Microsoft's motivation for investing heavily and partnering with OpenAI came from a sense of falling badly behind Google, according to an internal email released Tuesday as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case against the search giant. Bloomberg: The Windows software maker's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, was "very, very worried" when he looked at the AI model-training capability gap between Alphabet's efforts and Microsoft's, he wrote in a 2019 message to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. The exchange shows how the company's top executives privately acknowledged they lacked the infrastructure and development speed to catch up to the likes of OpenAI and Google's DeepMind. [...] Scott, who also serves as executive vice president of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, observed that Google's search product had improved on competitive metrics because of the Alphabet company's advancements in AI. The Microsoft executive wrote that he made a mistake by dismissing some of the earlier AI efforts of its competitors. "We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale," Scott said in the email. Significant portions of the message, titled 'Thoughts on OpenAI,' remain redacted. Nadella endorsed Scott's email, forwarding it to Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and saying it explains "why I want us to do this."

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The massive volumes of debt piling up around the globe forced the president of the World Economic Forum to reach back more than 200 years for a comparable period. Fortune: In an interview Sunday with CNBC at a WEF conference in Saudi Arabia, Borge Brende warned overall debt is approaching the world's total economic output. "We haven't seen this kind of debt since the Napoleonic Wars," he said. "We're getting close to 100% of global GDP in debt." According to the International Monetary Fund last year, global public debt hit $91 trillion, or 92% of GDP, by the end of 2022. That was actually a dip from pandemic-era debt levels but remained in line with a decades-long trend higher. Data on global debt during the Napoleonic Wars, which took place in the early 1800s, is harder to come by. But for comparison, some estimates put British government debt at more than 200% of GDP by 1815. Brende also told CNBC that governments need to take fiscal measures to reduce their debts without triggering a recession. For now, global growth is about 3.2% annually, which isn't bad, but it's also below the 4% trend growth the world had seen for decades, he said earlier in the interview. That risks a repeat of the 1970s, when growth was low for a decade, Brende added. But the world can avoid such an outcome if it continues to trade and doesn't engage in more trade wars. "Trade was the engine of growth for decades," he said.

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LinkedIn, the professional network known for job listings and unsolicited career advice, is jumping into gaming. From a report: The platform is officially introducing a set of Wordle-style puzzle games, weeks after they were first spotted in the app. The company is starting with three games: Pinpoint, a word game where players must guess the theme that ties a series of words together; Queens, a puzzle game that's a bit like a cross between Sudoku and Minesweeper; and Crossclimb, a trivia game that involves guessing a series of four-letter words and placing them in the correct order. LinkedIn describes them as "thinking-oriented games," though the format will likely look familiar to fans of The New York Times Games app. Each game can only be played once a day, and players can share their score with friends in cute emoji-filled messages reminiscent of the "Wordle grid." The service will also keep track of "streaks," to encourage players to come back every day. Given the similarities, it shouldn't be surprising that games were developed by LinkedIn's news team, which recently hired a dedicated games editor.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who has said his "biological age" is roughly a decade younger than his actual one, has put forward his largely unlined face as a spokesman for the longevity movement. The 54-year-old has built his brand on the idea that aging is a treatable disease. The notion has proven so seductive that legions of acolytes follow his online postings about his research and the cocktails of supplements he consumes to stave off the inevitable. His social-media accounts are a platform for assertions that his work is pushing nearer to a fountain of youth. He claimed last year that a gene therapy invented in his Harvard lab and being developed by a company he co-founded, Life Biosciences, had reversed aging and restored vision in monkeys. "Next up: age reversal in humans," he wrote on X and Instagram. On Feb. 29, in the eyes of many other scientists working to unlock the mysteries of aging, he went too far. Another company he co-founded, Animal Biosciences, quoted him in a press release saying that a supplement it had developed had reversed aging in dogs. Scientists who study aging can't even agree on what it means to "reverse" aging, much less how to measure it. The response was swift and harsh. The Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, a group of about 60 scientists that Sinclair co-founded and led, was hit with a cascade of resignations by members outraged by his claims. One scientist who quit referred to Sinclair on X as a "snake oil salesman." Days later, in a tense video meeting, the academy's five other board members pressed Sinclair to resign as president. He contended that the press release contained an inaccurate quote, according to people who were in the meeting, but he later stepped down. Sinclair's work is published regularly in top-tier scientific journals and has brought attention to an emerging field vying for credibility and funding. He has parlayed his research into hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in various companies, more than 50 patents and prominence as a longevity influencer. Along the way, his claims -- especially in his social-media posts, interviews and his book -- have drawn criticism from scientists who have accused him of hyping his research and extolling unproven products, including some from companies in which he had a financial interest. "My lab's ideas and findings are typically ahead of the curve, which is why some peers might feel the research is overstated at the time," Sinclair said to The Wall Street Journal in an email. "I stand behind my track record as a trusted scientist in one of the most competitive professions of all." He said he doesn't engage with social-media critics, including those calling him a snake oil salesman, and that many such comments are "nothing more than mischaracterizations."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Sunday, word began to spread on social media about a new mystery chatbot named "gpt2-chatbot" that appeared in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. Some people speculate that it may be a secret test version of OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 large language model (LLM). The paid version of ChatGPT is currently powered by GPT-4 Turbo. Currently, the new model is only available for use through the Chatbot Arena website, although in a limited way. In the site's "side-by-side" arena mode where users can purposely select the model, gpt2-chatbot has a rate limit of eight queries per day -- dramatically limiting people's ability to test it in detail. [...] On Monday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly dropped a hint by tweeting, "i do have a soft spot for gpt2." [...] OpenAI's fingerprints seem to be all over the new bot. "I think it may well be an OpenAI stealth preview of something," AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. But what "gpt2" is exactly, he doesn't know. After surveying online speculation, it seems that no one apart from its creator knows precisely what the model is, either. Willison has uncovered the system prompt for the AI model, which claims it is based on GPT-4 and made by OpenAI. But as Willison noted in a tweet, that's no guarantee of provenance because "the goal of a system prompt is to influence the model to behave in certain ways, not to give it truthful information about itself."

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AmiMoJo shares a report from Tech Times: China has reached a major landmark in green transportation with the launch of the world's largest fully electric container ship. Developed and manufactured by China Ocean Shipping Group (Cosco), the vessel is now operating a regular service route between Shanghai and Nanjing, aiming to reduce emissions significantly along its journey. The Greenwater 01, an all-electric container ship, is positioning itself to be a shipping industry pioneer. Equipped with a main battery exceeding 50,000 kilowatt-hours, the vessel can accommodate additional battery boxes for longer voyages. These battery boxes, each containing 1,600 kilowatt-hours of electricity and similar in size to standard 20-foot containers, provide flexibility in extending the ship's travel range. With 24 battery boxes onboard, the Greenwater 01 can complete a journey consuming 80,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is equivalent to saving 15 tons of fuel compared to a standard container ship, highlighting the efficiency of electric propulsion systems. According to Cosco, the vessel can reduce CO2 emissions by 2,918 tons per year, which is equivalent to taking 2,035 family cars off the road or planting 160,000 trees.

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Satellite operator SES plans to buy fellow satellite operator Intelsat, in a $3.1 billion deal that's expected to close next year. According to Space Magazine, the combined company could help it "compete with SpaceX's huge Starlink broadband network." From the report: SES and Intelsat both operate communications satellites in geostationary orbit, which lies 22,236 miles (35,785 kilometers) above Earth. SES also runs a constellation called O3b in medium Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 5,000 miles (8,000 km). As [SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh] noted, there is increasingly fierce competition for the services provided by these satellites -- for example, from SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation in low Earth orbit. And other LEO megaconstellations are in the works as well. For instance, Amazon launched the first two prototypes for its planned 3,200-satellite Project Kuiper network this past October. "By combining our financial strength and world-class team with that of SES, we create a more competitive, growth-oriented solutions provider in an industry going through disruptive change," Intelsat CEO David Wajsgras said in the same statement. "The combined company will be positioned to meet customers' needs around the world and exceed their expectations," he added.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. wind power slipped last year for the first time in a quarter-century due to weaker-than-normal Midwest breezes, underscoring the challenge of integrating volatile renewable energy sources into the grid. Power produced by turbines slipped 2% in 2023, even after developers added 6.2 gigawatts of new capacity, according to a government report Tuesday. The capacity factor for the country's wind fleet -- how much energy it's actually generating versus its maximum possible output -- declined to an eight-year low of 33.5%. Most of that decline was driven by the central US, a region densely dotted with turbines. Wind is a key component of the effort to cut carbon emissions, but the data highlights the downside of relying on intermittent energy sources tied to the effects of global weather. Last year's low wind speeds came during El Nino, a warming of the equatorial Pacific that tends to weaken trade winds. La Nina, the Pacific cooling pattern that dominated in 2022 and is poised to return later this year, usually has the opposite effect. The U.S. Energy Information Administration shared the findings in a report published earlier today.

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An anonymous reader shares that IPv6rs has debuted a new one-click self hosting system: Everyone seemed like they were talking about self hosting, but we didn't understand why it wasn't more prolific. Thus, we conducted a survey to hear reasons. It turned out the two most common reasons were: 1. Lack of an external IP address 2. Too difficult to setup and maintain Our service already solves the first issue. We set out with a self-hostathon to figure out what the blockers were in setting up and running a self-hosted server. ... writes IPv6rs on their blog. We needed to make things easier, so we created Cloud Seeder, a one click installer that instantly launches a fully encapsulated server appliance that is externally reachable. At the time of launching, the current version of Cloud Seeder supports 20+ different appliances - from Mastodon which federates with Meta's Threads to Nextcloud which provides an enterprise-level, self-hosted alternative to the big-name collaboration suites. It also automatically handles updates/maintenance. We hope this will bring a new era to self hosting and, in turn, will bring the decentralized internet forest back. Is the self hosting era making its return?

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Kaiser Permanente is the latest healthcare giant to report a data breach. Kaiser said 13.4 million current and former insurance members had their patient data shared with third-party advertisers, thanks to an improperly implemented tracking code the company used to see how its members navigated through its websites. Dark Reading reports: The shared data included names, IP addresses, what pages people visited, whether they were actively signed in, and even the search terms they used when visiting the company's online health encyclopedia. Kaiser has reportedly removed the tracking code from its sites, and while the incident wasn't a hacking event, the breach is still concerning from a security perspective, according to Narayana Pappu, CEO at Zendata. "The presence of third-party trackers belonging to advertisers, and the oversharing of customer information with these trackers, is a pervasive problem in both health tech and government space," he explains. "Once shared, advertisers have used this information to target ads at users for complementary products (based on health data); this has happened multiple times in the past few years, including at Goodrx. Although this does not fit the traditional definition of a data breach, it essentially results in the same outcome -- an entity and the use case the data was not intended for has access to it. There is usually no monitoring/auditing process to identify and prevent the issue."

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Mishaal Rahman reports via Android Authority: Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android's Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that "remove ACK's support for riscv64." The description of these patches states that "support for risc64 GKI kernels is discontinued." ACK stands for Android Common Kernel and refers to the downstream branches of the official kernel.org Linux kernels that Google maintains. The ACK is basically Linux plus some "patches of interest to the Android community that haven't been merged into mainline or Long Term Supported (LTS) kernels." There are multiple ACK branches, including android-mainline, which is the primary development branch that is forked into "GKI" kernel branches that correspond to a particular combination of supported Linux kernel and Android OS version. GKI stands for Generic Kernel Image and refers to a kernel that's built from one of these branches. Every certified Android device ships with a kernel based on one of these GKI branches, as Google currently does not certify Android devices that ship with a mainline Linux kernel build. Since these patches remove RISC-V kernel support, RISC-V kernel build support, and RISC-V emulator support, any companies looking to compile a RISC-V build of Android right now would need to create and maintain their own fork of Linux with the requisite ACK and RISC-V patches. Given that Google currently only certifies Android builds that ship with a GKI kernel built from an ACK branch, that means we likely won't see certified builds of Android on RISC-V hardware anytime soon. Our initial interpretation of these patches was that Google was preparing to kill off RISC-V support in Android since that was the most obvious conclusion. However, a spokesperson for Google told us this: "Android will continue to support RISC-V. Due to the rapid rate of iteration, we are not ready to provide a single supported image for all vendors. This particular series of patches removes RISC-V support from the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI)." Based on Google's statement, Rahman suggests that "there's still a ton of work that needs to be done before Android is ready for RISC-V." "Even once it's ready, Google will need to redo the work to add RISC-V support in the kernel anyway. At the very least, Google's decision likely means that we might need to wait even longer than expected to see commercial Android devices running on a RISC-V chip."

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Arcade giant Dave & Buster's said it will begin allowing customers to bet on arcade games. "Customers can soon make a friendly $5 wager on a Hot Shots basketball game, a bet on a Skee-Ball competition or on another arcade game," reports CNBC. "The betting function, expected to launch in the next few months, will work through the company's app." From the report: Dave & Buster's, started in 1982, now has more than 222 venues in North America, offering everything from bowling to laser tag, plus virtual reality. The company says it has five million loyalty members and 30 million unique visitors to its locations each year. The company's stock is up more than 50% over the past year. As a boom in betting increases engagement among sports fans, digital gamification could have a similar effect within Dave & Buster's customer base by allowing loyalty members to compete with one another and earn rewards. Ultimately, it could mean people spend more time and money at the venues. Dave and Buster's is using technology by gamification software company Lucra. [...] Lucra and Dave & Buster's said there will be a limit placed on the size of bets it will allow, but that they're not publicly disclosing that threshold just yet. Lucra said across its history the average bet size has been $10. "We're creating a new form of kind of a digital experience for folks inside of these ecosystems," said Madding, Lucra's chief operating officer. "We're getting them to engage in a new way and spend more time and money," he added. Lucra says its skills-based games are not subject to the same licenses and regulations gambling operators face with games of chance. Lucra is careful not to use the term "bet" or "wager" to describe its games. "We use real-money contests or challenges," Madding said. Lucra's contests are only available to players age 18 and older. The contests are available in 44 states.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Foss Outpost: Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has posted on Mastodon about their upcoming v256 release of Systemd, which is expected to include a sudo replacement called "run0". The developer talks about the weaknesses of sudo, and how it has a large possible attack surface. For example, sudo supports network access, LDAP configurations, other types of plugins, and much more. But most importantly, its SUID binary provides a large attack service according to Lennart: "I personally think that the biggest problem with sudo is the fact it's a SUID binary though -- the big attack surface, the plugins, network access and so on that come after it it just make the key problem worse, but are not in themselves the main issue with sudo. SUID processes are weird concepts: they are invoked by unprivileged code and inherit the execution context intended for and controlled by unprivileged code. By execution context I mean the myriad of properties that a process has on Linux these days, from environment variables, process scheduling properties, cgroup assignments, security contexts, file descriptors passed, and so on and so on." He's saying that sudo is a Unix concept from many decades ago, and a better privilege escalation system should be in place for 2024 security standards: "So, in my ideal world, we'd have an OS entirely without SUID. Let's throw out the concept of SUID on the dump of UNIX' bad ideas. An execution context for privileged code that is half under the control of unprivileged code and that needs careful manual clean-up is just not how security engineering should be done in 2024 anymore." [...] He also mentioned that there will be more features in run0 that are not just related to the security backend such as: "The tool is also a lot more fun to use than sudo. For example, by default, it will tint your terminal background in a reddish tone while you are operating with elevated privileges. That is supposed to act as a friendly reminder that you haven't given up the privileges yet, and marks the output of all commands that ran with privileges appropriately. It also inserts a red dot (unicode ftw) in the window title while you operate with privileges, and drops it afterwards."

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Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has been sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to charges related to enabling money laundering through his cryptocurrency exchange. CNBC reports: The sentence handed down to Zhao in Seattle federal court was significantly less than the three years that federal prosecutors had been seeking for him. The defense had asked for five months of probation. The sentencing guidelines called for a prison term of 12 to 18 months. In November, Zhao struck a deal with the U.S. government to resolve a multiyear investigation into Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. As part of the settlement, Zhao stepped down as the company's CEO. Zhao, who wore a dark navy suit with a light blue tie to court, is accused of willfully failing to implement an effective anti-money laundering program as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, and of allowing Binance to process transactions involving proceeds of unlawful activity, including between Americans and individuals in sanctions jurisdictions. The U.S. ordered Binance to pay $4.3 billion in fines and forfeiture. Zhao agreed to pay a $50 million fine.

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After convincing the world to buy open source and give up the Morse Code test for ham radio licenses, Bruce Perens has a new gambit: develop a license that ensures software developers receive compensation from large corporations using their work. The new Post-Open Zero Cost License seeks to address the financial disparities in open source software use and includes provisions against using content to train AI models, aligning its enforcement with non-profit performing rights organizations like ASCAP. Here's an excerpt from an interview The Register conducted with Perens: The license is one component among several -- the paid license needs to be hammered out -- that he hopes will support his proposed Post-Open paradigm to help software developers get paid when their work gets used by large corporations. "There are two paradigms that you can use for this," he explains in an interview. "One is Spotify and the other is ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The difference is that Spotify is a for-profit corporation. And they have to distribute profits to their stockholders before they pay the musicians. And as a result, the musicians complain that they're not getting very much at all." "There are two paradigms that you can use for this," he explains in an interview. "One is Spotify and the other is ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The difference is that Spotify is a for-profit corporation. And they have to distribute profits to their stockholders before they pay the musicians. And as a result, the musicians complain that they're not getting very much at all." Perens wants his new license -- intended to complement open source licensing rather than replace it -- to be administered by a 501(c)(6) non-profit. This entity would handle payments to developers. He points to the music performing rights organizations as a template, although among ASCAP, BMI, SECAC, and GMR, only ASCAP remains non-profit. [...] The basic idea is companies making more than $5 million annually by using Post-Open software in a paid-for product would be required to pay 1 percent of their revenue back to this administrative organization, which would distribute the funds to the maintainers of the participating open source project(s). That would cover all Post-Open software used by the organization. "The license that I have written is long -- about as long as the Affero GPL 3, which is now 17 years old, and had to deal with a lot more problems than the early licenses," Perens explains. "So, at least my license isn't excessively long. It handles all of the abuses of developers that I'm conscious of, including things I was involved in directly like Open Source Security v. Perens, and Jacobsen v. Katzer." "It also makes compliance easier for companies than it is today, and probably cheaper even if they do have to pay. It creates an entity that can sue infringers on behalf of any developer and gets the funding to do it, but I'm planning the infringement process to forgive companies that admit the problem and cure the infringement, so most won't ever go to court. It requires more infrastructure than open source developers are used to. There's a central organization for Post-Open (or it could be three organizations if we divided all of the purposes: apportioning money to developers, running licensing, and enforcing compliance), and an outside CPA firm, and all of that has to be structured so that developers can trust it." You can read the full interview here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The ransomware gang that hacked into U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare used a set of stolen credentials to remotely access the company's systems that weren't protected by multifactor authentication (MFA), according to the chief executive of its parent company, UnitedHealth Group (UHG). UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty provided the written testimony ahead of a House subcommittee hearing on Wednesday into the February ransomware attack that caused months of disruption across the U.S. healthcare system. This is the first time the health insurance giant has given an assessment of how hackers broke into Change Healthcare's systems, during which massive amounts of health data were exfiltrated from its systems. UnitedHealth said last week that the hackers stole health data on a "substantial proportion of people in America." According to Witty's testimony, the criminal hackers "used compromised credentials to remotely access a Change Healthcare Citrix portal." Organizations like Change use Citrix software to let employees access their work computers remotely on their internal networks. Witty did not elaborate on how the credentials were stolen. However, Witty did say the portal "did not have multifactor authentication," which is a basic security feature that prevents the misuse of stolen passwords by requiring a second code sent to an employee's trusted device, such as their phone. It's not known why Change did not set up multifactor authentication on this system, but this will likely become a focus for investigators trying to understand potential deficiencies in the insurer's systems. "Once the threat actor gained access, they moved laterally within the systems in more sophisticated ways and exfiltrated data," said Witty. Witty said the hackers deployed ransomware nine days later on February 21, prompting the health giant to shut down its network to contain the breach. Last week, the medical firm admitted that it paid the ransomware hackers roughly $22 million via bitcoin. Meanwhile, UnitedHealth said the total costs associated with the ransomware attack amounted to $872 million. "The remediation efforts spent on the attack are ongoing, so the total costs related to business disruption and repairs are likely to exceed $1 billion over time, potentially including the reported $22 million payment made [to the hackers]," notes The Register.

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Large swathes of Asia are sweltering through a heatwave that has topped temperature records from Myanmar to the Philippines and forced millions of children to stay home from school. From a report: In India, record temperatures have triggered a deadly heatwave and concerns about voter turnout in the nation's marathon election. Extreme heat has also forced Bangladesh to close all schools across the country. Extreme temperatures have also been recorded in Myanmar and Thailand, while huge areas of the Philippines are suffering from a drought. Experts say climate change has made heatwaves more frequent, longer and more intense, while the El Nino weather phenomenon is also driving this year's exceptionally warm weather. Approximate voter turnout data after polls closed on April 26 in India -- when stage two of the nation's seven-stage general election took place -- put voter turnout at 61 per cent. This was lower than the 65 per cent in the first phase, and 68 per cent in the second phase five years ago. Among the states that headed to the polls last week was Kerala in the south, where media reports on April 29 said that at least two people -- a 90-year-old woman and a 53-year-old man -- were suspected to have died of heatstroke. Temperatures in Kerala soared to 41.9 deg C, nearly 5.5 deg C above normal temperatures. At least two people have also died in India's eastern state of Odisha, where temperatures hit 44.9 deg C on April 28 -- the highest recorded in April. In neighbouring Bangladesh, students will continue to stay home this week, after schools across the country were ordered shut on April 29. A two-judge bench of the country's High Court passed an order directing all primary and secondary schools and madrasahs (Islamic schools) nationwide to remain closed till May 5, affecting an estimated 32 million students.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block on free speech grounds a provision of Texas law aimed at preventing minors from accessing pornographic content online. From a report: The justices turned away a request made by the Free Speech Coalition, a pornography industry trade group, as well as several companies. The challengers said the 2023 law violates the Constitution's First Amendment by requiring anyone using the platforms in question, including adults, to submit personal information. One provision of the law, known as H.B. 1181, mandates that platforms verify users' ages by requiring them to submit information about their identities. Although the law is aimed at limiting children's access to sexually explicit content, the lawsuit focuses on how those measures also affect adults. "Specifically, the act requires adults to comply with intrusive age verification measures that mandate the submission of personally identifying information over the internet in order to access websites containing sensitive and intimate content," the challengers wrote in court papers.

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Maciej Pocwierz, a senior software engineer Semantive, writing on Medium: A few weeks ago, I began working on the PoC of a document indexing system for my client. I created a single S3 bucket in the eu-west-1 region and uploaded some files there for testing. Two days later, I checked my AWS billing page, primarily to make sure that what I was doing was well within the free-tier limits. Apparently, it wasn't. My bill was over $1,300, with the billing console showing nearly 100,000,000 S3 PUT requests executed within just one day! By default, AWS doesn't log requests executed against your S3 buckets. However, such logs can be enabled using AWS CloudTrail or S3 Server Access Logging. After enabling CloudTrail logs, I immediately observed thousands of write requests originating from multiple accounts or entirely outside of AWS. Was it some kind of DDoS-like attack against my account? Against AWS? As it turns out, one of the popular open-source tools had a default configuration to store their backups in S3. And, as a placeholder for a bucket name, they used... the same name that I used for my bucket. This meant that every deployment of this tool with default configuration values attempted to store its backups in my S3 bucket! So, a horde of misconfigured systems is attempting to store their data in my private S3 bucket. But why should I be the one paying for this mistake? Here's why: S3 charges you for unauthorized incoming requests. This was confirmed in my exchange with AWS support. As they wrote: "Yes, S3 charges for unauthorized requests (4xx) as well[1]. That's expected behavior." So, if I were to open my terminal now and type: aws s3 cp ./file.txt s3://your-bucket-name/random_key. I would receive an AccessDenied error, but you would be the one to pay for that request. And I don't even need an AWS account to do so. Another question was bugging me: why was over half of my bill coming from the us-east-1 region? I didn't have a single bucket there! The answer to that is that the S3 requests without a specified region default to us-east-1 and are redirected as needed. And the bucket's owner pays extra for that redirected request. The security aspect: We now understand why my S3 bucket was bombarded with millions of requests and why I ended up with a huge S3 bill. At that point, I had one more idea I wanted to explore. If all those misconfigured systems were attempting to back up their data into my S3 bucket, why not just let them do so? I opened my bucket for public writes and collected over 10GB of data within less than 30 seconds. Of course, I can't disclose whose data it was. But it left me amazed at how an innocent configuration oversight could lead to a dangerous data leak! Lesson 1: Anyone who knows the name of any of your S3 buckets can ramp up your AWS bill as they like. Other than deleting the bucket, there's nothing you can do to prevent it. You can't protect your bucket with services like CloudFront or WAF when it's being accessed directly through the S3 API. Standard S3 PUT requests are priced at just $0.005 per 1,000 requests, but a single machine can easily execute thousands of such requests per second.

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