Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are the top three proliferators of state-linked Twitter misinformation campaigns, according to a report released Wednesday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

The think tank's International Cyber Policy Centre report and corresponding website examined datasets in Twitter's Information Operations Archive to understand state willingness, capability and intent to drive disinformation campaigns.

While Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia scored first, second and third, respectively, in terms of number of campaigns out of the 17 countries examined, China and Venezuela filled the next two places on the list.

A now-former finance director stole tablet computers and other equipment worth $40 million from the Yale University School of Medicine, and resold them for a profit.

Jamie Petrone, 42, on Monday pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of filing a false tax return, crimes related to the theft of thousands of electronic devices from her former employer. As director of finance and administration in the Department of Emergency Medicine, Petrone, of Lithia Springs, Georgia, was able to purchase products for her organization without approval if the each order total was less than $10,000.

She abused her position by, for example, repeatedly ordering Apple iPads and Microsoft Surface Pro tablets only to ship them to New York and into the hands of a business listed as ThinkingMac LLC. Money made by this outfit from reselling the redirected equipment was then wired to Maziv Entertainment LLC, a now-defunct company traced back to Petrone and her husband, according to prosecutors in Connecticut [PDF].

Facebook parent Meta, which has been struggling to compete against TikTok, has reportedly been paying a Republican-oriented consulting firm to encourage negative media reports about the Chinese-owned rival.

According to The Washington Post, Targeted Victory, a firm founded by Zac Moffatt, former digital director of Republican Senator Mitt Romney's 2012 White House run, has been working for Meta to place and promote articles designed to turn the American public against TikTok.

This would be done by, for instance, writing letters to editors, and submitting op-ed columns, calling for something to be done about bad things happening on TikTok, it's said. This coverage would then be used to fuel more anti-TikTok messaging.

The widely used Zlib data-compression library finally has a patch to close a vulnerability that could be exploited to crash applications and services — four years after the vulnerability was first discovered but effectively left unfixed.

Google Project Zero bug hunter Tavis Ormandy alerted the Open-Source-Software-Security mailing list about the programming blunder, CVE-2018-25032, which he found while trying to pinpoint the cause of a compressor crash.

"I reported it upstream, but it turns out the issue has been public since 2018, but the patch never made it into a release," Ormandy wrote. "As far as I know, nobody ever assigned it a CVE."

Intel is going to tell more of its staff to return to their campus desks after many have been working from home or working in the office occasionally, judging by an internal memo sent to employees on Tuesday.

In the email, seen by The Register, Intel Chief People Officer Christy Pambianchi said the chipmaker feels it's safe to bring more employees back to its various locations at this stage of the coronavirus pandemic due to "a high level of community immunity and a 90 percent vaccination rate among our employees." The message from on high did not contain specific requirements, and instead simply signals that teams will be coming in more, though how often that will be, and which units exactly and when, will depend upon where you are and what you're doing.

In her memo and a corresponding LinkedIn post shared yesterday, Pambianchi insisted the x86 giant is "embracing flexibility" with a work policy that takes into account various factors, and framed it as "the future of work."

The US Senate this week passed the America COMPETES Act by a bipartisan 68-28 vote, moving more than $50 billion in semiconductor industry funding closer to President Biden's desk. 

The Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology, and Economic Strength Act of 2022 – yes, COMPETES – mainly focuses on subsidies for scientific research and growing the US semiconductor manufacturing industry in a bid to improve the nation's chip design prowess, increase supply-chain resiliency, and stave off another semiconductor shortage. 

At more than 2,300 pages in length, the bill definitely has its fair share of riders, too: around 29 pages of items with reduced or suspended import duties, largely good news for Chinese companies, for example. Additional elements of the bill that favor China include addressing "diplomatic, security and other foreign relations matters."

Network equipment maker Ubiquiti on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against infosec journalist Brian Krebs, alleging he defamed the company by falsely accusing the firm of covering up a cyber-attack.

On March 30, 2021, Krebs reported that Ubiquiti had disclosed a January breach involving a third-party cloud provider, later revealed to be AWS, and that an unnamed source within the firm had claimed the company was downplaying a catastrophic compromise.

On December 1, 2021, the US Department of Justice charged former Ubiquiti software engineer Nickolas Sharp, accusing him of attempting to steal data from the company and to extort $2 million from the firm in Bitcoin ransom as part of an effort to reduce the price of Ubiquiti shares. The DoJ said that after Ubiquiti refused Sharp's payment demand, he tried to sink the company's shares by publishing stolen files and engaging in a media campaign to plant damaging stories about the firm.

Intel hopes to compete against Nvidia and AMD in the discrete GPU market with now-launched standalone graphics chips for laptops. These components are said to feature a slew of technologies designed to provide smoother gaming experiences and faster content-creation performance.

The chipmaker kicked off the Intel Arc A-Series on Wednesday with the lowest-end mobile GPU of three performance tiers, Intel Arc 3, which will arrive in laptops starting in April. But it comes with the same features as the more powerful Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics that will start hitting the market in early summer.

For those eager to get their hands on Intel's discrete graphics cards for desktops, you will also have to wait, but the details Intel provided today about the new laptop GPU products will serve as a preview for what people should expect.

OpenStack's 25th release brings the usual crop of new features to the open-source cloud platform, including support for DPUs, better integration with Prometheus and Kubernetes, and a handy un-delete feature for file system shares.

Available today, Yoga marks 12 years of development of the OpenStack framework, and while it may not have lived up to the early hype, the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF) was keen to talk up its success.

OpenStack now accounts for about 25 million CPU cores in production, OIF claims, up from the 15 million reported just last year. There have also been more than 100 new clouds added, with OpenStack used at more than 180 public cloud datacenters and in nine out of 10 telcos, according to the Open Infrastructure Foundation.

It turns out the only thing Russian forces needed to knock thousands of Ukrainian satellite broadband customers offline was a misconfigured VPN.

Viasat, whose Ukrainian satellite broadband service was knocked offline the day Russia invaded Ukraine, said its analysis of the attack revealed a poorly configured VPN appliance was used by the attacker to access the trusted management section of the KA-SAT satellite network. 

The attacker gained access to the segment of the network used to manage and operate it, and then pushed legitimate, yet malicious, commands to residential modems in Ukraine and several other European countries. 

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth today aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule and accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts.

Vande Hei's 355-day mission is the longest single spaceflight for a NASA astronaut, comfortably eclipsing the 340 days of Scott Kelly's mission from 2015 to 2016.

Kelly's interactions with Roscosmos boss Dmitry Rogozin on Twitter are a reminder that Vande Hei has returned to a changed world. The International Space Station (ISS) is pretty much the last example of global cooperation in space (at least as far as Russia is concerned).