When this happened in the US a few months ago, the Chinese entered through the NSA backdoor.

The "big three" credit rating companies - in particular Moody's - do this for company bonds and bonds issued by countries. Vaguely relevant because the USA was downrated a month ago, an indication that they are buying on credit.

If they're going to use Signal, they could at least make contributions towards Signal's development (financial, not code).

If someone really has to Unsubscribe, DO IT IN A PRIVATE SESSION (aka Porn Mode).

This was known 25 years ago.

Japan is the latest nation hoping to tempt disgruntled US researchers

I'd say your question was answered in the summary, or are you suggesting they might want to put intelligent Gaijin out to stud? That would be an enticement!

The United Kingdom has already been there, done that. Boris Johnson and his bunch of merry men (and women).

Hmm:
- confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were
- first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations
- repeatedly requested that the match start over
That all rings a bell somewhere - confusion, blaming everything else for the errors, repeatedly requesting a mulligan. That seems familiar.

A friend lost his iPhone to a pickpocket in Paris a couple of years back (can't remember when) and when he got back home he checked its location. Sofia, Bulgaria. No chance of getting that back.

As for an office break-in, around 15-17 years ago the company I was working for upgraded everything from Windows NT4 (really!) to Windows XP. The whole thing was handled by subcontracters and they were very active for a couple of days. The next day I came into the office at 7 am and started work normally, a few minutes later someone came in and reported that their new PCs had vanished. It turned out that all of the new PCs (50-75 of them) were gone with the exception of those in three offices - someone always came and left very late and was obviously still there when the thieves turned up (and it was dark outside), so they left his office and the two adjacent ones alone.
The thieves clearly had keys to the building and all offices. The subcontracting company was placed on a blacklist.

I've got a rebranded 10000 power bank purchased from a "reputable seller" (not Amazon or any of the Chinese direct sellers). The brand name is "sbs", the company based in Italy and the power bank says "made in China".
Luckily the device does not match the pictures in the original article so I'll tentatively assume that my device (bought in 2024) is not affected. The year 2024 should be an indicator that it is too new but the device was reduced to clear and that would suggest that it's a bit older.

There used to be a setting in Android to do this automatically on every reboot - I had it set in 2020 for a while - but I failed to find it when looking a couple of weeks ago. The Facebook app is not a problem for me (I placed it in "Forced Stop" on day 1 with my new phone) and Instagram is not installed, but I use WhatsApp. As for Yandox, not on a bet.

Is Cozy Bear the same as Fancy Bear?

I'd say it's conclusive proof that Open Source is bad for you, or at least bad for Vlad_Putin and his minions.

Business Insider announced this week that it wants staff to better incorporate AI into its journalism.

So they want their staff to fake it? Go full Boris Johnson? (He was sacked twice for "inventing" news).
Or do they want BI staff to act as fact checkers for AI-generated stories?

Can we assume that Garmin uses Google data?
I read about this outage on a German-language site while it was still ongoing (and verified it), but they made it clear that other mapping/SatNav systems such as TomTomGo were not affected. Apparently it was a database problem.