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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · 02:13 edit · 1 minute

    An anonymous reader writes: What if you could update the device while it's still in the box? That's the latest plan cooked up by Apple, which is close to rolling out a system that will let Apple Stores wirelessly update new iPhones while they're still in their boxes. The new system is called "Presto." French site iGeneration has the first picture of what this setup looks like. It starts with a clearly Apple-designed silver rack that holds iPhones and has a few lights on the front. The site (through translation) calls the device a "toaster," and yes, it looks like a toaster oven or food heating rack. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has been writing about whispers of this project for months, saying in one article that the device can "wirelessly turn on the iPhone, update its software and then power it back down -- all without the phone's packaging ever being opened." In another article, he wrote that the device uses "MagSafe and other wireless technologies." The iGeneration report also mentions that the device uses NFC, and there are "templates" that help with positioning the various-sized iPhone boxes so the NFC and wireless charging will work. With that wireless charging, downloading, and installing, all while being isolated in a cardboard box, Apple's "toaster" probably gets pretty hot.

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    How Apple Plans To Update New iPhones Without Opening Them
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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · Yesterday - 18:03 edit

    Dashlane, in a support page: Due to changes in business priorities, we've decided to discontinue the Dashlane Authenticator app as of May 13, 2024. You can still use the main Dashlane app as an authenticator to protect logins stored in Dashlane with 2-factor authentication.

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    Dashlane To Discontinue Its Authenticator App
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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · 3 days ago - 17:03 edit · 1 minute

    The Register: Cloudflare has revealed a little about how it maintains the millions of boxes it operates around the world -- including the concept of an "error budget" that enacts "empathy embedded in automation." In a Tuesday post titled "Autonomous hardware diagnostics and recovery at scale," the internet-taming biz explains that it built fault-tolerant infrastructure that can continue operating with "little to no impact" on its services. But as explained by infrastructure engineering tech lead Jet Marsical and systems engineers Aakash Shah and Yilin Xiong, when servers did break the Data Center Operations team relied on manual processes to identify dead boxes. And those processes could take "hours for a single server alone, and [could] easily consume an engineer's entire day." Which does not work at hyperscale. Worse, dead servers would sometimes remain powered on, costing Cloudflare money without producing anything of value. Enter Phoenix -- a tool Cloudflare created to detect broken servers and automatically initiate workflows to get them fixed. Phoenix makes a "discovery run" every thirty minutes, during which it probes up to two datacenters known to house broken boxen. That pace of discovery means Phoenix can find dead machines across Cloudflare's network in no more than three days. If it spots machines already listed for repairs, it "takes care of ensuring that the Recovery phase is executed immediately."

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    Cloudflare Says It's Automated Empathy To Avoid Fixing Flaky Hardware Too Often
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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · Tuesday, 19 March - 14:43 edit

    Ethiopia's biggest commercial bank is scrambling to recoup large sums of money withdrawn by customers after a "systems glitch." From a report: The customers discovered early on Saturday that they could take out more cash than they had in their accounts at the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE). More than $40m was withdrawn or transferred to other banks, local media reported. It took several hours for the institution to freeze transactions. Much of the money was withdrawn from state-owned CBE by students, bank president Abe Sano told journalists on Monday. News of the glitch spread across universities largely via messaging apps and phone calls. Long lines formed at campus ATMs, with a student in western Ethiopia telling BBC Amharic people were withdrawing money until police officers arrived on campus to stop them.

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    Commercial Bank of Ethiopia Glitch Lets Customers Withdraw Millions
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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · Sunday, 17 March - 21:18 edit · 2 minutes

    "Dell's strict new RTO mandate excludes fully remote workers from promotion," reports Business Insider. The site calls it "one of the most abrupt changes to remote work policies," noting that Dell "has had a hybrid working culture in place for more than a decade — long before the pandemic struck." "Dell cared about the work, not the location," a senior employee at Dell who's worked remotely for more than a decade, told Business Insider last month. "I would say 10% to 15% of every team was remote." That flexibility has enabled staff to sustain their careers in the face of major life changes, several employees told BI. It has also helped Dell to be placed on the "Best Place to Work for Disability Equality Index" since 2018. But in February Dell introduced a strict return-to-office mandate, with punitive measures for those who want to stay at home. Under the new policy, staff were told that from May almost all will be classified as either "hybrid," or "remote." Hybrid workers will be required to come into an "approved" office at least 39 days a quarter — the equivalent of about three days a week, internal documents seen by BI show. If they want to keep working from home, staff can opt to go fully remote. But that option has a downside: fully remote workers will not be considered for promotion, or be able to change roles. Workers have said Dell's approach might be intended to lower headcount without having to pay severance by inducing some employees to quit. But reached by Business Insider for a comment, Dell defended their approach as instead "critical to drive innovation and value differentiation." But Professor Cary Cooper, an organizational psychologist and cofounder of the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at work, tells the site Dell could be following a "pack mentality" among tech companies — or reacting to a sluggish world economy. "Senior execs somehow think that people in the office are more productive than at home, even though there's no evidence to back that up." Business Insider added that Dell's approach "differs from founder and CEO Michael Dell's previous support for remote workers," who famously said "If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you're doing it wrong."

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    Dell Workers Can Stay Remote - But They're Not Going to Get Promoted
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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · Thursday, 29 February - 14:32 edit · 1 minute

    Michael Larabel, reporting at Phoronix: One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed. For three years there has been a bug report around 4K@120Hz being unavailable via HDMI 2.1 on the AMD Linux driver. Similarly, there have been bug reports like 5K @ 240Hz not possible either with the AMD graphics driver on Linux. As covered back in 2021, the HDMI Forum closing public specification access is hurting open-source support. AMD as well as the X.Org Foundation have been engaged with the HDMI Forum to try to come up with a solution to be able to provide open-source implementations of the now-private HDMI specs. AMD Linux engineers have spent months working with their legal team and evaluating all HDMI features to determine if/how they can be exposed in their open-source driver. AMD had code working internally and then the past few months were waiting on approval from the HDMI Forum. Sadly, the HDMI Forum has turned down AMD's request for open-source driver support.

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    HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought By AMD
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      Are you near Houston? Come to our IT event at Space Center Houston on November 1!

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 20 October - 12:00 · 1 minute

    Photograph of a shuttle mock-up on top of a real 747

    Enlarge / Space Center Houston's Shuttle Independence sits atop one of the two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft 747s. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

    Are you an Ars Technica reader? (I hope so, because otherwise, how are you reading these words?) Are you somewhere in or around the greater Houston area, or maybe even somewhere reasonably Houston-adjacent, like Austin or San Antonio? Are you free on the afternoon of November 1, from about 2pm to about 6pm? And, if so, would you like to hang out?

    If the answers to these questions are mostly "yes," then you could do much worse with your time than attending the event we're hosting on November 1! Ars Technica has partnered up with IBM to bring you guys a set of panel discussions lasting a half-day, titled "Harnessing Big Data: Resiliency, AI, and the future of IT." On the menu for the day is a talk about modern strategies of fighting ransomware and other disasters; a discussion of managing machine learning data flows; and a talk about what the future of big distributed hybrid app development might look like.

    Because this is Houston, we opted for just about the most location-specific event venue that we could find: Space Center Houston , right next door to NASA's Johnson Space Center and the headquarters of Mission Control. Holding the event at SCH gives us access to some really cool stuff!

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      Tired of shortages, OpenAI considers making its own AI chips

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 9 October - 16:17 · 1 minute

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    Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Benj Edwards)

    OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and DALL-E 3 generative AI products, is exploring the possibility of manufacturing its own AI accelerator chips, according to Reuters . Citing anonymous sources, the Reuters report indicates that OpenAI is considering the option due to a shortage of specialized AI GPU chips and the high costs associated with running them.

    OpenAI has been evaluating various options to address this issue, including potentially acquiring a chipmaking company and working more closely with other chip manufacturers like Nvidia. Currently, the AI firm has not made a final decision, but the discussions have been ongoing since at least last year. Nvidia dominates the AI chip market, holding more than 80 percent of the global share for processors best suited for AI applications. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly expressed his concerns over the scarcity and cost of these chips.

    The hardware situation is said to be a top priority for OpenAI, as the company currently relies on a massive supercomputer built by Microsoft, one of its largest backers . The supercomputer uses 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), according to Reuters. Running ChatGPT comes with significant costs, with each query costing approximately 4 cents, according to Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon. If queries grow to even a tenth of the scale of Google search, the initial investment in GPUs would be around $48.1 billion, with annual maintenance costs at about $16 billion.

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      Millions of Americans’ personal DMV data exposed in massive MOVEit hack

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 16 June, 2023 - 16:28

    Computer code on a screen with a skull representing a malware attack.

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    As part of a massive ongoing cyberattack that exploits flaws in MOVEit file transfer software, the personal data of millions of US citizens, including those residing in Louisiana and Oregon, have been exposed to criminal organizations, according to CNN . In the wider attack, hackers targeted government agencies as well as multiple global organizations, causing a breach that extends beyond US boundaries.

    While the effects of the MOVEit hack have been ongoing throughout the month of June, the most recent intrusion has hit over 3.5 million residents of Oregon and potentially over 3 million residents of Louisiana, all possessing driver’s licenses or state ID cards. Information possibly compromised includes social security and driver’s license numbers. This breach has prompted the respective state authorities to educate residents on preventive measures against identity fraud.

    While no specific perpetrator has been officially accused by the states, federal officials have linked the comprehensive MOVEit hacking campaign to a Russian ransomware group known as Clop, which has been exploiting the same software vulnerability and demanding multimillion-dollar ransoms, as previously reported on Ars.

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