The Russia-linked ransomware group Black Basta is responsible for Wednesday's cyberattack on St. Louis-based Ascension health system, according to sources reported by CNN. The attack disrupted access to electronic health records, some phone systems and "various systems utilized to order certain tests, procedures and medications," the company said in...

A tokamak in France achieved a new record in fusion plasma by using tungsten to encase its reaction, which enabled the sustainment of hotter and denser plasma for longer periods than previous carbon-based designs. Quartz reports: A tokamak is a torus- (doughnut-) shaped fusion device that confines plasma using magnetic fields, allowing scientists to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Apple's top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company's virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant. The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product's use of generative artificial...

A "one-of-a-kind" Google Cloud "misconfiguration" resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's account last week, disrupting the financial services provider's than half a million members. "Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline," reports The Guardian. "Investment account balances...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Imagine this: you've "dated" 600 people in San Fransisco without having typed a word to any of them. Instead, a busy little bot has completed the mindless 'getting-to-know-you' chatter on your behalf, and has told you which people you should actually get off the couch to meet. That's the future...

Search giant Baidu fires its head of public relations after she outraged Gen Z workers. From a report [non-paywalled link]: The head of public relations at a major Chinese tech firm gained hundreds of thousands of followers seemingly overnight after posting a series of viral videos laying out her unapologetically tyrannical management style....