Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds is “starting to be a bit worried” by lack of progress on version 5.17 of the project.

In his weekly state of the kernel post, he opened with an observation that “whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had ‘Zombie apocalypse’ on my bingo card, not ‘Putin has a mental breakdown’), it doesn’t seem to have affected the kernel much.”

But something has affected this development cycle: a number of known regressions that Torvalds said have been known since the January 24 release of version 5.17 rc1.

Machine learning could one day help energy providers better pinpoint failing or compromised components in power grids, or better identify traffic congestion for local authorities, according to a study.

A research project led by MIT describes a technique capable of modelling complex interconnected systems made up of numerous variables that change value over time. By mapping connections in these so-called multiple time series, a Bayesian network can learn to identify anomalies in the data.

Power grids are a perfect case study, Jie Chen, co-author of the paper [PDF] and a research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, explained on Friday. “A prominent example of the source of multiple time series is the power grid, where each constituent series is the grid state over time, recorded by a sensor deployed at a certain geographic location,” he said.

The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. For this edition, we’re back in MMO territory and, yes, Amazon is involved.

Amazon Games’ New World was a huge launch for the fledgling studio, but a few months down the line and the new MMORPGhotness was coming apart at the seams. Gaping code oversights, show-stopping bugs, and fixes that broke other systems tested players’ patience to the limits. New World crashed from a peak of almost a million concurrent users five months ago to not quite 20,000 as I write.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger just a few days ago raged against Bitcoin, calling it a “climate crisis.”

“A single ledger entry in Bitcoin consumes enough energy to power your house for almost a day. That’s a climate crisis. That’s not okay,” he told Bloomberg in an interview last week.

He was clearly hitting out at power-guzzling GPUs and similar chips necessary for Bitcoin mining, which require country-size amounts of electricity as the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce heard last month.

In brief Nvidia is probing what may be a ransomware infection that caused outages within its internal network.

The malware is said to have taken hold in the past two days, knocking down email and developer systems. The GPU giant continues to investigate.

In a statement, an Nvidia spokesperson told The Register on Friday: “Our business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted. We are still working to evaluate the nature and scope of the event and don’t have any additional information to share at this time.”

How’s this for a security threat? A backdoor hidden in lab software that is activated when fed a specially crafted digital DNA sample.

Typically, this backdoor would be introduced in a supply-chain attack, as we saw with the compromised SolarWinds monitoring tools. When the lab analysis software processes a digital sample of genetic material with the trigger encoded, the backdoor in the application activates: the trigger could include an IP address and network port to covertly connect to, or other instructions to carry out, allowing spies to snoop on and interfere with the DNA processing pipeline.

It could be used to infiltrate national health institutions, research organizations, and healthcare companies, because few have recognized the potential of biological matter as the carrier or trigger of malware. Just as you can use DNA in living bacteria to hold information, this storage can be weaponized against applications processing that data.

The judge overseeing an age-discrimination case against IBM has denied the IT giant’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing evidence supporting plaintiff Eugen Schenfeld’s claim that CEO Arvind Krishna, then director of IBM research, made the decision to fire him.

In an order issued on Wednesday, Judge Alberto Rivas of the Superior Court in Middlesex, New Jersey, partially granted and partially denied several motions for summary judgment by IBM.

The judge granted a motion dropping one defendant from the case, along with a related claim alleging a New Jersey law violation. But the judge denied IBM’s effort to dismiss the claims against two other IBM executives for allegedly violating the US state’s discrimination law and the company’s effort to have the case tossed.

The increasingly wide use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for such computer vision tasks as facial recognition, medical imaging, object detection, and autonomous driving is going to, if not already, catch the attention of cybercriminals.

DNNs have become foundational to deep learning and to the larger field of artificial intelligence (AI). They’re a multi-layered class of machine learning algorithms that essentially try to mimic how a human brain works and are becoming more popular in developing modern applications.

That use is expected to increase rapidly in the coming years. According to analysts with Emergen Research, the worldwide market for DNN technology will grow from $1.26bn in 2019 to $5.98bn by 2027, with demand in such industries as healthcare, banking, financial services and insurance surging.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, the latter’s government is reportedly seeking cybersecurity volunteers to help defend itself. Meanwhile, Russia’s CERT has warned critical infrastructure operators that any strange outages should be treated as “a computer attack.”

Reuters reported this morning that a Google Docs form had been published so Ukrainian infosec specialists can register their services. The form reportedly had this message with it:

Friday FOSS Fest Looking for a little more desktop responsiveness? Liquorix provides current, easy-to-install desktop-performance-optimised kernels for Ubuntu, Mint, Debian and derivatives… and Arch and Red Hat users can get it, too.

Since we’ve been talking about kernels recently at The Reg FOSS desk, today we’re exploring options outside Ubuntu’s own offerings.

Ubuntu maintains three channels for kernels, depending on what type of release you’re running: LTS (or an LTS-based derivative such as Linux Mint), HWE and OEM.

Just when Dell thought it was getting on top of the knotty PC supply chain, the outlook is deteriorating again with the backlog swelling and no relief from pressure due to freight charges – the same dynamics that are at play in its server and storage division.

The industry-wide shortfall of semiconductors and “global logistics challenges” for good and services is continuing to be felt in “just about every industry,” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman at Dell and co-chief operating officer.

“We are still experiencing shortages of integrated circuits across a wide range of devices, including network controllers and micro controllers that go into our products and solutions. The result we are seeing an impact across client systems, servers and storage,” he added.