Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year Australian ministers have cited a study showing social media harms teens to justify a proposed ban for under-16s, but critics say the research is unsurprising and potentially flawed. MOST POPULAR AI https://beta.theregister.com/tag/ai - AI and ML Anthropic's extravagant tokenizer complicates AI pricing Token consumption doesn't tell the whole tale but it shouldn't be ignored - systems Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider Renting out spare compute is simply the natural progression for any sufficiently large infra company - AI and ML The price is wrong: AI cost calculation has to consider task completion rates, not just token costs Cheap can be expensive - ai and ml Microsoft chief turns hostile on frontier AI labs, warns companies to guard their IP Lock it down, warns Satya Nadella, seemingly forgetting the billions Redmond chipped in to OpenAI back in the good old days - AI + ML Memory makers are slaves to the boom-bust rollercoaster, and the AI boom is the wildest ride of all The RAMpocalypse may be the precursor to the AIpocalypse Infosec https://beta.theregister.com/security - Security Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more - Security Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more - Black Hat and DEF CON DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure Voting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included - Security EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz Acronis Went at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified - Malware Month Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight On the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career FOSS https://beta.theregister.com/tag/FOSS - Baddies caught exploiting extensions bugs with perfect 10 scores on vulnerable Joomla websites Flaws in iCagenda, Balbooa Forms extensions can impact open source CMS that powers a million sites worldwide - Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly Joins yserver, Phoenix, and of course XLibre – and outlier Arcan - Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it Next version of Linux Mint’s desktop has both kinds of display server - KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives 6.7 is now current, and in 6.8 you're getting Wayland whether you like it or not - Collabora releases CODE 26.04 as rivalry between FOSS cloudy office suites heats up Now with Markdown support and smarter formula error handling – plus integrated AI, though it's off by default - Blast from the past as GIMP 0.54 is revived in Flatpak form Retro-computing fun for the nostalgic with first and last release to use Motif instead of GTK