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AMD Warns of New Meltdown, Spectre-like Bugs Affecting CPUs

2 months 1 week ago
AMD is warning users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack affecting a broad range of its chips that could lead to information disclosure. Register: Akin to Meltdown and Spectre, the Transient Scheduler Attack (TSA) comprises four vulnerabilities that AMD said it discovered while looking into a Microsoft report about microarchitectural leaks. The four bugs do not appear too venomous at face value -- two have medium-severity ratings while the other two are rated "low." However, the low-level nature of the exploit's impact has nonetheless led Trend Micro and CrowdStrike to assess the threat as "critical." The reasons for the low severity scores are the high degree of complexity involved in a successful attack -- AMD said it could only be carried out by an attacker able to run arbitrary code on a target machine. It affects AMD processors (desktop, mobile and datacenter models), including 3rd gen and 4th gen EPYC chips -- the full list is here.

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Microsoft Touts $500 Million in AI Savings While Slashing Jobs

2 months 1 week ago
Microsoft is keen to show employees how much AI is transforming its own workplace, even as the company terminates thousands of personnel. From a report: During a presentation this week, Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff said artificial intelligence tools are boosting productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software engineering, according to a person familiar with his remarks. Althoff said AI saved Microsoft more than $500 million last year in its call centers alone and increased both employee and customer satisfaction, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Althoff said. This effort is nascent, but already generating tens of millions of dollars, he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Court cancels FTC click-to-cancel rule on a technicality

2 months 1 week ago
Welcome back to the age of dark patterns

The US was supposed to celebrate the enforcement date for an FTC rule requiring companies to offer simple, clear, one-click subscription cancellations next Monday, but a panel of appeals court judges has decided otherwise.…

Brandon Vigliarolo