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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft was hit on Tuesday in U.S. court with a private consumer lawsuit claiming the technology company's $69 billion bid to purchase "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard will unlawfully squelch competition in the video game industry. The complaint filed in federal court in California comes about two weeks after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a case with an administrative law judge seeking to stop Microsoft, owner of the Xbox console, from completing the largest-ever acquisition in the video-gaming market. The private lawsuit also seeks an order blocking Microsoft from acquiring Activision. It was filed on behalf of 10 video game players in California, New Mexico and New Jersey. The proposed acquisition would give Microsoft "far-outsized market power in the video game industry," the complaint alleged, "with the ability to foreclose rivals, limit output, reduce consumer choice, raise prices, and further inhibit competition." A Microsoft representative on Tuesday defended the deal, saying in a statement that it "will expand competition and create more opportunities for gamers and game developers." After the FTC sued, Microsoft President Brad Smith said, "We have complete confidence in our case and welcome the opportunity to present our case in court."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zimbabwe has prohibited the export of raw lithium from its mines so it can cash in on value addition and stop losing billions of dollars in mineral proceeds to foreign companies. Quartz reports: The ministry of Mines and Mining Development on Dec. 20 published a circular under the Base Minerals Export Control Act that seeks to "ensure that the vision of the president to see the country becoming an upper-middle income economy has been realized." The government says it is losing $1.8 billion in mineral revenues due to smuggling and externalization to South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Gold is the most smuggled mineral. With continued high international demand, Zimbabwe is projected to become one of the world's largest lithium exporters, with the government hoping to meet 20% of the world's total demand for lithium when it fully exploits its known lithium resources. Mineral exports account for about 60% (pdf) of Zimbabwe's export earnings while the mining sector contributes 16% to its GDP, according to a 2021 mining report by the London School of Economics. "No lithium-bearing ores, or unbeneficiated lithium whatsoever, shall be exported from Zimbabwe to another country except under the written permit of the minister," mining minister Winston Chitando says in the circular. However, according to deputy mining minister Polite Kambamura, mining companies that are building processing plants will be excluded from the directive. "If we continue exporting raw lithium we will go nowhere. We want to see lithium batteries being developed in the country," he said. "We have done this in good faith for the growth of industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Russian space agency is deciding whether it needs to send a rescue spacecraft to the International Space Station to bring home two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut after the Soyuz capsule that brought them there suffered a massive coolant leak. The Washington Post reports: Working with their counterparts at NASA, officials at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, are trying to determine if the vehicle is sound enough to bring the crew home, Sergei Krikalev, the executive director of Roscosmos's human spaceflight programs, said during a briefing Thursday. If not, the Russian agency would send up another Soyuz spacecraft that was to be used for another crewed mission to retrieve the crew. That spacecraft could be ready to fly up without any people on board sometime in February, a few weeks before the crew is set to return in March, officials said. The crew that would fly home on the rescue craft would include NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and a pair of cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, who arrived at the station in September. Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and SpaceShuttle program manger, said he could recall of no other time when NASA or Roscosmos had been forced to consider sending up another spacecraft as a lifeboat to bring back a crew.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: What if the U.S. placed a tax on robots? The concept has been publicly discussed by policy analysts, scholars, and Bill Gates (who favors the notion). Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them would give firms incentive to help retain workers, while also compensating for a dropoff in payroll taxes when robots are used. Thus far, South Korea has reduced incentives for firms to deploy robots; European Union policymakers, on the other hand, considered a robot tax but did not enact it. Now a study by MIT economists scrutinizes the existing evidence and suggests the optimal policy in this situation would indeed include a tax on robots, but only a modest one. The same applies to taxes on foreign trade that would also reduce U.S. jobs, the research finds. "Our finding suggests that taxes on either robots or imported goods should be pretty small," says Arnaud Costinot, an MIT economist, and co-author of a published paper detailing the findings. "Although robots have an effect on income inequality ... they still lead to optimal taxes that are modest." Specifically, the study finds that a tax on robots should range from 1 percent to 3.7 percent of their value, while trade taxes would be from 0.03 percent to 0.11 percent, given current U.S. income taxes. "We came in to this not knowing what would happen," says Ivan Werning, an MIT economist and the other co-author of the study. "We had all the potential ingredients for this to be a big tax, so that by stopping technology or trade you would have less inequality, but ... for now, we find a tax in the one-digit range, and for trade, even smaller taxes." [...] Apart from its bottom-line tax numbers, the study contains some additional conclusions about technology and income trends. Perhaps counterintuitively, the research concludes that after many more robots are added to the economy, the impact that each additional robot has on wages may actually decline. At a future point, robot taxes could then be reduced even further. "You could have a situation where we deeply care about redistribution, we have more robots, we have more trade, but taxes are actually going down," Costinot says. If the economy is relatively saturated with robots, he adds, "That marginal robot you are getting in the economy matters less and less for inequality." The paper, "Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation," appears in advance online form in The Review of Economic Studies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

b0s0z0ku writes: The European Union is proposing a law requiring easily replaceable batteries in new appliances and portable electronic devices. The law also sets targets for collection and recycling of those batteries, requiring 73% compliance by 2030. "Companies would get plenty of notice, however, as the requirement would only come into force 3.5 years after the legislation takes effect," adds 9to5Mac. "Companies will also be legally required to accept and recycle old batteries." Additionally, the European Commission is "expected to consider outlawing the use of non-rechargeable portable batteries," though this would likely come with many exceptions and wouldn't happen before the end of the decade. Further reading: EU Sets December 28, 2024, Deadline For All New Phones To Use USB-C for Wired ChargingRead more of this story at Slashdot.

LastPass revealed today that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. BleepingComputer reports: This follows a previous update issued last month when the company's CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to "certain elements" of customer information. Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data. The attacker gained access to Lastpass' cloud storage using "cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys" stolen from its developer environment. "The threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," Toubba said today. "The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data." Fortunately, the encrypted data is secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user's master password. According to Toubba, the master password is never known to LastPass, it is not stored on Lastpass' systems, and LastPass does not maintain it. Customers were also warned that the attackers might try to brute force their master passwords to gain access to the stolen encrypted vault data. However, this would be very difficult and time-consuming if you've been following password best practices recommended by LastPass. If you do, "it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology," Toubba added. "Your sensitive vault data, such as usernames and passwords, secure notes, attachments, and form-fill fields, remain safely encrypted based on LastPass' Zero Knowledge architecture."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTX sought a U.S. bankruptcy court's help amid a battle over ownership of about $450 million worth of stock in Robinhood Markets (HOOD), according to a filing (PDF) Thursday. CoinDesk reports: At issue are about 56 million shares of the brokerage owned by Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., a corporate entity organized in Antigua and Barbuda and 90% controlled by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, according to the filing. Three parties, the filing says, have tried to get control of those shares: BlockFi (a lender that FTX had helped prop up earlier this year), Yonathan Ben Shimon (an FTX creditor appointed as a receiver in Antigua and granted permission to sell the shares under supervision of a court there) and Bankman-Fried himself (who has legal bills). FTX's bankruptcy estate told ED&F Man Capital Markets, the brokerage where the shares are parked, to freeze the stock around the time the Chapter 11 case began on Nov. 11. FTX has determined that Emergent only "nominally" owns the shares and that they truly belong to FTX. "Emergent is a special-purpose holding company that appears to have no other business," the crypto exchange said in the filing. The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case should force the shares to remain frozen while FTX tries to figure out how to repay all its creditors, FTX argued in the filing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Micron Technology Inc., the largest US maker of memory chips, said the worst industry glut in more than a decade will make it difficult to return to profitability in 2023. The company on Wednesday announced a host of cost-cutting measures, including a 10% workforce reduction, aimed at helping it weather a rapid drop in revenue. Micron also projected a steep sales decline and a wider loss than analysts had estimated for the current quarter. The industry is experiencing its worst imbalance between supply and demand in 13 years, according to Micron Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra. Inventory should peak in the current period, then decline, he said. Customers will move to more healthy inventory levels by about the middle of 2023, and the chipmaker's revenue will improve in the second half of the year, Mehrotra said. "Profitability will be challenged throughout 2023 because of the oversupply that exists in the industry," he said in an interview. "The rate and pace of the recovery in terms of profitability depends on how fast supply is brought into line." Micron, which had already announced factory output reductions, is cutting its budget for new plants and equipment, and now expects to spend from $7 billion to $7.5 billion for the fiscal year, a decline from an earlier target of as much as $12 billion. The company is slowing the introduction of more advanced manufacturing techniques and predicts that spending on new production will fall throughout the industry. [...] In addition to its planned workforce reductions, the company has suspended share repurchases, is cutting executive salaries and will skip companywide bonus payments, executives said on a conference call after its results were released. Micron said sales will be about $3.8 billion in the fiscal second quarter. That compares with analysts' average estimate of $3.88 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the three months ended Dec. 1, Micron's revenue declined 47% to $4.09 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang pleaded guilty to charges tied to FTX's collapse, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams announced Wednesday night. CoinDesk reports: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) also announced (PDF) charges against the two, saying Ellison manipulated the price of FTT, an exchange token issued by FTX, at exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried's direction. The duo are cooperating with investigators, Williams announced. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) did not specify what they were being charged with. In a statement, SEC Deputy Enforcement Director Sanjay Wadhwa said the three "were active participants in a scheme to conceal material information from FTX investors, including through the efforts of Mr. Bankman-Fried and Ms. Ellison to artificially prop up the value of FTT, which served as collateral for undisclosed loans that Alameda took out from FTX pursuant to its undisclosed, and virtually unlimited, line of credit." Highlighted in the complaint are multiple times when Bankman-Fried made public statements, and provided investors with documentation via audited financial statements, that Alameda received no preferential treatment from FTX. Ellison was a close confidant of Bankman-Fried's, and has been targeted by prosecutors for her role in manipulating FTX's exchange token FTT, which Alameda had used as collateral for investments. In early December Ellison, who is thought to reside in Hong Kong or Nassau, was spotted in Manhattan at a coffee shop leading many to suspect she was working with authorities. Shortly after, Ellison retained the law firm WilmerHale to represent herself. WilmerHale counts Stephanie Avakian, a former director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, as one of its top attorneys. Further reading: FTX Founder Bankman-Fried To Be Released on a $250 Million Bond Package While He Awaits TrialRead more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI is recommending the use of ad blockers, warning in an alert this week that cybercriminals are using online ads in search results to steal or extort money from victims. TechCrunch reports: In a pre-holiday public service announcement, the FBI said that cybercriminals are buying ads to impersonate legitimate brands, like cryptocurrency exchanges. Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with "minimum distinction" between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware. One of the FBI's recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker. As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands. Ad blockers don't just remove the enormous bloat from websites, like auto-playing video and splashy ads that take up half the page, which make your computer fans run like jet engines. Ad blockers are also good for privacy, because they prevent the tracking code within ads from loading. That means the ad companies, like Google and Facebook, cannot track you as you browse the web, or learn which websites you visit, or infer what things you might be interested in based on your web history. "Of course, you can switch your ad blocker off any time you want, and even allow or deny ads for entire websites," adds the report. "Ads are still an important part of what keeps the internet largely free and accessible, including TechCrunch (and Slashdot!), even as subscriptions and paywalls are increasingly becoming the norm."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: DuckDuckGo, the internet's favorite private search engine, is rolling out a new feature across its service Wednesday called Google Sign-in Pop-up Protection, It's on by default, saving your eyes and your time from Google's nagging. You can still sign in with Google whenever you want, you just don't have to deal with Google's prompts. "They popups are invasive, annoying and they undermine user privacy," said Peter Dolanjski, director of product for DuckDuckGo. "Google is employing a dark pattern by pushing you to sign in when you might not have otherwise. When you do, Google is is tracking what you do on those websites and linking it to your identity." Google Sign In is nothing new, but the popups are a subtle but pervasive change to the web. You can find them on Booking.com, Pinterest, Reddit, Trulio, Zillo and countless more. "We believe google is pitching the popups to these websites as a win-win," Dolanjski said. "If they can get more users to sign in, it opens up more data collection both for Google and publishers, and it lets Google better target users with ads." That means more money for everyone involved, except you.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

slack_justyb writes: A rather exotic feature in Xorg and Xwayland is being proposed to have the default value turned off going forward in Fedora 38 due to its use in attacks (CVE-2014-8095, CVE-2014-8099, CVE-2014-8103. . . to name a few). The feature allows servers running on one endianess to byte-swap to allow clients of a different endianess to connect to it. This was more common in the 1980s when X servers ran on big-endian and clients would connect who were little-endian. The Xorg and Xwayland implementation of this feature has gone largely untested, the number of Fedora users that use it are virtually zero, and considering the number of attack vectors this has presented historically, setting the default to deny clients that require this seems the better way to do. This change will be to the xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland packages and those needing the feature turned back will need to add "AllowSwappedClients" "on" to their xorg.conf.d file in the "ServerFlags" section. Xwayland users will need to pass the +byteswappedclients flag, however, the compositor will need to be able to handle this flag which at this time GNOME does not.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A small but growing number of universities are now blocking access to TikTok on school-owned devices or WiFi networks, in the latest sign of a widening crackdown on the popular short-form video app. From a report: The University of Oklahoma and Auburn University in Alabama have each said they will restrict student and faculty access to TikTok, in order to comply with recent moves from the governors in their respective states to ban TikTok on government-issued devices. The 26 universities and colleges in the University System of Georgia are also reportedly taking a similar step. "In compliance with the Governor's Executive Order 2022-33, effective immediately, no university employee or student shall access the TikTok application or website on University-owned or operated devices, including OU wired and wireless networks," the University of Oklahoma said in an email this week. According to the email, the school will also require that university-administered TikTok accounts be deleted and "alternate social media platforms utilized in their place." Further reading: TikTok steps up efforts to clinch U.S. security deal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A proposal to force cellphone companies to block certain spam texts is gaining momentum. From a report: California Attorney General Rob Bonta has expressed his support for a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to put an end to illegal and malicious texts.ÂBy doing so, he joined attorneys general from the other 49 states and Washington D.C., who had all previously expressed their support of the proposal. In a letter signed by all 51 attorneys general to the FCC, supporting them in their hopes to require cellular providers to block illegal text messages from invalid or unused numbers, as well as blocking any phone numbers found on a "do not originate" list, numbers which have previously been proved to have been used for fraudulent activity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new wave of chat bots like ChatGPT use artificial intelligence that could reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine. From a report: Over the past three decades, a handful of products like Netscape's web browser, Google's search engine and Apple's iPhone have truly upended the tech industry and made what came before them look like lumbering dinosaurs. Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry's next big disrupter. [...] Although ChatGPT still has plenty of room for improvement, its release led Google's management to declare a "code red." For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm. Some fear the company may be approaching a moment that the biggest Silicon Valley outfits dread -- the arrival of an enormous technological change that could upend the business. For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world's primary gateway to the internet. But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business. One Google executive described the efforts as make or break for Google's future. ChatGPT was released by an aggressive research lab called OpenAI, and Google is among the many other companies, labs and researchers that have helped build this technology. But experts believe the tech giant could struggle to compete with the newer, smaller companies developing these chat bots, because of the many ways the technology could damage its business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sam Bankman-Fried will be released on a $250 million bond package while he awaits trial on fraud charges related to the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange, a federal magistrate judge said on Thursday. From a report: Prosecutors have accused him of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research. Nicolas Roos, a prosecutor, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein that the bail package included home detention and location monitoring. Bankman-Fried will also have to surrender his passport. Bankman-Fried's defense counsel said he agreed with these conditions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan adopted a plan on Thursday to extend the lifespan of nuclear reactors, replace the old and even build new ones, a major shift in a country scarred by the Fukushima disaster that once planned to phase out atomic power. From a report: In the face of global fuel shortages, rising prices and pressure to reduce carbon emissions, Japan's leaders have begun to turn back toward nuclear energy, but the announcement was their clearest commitment yet after keeping mum on delicate topics like the possibility of building new reactors. Under the new policy, Japan will maximize the use of existing reactors by restarting as many of them as possible and prolonging the operating life of aging ones beyond a 60-year limit. The government also pledged to develop next-generation reactors. In 2011, a powerful earthquake and the ensuing tsunami caused multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant -- a disaster that supercharged anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan and at one point led the government to promise to phase out the energy by around 2030. But since then, the government has recommitted to the technology, including setting a target for nuclear to make up 20-22% of the country's energy mix by the end of the decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced that two of its latest privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including one that blurs objects in a video, will be provided to anyone for free via open source. From a report: The new tools are part of Google's Protected Computing initiative designed to transform "how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety," the company said. The first is an internal project called Magritte, now out on Github, which uses machine learning to detect objects and apply a blur as soon as they appear on screen. It can disguise arbitrary objects like license plates, tattoos and more. The other with the unwieldy name "Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Transpiler, allows developers to perform computations on encrypted data without being able to access personally identifiable information. Google says it can help industries like financial services, healthcare and government, "where a robust security guarantee around the processing of sensitive data is of highest importance." Google notes that PETs are starting to enter the mainstream after being mostly an academic exercise. The White House recently touted the technology, saying "it will allow researchers, physicians, and others permitted access to gain insights from sensitive data without ever having access to the data itself."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States Copyright Office (USCO) reversed an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using "A.I. art," and announced that the copyright protection on the comic book will be revoked, stating that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection. From a report: In September, Kris Kashtanova announced that they had received a U.S. copyright on his comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book inspired by their late grandmother that she created with the text-to-image engine Midjourney. Kashtanova referred to herself as a "prompt engineer" and explained at the time that she went to get the copyright so that she could "make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

National Cyber Director Chris Inglis is leaving the government in the next few months, Politico reports, citing a former U.S. official and a second person familiar with the matter. From the report: For 17 months, Inglis has served as the inaugural holder of a new position as President Joe Biden's top adviser on a range of cybersecurity issues, including the protection of vital U.S. infrastructure from hackers and efforts to improve the government's own digital defenses. "He's done what he came to do -- build an office that's going to stand the test of time," said the former U.S. official, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal personnel matter. Inglis plans to leave sometime in January, the former official said. Inglis declined to comment on the record. Inglis never said how long he expected to say, and it was unclear if he had moved up his departure timeline. Inglis took office in July 2021 following unanimous Senate confirmation, and since then, he has steadily built up his new team by hiring outside experts and recruiting cybersecurity officials from other agencies. Inglis, a former National Security Agency deputy director, repeatedly described his job as a coordinator of the government's often disparate cybersecurity activities, someone who measured his success by whether the government was increasingly speaking with one voice on cyber issues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walking like John Cleese's character, Mr. Teabag, in Monty Python's famous "Ministry of Silly Walks" skit requires considerably more energy expenditure than a normal walking gait because the movement is so inefficient, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal. From a report: In fact, just 11 minutes a day of walking like Mr. Teabag was equivalent to 75 minutes of vigorously intense physical activity per week, presenting a novel means of boosting cardiovascular fitness. "Half a century ago, the [Ministry of Silly Walks] skit might have unwittingly touched on a powerful way to enhance cardiovascular fitness in adults," the authors wrote. "Had an initiative to promote inefficient movement been adopted in the early 1970s, we might now be living among a healthier society." The BMJ's Christmas issue is typically more lighthearted, though the journal maintains that the papers published therein still "adhere to the same high standards of novelty, methodological rigor, reporting transparency, and readability as apply in the regular issue." Past years have included papers on such topics as why 27 is not a dangerous age for musicians, the side effects of sword swallowing, and measuring the toxicity of the concoction brewed in Roald Dahl's 1981 book George's Marvelous Medicine. (It's very toxic indeed.) The most widely read was 1999's infamous "Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is stepping up scrutiny of the work that audit firms are doing for cryptocurrency companies, concerned that investors may be getting a false sense of reassurance from the firms' reports, a senior official at the regulator said. From a report: "We're warning investors to be very wary of some of the claims that are being made by crypto companies," Paul Munter, the SEC's acting chief accountant, said in an interview. Increased scrutiny has led at least one audit firm to drop crypto clients, in some cases soon after producing reports on the companies' assets and liabilities. Crypto companies are eager to get the blessing of an auditor to reassure their skittish clients. The Wall Street watchdog is looking closely at how crypto companies are portraying their reports from audit firms, according to Mr. Munter. Many of these companies are closely held or based offshore, and so unlikely to fall within the regulator's remit. The SEC is effectively sending a warning to audit firms, which don't want to run afoul of their regulator, as well as putting investors on alert. "We are increasing our understanding of what's going on in the marketplace," Mr. Munter said. "If we find fact patterns that we think are troublesome, we will consider a referral to the division of enforcement." The regulator is worried particularly about so-called proof-of-reserves reports, which aim to show that the crypto company has sufficient assets to cover customers' funds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Android banking malware named 'Godfather' has been targeting users in 16 countries, attempting to steal account credentials for over 400 online banking sites and cryptocurrency exchanges. From a report: The malware generates login screens overlaid on top of the banking and crypto exchange apps' login forms when victims attempt to log in to the site, tricking the user into entering their credentials on well-crafted HTML phishing pages. The Godfather trojan was discovered by Group-IB analysts, who believe it is the successor of Anubis, a once widely-used banking trojan that gradually fell out of use due to its inability to bypass newer Android defenses. ThreatFabric first discovered Godfather in March 2021, but it has undergone massive code upgrades and improvements since then. Also, Cyble published a report yesterday highlighting a rise in the activity of Godfather, pushing an app that mimics a popular music tool in Turkey, downloaded 10 million times via Google Play.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the Kremlin's most active hacking groups targeting Ukraine recently tried to hack a large petroleum refining company located in a NATO country. The attack is a sign that the group is expanding its intelligence gathering as Russia's invasion of its neighboring country continues. The attempted hacking occurred on August 30 and was unsuccessful, researchers with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 said on Tuesday. The hacking group -- tracked under various names including Trident Ursa, Gamaredon, UAC-0010, Primitive Bear, and Shuckworm -- has been attributed by Ukraine's Security Service to Russia's Federal Security Service. In the past 10 months, Unit 42 has mapped more than 500 new domains and 200 samples and other bread crumbs Trident Ursa has left behind in spear phishing campaigns attempting to infect targets with information-stealing malware. The group mostly uses emails with Ukrainian-language lures. More recently, however, some samples show that the group has also begun using English-language lures. "We assess that these samples indicate that Trident Ursa is attempting to boost their intelligence collection and network access against Ukrainian and NATO allies," company researchers wrote. Among the filenames used in the unsuccessful attack were: MilitaryassistanceofUkraine.htm, Necessary_military_assistance.rar, and List of necessary things for the provision of military humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.lnk. Tuesday's report didn't name the targeted petroleum company or the country where the facility was located. In recent months, Western-aligned officials have issued warnings that the Kremlin has set its sights on energy companies in countries opposing Russia's war on Ukraine. Trident Ursa's hacking techniques are simple but effective. The group uses multiple ways to conceal the IP addresses and other signatures of its infrastructure, phishing documents with low detection rates among anti-phishing services, and malicious HTML and Word documents. Unit 42 researchers wrote: "Trident Ursa remains an agile and adaptive APT that does not use overly sophisticated or complex techniques in its operations. In most cases, they rely on publicly available tools and scripts -- along with a significant amount of obfuscation -- as well as routine phishing attempts to successfully execute their operations..." Tuesday's report provides a list of cryptographic hashes and other indicators organizations can use to determine if Trident Ursa has targeted them. It also provides suggestions for ways to protect organizations against the group.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI chatbots. TechCrunch reports: Short for "Platform for Open Exploration," Poe -- which is invite-only and currently only available on iOS -- is "designed to be a place where people can easily interact with a number of different AI agents," a Quora spokesperson told TechCrunch via text message. "We have learned a lot about building consumer internet products over the last 12 years building and operating Quora. And we are specifically experienced in serving people who are looking for knowledge," the spokesperson said. "We believe much of what we've learned can be applied to this new domain where people are interfacing with large language models." At launch, Poe provides access to several text-generating AI models, including ChatGPT. (OpenAI doesn't presently offer a public API for ChatGPT; the Quora spokesperson refused to say whether Quora has a partnership with OpenAI for Poe or another form of early access.) Poe's like a text messaging app, but for AI models -- users can chat with the models separately. Within the chat interface, Poe provides a range of different suggestions for conversation topics and use cases, like "writing help," "cooking," "problem solving" and "nature." Poe ships with only a handful of models at launch, but Quora plans to provide a way for model providers -- e.g. companies -- to submit their models for inclusion in the near future. "We think this will be a fun way for people to interact with and explore different language models. Poe is designed to be the best way for someone to get an instant answer to any question they have, using natural conversation," the spokesperson said. "There is an incredible amount of research and development going into advancing the capabilities of these models, but in order to bring all that value to people around the world, there is a need for good interfaces that are easy to use. We hope we can provide that interface so that as all of this development happens over the years ahead, everyone around the world can share as much as possible in the benefits."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The creators of "South Park" have secured a $20 million investment for their AI entertainment startup Deep Voodoo. Variety reports: The funding was led by Connect Ventures, an investment partnership between CAA and venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). It's the first outside capital raised by Deep Voodoo, which previously was funded entirely by Parker and Stone's independent entertainment company, Park County. Stone and Parker plan to use the new funding to "accelerate Deep Voodoo's development of its leading deepfake technology, cost-effective visual effects services and original synthetic media projects," according to the announcement. Stone and Parker's Deep Voodoo began building their proprietary deepfake technology in early 2020, and the duo assembled a team of artists for a feature film about Donald Trump they had developed. In October of that year, they released "Sassy Justice," a 14-minute comedy short featuring a deepfaked Trump (voiced by Peter Serafinowicz), which went viral. But they suspended the movie project due to the COVID pandemic, and pivoted Deep Voodoo to be a provider of deepfake tools to the industry. With Connect Ventures' investment, Deep Voodoo has begun offering its "unrivaled face-swapping visual effects" to artists, producers and creators across the industry, per the announcement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Most people have two sex chromosomes, either two X's or an X and a Y, which give rise to female or male biological attributes on a spectrum. Studies suggest these chromosomes also have much broader effects, contributing to processes that include immune system function, neuronal development, disease susceptibility and reactions to drugs. But scrutinizing the specific role of X and Y chromosomes is challenging. With current tools, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of genes versus hormones, for example. Now scientists have devised a tool that could overcome this obstacle -- by generating XX and XY cells from a single person for the first time. This unique set of cells could help researchers tackle long-standing questions about how sex chromosomes affect disease and the role they play in early development. Benjamin Reubinoff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Hadassah Medical Center in Israel, and his team began the project to overcome barriers facing investigations of sex differences in humans. Currently there are two major ones, according to Reubinoff: the difficulty of separating chromosomal and hormonal effects and the inability to pinpoint the effects of X and Y chromosomes while ruling out contributions from the rest of a person's genetic makeup. "The main reason for doing this study was the lack of a good model to study differences between males and females in humans," Reubinoff says. "There have been animal models, but a model in humans was not available." To create such a model, Reubinoff, his former M.D. and Ph.D. student Ithai Waldhorn and their colleagues first obtained white blood cells previously collected from a person with Klinefelter syndrome, a condition in which male individuals are born with an extra X chromosome. The cells came from the repositories of the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, where people donate samples for use in a wide range of biomedical research projects. The donor had a rare "mosaic" form of the condition, in which some of their cells had three sex chromosomes (XXY), some had two X chromosomes, and some had one X and one Y. The researchers reprogrammed all three cell types into induced pluripotent stem cells, which have the capacity to self-renew and to develop into neurons, muscle cells or other cell types. Ultimately the team generated XX and XY cells that -- apart from their sex chromosomes -- were genetically identical. The researchers then conducted a series of experiments replicating findings from prior studies with other models. For example, they confirmed previously reported differences in genes that were turned on in XX or XY cells. They also coaxed their stem cells to develop into immature versions of neurons and found evidence of previously reported sex differences in early neural development. "It was reassuring to see that the model really shows differences between the sexes that were reported from other systems," Reubinoff says. The findings were published last month in Stem Cell Reports. "This is a very well-designed study that validates the notion that sex differences start early in development -- and that they depend on the sex chromosomes because that's the only thing that can account for those differences," says Nora Engel, a professor of cancer and cell biology at Temple University.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Multiple theaters in Japan reported technical problems when playing Avatar: The Way of the Water. According to Bloomberg, one theater in central Japan was forced to reduce the 48 fps frame rate down to the traditional 24 fps. Engadget reports: Fans were reportedly turned away from other screenings and issued refunds. Some of the theater chains cited by fans as having issues, including United Cinemas Co., Toho Col, and Tokyu Corp., declined to comment on the problem. Not many movie theaters support high frame rate (HFR) 48 fps playback, as it requires the latest projectors or upgrades to existing ones. Normally, movie theaters would be aware of which formats they can play and plan accordingly. But HFR has been used so little that it would be understandable if errors cropped up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence startup behind popular DALL-E text-to-image generator, announced (PDF) on Tuesday the release of its newest picture-making machine POINT-E, which can produce 3D point clouds directly from text prompts. Engadget reports: Whereas existing systems like Google's DreamFusion typically require multiple hours -- and GPUs to generate their images, Point-E only needs one GPU and a minute or two. Point-E, unlike similar systems, "leverages a large corpus of (text, image) pairs, allowing it to follow diverse and complex prompts, while our image-to-3D model is trained on a smaller dataset of (image, 3D) pairs," the OpenAI research team led by Alex Nichol wrote in Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts, published last week. "To produce a 3D object from a text prompt, we first sample an image using the text-to-image model, and then sample a 3D object conditioned on the sampled image. Both of these steps can be performed in a number of seconds, and do not require expensive optimization procedures." If you were to input a text prompt, say, "A cat eating a burrito," Point-E will first generate a synthetic view 3D rendering of said burrito-eating cat. It will then run that generated image through a series of diffusion models to create the 3D, RGB point cloud of the initial image -- first producing a coarse 1,024-point cloud model, then a finer 4,096-point. "In practice, we assume that the image contains the relevant information from the text, and do not explicitly condition the point clouds on the text," the research team points out. These diffusion models were each trained on "millions" of 3d models, all converted into a standardized format. "While our method performs worse on this evaluation than state-of-the-art techniques," the team concedes, "it produces samples in a small fraction of the time." OpenAI has posted the projects open-source code on Github.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube's Doctor Volt repurposed a Blu-Ray drive, which are now easy to find on the cheap in the era of streaming content, to build a simple scanning laser microscope. Gizmodo reports: A couple of custom-designed and manufactured plastic parts were added to the mix to create a scanning bed for a sample that could move back in forth in one direction, while the laser itself shifted back and forth in the other. Unlike an optical microscope, where the entirely of an object is imaged at once, a scanning laser microscope takes light intensity measurements in increments, moving across an object in a grid and assembling a magnified image pixel by pixel. In this case, given the limitations of the Blu-Ray drive's spindle, which moves the sample being viewed back and forth, the image is assembled from 16,129 measurements (a 127x127 grid) and then scaled up to a 512x512 image. A browser-based user interface written in Java allows focus adjustments and the scanning speed of the microscope to be modified, but at the slowest possible speed, the results are surprisingly good and recognizable. Certainly not comparable to what you'd get from lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, but for a re-purposed Blu-Ray drive you could get for less than $20 on eBay, this is an impressive hack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's Self Service Repair program continues to roll out in new regions and to new products. Earlier this month, the program expanded from the United States to eight European countries. Now, US customers are gaining access to manuals and parts for new devices: Mac desktops. As reported first by Six Colors, the program has now been extended to cover the Mac Studio, M1 Mac mini, M1 iMac, and the Studio Display. Up until now, it only covered the M1 MacBook Air, M1 MacBook Pro, the iPhone SE, and iPhone 12 and 13 models. This expansion only applies in the US, though; the previously mentioned European countries will have to wait to gain coverage of these additional devices, it seems. iPhone or Mac owners can go to Apple's website to buy or rent repair kits, including parts and manuals, to perform repairs themselves rather than take their devices to the Apple Store or a repair shop. Apple's Self Service Repair first launched in the United States in April, with an initial focus on the iPhone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Futurism: Your robot vacuums are watching you -- and the resulting imagery of your most private moments can, horrifically, get leaked online. As the MIT Technology Review reports, the aptly-named company iRobot, behind the uber-popular Roomba vacuums, confirmed that gig workers outside of the US broke a non-disclosure agreement when sharing intimate photos, including one of a woman on the toilet, to social media. The images in question, some of which MIT Tech shared -- though thankfully not the bathroom one -- were snapped by the vacuums for the purpose of data annotation, the process in which humans confirm or deny whether AI has accurately labeled things correctly. While the data annotation process is integral to Roomba-style vacuums and other AI-enabled robotics, most people are unaware of the process, though iRobot claimed in its responses to MIT Tech that the leaked images came from development robots that had a bright green label that said "video recording in process."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As a quick follow-up to yesterday's post about InSight's final photo, the InSight Lander's mission is now officially over after 2 failed communications attempts," writes Slashdot reader davidwr. From a NASA press release: NASA's InSight mission has ended after more than four years of collecting unique science on Mars. Mission controllers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft's solar-powered batteries have run out of energy -- a state engineers refer to as "dead bus." "I watched the launch and landing of this mission, and while saying goodbye to a spacecraft is always sad, the fascinating science InSight conducted is cause for celebration," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The seismic data alone from this Discovery Program mission offers tremendous insights not just into Mars but other rocky bodies, including Earth." You can read more about the InSight Mars Lander at NASA's website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. industrial conglomerate 3M Co on Tuesday set a 2025 deadline to stop producing PFAS, the "forever chemicals" used in anything from cell phones to semiconductors that have been linked to cancers, heart problems and low birth weights. Perfluoralkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) do not break down quickly and have in recent years been found in dangerous concentrations in drinking water, soils and foods. Legal pressure over the damage caused by PFAS has increased. Last month, 3M and DuPont de Nemours Inc (DD.N) were among several companies sued by California's attorney general to recover clean-up costs. Shareholders have also called for production of the chemicals to stop. Investors managing $8 trillion in assets earlier this year wrote to 54 companies urging them to phase out their use. "3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move," Victoria Scholar, head of investment at abrdn's Interactive Investor, said of 3M's deadline. "3M said its annual sales of manufactured PFAS are about $1.3 billion with estimated earnings before interest, tax, depreciation (EBITDA) margins of about 16%," adds Reuters. "The sales figure works out at about 3.7% of 3M's 2021 group revenues of $35.4 billion. 3M expects related total pre-tax charges of about $1.3 billion to $2.3 billion over the course of its PFAS exit."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The end of password sharing is coming to Netflix soon -- and it will be a challenge for both viewers and the streaming giant. From a report: The company has put off this moment for years. Researchers inside Netflix identified password sharing as a major problem eating into subscriptions in 2019, people familiar with the situation say, but the company was worried about how to address it without alienating consumers. Then Covid lockdowns hit, bringing a wave of new subscribers, and the effort to scrutinize sharing petered out. More than 100 million Netflix viewers now watch the service using passwords they borrow -- often from family members or friends, the company says. Netflix has said that it will put an end to that arrangement starting in 2023, asking people who share accounts to pay to do so. The company expects to begin rolling out the change in the U.S. early in the year. Netflix's crackdown risks squandering years of goodwill the company has built up over the years and angering consumers, who have a crowd of other streaming services to choose from.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: I reviewed a number of laptops in 2022 across consumer, workstation, gaming, business, Chromebook, and everywhere else. I touched all of the major brands. But I had a particular focus on ultraportables this year -- that is, thin and light devices that people buy to use, say, on their couch at home -- because, with Apple's MacBooks in such a dominant position, many eyes have been on their competitors on the Windows side. For many of these models, I found myself writing the same review over and over and over. They were generally good. They performed well. But their battery life was bad. What these laptops had in common is that they were all powered by the Intel P-series. Without getting too into the weeds here, Intel processors have, in the past, included H-series processors -- powerful chips that you'll find in gaming laptops and workstations -- and U-series processors for thinner, lighter devices. (There was also a G-series, which was this whole other thing, for a couple of years.) But the Intel 12th Generation of mobile chips (that is, the batch of chips that Intel released this year) has a new letter: the P-series. The P-series is supposed to sit between the power-hungry H-series and the power-efficient U-series; the hope was that it would combine H-series power with U-series efficiency. And then many -- a great many -- of this year's top ultraportable laptops got the P-series: big-screeners like the LG Gram 17; modular devices like the Framework Laptop; business notebooks like the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7; premium ultraportables like the Acer Swift 5, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, and the Dell XPS 13 Plus.The problem was that, in reality, the P-series was just a slightly less powerful H-series chip, which Intel had slapped an "ultraportable" label onto. It was identical to the H-series in core count and architecture, but it was supposed to draw slightly less power.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Core Scientific, one of the largest miners of Bitcoin, became the latest crypto company to file for bankruptcy as the industry reckons with a plunge in digital-asset prices. From a report: The Austin, Texas-based company listed $1.4 billion of assets against $1.33 billion of liabilities in its Chapter 11 petition, which was filed in the Southern District of Texas. The company's shares, already down 98% this year to trade at a fraction of a dollar, lost a further 40% on Wednesday morning. Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to continue operating while it works out a plan to repay creditors. Core Scientific said in a statement that it intends to reach a restructuring agreement with a group of convertible bondholders and continue operating its mining and hosting business. The company contributes about 10% of the computing power to secure the entire Bitcoin network. It had 243,000 servers for Bitcoin mining with 143,000 for self-mining. It has provided hosting services to the largest miners in the industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Users of digital wallets and e-commerce platforms must start reporting small transactions, sowing fears among small-business owners. From a report: A tweak to the tax code enacted last year was intended to ensure that those who use services such as Venmo, CashApp, Etsy, StubHub and Airbnb to collect money are reporting all their income to the I.R.S. The change was part of the Biden administration's efforts to narrow the $7 trillion "tax gap" between revenue that is owed but not collected. But for millions of Americans, the new requirement means they will be faced with additional tax forms, potentially higher tax bills and a lot of confusion. That is stirring anxiety among some of the middle-class taxpayers and independent business owners President Biden promised would spared from greater tax scrutiny. The new tax policy was tucked into the stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan that Democrats passed in 2021. It has gone largely unnoticed because it applies to income earned this year and affects taxes that most Americans will pay in 2023. It is projected to raise about $8 billion in additional tax revenue over a decade. But as the impact of the rule and the prospect of surprise tax bills becomes clear, it is drawing pushback from business groups, lawmakers and others, prompting a scramble within the Biden administration to come up with a solution to avoid another chaotic tax season next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People with low incomes can get free Internet service through Comcast and a government program, but signing up is sometimes harder than it should be because of confusion within Comcast's customer service department. From a report: Massachusetts resident Tonia Williams qualified for the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides $30 monthly discounts, and for Comcast's Internet Essentials Plus, a $30 monthly service for low-income people that is essentially free when combined with the ACP discount. But when she tried to use the ACP discount with Comcast's low-income service, Comcast incorrectly told her she wasn't eligible because she was already a Comcast customer. Williams, a certified nursing assistant who was not working when she spoke to Ars, was eventually able to get free home Internet service for her family. But she faced several hassles and said she would have given up if it hadn't been for David Isenberg, a Falmouth resident who's been helping low-income people in his town navigate the process. Isenberg knew Williams because she was previously a home health aide taking care of Isenberg's wife's uncle. "I would have given up if it wasn't for David pushing me," Williams told Ars in a phone interview in November. "It's such a run-around, and you have to sit and wait on hold. A lot of people don't have time to sit on the phone for that long and then be told, 'Well, you don't qualify.' If you don't really know what the service is or how to get it, I would have just believed them, that I didn't qualify."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will soon be in U.S. custody to face criminal charges connected to the collapse of the crypto exchange, after a judge here approved his transfer from a local jail where he has been held. From a report: Mr. Bankman-Fried agreed not to contest his extradition, and in court Wednesday his lawyer read an affidavit in which the former executive waived his right to extradition proceedings and said he had "a desire to make the relevant customers whole." When asked by Magistrate Judge Shaka Serville if the affidavit was his and represented his wishes, Mr. Bankman-Fried said, "Yes, I do wish to waive my right to formal extradition proceedings." He also told the judge he was healthy and doing well. His lawyer, Jerone Roberts, said his client's reasons were clear. "It has always been his desire to put customers right," he said. Mr. Roberts said Mr. Bankman-Fried "is anxious to leave" and asked that he be transported to the U.S. on Wednesday. The former FTX chief executive has been in a jail in the Bahamas since his arrest last week on charges he stole billions of dollars from customers while misleading lenders and investors. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York have charged Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30 years old, with eight criminal counts, including fraud, conspiracy and money-laundering offenses. Alternative, non-paywalled source: The Block.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel announced today that it would split its AXG graphics group to separately address the gaming and data center markets by placing it under two other business units. Raja Koduri, currently the Executive Vice President of the AXG business unit, will return to his previous role as an Intel Chief Architect. From a report: "Discrete graphics and accelerated computing are critical growth engines for Intel. With our flagship products now in production, we are evolving our structure to accelerate and scale their impact and drive go-to-market strategies with a unified voice to customers. This includes our consumer graphics teams joining our client computing group, and our accelerated computing teams joining our datacenter and AI group. In addition, Raja Koduri will return to the Intel Chief Architect role to focus on our growing efforts across CPU, GPU and AI, and accelerating high priority technical programs," Intel said. We spoke with Intel, and the company assures us that it remains fully committed to its existing roadmap of Arc consumer discrete GPUs, meaning it intends to launch the second-gen Battlemage and third-gen Celestial gaming GPUs as planned. Those GPUs will join the recently launched Alchemist series, which will also continue to be supported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On the last episode of "Will Anker ever tell us what's actually going on with its security cameras rather than lying and covering its tracks," we told you how Eufy's customer support team is now quietly providing some of the answers to the questions that the company had publicly ignored about its smart home camera security. Now, Anker is finally taking a stab at a public explanation, in a new blog post titled "To our eufy Security Customers and Partners." Unfortunately, it contains no apology, and doesn't begin to address why anyone would be able to view an unencrypted stream in VLC Media Player on the other side of the country, from a supposedly always-local, always-end-to-end-encrypted camera.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Health Organization is concerned about a spike in COVID-19 infections in China and is supporting the government to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country, the head of the UN agency said on Wednesday. From a report: Infections have recently spiked in the world's second-largest economy and projections have suggested China could face an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths next year. "The WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China, with increasing reports of severe disease," Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Indian central bank's governor said on Wednesday that it's not at war with crypto, but asserted that cryptocurrencies have no underlying fundamentals and their usage should be prohibited. From a report: RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das told a room packed with banking executives and lawmakers that crypto has a huge inherent risk to the macroeconomic and stability of the nation. "After the development of the last one year, including the latest episode surrounding FTX, I don't think we need to say anything more. Time has proven that crypto is worth what it's worth today." [...] Das said crypto owes its origin to the idea that it bypasses or breaks the existing financial system. "They don't believe in the central bank, they don't believe in a regulated financial world. I'm yet to hear a good argument about what public purpose it serves," he said, adding that he holds the view that crypto should be prohibited. "It should be prohibited because if it is allowed to grow ... say it's regulated and allowed to grow ... please mark my words that the next financial crisis will come from private cryptocurrencies," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Okta, a leading provider of authentication services and Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, says that its private GitHub repositories were hacked this month. From a report: According to a 'confidential' email notification sent by Okta and seen by BleepingComputer, the security incident involves threat actors stealing Okta's source code. BleepingComputer has obtained a 'confidential' security incident notification that Okta has been emailing to its 'security contacts' as of a few hours ago. We have confirmed that multiple sources, including IT admins, have been receiving this email notification. Earlier this month, GitHub alerted Okta of suspicious access to Okta's code repositories, states the notification. "Upon investigation, we have concluded that such access was used to copy Okta code repositories," writes David Bradbury, the company's Chief Security Officer (CSO) in the email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Treasury Department's top official for financial markets and stability expressed little urgency over the federal government's need to prepare for the potential launch of a digital US dollar. From a report: Regulators need to examine whether a central bank digital currency -- or CBDC -- would actually improve the speed or cost of real time interbank payments, which the Federal Reserve is aiming to introduce in 2023, said Nellie Liang, undersecretary for domestic finance at the Treasury. Asked whether a digital dollar would help defend the primacy of the dollar in international commerce or as a reserve currency, she was even clearer. "My view is our global leadership doesn't come from our technology," she said in an interview at Bloomberg News's Washington office Monday. "It comes from our governance system, the rules that govern our financial markets, our rule of law and the safety and soundness of our institutions." If after five or more years many countries have introduced a CBDC, she added, that might become a factor in pushing the US to adopt one. But she emphasized the US government's study of a potential CBDC was mainly to be prepared for a need that didn't currently exist.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Throughout December, a social media user known as Stelfie the Time Traveller has been crafting a time-hopping travelogue using generative AI. Thanks to Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning, an anonymous artist has created a fictional photorealistic character that he can insert into faux historical photographs set in different eras, such as ancient Egypt or the time of the dinosaurs. Stable Diffusion is a deep learning image synthesis model that allows people to create fictional scenes using text descriptions called prompts. With an additional technique called Dreambooth, people can insert their own subject or character into scenes generated by Stable Diffusion. It can also be used to insert real people into fictional situations. So far, "Stelfie" has taken historical selfies during the ice age (being chased by a woolly mammoth), in ancient Egypt (during the construction of the pyramids), in ancient Greece (with the Trojan Horse), hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci (while creating the Mona Lisa), in the old West, while running from a tyrannosaurus rex, and while sailing with Christopher Columbus. The artist behind Stelfie writes social media posts (on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit) in character as playful dispatches from a 41-year-old time traveler as he visits different locations. [...] The anonymous artist (a self-identified "funny old man") detailed some of the process he uses to create the images in several Reddit comments: a combination of Stable Diffusion 1.5, a custom AI model for the landscape, and a custom AI model trained on the Stelfie face, which is apparently a fictional person created using Character Creator. He uses "a lot of inpainting," which means inserting AI-generated imagery into the images to fix errors and sculpt the scene, and each image takes three hours to create.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from PC Magazine with the caption, "More Russian vaporware?" From the report: A Russian arms manufacturer claims it can help the country's military detect and bombard Starlink satellite dishes, which have been crucial to the defense effort in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a mysterious company called Sestroretsk Arms Factory published a website that debuted the "Borshchevik" or "hogweed" system, which is designed to locate Starlink dishes at a distance of up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). The technology can supposedly pinpoint a Starlink dish within 5 to 60 meters (16 to 196 feet) of its actual location. In addition, it can be fitted on top of a moving vehicle, allowing it to detect Starlink activity across the front lines on a battlefield. However, it's unclear how the Borshchevik system actually works or if it's even effective. News of the technology was posted on a Telegram channel called "Reverse Side of the Medal," which seems to be closely associated with the Russian military, including the paramilitary Wagner Group. The user behind the Reverse Side of the Medal channel said they plan on testing the Borshchevik system on the frontlines in Russia's ongoing war with Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aria Alamalhodaei writes via TechCrunch: We're going to have to wait a little longer for Rocket Lab's American debut. The company, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, was due to launch a trio of satellites for radio-frequency analytics customer HawkEye 360 to orbit from the company's new site at Virginia Space's Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. It would've marked the first time a Rocket Lab vehicle has taken off from U.S. soil. But the company said late yesterday that strong upper-levels winds made today -- the final day in the launch window -- a no-go, pushing the launch to January. It's certainly a bummer. The mission was due to have a handful of firsts: Not only marking the first time Electron takes off from U.S. soil, but also the first time a rocket flies with novel flight safety software that Rocket Lab and NASA say is a gamechanger for American launch plans. That software, an autonomous flight termination system, will reduce range costs and prime Rocket Lab to serve the launch needs of the U.S. defense agencies. "This flight just doesn't symbolize another launch pad for Rocket Lab," CEO Peter Beck told reporters in a media briefing last Wednesday. "It's a standing up of a new capability for the nation." That capability is called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU), a key component of the Pegasus software, which was jointly developed by Rocket Lab and the space agency. Autonomous flight termination capabilities will be required on all Department of Defense launches by 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Kelly Conlon joined her daughter's Girl Scout troop for a fun outing to see the Rockettes perform their Christmas Spectacular show at Radio City Music Hall in New York, she had no idea she would end up booted from the show once she entered the building. Security stopped Conlon, NBC New York reported, because she is a New Jersey lawyer. It seems that Madison Square Garden Entertainment has begun using facial recognition technology to identify any visitor to any of its venues -- including Radio City Music Hall -- who is involved with any law firm that is actively involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment. Conlon has never practiced law in New York nor personally been involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment. Instead, she is guilty by association, as an associate for Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which has spent years tangled up in litigation against a restaurant that NBC reported is "now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment." According to Conlon, she became aware of this supposed conflict of interest when security guards approached her in the Radio City Music Hall lobby just as she passed through the metal detector. Over the speakers, Conlon heard a warning about a woman in a gray scarf, then security confirmed the warning was about her, telling her, "Our recognition picked you up." Despite Conlon assuring security that "I'm not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG," she was escorted out. Ars could not immediately reach MSG for comment, but in a statement, MSG said the same thing would've happened to any attorney involved in her firm, claiming that her firm had been "notified twice" of MSG's policy. "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved," the statement provided to NBC said. "While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment."Read more of this story at Slashdot.