer The Register’s specific questions about the incident – including whether it was ransomware or worse – citing the ongoing investigation.

It appears top infosec house NCC Group has already tipped off its customers to the security snafu, and blamed an unnamed advanced persistent threat (APT) team.

H-ISAC noted in its industry bulletin that it had been warned by a friendly intel partner that APT29 – aka Russian intelligence’s Cozy Bear crew – has been “actively exploiting Teamviewer.”

Which could mean the Russians are separately exploiting weaknesses within TeamViewer to get into people’s networks, or taking advantage of poor customer-side security to get in via the remote-desktop software.

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The researchers’ approach involves two main innovations: first, they created a custom LLM and constrained it to use only ternary values (-1, 0, 1) instead of traditional floating-point numbers, which allows for simpler computations.

Second, the researchers redesigned the computationally expensive self-attention mechanism in traditional language models with a simpler, more efficient unit (that they called a MatMul-free Linear Gated Recurrent Unit—or MLGRU) that processes words sequentially using basic arithmetic operations instead of matrix multiplications.

These changes, combined with a custom hardware implementation to accelerate ternary operations through the aforementioned FPGA chip, allowed the researchers to achieve what they claim is performance comparable to state-of-the-art models while reducing energy use.

Researchers claim the MatMul-free LM achieved competitive performance against the Llama 2 baseline on several benchmark tasks, including answering questions, commonsense reasoning, and physical understanding.

The researchers project that their approach could theoretically intersect with and surpass the performance of standard LLMs at scales around 10²³ FLOPS, which is roughly equivalent to the training compute required for models like Meta’s Llama-3 8B or Llama-2 70B.

The article was updated on June 26, 2024 at 9:20 AM to remove an inaccurate power estimate related to running a LLM locally on a RTX 3060 created by the author.

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Chinese chip shop Loongson, which has built modest CPUs based on its own MIPS-like architecture, is on the march towards enterprise workloads.

The silicon slinger yesterday announced that 53 software developers have created 105 products compatible with its instruction set architecture (ISA).

Loongson’s list includes a server virtualization platform, a hyperconverged stack, and a cloud management product from the Chinese hardware maker.

Loongson deliberately eschews compatabiilty with either x86 or Arm in favour tech inspired by the permissively-licensed MIPS and RISC-V ISAs.

It’s been a good couple of weeks for the Chinese chip designer, which has also announced adoption of its silicon by a vendor of network-attached storage devices.

As is the news from last week that “nearly one thousand” desktops running on Loongson CPUs have found a home in one district of the city of Fuzhou.

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The latest feature headed to the Google graveyard is continuous scrolling on search results, according to a report from Search Engine Land.

The user experience, which mirrored the endless scrolling behavior of social media feeds, was originally introduced for search results on mobile devices in October of 2021 and then brought over to desktop search results in late 2022.

A Google spokesperson reportedly told Search Engine Land that continuous scroll is being removed today from desktop search results, while the feature will be removed from mobile results “in the coming months.”

In its place on desktop will be Google’s classic pagination bar, allowing users to jump to a specific page of search results or simply click “Next” to see the next page.

On mobile, a “More results” button will be shown at the bottom of a search to load the next page.

Google told Search Engine Land that “this change is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven’t explicitly requested.”

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Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads.

That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.

Thanks to this upgrade, you’ll probably do less of that, but in a screenshot, Meta notes that you can’t reply to replies “yet,” so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that Threads’ fediverse integration will be available starting today in more than 100 countries, a significant expansion from its initial availability in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Meta has been vocal about its plans to integrate with the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub since launching Threads nearly a year ago, with first testing starting in December.

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As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for the past several releases when using other GPUs/drivers.

But for Ubuntu 24.10, the plan is to cross that threshold for NVIDIA now that their official driver has much better Wayland support and has matured into great shape.

Particularly with the upcoming NVIDIA R555 driver reaching stable very soon, the Wayland support is in great shape with features like explicit sync ready to use.

Canonical’s Daniel van Vugt of the Ubuntu desktop team made the change last week for the GDM session manager to drop their NVIDIA-prefers-X11 patches so that NVIDIA Linux users will find Wayland being used by default.

Updated Revert-data-Disable-GDM-on-hybrid-graphics-laptops-with-v.patch to ensure Nvidia 5xx drivers always get Wayland as the default unless there’s a stronger reason why it won’t work (like modeset has been disabled on the kernel command line).

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The teen’s phone was flooded with calls and texts telling her that someone had shared fake nude images of her on Snapchat and other social media platforms.

Berry, now 15, is calling on lawmakers to write criminal penalties into law for perpetrators to protect future victims of deepfake images.

“This kid who is not getting any kind of real consequence other than a little bit of probation, and then when he’s 18, his record will be expunged, and he’ll go on with life, and no one will ever really know what happened,” McAdams told CNN.

The mom and daughter say legislation is essential to protecting future victims, and could have meant more serious consequences for the classmate who shared the deep-fakes.

“If [this law] had been in place at that point, those pictures would have been taken down within 48 hours, and he could be looking at three years in jail…so he would get a punishment for what he actually did,” McAdams told CNN.

“It’s still so scary as these images are off Snapchat, but that does not mean that they are not on students’ phones, and every day I’ve had to live with the fear of these photos getting brought up resurfacing,” Berry said.

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To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law.

An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it.

“This is a fight for the preservation of all libraries and the fundamental right to access information, a cornerstone of any democratic society,” Freeland wrote.

"We believe in the right of authors to benefit from their work; and we believe that libraries must be permitted to fulfill their mission of providing access to knowledge, regardless of whether it takes physical or digital form.

Among the “far-reaching implications” of the takedowns, IA fans counted the negative educational impact of academics, students, and educators—"particularly in underserved communities where access is limited—who were suddenly cut off from “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”

“Your removal of these books impedes academic progress and innovation, as well as imperiling the preservation of our cultural and historical knowledge,” the letter said.

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The Threads API is now available, meeting a promised launch by the end of June.

The free API will allow developers to build “unique integrations” into Threads, and potentially even result in third-party apps for Meta’s competitor to what was previously known as Twitter.

Chen says that insights into Threads posts are “one of our top requested features for the API,” so Meta is allowing developers to see the number of views, likes, replies, reposts, and quotes on Threads posts through the API.

Meta has been testing the Threads API with a small number of developers: Grabyo, Hootsuite, Social News Desk, Sprinklr, Sprout Social, and Techmeme.

These test integrations have allowed sites like Techmeme to automate posting to Threads, or Sprout and Hootsuite customers to feed Threads posts into the social media management platform.

We’re now waiting to see if developers will be able to easily build a third-party Threads app with this new API that’s not connected to a social media management platform.

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In a memo obtained by The Wrap, the New York Times Guild said that firing nine out of the newspaper’s 16 artists “reflect[s] a broader mindset that puts cost savings over people and the quality of our work.”

As the union maintains, shrinking the NYT art department by more than half represents one of the paper’s largest AI-driven staff reductions to date, during an industry-wide reckoning with the burgeoning technology.

As The Wrap points out, these job cuts come even as the newspaper sues OpenAI and Microsoft for using its copyrighted work without permission to train large language models (LLMs).

In a statement, a representative for the NYT claimed that art department staffers were offered voluntary buyouts and that the cuts were not driven by a desire to replace human workers with AI.

“Cutting nine human roles and expecting that work to be done by software is a troubling instance of our members being replaced by technology, at a moment when the company’s dabbling in AI threatens the security of other essential jobs.”

In statements about the NYT’s excellence in artistry, guild members pointed out that the newspaper recently won nine gold medals from the Society for News Design, suggesting that its industry standing hinges on its art.

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Following in the footsteps of the European Union, Japan has now passed a law that will restrict Apple and Google from blocking third-party app stores for Japanese users on their platforms.

Dubbed the Act on Promotion of Competition for Specified Smartphone Software, Japan’s law shares some similarities with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), enforcing strict rules against “designated providers.” That includes requiring their platforms to allow third-party app stores, allowing app developers to offer third-party billing services, and making it easier for users to change their default settings and web browsers.

The company is currently also working on bringing those services back to iOS in the EU “later this year,” following a hiccup where Apple banned (and then unbanned) its developer account.

Japan’s FTC said the changes were being introduced because it believes smartphone operating systems, app stores, browsers, and search engines are an “oligopoly market” that would take existing antimonopoly laws “a remarkably long time” to address.

“The Japanese government made a number of changes to the legislation that will help protect user privacy, data security, innovation, and our intellectual property,” Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz said to The Verge.

“We will continue our engagement with the JFTC during the implementation period as we remain concerned about how the law will impact Japanese consumers and the secure and private iPhone experience our users have come to expect.”

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Google is launching a new advertising network that serves targeted ads to Google TV-powered streaming boxes and smart TVs.

The ads service, known as the Google TV network, lets advertisers place unskippable in-stream ad spots across more than 125 live channels — many that are FAST, or free ad-supported streaming TV channels that Google’s been hell-bent on getting users to notice.

Google says there are 20 million monthly active Google TV and Android TV OS devices, a significant figure for advertisers to consider.

Google Ads can spread across networks on Google TV, and include Google-owned ad inventory in third-party apps.

According to Google, viewers of Google TV’s free channels watch on average 75 minutes per day.

FAST channels are growing fast since it’s the closest thing to paid cable service without the bill, and while the content is mostly reruns, sometimes people just want that old-school background noise — a perfect place for ads.

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UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron has fallen victim to a hoax call with someone pretending to be former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the Foreign Office (FCDO) said.A number of text messages were also exchanged between the impersonator and Lord Cameron, who regretted his mistake, according to an FCDO spokesperson.

“Whilst the video call clearly appeared to be with Mr Poroshenko, following the conversation the foreign secretary became suspicious,” the spokesperson added.The caller also requested contact details, after which Lord Cameron stopped responding.

The spokesperson said the “brief” call took place in “recent days” but did not elaborate on who was behind the hoax or how they were able to contact Lord Cameron directly.The FCDO said it released details of the exchange publicly over fears it could be “manipulated”.

"Whilst regretting his mistake, the foreign secretary thinks it important to call out this behaviour and increase efforts to counter the use of misinformation.

During his term as prime minister, David Cameron had multiple dealings with the Ukrainian leader, including meetings at international summits.

It’s not the first time Lord Cameron has fallen victim to a hoax call.In 2015, Downing Street was forced to review security procedures after a bogus caller was put through to him when he was prime minister.No 10 said the caller claimed to be Robert Hannigan, who was director of government monitoring agency GCHQ at the time.Lord Cameron ended the call when it became clear it was a hoax and no sensitive information was disclosed.

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Arguably most exciting out of AMD’s slew of Computex 2024 announcements is finally making official the Ryzen 9000 “Granite Ridge” processors built atop the new Zen 5 cores.

The Zen 5 core is bringing improved branch prediction accuracy and latency, higher throughput with wider pipelines and vectors, and a deeper window size.

The flagship SKU announced at Computex is the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X that is 16 cores / 32 threads with a 5.7GHz boost frequency and 80MB L2+L3 cache while having a 170 Watt TDP.

With the Ryzen 9000 series also comes the new X870/X870E chipsets as a new option while existing AM5 motherboards with a BIOS flash can work with the new processors.

Stay tuned for Linux performance tests and benchmarks of these new AMD Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) desktop processors.

AMD isn’t announcing any 3D V-Cache “X3D” processor models yet based on Zen 5 but will likely do so in the months ahead.

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Actress Scarlett Johansson’s voice bears a striking resemblance to OpenAI’s now-pulled “Sky” personal assistant, according to an artificial intelligence lab analysis conducted by researchers at Arizona State University.

The researchers measured Sky, based on audio from demos OpenAI delivered last week, against the voices of around 600 professional actresses.

The lab study shows that the voices of Sky and Johansson have undeniable commonalities – something many listeners believed, and that now can be supported by statistical evidence, according to Arizona State University computer scientist Visar Berisha, who led the voice analysis in the school’s College of Health Solutions and the College of Engineering.

Berisha said while the study analyzed a vast array of subtle vocal features, it also zoomed in on several particular dimensions of each voice and teased out some differences.

Altman himself amped up the speculation on the day of the release by posting on X one word, “her,” the name of the 2013 romantic sci-fi film in which a lonely man falls in love with a superintelligent computer operating system voiced by Johansson.

The company says he deferred to OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, who told NPR she didn’t even know what Johannson sounded like until people were comparing Sky to the actress.

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