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Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.

Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.

The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.

Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.

The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.

In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.

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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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The date for the introduction of the EU’s new entry-exit system has been pushed back again until November, allaying fears of long queues at the border during the October half-term holidays.

The launch of the new biometric checks for foreign travellers, including Britons, entering the EU, has been delayed from 6 October until at least 10 November, with many smaller airports yet to have facilities in place.

The move will again raise questions over the readiness of a system that has been long delayed from the planned 2021 start, with the French insisting the additional border controls should not be introduced before the Paris Olympics.

Under the entry-exit system (EES), non-EU citizens will have to register their biometric information – including fingerprints and facial scans – at the border, under the supervision of an EU officer, on their first visit.

There have been warnings of long queues at British points of entry – including the Port of Dover, and Eurostar’s St Pancras terminal – where the French and EU border is physically located in England, before passengers board ferries or trains.

The cross-Channel train operator said the process would add only a few seconds to border queues and not cause chaos, although passengers would have to ensure they arrived in time for the additional layer of biometric checks.

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Energy think tank Ember found that major growth in wind and solar helped push global electricity production past this milestone in 2023.

Its authors say that this rapid growth has brought the world to a crucial turning point where fossil fuel generation starts to decline.

“You also have the invasion of Ukraine which increased the sense of urgency around transitioning to clean power and getting off relying on fossil fuels - not just coal but also gas, and particularly from Russia.

Plans were put in place to help individual member states reach renewable energy targets and deploy technologies at a national scale.

“Certainly you can’t ignore that there was some demand [based] impact on the decrease in use of fossil fuels, but also there was a significant role of wind and solar replacing it.”

Normally this would have meant that the clean energy capacity added around the world last year would have caused fossil fuel generation to drop by 1.1 per cent.

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As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

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Just last Monday the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam began requiring face scans on phone banking apps as proof of identity for all digital transactions of around $400 and above.

Late last month, US cyber security firm Resecurity flagged similar concerns when it found a spike in leaked identity documents containing selfies of Singaporeans on the dark web.

Resecurity asserted that some were captured by cyber crime groups that run fake telemarketing or customer support scams and gather selfies so they can sell them to other miscreants.

“Using selfies for identity verification has been growing steadily for around the last five years, but the inflection point was during the pandemic when people were forced to engage digitally,” VP analyst at Gartner, Akif Khan, told The Register.

In his experience, businesses that rely on simple still selfies are typically smaller outfits that have experienced fraud and have implemented a selfie-based stopgap as they scramble to put a proper solution in place.

Khan thinks concern about identity theft from still images and picture IDs found on the dark web is overblown, as most entities will require liveness checks for opening bank accounts and other tasks.

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The Register reports that security researchers at Pen Test Partners recently got access to a British Airways 747, after the airline decided to retire its fleet following a plummet in travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

The team was able to inspect the full avionics bay beneath the passenger deck, with its data center-like racks of modular black boxes that perform different functions for the plane.

Pen Test Partners discovered a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive in the cockpit, which is used to load important navigation databases.

A cybersecurity professor discovered a buffer overflow exploit onboard a British Airways flight last year.

It’s more of a traditional network like you’d find inside an office building, and some of the latest airliners even receive software updates over the air.

Boeing only just resumed production of its troubled 737 Max airplane after software glitches led to two fatal crashes that killed a total of 346 passengers and crew members.

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Europol published a position paper today highlighting its concerns around SMS home routing – the technology that allows telcos to continue offering their services when customers visit another country.

If a crime is committed by a Brit in Germany, for example, then German police couldn’t issue a request for unencrypted data as they could with a domestic operator such as Deutsche Telekom.

Under home routing, the current investigatory powers of public authorities should be retained and a solution must be found that enables lawful interception of suspects within their territory," reads Europol’s paper.

Two possible solutions were suggested, but the wording of the paper clearly favored a legal ban on PETs (service-level encryption) in home routing over making it possible for one EU member state to request the comms from another country.

There is one that was developed for EIOs but cops are concerned this could lead to scenarios where law enforcement efforts are dependent on foreign service providers, which isn’t ideal.

“With this position paper, Europol wishes to open the debate on this technical issue, which at present is severely hampering law enforcement’s ability to access crucial evidence,” it said.

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Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18.

Once verified, they’ll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content.

While the tool has been criticized for its complexity, the government says the credit-based model is more privacy-friendly, ensuring that users’ online activities are not easily traceable.

It will be voluntary, as online platforms can rely on other age-verification methods to screen out inappropriate viewers.

It heralds an EU law going into force in October 2027, which will require websites to stop minors from accessing porn.Eventually, Madrid’s porn passport is likely to be replaced by the EU’s very own digital identity system (eIDAS2) — a so-called wallet app allowing people to access a smorgasbord of public and private services across the whole bloc.

“We are acting in advance and we are asking platforms to do so too, as what is at stake requires it,” José Luis Escrivá, Spain’s digital secretary, told Spanish newspaper El País.

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Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi networks on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest fliers’ credentials for email and social media services.

The man was investigated after an airline “reported concerns about a suspicious Wi-Fi network identified by its employees during a domestic flight.”

The AFP subsequently arrested a man who was found with “a portable wireless access device, a laptop and a mobile phone” in his hand luggage.

It’s alleged the accused’s collection of kit was used to create Wi-Fi hotspots with SSIDs confusingly similar to those airlines operate for in-flight access to the internet or streamed entertainment.

Airport Wi-Fi was also targeted, and the AFP also found evidence of similar activities “at locations linked to the man’s previous employment.”

AFP Western Command Cybercrime detective inspector Andrea Coleman pointed out that free Wi-Fi services should not require logging in through an email or social media account.

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Advances in artificial intelligence are leading to medical breakthroughs once thought impossible, including devices that can actually read minds and alter our brains.

Pauzaskie says our brain waves are like encrypted signals and, using artificial intelligence, researchers have identified frequencies for specific words to turn thought to text with 40% accuracy, “Which, give it a few years, we’re probably talking 80-90%.”

Researchers are now working to reverse the conditions by using electrical stimulation to alter the frequencies or regions of the brain where they originate.

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies - that are amassing large caches of brain data - are not.

The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

With companies and countries racing to access, analyze, and alter our brains, Pauzauskie suggests, privacy protections should be a no-brainer, "It’s everything that we are.

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As negotiations to end the long legal brawl between Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a choice so madcap that a person involved thought it sounded like a line from a Monty Python movie.

In April, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s national security division broke the impasse with a sly workaround: How about an American courtroom that wasn’t actually inside mainland America?

By early 2024, leaders in Australia, including Kevin Rudd, the ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, began pressuring their American counterparts to reach a deal — not so much out of solidarity with Mr. Assange, or support for his actions, but because he had spent so much time in captivity.

But after a short period of internal discussions, senior officials rejected that approach, drafting a somewhat tougher counteroffer: Mr. Assange would plead to a single felony count, conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a more serious offense that encompassed his interactions with Ms. Manning.

Instead, his initial refusal to plead guilty to a felony was rooted in his reluctance to appear in an American courtroom, out of fear of being detained indefinitely or physically attacked in the United States, Ms. Robinson said in the TV interview.

Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service, which is responsible for bringing criminal cases in England and Wales, believes the ruling might have “triggered” an acceleration of the plea deal.

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In communications with a federal confidential informant, the pair allegedly planned to “coordinate to get multiple [substations] at the same time.” Clendaniel pleaded guilty to conspiring to damage or destroy electrical facilities in May of this year.

But in a court filing, the ACLU attorneys say Russell has “reason to believe” that the government “intercepted his communications” and subjected him to a warrantless “backdoor search” by querying the Section 702 databases.

And less than a month after that initial query, we disrupted that US person who, it turned out, had researched and identified critical infrastructure sites in the US and acquired the means to conduct an attack.” The defense’s motion to compel the federal government to provide notice of use of Section 702 surveillance of Russell includes both the Politico report and Wray’s speech as exhibits.

The ACLU’s response, filed this Monday, notes that the government “does not dispute that Mr. Russell was subject to warrantless surveillance under Section 702” but instead claims it has no legal obligation to turn over FISA notice in this instance.

Legislators’ attempts to rein in the controversial surveillance authority failed, and multiple amendments requiring the FBI to obtain warrants to search or access Americans’ communications under Section 702 were voted down.

“Especially as recently expanded and reauthorized by Congress, this spying authority could be further abused by a future administration against political opponents, protest movements, and civil society organizations, as well as racial and religious minorities, abortion providers, and LGBTQ people.”

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We’re told this “irregularity” was spotted inside TeamViewer’s corporate IT environment on Wednesday, and that the biz immediately called in reinforcements in the form of cyber security investigators, implemented “necessary remediation measures,” and activated its incident response team and processes, according to an announcement on Thursday.

The words “TeamViewer” and “security breach” will make a lot of people’s blood run cold given how pervasively it is used – in homes, organizations, and businesses – so a compromise of the platform could be devastating.

TeamViewer spokesperson Maria Gordienko declined to answer The Register’s specific questions about the incident – including whether it was ransomware or worse – citing the ongoing investigation.

It appears top infosec house NCC Group has already tipped off its customers to the security snafu, and blamed an unnamed advanced persistent threat (APT) team.

H-ISAC noted in its industry bulletin that it had been warned by a friendly intel partner that APT29 – aka Russian intelligence’s Cozy Bear crew – has been “actively exploiting Teamviewer.”

Which could mean the Russians are separately exploiting weaknesses within TeamViewer to get into people’s networks, or taking advantage of poor customer-side security to get in via the remote-desktop software.

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The researchers’ approach involves two main innovations: first, they created a custom LLM and constrained it to use only ternary values (-1, 0, 1) instead of traditional floating-point numbers, which allows for simpler computations.

Second, the researchers redesigned the computationally expensive self-attention mechanism in traditional language models with a simpler, more efficient unit (that they called a MatMul-free Linear Gated Recurrent Unit—or MLGRU) that processes words sequentially using basic arithmetic operations instead of matrix multiplications.

These changes, combined with a custom hardware implementation to accelerate ternary operations through the aforementioned FPGA chip, allowed the researchers to achieve what they claim is performance comparable to state-of-the-art models while reducing energy use.

Researchers claim the MatMul-free LM achieved competitive performance against the Llama 2 baseline on several benchmark tasks, including answering questions, commonsense reasoning, and physical understanding.

The researchers project that their approach could theoretically intersect with and surpass the performance of standard LLMs at scales around 10²³ FLOPS, which is roughly equivalent to the training compute required for models like Meta’s Llama-3 8B or Llama-2 70B.

The article was updated on June 26, 2024 at 9:20 AM to remove an inaccurate power estimate related to running a LLM locally on a RTX 3060 created by the author.

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Chinese chip shop Loongson, which has built modest CPUs based on its own MIPS-like architecture, is on the march towards enterprise workloads.

The silicon slinger yesterday announced that 53 software developers have created 105 products compatible with its instruction set architecture (ISA).

Loongson’s list includes a server virtualization platform, a hyperconverged stack, and a cloud management product from the Chinese hardware maker.

Loongson deliberately eschews compatabiilty with either x86 or Arm in favour tech inspired by the permissively-licensed MIPS and RISC-V ISAs.

It’s been a good couple of weeks for the Chinese chip designer, which has also announced adoption of its silicon by a vendor of network-attached storage devices.

As is the news from last week that “nearly one thousand” desktops running on Loongson CPUs have found a home in one district of the city of Fuzhou.

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The latest feature headed to the Google graveyard is continuous scrolling on search results, according to a report from Search Engine Land.

The user experience, which mirrored the endless scrolling behavior of social media feeds, was originally introduced for search results on mobile devices in October of 2021 and then brought over to desktop search results in late 2022.

A Google spokesperson reportedly told Search Engine Land that continuous scroll is being removed today from desktop search results, while the feature will be removed from mobile results “in the coming months.”

In its place on desktop will be Google’s classic pagination bar, allowing users to jump to a specific page of search results or simply click “Next” to see the next page.

On mobile, a “More results” button will be shown at the bottom of a search to load the next page.

Google told Search Engine Land that “this change is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven’t explicitly requested.”

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Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads.

That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.

Thanks to this upgrade, you’ll probably do less of that, but in a screenshot, Meta notes that you can’t reply to replies “yet,” so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that Threads’ fediverse integration will be available starting today in more than 100 countries, a significant expansion from its initial availability in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Meta has been vocal about its plans to integrate with the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub since launching Threads nearly a year ago, with first testing starting in December.

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“Civil rights guardrails are essential for consumer trust in a system that allows companies to collect and use personal data without consent,” the legal group said in a statement.

When first proposed in April by US House Rep Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and US Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), the APRA was sold as a way to give all Americans meaningful data privacy protections, something many have sought for decades.

The lobbying organization in April said it wanted to avoid the creation of “a federal floor” that might “encourage states to pass more restrictive privacy laws.”

“Moving forward without baseline civil rights protections would create blind spots and permit discriminatory data practices to remain undetected and unchallenged,” said Ruiz.

“This was the one comprehensive privacy bill that had a real chance of passing and now Congress has effectively gutted it as part of a backroom deal to appease right wing extremists,” Greer opined to The Register.

By removing crucial civil rights language, lawmakers have turned it into a bill that effectively endorses privacy violations and discriminatory uses of personal data.

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