ICT news

• FBI, CISA Say Cuba Ransomware Gang Extorted $60 Million From Victims This Year

  02-12-2022 23:40 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Cuba ransomware gang extorted more than $60 million in ransom payments from victims between December 2021 and August 2022, a joint advisory from CISA and the FBI has warned. The latest advisory is a follow-up to a flash alert (PDF) released by the FBI in December 2021, which revealed that the gang had earned close to $44 million in ransom payments after attacks on more than 49 entities in five critical infrastructure sectors in the United
  
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• Florida State Tax Website Bug Exposed Filers' Data

  02-12-2022 23:02 via it.slashdot.org
  A security flaw on the Florida Department of Revenue website exposed at least hundreds of taxpayers' Social Security numbers and bank account numbers, a security researcher found. From a report: Kamran Mohsin said the security flaw -- now fixed -- allowed him, or anyone else who was logged in to the state's business tax registration website, to access, modify and delete the personal data of business owners whose information is on file with the state's tax authority by modifying the part of the w
  
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• DHS Board Starts Investigating Lapsus$ Teen Hacker Group

  02-12-2022 22:21 via news.slashdot.org
  A group of federal cyber advisers is putting a suspected teen hacking group under the microscope in the second investigation ever conducted by the Cyber Safety Review Board. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security review board -- a group of 15 federal government and private-sector cyber experts -- announced Friday morning that it will study and provide recommendations to fend off the hacking techniques behind the Lapsus$ data extortion group. The Cyber Safety Review Board first invest
  
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• Intel Offers Irish Staff a Three-Month Break From Being Paid

  02-12-2022 21:40 via slashdot.org
  guest reader writes: Chipmaker Intel is offering staff in Ireland the opportunity to take three months' leave from their jobs, with the catch being that it is unpaid. The move is part of cost saving measures at the company. According to various reports in the Irish media, thousands of workers at Intel's manufacturing plant in Leixlip, County Kildare, were offered three months' voluntary unpaid leave in a bid to lower overheads.
  The move follows Intel's announcement in October that it planned to
  
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• PCI Standards Group Deflects, Assigns Blame for Melting GPU Power Connectors

  02-12-2022 21:01 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia's new RTX 4090 and 4080 GPUs both use a new connector called 12VHPWR to deliver power as a way to satisfy ever-more power-hungry graphics cards without needing to set aside the physical space required for three or four 8-pin power connectors. But that power connector and its specifications weren't created by Nvidia alone -- to ensure interoperability, the spec was developed jointly by the PCI Express Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), a body that includ
  
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• Google Shuts Down Duplex on the Web, Its Attempt To Bring AI Smarts To Retail Sites and More

  02-12-2022 20:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google is shutting down Duplex on the Web, its AI-powered set of services that navigated sites to simplify the process of ordering food, purchasing movie tickets and more. From a report: According to a note on a Google support page, Google on the Web and any automation features enabled by it will no longer be supported as of this month. Google introduced Duplex on the Web, an outgrowth of its call-automating Duplex technology, during its 2019 Google I/O developer conference. To start, it was foc
  
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• US Army Planned To Pay Streamers Millions To Reach Gen-Z Through Call of Duty

  02-12-2022 19:42 via news.slashdot.org
  The U.S. Army allocated millions of dollars to sponsor a wide range of esports tournaments, individual high profile Call of Duty streamers, and Twitch events in the last year to specifically grow its audience with Gen-Z viewers, and especially women and Black and Hispanic people, according to internal Army documents obtained by Motherboard. From the report: In many cases the sponsorships ultimately did not happen -- the Army ordered a stop of all spending with Call of Duty's publisher Activision
  
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• Using Rust at a Startup: A Cautionary Tale

  02-12-2022 19:00 via it.slashdot.org
  "Rust is awesome, for certain things. But think twice before picking it up for a startup that needs to move fast," Matt Welsh, co-founder and chief executive of Fixie.ai and former Google engineering director, writes in a blog post. From the post: I hesitated writing this post, because I don't want to start, or get into, a holy war over programming languages. (Just to get the flame bait out of the way, Visual Basic is the best language ever!) But I've had a number of people ask me about my exper
  
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• IBM and Maersk Abandon Ship on TradeLens Logistics Blockchain

  02-12-2022 18:23 via tech.slashdot.org
  Maersk and IBM will wind down their shipping blockchain TradeLens by early 2023, ending the pair's five-year project to improve global trade by connecting supply chains on a permissioned blockchain. From a report: TradeLens emerged during the "enterprise blockchain" era of 2018 as a high-flying effort to make inter-corporate trade more efficient. Open to shipping and freight operators, its members could validate the transaction of goods as recorded on a transparent digital ledger.
  The idea was t
  
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• Smartphones Wiped 97% of Compact Digital Camera Market

  02-12-2022 17:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  Japanese camera manufacturers are bidding farewell to a once-major component of their operations, with Panasonic Holdings and Nikon suspending development of entry-level point-and-shoot cameras under their flagship brands. From a report: The companies will instead focus resources on pricier mirrorless models going forward, aiming to navigate a market upended by smartphones. Casual photographers flocked to compact digital cameras in the mid- to late 1990s, embracing their affordability and portab
  
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• Pentagon Debuts Its New Stealth Bomber, the B-21 Raider

  02-12-2022 17:06 via news.slashdot.org
  America's newest nuclear stealth bomber is making its public debut after years of secret development and as part of the Pentagon's answer to rising concerns over a future conflict with China. From a report: The B-21 Raider is the first new American bomber aircraft in more than 30 years. Almost every aspect of the program is classified. Ahead of its unveiling Friday at an Air Force facility in Palmdale, California, only artists' renderings of the warplane have been released. Those few images reve
  
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• Meta Urges Washington To Take Hands-Off Approach To Regulating the Metaverse

  02-12-2022 16:31 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta is urging policymakers to hold off on creating new rules governing the metaverse. From a report: In a policy paper released Friday, Meta argues that many of the world's existing laws and regulations will also apply to activity in the metaverse -- a catch-all term that refers to an immersive virtual world that doesn't yet exist in which users could someday work, play games, shop and interact. Edward Bowles, Meta's head of fintech policy, told reporters that regulators could "stymie innovatio
  
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• BloomTech, Previously Lambda School, Cuts Half of Staff

  02-12-2022 15:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  A little over a year after buzzy coding bootcamp Lambda School rebranded as Bloom Institute of Technology, the venture-backed startup is conducting massive layoffs, TechCrunch reported, citing sources. From the report: The workforce reduction, per people familiar with the matter, has impacted half of the company's staff across content, product, data and engineering teams. The layoff is expected to have impacted around 88 employees, using metrics provided in BloomTech's 2022 diversity report metr
  
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• Mozilla Acquires Active Replica To Build On its Metaverse Vision

  02-12-2022 15:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  An automated status updater for Slack isn't the only thing Mozilla acquired this week. From a report: On Wednesday, the company announced that it snatched up Active Replica, a Vancouver-based startup developing a "web-based metaverse." According to Mozilla SVP Imo Udom, Active Replica will support Mozilla's ongoing work with Hubs, the latter's VR chatroom service and open source project. Specifically, he sees the Active Replica team working on personalized subscription tiers, improving the onboa
  
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• Hive Social Turns Off Servers After Researchers Warn Hackers Can Access All Data

  02-12-2022 14:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hive Social, a social media platform that has seen meteoric growth since Elon Musk took over Twitter, abruptly shut down its service on Wednesday after a security advisory warned the site was riddled with vulnerabilities that exposed all data stored in user accounts. "The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages," the advisory, published
  
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• Government Scientists 'Approaching What is Required for Fusion' in Breakthrough Energy Research

  02-12-2022 11:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Scientists hoping to harness nuclear fusion -- the same energy source that powers the Sun and other stars -- have confirmed that magnetic fields can enhance the energy output of their experiments, reports a new study. The results suggest that magnets may play a key role in the development of this futuristic form of power, which could theoretically provide a virtually limitless supply of clean energy. Motherboard reports: Fusion power is generated by the immense energy released as atoms in extrem
  
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• An Ancient Asteroid Impact May Have Caused a Megatsunami on Mars

  02-12-2022 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  The Viking 1 lander arrived on the Martian surface 46 years ago to investigate the planet. It dropped down into what was thought to be an ancient outflow channel. Now, a team of researchers believes they've found evidence of an ancient megatsunami that swept across the planet billions of years ago, less than 600 miles from where Viking landed. Gizmodo reports: In a new paper published today in Scientific Reports, a team identified a 68-mile-wide impact crater in Mars' northern lowlands that they
  
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• Scientists Have Created the World's Smallest Organism That Moves With Genetic Engineering

  02-12-2022 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Motility -- the scientific term for being able to move independently -- is one of the most important features for living organisms on Earth. But where cells' ability to move came from has been a mystery for many scientists. However, new research in which scientists created the world's smallest moving organism provides one idea of how cell motility came to be. As the authors write in their paper, "motility is observed in various phyla and argu
  
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• OpenAI's New Chatbot Can Explain Code and Write Sitcom Scripts But Is Still Easily Tricked

  02-12-2022 02:25 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI has released a prototype general purpose chatbot that demonstrates a fascinating array of new capabilities but also shows off weaknesses familiar to the fast-moving field of text-generation AI. And you can test out the model for yourself right here. The Verge reports: ChatGPT is adapted from OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model but trained to provide more conversational answers. While GPT-3 in its original form simply predicts what text follows any given string of words, ChatGPT tries to engage with us
  
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• Google Reports Decline In Android Memory Safety Vulnerabilities As Rust Usage Grows

  02-12-2022 01:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Last year, Google announced Android Open Source Project (AOSP) support for Rust, and today the company provided an update, while highlighting the decline in memory safety vulnerabilities. 9to5Google reports: Google says the "number of memory safety vulnerabilities have dropped considerably over the past few years/releases."; Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android's total vulnerabilities versus 76% fo
  
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• Hyundai App Bugs Allowed Hackers To Remotely Unlock, Start Cars

  02-12-2022 01:02 via it.slashdot.org
  Vulnerabilities in mobile apps exposed Hyundai and Genesis car models after 2012 to remote attacks that allowed unlocking and even starting the vehicles. BleepingComputer reports: Security researchers at Yuga Labs found the issues and explored similar attack surfaces in the SiriusXM "smart vehicle" platform used in cars from other makers (Toyota, Honda, FCA, Nissan, Acura, and Infinity) that allowed them to "remotely unlock, start, locate, flash, and honk" them. At this time, the researchers hav
  
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• Brains of Post-Pandemic Teens Show Signs of Faster Aging, Study Finds

  02-12-2022 00:20 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brains of teenagers who lived through the Covid pandemic show signs of premature aging, research suggests. The researchers compared MRI scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 teens collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted. After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the te
  
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