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UK Universities Offered To Monitor Students' Social Media For Arms Firms, Emails Show

2 months 1 week ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Universities in the UK reassured arms companies they would monitor students' chat groups and social media accounts after firms raised concerns about campus protests, according to internal emails. One university said it would conduct "active monitoring of social media" for any evidence of plans to demonstrate against Rolls-Royce at a careers fair. A second appeared to agree to a request from Raytheon UK, the British wing of a major US defence contractor, to "monitor university chat groups" before a campus visit. Another university responded to a defence company's "security questionnaire" seeking information about social media posts suggestive of imminent protests over the firm's alleged role in fuelling war, including in Gaza. The universities' apparent compliance with the sensitivities of arms companies before careers fairs has emerged in emails obtained by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates after freedom of information (FoI) requests.

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Synology Reverses Course on Some Drive Restrictions

2 months 1 week ago
Synology has released an update to its Disk Station Manager software that removes verified drive requirements from its 2025 model-year Plus, Value and J-series DiskStation network-attached storage devices. The change allows users to install non-validated third-party drives and create storage pools without restrictions. The company had expanded its verified drive policy to the entire Plus line a few months earlier. Synology-branded drives carried substantial price premiums over commodity hardware. The HAT5310 enterprise SATA drive costs $299 for 8TB compared to $220 for an identically sized Seagate Exos disk. Users who installed non-verified drives in affected models faced reduced functionality and persistent warning messages in the DSM interface. Synology said today it is collaborating with third-party drive manufacturers to accelerate testing and verification of additional storage drives. Pool and cache creation on M.2 disks still requires drives from the hardware compatibility list. Synology did not clarify whether the policy change applies to previous-generation products.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth

2 months 1 week ago
UK central bank warns of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks

The Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee has warned of the dangers of a sudden correction in the financial markets, owing to the value of tech and AI stocks, and has compared the risks to the dotcom bubble.…

Lindsay Clark