An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Starting next year, executive M.B.A. students at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania can earn the $223,500 degree from their living rooms. After years of resistance, some of the country's top business schools are starting virtual M.B.A. programs that require only a few days of in-person instruction. Wharton and Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business said they would include options for executive and part-time M.B.A. students to take most coursework online in 2023. This fall, part-time M.B.A. students at New York University's Stern School of Business and the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business were given an online option for most of their classes. All of the programs will charge online students the same tuition as those who attend in person, and those online students will get the same degree and credential as on-campus counterparts.

The move to give students flexible location options comes as demand for two-year, full-time traditional M.B.A. programs has been dropping amid a competitive job market and growing concern about the cost of college. Between 2009 and 2020 the number of online M.B.A.s at accredited business schools in the U.S.more than doubled, and schools added more fully online M.B.A. degrees over the past two years during the pandemic, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Recent announcements by Wharton and others mark a turning point for adoption of the degrees even at highly ranked campuses, school leaders say. For decades, part of the M.B.A.'s allure has been the face-to-face networking.But over the past two years, fully online M.B.A. programs in the U.S. enrolled more students than fully in-person programs, according to the association's survey of more than 150 business schools. A McDonough official said that part-time M.B.A. students tend to be less interested in the networking aspect of school.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: IoT devices are often stitched together from various odd libraries and features. The SANS Internet Storm Center has a story about a cat feeder that not only appears to reach out to Baidu.com every five minutes but also uses a vulnerable DNS library that uses repeating query ids allowing for simple spoofing not seen since the early dark years of DNS
The article, by a SANS.edu dean of research, concludes that "Some networking libraries use 'baidu.com' for internet connectivity checks. Even if the DNS lookup succeeds, there is no actual outbound connection in this case. The device is happy as long as an IP address is returned."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Everyone depends on OpenSSL. You may not know it, but OpenSSL is what makes it possible to use secure Transport Layer Security (TLS) on Linux, Unix, Windows, and many other operating systems. It's also what is used to lock down pretty much every secure communications and networking application and device out there. So we should all be concerned that Mark Cox, a Red Hat Distinguished Software Engineer and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF)'s VP of Security, this week tweeted, "OpenSSL 3.0.7 update to fix Critical CVE out next Tuesday 1300-1700UTC." How bad is "Critical"? According to OpenSSL, an issue of critical severity affects common configurations and is also likely exploitable. It's likely to be abused to disclose server memory contents, and potentially reveal user details, and could be easily exploited remotely to compromise server private keys or execute code execute remotely. In other words, pretty much everything you don't want happening on your production systems.

The last time OpenSSL had a kick in its security teeth like this one was in 2016. That vulnerability could be used to crash and take over systems. Even years after it arrived, security company Check Point estimated it affected over 42% of organizations. This one could be worse. We can only hope it's not as bad as that all-time champion of OpenSSL's security holes, 2014's HeartBleed. [...] There is another little silver lining in this dark cloud. This new hole only affects OpenSSL versions 3.0.0 through 3.0.6. So, older operating systems and devices are likely to avoid these problems. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x and earlier and Ubuntu 20.04 won't be smacked by it. RHEL 9.x and Ubuntu 22.04, however, are a different story. They do use OpenSSL 3.x. [...] But, if you're using anything with OpenSSL 3.x in -- anything -- get ready to patch on Tuesday. This is likely to be a bad security hole, and exploits will soon follow. You'll want to make your systems safe as soon as possible.

The social networking company, which is trying to shift into the so-called metaverse, posted falling sales and said it was "making significant changes" to operate more efficiently. The New York Times reports: This year, Meta's earnings have been hit hard by its spending on the metaverse and its slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first sales decline as a public company. Its stock has plunged more than 60 percent this year. On Wednesday, Meta continued that trajectory and indicated that the decline would not end anytime soon. It said it would be "making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently," including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.

The company reported a 4 percent drop in revenue for its third quarter -- to $27.7 billion, down from $29 billion a year earlier. Net income was $4.4 billion, down 52 percent from a year earlier. Spending soared by 19 percent from a year earlier. The company's metaverse investments remained troubled. Meta said its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the virtual reality and augmented reality efforts that are central to the metaverse, had lost $3.7 billion compared with $2.6 billion a year earlier. It said operating losses for the division would grow "significantly" next year. For the current quarter, Meta forecast revenue of between $30 billion and $32.5 billion, which would be down from a year ago. The company's shares fell more than 11 percent in after-hours trading. In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and chief executive, acknowledged "near-term challenges on revenue." But he added that "the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth" and that he was "approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency."

Harry Halpin helped create uniform cryptography standards for the World Wide Web Consortium, reports Quanta magazine — but "he also wanted to protect the lower, foundational level: the network through which the information is transmitted.

"In 2018, he started Nym Technologies to take on this problem.... Halpin spoke with Quanta from Nym's headquarters in Neuchâtel, Switzerland." Halpin: The trickier problem is this: How do I communicate with you so that no one else knows I'm communicating with you, even if our messages are encrypted? You can get a sense of what people are saying from the pattern of communication: Who are you talking with, when are your conversations, how long do they last...?

There are two key elements: One is the "mixnet," a technology invented by David Chaum in 1979 that my team has improved. It relies on the premise that you can't be anonymous by yourself; you can only be anonymous in a crowd. You start with a message and break it into smaller units, communications packets, that you can think of as playing cards. Next, you encrypt each card and randomly send it to a "mixnode" — a computer where it will be mixed with cards from other senders. This happens three separate times and at three separate mixnodes. Then each card is delivered to the intended recipient, where all the cards from the original message are decrypted and put back into the proper order. No person who oversees mixing at a single mixnode can know both the card's origin and its destination. In other words, no one can know who you are talking to.

Q: That was the original mixnet, so what improvements have you made?

Halpin: For one thing, we make use of the notion of entropy, a measure of randomness that was invented for this application by Claudia Diaz, a computer privacy professor at KU Leuven and Nym's chief scientist. Each packet you receive on the Nym network has a probability attached to it that tells you, for instance, the odds that it came from any given individual.... Our system uses a statistical process that allows you both to measure entropy and to maximize it — the greater the entropy, the greater the anonymity. There are no other systems out there today that can let users know how private their communications are.

Q: What's the second key element you referred to?

Halpin: Mixnets, as I said, have been around a long time. The reason they've never taken off has a lot to do with economics. Where do the people who are going to do the mixing come from, and how do you pay them? We think we have an answer. And the kernel of that idea came from a conversation I had in 2017 with Adam Back, a cryptographer who developed bitcoin's central "proof of work" algorithm. I asked him what he would do if he were to redesign bitcoin. He said it would be great if all the computer processing done to verify cryptocurrency transactions — by solving so-called Merkle puzzles that have no practical value outside of bitcoin — could instead be used to ensure privacy.

The computationally expensive part of privacy is the mixing, so it occurred to me that we could use a bitcoin-inspired system to incentivize people to do the mixing. We built our company around that idea....

A new paper that came out in June shows that this approach can lead to an economically sustainable mixnet....

We are not building a currency system or trying to replace the dollar. We just want to provide privacy to ordinary people.

First released in 1998, the BSD-licensed software Zeek (originally named "Bro") is about to get more widely adopted, writes long-time Slashdot reader skinfaxi: Zeek, the open source network security monitoring platform, is being integrated into Windows and "is now deployed on more than one billion global endpoints," according to an announcement from Corelight.
From Corelight's press release: Corelight, the leader in open network detection and response, today announced the integration of Zeek, the world's most popular open source network security monitoring platform, as a component of Microsoft Windows and Defender for Endpoint. The integration will help security teams respond to the most challenging attacks by providing "richer signals for advanced threat hunting, complete and accurate discovery of IoT devices, and more powerful detection and response capabilities."

Originally created by Corelight co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Vern Paxson while at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Zeek transforms network traffic into compact and high-fidelity logs, file content, and behavioral analytics to accelerate security operations. Vital funding for Zeek came initially from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science. As adoption increased, Corelight was founded to provide a financial model and corporate sponsor for the project....

"Microsoft is strongly committed to supporting open source projects and ecosystems," said Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft. "We're proud to be working with Zeek and are thrilled to bring this level of network intelligence and monitoring to our customers."

"This is an amazing development for Zeek and its community of contributors and users," said Paxson. "I never imagined that the tool I developed for network monitoring would find broader application in defending endpoints — but that's part of the creative magic of open source development.

"We are grateful for Microsoft's contributions and support, and we are excited that the project's impact, and that of the community of contributors, will increase so dramatically."

tedlistens shares a report from Fast Company: Two corners of Brooklyn's historic Navy Yard will be connected by a small test bed for quantum networking, a first step toward a future "quantum internet" that promises to transform computing and make communications untappable. The effort, by a startup company called Qunnect, will join dozens of experiments around the U.S., Europe, and China, but would be the first commercial quantum network in the country, and the first to use only small, room-temperature devices. Such tools could make it easier to link quantum computers across the planet, opening the door to more practical uses of the technology in research, defense, finance, and other yet-to-be-determined applications.

"We can have these networks go all the way from here, coast to coast, and eventually global," says Dr. Noel Goddard, the CEO of Qunnect. In addition to testing a protocol for sharing quantum information across conventional fiber-optic lines, the 12-person startup will use the network to test a group of quantum networking hardware that can fit into the server racks of existing telecom buildings. Its flagship product, spun out of research at SUNY Stony Brook, is a type of device thought to be crucial to establishing the "magic" of quantum entanglement across a fiber line, called a quantum memory. The machines use rubidium vapor to briefly store photons' quantum information, with all of its weird uncertainty, so that the information can be repeated across a long-distance fiber network without disturbing it along the way. But unlike many quantum machines -- often sprawling tabletop contraptions that rely on cryogenic cooling, vacuums, and other delicate equipment -- Qunnect's memory machine operates at room temperature and fits inside a box the size of a large desk drawer.

Qunnect's sold just three of its memory machines so far, to Brookhaven National Lab and Stony Brook University, at a reported price of around $100,000 apiece. But a number of government and defense labs, along with big telecom and tech companies, from Amazon to Verizon, are paying close attention. The device has already received millions in backing from the Department of Energy and other federal and state agencies. And last week, Qunnect announced its largest endorsement yet: $8 million in funding, in a series A round led by Airbus Ventures and including The New York Ventures Fund, Impact Science Ventures, Motus Ventures, and SandboxAQ, a post-quantum security company Google spun off earlier this year. The new money will help build the test bed, which Qunnect plans to start operating by the middle of next year, when it will open it up to researchers and customers in government, finance, and telecom. These experiments will help the company learn more about a variety of proposals for building quantum networks, and, it hopes, position it as a device supplier for the whole quantum internet.

Intel and Google Cloud on Tuesday said they have launched a co-designed chip that can make data centers more secure and efficient. From a report: The E2000 chip, code named Mount Evans, takes over the work of packaging data for networking from the expensive central processing units (CPU) that do the main computing. It also offers better security between different customers that may be sharing CPUs in the cloud, explained Google's vice president of engineering, Amin Vahdat. Chips are made up of basic processors called cores. There can be hundreds of cores on a chip and sometimes information can bleed between them. The E2000 creates secure routes to each core to prevent such a scenario. Companies are running increasingly complex algorithms, using progressively bigger data sets, at a time when the performance improvement of chips like CPUs is slowing down. Cloud companies are therefore looking for ways to make the data center itself more productive.

Suspected Chinese hackers tampered with widely used software distributed by a small Canadian customer service company, another example of a "supply chain compromise" made infamous by the hack on U.S. networking company SolarWinds. From a report: U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike will say in an upcoming blog post seen by Reuters that it had discovered malicious software being distributed by Vancouver-based Comm100, which provides customer service products, such as chat bots and social media management tools, to a range of clients around the globe. The scope and scale of the hack wasn't immediately clear. In a message, Comm100 said it had fixed its software earlier Thursday and that more details would soon be forthcoming. The company did not immediately respond to follow-up requests for information. CrowdStrike researchers believe the malicious software was in circulation for a couple of days but wouldn't say how many companies had been affected, divulging only that "entities across a range of industries" were hit.

Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it will freeze hiring and restructure some teams in an effort to cut costs and shift priorities. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the social networking company's freeze during a weekly Q&A session with employees, according to a person in attendance. He added that the company would reduce budgets across most teams, even teams that are growing, and that individual teams will sort out how to handle headcount changes -- whether that means not filling roles that employees depart, shifting people to other teams, or working to "manage out people who aren't succeeding," according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. "I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively," Zuckerberg said.

A listing on a popular hacker forum offers 350 million Ask.FM user records for sale in what might be one of the biggest breaches of all time. Cybernews reports: The listing allegedly includes 350 million Ask.FM user records, with the threat actor also offering 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, and Confluence databases. Ask.FM is a question and answer network launched in June 2010, with over 215 million registered users. The posting also includes a list of repositories, sample git, and sample user data, as well as mentions of the fields in the database: user_id, username, mail, hash, salt, fbid, twitterid, vkid, fbuid, iguid. It appears that Ask.FM is using the weak hashing algorithm SHA1 for passwords, putting them at risk of being cracked and exposed to threat actors.

In response to DataBreaches, the user who posted the database -- Data -- explained that initial access was gained via a vulnerability in Safety Center. The server was first accessed in 2019, and the database was obtained on 2020-03-14. Data also suggested that Ask.FM knew about the breach as early as back in 2020. While the breach has not been confirmed, the seller called "Data" says he will "vouch all day and night for" listed user data from Ask.FM (ASKfm), the social networking site. "I'm selling the users database of Ask.fm and ask.com," Data wrote. "For connoisseurs, you can also get 607 repositories plus their Gitlab, Jira, Confluence databases."

"In addition to Ubuntu supporting the StarFive VisionFive and Nezha RISC-V boards, Canonical engineers are also working on supporting the Sipeed LicheeRV board too for next month's 22.10 release," reports Phoronix.

"The Sipeed LicheeRV is notable in being one of the cheapest RISC-V boards out there: pricing starts at $16.90 USD...." The Sipeed LicheeRV uses the Allwinner D1 SoC and is powered by a single-core XuanTie C906 64-bit RISC-V processor. This single-core RISC-V processor runs at just 1.0GHz. Yes, this is a very cheap but slow board. The LicheeRV is primarily for networking purposes and other IoT use-cases....

The Sipeed LicheeRV was announced last year and initially targeting support for OpenWrt-based Linux distributions, but Canonical recently has been working on getting support for this RISC-V board squared away in time for Ubuntu 22.10.

This appears to be part of an increasing focus by the Ubuntu maker for being a leading distribution contender for RISC-V hardware.

VMware engineers have tested the Linux kernel's fix for the Retbleed speculative execution bug, and report it can impact compute performance by a whopping 70 percent. The Register reports: In a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List titled "Performance Regression in Linux Kernel 5.19", VMware performance engineering staffer Manikandan Jagatheesan reports the virtualization giant's internal testing found that running Linux VMs on the ESXi hypervisor using version 5.19 of the Linux kernel saw compute performance dip by up to 70 percent when using single vCPU, networking fall by 30 percent and storage performance dip by up to 13 percent. Jagatheesan said VMware's testers turned off the Retbleed remediation in version 5.19 of the kernel and ESXi performance returned to levels experienced under version 5.18.

Because speculative execution exists to speed processing, it is no surprise that disabling it impacts performance. A 70 percent decrease in computing performance will, however, have a major impact on application performance that could lead to unacceptable delays for some business processes. VMware's tests were run on Intel Skylake CPUs -- silicon released between 2015 and 2017 that will still be present in many server fleets. Subsequent CPUs addressed the underlying issues that allowed Retbleed and other Spectre-like attacks.

Inside Google, a team of techies has been working behind the scenes on software for high-speed communications networks that extend from land to space. Codenamed "Minkowski" within Google, the secret project is being unveiled to the public on Monday as a new spinout called Aalyria. CNBC reports: While Google declined to offer details about Aalyria, such as how long it's been working on the technology and how many employees are joining the startup, Aalyria said in a news release that its mission is to manage "hyper fast, ultra-secure, and highly complex communications networks that span land, sea, air, near space, and deep space." The company says it has a laser communications technology "on an exponentially greater scale and speed than anything that exists today." Aalyria's software platform has been used in multiple aerospace networking projects for Google.

Aalyria (pronounced ah-Leer-eeh-ah) said it has an $8.7 million commercial contract with the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit. The company will be led by CEO Chris Taylor, a national security expert who has led other companies that have worked with the government. Taylor's LinkedIn profile says he's the CEO of a company in stealth mode that he founded in November. Aalyria's board of advisors includes several previous Google employees and executives as well as Vint Cerf, Google's chief internet evangelist who's known as one of the fathers of the web. Google will retain a minority stake in Aalyria but declined to say how much it owns and how much outside funding the company has raised. Google said that earlier this year it transferred nearly a decade's worth of intellectual property, patents and physical assets, including office space, to Aalyria. Aalyria's light laser technology, which it calls "Tightbeam," claims to keep data "intact through the atmosphere and weather and offers connectivity where no supporting infrastructure exists."

"Tightbeam radically improves satellite communications, Wi-Fi on planes and ships, and cellular connectivity everywhere," the company said.

Where did the internet come from? When students are asked that by an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, some mention ARPANET or Silicon Valley — and "no fewer than four students have simply written, 'Bill Gates....'"

But even beyond that, "The best-known histories describe an internet that hasn't existed since 1994..." argues Kevin Driscoll "the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, commercial, and cooperative networks." So in an excerpt from his new book, Driscoll describes exactly how "a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public..."

And what's often left out is the pre-web "modem world": Whereas ARPANET was created by professional researchers in university and government labs, the modem world was driven by community-oriented amateurs and entrepreneurs — hobby radio groups, computer clubs, software pirates, and activist organizations. Despite their shared interest in computer networking, these were, with rare exception, distinct spheres of social and technical activity. The predominant form of PC networking was the bulletin board system, or BBS.... The ARPANET family of networks ran on a fundamentally different infrastructure from consumer-oriented BBS networks, and relatively few people were expert users of both. BBSs were not so much ignored by institutions of power as they were overlooked....

Between 1994 and 1995, the World Wide Web — and not the BBS — became the public face of cyberspace. On television and in print, journalists touted graphical browsers like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator as the internet's future. As hype mounted, investment capital flooded the data communications industry. But instead of BBSs, the money and attention flowed to firms linked to the nascent Web. Finally, when a moral panic over "cyberporn" threatened to burst the dot-com bubble, BBSs provided a convenient scapegoat. BBSs were old and dirty; the Web was new, clean, and safe for commerce. To avoid the stigma, enterprising BBS operators quietly rebranded. Seemingly overnight, thousands of dial-up BBSs vanished, replaced by brand-new "internet service providers." In the United States, the term BBS fell out of use.

The people who built the modem world in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. Along with writing code and running up their phone bills, BBS operators developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. When internet access finally came to the public, former BBS users carried the experience of grassroots networking into the social Web. Over time, countless social media platforms have reproduced the social and technical innovations of the BBS community.

Forgetting has high stakes. As the internet becomes the compulsory infrastructure of everyday life, the stories we tell about its origins are more important than ever. Recovering the history of the modem world helps us to imagine a world beyond — or perhaps after — commercial social media, mass surveillance, and platform monopolies. Endlessly modifiable, each BBS represented an idiosyncratic dream of what cyberspace could be, a glimpse of the future written in code and accessible from your local telephone jack. Immersing ourselves in this period of experimentation and play makes the internet seem strange again. By changing how we remember the internet's past, we can change our expectations for its future.

Comcast says it's "evolving its entire network architecture" (along with its equipment and customer devices) -- and it's not just a multi-gig network. They're calling it America's fastest -- and its largest. It's being rolled out "immediately" to millions of homes and business, "combined with up to 5x-to-10x faster upload speeds."

"Comcast plans on bringing multi-gig internet speeds to 34 cities across the U.S. by the end of this year," reports the Verge, "and will later expand its reach to more than 50 million households by the end of 2025." According to a press release, the company has already started rolling out 2-gig speeds over its broadband network in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Augusta, Georgia; Panama City Beach, Florida; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Customers in these cities will also get to take advantage of upload speeds that Comcast says are five to 10 times faster than what it currently offers. The upload speeds appear to max out at 200Mbps, even with the new Gigabit x2 plan, but Comcast intends to change that. It's launching multi-gig symmetrical speeds next year, which will enable multi-gig speeds for both downloads and uploads.
"As part of this initiative, Comcast is accelerating the transformation of its network to a virtualized cloud-based architecture that is fully prepared for 10G and DOCSIS 4.0..." explains the press release, "which will deliver multi-gig symmetrical speeds over the connections already installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses."

The big advantage of digital network technology is "rather than maintaining, updating, and replacing traditional analog network appliances by hand -- which can take days or even weeks -- Comcast engineers can reliably maintain, troubleshoot, and upgrade core network components almost instantly, with a few keystrokes on a laptop or mobile app. This also makes the network much more energy efficient and is an important element of Comcast's plan to become carbon neutral by 2035."

Editor's note: An earlier version of the story said Comcast was offering 2-gigabyte download speeds when it should have said 2-gigabit. We regret the error.

Following a preview in April, Microsoft this morning announced the general availability of virtual machines (VMs) on Azure featuring the Ampere Altra, a processor based on the Arm architecture. From a report: The first Azure VMs powered by Arm chips, Microsoft says that they're accessible in 10 Azure regions today and can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service beginning on September 1.

The Azure Arm-based VMs have up to 64 virtual CPU cores, 8 GB of memory per core and 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as SSD local and attachable storage. Microsoft describes them as "engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads," including open source databases, Java and .NET applications and gaming, web, app and media servers. Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise and Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Debian are available on the VMs day one, with support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux to arrive in the future. Microsoft notes that Java apps in particular can run with few additional code changes, thanks to the company's contributions to the OpenJDK project.

Continuing the focus on delivering the world's fastest internet speeds that led Chattanooga's municipal utility to launch America's first comprehensively available Gig-speed internet service (2010) and the first 10-Gig internet service (2015), EPB has launched the nation's first community-wide 25 gigabits per second (25,000 Mbps) internet service. Chattanoogan reports: It is set to be available to all residential and commercial customers over a 100 percent fiber optic network with symmetrical upload and download speeds. Through a partnership with Hamilton County and the city of Chattanooga, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Convention Center is EPB's first 25 Gig customer, making it the first convention center worldwide to offer such blazingly fast speeds over a broadband network. With this technology, the Convention Center will be able to simultaneously provide high bandwidth connectivity to thousands of smart devices to draw business conferences, e-gaming competitions, live streaming events and more.

Hamilton County and the city of Chattanooga have each dedicated $151,000 in infrastructure funding for a total of $302,000 to cover the cost of installing new networking equipment and Wi-Fi access points throughout the convention center as well as much of the cost of providing multi-gig connectivity for the next five years. Once the new equipment is installed, visitors will be able to benefit from high-speed connectivity throughout the facility.

Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins told managers earlier this month that the networking hardware pioneer would increase its operating expenses $1 billion over the next 12 months, in part to raise employee pay to stem a rise in departures, The Information reported Friday, citing a person with direct knowledge of the situation. From a report: Robbins made the surprising comment after the company's revenue growth flatlined in the quarter that ended in July and following a 12-month period in which Cisco shrank its operating expenses as its free cash flow fell. The company didn't discuss Robbins' plan in its quarterly earnings report or conference call on Wednesday.

Cisco's move may seem unusual, given the belt-tightening happening almost everywhere else in the tech sector. Most major technology companies, including Google, Meta Platforms and Oracle, are freezing hiring, laying off employees or cutting contractors and extraneous projects as their growth slows. At the same time, these companies face enormous pressure to retain employees in a tight labor market after some workers have expressed concerns about their pay amid rising inflation. Earlier in the year, before macroeconomic conditions deteriorated further, managers' concerns about employee turnover prompted Microsoft and Amazon to announce broad pay increases.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate for the Linux kernel version 6.0, but he says the major number change doesn't signify anything especially different about this release. ZDNet: While there is nothing fundamentally different about this release compared with 5.19, Torvalds noted that there were over 13,500 non-merge commits and over 800 merged commits, meaning "6.0 looks to be another fairly sizable release." According to Torvalds, most of the updates are improvements to the GPU, networking and sound. Torvalds stuck to his word after releasing Linux kernel 5.19 last month, when he flagged he would likely call the next release 6.0 because he's "starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again."

On Sunday's release of Linux 6.0 release candidate version 1 (rc-1), he explained his reasoning behind choosing a new major version number and its purpose for developers. Again, it's about avoiding confusion rather than signaling that the release has major new features. His threshold for changing the lead version number was .20 because it is difficult to remember incremental version numbers beyond that. "Despite the major number change, there's nothing fundamentally different about this release - I've long eschewed the notion that major numbers are meaningful, and the only reason for a 'hierarchical; numbering system is to make the numbers easier to remember and distinguish," said Torvalds. Torvalds lamented some Rust-enabling code didn't make it into the release. The Register adds: "I actually was hoping that we'd get some of the first rust infrastructure, and the multi-gen LRU VM, but neither of them happened this time around," he mused, before observing "There's always more releases. This is one of those releases where you should not look at the diffstat too closely, because more than half of it is yet another AMD GPU register dump," he added, noting that Intel's Gaudi2 Ai processors are also likely to produce plenty of similar kernel additions. "The CPU people also show up in the JSON files that describe the perf events, but they look absolutely tiny compared to the 'asic_reg' auto-generated GPU and AI hardware definitions," he added.