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The Beeb decided to test some LLMs to see how well they could summarize the news https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko Turns out the answer is, "not very well".

In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer. It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants. It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form. Additionally, 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, such as incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates.

[...] In her blog, Ms Turness said the BBC was seeking to "open up a new conversation with AI tech providers" so we can "work together in partnership to find solutions".

She called on the tech companies to "pull back" their AI news summaries, as Apple did after complaints from the BBC that Apple Intelligence was misrepresenting news stories.

Some examples of inaccuracies found by the BBC included:

• Gemini incorrectly said the NHS did not recommend vaping as an aid to quit smoking
• ChatGPT and Copilot said Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon were still in office even after they had left
• Perplexity misquoted BBC News in a story about the Middle East, saying Iran initially showed "restraint" and described Israel's actions as "aggressive"

In general, Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Gemini had more significant issues than OpenAI's ChatGPT and Perplexity, which counts Jeff Bezos as one of its investors. Normally, the BBC blocks its content from AI chatbots, but it opened its website up for the duration of the tests in December 2024. The report said that as well as containing factual inaccuracies, the chatbots "struggled to differentiate between opinion and fact, editorialised, and often failed to include essential context."

Normally I'd add a snide remark, but I don't think I need to this time...

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In mid-January, a top United States materials company announced that it had started to manufacture rare earth magnets. It was important news—there are no large U.S. makers of the neodymium magnets that underpin huge and vitally important commercial and defense industries, including electric vehicles. But it created barely a ripple during a particularly loud and stormy time in U.S. trade relations.

The press release, from MP Materials, was light on details. The company disclosed that it had started producing the magnets, called neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB), on a “trial” basis and that the factory would begin gradually ramping up production before the end of this year. According to MP’s spokesman, Matt Sloustcher, the facility will have an initial capacity of 1,000 tonnes per annum, and has the infrastructure in place to scale up to 2,000 to 3,000 tonnes per year. The release also said that the facility, in Fort Worth, Texas, would supply magnets to General Motors and other U.S. manufacturers.

The Texas facility, which MP Materials has named Independence, is not the only major rare-earth-magnet project in the U.S. Most notably, Vacuumschmelze GmbH, a magnet maker based in Hanau, Germany, has begun constructing a plant in South Carolina through a North American subsidiary, e-VAC Magnetics. To build the US $500 million factory, the company secured $335 million in outside funds, including at least $100 million from the U.S. government. (E-VAC, too, has touted a supply agreement with General Motors for its future magnets.)

In another intriguing U.S. rare-earth magnet project, Noveon Magnetics, in San Marcos, Texas, is currently producing what it claims are “commercial quantities” of NdFeB magnets. However, the company is not making the magnets in the standard way, starting with metal alloys, but rather in a unique process based on recycling the materials from discarded magnets. USA Rare Earth announced on 8 January that it had manufactured a small amount of NdFeB magnets at a plant in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Yet another company, Quadrant Magnetics, announced in January, 2022, that it would begin construction on a $100 million NdFeB magnet factory in Louisville, Kentucky. However, 11 months later, U.S. federal agents arrested three of the company’s top executives, charging them with passing off Chinese-made magnets as locally produced and giving confidential U.S. military data to Chinese agencies.

The multiple US neodymium-magnet projects are noteworthy but even collectively they won’t make a noticeable dent in China’s dominance. “Let me give you a reality check,” says Steve Constantinides, an IEEE member and magnet-industry consultant based in Honeoye, N.Y. “The total production of neo magnets was somewhere between 220 and 240 thousand tonnes in 2024,” he says, adding that 85 percent of the total, at least, was produced in China. And “the 15 percent that was not made in China was made in Japan, primarily, or in Vietnam.” (Other estimates put China’s share of the neodymium magnet market as high as 90 percent.)

But look at the figures from a different angle, suggests MP Materials’s Sloustcher. “The U.S. imports just 7,000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year,” he points out. “So in total, these [U.S.] facilities can supplant a significant percentage of U.S. imports, help re-start an industry, and scale as the production of motors and other magnet-dependent industries” returns to the United States, he argues.

And yet, it’s hard not to be a little awed by China’s supremacy. The country has some 300 manufacturers of rare-earth permanent magnets, according to Constantinides. The largest of these, JL MAG Rare-Earth Co. Ltd., in Ganzhou, produced at least 25,000 tonnes of neodymium magnets last year, Constantinides figures. (The company recently announced that it was building another facility, to begin operating in 2026, that it says will bring its installed capacity to 60,000 tonnes a year.)

That 25,000 tonnes figure is comparable to the combined output of all of the rare-earth magnet makers that aren’t in China. The $500-million e-VAC plant being built in South Carolina, for example, is reportedly designed to produce around 1,500 tonnes a year.

RamiK writes:

In a 1985 paper, the computer scientist Andrew Yao, who would go on to win the A.M. Turing Award, asserted that among hash tables with a specific set of properties, the best way to find an individual element or an empty spot is to just go through potential spots randomly — an approach known as uniform probing. He also stated that, in the worst-case scenario, where you're searching for the last remaining open spot, you can never do better than x. for 40 years, most computer scientists assumed that Yao's conjecture was true.

Krapivin was not held back by the conventional wisdom for the simple reason that he was unaware of it. "I did this without knowing about Yao's conjecture," he said. His explorations with tiny pointers led to a new kind of hash table — one that did not rely on uniform probing. And for this new hash table, the time required for worst-case queries and insertions is proportional to (log x)² — far faster than x. This result directly contradicted Yao's conjecture.

[...] "It's not just that they disproved [Yao's conjecture], they also found the best possible answer to his question," said Sepehr Assadi of the University of Waterloo.

[...] In addition to refuting Yao's conjecture, the new paper also contains what many consider an even more astonishing result. It pertains to a related, though slightly different, situation: In 1985, Yao looked not only at the worst-case times for queries, but also at the average time taken across all possible queries. He proved that hash tables with certain properties — including those that are labeled "greedy," which means that new elements must be placed in the first available spot — could never achieve an average time better than log x.

[...] They showed that it did not by providing a counterexample, a non-greedy hash table with an average query time that's much, much better than log x. In fact, it doesn't depend on x at all. "You get a number," Farach-Colton said, "something that is just a constant and doesn't depend on how full the hash table is." The fact that you can achieve a constant average query time, regardless of the hash table's fullness, was wholly unexpected — even to the authors themselves.

( https://www.quantamagazine.org/undergraduate-upends-a-40-year-old-data-science-conjecture-20250210/ )

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Handful of users claim new Nvidia GPUs are melting power cables again:

Here we (maybe) go again: Reports from a handful of early adopters of Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card are reporting that their power cables are melting (so far, there's at least one report on YouTube and one on Reddit, as reported by The Verge). This recalls a similar situation from early in the RTX 4090's life cycle, when power connectors were melting and even catching fire, damaging the GPUs and power supplies.

After much investigation and many guesses from Nvidia and other testers, the 4090's power connector issues ended up being blamed on what was essentially user error; the 12VHPWR connectors were not being inserted all the way into the socket on the GPU or were being bent in a way that created stress on the connection, which caused the connectors to run hot and eventually burst into flames.

The PCI-SIG, the standards body responsible for the design of the new connector, claimed that the design of the 12VHPWR connector itself was sound and that any problems with it should be attributed to the manufacturers implementing the standard. Partly in response to the 4090 issues, the 12VHPWR connector was replaced by an updated standard called 12V-2x6, which uses the same cables and is pin-compatible with 12VHPWR, but which tweaked the connector to ensure that power is only actually delivered if the connectors are firmly seated. The RTX 50-series cards use the 12V-2x6 connector.

The 12VHPWR and 12V-2x6 connectors are both designed to solve a real problem: delivering hundreds of watts of power to high-end GPUs over a single cable rather than trying to fit multiple 8-pin power connectors onto these GPUs. In theory, swapping two to four 8-pin connectors for a single 12V-2x6 or 12VHPWR connector cuts down on the amount of board space OEMs must reserve for these connectors in their designs and the number of cables that users have to snake through the inside of their gaming PCs.

But while Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Arm, and other companies are all PCI-SIG members and all had a hand in the design of the new standards, Nvidia is the only GPU company to use the 12VHPWR and 12V-2x6 connectors in most of its GPUs. AMD and Intel have continued to use the 8-pin power connector, and even some of Nvidia's partners have stuck with 8-pin connectors for lower-end, lower-power cards like the RTX 4060 and 4070 series.

Both of the reported 5090 incidents involved third-party cables, one from custom PC part manufacturer MODDIY and one included with an FSP power supply, rather than the first-party 8-pin adapter that Nvidia supplies with GeForce GPUs. It's much too early to say whether these cables (or Nvidia, or the design of the connector, or the affected users) caused the problem or whether this was just a coincidence.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Boeing has informed its employees of uncertainty in future SLS contracts:

The primary contractor for the Space Launch System rocket, Boeing, is preparing for the possibility that NASA cancels the long-running program.

On Friday, with less than an hour's notice, David Dutcher, Boeing's vice president and program manager for the SLS rocket, scheduled an all-hands meeting for the approximately 800 employees working on the program. The apparently scripted meeting lasted just six minutes, and Dutcher didn't take questions.

During his remarks, Dutcher said Boeing's contracts for the rocket could end in March and that the company was preparing for layoffs in case the contracts with the space agency were not renewed. "Cold and scripted" is how one person described Dutcher's demeanor.

The aerospace company, which is the primary contractor for the rocket's large core stage, issued the notifications as part of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (or WARN) Act, which requires US employers with 100 or more full-time employees to provide a 60-day notice in advance of mass layoffs or plant closings.

"To align with revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations, today we informed our Space Launch Systems team of the potential for approximately 400 fewer positions by April 2025," a Boeing spokesperson told Ars. "This will require 60-day notices of involuntary layoff be issued to impacted employees in coming weeks, in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. We are working with our customer and seeking opportunities to redeploy employees across our company to minimize job losses and retain our talented teammates."

The timing of Friday's hastily called meeting aligns with the anticipated release of President Trump's budget proposal for fiscal-year 2026. This may not be an entire plan but rather a "skinny" budget that lays out a wish list of spending requests for Congress and some basic economic projections. Congress does not have to act on Trump's budget priorities.

Multiple sources said there has been a healthy debate within the White House and senior leadership at NASA, including acting administrator Janet Petro, about the future of the SLS rocket and the Artemis Moon program. Some commercial space advocates have been pressing hard to cancel the rocket outright. Petro has been urging the White House to allow NASA to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions using the initial version of the SLS rocket before the program is canceled.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It's certain that recently discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 will swing close to Earth in 2032. The chances of an impact remain low — but with relatively limited observations so far, the odds are in flux.

On Jan. 31, the collision impact probability was 1.4 percent. As of Feb. 7, NASA reports it's 2.3 percent, which also means a 97.7 percent chance of missing our humble blue world. But don't be surprised if that number climbs higher: It's normal for the impact odds to increase before falling or disappearing completely.

[...] Asteroid 2024 YR4 — spotted by a telescope from the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System — has been deemed an object worthy of close monitoring because of its size. " Currently, no other known large asteroids have an impact probability above 1 percent," the space agency explained. It's between 130 to 300 feet wide, enough to be dubbed a "city-killer" asteroid — if it indeed hit a city. (For reference, the asteroid that hit Arizona 50,000 years ago and created the 600-foot-deep "Meteor Crater" was 100 to 170 feet, or 30 to 50 meters, across. "A similar-size impact event today could destroy a city the size of Kansas City," David Kring, an impact cratering expert at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, explained in a NASA blog.)

Telescopes will refine the asteroid's orbit around the solar system over the coming months, until it travels too far away to observe (it will return again in 2028). And this added information may likely, though temporarily, boost its Earth impact odds. That's because the asteroid's risk corridor or area of uncertainty around Earth will shrink as astronomers can better define its orbit. But as long as Earth remains in that estimated hazard area — like a catcher's mitt awaiting a high-speed baseball — its relative odds of getting hit increases as the possible range of uncertainty shrinks.

"Earth is taking up a bigger percentage of that uncertain area," Betts explained. "So the impact percentage goes up."

Yet space is vast. And at the same time the area of uncertainty is shrinking, more observations reveal and shift where exactly this zone of uncertainty is. The shrinking area typically moves off of Earth, meaning our planet is no longer in that potential impact area. This happened with the asteroid Apophis — a 1,100-foot-wide behemoth that once had a small chance of impacts in both 2029 and 2036. But more precise telescope observations moved Apophis' range of trajectory off of Earth. The impact probability then plummeted.

"It dropped to zero," Betts said.

"It’s a funny thing about homing in on an asteroid and calculating its path, future position, and probability of impacting Earth – it will often appear risky during initial observations, get riskier, and then suddenly become entirely safe," the European Space Agency noted.

Related:
    Huge 'God of Chaos' Asteroid to Pass Near Earth in 2029
    Asteroid Shock: NASA Preparing for 'Colossal God of Chaos' Rock to Arrive in Next 10 Years
    Feared Apophis Impact Ruled Out – Asteroid Will Pass Close Enough to Earth to See with Naked Eye

Original Submission

[Rescheduled to keep it visible--JR]

Introduction

For most people the holiday season is over. There are a few who have their winter holidays booked as we still have a few months of the skiing season to go yet, but I don't think that this affects any of our staff! So I offer a belated 'Happy New Year' and wish you all the very best for 2025.

Volunteers for the Board

Slightly less than 12 months ago I asked for volunteers to serve on the Board of SoylentNews and fortunately some people stepped forward and took on the 3 key roles (Chairman, Treasurer and Secretary). They have each contributed to the setting up of the site and getting us where we are today. However, they will soon be wanting to stand down from their current posts. The concept of the site is that the governance is provided by the community and that posts should be rotated occasionally. We are again seeking volunteers to assume one of the current positions. The roles are important, they are the most important posts on the site because without them there can be no site, but I don't think that they are particularly arduous. They are not roles that require a daily or even a weekly input. They maintain an overview of the site and they have an independent decision-making role in future site operations.

Volunteers for the posts should remember that they must be prepared to sign site legal business documents and therefore cannot maintain perfect anonymity. On the site we have not given any additional information other than their nicknames and user ids. Nevertheless, somewhere in the masses of paperwork and records that the US demands and maintains their names and contact details are recorded.

If you wish to volunteer for a post then you should have an account in good standing i.e. not banned or created within the last few months, and with a reasonable level of karma. Please volunteer either here in the comments or directly via email to admin@soylentnews.org. If you have volunteered for a post previously then it does not preclude you from volunteering again. If you have questions regarding a role then please raise them here. If appropriate, I will ask the person currently in that post to reply so that you get the information direct from 'the horses mouth'.

Once we have a volunteer or volunteers for a post we will hold an election for the community to approve and select a person for a post. This will be done openly and everyone with an active account created before the date and time that this Meta is published will have a single vote. The reason for this restriction is to prevent a mass of new accounts attempting to unfairly influence the outcome of the vote. The current Board will make the final decision on who is chosen.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] The research team, led by Professor Tobin Filleter, has engineered nanomaterials that offer unprecedented strength, weight, and customizability. These materials are composed of tiny building blocks, or repeating units, measuring just a few hundred nanometers – so small that over 100 lined up would barely match the thickness of a human hair.

The researchers used a multi-objective Bayesian optimization machine learning algorithm to predict optimal geometries for enhancing stress distribution and improving the strength-to-weight ratio of nano-architected designs. The algorithm only needed 400 data points, whereas others might need 20,000 or more, allowing the researchers to work with a smaller, high-quality data set. The Canadian team collaborated with Professor Seunghwa Ryu and PhD student Jinwook Yeo at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science & Technology for this step of the process.

This experiment was the first time scientists have applied machine learning to optimize nano-architected materials. According to Peter Serles, the lead author of the project's paper published in Advanced Materials, the team was shocked by the improvements. It didn't just replicate successful geometries from the training data; it learned from what changes to the shapes worked and what didn't, enabling it to predict entirely new lattice geometries.

The team used a two-photon polymerization 3D printer to create prototypes for experimental validation, building optimized carbon nanolattices at the micro- and nano-scale. The team's optimized nanolattices more than doubled the strength of existing designs, withstanding stress of 2.03 megapascals for every cubic meter per kilogram of density – about five times stronger than titanium.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A robotic spacecraft has beamed home crisp videos and snapshots of Earth eclipsing the moon.

Though lunar eclipses generally aren't that unusual — stargazers can watch Earth's shadow obscuring the moon a few times a year — this was different.

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, a private spacecraft hired by NASA to take experiments to the moon, got a rare front-row seat of the spectacle in space. The phenomenon occurred when the blue marble came between the moon and the spacecraft.

Blue Ghost, named after an exotic species of firefly, captured the below footage while flying laps around Earth as it gears up for its first attempt at a lunar touchdown. Almost two weeks ago, the spacecraft witnessed another majestic moment when Earth eclipsed the sun. 

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Intel has already received $2.2B in federal grants for chip production:

Semiconductor giant Intel Corporation has already received $2.2 billion in federal grants from the U.S. Department of Commerce through the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, the company shared during its Thursday earnings call.

Dave Zinsner, Intel's co-interim CEO, executive vice president, and CFO, said the Silicon Valley-based company received the first tranche of $1.1 billion in federal grants at the end of 2024 and an additional $1.1 billion in January 2025.

These grants are based on reaching certain milestones, Zinsner added. Another $5.66 billion has yet to be dispersed.

The company was awarded a total of $7.86 billion in federal grants to build semiconductors in the U.S. in November as part of the U.S. Department of Commerce's U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. While a sizable sum, this total was less than the original $8.5 billion estimate.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The threatened Eurasian otter appears to have disappeared in Kyrgyzstan, officials and scientists warned on Friday, following a long decline in its numbers linked to human activity.

The playful carnivorous mammal was already rare in the land-locked Central Asian country, but is now no longer visible in its one known habitat there, a ministry spokesman said.

The Eurasian otter "in Kyrgyzstan is either on the verge of disappearance or has already disappeared", the spokeswoman for the Kyrgyz natural resources ministry told AFP.

The Ilbirs Foundation, which seeks to protect the mammal, on Friday released a report saying "the otter has disappeared" from its sole known habitat, "putting in question the species' existence in Kyrgyzstan".

Original Submission

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