Subscribers to Prime Video's ad tier will start seeing more commercials next year, further testing how much advertising streamers will tolerate.

Speaking to the Financial Times today, Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International, said that Amazon will offer more Prime Video ad slots to advertisers next year. She didn't get into specifics but confirmed that Prime Video's ad load would "ramp up a little bit more into 2025."

In January, when Amazon launched Prime Video's ad tier , The Wall Street Journal reported that subscribers would see an average of between two and three-and-a-half minutes of ads per hour. Day told FT today that upon launch, Prime Video with ads was given a "very light ad load," providing subscribers “gentle entry into advertising that has exceeded customers expectations in terms of what the ad experience would be like." The executive pointed out that Prime Video with ads doesn't show commercials in the middle of content. That could change next year.

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Attackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in mail servers sold by Zimbra in an attempt to remotely execute malicious commands that install a backdoor, researchers warn.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-45519, resides in the Zimbra email and collaboration server used by medium and large organizations. When an admin manually changes default settings to enable the postjournal service, attackers can execute commands by sending maliciously formed emails to an address hosted on the server. Zimbra recently patched the vulnerability . All Zimbra users should install it or, at a minimum, ensure that postjournal is disabled.

Easy, yes, but reliable?

On Tuesday, Security researcher Ivan Kwiatkowski first reported the in-the-wild attacks, which he described as “mass exploitation.” He said the malicious emails were sent by the IP address 79.124.49[.]86 and, when successful, attempted to run a file hosted there using the tool known as curl. Researchers from security firm Proofpoint took to social media later that day to confirm the report.

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Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them."

In a Google document , AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media .

This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT , has now raised $6.6 billion in a new funding round that values the company at $157 billion, nearly doubling its previous valuation of $86 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal .

The funding round comes with strings attached: Investors have the right to withdraw their money if OpenAI does not complete its planned conversion from a nonprofit (with a for-profit division) to a fully for-profit company.

Venture capital firm Thrive Capital led the funding round with a $1.25 billion investment. Microsoft, a longtime backer of OpenAI to the tune of $13 billion, contributed just under $1 billion to the latest round. New investors joined the round, including SoftBank with a $500 million investment and Nvidia with $100 million.

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Recently, chemists at Binghamton University learned that many tattoo inks in the US contain different pigments than those listed, or unlisted additives. One might expect the European Union, with its stricter regulations, to have fewer issues on that score, but according to a new paper published in the journal Analyst, that's not the case, particularly for green and blue tattoo inks. Most had components that were not listed on the label, and some included banned ingredients.

“Our work cannot say anything about the safety of tattoos, but we think it's an important first step in addressing the question ‘Are tattoos safe?’" said co-author John Swierk , a chemist at Binghamton University. “If we don't know what's in a bottle of tattoo ink, then we cannot figure out what might be causing an adverse event in the near and long term, whether that’s an allergic reaction or something more serious. As a team, we aren't anti-tattoo, we just believe that clients and artists have a right to know what's in the inks they are using.”

As previously reported, typical tattoo ink contains one or more pigments (which give the ink its color) within a "carrier package" to help deliver the pigments into the skin. The pigments are the same as those used in paints and textiles. They can be either small bits of solids or discrete molecules, such as titanium dioxide or iron oxide (for white or rust-brown colors, respectively). As for the carrier packages, most ink manufacturers use grain or rubbing alcohol, sometimes with a bit of witch hazel added to the mix to help the skin heal after the tattooing process. There may also be other additives to adjust the viscosity and keep pigment particles suspended in the carrier package.

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Microsoft's push to get Windows and Office users to buy Microsoft 365 subscriptions can be irritating, but to the company's credit, it's one of the few that has continued to sell buy-once, use-forever versions of its flagship software after launching a subscription model. This week the company has officially launched Microsoft Office 2024 , a new "locked-in-time" update to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other apps for people who don't want the continuously developed Microsoft 365 versions.

For end users, Office Home 2024 gets you Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for $149.99. Office Home & Business 2024 costs $249.99, which adds Outlook "and the rights to use the apps for commercial purposes." Both licenses cover a single PC or Mac.

New Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) products are also being released for businesses and other organizations; Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024 for Windows also includes the Access database management app. Project 2024 and Visio 2024 are also still being offered as standalone products.

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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed charges against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant has illegally refused to bargain with a union representing drivers who are frustrated by what they claim are low wages and dangerous working conditions.

Back in August, drivers celebrated what they considered a major win when the NLRB found that Amazon was a joint employer of sub-contracted drivers, cheering "We are Amazon workers!" At that time, Amazon seemed to be downplaying the designation, telling Ars that the union was trying to "misrepresent" a merit determination that the NLRB confirmed was only "the first step in the NLRB’s General Counsel litigating the allegations after investigating an unfair labor practice charge."

But this week, the NLRB took the next step, signing charges soon after Amazon began facing intensifying worker backlash , not just from drivers but also from disgruntled office and fulfillment workers . According to Reuters , the NLRB accused Amazon of "a series of illegal tactics to discourage union activities" organized by drivers in a Palmdale, California, facility.

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DirecTV's agreement to buy the Dish satellite and streaming TV business from EchoStar is facing opposition from Dish creditors who would be forced to take a loss on the value of their debt.

Dish creditors "plan to block a distressed exchange that's a key part of its tie-up with rival DirecTV, according to people familiar with the matter," Bloomberg reported today . "A group of steering committee investors has gained a blocking position in order to negotiate with the company, the people said. They may even explore a better outcome through litigation, said some of the people." The Bloomberg article was titled, "Dish-DirecTV Deal Sparks Creditor Revolt Over $1.6 Billion Loss."

As Bloomberg notes, "Dish needs consent from its bondholders to exchange old debts for notes issued out of the new combined entity" in order to complete the deal. A previous Bloomberg article said that "just over two-thirds of [Dish] bondholders in each series of notes have to agree to the exchange, with the deadline set for October 29." EchoStar executives argue that debt holders will benefit from the merger by "owning debt of a stronger company with lower leverage," the article said.

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Sonos' controversial app update in May was "obviously a failure," Sonos CEO Patrick Spence told Reuters today.

When the update launched in May, customers revolted over missing features, like the ability to search music libraries, edit song and playlist queues, and set sleep timers. In addition, some already purchased hardware, especially older models, began having problems.

In a note to investors on Tuesday, Sonos said that "more than 80 percent of the app's missing features have been reintroduced." The app should be "almost 100 percent restored in the coming weeks." Sonos has been updating the app every two weeks in an effort to bring it to parity with the old one.

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