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  It also says it is 'not healthy nor sustainable' to expect two private companies to be solely responsible for solving the challenges faced by the Australian media industry. The federal government is hoping to make tech giants such as Facebook and Google pay for Australian content if it is a source of profit, and the country's consumer watchdog is leading the charge on a mandatory code of conduct to address "bargaining power imbalances" between news media businesses and digital platforms. While Facebook doesn't agree that it possesses unequal bargaining power compared to some of the largest media companies in Australia, it said there is a level of merit in setting regulatory frameworks to provide confidence that it is contributing "appropriately" in the Australian news ecosystem. The social media giant used its submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC)  Mandatory news media bargaining code Concepts paper  to say i...

  The previous record for the largest DDoS attack ever recorded was of 1.7 Tbps, recorded in March 2018. Amazon said its AWS Shield service mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, stopping a 2.3 Tbps attack in mid-February this year. The incident was disclosed in the company's  AWS Shield Threat Landscape [PDF] , a report detailing web attacks mitigated by Amazon's AWS Shield protection service. The report didn't identify the targeted AWS customer but said the attack was carried out using hijacked CLDAP web servers and caused three days of "elevated threat" for its AWS Shield staff. CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an alternative to the older LDAP protocol and is used to connect, search, and modify Internet-shared directories. The protocol has been abused for DDoS attacks  since late 2016 , and CLDAP servers are known to amplify DDoS traffic  by 56 to 70 times  its initial size, making it a highly sought-after protocol an...

  Memory-safe systems programming language Rust is finally capturing the attention of lots of developers. Programming language Rust has entered the top 20 of the Tiobe popularity index for the first time, but it's still five spots behind systems programming rival Go.   There's growing interest in the use of memory-safe Rust for systems programming to build major platforms, in particular at Microsoft, which is exploring it for Windows and Azure with the goal of wiping out memory bugs in code written in C and C++. Amazon Web Services is also using Rust for performance-sensitive components in Lambda, EC2, and S3.   Rust has seen its ranking rise considerably on Tiobe, from 38 last year to 20 today. Tiobe's index is based on searches for a language on major search engines, so it doesn't mean more people are using Rust, but it shows that more developers are searching for information about the language.  Rust was voted for the fifth year straight the most-lo...

  SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which flew NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station, is powered by liquid oxygen, rocket-grade kerosene, and Linux. In a terrible year, it was a great moment. On May 30, SpaceX's  Crew Dragon , the first private-manned spacecraft ever and the first US-manned spaceflight in nine years, successfully delivered NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley into orbit. Taking them was SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9, powered by rocket fuel and Linux. Like supercomputers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and many mission-critical devices, the Falcon 9 flies with Linux. SpaceX's software engineers explained several years ago how the  Falcon 9 programming works .  At the time, the developers said: "The Flight Software team is about 35 people. We write all the code for Falcon 9, Grasshopper [The Falcon 9 test rocket], and Dragon applications; and do the core platform work, also on those vehicles; ...

  Microsoft will adopt Workday Adaptive Planning, which will run on Azure. Separately, Workday reported better-than-expected first quarter results and outlined plans to integrate with Salesforce's Work.com. Microsoft and Workday have forged a broad partnership that combines Workday Adaptive Planning and Microsoft Azure as well as Workday integrations with Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Teams.  Key points on the partnership include: Workday customers will be able to run Workday Adaptive Planning on Microsoft Azure's cloud. Microsoft will adopt Workday Adaptive Planning for its global finance teams for planning, budgeting and forecasting. The partnership includes integrations between Workday applications and Microsoft Teams and Azure Active Directory. Tom Bogan, Workday vice chairman, said the company has had a close working relationship with Microsoft for years as Adaptive Planning has been landing more large enterprise customers. "Midsized is still are largest custom...

  Just a week ago reports were in that the Supercomputer named Archer from Europe was cyber-attacked by hackers to steal critical information about the research and development taken up by Universities and Government to find a vaccine for COVID 19.   Now the news is out that almost all the supercomputers operating in Germany, UK, Switzerland, and Spain were affected by a malware strain propelling mining of cryptocurrency.   According to the breaches took place at different time frames in this year and were infected by a specific malware strain designed to use the computing power of a supercomputer to mine Monero XMR Cryptocurrency.   Chris Domain, the Co-Founder of ‘Cado Security’ was the person who discovered and passed on the details to technology news resource which now states that many of the powerful machines were forced to shut down as they have already leaked a section of information related to research carried out to find medicine for Corona Virus   Evid...

  Synopsys has found that 99% of commercial software programs include at least one open-source component. But 91% of those included out of date or abandoned open-source code. Open source rules. Everyone from Apple to Microsoft to  Zoom  uses it. Don't believe me? Synopsys, a software and silicon design company, which also covers intellectual property, reported in its  2020 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report  that nearly all (99%) of audited codebases contained at least one open-source component. That's good news. The bad news is 91% of the codebases containing components were either more than four years out of date or had seen no development activity in the last two years. Not good. Underlining how disturbing this is,  Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC)  found that open source made up  70% of all. That's a lot of aged and abandoned open-source software. Old software, unlike fine wine, does not age well.  The...

  For almost eight years, a hacker has silently hijacked D-Link NVRs (network video recorders) and NAS (network-attached storage) devices into a botnet that had the sole purpose of connecting to online websites and download anime videos. Named Cereals and first spotted in 2012, the botnet reached its peak in 2015 when it amassed more than 10,000 bots. However, despite its size, the botnet operated without detection from most cyber-security firms. Currently, Cereals is slowly disappearing, as the vulnerable D-Link devices on which it fed all these years have started aging and are being decommissioned by their owners. Further, the botnet's decline was also accelerated when a ransomware strain named Cr1ptT0r wiped the Cereals malware from many D-Link systems in the winter of 2019. Now that both the botnet and the vulnerable devices behind it are dying out, cyber-security firm Forcepoint published a report on the botnet's past operations, without fear that its report could draw att...

  Visual Studio Online is being rechristened as Visual Studio Codespaces. And pricing cuts are coming for all tiers as of mid-May. Microsoft is on a rebranding roll these days. The latest product to get the treatment is Visual Studio Online, which is now going to be known as  Visual Studio Codespaces. In a blog post on April 30, Microsoft officials said the reason for the rebranding is because they wanted to be clear that the product is much more than just "an editor in the browser." The new tagline: Codespaces "are simply the most productive place to code." The rebranding will begin showing up "in the coming weeks and months." Microsoft made the  public preview of Visual Studio Online in November 2019 . At that time, officials stressed that its online code editor and companion to Visual Studio and  Visual Studio Code  could be used for managed development for anything from long-term projects to short term tasks. (An aside:  Visual Studio Online originally...

  Microsoft is using this week's Ignite conference to try to help clarify its collaboration-tool strategy. Here's how SharePoint, Teams and Yammer figure in the mix. Choice is good. But too much choice, especially when it comes to collaboration tools, has been a problem for Microsoft. This isn't news to customers, partners or Microsoft execs themselves. But at the company's Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft execs took a step to try to clarify the company's strategy and messaging in this area. Microsoft Office 365 Marketing chief Ron Markezich kicked off the conference this week with a slide entitled "Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Where to Start a Conversation." That slide attempts to do what  Microsoft initially attempted with a 60-plus-page whitepaper : Clarify which collaboration tools customers should use when. The slide, which features SharePoint -- and its files, sites and content storage at the center -- is broken down into the ...