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Supermarket Giant Tesco Sues VMware, Warns Lack of Support Could Disrupt Food Supply

3 months 3 weeks ago
Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million, claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years. All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions. The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9. The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price. Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software, and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland." "VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute persists the higher damages will climb.

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Instagram Is Coming To iPad, 15 Years Later

3 months 3 weeks ago
After years of requests, Instagram is finally releasing a dedicated iPad app on September 3rd... "But it will be slightly different than the mobile app users are accustomed to," reports The Verge. From the report: Most significantly, the iPad app will open directly to a feed of Reels, the company's TikTok competitor -- perhaps a sign of the short-form-video times. [...] Other features will be available on iPad: Stories will still line the top of the homepage, and users will be able to switch to a "Following" tab where they'll be able to swipe between feeds that more resemble the mobile Instagram experience (including a chronological option). The bigger screen means more space and fewer clicks: comments on Reels will appear next to full-size videos, and the DMs page will have your inbox alongside chats, similar to what Messenger looks like on desktop.

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Biased bots: AI hiring managers shortlist candidates with AI resumes

3 months 3 weeks ago
When AI runs recruiting, the winning move is using the same bot

Job seekers who use the same AI model to compose their resumes as the AI model used to evaluate their application are more likely to advance through the hiring process than those submitting human-written materials, according to researchers.…

Thomas Claburn

Cloudflare Stops New World's Largest DDoS Attack Over Labor Day Weekend

3 months 3 weeks ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger. According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second. This attack, Cloudflare reported, came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers. Although compromised accounts on Google Cloud were a major source, the bulk of the attack originated from other sources. The specific target of this attack has not been publicly disclosed, but we can be sure the intent was to overwhelm the victim's network and render online services inoperative. Cloudflare says its globally distributed, fully autonomous DDoS mitigation network detected and neutralized the threat in real time, without notable impact on customer services or requiring manual intervention. This operation highlights both the rising sophistication of attack methods and the resilience of modern internet infrastructure defenses, especially Cloudflare's use of real-time packet analysis, fingerprinting, and rapid threat intelligence sharing across its network.

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