Compromise of 3 domain registries allows hackers to walk off with unauthorized certs.

Source: https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/things-that-can-fly/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52798515

All that glitters …

McDonald’s is facing a federal lawsuit that alleges its AI-enhanced pricing tool violates antitrust laws because it shares nonpublic data with franchisees who might be competing in the same market.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in Illinois, said McDonald’s pricing tool uses artificial intelligence to collect data that competing franchises wouldn’t normally share, like store-level sales. The Chicago-based burger giant has said it makes the tool available to U.S. franchisees to help them set prices at their individual restaurants.

The lawsuit also blames the pricing system for raising McDonald’s U.S. prices.

“McDonald’s has built and for years deployed its own information-sharing pricing platform, which draws on data from its millions of daily transactions to set menu prices across thousands of U.S. restaurants,” the lawsuit states. “The result is algorithmic price-fixing aimed at customers who are already stretched thin.”

VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware.

Today, Rimini Street published its “2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What’s Next for VMware Users.” The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware.

Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there’s an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers.

For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini’s survey said they’re exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware’s higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders.

Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini’s survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions.

“Significant barriers”

In today’s announcement, Rimini pointed to “significant barriers to progress” for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent).

“These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption,” Rimini’s announcement said.

Broadcom’s takeover has spotlighted the challenges of being overly reliant on a single vendor.

“Many clients are looking … at this [as] a wake-up call to how dependent they had become on a single vendor and are looking for more diversity in their on-premises environments,” Tony Harvey, a senior director analyst at Gartner, previously told Ars, referring to Broadcom’s acquisition.

Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of “growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals.”

“In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for ‘best of both worlds’ workload placement,” the announcement said.

Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren’t planning to move any of their assets to VMware’s hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

“The trend shows increasing diversification in enterprise virtualization strategies with a longer-term transition toward bespoke, multi-platform IT virtualization environments. As organizations reevaluate their paths to modernization, they are increasingly adopting approaches that combine on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud and alternative hypervisors to support workload flexibility, operational efficiency and better cost control,” the announcement says.

In its “Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure” released last month, Gartner predicted that 55 percent of enterprises will make “proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery” by 2029, which is an increase from 25 percent in 2026.

In a statement today, Joe McKendrick, lead analyst at Unisphere Research, pointed to interest among VMware users to do more than just replace their virtualization vendor.

“[The survey] reflects a broader effort by enterprises to reduce dependency on a single provider, maintain continuity for mission-critical systems and modernize at a pace that fits their own business requirements,” he said. “For many organizations, that means balancing support for existing environments with new investments designed to improve resilience, security and scalability over time.”

source

IBM and Red Hat announced today they have identified and remediated more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across popular Java libraries.

Red Hat's Lightwell open-source software supply chain initiative that relies on specialized AI agents was able to accelerate the discovery of 400+ vulnerabilities affecting popular Java code. They announced this feat today as part of their promoting Lightwell Clearinghouse to GA, which is an enterprise service for their customers to submit open-source software dependencies for priority review and remediation.

From today's announcement:

"The milestone addresses a growing business risk. As autonomous AI agents become capable of combining several lower-risk software weaknesses into a more serious attack, companies need to do more than identify vulnerabilities. They need a practical way to develop, test and deploy fixes in the software that supports critical applications."

Details are light on all the specific vulnerabilities uncovered. They appear to be ramping up fast in their Lightwell efforts as in the embargoed press release days ago was at 300+ vulnerabilities and then increased to 400+ vulnerabilities. Their AI laden press release announcing these 400+ vulnerabilities can be found on the IBM Newsroom.

Bonus points for also including favourite and/or most interesting.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52799193

Being a doctor is one of the jobs expected to be least at risk from AI replacement. But a new program launched in Utah is raising questions over that assumption. A healthcare startup will begin offering AI examinations and prescriptions to patients without direct human oversight, making Utah the first state to replace a doctor with an AI.

The good news is that the program is currently very limited in its scope. It's just one year long and only for patients with mild-to-moderate acne.

The process works when a person signs up for Nolla Health's $4.99-per-month app and uses it to scan their face. After completing a medical history and personal information form, the AI analyzes their skin, identifies the acne problem, rates the skin's oiliness, and then generates a numerical acne severity score that ranges between clear skin and severe acne, reports Bloomberg.

Amazon hasn't made an Echo with a 3.5mm port in six years.

I'm sharing this one because I'm curious what more knowledgeable people think about this one. Please take a peek at the article before joining the discussion, as my limited quote might have dropped useful information

The VPN industry runs on a promise. Pick almost any provider and the pitch is the same: "we don't keep logs." You hand over your entire internet connection and, in return, you get a pinky-promise that nobody is writing anything down.

For a lot of privacy-minded people, that promise stopped being good enough a while ago. A no-logs policy is only as honest as the company making it, and even an honest company can be hacked, subpoenaed, or quietly acquired.

Obscura VPN is trying to answer to that problem. Instead of asking you to trust its word, it splits the job across two independent companies so that neither one can tie your identity to your browsing. The first hop is Obscura's own servers; the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden. Your traffic is end-to-end encrypted to Mullvad's keys, so Obscura literally can't read it, and Mullvad never sees who you are.