178431678
submission
smooth wombat writes:
KNP, a Northampshire transport company, shut its doors last week, putting 700 people out of work. The company, which had existed for 158 years, didn't go under due to tariffs or competition. Instead, it is thought hackers gained access to the company's internal systems and data by guessing an employee's password, then encryped everything.
The company said its IT complied with industry standards and it had taken out insurance against cyber-attack.
But a gang of hackers, known as Akira, got into the system leaving staff unable to access any of the data needed to run the business. The only way to get the data back, said the hackers, was to pay.
"If you're reading this it means the internal infrastructure of your company is fully or partially deadLet's keep all the tears and resentment to ourselves and try to build a constructive dialogue," read the ransom note.
The hackers didn't name a price, but a specialist ransomware negotiation firm estimated the sum could be as much as £5m. KNP didn't have that kind of money. In the end all the data was lost, and the company went under.
KNP director Paul Abbott says he hasn't told the employee that their compromised password most likely led to the destruction of the company.
"Would you want to know if it was you?" he asks.
178164475
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Two days after Tesla rolled out Robotaxi in Austin, Texas, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is already launching an investigation after videos showed the vehicles driving erratically.
The Robotaxi’s debut over the weekend featured about 10 cars with “safety drivers” in the front passenger seat driving around a circumscribed area of Austin. Although Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, touted the launch as a huge success and vowed it would make driving safer, several influencers posted videos that appeared to show their Robotaxis glitching or speeding.
One video – posted by a Tesla investor who formerly hosted a podcast about the company – showed the Robotaxi wobbling as it misjudged a left turn, then going into a lane meant for oncoming traffic before driving across a double yellow line back into the correct lane. No cars were in the lane intended for oncoming traffic at the time.
In another video, a pro-Tesla YouTuber praised how the car was going several miles over the speed limit.
177408127
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Over the past year there have been stories about North Korean spies unknowningly, or knowingly, being hired to work in western companies. During an interview by Kraken, a crypto exchange, the interviewers became suspicious about the candidate. Instead of cutting off the interview, Kraken decided to continue the candidate through the hiring process to gain more information. One simple question confirmed the user wasn't who they said they were and even worse, was a North Korean spy. From the article:
The interview was scheduled for Halloween, a classic American holiday—especially for college students in New York—that Smith seemed to know nothing about.
“Watch out tonight because some people might be ringing your doorbell, kids with chain saws,” Percoco said, referring to the tradition of trick or treating. “What do you do when those people show up?”
Smith shrugged and shook his head. “Nothing special,” he said.
Smith was also unable to answer simple questions about Houston, the town he had supposedly been living in for two years. Despite having listed "food" as an interest on his résumé, Smith was unable to come up with a straight answer when asked about his favorite restaurant in the Houston area. He looked around for a few seconds before mumbling, “Nothing special here.”
177003563
submission
smooth wombat writes:
With the implementation of tariffs on nearly every country which does business with the U.S., some companies are already raising prices to account for the increaesed cost of products. Other companies have not yet implemented price increasd, but are warning customers to expect higher prices in the near future. As a result, companies are now adding a "tariff surcharge" to all purchases.
Dame, a sexual wellness brand that makes adult toys and personal care products, has implemented a $5 "Trump tariff surcharge" that is automatically added to customers' online shopping carts at checkout.
Dame CEO Alexandra Fine said the fee doesn't cover all of its extra costs and that the company is analyzing its pricing given that most of its products are made in China. "Our whole industry is in China, so we've already seen the impact," she told CBS MoneyWatch.
Fine also said she wants to be transparent with customers about what is happening, rather than quietly inflating prices.
"The intention of adding the Trump tariff surcharge as a line item at checkout was to remind people that this is an extra tax on us. I wanted people to understand why it's more expensive — that it's because of political decisions that were made," she said.
177003065
submission
smooth wombat writes:
The Social Security Administration has announced the only method it will communicate with the public or media is through posts on Twitter (X). This change took place after large numbers of communications staff were either fired or reassigned, sometimes to less senior positions. SSA Midwest-West (MWW) Regional Commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis told employees in a call Thursday that those regional offices will no longer issue press releases or “Dear Colleague” letters to advocate groups.
SSA is centralizing its process for responding to all inquiries, except those coming from members of Congress. For non-congressional inquiries, SSA regional offices will send their draft responses to SSA’s deputy commissioner of operations for review.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that SSA technicians received an email that read: “Effective immediately, do not respond directly to any public or congressional inquiries.”
176666073
submission
smooth wombat writes:
In what can only be described as a no-brainer, Volkswagen has announced it will have once again have physical buttons in all its vehicles. As Andreas Mindt, design chief at the company said, removing buttons was "a mistake".
“From the ID 2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light – below the screen,” he explained, adding: “It's not a phone: it's a car.”
This doesn’t mean touch screens are set to disappear on new Volkswagens, just that drivers will now have the option of physical controls for their most used day-to-day tasks. The new controls are set to make their debut in the ID.2all, a small, budget EV set to debut in Europe.
176333709
submission
smooth wombat writes:
The man who espouses "free speech" has announced he will be "fixing" Community Notes on Twitter because they repeatedly contradict what Trump says. He claims a cabal of governments and media are using Notes to game the system.
Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."
Yaccarino invited audience members to "think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time," but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.
Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a "neon sore thumb."
176002645
submission
smooth wombat writes:
China has broken its own record for maintaining a steady state, high confinement plasma operation. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) was able to operate for 17 minutes and 46 seconds, almost triple the previous record of 6 minutes and 43 seconds which EAST also set in 2023.
"We hope to expand international collaboration via EAST and bring fusion energy into practical use for humanity," Professor Yuntao Song, director of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Plasma Physics, said in a statement.
EAST—which began experimental operations in 2006—has received a number of upgrades since its previous record-breaking run in 2023, Xianzu Gong, head of EAST's Physics and Experimental Operations division, explained in a statement.
For example, refinements to the reactor's heating system have seen its stable power output doubled; it now operates at the level equivalent to some 140,000 microwave ovens.
175988917
submission
smooth wombat writes:
After going dark for 12 hours in response to a U.S. law saying it must divest from Chinese ownership, TikTok came back on line when the new administration took office. However, once up and running, users found one unexpected change. Anti-Trump content is now being censored. Words, phrases, and videos which were readily accessible pre-blackout were now unavailable or being removed entirely.
A post on X, formerly Twitter, which has received 4.5 million views at the time of reporting, claims that "TikTok is now region locking Americans from looking up things like "fascism" and "Donald Trump rigged election"."
The post includes two screenshots of the TikTok app. The screenshot is of the search page, and in both the search term is "Donald Trump rigged election." The post states that: "On the left are results from a device in America, and on the right are results from one in the UK."
The post on the left shows a results page stating "No results found," while on the left it shows two videos of the President.
Another post from the account Dustin Genereux said that, "Censorship on TikTok is at an all time high with accounts being deleted, posts going back years being flagged, people losing access to the creator fund for saying anything Anti-Trump, MAGA, Elon, etc. But free speech and all that right?"
175818025
submission
smooth wombat writes:
On March 25, 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law HB 3, legislation which bans most children from having social media accounts and requires adult web sites to implement age verification on any person, not just minors, who visit their site. On January 1, 2025 the law went into effect and as happened before, PornHub and other adult sites blocked access to people in Florida. As a result, searches for VPN have skyrocketed.
Google trends data published on January 2 showed a sharp rise in "vpn" searches beginning on December 31 2024 and continuing into the new year. VPNs allow computer users to disguise their locations and thus get around location-specific website blocks.
While it doesn't give individual search figures, Google gave the value of 100 to vpn inquiries on January 2, compared to the level of 91 on January 1, 55 on December 31 and 37 on December 30.
Searches for individual VPN providers as well as "Internet pornography" and "computer virus" were also categorized as "breakout" for Florida over the period by Google.
175639123
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Scientist have unlocked the secret to a bacteria dubbed 'Conan the Bacterium' which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most radiant-resistant life-form. Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand radiation doses 28,000 times greater than that which would kill a human. In addition, this bacteria can survive on the outside of the International Space Station for three years. It can also withstand acid, cold, and dehydration (a D&D player's worst nightmare). All of this proctection comes down a unique antioxidant.
The antioxidant is formed by a simple group of small molecules called metabolites, including manganese, phosphate and a small peptide, or molecule, of amino acids.
Together, this powerful trilogy is more effective in protecting against radiation than manganese combined with just one of the other components, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings could be used to protect astronauts from high doses of cosmic radiation on future deep-space missions across our solar system, according to the study authors.
“We’ve long known that manganese ions and phosphate together make a strong antioxidant, but discovering and understanding the ‘magic’ potency provided by the addition of the third component is a breakthrough. This study has provided the key to understanding why this combination is such a powerful — and promising — radioprotectant,” said study coauthor Brian Hoffman, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry and professor of molecular biosciences at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a statement.
175523161
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Steven Adair, of cybersecurity firm Veloxity, revealed at the Cyberwarcon secrity conference how Russian hackers were able to daisy-chain as many as three separate wi-fi networks in their efforts to attack victims.
Adair says that Volexity first began investigating the breach of its DC customer's network in the first months of 2022, when the company saw signs of repeated intrusions into the customer's systems by hackers who had carefully covered their tracks. Volexity's analysts eventually traced the compromise to a hijacked user's account connecting to a Wi-Fi access point in a far end of the building, in a conference room with external-facing windows. Adair says he personally scoured the area looking for the source of that connection. “I went there to physically run down what it could be. We looked at smart TVs, looked for devices in closets. Is someone in the parking lot? Is it a printer?” he says. “We came up dry.”
Only after the next intrusion, when Volexity managed to get more complete logs of the hackers' traffic, did its analysts solve the mystery: The company found that the hijacked machine which the hackers were using to dig around in its customer's systems was leaking the name of the domain on which it was hosted—in fact, the name of another organization just across the road. “At that point, it was 100 percent clear where it was coming from,” Adair says. “It's not a car in the street. It's the building next door.”
With the cooperation of that neighbor, Volexity investigated that second organization's network and found that a certain laptop was the source of the street-jumping Wi-Fi intrusion. The hackers had penetrated that device, which was plugged into a dock connected to the local network via Ethernet, and then switched on its Wi-Fi, allowing it to act as a radio-based relay into the target network. Volexity found that, to break into that target's Wi-Fi, the hackers had used credentials they'd somehow obtained online but had apparently been unable to exploit elsewhere, likely due to two-factor authentication.
Volexity eventually tracked the hackers on that second network to two possible points of intrusion. The hackers appeared to have compromised a VPN appliance owned by the other organization. But they had also broken into the organization's Wi-Fi from another network's devices in the same building, suggesting that the hackers may have daisy-chained as many as three networks via Wi-Fi to reach their final target. “Who knows how many devices or networks they compromised and were doing this on,” says Adair.
Volexity had presumed early on in its investigation that the hackers were Russian in origin due to their targeting of individual staffers at the customer organization focused on Ukraine. Then in April, fully two years after the original intrusion, Microsoft warned of a vulnerability in Windows' print spooler that had been used by Russia's APT28 hacker group—Microsoft refers to the group as Forest Blizzard—to gain administrative privileges on target machines. Remnants left behind on the very first computer Volexity had analyzed in the Wi-Fi-based breach of its customer exactly matched that technique. “It was an exact one-to-one match,” Adair says.
175266053
submission
smooth wombat writes:
In 2013, James Howell's partner inadvertently threw out a hard drive along with other trash. Unknown to this person, this hard drive contained approxmately 8,000 bitcoins. For the past decade Howell has been petitioning the town council of Newport to excavate the landfill in the hope of recovering the drive which would now hold approximately $647 million worth of cryptocurrency. Now he is suing the council in an attempt to force them to let him excavate.
Should the hard drive be recovered, Howells thinks there is an 80 percent chance that the coins on it would be retrievable. If it all works out, he has offered the council 10% of the recovered Bitcoin: $65 million worth. But, citing environmental concerns, the council has rejected his proposal to dig through over a decade’s worth of garbage.
The council issued a report wherein a spokesperson said, “The council has told Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. The council is the only body authorized to carry out operations on the site.”
The excavation would cost $13 million and take between 18 and 36 months, plus another year to restore things to their original state. Howells says the council won’t have to pay for any of it, plus he’d give them 10 percent if he finds it.
175227377
submission
smooth wombat writes:
The Windows 11 24H2 update has had a host of issues associated with it including disappearing mouse cursors and blue screens related to Intel drivers. Now comes word the update leaves behind over 8 GB of undeletable cache files.
According to Windows Latest, attempts to delete the cache via the Control Panel are unsuccessful. Although you can select the cache for deletion and initiate the deletion process, the cache remains. Various other methods to remove the Windows update cache failed, too. It only cleared after a clean Windows installation altogether.
Microsoft is preparing a patch to solve the problem, which should be rolled out as part of an upcoming update. Until then, you should leave the Windows Update cache untouched. It really isn’t worth the hassle of reinstalling Windows just to clear those files.
175169481
submission
smooth wombat writes:
With all the devastation going on in the Southeast due to Hurricane Helene, any impact to the tech industry might not be high on the list of things to worry about. However, a tiny town in North Carolina is indispensable to tech, and its flooding could have a large impact. Why? Spruce Pine has one of the largest sources of pure quartz used in the semiconductor and solar panel industry on the planet.
“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors.
“Purity really does matter,” he says. “You're talking about a process to create the silicon wafers that later become silicon chips, where one single atom being in the wrong place” could derail production.
