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Dmitry Antipov, a Linux developer at CloudLinux, AlmaLinux OS’s parent company, first spotted the problem in March 2021. Antipov found that RPM would work with unauthorized RPM packages. This meant that unsigned packages or packages signed with revoked keys could silently be patched or updated without a word of warning that they might not be kosher. Why? Because RPM had never properly checked revoked certificate key handling. Specifically, as Linux and lead RPM developer Panu Matilainen explained: “Revocation is one of the many unimplemented things in rpm’s OpenPGP support....

The company introduced Astro, which includes Alexa, computer vision and AI. Astro will cost $1,449.99, but as part of the Day 1 Editions program, it will be available for an introductory price of $999.99 with a six-month trial of the Ring Protect Pro subscription included. Limp said he has been using Astro for a year in testing to check on loved ones and pets. A periscope feature can check on objects and investigate activity....

To help researchers address those problems, Meta, on Friday, announced the release of a new large language model called LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI). The company is making it available under a noncommercial license focused on research use cases, with plans to grant access on a case-by-case basis. It will be available to academic researchers; those affiliated with organizations in government, civil society, and academia; and industry research laboratories around the world....

WebView 2, which is built on Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser, is included as part of Windows 11 but for Windows 10, Microsoft has recommended developers distribute and install the runtime with their applications. WebView2 is a control for integrating web content into an app, such as in JavaScript and HTML. Edge serves as the rendering engine to display web content in apps. SEE: Windows 11: Microsoft gives Notepad an update it thinks you will enjoy Microsoft says that more than 400 million Windows 10 devices now have WebView2, thanks to developers distributing WebView2 applications....

Already announced for other Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, the Copilot integration for OneNote will combine large language models (LLMs) such as Open AI’s GPT-4 with your notes, calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and other data. As such, the tool aims to assist you in two key ways, according to Microsoft. Also: How to use ChatGPT to create an app First, the Copilot AI will work behind the scenes to try to help you as you work....

Here’s a transcript of our conversation, edited slightly for clarity. MJF: For anyone who’s interested in the Microsoft Cloud, what do you consider to be the top three or four “hidden gems” at Ignite? I’m thinking topics which may not have gotten enough attention or things that people might be interested in if they knew more about them. Guthrie: I think I’d say one macro trend that we’ve talked about before this Ignite obviously is the integration of the subcomponents of the Microsoft Cloud, and the fact that you can take advantage of these pieces that are not required but are preintegrated to get faster value....

If you want a thorough explanation of what changed regarding the Edge protocol, I’d recommend this post from ghacks.net. In short, Microsoft blocked tools like Edge Deflector and Search Deflector, which were designed to make selecting a browser other than Edge more of a straightforward process. Microsoft didn’t do this by accident, and officials made it clear they aren’t considering relenting on this. In last week’s Windows 11 Dev Channel test build notes, there’s a line that acknowledges its latest move....

The rankings, compiled by the Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute for the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) Management Top 250 list, compares America’s largest publicly traded companies. Microsoft led the pack, followed by Apple (2), IBM (3), General Motors (4), and Whirlpool (5). As noted by WSJ, last year, the first five spots were taken by tech companies. This year’s top five consist of three firms founded before World War I: IBM and Whirlpool were founded in 1911, while GM was founded in 1908....

Microsoft Teams Together Mode, which displays participants in a common virtual room like a lecture hall, now allows meeting organizers to assign seats to participants. The app also lets users pop out shared meeting content, like a PowerPoint presentation, into a separate window so users can see each other and their content more easily. Also: Four ways to get noticed in the changing world of work There are also updates for live translated captions that are tied to Microsoft’s new Teams Premium accounts....

The new Clippy is now part of Microsoft’s attempt to lighten up Teams video calls after a year of remote working. But this time around, Clippy’s job has been reduced from that of an animated helper to a mere Teams background image, where he’s not working but instead just sitting on an endless Office ribbon, which is a nod to an old Clippy Flash animation on the Office ribbon. “After well over a year of remote and hybrid work we could all use some excitement on video calls, we asked our designers to give a few memorable Microsoft moments their debut as Microsoft Teams backgrounds,” Microsoft said in a blogpost....

As part of Meta’s unveiling, Microsoft announced it will bring Mesh for Teams to Meta Quest devices. Microsoft’s Mesh for Teams, announced in November 2021, is a feature of the Teams collaboration platform which will combine the mixed-reality capabilities of the Microsoft Mesh platform with the productivity tools like meetings, chat and document collaboration of Teams. Microsoft has been building immersive spaces for Mesh for Teams users, as well as avatars that Teams users can use as an alternative to having their cameras always on....

Officials said today that Microsoft will have an “accommodation” process in place for employees, so that those with a medical condition or other protected reason, such as religion, which prevents them from getting vaccinated, will be able to obtain an exemption. They also said caregivers of those who are immunosuppressed or parents of children too young to receive a vaccine will be able to continue to work from home until January 2022....

In Microsoft Edge 84, Microsoft introduced “quiet notification requests” by default to tame spammy alerts from websites that want permission to issue notifications to users. Instead of a full flyout asking the user to accept or dismiss a notification request, these requests were hidden behind a bell icon labelled “Notifications blocked”. But apparently that control was a bit blunt. While it helped tame spammy notifications, it also stopped Edge users from accepting notifications from well-liked sites....

According to Microsoft, attacks from state-sponsored Iranian hackers on IT services firms were virtually non-existent in 2020, but this year exceeded 1,500 potential attacks. “Microsoft has observed multiple Iranian threat actors targeting the IT services sector in attacks that aim to steal sign-in credentials belonging to downstream customer networks to enable further attacks,” it said. See also: A winning strategy for cybersecurity (ZDNet special report). Most of the targeting is focused on IT services companies based in India, as well as several companies based in Israel and the United Arab Emirates....

MLCommons released the inaugural MLPerf HPC results last year, measuring how quickly different systems could train a neural network. The initial benchmark suite has been used to measure systems that generally use somewhere between 500 to 4,000 processors or accelerators – quite a bit smaller than the leading supercomputers. But while the initial version worked well for many scientifically-oriented workloads, it didn’t really scale up to full supercomputing capabilities. For instance, at scale, interconnect begins to matter a lot more....

Automation is getting us there. John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies, states that transformative digital technologies are now a necessity, but there simply aren’t enough people to keep an enterprise competitive in the 2020s. “It’s a scale issue,” he explained in a recent interview published by MIT Technology Review. “Without autonomous operations, it becomes impossible to keep up with the growing opportunity to become a more digital business using human effort alone....

On November 15, Check Point Research (CPR) said the group began targeting organizations in Israel during September this year, joining campaigns launched by Pay2Key and BlackShadow. The focus of these operations was to deploy ransomware on their victim’s systems, cause damage, and steal valuable information destined for future public leaks. Ransomware operators, including Maze, Conti, and LockBit, to name but a few, have adopted double-extortion tactics through the launch of dedicated data leak websites on the Dark Web....

“We took the decision to end this service based on a decrease in customer use and an uptake of other payment services supported by NAB,” the company said. NAB Pay was introduced by the bank in 2016 to enable customers with a Visa debit or credit account to use their NAB mobile banking app to make contactless payments for purchases under AU$100. NAB Pay was only available for Android users, and it was also the first instance of Visa tokenisation in Australia....

Your online accounts tend to be linked to your username and password, with an added layer of SMS verification to provide two-factor authentication. However, these types of accounts can be compromised by phishing or social engineering to gain access to your accounts. To solve this issue, New York-based ID authentication company Nametag has launched “Sign in with ID” to access online accounts using its multifactor authentication technology combined with biometric identity verification....