Besides naming some employees, there isnt much more information at this time. Via: The Verge: xAI, Elon Musks newly formed AI company, has revealed itself with a new website detailing its mission and team at https://x.ai/. Musk tweeted the companys intent is to understand reality without any other details or explanation. The goal of xAI []

The first comprehensive study of electric-field-induced polarization switching in wurtzites reveals an atomic-scale switching pathway with potential electronics applications.

All biological systems are wildly disordered. Yet somehow, that disorder enables plant photosynthesis to be nearly 100% efficient.

We are pleased to announce Claude 2, our new model. Claude 2 has improved performance, longer responses, and can be accessed via API as well as a new public-facing beta website, claude.ai. We have heard from our users that Claude is easy to converse with, clearly explains its thinking, is less likely to produce harmful outputs, and has a longer memory. We have made improvements from our previous models on coding, math, and reasoning. For example, our latest model scored 76.5% on the multiple choice section of the Bar exam, up from 73.0% with Claude 1.3. When compared to college students applying to graduate school, Claude 2 scores above the 90th percentile on the GRE reading and writing exams, and similarly to the median applicant on quantitative reasoning.

Think of Claude as a friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant who can be instructed in natural language to help you with many tasks. The Claude 2 API for businesses is being offered for the same price as Claude 1.3. Additionally, anyone in the US and UK can start using our beta chat experience today.

As we work to improve both the performance and safety of our models, we have increased the length of Claudes input and output. Users can input up to 100K tokens in each prompt, which means that Claude can work over hundreds of pages of technical documentation or even a book. Claude can now also write longer documents from memos to letters to stories up to a few thousand tokens all in one go.

The recent rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP).

The performance of these generative models is largely dependent on users prompts, which are becoming increasingly detailed and complex.

A Google Trends search reveals a hundredfold increase in popularity for the term prompt engineering over the last six months, and social media is teeming with novel prompting tips and templates.

The European Southern Observatory continues to build the largest telescope in the world, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Construction of the telescope began in 2014 with flattening the top of a mountain named Cerro Armazones in Chiles Atacama Desert.

ESO just announced that progress on construction has crossed the 50% mark. The remaining work should take another five years. When it finally comes online in 2028, the telescope will have a 39-meter (128 ft) primary mirror of 798 hexagonal segments, making it the largest telescope in the world for visible and infrared light. The new telescope should help to answer some of the outstanding questions about our Universe, such as how the first stars and galaxies formed, and perhaps even be able to take direct images of extrasolar planets.

The ELT is the largest of the next generation of ground-based optical and near-infrared telescopes and the one that is most advanced in its construction, said ESO Director General Xavier Barcons, in an ESO press release. Reaching 50% completion is no small feat, given the challenges inherent to large, complex projects, and it was only possible thanks to the commitment of everyone at ESO, the continued support of the ESO Member States and the engagement of our partners in industry and instrument consortia. I am extremely proud that the ELT has reached this milestone.

CyberNews researchers discovered that at least one of the Cl0p ransomware gang masterminds is still residing in Ukraine.

Original post at: https://cybernews.com/security/cl0p-hacker-hides-in-ukraine/

As the Cl0p ransomware gang continues to sow anxiety worldwide, affecting prominent companies like the BBC and Deutsche Bank, at least one of the gang masterminds, Cybernews discovered, is still residing in Ukraine.

Deutsche Bank, one of the worlds largest banks, is the latest victim of the Cl0p gang. The banks customer data was leaked after hackers penetrated a third-party vendor, Majorel, by exploiting the MOVEit vulnerability.

Other major banks in Europe, including Deutsche Bank-owned Postbank, ING Bank, and Comdirect, have also been affected.

Cl0p, which has a tendency to publicly name its victims in batches, has reportedly been sitting on the zero-day vulnerability for two years. As is quite common with malicious activity en masse, malicious hackers chose the Memorial Day weekend in the US (May 27th and 28th) for a broad swath of activity.

Before the MOVEit saga, which seems far from over, Cl0p enjoyed the spotlight by exploiting Fortras GoAnywhere vulnerability. Shell, Hitachi, Hatch Bank, Rubrik, Virgin, and many others are among its claimed victims.

Curiously, Shell has been affected by both the GoAnywhere and MOVEit flaws.

Cl0p, first observed in 2019, is quite old for a ransomware gang, given that they tend to regularly restructure and rebrand to throw law enforcement off track. The hacker group, also known by cyber pundits as Lace Tempest, Dungeon Spider...

• GNU/Linux

  • Computer Weekly China releases openKylin open source desktop operating system

    While Red Hat continues to wrangle with its approach to open developer access on the Red Hat Enterprise Linus (RHEL) source code front (and thats another story in and of itself), China has stepped up its efforts to achieve IT independence in the face of a traditional reliance upon US technologies with the launch of its open source desktop operating system.

    OpenKylin, or openKylin, stems from what its makers call an open source community founded by (again quoting from its core ho...

• Leftovers

  • Science

    • The Conversation 2023-07-06 [Older] Why earthquakes happen all the time in Britain but not in Ireland

    • The Conversation 2023-07-05 [Older] Poverty is linked to poorer brain development but reading can help counteract it

  • Education

    • [Repeat] FreeBSD ...

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • The sound of music

      The day got off to somewhat of a slow start, but we eventually wound up visiting the municipal band so my wife could rehearse with them for a hometown (her hometown) music event in a couple days. Got some good recordings so she can continue to rehearse her part. It was fun to exercise the good ole Zoom H4 device to accomplish the recording. Cant say enough about it. Cant remember how long Ive had it, prolly at least half a decade. But its simplified a lot of sound-related things for us over the years. Its a rare tech winner in my book.

    • SpellBinding: ABDILZR Wordo: MISSY

    • A really hot Sunday

      It was really, REALLY hot on Sunday. Looking back at the weather report, it
      said the RealFeel was 39c, which is 102f. Also the UV Index was 11: Extreme.
      That is probably why I got burned again despite putting on sunblock,
      wearing protection and so on.

    • Depressing Summer

      The RealFeel today after lunch, was 42c / 107f. The news said 20 of the 47 prefectures of Japan raised Heat Stroke warnings. Western Japan was battered by heavy rains which unfortunately took lives. Here in the East its very hot and very humid. We are baking here in Tokyo.

      Its turning into a depressing Summer. A/C all day and all night, the drone of cicadas all the time, a loss of appetite.

  • Politics and World Events

    • Annotation and Commentary on Marxs Gothakritik

      Free State what is this?

      It is by no means the aim of the workers [..] to set the State free. [..] [T]oday [..] the forms of State are more free or less free t...

Not long after the first desktop 3D printers were created, folks started wondering what other materials they could extrude. After all, plastic is only good for so much, and theres plenty of other interesting types of goop that lend themselves to systematic squirting. Clay, cement, wax, solder, even biological material. The possibilities are vast, and even today, were still exploring new ways to utilize additive manufacturing.

...

Damn all those quiet quitters, causing a Great Resignation

Summary: The phony narrative wherein only 2 cities are impacted by this months Microsoft layoffs is seldom disputed; thats the cost of letting the media be captured by corporations (they control coverage about themselves)

ACCORDING to "media" reports, Microsoft declined to provide the scope of the job cuts. [1] Or a Microsoft spokesperson declined to specify the number of cuts in the latest round. [2] Thats according to writers who work closely with Microsoft and have worked for Microsoft for years if not decades (we know them by name and wrote about them many times before). There are many other examples that show Microsoft utterly refusing to speak about the scale of these layoffs (or how long follow-up layoffs will go on for). Deja vu? Microsoft fired far more than 10,000 people this year, not even counting temps and contractors (borderline "gig workers" in IT).

So the reporting is bunk. Only the numbers from WARN in Washington are cited as if theyre the sole heart and core of these layoffs. But we know for a fact...

Fortinet warns of a critical vulnerability impacting FortiOS and FortiProxy that can allow remote attackers to perform arbitrary code execution.

Fortinet has disclosed a critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-33308 (CVSS score 9.8), that impacts FortiOS and FortiProxy. A remote attacker can exploit the vulnerability to perform arbitrary code execution on vulnerable devices.

The issue is a stack-based overflow vulnerability that can be exploited via crafted packets reaching proxy policies or firewall policies with proxy mode alongside SSL deep packet inspection.

A stack-based overflow vulnerability [CWE-124] in FortiOS & FortiProxy may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or command via crafted packets reaching proxy policies or firewall policies with proxy mode alongside SSL deep packet inspection. reads the advisory published by the vendor.

The vulnerability impacts the following FortiOS versions: 

The following versions address the vulnerability:

The vulnerability was discovered by researchers at the security firm Watchtowr.

The advisory also provides a workaround to address the vulnerability recommending disabling HTTP/2 support on SSL inspection profiles used by proxy policies or firewall policies with proxy mode.

US CISA published an alert to urge organizations to update their installs.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs  hacking, FortiOS)

The post...

A British IT worker who exploited a ransomware attack against the company he worked for, in an attempt to extort money from them for himself, has been sentenced to jail for three years and seven months.

WatchGuard Technologies has unveiled AuthPoint Total Identity Security, a comprehensive bundle that combines the AuthPoint multi-factor authentication (MFA) with dark web credential monitoring capabilities and a corporate password manager. The introduction of this new product, paired with the zero trust risk-based policies of WatchGuards Unified Security Platform architecture, enables managed service providers (MSPs) to provide optimal modern cybersecurity delivery from WatchGuard Cloud. Stolen or leaked credentials are a primary cause of data breaches, yet passwords More

The post WatchGuard expands identity protection capabilities with AuthPoint Total Identity Security appeared first on Help Net Security.

This week and next theres an interesting summer school going on at the IAS, with topic Understanding Confinement. Videos of talks are available here or at the IAS video site.

Taking a look at some of the first talks brings back vividly my graduate student years, which were dominated by thinking about this topic. When I arrived in Princeton in 1979, the people there had been working for several years on trying to understand confinement semi-classically, in terms of instantons and other solutions to the Yang-Mills equations (e.g. merons). By 1979 it had become clear that such semi-classical calculations were not sufficient to understand confinement and people were looking for other ideas. There were quite a few around, including the idea that there was some sort of string theory dual to pure Yang-Mills theory, and I spent quite a lot of time reading up on efforts of Migdal, Polyakov and others to find a formulation of string theory that would provide the needed dual. I ended up writing my thesis on lattice gauge theory, an approach which had the great advantage that you could at least put the calculation on a computer and start trying to get a reliable result for pure Yang-Mills numerically. Some of the calculations I did were done at the IAS, with Nati Seiberg and others. The other thing I spent a lot of time thinking about was how to put spinor fields on the lattice, the beginning of my interest in the geometry of spinors.

I strongly recommend watching Wittens talk on Some Milestones in the Study of Confinement. His career started a few years before mine, with the early part very much dominated by the problem of how to make sense of Yang-Mills theory non-perturbatively, and this has has always been a motivating problem behind much of his work. In his talk he explains clearly the approaches to the problem (lattice gauge theory, 1/N, dual Meissner) that appeared very soon after the advent of QCD in 1973. He emphasizes how each of these approaches shows indications of a possible string theory dual, while frustratingly not leading to a string model that has the right properties, summarizing (41:30) the situation with:

The string theory we want is probably quite unlike any that we actually know, as of now. We dont know how to make a string theory with the short distance behavior of asymptotic freedom.

In his talk he discusses later developments, in particular the Seiberg-Witten solution to N=2 SYM and the AdS/CFT duality between a string theory and N=4 SYM, explaining how these advances still dont provide a viable approach to the confinement problem in pure Yang-Mills.

Im looking forward to seeing the rest of the ta...

Now that the Linux 6.5 merge window ended this past weekend, here is the usual Phoronix overview that lists all the prominent new features and changes coming for this next version.

Liongard announced its newly enhanced platform to transform the way IT service providers deliver IT governance and mitigate risk with the launch of its Configuration Change Detection and Response (CCDR) platform. More than 2,000 cyberattacks strike the internet each day. As businesses search for more efficient ways to protect themselves, they face an uphill battle since, according to the World Economic Forum, 95% of all cybersecurity issues can be traced to human error. This can More

The post Liongard launches Configuration Change Detection and Response platform appeared first on Help Net Security.

If youve ever wanted to watch someone bring CP/M up on a new system and you have a couple of hours to spare, check out the recorded live stream of [Poking Technology]. The system in question is an Agon Light, a modern board with a Z-80-derived CPU. If you want to get right to the porting part, you might want to skip about 31 minutes of the nearly 2.5-hour video.

The first half hour is more about the built-in assembler and the board in general. If youve ever ported CP/M before, you know it isnt as hard as bootstrapping a modern operating system. There are two major things you need: A BIOS, which is specific to your machine, and a BDOS, which is usually taken verbatim from the operating system sources. Your programs typically call one of the 40 or so functions in the BDOS.

The BIOS has about 20 functions you must provide and is mainly called by the BDOS. While BDOS worries about things like directories and file structure, the BIOS simply reports information about disks and devices and lets a caller directly access those things.

Part of the task of creating a BIOS involves building data structures to describe the disk hardware. You also provide a jump table with a few common functions. For the original CP/M there were only 15 functions. CP/M 2 added two more. CP/M 3 added a whopping 16 functions. The functions fall into three broad categories: system management (like BOOT and WBOOT), device I/O (like CONIN and PUNCH), and disk I/O (like...

Summary: A meme which best explains how GLA treats people whom it contracted to work on its computer systems (Sirius Open Source) upon discovering crimes were committed against them

Tesla CEO Elon Musk claims the brands cars can swim for short periods of time, implying that owners can escape floods or drive past water crossings.

Our universe could be twice as old as current estimates, according to a new study that challenges the dominant cosmological model and sheds new light on the so-called impossible early galaxy problem.

Our newly-devised model stretches the galaxy formation time by a several billion years, making the universe 26.7 billion years old, and not 13.7 as previously estimated, says author Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa.

For years, astronomers and physicists have calculated the age of our universe by measuring the time elapsed since the Big Bang and by studying the oldest stars based on the redshift of light coming from distant galaxies. In 2021, thanks to new techniques and advances in technology, the age of our universe was thus estimated at 13.797 billion years using the Lambda-CDM concordance model.

Summary: The London Municipality, also known as Greater London Authority (GLA), turns its back on people who worked on its computer systems for nearly a decade; its not convenient to deal with victims of a crime, especially when the crime was committed on GLAs watch while GLA was sponsoring the perpetrators of the crime

THE series about crimes of Sirius Open Source is far from over. What we have here a formerly OK company that even funded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for a couple of years turning into a criminal organisation, taking bribes in secret from Bill Gates (under an NDA) while besieging and bullying its own staff. This must be treated as a criminal matter, not a civil matter. Arrests should be made as soon as possible.

But what happens when the perpetrators of the crimes are connected to the British government, not just local authorities but also Home Office? Then it gets a little tricky or complicated for them to handle. Its almost like theyre asked to investigate themselves and hold themselves accountable.

As a recap, so far Ive contacted:

1. Greater Manchester Police (repeatedly insisting I defer to Action Fraud after nearly 40 minutes on the phone)
2. Action Fraud (4 weeks, no action)
3. My MP contacting Action Fraud (4 weeks, no response)
4. GLA (London Municipality), whose computer systemd Ive worked on since 2013
5. ECVCU Victim Contact/City of London Police
6. The equivalent of the ombudsman next

It should be strongly emphasised that:

1. Im not the only victim. Men and women I worked with are also victims.
2. None of the steps above resulted in any real progress, except proving that this whole law enforcement system is trash
3. The perpetrators of the pension fraud crime (other crimes aside) got in touch with me personally and did not deny committing the crime

About 5 days ago I sent the following message to GLA, especially senior people there (they know me in person):

City of London Police Does Not Protect GLA Staff Victimised by the Employer

Two weeks ago I wrote to you regarding Action Fraud not taking action and not even replying to my MP upon escalat...

By Waqas

Owncase is a self-hosted live video streaming software, while EaseProbe is a lightweight and standalone health status checking tool.

This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Oxeye warns of SSRF Vulnerability in Owncast, SQL Injection Flaws in EaseProbe

anecdotes launched Analysis Engine, empowering its customers to attain proactive GRC monitoring. With the introduction of the new engine, users gain access to robust analysis capabilities that automatically detect gaps in their data and provide deep visibility into their Compliance posture. It offers a library of over 200 pre-defined Analysis Rules based on the CIS Benchmarks and, in line with anecdotes enterprise-ready approach, allows users to configure their own rules to align with their organizations More

The post anecdotes Analysis Engine helps users detect gaps in their data appeared first on Help Net Security.

Summary: The London Municipality, also known as Greater London Authority (GLA), turns its back on people who worked on its computer systems for nearly a decade; its not convenient to deal with victims of a crime, especially when the crime was committed on GLAs watch while GLA was sponsoring the perpetrators of the crime

THE series about crimes of Sirius Open Source is far from over. What we have here a formerly OK company that even funded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for a couple of years turning into a criminal organisation, taking bribes in secret from Bill Gates (under an NDA) while besieging and bullying its own staff. This must be treated as a criminal matter, not a civil matter. Arrests should be made as soon as possible.

But what happens when the perpetrators of the crimes are connected to the British government, not just local authorities but also Home Office? Then it gets a little tricky or complicated for them to handle. Its almost like theyre asked to investigate themselves and hold themselves accountable.

As a recap, so far Ive contacted:

1. Greater Manchester Police (repeatedly insisting I defer to Action Fraud after nearly 40 minutes on the phone)
2. Action Fraud (4 weeks, no action)
3. My MP contacting Action Fraud (4 weeks, no response)
4. GLA (London Municipality), whose computer systemd Ive worked on since 2013
5. ECVCU Victim Contact/City of London Police
6. The equivalent of the ombudsman next

It should be strongly emphasised that:

1. Im not the only victim. Men and women I worked with are also victims.
2. None of the steps above resulted in any real progress, except proving that this whole law enforcement system is trash
3. The perpetrators of the pension fraud crime (other crimes aside) got in touch with me personally a...

Last month AMD Linux kernel driver patches revealed a new feature called FreeSync Panel Replay that is basically an improvement over Panel Self Refresh (PSR) for laptop displays. That code didn't make it for the recently-closed v6.5 merge window but this week AMD engineers did post a second iteration of the patches...

Wipro launched Wipro ai360, a comprehensive, AI-first innovation ecosystem that builds on Wipros decade-long investments in AI with the goal of integrating AI into every platform, every tool, and every solution used internally and offered to clients. Along with the launch of Wipro ai360, the company also committed to making a $1 billion investment in advancing AI capabilities over the next three years. Wipro ai360, fueled by this new investment, will help unleash a new More

The post Wipro announces Wipro ai360 and the $1 billion investment in AI appeared first on Help Net Security.

Posted by Daniel Beck on Jul 12

Jenkins is an open source automation server which enables developers around
the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software.

The following releases contain fixes for security vulnerabilities:

* Active Directory Plugin 2.30.1
* Datadog Plugin 5.4.2
* External Monitor Job Type Plugin 207.v98a_a_37a_85525
* mabl Plugin 0.0.47
* OpenShift Login Plugin 1.1.0.230.v5d7030b_f5432
* Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute Plugin 1.0.17
* Orka...

AMD has made available the FidelityFX SDK solution available via GPUOpen as their easy-to-integrate offering for FidelityFX technologies...

DirectDefense announced its partnership with SCADAfence to enhance industrial cybersecurity and safeguard OT Networks in the era of IIoT. The SCADAfence Platform enables critical infrastructure and manufacturing organizations with complex Operational Technology (OT) networks to embrace the benefits of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) by reducing cyber risks and mitigating operational threats. With the rise of the IIoT, OT devices are becoming more interconnected, allowing for enhanced automation and remote monitoring. While these technologies More

The post DirectDefense partners with SCADAfence to strengthen industrial cybersecurity appeared first on Help Net Security.

Snail mail. You may not think much of it these days, but the mail doesnt stop and it never has. Every type of mail from postcards and letters to large envelopes and packages of all sizes moves every single day all over the US, even though it isnt typically delivered on Sundays. Dealing with the ever-increasing volume of physical mail has called for the invention and evolution of automatic mail sorting machines that are used by both postal facilities and businesses alike.

While mail sorting machines have grown and matured over the years, the human element of the task remains intact. As long as people type addresses, write them by hand, and/or print them in handwriting fonts by the hundreds, there will need to be humans on hand to verify at least a few of them that are really hard to read.

There are roughly a dozen different types of mail sorting machines in 2023. In this series, were going to take a look at most of them, along with many other aspects of the United States Postal Service and its history.

Dont Pigeon-Hole Postal Employees

...

An anonymous submitter reminded us that Marc Espie (espie@) posted a summary of the state of OpenBSD packages in a message to the tech mailing list with the subject pkg_*: the road forward.

Marc writes,

Subject:    pkg_*: the road forward
From:       Marc Espie 
Date:       2023-07-10 19:04:04

I spent some time during the last hackathon, talking to various people over
where we're going.

Read on below the fold or take in the whole thing here (including any followups) -

Read more

upstart writes:

Researchers discover safe, easy, and affordable way to store and retrieve hydrogen:

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) in Japan have discovered a compound that uses a chemical reaction to store ammonia, potentially offering a safer and easier way to store this important chemical.

This discovery, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on July 10, makes it possible not only to safely and conveniently store ammonia, but also the important hydrogen is [sic] carries. This finding should help lead the way to a decarbonized society with a practical hydrogen economy.

For society to make the switch from carbon-based to hydrogen-based energy, we need a safe way to store and transport hydrogen, which by itself is highly combustible. One way to do this is to store it as part of another molecule and extract it as needed. Ammonia, chemically written as NH₃, makes a good hydrogen carrier because three hydrogen atoms are packed into each molecule, with almost 20% of ammonia being hydrogen by weight.

The problem, however, is that ammonia is a highly corrosive gas, making it difficult to store and use. Currently, ammonia is generally stored by liquefying it at temperatures well below freezing in pressure-resistant containers. Porous compounds can also store ammonia at room temperature and pressure, but storage capacity is low, and the ammonia cannot always be retrieved easily.

The new study reports the discovery of a perovskite, a material with a distinctive repetitive crystal structure, which can easily store ammonia and also allows easy and complete retrieval at relatively low temperatures.

The research team led by Masuki Kawamoto at RIKEN CEMS focused on the perovskite ethylammonium lead iodide (EAPbI₃), chemically written as CH₃CH₂NH₃PbI₃. They found that its one-dimensional columnar structure undergoes a chemical reaction with ammonia at room temperature and pressure, and dynamically transforms into a two-dimensional layered structure called lead iodide hydroxide, or Pb(OH)I.

Journal Reference:
Jyorthana Rajappa Muralidhar, Krishnachary Salikolimi, Kiyohiro Adachi, et al., Chemical Storage of Ammonia through Dynamic Structural Transformation of a Hybrid Perovskite Compound, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2023. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.3c04181

---

Original Submission

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

By Deeba Ahmed

The Big Head ransomware samples were discovered in the US, France, Spain, and Turkey.

This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Big Head Ransomware Found in Malvertising and Fake Windows Updates

CyberCatch and Proficio announced a strategic partnership to join forces to market and deliver a combined AI-enabled solution for organizations worldwide. CyberCatchs proprietary, artificial intelligence-enabled (AI) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is designed to help organizations implement all mandated and necessary controls, detect control failures promptly, and facilitate their resolution, enabling continuous compliance and cyber risk mitigation. Proficios MDR services provide round-the-clock protection, enabling organizations to proactively identify and respond to potential threats in real-time. With an More

The post CyberCatch collaborates with Proficioto to protect users against cyber threats appeared first on Help Net Security.

UniqueMotionGraphics/iStock.

Ammonia, chemically written as NH₃, is widely used across industries ranging from textiles to pharmaceuticals and is an important component in the manufacture of fertilizers. For its current use, ammonia is stored in pressure-resistant containers after liquefying it at temperatures of-27 Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius).

Advancing the state of the art in superconducting qubit hardware requires knowledge across a range of disciplines, including materials, fabrication, circuit design and simulation, packaging, cryogenics, low-noise measurement, hardware-software interfacing, and quantum compilation. As understanding of materials and processes has advanced over time, fabricating the highest-quality qubits increasingly relies on millions of dollars of fabrication equipment and countless hours of process development and sustainment.

It has become increasingly challenging for individual organizations to maintain this full stack of expertise, particularly as circuits become more complex to design, fabricate, and measure, Schwartz says. As a result, superconducting qubit hardware research has remained centralized into a relatively small number of laboratories and large universities capable of developing and sustaining this expertise.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is one of these laboratories, with more than 20 years of research and development in superconducting qubits and demonstrations of world-leading qubit performance. The qubits are made on-site at the Microelectronics Laboratory, considered to be one of the U.S. governments most advanced foundries, and in specialized prototyping facilities. The collective expertise and equipment of this facility have made it possible to stand-up the SQUILL Foundry.

An international team of physicists has succeeded in measuring a property of the electron known as topological spin winding for the first time. The team obtained this result by studying the behaviour of electrons in so-called kagome metals, which are materials that have unique quantum properties related to their physical shape, or topology. The work could advance our understanding of the physics of superconductors and other systems that contain strongly correlated electrons.

Kagome metals are named after a traditional Japanese basket-weaving technique that produces a lattice of interlaced, symmetrical triangles with shared corners. When the atoms of a metal or other conductor are arranged in this kagome pattern, their electrons behave in unusual ways. For example, the wavefunctions of the electrons can interfere destructively, resulting in highly localized electronic states in which the particles interact strongly with each other. These strong interactions lead to a range of quantum phenomena, including magnetic ordering of unpaired electrons spins that can produce, for example, ferro-or antiferromagnetic phases, superconducting structures, quantum spin liquids and abnormal topological phases. All these phases have applications in advanced nanoelectronics and spintronics technologies.

In the new work, researchers led by Domenico Di Sante of the University of Bologna in Italy studied the spin and electronic structure of XV₆Sn₆, where X is a rare-earth element. These recently-discovered kagome metals contain a Dirac electronic band and a nearly flat electronic band. At the point at which these bands meet, an effect called spin-orbit coupling creates a narrow gap between the bands. This spin-orbit coupling also creates special type of electronic ground state at the materials surface.

Latest blog post:

Typical Canonical. Deep-pocketed Mark Shuttleworth (MS) sent CDs to everyone (ShipIt) to drive rivals out of users, then said this:

Whos using it anyway?

Summary: Instead of promoting GNU/Linux, which is what it built its business on, Canonical is promoting Windows (WSL) and Azure (Microsoft); proprietary software is OK as long as Microsoft pays Canonical to promote it, along with back doors and misleading buzzwords (CC)

Ransomware has emerged as the only cryptocurrency-based crime to grow in 2023, with cybercriminals extorting nearly $175.8 million more than they did a year ago, according to findings from Chainalysis. "Ransomware attackers are on pace for their second-biggest year ever, having extorted at least $449.1 million through June," the blockchain analytics firm said in a midyear crypto crime report

Hubble announced its next-generation Technology Asset Visibility and Cybersecurity Posture Management Platform, Aurora. Aurora builds on the foundation of Hubbles existing Asset Intelligence platform, providing users with asset visibility and insights into their cybersecurity posture, with new features such as a no-code dashboarding interface and a rich, open schema and SDK for integrating Hubble Asset Intelligence into third-party applications. Organizations and regulators alike, are awakening to the fundamental nature of having a precise and continually More

The post Hubble Aurora empowers businesses to gain insights into their technology ecosystems appeared first on Help Net Security.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (erlang, symfony, thunderbird, and yajl), Fedora (cutter-re, kernel, rizin, and yt-dlp), Red Hat (grafana), SUSE (kernel and python-Django), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet7 and firefox).

IronNets Board of Directors has appointed Linda Zecher as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) effective immediately. Cameron Pforr, the companys current Chief Financial Officer (CFO), has been appointed President of IronNet. GEN (Ret.) Keith Alexander will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board, transitioning to a non-executive role. John OHara has been appointed to Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Partnerships reporting to the CEO. These changes are consistent with the Take Private Letter More

The post IronNet appoints Linda Zecher as CEO appeared first on Help Net Security.

Microsoft announced it has mitigated a cyber attack by a China-linked threat actor, tracked as Storm-0558, which targeted customer emails.

Microsoft announced it has mitigated an attack conducted by a China-linked threat actor, tracked as Storm-0558, which targeted customer emails.

Storm-0558 threat actors focus on government agencies in Western Europe and were observed conducting cyberespionage, data theft, and credential access attacks. The attack was reported by a customer on June 16, 2023. The investigation revealed that the attack began on May 15, 2023, when Storm-0558 gained access to email accounts affecting approximately 25 organizations, including government agencies as well as related consumer accounts of individuals likely associated with these organizations.

The attackers forged authentication tokens to access user email using an acquired Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key.

Our telemetry indicates that we have successfully blocked Storm-0558 from accessing customer email using forged authentication tokens. No customer action is required. reads the post published by Microsoft. As with any observed nation-state actor activity, Microsoft has contacted all targeted or compromised organizations directly via their tenant admins and provided them with important information to help them investigate and respond.

Microsoft researchers discovered that the threat actors gained access to customer email accounts using Outlook Web Access in Exchange Online (OWA) and Outlook.com by forging authentication tokens to access user email.  

The attackers used an acquired MSA key to forge the tokens to access OWA and Outlook.com. The attackers exploited a token validation issue to impersonate Azure AD users and gain access to enterprise mail.

Microsoft added that it is not aware of any abuses of Azure AD keys or any other MSA keys by this threat actor.

We assess this adversary is focused on espionage, such as gaining access to email systems for intelligence collection. This type of espionage-motivated adversary seeks to abuse credentials and gain access to data residing in sensitive systems. concludes Charlie Bell, executive vice president of Microsoft Security, said.

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IDrive Backup announced the introduction of Google Shared Drive backup, which automatically detects and backs up all the shared drives available to the Super Administrator of the Google Workspace account. Shared drives, which are special folders in Google Drive that can be used by teams to store, search, and access files, allows for smoother collaboration and communication, increased visibility, easier document management, and better administrative control. Given the benefits of Google Shared Drive, where large More

The post IDrive introduces Google Shared Drive backup appeared first on Help Net Security.

Threat landscape trends demonstrate the impressive flexibility of cybercriminals as they continually seek out fresh methods of attack, including exploiting vulnerabilities, gaining unauthorized access, compromising sensitive information, and defrauding individuals, according to the H1 2023 ESET Threat Report. Microsoft: An interesting threat landscape One of the reasons for shifts in attack patterns is stricter security policies introduced by Microsoft, particularly on opening macro-enabled files. ESET telemetry data also suggests that operators of the once-notorious Emotet More

The post Same code, different ransomware? Leaks kick-start myriad of new variants appeared first on Help Net Security.

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds immense potential for optimizing internal processes within businesses. However, it also comes with legitimate concerns regarding unauthorized use, including data loss risks and legal consequences. In this article, we will explore the risks associated with AI implementation and discuss measures to minimize damages. Additionally, we will examine regulatory

One of the Linux stories of the moment has come from Red Hat, with their ongoing efforts to make accessing the source of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux product a paid-for only process. This has caused consternation and annoyance alike, from the open source community angry at any liberties taken with the GPL, and from the community of RHEL users and customers concerned as to what it might mean for them.

Now a new player has entered the fray in the form of SuSe, who have announced the creation of an RHEL fork with the intention of maintaining a freely-available Red Hat compatible operating system distribution.

This is good news for all who use Red Hat derived software and we expect the likes of Rocky Linux will be taking a close look at it, but its also a canny move from the European company as they no doubt hope to tempt away some of those commercial Red Hat customers with a promise of stability and their existing experience supporting Red Hat users through their mixed Linux support packages. We hope theyll continue to maintain their relationship with the open source world, and that the prospect of their actions unleashing a new commercial challenge causes Red Hat to move away from the brink a little.

Need some of the backstory? Weve got...

Over a week ago: Twitter Has Just Been Unofficially Killed by Elon Musk (Date of Death: June 30 2023)

Akin to paywalls everywhere (some people called them paywalls, but theyre walled gardens)

Summary: Nothing has been the same since Twitter put everything behind walled gardens; it gave people a strong nudge in another direction and they took the hint

THE pundits ask aloud if Facebook can swallow Twitter [1], seeing that Bluesky is barely talked about anymore [2] (its where Jack Dorsey went, but they suffered a slow start with relatively disappointing adoption numbers). Remember Mastodon? It has problems of its own and some people wrongly believe Facebook can help. Facebook can actually do a lot of harm, in methods that are akin to embrace and extend. The only thing we condone is abandoning all social control media.

Facebook can actually do a lot of harm, in methods that are akin to embrace and extend.At the moment the media focuses on just two options [3-4], even in the spamfarm known as CNET [5-6]. There are already signs of censorship opportunism [7] and Engadget is trying to capitalise on the sudden interest [8-10]. A lot of the discussion focuses on the wrong things, e.g. boredom [11]. The latest Twitter scandals [12] are lost in the mist of deathmatch-like framings. Not many people paid attention to the privacy red flags [13]. When someone threatens to sue a company it grabs a lot more headlines. In many ways, Twitter shot its own foot [14] and we heralded its death over a week ago when walled gardens were erected (after they had allegedly found themlselves compelled to do this; it was likely a fat lie).

Issues accessing the tweets (hence the ads), without prior warning, meant many people began marking Twitter as dead. They felt anxious to move somewhere else.Instagram Threads sort of launched (maybe even rushed and released prematurely) at the almost perfect timing, stealing Blueskys thunder [15-16] within only a few days. Advertisers (the main source of income) were talking away [17], trying to relocate where eyeballs were moving. Issues accessing the tweets (hence the ads), without prior warning [18],...

Microsoft on Tuesday revealed that it repelled a cyber attack staged by a Chinese nation-state actor targeting two dozen organizations, some of which include government agencies, in a cyber espionage campaign designed to acquire confidential data. The attacks, which commenced on May 15, 2023, entailed access to email accounts affecting approximately 25 entities and a small number of related

While the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window just ended days ago and there still is two months to go until that stable release, already the lead developer of the Bcachefs file-system is working to get the code merged for Linux 6.6...

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a novel rootkit signed by Microsoft that's engineered to communicate with an actor-controlled attack infrastructure. Trend Micro has attributed the activity cluster to the same actor that was previously identified as behind the FiveSys rootkit, which came to light in October 2021. "This malicious actor originates from China and their main victims are the

As a follow-up to the news last week when I pointed out that Intel has begun working on Granite Rapids D compiler support for the GNU Compiler Collection, that code has now been merged for next year's GCC 14 release...

Libva 2.19 has been released as the newest feature update for this centralized library used by the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) on Linux and other platforms...