Australia

Australia Will Now Fine Firms Up To $33.4 Million for Data Breaches (bleepingcomputer.com) 19

The Australian parliament has approved a bill to amend the country's privacy legislation, significantly increasing the maximum penalties to AU$50 million for companies and data controllers who suffered large-scale data breaches. From a report: The financial penalty introduced by the new bill is set to whichever is greater: AU$50 million, three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information, and 30% of a company's adjusted turnover in the relevant period.

Previously, the penalty for severe data exposures was AU$2.22 million, considered wholly inadequate to incentivize companies to improve their data security mechanisms. The new bill comes in response to a series of recent cyberattacks against Australian companies, including ransomware and network breaches, resulting in the exposure of highly sensitive data for millions of people in the country. "The Albanese Labor government has wasted no time in responding to recent major data breaches. We have announced, introduced, and delivered legislation in just over a month," reads the media announcement. "These new, larger penalties send a clear message to large companies that they must do better to protect the data they collect."

Google

Google Stadia Hardware Refunds Will Be Issued Within Two Weeks (theverge.com) 11

Google will be issuing refunds for Stadia hardware purchased from the Google Store within two weeks, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The Verge reports: That means the refunds should arrive well ahead of the cloud gaming service's impending January 18th shutdown. Purchases of the Stadia controller, the Founder's Edition, the Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages are all eligible for refunds, according to Google's Stadia shutdown FAQ.

At the time of the shutdown announcement, Google committed to refunding hardware and software purchases, and it began software refunds earlier this month. Once your hardware refund has been issued, you'll get an email confirmation, Google said in Wednesday's email. Google expects the "majority" of Stadia refunds to be processed by the January 18th shutdown date.

Technology

Crypto Exchange Kraken Cuts 1,100 Jobs To 'Weather Crypto Winter' (kraken.com) 72

Crypto exchange Kraken writing in a blog post: Today we're announcing one of the hardest decisions at Kraken to date. We're reducing our global workforce by approximately 1,100 people, or 30 percent, in order to adapt to current market conditions. We are extremely grateful for the contributions of those impacted by today's announcement and we'll do our best to help them transition to their next opportunity. All impacted Krakenites have been notified as of this morning. Over the past few years, hundreds of millions of new users entered the crypto space and millions of new clients put their trust in Kraken during that time. We had to grow fast, more than tripling our workforce in order to provide those clients with the quality and service they expect of us. This reduction takes our team size back to where it was only 12 months ago.

Since the start of this year, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have weighed on financial markets. This resulted in significantly lower trading volumes and fewer client sign-ups. We responded by slowing hiring efforts and avoiding large marketing commitments. Unfortunately, negative influences on the financial markets have continued and we have exhausted preferable options for bringing costs in line with demand. As one of the longest running global crypto exchanges, founded in 2011, we have successfully navigated many market cycles and our strategy has always included thoughtful cost management and spending. These changes will allow us to sustain the business for the long-term while continuing to build world-class products and services in selective areas that add the most value for our clients.

China

Jiang Zemin, Leader Who Guided China Into Global Market, Dies at 96 (nytimes.com) 49

Jiang Zemin, the Shanghai Communist kingpin who was handpicked to lead China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and presided over a decade of meteoric economic growth, died on Wednesday. He was 96. From a report: A Communist Party announcement issued by Chinese state media said he died in Shanghai of leukemia and multiple organ failure. His death and the memorial ceremonies to follow come at a delicate moment in China, where the ruling party is confronting a wave of widespread protests against its pandemic controls, a nationwide surge of political opposition unseen since the Tiananmen movement of Mr. Jiang's time.

Mr. Jiang was president of China for a decade from 1993. In the eyes of many foreign politicians, Mr. Jiang was the garrulous, disarming exception to the mold of stiff, unsmiling Chinese leaders. He was the Communist who would quote Lincoln, proclaim his love for Hollywood films and burst into songs like "Love Me Tender." Less enthralled Chinese called him a "flowerpot," likening him to a frivolous ornament, and mocking his quirky vanities. In his later years young fans celebrated him, tongue-in-cheek, with the nickname "toad." But Mr. Jiang's unexpected rise and quirks led others to underestimate him, and over 13 years as Communist Party general secretary he matured into a wily politician who vanquished a succession of rivals. Mr. Jiang's stewardship of the capitalist transformation that had begun under Deng Xiaoping was one of his signal accomplishments. He also amassed political influence that endured long past his formal retirement, giving him a big say behind the scenes in picking the current president, Xi Jinping.

Bitcoin

Binance Releases Proof-of-Reserves System (theblock.co) 79

Binance has released its proof-of-reserves system, starting with bitcoin, in order to show that the exchange is healthy and solvent. From a report: This comes just weeks after rival exchange FTX collapsed, after seemingly swapping user funds for other, more illiquid tokens -- eventually leading to a liquidity crisis. Binance's goal is to show that it holds its users' assets in the same tokens that they have deposited. For bitcoin, Binance has provided a snapshot of account balances and the exchange's bitcoin reserves. It claims it has 582,485 bitcoin in its reserves, while its users have a net balance of 575,742 bitcoin -- giving it a margin of 6,743 bitcoin. It also provided a link for Binance users to verify their own bitcoin on the exchange.
Software

Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Computer Design Innovator, Dies at 91 16

Frederick P. Brooks Jr., whose innovative work in computer design and software engineering helped shape the field of computer science, died on Thursday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his son, Roger, who said Dr. Brooks had been in declining health since having a stroke two years ago. The New York Times reports: Dr. Brooks had a wide-ranging career that included creating the computer science department at the University of North Carolina and leading influential research in computer graphics and virtual reality. But he is best known for being one of the technical leaders of IBM's 360 computer project in the 1960s. At a time when smaller rivals like Burroughs, Univac and NCR were making inroads, it was a hugely ambitious undertaking. Fortune magazine, in an article with the headline "IBM's $5,000,000,000 Gamble," described it as a "bet the company" venture.

Until the 360, each model of computer had its own bespoke hardware design. That required engineers to overhaul their software programs to run on every new machine that was introduced. But IBM promised to eliminate that costly, repetitive labor with an approach championed by Dr. Brooks, a young engineering star at the company, and a few colleagues. In April 1964, IBM announced the 360 as a family of six compatible computers. Programs written for one 360 model could run on the others, without the need to rewrite software, as customers moved from smaller to larger computers. The shared design across several machines was described in a paper, written by Dr. Brooks and his colleagues Gene Amdahl and Gerrit Blaauw, titled "Architecture of the IBM System/360." "That was a breakthrough in computer architecture that Fred Brooks led," Richard Sites, a computer designer who studied under Dr. Brooks, said in an interview.

But there was a problem. The software needed to deliver on the IBM promise of compatibility across machines and the capability to run multiple programs at once was not ready, as it proved to be a far more daunting challenge than anticipated. Operating system software is often described as the command and control system of a computer. The OS/360 was a forerunner of Microsoft's Windows, Apple's iOS and Google's Android. At the time IBM made the 360 announcement, Dr. Brooks was just 33 and headed for academia. He had agreed to return to North Carolina, where he grew up, and start a computer science department at Chapel Hill. But Thomas Watson Jr., the president of IBM, asked him to stay on for another year to tackle the company's software troubles. Dr. Brooks agreed, and eventually the OS/360 problems were sorted out. The 360 project turned out to be an enormous success, cementing the company's dominance of the computer market into the 1980s.
"Fred Brooks was a brilliant scientist who changed computing," Arvind Krishna, IBM's chief executive and himself a computer scientist, said in a statement. "We are indebted to him for his pioneering contributions to the industry."

Dr. Brooks published a book in 1975 titled, "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering." It was "a quirky classic, selling briskly year after year and routinely cited as gospel by computer scientists," reports the Times.
HP

HP Will Cut Up To 6,000 Jobs Over Next Three Years 32

Computer and printer maker HP said Tuesday it will cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of 2025 as part of a restructuring. Axios reports: HP said the move will save it at least $1.4 billion annually by the end of fiscal 2025. However, it expects to incur $1 billion in costs due to the restructuring, with $600 million in fiscal 2023 and the rest split over the remaining two years. It made the announcement alongside its quarterly earnings report.

As part of that report, HP said to expect per-share earnings of 70 cents to 80 cents, excluding items. That's below consensus expectations of about 86 cents per share, per CNBC.
Further reading: A Host of Tech Companies, Including Coinbase, Robinhood, Lyft, and Stripe, Announce Hiring Freezes and Job Cuts
Social Networks

Tumblr To Add Support For ActivityPub, the Social Protocol Powering Mastodon and Other Apps (techcrunch.com) 36

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that's today powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in a response to a Twitter user's complaint about Mastodon's complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg -- whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 -- suggested the user "come to Tumblr" as the site would soon "add activitypub for interconnect."

"Don't stress," he said, before clarifying that Tumblr first has to deal with the waves of new users coming in right now from Twitter, but that support for "interop and activitypub" were due to come "ASAP." In short, this announcement means Tumblr would move from being only a niche blogging platform to instead become a part of a larger, decentralized social network of sorts -- and one whose user base has grown in size in recent days as people flee Elon Musk's Twitter in search of new communities.

The ActivityPub protocol, its website explains, provides a client-to-server API for creating, updating, and deleting content as well as a federal server-to-server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content. In practice, this means that Mastodon users can interact and follow users on other instances (independently run nodes), as well as with users on other social apps (like PeerTube), which also support the implementation of ActivityPub. It makes for a web of social networks where users can find and follow each other without having to set up new accounts on each new service. This is the opposite approach to today's "walled garden" social networks, where a post on one platform can't be viewed by those on others, unless you re-upload or repost the content directly or share a link to the other site where the content can be found.

Piracy

Z-Library Responds to US Crackdown, Asks Authors for Forgiveness (torrentfreak.com) 24

Earlier this month, the feds arrested two Russians accused of running Z-Library -- an e-book pirate site that claims to be "the world's largest library." Z-Library's remaining team members have since responded by saying they are determined to keep going, promising to take the complaints of authors seriously and asking for their forgiveness. TorrentFreak reports: After the indictment was unsealed, Z-Library's position became untenable. That led to the publishing of an official response. It confirms that part of the Z-Library team is operational but refrains from commenting on the alleged involvement of the two arrestees. "We refrain commenting on the alleged Anton and Valeria involvement in the Z-Library project and the charges against them. We are very sorry they are arrested [sic]," the announcement reads (Tor link). Z-Library does, however, realize that its site is causing trouble for authors so asks for their forgiveness. "We also regret that some authors have suffered because of Z-Library and ask for their forgiveness. We do our best to respond to all complaints about files hosted in our library if it violates authors' rights." The [response] suggests that Z-Library will do its best to respond to all takedown requests from authors but that doesn't mean the site will cease operating. On the contrary, it is still up and running on the dark web, serving millions of books to registered users.

Z-Library doesn't just respond to rightsholders. In its message, the site also addresses its users, especially those who continue to donate to the site. "We see the resonance recent events caused, we see how many people support and believe in Z-Library. Thank you for your support, it is extremely valuable to us. Thank you for each donation you make. You are the ones who making the existence of the Z-Library possible." Donations may help to keep Z-Library afloat and that is what the site appears to aspire to. Instead of waving the white flag, it is doubling down on its goal to make knowledge freely accessible to people around the world. "We believe the knowledge and cultural heritage of mankind should be accessible to all people around the world, regardless of their wealth, social status, nationality, citizenship, etc. This is the only purpose Z-Library is made for." This message resonates with many Z-Library users, with hundreds sending well wishes and words of support in response to the announcement [...]. The problem for Z-Library is that the U.S. Department of Justice clearly disagrees with these users, and will likely do its best to ensure that the remaining members of the Z-Library team will be also held accountable.

Businesses

Bob Iger Returns As Disney CEO (cnbc.com) 107

Disney, in a shocking late Sunday announcement, said it had reappointed Iger as chief executive, effective immediately, after Iger's hand-picked successor as CEO, Bob Chapek, came under fire for his management of the entertainment giant. CNBC reports: "It is with an incredible sense of gratitude and humility -- and, I must admit, a bit of amazement -- that I write to you this evening with the news that I am returning to The Walt Disney Company as Chief Executive Officer," Iger wrote to employees in an email, which was obtained by CNBC. Shares of Disney, a Dow component, closed up more than 6% on Monday.

The dramatic upheaval comes 11 months after Iger left Disney, and days after Chapek said he planned to cut costs at the company, which had been burdened by swelling costs at its streaming service, Disney+. Earlier this month, the company's earnings vastly underperformed Wall Street's expectations. Even its theme park business, which reported a surge in revenue, delivered less than what analysts had projected. Iger will help the company's board develop a new successor, Disney said in a release.

Shares of Disney have fallen about 37% so far this year. The stock hit a 52-week low Nov. 9. Iger has signed on to work as CEO for two years, Disney said Sunday, "with a mandate from the Board to set the strategic direction for renewed growth and to work closely with the Board in developing a successor to lead the Company at the completion of his term." "We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic," said Susan Arnold, Disney's board chair. She will remain in that role.

Books

Authors Offer Free Downloads for New Second Edition of 'Designing with LibreOffice' Book (designingwithlibreoffice.com) 36

He's been a contributing editor at the Linux foundation's Linux.com, a contributor to Linux Journal, and a blogger for Linux Pro magazine. Now Bruce Byfield has teamed with the lead editor for the Open Office authors volunteer group (who was also co-lead on Open Office's documentation project) to co-author a second edition of Byfield's book Designing with LibreOffice.

From the official announcement: The book is available as an .ODT or .PDF file under the Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike License version 4.0 or later from https://designingwithlibreoffice.com. ["Under this license, you can share or copy the book, or even add to it," explains the book's site, "so long as you mention the writer's name and release your changes under the same license."]

The first edition was published in 2016, and was downloaded over thirty-five thousand times. Michael Meeks, one of the co-founders of LibreOffice, described the first edition as "an outstanding contribution to help people bring the full power of LibreOffice into their document...."

The second edition updates the original, removing outdated information and adding updated screenshots and new information about topics such as Harfbuzz font shaping codes, export to EPUB formats for ereaders, the Zotero extension for bibliographies, and Angry Reviewer, a Grammarly-like extension for editing diction.

In the future, the writers plan to release other editions as necessary to keep Designing with LibreOffice current.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader nanday for sharing the news.
Facebook

Facebook's Fact-checkers Will Stop Checking Trump After Announcement of Presidential Bid (cnn.com) 297

CNN reports: Facebook's fact-checkers will need to stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following the announcement that he is running for president, according to a company memo obtained by CNN.

While Trump is currently banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says, and false statements made by Trump can be posted to the platform by others. Despite Trump's ban, "Team Trump," a page run by Trump's political group, is still active and has 2.3 million followers.... The carve-out is not exclusive to Trump and applies to all politicians, but given the rate fact-checkers find themselves dealing with claims made by the former president, a manager on Meta's "news integrity partnership" team emailed fact-checkers on Tuesday ahead of Trump's announcement. ...

The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians. "It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak," Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former politician, said in 2019, defending the exemption. The Meta memo sent to fact-checkers made clear that if Trump announced a 2024 presidential bid Tuesday night, he could no longer be fact-checked on the platform. The memo noted that "political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign."

It concluded that "if former President Trump makes a clear, public announcement that he is running for office, he would be considered a politician under our program policies."

Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said the memo was "a reiteration of our long-standing policy" and "should not be news to anyone...."

Meta plans on considering allowing Trump back on the platform as soon as January — two years since his initial ban.

United States

US Fines Airlines More Than $7 Million for Not Providing Refunds (nytimes.com) 29

The Transportation Department has fined a half-dozen airlines a total of more than $7 million for failing to provide timely refunds to customers. The department's intervention contributed to the airlines' issuing more than $600 million in refunds, it said. From a report: Frontier Airlines, a budget carrier based in Denver, was fined $2.2 million, more than any other company. It was the only U.S. airline penalized as part of Monday's announcement and has issued $222 million in refunds, according to the department. The refunds were meant to compensate passengers for flights that were canceled, significantly delayed or otherwise altered substantially, the department said. "As people get ready to fly this holiday season, I want customers to know that the D.O.T. has their back," the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, said on a call with reporters. Air India was assessed the second-largest fine, of $1.4 million, and TAP Air Portugal was fined $1.1 million. The remaining three carriers -- Aeromexico, El Al and Avianca -- will each pay less than $1 million. Including the penalties announced on Monday, the department's Office of Aviation Consumer Protection has issued a record $8.1 million in fines in 2022.
Hardware

Qualcomm Publishes, then Deletes, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Announcement (qualcomm.com) 10

In a blog post initially published Tuesday and since taken down, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, its new marquee chipset offering. The new features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, as described on the since altered blog, include:

1. Upgraded Hexagon DSP, with support for microtile inferencing and a bigger tensor accelerator (up to 4.35X increase in AI perf when compared to 8 Gen 1 in MobileBert)
2. Support for INT4 with a 60% perf/watt improvement
3. Sensing Hub with dual AI processors
4. Upgraded GPU (~25% faster perf YoY)
5. Upgraded CPU (~40% more power efficient YoY)
6. Snapdragon X70 modem-RF system, w/ support for 5G DSDA
7. FastConnect 7800 support, w/ WiFi 7 support

Devices powered with the new chipset are expected to come out starting end of the year, Qualcomm said.
Australia

Australia To Consider Banning Ransomware Payments (therecord.media) 86

Australia will consider banning ransomware payments in a bid to undermine the cybercriminal business model, a government minister said on Sunday. From a report: Clare O'Neil, the minister for home affairs and cybersecurity, confirmed to Australia's public broadcaster ABC that the government was looking at criminalizing extortion payments as part of the government's cyber strategy. The announcement follows several large security incidents affecting the country, including most significantly the data breach of Medibank, one of the country's largest health insurance providers.

Earlier this month Medibank stated it would not be making a ransom payment after hackers gained access to the data of 9.7 million current and former customers, including 1.8 million international customers living abroad. All of the data which the criminals accessed "could have been taken," the company said. This includes sensitive health care claims data for around 480,000 individuals, including information about drug addiction treatments and abortions. O'Neil's interview followed the AFP's commissioner Reece Kershaw announcing that they had identified the individual perpetrators of the Medibank hack, and that a group based in Russia was to blame.
Further reading: After Ransomware Gang Releases Sensitive Medical Data, Australia Vows Consequences.
Businesses

FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Attempts To Raise Fresh Cash Despite Bankruptcy (wsj.com) 61

FTX filed for bankruptcy last week, but the cryptocurrency exchange's founder still thinks that he can raise enough money to make users whole, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Mr. Bankman-Fried, alongside a few remaining employees, spent the past weekend calling around in search of commitments from investors to plug a shortfall of up to $8 billion in the hopes of repaying FTX's customers, the people said. The efforts to cover that shortfall have so far been unsuccessful. The Wall Street Journal couldn't determine what Mr. Bankman-Fried is offering in return for any potential cash infusion, or whether any investors have committed.

FTX filed for bankruptcy protection Friday, and Mr. Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive of the company. He remains its largest shareholder. The bankruptcy announcement shocked FTX customers who had hoped they could recover assets. Now-deleted tweets from Mr. Bankman-Fried in the days before the filing assured users that the company was "fine." Companies under bankruptcy protection sometimes receive loans meant to help maintain operations. Debtor-in-possession financing means that if companies survive, the first funds they earn will go toward paying down that lifeline. It is less common for a company to try to raise fresh equity capital early on in the bankruptcy process, since debtholders hold priority over any remaining assets.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Aaron Swartz Day Commemorated With International Hackathon (eff.org) 27

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares this announcement from the EFF's DeepLinks blog:

This weekend, EFF is celebrating the life and work of programmer, activist, and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz by participating in the 2022 Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon. This year, the event will be held in person at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on Nov. 12 and Nov. 13. It will also be livestreamed; links to the livestream will be posted each morning.

Those interested in attending in-person or remotely can register for the event here.

Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. His life was cut short in 2013, after federal prosecutors charged him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for systematically downloading academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. Facing the prospect of a long and unjust sentence, Aaron died by suicide at the age of 26....

Those interested in working on projects in Aaron's honor can also contribute to the annual hackathon, which this year includes several projects: SecureDrop, Bad Apple, the Disability Technology Project (Sat. only), and EFF's own Atlas of Surveillance. In addition to the hackathon in San Francisco, there will also be concurrent hackathons in Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. For more information on the hackathon and for a full list of speakers, check out the official page for the 2022 Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon.

Speakers this year include Chelsea Manning and Cory Doctorow, as well as Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, and Creative Commons co-founder Lisa Rein.
Encryption

Introducing Shufflecake: Plausible Deniability For Multiple Hidden Filesystems on Linux (kudelskisecurity.com) 90

Thursday the Kudelski Group's cybersecurity division released "a tool for Linux that allows creation of multiple hidden volumes on a storage device in such a way that it is very difficult, even under forensic inspection, to prove the existence of such volumes."

"Each volume is encrypted with a different secret key, scrambled across the empty space of an underlying existing storage medium, and indistinguishable from random noise when not decrypted." Even if the presence of the Shufflecake software itself cannot be hidden — and hence the presence of secret volumes is suspected — the number of volumes is also hidden. This allows a user to create a hierarchy of plausible deniability, where "most hidden" secret volumes are buried under "less hidden" decoy volumes, whose passwords can be surrendered under pressure. In other words, a user can plausibly "lie" to a coercive adversary about the existence of hidden data, by providing a password that unlocks "decoy" data.

Every volume can be managed independently as a virtual block device, i.e. partitioned, formatted with any filesystem of choice, and mounted and dismounted like a normal disc. The whole system is very fast, with only a minor slowdown in I/O throughput compared to a bare LUKS-encrypted disk, and with negligible waste of memory and disc space.

You can consider Shufflecake a "spiritual successor" of tools such as Truecrypt and Veracrypt, but vastly improved. First of all, it works natively on Linux, it supports any filesystem of choice, and can manage up to 15 nested volumes per device, so to make deniability of the existence of these partitions really plausible.

"The reason why this is important versus "simple" disc encryption is best illustrated in the famous XKCD comic 538," quips Slashdot reader Gaglia (in the original submission. But the big announcement from Kudelski Security Research calls it "a tool aimed at helping people whose freedom of expression is threatened by repressive authorities or dangerous criminal organizations, in particular: whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and activists for human rights in oppressive regimes.

"Shufflecake is FLOSS (Free/Libre, Open Source Software). Source code in C is available and released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or superior.... The current release is still a non-production-ready prototype, so we advise against using it for really sensitive operations. However, we believe that future work will sensibly improve both security and performance, hopefully offering a really useful tool to people who live in constant danger of being interrogated with coercive methods to reveal sensitive information.
Microsoft

Microsoft To Spend $1 Billion On Datacenters In North Carolina (theregister.com) 14

Microsoft is building four datacenters in North Carolina as part of a phased development that will see it invest at least $1 billion over the next decade. The Register reports: The datacenter expansion will see Microsoft construct the facilities at sites in Conover, Maiden and two at Hickory in Catawba County, creating at least 50 new jobs, according to the Catawba County Economic Development Corporation. Economic development agreements and incentive grants for the project were approved at a joint meeting this week by the Catawba County Board of Commissioners along with the elected councils of Conover, Hickory and Maiden.

The terms of the agreement include a guaranteed minimum investment over 10 years in Catawba County from Microsoft of $1 billion, with each municipality getting $332 million, with an additional $33 million to Hickory for its second site. Microsoft will get performance-based incentive grants of 50 percent real property value and 85 percent personal property value, to be awarded over ten years. This means that over that period, the local government bodies will essentially pay back that proportion of Microsoft's property taxes, according to reports in local media The Charlotte Observer.

Microsoft did not state what capacity the new datacenters will have once built, but they are set to take up a combined 687 acres of land between them. The expansion is likely to be additional capacity for Microsoft Azure cloud. Currently, Microsoft already operates more than 200 datacenters globally. Last year, Microsoft said it planned to build new facilities in at least 10 more countries, and that it aimed to construct between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future.

AI

DeviantArt Is Launching Its Own AI Art Generator (engadget.com) 29

DeviantArt is launching an AI art generator called DreamUp, promising "safe and fair" generation for creators. Engadget reports: The website says one of artists' main concerns about AI art is that their work may be used to train artificial intelligence models, which means the generator could spit out pieces in their style without their consent. In an attempt to give artists control over their work, DeviantArt is giving them the ability to choose whether or not the tool can use their style for direct inspiration. Further, the website is giving them the power to declare whether or not to allow their work to be used in datasets used to train third-party AI models. If they choose not to be included in those datasets, their content pages' HTML files will contain a "noimageai" directive. Also a "noai" directive protects their artwork when media files are directly downloaded from DeviantArt's servers.

"DeviantArt encourages other creator platforms to adopt this approach in order to ensure artists remain able to share their work with online audiences while retaining control over non-human usage," the website wrote in its announcement. Those directives, of course, won't be added to their pages' HTML files if they're cool with their work being used to train AI models. And if they choose to allow DreamUp to use their style as a direct inspiration, they will be "clearly credited" on the output when it's published on DeviantArt.
Engadget notes that "all DreamUp submissions will be automatically tagged as #AIArt, and users will be able to choose to see or to hide posts under the topic."

The generator is available for DeviantArt's paid Core subscription plans, but all users can sample the tool with up to five free prompts.

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