Tuesday Meta released Llama 3.1, its largest open-source AI model to date. But just one day Mistral released Large 2, notes this report from TechCrunch, "which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning...

"Though Mistral is one of the newer entrants in the artificial intelligence space, it's quickly shipping AI models on or near the cutting edge." In a press release, Mistral says one of its key focus areas during training was to minimize the model's hallucination issues. The company says Large 2 was trained to be more discerning in its responses, acknowledging when it does not know something instead of making something up that seems plausible. The Paris-based AI startup recently raised $640 million in a Series B funding round, led by General Catalyst, at a $6 billion valuation...

However, it's important to note that Mistral's models are, like most others, not open source in the traditional sense — any commercial application of the model needs a paid license. And while it's more open than, say, GPT-4o, few in the world have the expertise and infrastructure to implement such a large model. (That goes double for Llama's 405 billion parameters, of course.)
Mistral only has 123 billion parameters, according to the article. But whichever system prevails, "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward," Mark Zuckerberg wrote this week, predicting that open-source AI will soar to the same popularity as Linux: This year, Llama 3 is competitive with the most advanced models and leading in some areas. Starting next year, we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry. But even before that, Llama is already leading on openness, modifiability, and cost efficiency... Beyond releasing these models, we're working with a range of companies to grow the broader ecosystem. Amazon, Databricks, and NVIDIA are launching full suites of services to support developers fine-tuning and distilling their own models. Innovators like Groq have built low-latency, low-cost inference serving for all the new models. The models will be available on all major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and more. Companies like Scale.AI, Dell, Deloitte, and others are ready to help enterprises adopt Llama and train custom models with their own data.
"As the community grows and more companies develop new services, we can collectively make Llama the industry standard and bring the benefits of AI to everyone," Zuckerberg writes. He says that he's heard from developers, CEOs, and government officials that they want to "train, fine-tune, and distill" their own models, protecting their data with a cheap and efficient model — and without being locked into a closed vendor. But they also tell him that want to invest in an ecosystem "that's going to be the standard for the long term." Lots of people see that open source is advancing at a faster rate than closed models, and they want to build their systems on the architecture that will give them the greatest advantage long term...

One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it's clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in AI and AR/VR for the next generation of computing...

I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future. AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life — and to accelerate economic growth while unlocking progress in medical and scientific research. Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn't concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society. There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it's in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer... [O]pen source should be significantly safer since the systems are more transparent and can be widely scrutinized...

The bottom line is that open source AI represents the world's best shot at harnessing this technology to create the greatest economic opportunity and security for everyone... I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source, and I expect that approach to only grow from here. I hope you'll join us on this journey to bring the benefits of AI to everyone in the world.

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Only 14 percent of Oracle Java subscribers plan to stay on Big Red's runtime environment, according to a study following the introduction of an employee-based subscription model. At the same time, 36 percent of the 663 Java users questioned said they had already moved to the employee-based pricing model introduced in January 2023. Shortly after the new model was implemented, experts warned that it would create a significant price hike for users adopting it. By July, global tech research company Gartner was forecasting that those on the new subscription package would face between two and five times the costs compared with the previous usage-based model.

As such, among the 86 percent of respondents using Oracle Java SE who are currently moving or plan to move all or some of their Java applications off Oracle environments, 53 percent said the Oracle environment was too expensive, according to the study carried out by independent market research firm Dimensional Research. Forty-seven percent said the reason for moving was a preference for open source, and 38 percent said it was because of uncertainty created by ongoing changes in pricing, licensing, and support. [...]

To support OpenJDK applications in production, 46 percent chose a paid-for platform such as Belsoft Liberica, IBM Semeru, or Azul Platform Core; 45 percent chose a free supported platform such as Amazon Corretto or Microsoft Build of OpenJDK; and 37 percent chose a free, unsupported platform. Of the users who have already moved to OpenJDK, 25 percent said Oracle had been significantly more expensive, while 41 percent said Big Red's licensing had made it somewhat more expensive than the alternative. The survey found three-quarters of Java migrations were completed within a year, 23 percent within three months.

In a response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority's investigation into cloud services and licensing, Microsoft has defended its practices, asserting that its terms "do not meaningfully raise cloud rivals' costs." The Windows-maker emphasized Amazon's continued dominance in the UK hyperscale market and noted Google's quarter-on-quarter growth, while also highlighting the declining share of Windows Server relative to Linux in cloud operating systems and SQL Server's second-place position behind Oracle.

[...] The CMA's inquiry primarily focuses on the pricing disparity between using Microsoft products on Azure versus rival cloud platforms, with most surveyed customers perceiving Azure as the more cost-effective option for Microsoft software deployment. The Register adds: Microsoft's bullish take on this is that AWS and Google should be grateful that they even get to run its software. In its response, the company said: "This dispute on pricing terms only arises because Microsoft grants all rivals IP licenses in the first place to its software that is of most popularity for use in the cloud. It does this not because there is any legal obligation to share IP with closest rivals in cloud, but for commercial reasons."

Azure used to be a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. Now, it's the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack's Joab Jackson writes: These days, Microsoft expends considerable effort that Linux runs as smoothly as possible on Azure, according to a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. "Linux is the #1 operating system in Azure today," Aboutoul said. And all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expects. Hence, the need for the Microsoft's Linux Platforms Group, which provides support Linux to both the internal customers and to Azure customers. These days, the duo of engineers explained, Microsoft knows about as much as anyone about how to operate Linux at hyperscale. [...]

As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services. "A lot of the infrastructure powering everything else is running on Linux," Aboutoul said. "They're different flavors of Linux running all over the place," Aboutoul said. To run these services, Microsoft maintains its own kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the company released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux. But Azure Linux is just a small portion of all the other flavors of Linux running on Azure, all of which Microsoft must work with to support.

Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). [...] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (Suse has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance).

Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the database software and cloud computing company of invading people's privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties. Reuters: The plaintiffs, who otherwise have no connection to Oracle, said the company violated federal and state privacy laws and California's constitution by creating unauthorized "digital dossiers" for hundreds of millions of people. They said the dossiers contained data including where people browsed online, and where they did their banking, bought gas, dined out, shopped and used their credit cards. Oracle then allegedly sold the information directly to marketers or through products such as ID Graph, which according to the company helps marketers "orchestrate a relevant, personalized experience for each individual."

The latest release of MySQL has underwhelmed some commentators who fear Oracle -- the custodian of the open source database -- may have other priorities. From a report: Earlier this month, Oracle -- which has long marketed its range of proprietary database systems -- published the 9.0 version as an "Innovation Release" of MySQL. MySQL 9.0 is now among the three iterations Oracle supports. The others include 8.0 (8.0.38) and the first update of the 8.4 LTS (8.4.1).

[...] In June, Peter Zaitsev, an early MySQL engineer and founder of open source consultancy Percona, said he feared the lack of features in MySQL was a result of Oracle's focus on Heatwave, a proprietary analytics database built on MySQL. He had previously defended Oracle's stewardship of the open source database. The release of MySQL 9.0 has not assuaged those concerns, said colleague Dave Stokes, Percona technology evangelist. It had not lived up to the previous 8.0 release, which arrived with many new features. "MySQL 9.0 is supposed to be an 'innovation release' where [Oracle offers] access to the latest features and improvements and [users] enjoy staying on top of the latest technologies," he said. However, he pointed out most more innovative features, such as vector support and embedded JavaScript store procedures, were not in the free MySQL Community Edition and were only available on the paid-for HeatWave edition. "The ability to store the output of an EXPLAIN command to a variable is not the level of new feature hoped for," he said.

A 2023 red team exercise by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at an unnamed federal agency exposed critical security failings, including unpatched vulnerabilities, inadequate incident response, and weak credential management, leading to a full domain compromise. According to The Register's Connor Jones, the agency failed to detect or remediate malicious activity for five months. From the report: According to the agency's account of the exercise, the red team was able to gain initial access by exploiting an unpatched vulnerability (CVE-2022-21587 - 9.8) in the target agency's Oracle Solaris enclave, leading to what it said was a full compromise. It's worth noting that CVE-2022-21587, an unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) bug carrying a near-maximum 9.8 CVSS rating, was added to CISA's known exploited vulnerability (KEV) catalog in February 2023. The initial intrusion by CISA's red team was made on January 25, 2023. "After gaining access, the team promptly informed the organization's trusted agents of the unpatched device, but the organization took over two weeks to apply the available patch," CISA's report reads. "Additionally, the organization did not perform a thorough investigation of the affected servers, which would have turned up IOCs and should have led to a full incident response. About two weeks after the team obtained access, exploit code was released publicly into a popular open source exploitation framework. CISA identified that the vulnerability was exploited by an unknown third party. CISA added this CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog on February 2, 2023." [...]

After gaining access to the Solaris enclave, the red team discovered they couldn't pivot into the Windows part of the network because missing credentials blocked their path, despite enjoying months of access to sensitive web apps and databases. Undeterred, CISA managed to make its way into the Windows network after carrying out phishing attacks on unidentified members of the target agency, one of which was successful. It said real adversaries may have instead used prolonged password-praying attacks rather than phishing at this stage, given that several service accounts were identified as having weak passwords. After gaining that access, the red team injected a persistent RAT and later discovered unsecured admin credentials, which essentially meant it was game over for the agency being assessed. "None of the accessed servers had any noticeable additional protections or network access restrictions despite their sensitivity and critical functions in the network," CISA said.

CISA described this as a "full domain compromise" that gave the attackers access to tier zero assets -- the most highly privileged systems. "The team found a password file left from a previous employee on an open, administrative IT share, which contained plaintext usernames and passwords for several privileged service accounts," the report reads. "With the harvested Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) information, the team identified one of the accounts had system center operations manager (SCOM) administrator privileges and domain administrator privileges for the parent domain. "They identified another account that also had administrative permissions for most servers in the domain. The passwords for both accounts had not been updated in over eight years and were not enrolled in the organization's identity management (IDM)." From here, the red team realized the victim organization had trust relationships with multiple external FCEB organizations, which CISA's team then pivoted into using the access they already had.

The team "kerberoasted" one partner organization. Kerberoasting is an attack on the Kerberos authentication protocol typically used in Windows networks to authenticate users and devices. However, it wasn't able to move laterally with the account due to low privileges, so it instead used those credentials to exploit a second trusted partner organization. Kerberoasting yielded a more privileged account at the second external org, the password for which was crackable. CISA said that due to network ownership, legal agreements, and/or vendor opacity, these kinds of cross-organizational attacks are rarely tested during assessments. However, SILENTSHIELD assessments are able to be carried out following new-ish powers afforded to CISA by the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the same powers that also allow CISA's Federal Attack Surface Testing (FAST) pentesting program to operate. It's crucial that these avenues are able to be explored in such exercises because they're routes into systems adversaries will have no reservations about exploring in a real-world scenario. For the first five months of the assessment, the target FCEB agency failed to detect or remediate any of the SILENTSHIELD activity, raising concerns over its ability to spot genuine malicious activity. CISA said the findings demonstrated the need for agencies to apply defense-in-depth principles. The cybersecurity agency recommended network segmentation and a Secure-by-Design commitment.

A group of residents in Tokyo said on Wednesday they were aiming to block construction of a massive logistics and data centre planned by Singaporean developer GLP, in a worrying sign for businesses looking to Japan to meet growing demand. From a report: The petition by more than 220 residents of Akishima city in western Tokyo follows a successful bid in December in Nagareyama city to quash a similar data-centre plan. The Akishima residents were concerned the centre would threaten wildlife, cause pollution and a spike in electricity usage, and drain its water supply which comes solely from groundwater. They filed a petition to audit the urban planning procedure that approved GLP's 3.63-million-megawatt data centre, which GLP estimated would likely emit about 1.8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. "One company will be responsible for ruining Akishima. That's what this development is," Yuji Ohtake, a representative of the residents' group, told a press conference. Global tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle also have plans to build data centres in Japan. The residents estimated that 3,000 of 4,800 trees on the site would have to be cut down, threatening the area's Eurasian goshawk birds and badgers.

Paramount Global has agreed to merge with Skydance in a significant deal that will see the Redstone family relinquish control of the storied movie studio and media company. The merger, valued at over $8 billion, involves a consortium including RedBird Capital Partners and KKR, and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approval. CNBC reports: The deal gives National Amusements an enterprise value of $2.4 billion, which includes $1.75 billion in equity. Paramount's class A shareholders will receive $23 apiece in cash or stock, while class B stockholders will receive $15 per share, equating to a cash consideration totaling $4.5 billion available to public shareholders. As part of the deal Skydance will also inject $1.5 billion of capital into Paramount's balance sheet. "It's a new Paramount; it's not just a catchphrase," said RedBird's Jeff Shell, former CEO of NBCUniversal, on a call with investors Monday. "We think it's going to be a new day for these combined assets."

Skydance founder David Ellison will lead the combined company as CEO, while Shell will serve as president. The merger is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in the third quarter of 2025. It also includes a 45-day "go-shop period," in which the Paramount special committee can solicit other offers. A completed Skydance merger would mark a major shift for the ownership of Paramount, as well as for Hollywood as a whole. The Redstone family has long controlled the movie studio -- known for films such as "The Godfather," "Top Gun" and "Forrest Gump" -- as well as the CBS broadcast network and cable TV networks including MTV and Nickelodeon. Now, Ellison, 41, son of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison, will be at the helm of a major movie studio and among Hollywood's elite. "It's been a long time since a creative executive ran one of the big Hollywood companies," Shell said on Monday's call. "And I think it's really important when creative is the core."

This week the Linux Foundation announced a new organization for decentralized systems and technologies, with an aim of "fostering innovation and collaboration" in both their development and deployment.

It will build on existing Linux Foundation blockchain and digital identity projects, according to the announcement, while supporting "a rapidly growing decentralized technology landscape." To foster this broader ecosystem, LF Decentralized Trust will encompass the growing portfolio of Hyperledger projects and host new open source software, communities, standards, and specifications that are critical to the macro shift toward decentralized systems of distributed trust....

LF Decentralized Trust's expanded project and member ecosystem will be both essential to emerging tokenized assets classes and networks, as well as to modernizing the core infrastructure for finance, trade, government, healthcare, and more. LF Decentralized Trust will serve as a neutral home for the open development of a broad range of ledger, identity, security, interoperability, scale, implementation, and related technologies... LF Decentralized Trust will also include new directed funding models that will drive strategic investments by members into individual projects and project resources.

"With LF Decentralized Trust, we're expanding our commitment to open source innovation by embracing a wider array of decentralized technologies," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. "This new, elevated foundation will enable the community to build a more robust ecosystem that drives forward transparency, security, and efficiency in global infrastructure."

"After eight years of advancing the development of blockchain, decentralized identity and related technologies via the Hyperledger community, the time has come to broaden our effort and impact," said Daniela Barbosa, General Manager, Blockchain and Identity, the Linux Foundation. "Ledgers and ledger technologies are but one component of the decentralized systems that will underpin a digital-first global economy. LF Decentralized Trust is where we will gather and grow an expanded community and portfolio of technologies to deliver the transparency, reliability, security and efficiency needed to successfully upgrade critical systems around the world."
The announcement includes quotes of support from numerous companies including Oracle, Siemens, Visa, Accenture, Citi, and Hitachi. Some highlights:

• "The formation of the LF Decentralized Trust reflects the growing demand for open source resources that are critical to the management and functionality of decentralized systems." — CEO of Digital Asset

• "The adoption of decentralized infrastructure is at an inflection point, reflecting the increasing demand from both enterprises and consumers for more secure and transparent digital transactions. As the industry leader for onchain data, blockchain abstraction, and interoperability, we're excited to see the formation of the LF Decentralized Trust and to expand our collaboration with leading financial institutions on advancing tokenized assets and the onchain economy at large." — CMO at Chainlink Labs.

• "As a founding member of the Hyperledger Foundation, and given our unique position in the financial markets, we recognize the vast potential for open-source innovation and decentralized technologies when it comes to reducing risk, increasing resiliency and improving security. The expansion of Hyperledger Foundation into LF Decentralized Trust represents an exciting opportunity to continue expanding these groundbreaking technologies." — a managing director at DTCC

During its earnings call on Monday, Oracle CEO Safra Catz told analysts that it is shutting down its ads business. "In Q4, we decided to exit the advertising business, which had declined to about $300 million in revenue in fiscal year '24," said Catz, according to an earnings transcript. Adweek's Catherine Perloff reports: In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle Advertising made $2 billion in revenue. At the time, revenue was only growing by 2% a year and many employees had been laid off as part of a reorganization in 2022, Business Insider reported. Oracle spent billions on entering the advertising business, acquiring nearly a dozen ad technology companies for over a decade. Notable acquisitions include data firms DataLogix, bought in 2014 for $1.2 billion, and brand safety platform Moat, purchased in 2017 for a reported $850 million. "Oracle's bet on the advertising industry was undermined when Meta [...] shut down its data to third parties including Oracle in 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal," notes Adweek. Europe's GDPR further restricted Oracle's advertising business, leading the company to shut down its 'AddThis' publisher audience tool in 2019, which relied on third-party data.

It was "a catastrophic IT failure," writes Computer Weekly. It was nearly two years ago that Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, "declared itself in financial distress" — effectively declaring bankruptcy — after the costs on an Oracle project costs ballooned from $25 million to around $125.5 million.

But Computer Weekly's investigation finds signs that the program board and its manager wanted to go live in April of 2022 "regardless of the state of the build, the level of testing undertaken and challenges faced by those working on the programme." One manager's notes "reveal concerns that the program manager and steering committee could not be swayed, which meant the system went live despite having known flaws." Computer Weekly has seen notes from a manager at BCC highlighting a number of discrepancies in the Birmingham City Council report to cabinet published in June 2023, 14 months after the Oracle system went into production. The report stated that some critical elements of the Oracle system were not functioning adequately, impacting day-to-day operations. The manager's comments reveal that this flaw in the implementation of the Oracle software was known before the system went live in April 2022... An insider at Birmingham City Council who has been closely involved in the project told Computer Weekly it went live "despite all the warnings telling them it wouldn't work"....

Since going live, the Oracle system effectively scrambled financial data, which meant the council had no clear picture of its overall finances. The insider said that by January 2023, Birmingham City Council could not produce an accurate account of its spending and budget for the next financial year: "There's no way that we could do our year-end accounts because the system didn't work."
A June 2023 report to cabinet "stated that due to issues with the council's bank reconciliation system, a significant number of transactions had to be manually allocated to accounts rather than automatically via the Oracle system," according to the article. But Computer Weekly has seen a 2019 presentation slide deck showing the council was already aware that Oracle's out-of-the-box bank reconciliation system "did not handle mixed debtor/non-debtor bank files. The workaround suggested was either a lot of manual intervention or a platform as a service (PaaS) offering from Evosys, the Oracle implementation partner contracted by BCC to build the new IT system."

The article ultimately concludes that "project management failures over a number of years contributed to the IT failure."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Caroline Haskins: On May 7th and 8th in Washington, D.C., the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it. It was the inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness," hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project -- better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces.

The conference hall was also filled with booths representing the U.S. military and dozens of its contractors, ranging from Booz Allen Hamilton to a random company that was described to me as Uber for airplane software. At industry conferences like these, powerful people tend to be more unfiltered – they assume they're in a safe space, among friends and peers. I was curious, what would they say about the AI-powered violence in Gaza, or what they think is the future of war?

Attendees were told the conference highlight would be a series of panels in a large room toward the back of the hall. In reality, that room hosted just one of note. Featuring Schmidt and the Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, the fire-breathing panel would set the tone for the rest of the conference. More specifically, it divided attendees into two groups: those who see war as a matter of money and strategy, and those who see it as a matter of death. The vast majority of people there fell into group one. I've written about relationships between tech companies and the military before, so I shouldn't have been surprised by anything I saw or heard at this conference. But when it ended, and I departed DC for home, it felt like my life force had been completely sucked out of my body. Some of the noteworthy quotes from the panel and convention, as highlighted in Haskins' reporting, include:

"It's always great when the CIA helps you out," Schmidt joked when CIA deputy director David Cohen lent him his microphone when his didn't work.

The U.S. has to "scare our adversaries to death" in war, said Karp. On university graduates protesting Israel's war in Gaza, Karp described their views as a "pagan religion infecting our universities" and "an infection inside of our society."

"The peace activists are war activists," Karp insisted. "We are the peace activists."

A huge aspect of war in a democracy, Karp went on to argue, is leaders successfully selling that war domestically. "If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any armies in the west ever," Karp said.

A man in nuclear weapons research jokingly referred to himself as "the new Oppenheimer."

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.

The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health-care epicenter. CNBC reports: In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a "huge campus" to Nashville, "which will ultimately be our world headquarters." He said Nashville is an established health center and a "fabulous place to live," one that Oracle employees are excited about. "It's the center of the industry we're most concerned about, which is the health-care industry," Ellison said. The announcement was seemingly spur-of-the-moment. "I shouldn't have said that," Ellison told Frist, a longtime health-care industry veteran who represented Tennessee in the Senate. The pair spoke during a fireside chat at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville.

Nashville has been a major player in the health-care scene for decades, and the city is now home to a vibrant network of health systems, startups and investment firms. The city's reputation as a health-care hub was catalyzed when HCA Healthcare, one of the first for-profit hospital companies in the U.S., was founded there in 1968. HCA helped attract troves of health-care professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. Oracle has been developing its new $1.2 billion campus in the city for about three years, according to The Tennessean. "Our people love it here, and we think it's the center of our future," Ellison said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hospitals -- despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private -- frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to research published today. Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals -- essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments -- and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties. Additionally, not all of these websites even had a privacy policy. And of the 71 percent that did, 56 percent disclosed specific third-party companies that could receive user information.

The researchers' latest work builds on a study they published a year ago of 3,747 US non-federal hospital websites. That found 98.6 percent tracked and transferred visitors' data to large tech and social media companies, advertising firms, and data brokers. To find the trackers on websites, the team checked out each hospitals' homepage on January 26 using webXray, an open source tool that detects third-party HTTP requests and matches them to the organizations receiving the data. They also recorded the number of third-party cookies per page. One name in particular stood out, in terms of who was receiving website visitors' information. "In every study we've done, in any part of the health system, Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, is on nearly every page, including hospitals," [Dr Ari Friedman, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania] observed. "From there, it declines," he continued. "Meta was on a little over half of hospital webpages, and the Meta Pixel is notable because it seems to be one of the grabbier entities out there in terms of tracking."

Both Meta and Google's tracking technologies have been the subject of criminal complaints and lawsuits over the years -- as have some healthcare companies that shared data with these and other advertisers. In addition, between 20 and 30 percent of the hospitals share data with Adobe, Friedman noted. "Everybody knows Adobe for PDFs. My understanding is they also have a tracking division within their ad division." Others include telecom and digital marketing companies like The Trade Desk and Verizon, plus tech giants Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon, according to Friedman. Then there's also analytics firms including Hotjar and data brokers such as Acxiom. "And two thirds of hospital websites had some kind of data transfer to a third-party domain that we couldn't even identify," he added. Of the 71 hospital website privacy policies that the team found, 69 addressed the types of user information that was collected. The most common were IP addresses (80 percent), web browser name and version (75 percent), pages visited on the website (73 percent), and the website from which the user arrived (73 percent). Only 56 percent of these policies identified the third-party companies receiving user information. In lieu of any federal data privacy law in the U.S., Friedman recommends users protect their personal information via the browser-based tools Ghostery and Privacy Badger, which identify and block transfers to third-party domains.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis. The Linux Foundation went public today with their intent to fork Valkey as an open-source alternative to the Redis in-memory store. Due to the Redis licensing changes, Valkey is forking from Redis 7.2.4 and will maintain a BSD 3-clause license. Google, AWS, Oracle, and others are helping form this new Valkey project.

The Linux Foundation press release shares: "To continue improving on this important technology and allow for unfettered distribution of the project, the community created Valkey, an open source high performance key-value store. Valkey supports the Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD platforms. In addition, the community will continue working on its existing roadmap including new features such as a more reliable slot migration, dramatic scalability and stability improvements to the clustering system, multi-threaded performance improvements, triggers, new commands, vector search support, and more. Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it."

"Until recently, Linux kernel developers have been the ones keeping long-term support (LTS) versions of the Linux kernel patched and up to date," writes ZDNet.

"Then, because it was too much work with too little support, the Linux kernel developers decided to no longer support the older kernels." Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, announced that the Linux 4.14.336 release was the last maintenance update to the six-year-old LTS Linux 4.14 kernel series. It was the last of the line for 4.14. Or was it?

Kroah-Hartman had stated, "All users of the 4.14 kernel series must upgrade." Maybe not. OpenELA, a trade association of the Linux distributors CIQ (the company backing Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE, is now offering — via its kernel-lts — a new lease on life for 4.14.

This renewed version, tagged with the following format — x.y.z-openela — is already out as v4.14.339-openela. The OpenELA acknowledges the large debt they owe to Kroah-Hartman and Sasha Levin of the Linux Kernel Stable project but underlines that their project is not affiliated with them or any of the other upstream stable maintainers. That said, the OpenELA team will automatically pull most LTS-maintained stable tree patches from the upstream stable branches. When there are cases where patches can't be applied cleanly, OpenELA kernel-lts maintainers will deal with these issues. In addition, a digest of non-applied patches will accompany each release of its LTS kernel, in mbox format.
"The OpenELA kernel-lts project is the first forum for enterprise Linux distribution vendors to pool our resources," an Oracle Linux SVP tells ZDNet, "and collaborate on those older kernels after upstream support for those kernels has ended." And the CEO of CIQ adds that after community support has ended, "We believe that open collaboration is the best way to maintain foundational enterprise infrastructure.

"Through OpenELA, vendors, users, and the open source community at large can work together to provide the longevity that professional IT organizations require for enterprise Linux."

A directive known as Document 79 ramps up Beijing's effort to replace U.S. tech with homegrown alternatives. From a report: For American tech companies in China, the writing is on the wall. It's also on paper, in Document 79. The 2022 Chinese government directive expands a drive that is muscling U.S. technology out of the country -- an effort some refer to as "Delete A," for Delete America. Document 79 was so sensitive that high-ranking officials and executives were only shown the order and weren't allowed to make copies, people familiar with the matter said. It requires state-owned companies in finance, energy and other sectors to replace foreign software in their IT systems by 2027.

American tech giants had long thrived in China as they hot-wired the country's meteoric industrial rise with computers, operating systems and software. Chinese leaders want to sever that relationship, driven by a push for self-sufficiency and concerns over the country's long-term security. The first targets were hardware makers. Dell, International Business Machines and Cisco Systems have gradually seen much of their equipment replaced by products from Chinese competitors.

Document 79, named for the numbering on the paper, targets companies that provide the software -- enabling daily business operations from basic office tools to supply-chain management. The likes of Microsoft and Oracle are losing ground in the field, one of the last bastions of foreign tech profitability in the country. The effort is just one salvo in a yearslong push by Chinese leader Xi Jinping for self-sufficiency in everything from critical technology such as semiconductors and fighter jets to the production of grain and oilseeds. The broader strategy is to make China less dependent on the West for food, raw materials and energy, and instead focus on domestic supply chains.

"Oracle's plans to evolve Java in 2024 involve OpenJDK projects," writes InfoWorld, citing a recent video by Oracle Java developer relations representative Nicolai Parlog. (Though many improvements may not be usable until 2025 or later...) - For Project Babylon, Parlog cited plans for code reflection, expanding the reflection API, and allowing transformation of Java code inside a method. The goal is to allow developers to write Java code that libraries then can interpret as a mathematical function, for example. The Babylon team in coming weeks plans to publish work on use cases such as auto-differentiating, C# LINQ emulation, and GPU programming.

- In Project Leyden, which is aimed at improving startup times, plans for 2024 involve refining the concept of condensers and working toward the production-readiness of prototype condensers.

- In Project Amber, current features in preview include string templates, a simplified main method, and statements before this() and super(). "I expect all three to finalize in 2024," said Parlog. Under exploration are capabilities such as primitive types in patterns and with expressions.

- In Project Valhalla, work will focus on value classes and objects, which provide class instances that have only final instance fields and lack object identity [to] significantly reduce the run time overhead of boxed Integer, Double, and Byte objects...

- In Project Lilliput, aimed at downsizing Java object headers in the HotSpot JVM and reducing Java's memory footprint, work now centers on polishing a fast-locking scheme.

- Project Panama, for interconnecting JVM and native C code, "has three irons in the fire," Parlog said.