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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

IBM is hopeful of completing the $6.4 billion purchase of Hashicorp relatively smoothly given what Big Blue perceives to be a "more rational" and "pro-competition" regulatory environment.

The comments were made on Wednesday night during an exec earnings call with analysts to discuss IBM's latest results for calendar Q4 and 2024 as a whole, before the Justice Department sued to block HPE's buy of Juniper Networks.

Responding to a question about possible M&A activity as the US enters a "period of relatively low regulatory overhang," IBM boss Arvind Krishna, said:

"We are looking forward to a regulatory environment that is a bit more rational and a bit more pro-competition. So I think what that implies for us is that we think reasonable deals have a very good chance of getting through in a reasonable amount of time and not being held up for years."

IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp was first announced in April, intended as a way for Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform's configuration management and Terraform's automation to "simplify provisioning and configuration of applications across hybrid cloud environments."

The deal has since been held up on both sides of the pond, with the US FTC opening an antitrust review in July and the UK's CMA launching an inquiry into the proposed transaction last month.

In expectation of a friendlier business approach from regulators, Krishna said with that in mind, "we are going to lean in more, which is reasonable. If you look at our free cash flow and you look at what we are setting out for the year, that could leave as much as $7 billion or a bit more."

Don't worry investors, IBM has your back and there is still enough tucked away for a dividend. The corporation ended last year with $12.7 billion in free cash and says it has flexibility to borrow if needed but intends to live within its means. "And if we find targets that meet our criteria, we are going to lean in and get things done."

"I'm going to just finish that by saying Hashi has been waiting out there for almost a year. We certainly hope that with a friendlier environment, that gets done soon and that then begins to open up the aperture for getting more deals done. So I think hopefully that address both the cash flows and the regulations around M&A."

CFOP James Kavanaugh chimed in, saying "we fully expect to close the Hashi transaction in a relatively soon period of time… We fully expect that in this new administration environment."

[...] Just [recently], however, the Justice Department – which was already examining the transaction's implications – said it would "eliminate fierce head-to-head competition between the companies, raise prices, reduce innovation, and diminish choice for scores of American businesses and institutions."

It has sued to block the marriage between HPE and Juniper, the second and third biggest providers of wireless local area networks in the US, filing a complaint in the Northern District of California.

Hashicorp doesn't command the same market share as Juniper Networks in its sector, and no such legal action has het been launched. With a multi-billion war chest at its disposal, IBM will be keeping a watchful eye on the case.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

It might be the first time this type of stealer has cracked iPhones:

Researchers from Kaspersky have identified malware being distributed within apps on both Android and iOS mobile storefronts. Dmitry Kalinin and Sergey Puzan shared their investigation into a malware campaign, which they have dubbed SparkCat, that has likely been active since March 2024.

"We cannot confirm with certainty whether the infection was a result of a supply chain attack or deliberate action by the developers," the pair wrote. "Some of the apps, such as food delivery services, appeared to be legitimate, whereas others apparently had been built to lure victims." They said SparkCat is a stealthy operation that at a glance appears to be requesting normal or harmless permissions.

[...] The malware in question uses optical character recognition (OCR) to review a device's photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more than 242,000 times. Kaspersky says "This is the first known case of an app infected with OCR spyware being found in Apple's official app marketplace."

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://chiraaggohel.com/posts/llms-eda/

One paper that caught my attention a bit ago was Selective attention in hypothesis-driven data analysis by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher. In their study, students who were given specific hypotheses to test were much less likely to notice an obvious "gorilla in the data" compared to students who explored the data freely.

[...] I use large language models relatively often to assist with smaller portions of my daily bioinformatics work and have been interested in studying their ability to perform complete bioinformatics analyses. A key part of any analysis is exploratory data analysis (EDA), and I wondered how well large language models would perform at this task. This naturally begs the question: are large language models able to notice the "gorilla in the data" given the same prompts given to human students?

[...] Furthermore, their data analysis capabilities seem to focus much more on quantitative metrics and summary statistics, and less on the visual structure of the data. In some ways, this could be seen as a feature rather than a bug. While humans are hard-wired to see faces in clouds and trends in random noise, these models appear to err in the opposite direction.

I have a few thoughts on potential implications:

First, it suggests that current LLMs might be particularly valuable in domains where avoiding confirmation bias is critical. They could serve as a useful check against our tendency to over-interpret data, especially in fields like genomics or drug discovery where false positives are costly. (But also it's not like LLMs are immune to their own form of confirmation bias)

However, this same trait makes them potentially problematic for exploratory data analysis. The core value of EDA lies in its ability to generate novel hypotheses through pattern recognition. The fact that both Sonnet and 4o required explicit prompting to notice even dramatic visual patterns suggests they may miss crucial insights during open-ended exploration.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Messaging app said it had 'high confidence' some users were targeted and 'possibly compromised' by Paragon Solutions spyware:

Nearly 100 journalists and other members of civil society using WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Meta, were targeted by spyware owned by Paragon Solutions, an Israeli maker of hacking software, the company alleged on Friday.

The journalists and other civil society members were being alerted of a possible breach of their devices, with WhatsApp telling the Guardian it had "high confidence" that the 90 users in question had been targeted and "possibly compromised".

It is not clear who was behind the attack. Like other spyware makers, Paragon's hacking software is used by government clients and WhatsApp said it had not been able to identify the clients who ordered the alleged attacks.

Experts said the targeting was a "zero-click" attack, which means targets would not have had to click on any malicious links to be infected.

[...] WhatsApp said it had sent Paragon a "cease and desist" letter and that it was exploring its legal options. WhatsApp said the alleged attacks had been disrupted in December and that it was not clear how long the targets may have been under threat.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Related:

• Journalist Sues Predator Spyware Maker for Allegedly Helping Government Surveil Him
• Israeli Spyware Maker Is in Spotlight Amid Reports of Wide Abuses
• The Great iPwn -- Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage 'Zero-Click' Exploit

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-through-annas-archive-despite-few-seeders-250206/

Facebook/Meta torrented over 81+TB of books/data to feed their models. Odd that the law isn't pounding on their door or they have some kind of strikes to get disconnected from the internet. Zuck likes his torrents and pirated books ...

Freshly unsealed court documents reveal that Meta downloaded significant amounts of data from shadow libraries through Anna's Archive. The company's use of BitTorrent was already known, but internal email communication reveals sources and terabytes of downloaded data, as well as a struggle with limited availability and slow download speeds due to a lack of seeders.

"Meta downloaded millions of pirated books from LibGen through the bit torrent protocol using a platform called LibTorrent. Internally, Meta acknowledged that using this protocol was legally problematic," the third amended complaint noted.

Meta's employees were not oblivious to potential copyright concerns. According to the unsealed records, one employee stated: "I feel that using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold."

Clearly not beneath them.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] For Danny Glavin, a senior sample scientist, he wanted to solve a relentless mystery in his life's work: Why are all known living things only based on the left-handed forms of amino acids, the molecules that build proteins? 

His moment arrived nearly a decade later. Glavin and a team of researchers probed the grit from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid made of loosely bound boulders, but what they found threw them a curveball. Rather than supporting one of the leading hypotheses — that the early solar system favored the left-handed variety and brought those ingredients to primitive Earth — it showed no favoritism at all. 

[...] Many amino acids, whether they're used in biology or not, come in two mirror-image forms. Each molecule has a central carbon atom with other atom groups attached, oriented in one direction or the reverse. This property, called chirality, is like a left and right hand: They're similar, but if you stacked them, the thumbs would be hitchhiking opposite ways.

In Earth life, the amino acids are always "left-handed," and sugars, which partly make up the backbone of DNA, are always right-handed, giving the double helix its signature twist to the right. The homogeneity found among both is especially confounding to scientists because the left and right-handed versions of all these molecules are equally available in nonliving chemical mixes. 

Practically speaking, if all biological molecules took the reverse form, that might work just fine. So if life could have taken the other path, why didn't it? Is uniform "handedness" a secret ingredient in the recipe for life, and more specifically, did it have to turn left? Did the bias toward left-handed amino acids begin in the cosmos, or did it happen later on this planet?

"A fundamental question for all of us is whether life had to be the way it is," said Iris Chen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA, who wasn't involved in the asteroid study. "Is the universe predisposed to our kind of life, or is our biology the result of accidents and chance?"

Scientists knew early on they would use the material collected by NASA's $800 million OSIRIS-Rex mission, short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, to analyze the "handedness" of individual amino acids. Bennu's mineral fragments could be older than the 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. These grains of stardust could have come from dying stars or supernovas that eventually led to the creation of the sun and planets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-encryption-backdoor-uk/ [Paywalled]

"Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

"The British government's undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues."

From the BBC:

The UK government has demanded to be able to access encrypted data stored by Apple users worldwide in its cloud service.

Currently only the Apple account holder can access data stored in this way - the tech giant itself cannot view it.

The demand has been served by the Home Office under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which compels firms to provide information to law enforcement agencies. Apple declined to comment, but says on its website that it views privacy as a "fundamental human right". Under the law, the demand cannot be made public.

The Home Office said: "We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices."

Privacy International called it an "unprecedented attack" on the private data of individuals. "This is a fight the UK should not have picked," said the charity's legal director Caroline Wilson Palow. "This overreach sets a hugely damaging precedent and will embolden abusive regimes the world over."

owl writes:

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently, I'm not alone.

On this page I'm going to briefly explore why people hate E.T., and how the game can be fixed.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Law enforcement officers across Europe assembled again to collectively disrupt major facilitators of cybercrime, with at least one of those cuffed apparently a fan of the dramedy series The Gilmore Girls.

Two crime forums, Cracked and Nulled, were pulled offline.

Together, the platforms amassed more than 9 million users and were often budding e-miscreants' first foray into pursuing a life of cybercrime.

Similar to BreachForums, which was briefly taken down by law enforcement last year, Cracked and Nulled offered users a platform to discuss all things devious and a marketplace to sell their tools and ill-gotten wares.

The collective takedown action was led by German authorities in a campaign dubbed Operation Talent and took place between January 28-30.

It led to two arrests following the search of seven properties. Law enforcement seized 17 servers, 12 domains, 50 devices, and around €300,000 ($311,279) worth of cash and cryptocurrency tokens. Given that Cracked and Nulled generated millions in revenue, the amount seized is just a fraction - but still a notable disruption to their operations.

Lucas Sohn, a 29-year-old Argentine, was the only named suspect. A video released by Europol showed Sohn, who resides in Spain, being arrested and his devices combed through by the Guardia Civil. The video also showed the arrest of a second, unnamed individual.

[...] The Justice Department said Cracked had been on the scene since 2018 and raked in $4 million in the process. Its primary offering was a marketplace that offered access to stolen credentials, hacking tools, and servers to host malware and stolen data.

[...] Meanwhile, in a separate crackdown, the US and Dutch Politie jointly announced the disruption of a Pakistan-based fraud network.

The network was comprised of websites devoted to selling products like phishing kits, which were later used to carry out Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes – the most economically damaging cybercrime in the US, the FBI reckons.

Run by a group known as Saim Raza, aka HeartSender, a total of 39 domains and their associated servers were seized by the US and Netherlands.

Authorities didn't specify victim numbers, only that 'numerous' US-based cases resulted in over $3 million in losses.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-radiation-belts-detected-around-earth-after-epic-solar-storm

In May 2024, an epic solar storm rattled Earth so powerfully that its effects were felt even at the bottom of the ocean.

In the wake of a torrent of flare activity on the Sun, our planet was buffeted by a powerful blast of solar particles that shook our magnetic field, and bathed our skies with a panoply of shimmering colors as auroras reached far lower latitudes than usual.

But its effects were way more far-reaching, as scientists now reveal. In the months following the storm, Earth was girded by two new, temporary radiation belts of high-energy particles, trapped by the planet's magnetic field.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JA033504

Original Submission

upstart writes:

This year will decide if Horizon Worlds "will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure," according to a Meta executive:

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth is giving the metaverse a year to become a hit, according to an internal forum post reported by Business Insider. That time period will determine whether Reality Labs' mixed reality efforts are "the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure," he writes.

Bosworth details his expectations early in the post:

We have the best portfolio of products we've ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR [Mixed Reality]. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.

The post comes days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recently leaked comments in an all-hands meeting, in which he predicted an "intense year" and emphasized the need to stay in the lead with its smart glasses, which have taken the spotlight away from Reality Labs' Quest headsets.

Bosworth says that despite 2024 being the department's best year, Reality Labs hasn't "actually made a dent in the world yet." The group is smaller now in the wake of layoffs and the success of Meta's Ray-bans and AI efforts, but Bosworth wrote that it doesn't "need big teams to do great work" and that he thinks smaller teams have moved faster and produce better results.

He closes out the post saying the team doesn't need "a bunch of new ideas," but that most in the group "just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed." As for what happens if Horizon Worlds doesn't become a hit in the next year, Bosworth doesn't get more specific than his "legendary misadventure" comment. But it seems unlikely that it'll take off now, making his post feel more like an expiration date than anything else.

Do you think Mixed Reality will take off and, if not, why has it failed to become as popular as Meta believes it eventually will? What do you see as the future for MR?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Platinum, a metal that helps craft aesthetically pleasing jewelry, also finds use in a car's exhaust for entirely non-aesthetic reasons. The catalytic converter is required on nearly every car to remove harmful gases, such as nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide, from your exhaust. Platinum and other heavy metals such as palladium and rhodium in the catalytic converter act a catalyst in detoxifying these gases.

However, the presence of such precious metals and catalytic converters' easy accessibility makes converters a sought-after target for thieves known as "cutters." Catalytic converter theft witnessed an exponential rise during the pandemic, peaking in 2022, when State Farm alone saw 45,000 claims for stolen converters. Cutters often sell the stolen converters to scrap recyclers, who then extract the pure platinum and palladium. 

So how much platinum and palladium does your catalytic converter contain? Also, why exactly does the mostly inert platinum find its use in a catalytic converter? 

[...] The major reason why catalytic converter theft skyrocketed after the pandemic was the sudden price rise of the catalyst, especially platinum and palladium. During their peak, platinum sold for $1,289 per ounce and palladium sold for $3,307 per ounce, making a typical catalytic converter worth at least $128 of platinum and $231 of palladium. With metal prices settling since the pandemic, a typical catalytic converter now contains upward of $90 worth of platinum and $68 worth of palladium. The massive drop in prices and government efforts to end catalytic converter theft have been a key reason they've declined in recent times.

[...] While numerous other metals such as copper, nickel, manganese, cerium, and iron can all behave as catalysts for the these reactions, they often lack the stability and heat tolerance needed to withstand the high temperatures and elemental exposure in a car's exhaust. As a result, metals like platinum, palladium, and rhodium become the perfect fit for catalytic converters, helping reduce harmful exhausts that can have detrimental environmental effects such as acid rain and formation of ground-level ozone.

Original Submission

digitalaudiorock writes:

For what is apparently the fifth time in recent years, changes to the Cloudflare browser integrity check are blocking the Palemoon browser as well as other non-mainstream browsers from any sites that use it. Every time this has happened before it's taken at least two weeks for them to address it. This one has gone on for a week and Cloudflare has yet to even acknowledge it. Here's the original post on the Palemoon forum:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32045

The following post was then made on the Cloudflare community forum. Oddly, the thread was apparently closed because forum users flagged it as spam. It's pretty clear that these were pro-Cloudflare trolls on the forum that Cloudflare themselves is apparently OK with...likely because they troll on Cloudflare's side:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/access-denied-to-pale-moon-desktop-browser/764330

This was later started on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953508

It's bad enough that many sites get coded so as to only work on mainstream browsers. However it's a much bigger issue when a company that's becoming the gateway to the web does so. In addition to the countless things that are wrong with this, I also agree with this post from user "Deadgye" on the Palemoon forum, making a case for false advertising on their part:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32045&start=100#p259382

The cynic in me wonders if every time I get blocked from a site, I might be doing a $blocked_bots++ to some statistics Clouldflare may brag about.

Original Submission

TheReaperD writes:

News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include "ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation", "New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens", and in Wisconsin, "ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens".

But The Guardian took a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: "Updated: 01/24/2025".

So, it looks like rather than actually doing any immigration raids, they're simply changing the timestamps on [some] raids dating back to 2008 to claim credit again for raids they did long [ago]. Once again, hype over substance.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Piecing together the puzzle of the world's earliest datable rune stone:

Piecing together fragments of the world's earliest known rune stone shows they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and may have been separated intentionally, shedding light on the varied pragmatic and ritual aspects of early Germanic rune stones.

Runes were the letters used to write Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet, the oldest of which were in use until about AD 700. However, how these runes originated and were used is unclear.

"The development of runic writing and the practice of inscribing runes on stone are difficult to trace," says Dr. Kristel Zilmer, professor in runology at the University of Oslo, and member of the research team behind a new publication in Antiquity.

Thus, the discovery of several sandstone fragments inscribed with runes at the grave field of Svingerud, Norway, is exciting, as they shed light on early use of runic writing on stone and feature multiple intriguing sequences of runes alongside other puzzling markings. The archaeological contexts of the finds provide excellent opportunities for dating the rune stone by radiocarbon dates.

The pieces of stone were found in separate graves. Through meticulous archaeological investigations over three field seasons and analysis of the fragments in the lab, the research team found that they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. By piecing together the fragments, the team were able to detect several runic inscriptions.

[...] This suggests that the original, large stone was intentionally fragmented, scattered and incorporated into later burials. Perhaps the stone was initially intended to mark one grave, but was fragmented to commemorate subsequent burials.

This invites a different perspective on the rune stone: could some of the unidentified symbols bridge the gap between ornamental script and early writing? Was the fragmentation and scattering of rune stones a means to connect different graves across the grave field?

Journal Reference: Inscribed sandstone fragments of Hole, Norway: radiocarbon dates provide insight into rune-stone traditions, Antiquity (2025). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.225

Original Submission