A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers.
Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux.
Now you see it, now you don't
AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public.
"Battered by years of mass layoffs, California tech workers were hoping the job market would rebound this year," reports the Los Angeles Times. "But things are getting worse."
The class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees is landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work. The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired....
Since 2022, more than 815,500 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts. The tsunami of pink slips surged in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts this year, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that the number of information jobs — which includes jobs in hard-hit Hollywood as well as tech — tumbled 17% between the middle of 2022 and this February. The San Francisco Bay Area has been hardest hit, the institute said in a recent report, with the number of jobs declining by 0.4%, compared with 7.5% growth over a similar time span before COVID-19 slammed into the U.S. economy.
Tech layoffs are also spilling over into other industries. Automaker General Motors laid off roughly 600 workers in its information technology department, and Walmart is reportedly laying off or relocating roughly 1,000 workers in its technology and products teams. Recruiters say companies have become much more selective, requiring AI skills, combining different positions and interviewing more people for each job. "You're seeing elongated hiring cycles," said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a California company that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers and other contingent workers. "There's more opportunity to fill the need that they truly want."
Paul Flaharty, district president at staffing firm Robert Half in Los Angeles, said companies are laying off workers, but also creating new roles tied to AI initiatives. "For individuals that are displaced, it's really important that they find ways to upskill themselves so that they can make themselves as attractive as possible for these new jobs that are being created," he said. Kira Martins was already taking on more work in a small team at Snap — the parent company of disappearing messaging app Snapchat — when she was laid off in April. The company said the layoffs were to cut costs as it focuses on profitability, noting how employees are using AI to "reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers...." Martins, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident, views AI as a tool and is optimistic about finding her next role. People still need to decide how to use AI and check the work it generates, she said. "In tech, you want to be a first adopter, because if you don't move quickly, it's very easy to become irrelevant," she said. "Everyone's kind of hopping on the AI train."
A former Google worker (laid off more than a year ago) says he's still job hunting, according to the article, and "he's learned it's not enough to just apply in this competitive market. Workers really need to network and leverage their connections to get seen by hiring managers and stand out."
But when 64-year-old product manager Bruce Bowers lost his job at Oracle — along with thousands of others — he just started his retirement early.
For many, including European Union policy makers, increased use of open source software is a key part of the answer, offering an alternative to proprietary platforms from a handful of large US vendors.
That’s the view of Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, the German software vendor that bills itself as an open-source alternative to software suites from the likes of Microsoft and Google.
Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek speaking at the German software company’s Nextcloud Summit 2026.
Nextcloud
Karlitschek founded the company in 2016, forking OwnCloud’s open-source file-sharing software. Since then, Nextcloud has expanded its products to include a range of productivity and collaboration tools that organizations can install and run on their own servers or access via cloud providers.
More recently, Nextcloud helped develop the Euro-Office application suite, which launched last week as an open source alternative to Microsoft Office and others, and continues to build out its Nextcloud Hub with AI assistant and agent features. The company now says revenues are growing at between 50% to 100% year over year.
Computerworld spoke to Karlitschek at Nextcloud Summit about momentum around digital sovereignty, the European Commission’s Tech Sovereignty Package proposals, and how Nextcloud hopes to evolve in the coming years.
The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
When Nextcloud launched, there was a big push in Europe away from on-premise software towards US cloud providers. How have attitudes towards open source and awareness of alternatives providers changed since then? “I’ve been doing open source since the ‘90s; at the time it was mostly for a nerdy audience — a very small group of people who really care about software and being in control. The sovereignty part was always there. It’s the core idea behind open source that you can understand what the software is doing, you can deploy it wherever you want, you can study it and change it, and so on.
“At the time, it was very niche, and since then it’s really growing and growing. There are certain points in time that really accelerated the growth; something like the Snowden revelations, for example, or the whole discussion about GDPR and certain legislation. And then, of course, the current geopolitical situation.
“I personally find it interesting that it grew from something that is just interesting for software developers, and now it’s on the geopolitical stage. I have meetings with big politicians who really care about it now, and I personally find it interesting that it’s increasingly understood by — I wouldn’t say the mainstream, but more and more people.
“At the beginning of Nextcloud, we mostly talked with IT managers looking for a solution; they care about how it works, the price and other things. But now we are also talking with the C-level people. It’s part of an overall strategy of a company, to say, ‘Hey, we need to look into the dependencies, we want to have a solution that fits into the strategy of the company.’
“In the past, it was like a commodity – it’s just some software, who cares? Now, it’s really part of the company strategy. That’s really interesting.”
There’s been a lot of interest around digital sovereignty over the past couple of years. To what degree is this translating into action, with organizations migrating away from US cloud providers? “The interest is gigantic. Everybody’s talking about it, we have so many contacts and people coming to us. Not everybody is doing it — a lot of people are just exploring and seeing what the options are.
“Obviously, we hope that this will translate into actions in a few months. At the moment, it’s a lot of talking and exploring the options. As a company, we are also growing a lot in customer base. But the interest in this space is even bigger; we see it as the beginning of a funnel.
‘In defense we see a lot of interest, then also everything around education is very important for us, then other regulated markets like the healthcare, for example. Finance is an interesting one.”
A lot of the conversations around digital sovereignty are tied to the current geopolitical situation and even the US administration. Do you see demand for sovereign technology as a structural change or are some organizations holding back to see how the situation improves in the future? “I see it as a long-term trend. If you look at the IT budgets and projects in the ‘90s, it was some something unimportant. It was, of course, important that the printer works and the fax machine works, but it was not definitely not strategic for the company.
“And then in 2000, the whole cloud trend came up, and there was the big hope that this will save money. It was always the narrative with cloud computing that you can just outsource it and save money and it’s great.
“Nowadays, people realize that it’s not something that you can just ignore. I wouldn’t say that everything comes back on premise, but people care about it now. They understand it’s not just a commodity, like water, or electricity that comes out of the wall and you don’t care what’s behind it. People realize that it’s something that has an impact on the future of an organization, from a vendor lock-in perspective, from a cost perspective, from an industry espionage perspective, and competitiveness. With open source, you’re more flexible. So, I think the trend that this is all more strategic and important for the future, this will go on.”
The European Commission recently published its Tech Sovereignty Package, including its open source strategy. Are these proposals sufficient to address the concern around digital sovereignty and support the open source ecosystem in Europe?
“It’s great, I really like it. I was actually surprised they listened so well. But now the real challenge is to actually do it; this still needs to happen. The description of the problem and a possible solution, this is all very good. I’m surprised, I’m happy about it, but to put this into actually binding law, this still needs happen.”
Would you like to see any changes to the current proposals before they’re gets passed into legislation? “At the moment, they have these four different risk levels, and the most critical one — No. 4 — is one where they accept only open source and European solutions. This is the highest risk level, but this is only for 1% of the market. I hope that it’s better understood that more than 1% should care about this more.
“If you have something which is completely not critical, maybe doesn’t possess any personal data at all — sure, it’s totally fine [to use non-EU suppliers]. But if you have GDPR requirements, espionage protection, no vendor lock-in, and so on, then there should be more of that [the highest requirement level].”
US firms have attempted to address European customers’ concerns in different ways, with sovereign marketed cloud services and joint ventures with European providers. Microsoft 365 Local is designed to run on premise. Where do you draw the line between what’s actually a sovereign solution and what some call ‘sovereignty washing? “Sovereignty has different dimensions, of course. But if you look at the problem of the CLOUD Act alone, which gives foreign agencies full access to the data here, then the whole idea that it’s enough to have European data centers — that’s not enough. It’s clearly written in the CLOUD Act, that even with [European] data centers, or subsidiaries, it still applies.
“Microsoft tries to find a solution there with its Delos idea; a company that is owned by SAP — a German company — and Microsoft delivers only the software. But even then, you have this dependency, because software needs updates and software security updates. And if they’re not available, or if someone puts a backdoor into the software, which is possible, then you still have a problem.
“So, they’re trying really, really hard to find a way around the problem, but it’s not easy for them.”
To look ahead a bit in terms of the product strategy, there were announcements for Nextcloud Hub this week around AI agents, and the program to work with independent software vendors. What do these say about Nextcloud’s future? “The overall product strategy will not change so much; it’s about having state-of-the-art collaboration software — but with a lot more control, security and safety — that’s open source and independent where you host it. So this will always stay, but of course, there’s some additional factors that come into play now, like the AI impact that we see and want to leverage with our agent strategy.
“We’ve had this for one and a half years already, but we are expanding that. In the future, you might still use an interface in a classic way that you open documents and type in text and so on. But there are also a lot of operations that can be automated in the future with AI. And this is something we really invest a lot into.
“Another aspect of AI is how easy it is to build custom software around it. The coding models are getting better all the time, which means there will be more and more custom business software. This is what we want to capture with our ISV program. Software development will become easier, but you don’t want to deploy just random software in your company, you want to have something that is tested, certified and secured, and that somebody’s accountable for it. This can be something we can provide at Nextcloud.”
Editor’s note: NextCloud paid for Matthew Finnegan’s travel and hotel costs for NextCloud Summit 2026, but had no editorial role in the creation of this story.
MIT’s new two-in-one space engine could turn tiny satellites into surprisingly capable deep-space explorers. Researchers at MIT are testing a new propulsion technology that could give small satellites a major boost in capability. The system combines two very different forms of spacecraft propulsion in a single package, allowing satellites to perform both rapid maneuvers and [...]
O Trump Phone não é o que parece e uma nova desmontagem da iFixit confirma o que muitos suspeitavam. Afinal, o smartphone é quase idêntico ao HTC U24 Pro, lançado em 2024.
The unveiling of the new garment by Prada and Axiom Space took place at Prada’s SoHo location in Manhattan just days before the announcement of the Artemis III crew, according to the New York Timesfashion desk. With black-clad waiters circulating champagne and healthy juices through the Rem Koolhaas-designed venue, the intersection of fashion and space exploration was once again on full display.
“The future of space exploration will not be built by any one entity alone, and our partnership with Prada is proof of that,” said Dr. Jonathan Cirtain, Axiom Space CEO and President, in a statement.
“By bringing together the best in both aerospace engineering as well as luxury craftmanship and advanced product development, we have developed a garment that neither company could have created independently, and that is exactly the kind of cross-industry thinking that will define the next era of human spaceflight,” Cirtain added.
Some might be surprised to learn this is not the first time NASA has collaborated with a fashion house. The first modern spacesuit was designed and crafted by a group of international designers at the Latex Corporation (ILC). In the 1960s, this company was best known for manufacturing bras and girdles.
Notably, a version of its A7L spacesuit was worn by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission. Designers developed the A7L to protect astronauts from the harsh conditions of space and the lunar surface.
The suit was constructed using materials such as neoprene, Beta cloth—which helped protect astronauts from extreme temperatures—and aluminized Mylar. Overall, it was a highly complex, multilayered design.
The new LCVG collaboration draws on Prada’s expertise in knitting, craftsmanship, and advanced design. The resulting garment is a next-generation system developed using sophisticated 3D modeling techniques.
The suit is designed to maintain cooling and ventilation while remaining comfortable during spacewalks lasting up to eight hours. Thanks to its high-performance materials, it can also be worn repeatedly during long-duration missions.
“When we unveiled the AxEMU, we announced that the collaboration between Prada and Axiom Space would continue beyond that first milestone,” said Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Sustainability, in a statement.
“Today, we are proud to present a new achievement born from the unique combination of Axiom Space’s pioneering expertise and Prada’s know-how in design, patternmaking, and advanced materials, ahead of humanity’s return to the lunar surface,” Bertelli added.
In 2024, Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the AxEMU’s outer layer, designed to withstand the harsh conditions of the lunar South Pole. Their latest collaboration on the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment builds on that partnership, focusing on astronaut comfort, thermal regulation, and reliability inside the spacesuit.
“We look forward to continuing this collaboration with Axiom Space, pushing boundaries and exploring new frontiers together,” adds Bertelli.
The LCVG keeps astronauts cool during spacewalks by circulating chilled water through tubes woven into the garment, removing body heat and venting it through the spacesuit. It also delivers fresh oxygen and removes carbon dioxide, helping astronauts remain safe and comfortable in the harsh environment of space.
“Every minute astronauts spend outside their vehicle, the LCVG is working to keep them safe,” said Russell Ralston, Axiom Space Senior Vice President of Spacecraft Development.
“It manages their thermal environment, supports their breathing, and does it all while they’re pushing their bodies to the limit,” Ralson added. “The work we have done with Prada has taken that capability to a level we could not have achieved alone.”
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.
One of the world’s most active ransomware groups exploited a critical vulnerability in Oracle’s PeopleSoft software suite and used it to target about 100 customers and extort at least one of them to pay up in exchange for not leaking stolen data, researchers said.
The group, tracked as ShinyHunters, had been exploiting the PeopleSoft vulnerability for more than two weeks before Oracle flagged it. CVE-2026-35273, as the vulnerability is tracked, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10, making the former zero-day one of the year’s most critical vulnerabilities to be exploited.
Google’s Mandiant security team said it’s an SSRF (server-side request forgery), a vulnerability that allows attackers to send requests from a susceptible server to systems used by the targeted organization. Oracle said the SSRF is remotely exploitable, and the company has issued a stopgap mitigation but has yet to fully patch the flaw. Google has confirmed that victims are receiving extortion demands.
Portugal reforçou a sua presença na edição de 2025 do Technology Fast 500 EMEA. com 18 empresas distinguidas. A melhor classificação portuguesa pertence à Bloq.it que ocupa novamente o segundo lugar no ranking da Deloitte.
A conferência anual da Agência Espacial Portuguesa regressa a Lisboa este mês e segue o tema "A Arquitetura do Poder: Geopolítica na Segunda Era da Exploração Espacial”. A participação é gratuita, com inscrição obrigatória.
Celestron's iconic orange NexStar series is on sale on Amazon and includes the smallest of the set, the NexStar 4SE, a perfect first telescope for new stargazers. It has a 4-inch aperture and go-to technology for easily finding night sky objects.
Apesar dos progressos significativos na conectividade de fibra de alta velocidade em Portugal, um novo estudo mostra que que muitos utilizadores continuam a enfrentar problemas de latência, bloqueios, paragens de carregamento e quebras de ligação.
Labour’s goal of 'dynamic alignment' with the EU is bad news for the party's beloved Net Zero, says Ben Pile. Even more than in Britain, the backlash in Europe against ruinous climate policies is gathering steam.
Physicists at the University of Oxford have engineered a new class of ‘cat states’ -- quantum superpositions constructed not from ordinary wave packets, but from deeply exotic, nonclassical components -- opening unexpected paths toward more resilient quantum computers.
The team behind the novel propulsion technology said that electrospray thrusters could allow mission planners to design smaller, more nimble satellites and spacecraft capable of performing faster, more powerful maneuvers or slower, more precise adjustments, depending on mission requirements.
Electrospray Combines the Best of Chemical and Electric Propulsion
Launching rockets into space still requires chemical thrusters, but once spacecraft and satellites reach orbit, engineers continue to develop novel propulsion methods that are more efficient than chemical propulsion technologies. Given the strict weight requirements of spacecraft launches, finding alternatives to chemical propellants has opened up a wider range of mission profiles.
Among the most common alternatives to chemical thrusters are designs that combine electrical energy with small amounts of propellant to produce small but sustainable thrust. Although electric thruster designs require less fuel, saving significantly on launch weight, they also lack both the power and the rapid, quick burst performance of chemical thrusters.
According to study author Amelia Bruno, a former postdoc in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), combining chemical and electrical propulsion into a single system is “the best of both worlds.”
“This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform,” Bruno explained to MIT News.
Study co-author Paulo Lozano, the Miguel Alemán Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, agreed, noting that combining both technologies could enable a CubeSat mission to Mars “where they could make the journey slowly, using electrospray thrusters.”
“You could then use your chemical thrusters to quickly move to look at interesting features,” the professor added. “You could have a lot more flexibility to do a lot more things.”
ASCENT Rocket Fuel as the Thruster’s Ionic Liquid Propellant Enables Hybrid Design
According to a statement detailing the new electrospray thruster’s design, the ones developed by the MIT team are about the size of a thumbnail. Each thruster is also placed directly above a small fuel reservoir. For the MT electrospray thrusters, the fuel is an ionic liquid propellant, a liquid composed of salts that remain dissolved in a solution.
These four flight-unit electrospray thrusters were delivered by the MIT Space Propulsion Laboratory to NASA for the upcoming Green Propulsion Dual Mode (GPDM) mission. Image Credit: Amelia Bruno
“Ionic liquids are very stable and can even remain a liquid in space, which not a lot of materials can do,” Bruno explained. “And it’s basically a sea of ions, which is why we base our technology around it, so we can pull those ions out into an electrospray.”
When a spacecraft’s battery delivers an electric charge to the fuel reservoir, the ions within the fuel also become charged. The thruster’s design channels the charged particles from the reservoir and through the thruster tips, expelling them into space.
Although the team has tested several types of ionic propellant in its electrospray propulsion thrusters, Bruno and Lozano have collaborated with the U.S. Air Force to synthesize an all-new ionic liquid propellant, which they are calling the Advanced SpaceCraft Energetic Non-Toxic propellant, or ASCENT.
Originally designed as a “green” alternative to extremely hazardous hydrazine rocket fuel that has been the staple in the rocket industry for decades, Bruno notes that ASCENT “happens to be an ionic liquid mixture.”
“And we said, hey, that’s the stuff we typically use,” the researcher added. “Theoretically, this should work. Let’s go figure out how.”
Tests: Chemical Propellant Equally Efficient as Conventional Ionic Liquids
To test their electrospray design, each tested thruster was attached to a small reservoir about the size of a single Lego brick, and then the reservoir was filled with ASCENT. Next, electrospray thrusters were mounted on opposite sides of a traditional CubeSat.
To simulate the microgravity environment of Near-Earth Orbit, the team placed the thruster-equipped CubeSat on a MagLev stand. The team noted that the MagLev in Lozano’s lab is installed inside a large vacuum chamber. This design allows the researchers to fine-tune the environment to best mimic the conditions in space.
During a series of tests, the team applied varying voltage levels to the electrospray thrusters. As expected, the reaction produced a spray from the thruster nozzles, which spun the CubeSat around on the MagLev stand like a freely spinning top.
During each thruster firing, the team measured the amount of thrust produced. This data, combined with the voltage and fuel data, allowed the team to calculate ASCENT’s fuel efficiency during continuous operation. Some tests lasted up to 100 hours.
When the MIT group evaluated the results, they first determined that the choice of ASCENT was correct, as it successfully fueled each electrospray thruster. Even more significantly, the tests revealed that the readily available chemical propellant was equally efficient as conventional ionic liquids.
“Compared to our normal electrospray propellants, ASCENT can provide similar performance in terms of thrust,” Bruno explained. “Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better.”
Testing Electrospray Thrusters on NASA’s Green Propulsion Dual Mode Mission
When discussing the benefits of their successful electrospray thruster tests, Lozano noted that a spacecraft with electric and chemical thrusters can share a single fuel tank. Due to its compact design, this hybrid electrospray thruster could be mounted on a small satellite.
Fortunately, the team won’t have to wait long to see their thruster in action. According to the research team, whose work was partially supported by NASA, their design will be incorporated into NASA’s upcoming Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission scheduled to launch in November. The Green Propulsion Dual-Mode mission will carry a briefcase-sized CubeSat with a primary chemical thruster and specially designed electrospray thrusters, making it the first attempt to combine electrical and chemical propulsion in a small spacecraft.
“This will be the first time that a satellite will have a shared propellant tank,” Lozano explained.
Although a large portion of proposed electric propulsion missions that might employ the new electrospray thruster are designed to explore deeper into the Solar System and beyond, Lozano also highlighted the technology’s possible applications closer to home. For example, satellites equipped with both technologies could rapidly respond to environmental or climate changes in real time with a speed and efficiency unavailable with current propulsion options.
“Say there’s a storm coming, and you’d want to deploy your constellation of small satellites to observe over one location,” the researcher explained. “You could choose to send them quickly or slowly, depending on the nature of the observation.”
“And the only way to do that is if you have two propulsion systems, which is now possible,” he added.
Although the mission will not launch before November, Bruno noted that a successful test could allow engineers to consider missions they never thought possible.
“Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better,” the researcher explained.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for two high-severity zero-days that were disclosed by a researcher who has been locked in a testy beef with the software giant.
Nightmare Eclipse, the pseudonym the researcher goes by, released a handful of high-severity vulnerabilities in recent months, making them zero-days that had the potential to be exploited in the wild. The researcher has said the disclosures, which included proof-of-concept code, came after Microsoft reneged on an arrangement the two made regarding vulnerabilities they had discussed.
Disclosure drama
“But someone violated our agreement and left me homeless with nothing,” Nightmare Eclipse wrote in March. “They knew this will happen and they still stabbed me in the back anyways, this is their decision not mine.”
Researchers have analyzed a high-severity vulnerability in Linux that’s able to escalate untrusted users to root by exploiting a bug you don't often see: a single errant character inside the kernel.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-23111, is located in nf_tables, a subsystem of the Linux kernel that provides packet filtering capabilities. It’s used to manage firewall rules and replaces older subsystems such as iptables, ip6tables, arptables, and ebtables.
!!!WTF!!!
The presence of a single mis-issued exclamation point in code implementing nf_tables introduced a use-after-free, a class of vulnerability that corrupts memory by placing malicious code at memory addresses that haven’t been properly freed of their previous contents. CVE-2026-23111 can be exploited by an unprivileged user or process to elevate system rights to root.
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