This season, more than 140,000 taxpayers successfully filed returns using IRS Direct File, a free tax filing pilot from the IRS, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the IRS. Direct File surveyed more than 15,000 users, around 90% of whom rated their experience as “excellent,” the agencies reported.

“We have not made a decision about the future of Direct File,” Werfel said, noting the agency still needs to analyze data and get feedback from a “wide variety of stakeholders.” The IRS plans to release a more detailed report about the Direct File pilot “in the coming days,” he added. If Direct File were expanded for the next season, the program could add additional states and tax situations, according to a senior IRS official. The agency expects to decide the future of Direct File later this spring, Werfel said.

Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives’ Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC.

Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive’s parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives’ internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn’t require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn’t just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers. […]

In terms of software, 45 Drives says it will offer a number of operating system images for customers to choose from at the time of purchase, and Linux will be a first-class citizen on these devices. It’s safe to say that Milburn isn’t a big fan of Microsoft these days. “We run many hundreds of Microsoft workstations here, but we’re kind of moving away from it,” he said. “With Microsoft, it’s a control thing; it’s forced updates; it’s a way of life with them.” Milburn also isn’t a fan of Microsoft’s registration requirements and online telemetry. “We want control over what all our computers do. We want no traffic on our network that’s out of here,” he said. As a result, Milburn says 45 Drives is increasingly relying on Linux, and that not only applies to its internal machines but its products as well. Having said that, we’re told that 45 Drives recognizes that Linux may not be appropriate for everyone and will offer Windows licenses at an additional cost. And, these both being x86 machines, there’s nothing stopping you from loading your preferred distro or operating system on them after they’ve shipped.

Darktrace is set to go private in a deal that values the U.K.-based cybersecurity giant at around $5 billion. A newly formed entity called Luke Bidco Ltd., formed by private equity giant Thoma Bravo, has tabled an all-cash bid of $7.75 per share, which represents a 44% premium on its average price for the three-month period ending April 25. However, this premium drops to just 20% when juxtaposed against Darktrace’s closing price Thursday, as the company’s shares had risen 20% to 5.18 pounds in the past month.

Founded out of Cambridge, U.K., in 2013, Darktrace is best known for AI-enabled threat detection smarts, using machine learning to identify abnormal network activity and attempts at ransomware attacks, insider attacks, data breaches and more. The company claims big-name customers including Allianz, Airbus and the city of Las Vegas. After raising some $230 million in VC funding and hitting a private valuation of $1.65 billion, Darktrace went public on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021, with an opening-day valuation of $2.4 billion. Its shares hit an all-time high later that year of 9.45 pounds and plummeted to an all-time low of 2.29 pounds last February. But they had been steadily rising since the turn of the year and hadn’t fallen below 4 pounds since the beginning of March.

The full valuation based on Thoma Bravo’s offer amounts to $5.3 billion on what is known as a full-diluted basis, which takes into account all convertible securities and is designed to give a more comprehensive view of a company’s valuation. However, the enterprise value in this instance is approximately $4.9 billion, which includes additional considerations such as debt and cash positions. […] The deal is of course still subject to shareholder approval, but the companies said that they expect to complete the transaction by the end of 2024.

In February, a university investigation found that he had committed scientific misconduct by, among other things, fabricating data to claim the discovery of superconductors — materials with zero electrical resistance — at room temperature. Dias filed the lawsuit against the university for allegedly violating his academic freedom and conducting a biased investigation into his work.

On 19 April, Monroe County Supreme Court justice Joseph Waldorf denied Dias’s petitions and dismissed the lawsuit as premature. The matter “is not ripe for judicial review,” Waldorf wrote, because, although Rochester commissioned an independent review that found Dias had committed misconduct, it has not yet finished taking administrative action. The university provost has recommended that Dias be fired, but a final decision is still forthcoming. A spokesperson for the university said Rochester was “pleased” with the justice’s ruling, and reiterated that its investigation was “carried out in a fair manner” and reached a conclusion that it thinks is correct.

Nature’s news team reported on Rochester’s investigation previously: three scientists external to the university conducted a 10-month probe into 16 allegations against Dias and determined that the physicist had committed plagiarism, and data fabrication and falsification related to four scientific papers, including two published in Nature. Normally, the details of the investigation would probably have remained confidential. But in response to Dias’s lawsuit, the university submitted the entire report as a court exhibit, making it public.

“We know that our universities are being actively targeted by hostile actors and need to guard against the threat posed to frontier research in the most sensitive sectors,” said the deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, who also attended the briefing. The threat requires “further measures,” said the deputy PM, who announced that the government was launching a consultation with the sector so it could “do more to support our universities and put the right security in place to protect their cutting-edge research.”

The briefing was delivered by Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, alongside Dowden and the National Cyber Security Centre’s interim chief executive, Felicity Oswald. It was made to the vice-chancellors of the Russell Group, a collective of the country’s 24 leading universities. Among the range of measures being considered is having MI5, the domestic security agency, carry out security vetting on key researchers involved in a “small proportion of academic work, with a particular focus on research with potential dual uses in civilian and military life.”

Unhatched birds and hatchlings that are exposed to noise from city traffic experience long-term negative effects on their health, growth and reproduction, the study found. “Sound has a much stronger and more direct impact on bird development than we knew before,” said Dr Mylene Mariette, a bird communication expert at Deakin University in Australia and a co-author of the study, published in the journal Science. “It would be wise to work more to reduce noise pollution.”

A growing body of research has suggested that noise pollution causes stress to birds and makes communication harder for them. But whether birds are already distressed at a young age because they are affected by noise, or by how noise disrupts their environment and parental care, was still unclear. Mariette’s team routinely exposed zebra finch eggs for five days to either silence, soothing playbacks of zebra finch songs, or recordings of city traffic noises such as revving motors and cars driving past. They did the same with newborn chicks for about four hours a night for up to 13 nights, without exposing the birds’ parents to the sounds.

The worm — which first came to light in a 2023 post published by security firm Sophos — became active in 2019 when a variant of malware known as PlugX added functionality that allowed it to infect USB drives automatically. In turn, those drives would infect any new machine they connected to, a capability that allowed the malware to spread without requiring any end-user interaction. Researchers who have tracked PlugX since at least 2008 have said that the malware has origins in China and has been used by various groups tied to the country’s Ministry of State Security.

For reasons that aren’t clear, the worm creator abandoned the one and only IP address that was designated as its command-and-control channel. With no one controlling the infected machines anymore, the PlugX worm was effectively dead, or at least one might have presumed so. The worm, it turns out, has continued to live on in an undetermined number of machines that possibly reaches into the millions, researchers from security firm Sekoia reported. The researchers purchased the IP address and connected their own server infrastructure to “sinkhole” traffic connecting to it, meaning intercepting the traffic to prevent it from being used maliciously. Since then, their server continues to receive PlugX traffic from 90,000 to 100,000 unique IP addresses every day.

The companies and cybersecurity experts who design Captchas have been doing all they can to stay one step ahead of the bad actors figuring out how to crack them. A cottage industry of third-party Captcha-solving firms — essentially, humans hired to solve the puzzles all day — has emerged. More alarmingly, so has technology that can automatically solve the more rudimentary tests, such as identifying photos of motorcycles and reading distorted text. “Software has gotten really good at labeling photos,” said Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, which designs what it calls “fraud and abuse prevention solutions,” including Captchas. “So now enters a new era of Captcha — logic based.”

That shift explains why Captchas have started to both annoy and perplex. Users no longer have to simply identify things. They need to identify things and do something with that information — move a puzzle piece, rotate an object, find the specter of a number hidden in a roomscape. Compounding this bewilderment is the addition to the mix of generative AI images, which creates new objects difficult for robots to identify but baffles humans who just want to log in. “Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something that’s nonsensical,” Gosschalk said. “Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand.”

As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss — ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We’ve now “hit the buffers” of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can’t approve any more deficit budgets — to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.

DJI is on a Defense Department list of Chinese military companies whose products the U.S. armed forces will be prohibited from purchasing in the future. As part of the defense budget that Congress passed for this year, other federal agencies and programs are likely to be prohibited from purchasing DJI drones as well. The drones — though not designed or authorized for combat use — have also become ubiquitous in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The Treasury and Commerce Departments have penalized DJI over the use of its drones for spying on Uyghur Muslims who are held in camps by Chinese officials in the Xinjiang region. Researchers have found that Beijing could potentially exploit vulnerabilities in an app that controls the drone to gain access to large amounts of personal information, although a U.S. official said there are currently no known vulnerabilities that have not been patched. Now Congress is weighing legislation that could kill much of DJI’s commercial business in the United States by putting it on a Federal Communications Commission roster blocking it from running on the country’s communications infrastructure.

The bill, which has bipartisan support, has been met with a muscular lobbying campaign by DJI. The company is hoping that Americans like Mr. Nordfors who use its products will help persuade lawmakers that the United States has nothing to fear — and much to gain — by keeping DJI drones flying. “DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America,” Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York and one of the bill’s primary sponsors, said in an emailed statement this month.

The attack is an edge case but one that still highlights how the use of Google accounts, even on products that aren’t necessarily designed for browsing user data, can expose information in unusual ways, including TVs in businesses or ones that have been resold or given away.

“My office is mid-way through a review of the privacy practices of streaming TV technology providers. As part of that inquiry, my staff discovered an alarming video in which a YouTuber demonstrated how with 15 minutes of unsupervised access to an Android TV set top box, a criminal could get access to private emails of the Gmail user who set up the TV,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of the $1.6tn fund, told the Financial Times it was “worrisome” that American companies were outpacing their European rivals [non paywalled link] on innovation and technology, leading to vast outperformance of US shares in the past decade. “There’s a mindset issue in terms of acceptance of mistakes and risks. You go bust in America, you get another chance. In Europe, you’re dead,” he said, adding that there was also a difference in “the general level of ambition. We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder.”

His views are significant as the oil fund is one of the largest single investors in the world, owning on average 1.5 per cent of every listed company globally and 2.5 per cent of every European equity. Its US holdings have increased in the past decade while its European ones have declined. US shares account for almost half of all its equities compared with 32 per cent in 2013. The leading European country — the UK — represented 15 per cent of its equity portfolio a decade ago but just 6 per cent last year.

Google Search rankings are all too familiar to search engine optimization (SEO) specialists charged with ensuring web pages rise to the top of search results. In the case of Tutao’s products — Tuta Mail and Tuta Calendar — all was going well until the beginning of March 2024, when the company claims tuta.com was abruptly de-ranked in Google Search. Rather than being displayed as a search result of thousands of keywords, the count dropped to the hundreds, the developer alleges.

Matthias Pfau, co-founder of Tuta Mail, said: “This reduction in Google Search took us by surprise as we did not change anything on our website during that time. We tried to reach out to Google about this issue, but were met with radio silence.” Google denies the claims. It told The Reg: “Search ranking updates absolutely do not aim to preference Google products, or any other particular website. The email provider in question is easily accessible globally on Search. We appreciate the feedback and will look into how we can ensure Search continues to return the most helpful, relevant results.”

Tuta Mail’s Pfau claims a change in results mean that when a user searches for “encrypted email,” Tuta’s products no longer show up. However, he went on to allege that if you search for “Tuta” or “Tutanota,” the company appears in the results.

With Windows 11 24H2 all geared up to have AI-intensive applications, Microsoft has added a code that will warn you if your PC does not meet the hardware requirements, according to code dug up by Twitter/X sleuth Albacore. The warning will be displayed as a watermark so you know that you cannot use certain AI-powered built-in apps because of an unsupported CPU.

Apple has removed a number of AI image generation apps from the App Store after 404 Media found these apps advertised the ability to create nonconsensual nude images, a sign that app store operators are starting to take more action against these types of apps.

Overall, Apple removed three apps from the App Store, but only after we provided the company with links to the specific apps and their related ads, indicating the company was not able to find the apps that violated its policy itself.

Apple’s action comes after we reported on Monday that Instagram advertises nonconsensual AI nude apps. By browsing Meta’s Ad Library, which archives ads on its platform, when they ran, on what platforms, and who paid for them, we were able to find ads for five different apps, each with dozens of ads. Two of the ads were for web-based services, and three were for apps on the Apple App Store. Meta deleted the ads when we flagged them. Apple did not initially respond to a request for comment on that story, but reached out to me after it was published asking for more information. On Tuesday, Apple told us it removed the three apps on its App Store.