When most students get As, grading loses all meaning as a way to encourage exceptional work and recognize excellence. From a report: Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8. The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the U.S., the most commonly awarded grade is now an A. Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement.

If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend -- to themselves and to others -- that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses. All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record of American colleges in actually educating their students. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed in their 2011 book "Academically Adrift," the time that the average full-time college student spent studying dropped by half in the five decades after 1960, falling to about a dozen hours a week. A clear majority of college students "showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing," with about half failing to make any improvements at all in their first two years of higher education.

An anonymous reader shares a report: ChatGPT's 200 million weekly active users have helped propel OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot, to a $100 billion valuation. But outside the mainstream there's still plenty of money to be made -- especially if you're catering to the underworld. Illicit large language models (LLMs) can make up to $28,000 in two months from sales on underground markets, according to a study published last month in arXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University. That's just the tip of the iceberg, according to the study, which looked at more than 200 examples of malicious LLMs (or malas) listed on underground marketplaces between April and October 2023.

The LLMs fall into two categories: those that are outright uncensored LLMs, often based on open-source standards, and those that jailbreak commercial LLMs out of their guardrails using prompts. "We believe now is a good stage to start to study these because we don't want to wait until the big harm has already been done," says Xiaofeng Wang, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, and one of the coauthors of the paper. "We want to head off the curve and before attackers can incur huge harm to us." While hackers can at times bypass mainstream LLMs' built-in limitations meant to prevent illegal or questionable activity, such instances are few and far between. Instead, to meet demand, illicit LLMs have cropped up. And unsurprisingly, those behind them are keen to make money off the back of that interest.

The electric revolution has given way to a gradual transformation, but the groundwork is already being laid for the future. From a report: The Department of Energy recently highlighted this by noting the number of publicly available EV chargers has doubled since President Biden was inaugurated on January 20, 2021. According to the government, there are now more than 192,000 publicly available charging ports in the United States and around 1,000 are being added every week. The Department of Energy credited the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as aiding the buildout, which is helping to bring charging infrastructure to rural, suburban, and urban communities.

The law provided funding for a $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program. A big chunk of that money is now heading out as the Biden administration recently announced $521 million in grants to support projects in 29 states as well as the District of Columbia and a few tribal areas. This will result in more than 9,200 charging ports being added, which means each one will cost roughly $56,630 -- although California's West Coast Truck Charging and Fueling Corridor Project also includes a hydrogen component.

Visa said it plans to launch a dedicated service for bank transfers, skipping credit cards and the traditional direct debit process. From a report: Visa, which alongside Mastercard is one of the world's largest card networks, said Thursday it plans to launch a dedicated service for account-to-account (A2A) payments in Europe next year. Users will be able set up direct debits -- transactions that take funds directly from your bank account -- on merchants' e-commerce stores with just a few clicks. Visa said consumers will be able to monitor these payments more easily and raise any issues by clicking a button in their banking app, giving them a similar level of protection to when they use their cards.

The service should help people deal with problems like unauthorized auto-renewals of subscriptions, by making it easier for people to reverse direct debit transactions and get their money back, Visa said. It won't initially apply its A2A service to things like TV streaming services, gym memberships and food boxes, Visa added, but this is planned for the future. The product will initially launch in the U.K. in early 2025, with subsequent releases in the Nordic region and elsewhere in Europe later in 2025. [...] Static direct debits, for example, require advance notice of any changes to the amount taken, meaning you have to either cancel the direct debit and set up a new one or carry out a one-off transfer. With Visa A2A, consumers will be able to set up variable recurring payments (VRP), a new type of payment that allows people to make and manage recurring payments of varying amounts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Passport numbers for a group of Disney cruise line workers. Disney+ streaming revenue. Sales of Genie+ theme park passes. The trove of data from Disney that was leaked online by hackers earlier this summer includes a range of financial and strategy information that sheds light on the entertainment giant's operations, according to files viewed by The Wall Street Journal. It also includes personally identifiable information of some staff and customers.

The leaked files include granular details about revenue generated by such products as Disney+ and ESPN+; park pricing offers the company has modeled; and what appear to be login credentials for some of Disney's cloud infrastructure. (The Journal didn't attempt to access any Disney systems.) "We decline to comment on unverified information The Wall Street Journal has purportedly obtained as a result of a bad actor's illegal activity," a Disney spokesman said. Disney told investors in an August regulatory filing that it is investigating the unauthorized release of "over a terabyte of data" from one of its communications systems. It said the incident hadn't had a material impact on its operations or financial performance and doesn't expect that it will.

Data that a hacking entity calling itself Nullbulge released online spans more than 44 million messages from Disney's Slack workplace communications tool, upward of 18,800 spreadsheets and at least 13,000 PDFs, the Journal found. The scope of the material taken appears to be limited to public and private channels within Disney's Slack that one employee had access to. No private messages between executives appear to be included. Slack is only one online forum in which Disney employees communicate at work.

Federal investigators have indicted a North Carolina man over a scheme in which he allegedly used bot accounts and hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to earn more than $10 million in royalty payments from the major streaming services. RollingStone: The case is a landmark development in the still-developing music streaming market, with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York calling it the first criminal case involving artificially inflated music streaming. In the indictment, the prosecutors say that for the past seven years, North Carolina musician Michael Smith had been running a complex music streaming manipulation scheme to fraudulently profit off of billions of streams from bot accounts. "At a certain point in the charged time period, Smith estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128," the prosecutors said in the indictment announcement.

Smith, 52, was charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, totaling to a combined maximum of 60 years in prison if convicted. "Through his brazen fraud scheme, Smith stole millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed," said Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. "Today, thanks to the work of the FBI and the career prosecutors of this Office, it's time for Smith to face the music."

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion to develop safe AI systems that surpass human capabilities. The company, valued at $5 billion, plans to use the funds to hire top talent and acquire computing power, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global. Reuters reports: Sutskever, 37, is one of the most influential technologists in AI. He co-founded SSI in June with Gross, who previously led AI initiatives at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher. Sutskever is chief scientist and Levy is principal scientist, while Gross is responsible for computing power and fundraising. Sutskever said his new venture made sense because he "identified a mountain that's a bit different from what I was working on."

SSI is currently very much focused on hiring people who will fit in with its culture. Gross said they spend hours vetting if candidates have "good character", and are looking for people with extraordinary capabilities rather than overemphasizing credentials and experience in the field. "One thing that excites us is when you find people that are interested in the work, that are not interested in the scene, in the hype," he added. SSI says it plans to partner with cloud providers and chip companies to fund its computing power needs but hasn't yet decided which firms it will work with. AI startups often work with companies such as Microsoft and Nvidia to address their infrastructure needs.

Sutskever was an early advocate of scaling, a hypothesis that AI models would improve in performance given vast amounts of computing power. The idea and its execution kicked off a wave of AI investment in chips, data centers and energy, laying the groundwork for generative AI advances like ChatGPT. Sutskever said he will approach scaling in a different way than his former employer, without sharing details. "Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" he said. "Some people can work really long hours and they'll just go down the same path faster. It's not so much our style. But if you do something different, then it becomes possible for you to do something special."

The latest Windows personal computers with AI features have "the best specs" on "all the benchmarks," Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella recently said. There is one problem: The chips inside current models are incompatible with many leading videogames. From a report: Microsoft and its partners this spring rolled out Copilot+ PCs that include functions such as creating AI-generated pictures and video. Under the hood of the new laptops is a hardware change. Instead of the Intel chips that have powered Microsoft Windows PCs for nearly four decades, the initial Copilot+ PCs to hit the market use Qualcomm chips, which in turn rely on designs from U.K.-based Arm.

Most PC games, including popular multiplayer games such as "League of Legends" and "Fortnite," are made to work with Intel's x86, a chip architecture that has been the standard for many personal computers for decades. To make some of these programs function on the Qualcomm-Arm system, they must be run through a layer of software that translates Intel-speak into Arm-speak. Chip experts say the approach isn't perfect and can result in bugs, glitches or games simply not working. The problem is widespread. About 1,300 PC games have been independently tested to see if they work on Microsoft's new Arm-powered PCs and only about half ran smoothly, said James McWhirter, an analyst with research firm Omdia.

Verizon is in advanced talks to acquire Frontier Communications in a deal that would bolster the company's fiber network to compete with rivals including AT&T, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: An announcement could come this week, granted the talks don't hit any last-minute snags, the people said. A deal would be sizable, given Frontier's market value of over $7 billion. The company, cobbled together by several deals over the years, provides broadband connections to about three million locations across 25 states.

Verizon, the top cellphone carrier by subscribers, has faced increased pressure from competitors and from cable-TV companies that offer discounted wireless service backed by Verizon's own cellular network. Verizon has its Fios-branded fiber network, and AT&T has focused on expanding its fiber network since shedding its WarnerMedia assets in 2022. Fiber M&A has heated up as telecom companies and financial firms pour capital into neighborhoods that lack high-speed broadband or offer only one internet provider, usually from a cable-TV company.

After an initial euphoric rush to the cloud, admins are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services. The Register: According to a report published by UK cloud outfit Civo, more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill. Although the survey, unsurprisingly, paints Civo in a flattering light, some of its figures may make uncomfortable reading for customers sold on the promises from hyperscalers. Like-for-like comparisons for a simple three-node cluster with 200 GB of persistent storage and a 5 TB data transfer showed prices going from $1,278.58 in 2022 to $1,458.68 in 2024 on Microsoft Azure.

For Google, the price went from $1,107.61 to $1,250.35. According to Civo's figures, the cost at AWS increased from $1,142.46 to $1,234.59. "The Kubernetes prices were taken from the hyperscalers' very own pricing calculators," a Civo spokesperson told The Register. In the IT world, there is an expectation that bang for buck increases as time goes by, but in this example, prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, and what customers receive for their money remains unchanged.

The Biden-Harris administration's big bet on Intel to lead a US chipmaking renaissance is in grave trouble as a result of the company's mounting financial struggles, creating a potentially damaging setback for the country's most ambitious industrial policy in decades. From a report: Five months after the president traveled to Arizona to unveil a potential $20 billion package of incentives alongside Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger, there are growing questions around when -- or if -- Intel will get its hands on that money. Intel's woes also may jeopardize the government's ability to reach its policy goals, which include establishing a secure supply of cutting-edge chips for the Pentagon and making a fifth of the world's advanced processors by 2030.

Intel is mired in a sales slump worse than anticipated and hemorrhaging cash, forcing its board to consider increasingly drastic actions -- including possibly splitting off its manufacturing division or paring back global factory plans, Bloomberg reported last week. That threatens to further complicate its quest for government funding, at a time when Intel desperately needs the help. The Silicon Valley company is supposed to receive $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in loans from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, but only if the chipmaker meets key milestones -- and after significant due diligence. That process, which applies to all Chips Act winners, has been clear from the outset, and aims to ensure that companies only get taxpayer dollars once they've actually delivered on their promises. Intel, like other potential recipients, hasn't received any money yet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Dutch data protection watchdog on Tuesday issued facial recognition startup Clearview AI with a fine of $33.7 million over its creation of what the agency called an "illegal database" of billion of photos of faces. The Netherlands' Data Protection Agency, or DPA, also warned Dutch companies that using Clearview's services is also banned. The data agency said that New York-based Clearview "has not objected to this decision and is therefore unable to appeal against the fine."

But in a statement emailed to The Associated Press, Clearview's chief legal officer, Jack Mulcaire, said that the decision is "unlawful, devoid of due process and is unenforceable." The Dutch agency said that building the database and insufficiently informing people whose images appear in the database amounted to serious breaches of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. "Facial recognition is a highly intrusive technology, that you cannot simply unleash on anyone in the world," DPA chairman Aleid Wolfsen said in a statement. "If there is a photo of you on the Internet -- and doesn't that apply to all of us? -- then you can end up in the database of Clearview and be tracked. This is not a doom scenario from a scary film. Nor is it something that could only be done in China," he said. DPA said that if Clearview doesn't halt the breaches of the regulation, it faces noncompliance penalties of up to $5.6 million on top of the fine. Mulcaire said Clearview doesn't fall under EU data protection regulations. "Clearview AI does not have a place of business in the Netherlands or the EU, it does not have any customers in the Netherlands or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR," he said.

A former executive of smartphone startup OSOM Products has filed a lawsuit alleging the company's founder misused funds for personal expenses, including two Lamborghinis and a lavish lifestyle. Mary Ross, OSOM's ex-Chief Privacy Officer, is seeking access to company records in a Delaware court filing.

OSOM, founded in 2020 by former Essential employees, launched two products: the Solana-backed Saga smartphone and a privacy cable. Android founder Andy Rubin founded Essential, which sought to compete with Apple and Android-makers on a smartphone, but later shutdown after not find many takers for its phone. The lawsuit claims OSOM founder Jason Keats used company money for racing hobbies, first-class travel, and mortgage payments.

To make America the "crypto capital of the planet," former U.S. President Donald Trump promised crypto-friendly policies, writes Politico, which "could have a new beneficiary: his own family." Trump has vowed to enact an array of pro-crypto policies in a bid to win votes — and campaign cash — from digital asset enthusiasts in recent months. Now, he's weaving the overtures into his pitch for his sons' forthcoming startup... It remains unclear what the Trump sons' crypto venture will look like. They have been teasing their plans to launch it for weeks, in part by positioning it as an alternative to the use of big banks.... ["Be defiant," reads the tagline on their World Liberty Financial home page — with nothing more than its name and the words "Coming soon."]

Trump's sons took over control of their father's business, the Trump Organization, after he became president in 2017, but he retained ownership of the company... It is unclear whether the crypto startup would be launched as part of the Trump Organization or as a separate entity. Either way, ethics experts and watchdogs say the crypto business could create the appearance of a conflict of interest if Trump wins back the White House this fall... From an "optics perspective, it's terrible," said Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush and later ran for Congress as a Democrat. But he said it wouldn't violate any ethics laws.

The family venture is the latest way Trump has embraced the digital asset industry, which is pouring more than $160 million into the 2024 elections as it seeks to help elect allies up and down the ballot. Trump has also marketed his own line of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which are digital images of the former president that fans can purchase for $99... Trump's NFT sales could also raise ethics concerns, said Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington....

"[P]rior conflicts and illegalities took advantage of preexisting loopholes," said Norman Eisen, an ethics lawyer who served in the Obama White House and later helped build the first impeachment case against Trump. "Here, Trump appears to be promising to create the loopholes while his family is simultaneously designing a business venture to exploit them."
The article notes that Trump promoted his son's crypto venture on X this week with audio from Trump's speech at a crypto conference in July. "He first revealed his pro-crypto leanings — after previously deriding digital currency — at a Mar-a-Lago event in May with supporters who bought his crypto-linked digital trading cards..."

"Trump is also facing new questions about what he would do with his stake in the parent company of the social media service Truth Social," the article adds. (Although this week the stock hit a new low. After losing 50% of its value in six weeks, it's dropped below $20 per share for the first time since it started publicly trading...)

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The Contingency Contingent, is Leigh Claire La Berge's amazing tale of what she calls her "fake job in Y2K preparedness." La Berge offers an insider's view of the madness that ensued when Y2K panic gave rise to seemingly-limitless spending at mega-corporations for massive enterprise-wide Y2K remediation projects led by management consulting firms that left clients with little to show for their money. (La Berge was an analyst for consulting firm Arthur Andersen, where "the Andersen position was that 'Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem'.... At a certain point all that had happened yesterday was our documenting, so then we documented that. Then, exponentially, we had to document ourselves documenting our own documentation."). In what reads like the story treatment for an Office Space sequel, La Berge writes that it was a fake job "because Andersen was faking it."
From the article: The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a household phrase, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, surrendered its accounting licenses, and shuttered. But that was later.

Finally, it was a fake job because the problem that the Conglomerate had hired Andersen to solve was not real, at least not in the sense that it needed to be solved or that Andersen could solve it. The problem was known variously as Y2K, or the Year 2000, or the Y2K Bug, and it prophesied that on January 1, 2000, computers the world over would be unable to process the thousandth-digit change from 19 to 20 as 1999 rolled into 2000 and would crash, taking with them whatever technology they were operating, from email to television to air-traffic control to, really, the entire technological infrastructure of global modernity. Hospitals might have emergency power generators to stave off the worst effects (unless the generators, too, succumbed to the Y2K Bug), but not advertising firms.

With a world-ending scenario on the horizon, employment standards were being relaxed. The end of the millennium had produced a tight labor market in knowledge workers, and new kinds of companies, called dot-coms, were angling to dominate the emergent world of e-commerce. Flush with cash, these companies were hoovering up any possessors of knowledge they could find. Friends from my gradeless college whose only experience in business had been parking-lot drug deals were talking stock options.
Looking back, the author remembers being "surprised by how quickly Y2K disappeared from office discourse as though censored..."

Their upcoming book is called Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke.

"Dirk Hohndel, a Linux kernel developer and long-time open source leader, wanted his audience at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2024 Summit China to know he's not a Valkey developer," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. "He's a Valkey user and fan." [Hohndel] opened his speech by recalling how the open source, high-performance key/value datastore Valkey had been forked from Redis... Hohndel emphasized that "forks are good. Forks are one of the key things that open source licenses are for. So, if the maintainer starts doing things you don't like, you can fork the code under the same license and do better..." In this case, though, Redis had done a "bait-and-switch" with the Redis code, Hohndale argued. This was because they had made an all-too-common business failure: They hadn't realized that "open source is not a business model...."

While the licensing change is what prompted the fork, Hohndel sees leadership and technical reasons why the Valkey fork is likely to succeed. First, two-thirds of the formerly top Redis maintainers and developers have switched to Valkey. In addition, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, under the Linux Foundation's auspices, all support Valkey. When both the technical and money people agree, good things can happen.

The other reason is that Valkey already looks like it will be the better technical choice. That's because the recently announced Valkey 8.0, which builds upon the last open source version of Redis, 7.2.4, introduces serious speed improvements and new features that Redis users have wanted for some time. As [AWS principal engineer Madelyn] Olson said at Open Source Summit North America earlier this year, "Redis really didn't want to break anything." Valkey wants to move a bit faster. How much faster? A lot. Valkey 8.0 overhauls Redis's single-threaded event loop threading model with a more sophisticated multithreaded approach to I/O operations. Hohndel reported that on his small Valkey-powered aircraft tracking system, "I see roughly a threefold improvement in performance, and I stream a lot of data, 60 million data points a day."
The article notes that Valkey is already being supported by major Linux distros including AlmaLinux, Fedora, and Alpine.

CSO Online reports that North Korea "is actively infiltrating Western companies using skilled IT workers who use fake identities to pose as remote workers with foreign companies, typically but not exclusively in the U.S."

Slashdot reader snydeq shares their report, which urges information security officers "to carry out tighter vetting of new hires to ward off potential 'moles' — who are increasingly finding their way onto company payrolls and into their IT systems." The schemes are part of illicit revenue generation efforts by the North Korean regime, which faces financial sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, as well as a component of the country's cyberespionage activities.

The U.S. Treasury department first warned about the tactic in 2022. Thosands of highly skilled IT workers are taking advantage of the demand for software developers to obtain freelance contracts from clients around the world, including in North America, Europe, and East Asia. "Although DPRK [North Korean] IT workers normally engage in IT work distinct from malicious cyber activity, they have used the privileged access gained as contractors to enable the DPRK's malicious cyber intrusions," the Treasury department warned... North Korean IT workers present themselves as South Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Eastern European, and as U.S.-based teleworkers. In some cases, DPRK IT workers further obfuscate their identities by creating arrangements with third-party subcontractors.

Christina Chapman, a resident of Arizona, faces fraud charges over an elaborate scheme that allegedly allowed North Korean IT workers to pose as U.S. citizens and residents using stolen identities to obtain jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies. U.S. payment platforms and online job site accounts were abused to secure jobs at more than 300 companies, including a major TV network, a car manufacturer, a Silicon Valley technology firm, and an aerospace company... According to a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, unsealed in May 2024, Chapman ran a "laptop farm," hosting the overseas IT workers' computers inside her home so it appeared that the computers were located in the U.S. The 49-year-old received and forged payroll checks, and she laundered direct debit payments for salaries through bank accounts under her control. Many of the overseas workers in her cell were from North Korea, according to prosecutors. An estimated $6.8 million were paid for the work, much of which was falsely reported to tax authorities under the name of 60 real U.S. citizens whose identities were either stolen or borrowed...

Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv, was separately charged over a years-long scheme to create fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms and with U.S.-based money service transmitters. "Didenko sold the accounts to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean, and the overseas IT workers used the false identities to apply for jobs with unsuspecting companies," according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Didenko, who was arrested in Poland in May, faces U.S. extradition proceedings...

How this type of malfeasance plays out from the perspective of a targeted firm was revealed by security awareness vendor KnowBe4's candid admission in July that it unknowingly hired a North Korean IT spy... A growing and substantial body of evidence suggests KnowBe4 is but one of many organizations targeted by illicit North Korean IT workers. Last November security vendor Palo Alto reported that North Korean threat actors are actively seeking employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world...

Mandiant, the Google-owned threat intel firm, reported last year that "thousands of highly skilled IT workers from North Korea" are hunting work. More recently, CrowdStrike reported that a North Korean group it dubbed "Famous Chollima" infiltrated more than 100 companies with imposter IT pros.
The article notes the infiltrators use chatbots to tailor the perfect resume "and further leverage AI-created deepfakes to pose as real people." And the article includes this quote from a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force turned cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig. "In some cases, they may try to get jobs at tech companies in order to steal their intellectual property before using it to create their own knock-off technologies."

The article closes with its suggested "countermeasures," including live video-chats with prospective remote-work applicants — and confirming an applicant's home address.

Intel is working with investment bankers to help navigate the most difficult period in its 56-year history, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company is discussing various scenarios, including a split of its product-design and manufacturing businesses, as well as which factory projects might potentially be scrapped, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Intel's longtime bankers, have been providing advice on the possibilities, which could also include potential M&A, the people said. The discussions have only grown more urgent since the Santa Clara, California-based company delivered a grim earnings report this month, which sent the shares plunging to their lowest level since 2013.

Three former Backpage executives, including co-founder Michael Lacey, were sentenced to prison for promoting prostitution and laundering money while disguising their activities as a legitimate classified business. The Associated Press reports: A jury convicted Lacey, 76, of a single count of international concealment money laundering last year, but deadlocked on 84 other prostitution facilitation and money laundering charges. U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa later acquitted Lacey of dozens of charges for insufficient evidence, but he still faces about 30 prostitution facilitation and money laundering charges. Authorities say the site generated $500 million in prostitution-related revenue from its inception in 2004 until it was shut down by the government in 2018.

Lacey's lawyers say their client was focused on running an alternative newspaper chain and wasn't involved in day-to-day operations of Backpage. But Humetewa told Lacey during Wednesday's sentencing he was aware of the allegations against Backpage and did nothing. "In the face of all this, you held fast," Humetewa said. "You didn't do a thing." Two other Backpage executives, Chief Financial Officer John Brunst and Executive Vice President Scott Spear, also were convicted last year and were each sentenced on Wednesday to 10 years in prison. The judge ordered Lacey and the two executives to report to the U.S. Marshals Service in two weeks to start serving their sentences.

According to a new survey from Bitkom, cybercrime and other acts of sabotage have cost German companies around $298 billion in the past year, up 29% on the year before. Reuters reports: Bitkom surveyed around 1,000 companies from all sectors and found that 90% expect more cyberattacks in the next 12 months, with the remaining 10% expecting the same level of attacks. Some 70% of companies that were targeted attributed the attacks to organised crime, the survey found, adding 81% of companies reported data theft, including customer data, access data and passwords, as well as intellectual property such as patents. Around 45% of companies said they could attribute at least one attack to China, up from 42% in the previous year. Attacks blamed on Russia came in second place at 39%.

The increase in attacks has prompted companies to allocate 17% of their IT budget to digital security, up from 14% last year, but only 37% said they had an emergency plan to react to security incidents in their supply chain, the survey showed.