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The Ockenden report tells a terrible story of neglect. It’s a story that I – and far too many women I know – recogniseThe findings of Donna Ockenden’s report on maternity services at Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust (NUH) are horrifying. Such is the scale of suffering on the part of mothers, babies and their loved ones that it is almost beyond contemplation. Harrowing details – a room filled with the smell of infection after a woman who was told to labour at home for six days was finally granted surgery; a student doctor being allowed to perform an emergency hysterectomy on a woman, and accidentally removing her bladder; a baby’s remains being disposed of as clinical waste – haunt you long after you finish reading. And then there are all those babies, who should now be exuberant, lovely children, who died because of poor care and neglect.The victims and survivors, who campaigned long and hard for this review, don’t have the luxury of absorbing this information at their own pace, as I had to on Wednesday. They have lived with the brutal reality of it for many long years as they have fought for justice and accountability. These “mad grieving parents” – Sarah Hawkins’ description of how they were made to feel after the death of their daughter Harriet – did not give up in their quest for answers, and though they have been vindicated, I imagine there is a bitter aftertaste. Shamefully, nearly half of the senior members of staff at NUH refused to speak to Ockenden’s review.Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

The International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg was the perfect platform for Lineshine (or Língshèng 灵晟) to, well, shine, as it received the crown of the world’s most powerful computer ever built.It smashed the previous TOP500 record held by El Capitan, the US supercomputer built in 2024 by HPE for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Unlike the latter, Lineshine uses CPU power only rather than APU or GPUs, a remarkable feat given the prevalence of these technologies. Only another supercomputer in the top 10, the Arm-powered Fugaku supercomputer, falls in that category.Details shared by Lu Yutong, the chief designer of Lineshine show that it is powered by more than 13.7 million ARMv9 cores spread over 90 racks and 45,360 CPUs. Yes, you’ve got it right, there are 304 cores per socket split in two chiplets, and eight NUMA domains each with 38 cores and 4GB HBM memory. There’s apparently eight CPU slots left empty per rack.Each socket can access 256GB of DDR5 memory, which means that the entire system has 128TB off-package RAM and 16TB HBM. The entire supercomputer has 11.6PB of traditional DDR5 memory and almost 1.5PB of HBM.Compared to El Capitan pure HBM3 approach, Lineshine opted for a tiered memory pool similar to traditional computers (using RAM and SSD). The system is connected to 200PB of direct storage as well.Breathtaking performanceAltogether, Lineshine reached 2.198 exaflops, 21% faster than the 1.809 exaflop figure reached by El Capitan. However numbers don’t tell the whole story; China’s new top dog consumes far more power than El Capitan, making it far less efficient. It only reached 52 Gigaflops/Watt compared to 60.95 Gigaflops for El Capitan and 73.28 for Kairos, the greenest supercomputer in operation.What is more interesting is the fact that each core, even running at 1.5GHz, reached about 200 Gigaflops of FP64. Significantly more than any supercomputing CPU Core (e.g. AMD Zen 4 or Nvidia Grace) which ironically underlines Chinese weakness when it comes to GPU, i.e they went the CPU way because they didn’t have any option than to go brute-force.And that’s despite the barrage of launches by Huawei over the past few years with the Ascend 910D, the Ascend 910C and the Ascend 920.Lineshine used its own version of Nvidia’s Nvlink interconnect called LinQi, one that can scale in excess of 100,000 nodes or more than 60 million cores, 4x the current core count. So there’s plenty of room to grow should Lineshine want to keep its rank.It is not the first time that China sits atop the TOP500 leaderboard. The last time it achieved it was with the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer back in 2017. And while nabbing the top spot on this leaderboard gets the winner bragging rights, it is only really useful for HPC (high performance computing) applications like CFD, earthquake simulation, materials, energy, drug design, neuroscience and scientific AI, and others.Hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft can muster even more powerful compute power, by at least an order of magnitude, if needed but that is not accounted for by TOP500 for various reasons.

Zscaler uncovered “Edgecution,” a malicious Edge extension deployed via fake Outlook update sites shared in Teams phishingAttack uses ZIP archives with Python runtime to escape browser sandbox, creating a backdoor capable of shell/PowerShell execution and system data theftBelieved linked to Initial Access Brokers tied to ransomware group Payout Kings, showing evolving sophistication in access‑for‑sale operationsIf you are using the Edge browser be careful - there is a malicious campaign going round that uses the browser to deploy a backdoor via an extension.According to security researchers Zscaler, scammers are reaching out to their victims via Microsoft Teams, pretending to be IT support. They claim the user needs to install an Outlook update, or a spam filter, and direct the victims to a fake “Outlook Updates Management Console” website. There, the users are instructed to run one of the three provided processes, all of which download a ZIP archive that, when executed, creates a scheduled task. This task starts the Edge browser in headless mode (invisible to the user) and installs an extension officially called “Edge Monitoring Agent”. Zscaler, on the other hand, calls it “Edgecution”.Creating a Native Messaging manifestThe ZIP archive also contains an embedded Python runtime and a Python-based backdoor. The runtime creates a Native Messaging manifest - a file that tells the browser how to communicate with the backdoor. That’s the way the threat actors managed to escape the browser’s sandbox and run the backdoor on the compromised computer itself. That backdoor can do multiple things, from executing shell commands, to running PowerShell and arbitrary Python code. It can also write files on the host, enumerate running processes, and gather system information. Zscaler believes this is the work of an Initial Access Broker (IAB), a malicious group whose only job is to obtain access to a victim’s infrastructure and then sell it - or share it with a partnering group. This particular IAB, the researchers believe, is connected to a ransomware operation called Payout Kings. “The Edgecution browser extension illustrates the evolving sophistication of initial access brokers operating in the ransomware landscape,” Zscaler warns. “The reliance on a malicious browser extension to relay commands to a Python-based native host demonstrates a creative approach to evade traditional endpoint detection.”A full list of Indicators of Compromise (IoC) can be found on this link.Via BleepingComputer