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aliks writes:

The stated aim is to promote better security by encouraging automation of certificate renewal, and this is the narrative promoted by vendors who will coincidentally benefit mightily from increased certificate and services sales.

The story was picked up by most of the usual tech channels such as Computerworld

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3960658/vendors-vote-to-radically-slash-website-certificate-duration.html

who have a decent summary of the likely consequences, but here is an exercept from the press release of one vendor: Sectigo

https://www.sectigo.com/resource-library/sectigo-cab-reduce-ssl-tls-certificates-lifespan-47-days

Scottsdale, AZ — April 14, 2025 — Sectigo, a global leader in digital certificates and automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), today announced that the CA/Browser (CA/B) Forum ballot it endorsed to reduce the maximum validity term of SSL/TLS certificates to 47 days by 2029 has passed. This groundbreaking move to shorten digital certificate lifespans seeks to enhance online security, drive automation in certificate management, and ready systems for quantum computing challenges by improving crypto agility.

The newly approved measure, initially proposed by Apple and endorsed by Sectigo in January 2025, will gradually reduce certificate lifespans from the current 398 days to 47 days through a phased approach:

        March 15, 2026: Maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 200 days. This accommodates a six-month renewal cadence. The Domain Control Validation (DCV) reuse period reduces to 200 days.
        March 15, 2027: Maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 100 days. This accommodates a three-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 100 days.
        March 15, 2029: Maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 47 days. This accommodates a one-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 10 days.

"At Sectigo we have long advocated for shorter certificate lifecycles as a crucial step in bolstering internet security, which is why we endorsed this ballot from its inception," said Kevin Weiss, chief executive officer at Sectigo. "This collaborative initiative passed by the CA/Browser Forum not only showcases the industry's unified commitment to enhance digital trust for all but also empowers customers to be at the leading edge of preparing for a quantum future."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla Accused Of Speeding Up Odometers So Their Warranties Expire Faster:

A Tesla owner in California is seeking a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all other Tesla owners in the state after he says the company has been systematically altering odometers so their warranties expire faster.

Lead plaintiff Nyree Hinton said he bought a used Model Y in December 2022 with 36,772 miles on it.

But after several visits to Tesla for repairs completed under warranty, he said, he began to notice odd quirks with the odometer, which regularly overestimated his mileage by at least 15% but sometimes as much as 117%.

From March 2023 to June 2023, for instance, Hinton said, his car logged 72.35 miles per day despite him having a consistent driving routine of just 20 miles per day.

After the vehicle's 50,000-mile basic warranty expired in July 2023, Hinton said, the odometer then began to underreport his daily usage. In April 2024, the lawsuit alleges, the Model Y reported around 50 average daily miles, despite Hinton driving a 100-mile commute two to three days a week.

The lawsuit points to similar tales shared by other Tesla owners online as the basis for class-action status.

According to the lawsuit, Tesla's odometer system isn't physically linked to the number of miles the vehicle has traveled, instead relying on data like energy consumption, driving behavior and predictive algorithms to estimate distance traveled.

"By tying warranty limits and lease mileage caps to inflated 'odometer' readings, Tesla increases repair revenue, reduces warranty obligations, and compels consumers to purchase extended warranties prematurely," the suit said.

Odometer fraud constitutes a federal crime, with cumulative penalties that can be applied for every instance of odometer tampering.

Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Oldest serving US astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday:

America's oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday.

The Soyuz MS-26 space capsule carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan's steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.

They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said.

For Pettit - who has now spent a total of 590 days in space - it was his fourth mission.

Still, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit - that record belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998. He died in 2016.

Pettit and the two Russian cosmonauts will now spend some time readjusting to gravity.

After that, Pettit - who was born in Oregon on 20 April 1955 - will be flown to Houston in Texas, while Ovchinin and Vagner will go to Russia's main space training base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star City) near Moscow.

Before their departure from the ISS, the crew handed command of the spaceship to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.

Last month, two Nasa astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, finally returned to Earth after spending more than nine months on board the ISS - instead of the initially planned just eight days.

They flew to the ISS in June 2024 - but technical issues with the spacecraft they used to get to the space station meant they were only able to return to Earth on 18 March this year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

by Tokyo Metropolitan University

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have found that the motion of unlabeled cells can be used to tell whether they are cancerous or healthy. They observed malignant fibrosarcoma cells and healthy fibroblasts on a dish and found that tracking and analysis of their paths can be used to differentiate them with up to 94% accuracy.

Beyond diagnosis, their technique may also shed light on cell motility-related functions, like tissue healing. The paper is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

While scientists and medical experts have been looking at cells under the microscope for many centuries, most studies and diagnoses focus on their shape, what they contain, and where different parts are located inside. But cells are dynamic, changing over time, and are known to be able to move.

By accurately tracking and analyzing their motion, we may be able to differentiate cells which have functions relying on cell migration. An important example is cancer metastasis, where the motility of cancerous cells allows them to spread.

However, this is easier said than done. For one, studying a small subset of cells can give biased results. Any accurate diagnostic technique would rely on automated, high-throughput tracking of a significant number of cells.

Many methods then turn to fluorescent labeling, which makes cells much easier to see under the microscope. But this labeling procedure can itself affect their properties. The ultimate goal is an automated method which uses label-free conventional microscopy to characterize cell motility and show whether cells are healthy or not.

Now, a team of researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University led by Professor Hiromi Miyoshi have come up with a way of tracking cells using phase-contrast microscopy, one of the most common ways of observing cells.

Submissions - we need them please

That says it all, really.

ImportantNote:

From Firefox user advice:

Private Browsing does not make you anonymous on the Internet. Selecting a 'Private Window' does not affect anonymity.

upstart writes:

Jim Zemlin on taking a 'portfolio approach' to Linux Foundation projects:

The Linux Foundation has become something of a misnomer through the years. It has extended far beyond its roots as the steward of the Linux kernel, emerging as a sprawling umbrella outfit for a thousand open source projects spanning cloud infrastructure, security, digital wallets, enterprise search, fintech, maps, and more.

Last month, the OpenInfra Foundation — best known for OpenStack — became the latest addition to its stable, further cementing the Linux Foundation's status as a "foundation of foundations."

The Linux Foundation emerged in 2007 from the amalgamation of two Linux-focused not-for-profits: the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG). With founding members such as IBM, Intel, and Oracle, the Foundation's raison d'être was challenging the "closed" platforms of that time — which basically meant doubling down on Linux in response to Windows' domination.

[...] Zemlin has led the charge at the Linux Foundation for some two decades, overseeing its transition through technological waves such as mobile, cloud, and — more recently — artificial intelligence. Its evolution from Linux-centricity to covering just about every technological nook is reflective of how technology itself doesn't stand still — it evolves and, more importantly, it intersects.

"Technology goes up and down — we're not using iPods or floppy disks anymore," Zemlin explained to TechCrunch in an interview during KubeCon in London last week. "What I realized early on was that if the Linux Foundation were to become an enduring body for collective software development, we needed to be able to bet on many different forms of technology."

This is what Zemlin refers to as a "portfolio approach," similar to how a company diversifies so it's not dependent on the success of a single product. Combining multiple critical projects under a single organization enables the Foundation to benefit from vertical-specific expertise in networking or automotive-grade Linux, for example, while tapping broader expertise in copyright, patents, data privacy, cybersecurity, marketing, and event organization.

Being able to pool such resources across projects is more important than ever, as businesses contend with a growing array of regulations such as the EU AI Act and Cyber Resilience Act. Rather than each individual project having to fight the good fight alone, they have the support of a corporate-like foundation backed by some of the world's biggest companies.

"At the Linux Foundation, we have specialists who work in vertical industry efforts, but they're not lawyers or copyright experts or patent experts. They're also not experts in running large-scale events, or in developer training," Zemlin said. "And so that's why the collective investment is important. We can create technology in an agile way through technical leadership at the project level, but then across all the projects have a set of tools that create long-term sustainability for all of them collectively."

[...] While AI is inarguably a major step-change both for the technology realm and society, it has also pushed the concept of "open source" into the mainstream arena in ways that traditional software hasn't — with controversy in hot pursuit.

aliks writes:

Glyn Moody writing for the techdirt.com site has a good summary of the status of Deepseek - with an added bonus of lots of links to his source material. Longish article, covering a lot of ground including usage of AI for social surveillance by the Chinese government

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/14/deepseek-is-already-being-applied-widely-across-chinas-industries-and-used-for-government-surveillance-and-propaganda/

" It's just three months since the Chinese company DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model. In that time, its global impact has been dramatic: An article in Fortune magazine described how DeepSeek had "erased Silicon Valley's AI lead and wiped $1 trillion from U.S. markets." It also immediately raised serious privacy issues in the EU. The speed at which DeepSeek-R1 was built, and the relatively low cost of doing so, has had another dramatic knock-on effect, shifting interest and investment away from closed development towards open source AI models. As Wired wrote when DeepSeek-R1 appeared:

        However DeepSeek's models were built, they appear to show that a less closed approach to developing AI is gaining momentum. In December, Clem Delangue, the CEO of HuggingFace, a platform that hosts artificial intelligence models, predicted that a Chinese company would take the lead in AI because of the speed of innovation happening in open source models, which China has largely embraced. "This went faster than I thought," he says.

The open source nature of DeepSeek-R1 means that it is cheaper and easier to use it as the basis of other AI services and products, than to start from scratch. That's precisely what is happening in China, with the additional twist that many companies are doing so from a patriotic pride that Chinese computer technology has caught up with Silicon Valley. "

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The prevailing consensus in astrophysics is that the universe has spent the past 13-or-so billion years expanding outward in all directions, ever since the Big Bang. It's expanding at this very moment, and will continue to do so until... a number of possible theoretical endings. Meanwhile, the specific rate at which the universe is growing remains a longstanding point of contention known as the "Hubble tension." However, there may be a way to finally ease that tension—you just need to put a slight spin on everything.

In simplest terms, the rate at which the universe expands on paper doesn't match actual astronomical observations. That speed—called the Hubble Constant—is measured in units of kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc), with a megaparsec measuring about 300,000 light years. The most widely accepted theoretical model, the Lambda/Cold Dark Matter model (ΛCDM), says the universe is growing at 67-68 km/s/Mpc. But what astronomers see through their equipment is a little faster, at about 73 km/s/Mpc. And therein lies the Hubble tension.

In a study published in the April issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers including experts at the University of Hawai'i's Institute for Astronomy argue that introducing a miniscule amount of rotation to standard mathematical model of the universe may provide the way to align both expansion theories.

"Much to our surprise, we found that our model with rotation resolves the paradox without contradicting current astronomical measurements," study co-author and astrophysicist? István Szapudi said in a statement. "Even better, it is compatible with other models that assume rotation."

[...] Looking ahead, astronomers hope to construct a full computer model of the universe based in part of their new theory. From there, they will hopefully be able to pinpoint signs of cosmic spinning to search for among the stars.

[Source] Popular Science

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google introduces Firebase Studio, an end-to-end platform that builds custom apps in-browser, in minutes:

Today at Google Cloud Next, the tech giant introduced the full-stack AI workspace Firebase Studio.

Devs and non-devs can use the cloud-based, Gemini-powered agentic development platform to build, launch, iterate on and monitor mobile and web apps, APIs, backends and frontends directly from their browsers. It is now available in preview to all users (you must have a Google account).

Firebase Studio combines Google's coding tools Genkit and Project IDX with specialized AI agents and Gemini assistance. It is built on the popular Code OSS project, making it look and feel familiar to many.

Users just need to open their browser to build an app in minutes, importing from existing repositories such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or a local machine. The platform supports languages including Java, .NET, Node.js, Go and Python, and frameworks like Next.js, React, Angular, Vue.js, Android, Flutter and others.

Users can choose from more than 60 pre-built templates or use a prototyping agent that helps design an app (including UI, AI flows and API schema) through natural language, screenshots, mockups, drawing tools, screenshots, images and mockups—without the need for coding. The app can then be directly deployed to Firebase App Hosting, Cloud Run, or custom infrastructure.

Apps can be monitored in a Firebase console and refined and expanded in a coding workspace with a single click. Apps right can be previewed in a browser, and Firebase Studio features built-in runtime services and tools for emulation, testing, refactoring, debugging and code documentation.

Google says the platform greatly simplifies coding workflows. Gemini helps users write code and documentation, fix bugs, manage and resolve dependencies, write and run unit tests, and work with Docker containers, among other tasks. Users can customize and evolve different aspects of their apps, including model inference, agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), UX, business logic and others.

Google is also now granting early access to Gemini Code Assist agents in Firebase Studio for those in the Google Developer Program. For instance, a migration agent can help move code; a testing agent can simulate user interactions or run adversarial scenarios against AI models to identify and fix potentially dangerous outputs; and a code documentation agent can allow users to talk to code.

Original Submission

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-04/pope-francis-dies-on-easter-monday-aged-88.html

Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at the age of 88 at his residence in the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta.

upstart writes:

Intel agrees to sell controlling stake in Altera chip business:

Intel on Monday announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell 51% of its Altera semiconductor business to Silver Lake, a private equity firm.

The deal, which values Altera at $8.75 billion, will make Altera "operationally independent," Intel said in a press release. Intel will retain 49% ownership in Altera, which will be led by Raghib Hussain, who's set to succeed Sandra Rivera as CEO on May 5.

"Today's announcement reflects our commitment to sharpening our focus, lowering our expense structure, and strengthening our balance sheet," said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in a statement. "Altera continues to make progress repositioning its product portfolio to participate in the fastest growing and most profitable segments of the FPGA market."

Altera was founded in 1983 by semiconductor veterans Rodney Smith, Robert Hartmann, James Sansbury, and Paul Newhagen. The company develops a range of programmable chips known as field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, and the software to support them, including for industries like communications, robotics, and AI.

Intel acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion, and it became a newly formed business unit called Programmable Solutions Group (PSG). In 2023, Intel announced that it would spin off PSG into a separate company, while maintaining majority ownership and intending to seek an IPO within three years.

The decision came amid rapid growth in the FPGA sector. According to one analysis, the market for FPGAs could grow from $12.1 billion last year to $25.8 billion by 2029.

In fiscal year 2024, Altera generated revenues of $1.54 billion, according to Intel.

The transaction with Silver Lake is expected to close in the second half of 2025, Intel said, subject to customary closing conditions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google has illegal advertising monopoly, judge rules:

A US judge has ruled tech giant Google has a monopoly in online advertising technology. The US Department of Justice, along with 17 US states, sued Google, arguing the tech giant was illegally dominating the technology which determines which adverts should be placed online and where. This is the second antitrust case Google has lost in a year, after it was ruled the company also had a monopoly on online search.

Google said it would appeal against the decision.

"Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective," the firm's head of regulatory affairs Lee-Ann Mulholland said.

US district judge Leonie Brinkema said in the ruling Google had "wilfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts" which enabled it to "acquire and maintain monopoly power" in the market. "This exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," she said.

Google lost on two counts, while a third was dismissed. "We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half," Ms Mulholland said.

"The court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don't harm competition."

The ruling is a significant win for US antitrust enforcers, according to Laura Phillips-Sawyer, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law. "It signals that not only are agencies willing to prosecute but also that judges are willing to enforce the law against big tech firms," she said. She said the verdict sets an important legal precedent and is likely to affect decision-making in corporate America.

Google's lawyers had argued the case focused too much on its past activities, and prosecutors ignored other large ad tech providers such as Amazon.

"Google has repeatedly used its market power to self-preference its own products, stifling innovation and depriving premium publishers worldwide of critical revenue needed to sustain high-quality journalism and entertainment," said Jason Kint, head of Digital Content Next, a trade association representing online publishers.

Google owns large companies on the buyer and seller sides of the online advertising market, as well as an ad exchange which matches demand and supply.

Internet users will not notice a difference online as a result of the decision, said Anupam Chander, professor of law and technology at Georgetown University. But it affects "the division of monies between advertisers, publishers, and ad service providers". "The judge seems willing to order structural changes in Google's ad exchange practices, which may affect Google's bottom line somewhat, but don't seem to necessarily threaten its core value proposition as an advertising middleman," he added.

In an ongoing series of antitrust lawsuits, the US government argues Google and its parent company Alphabet should be broken up - which could include selling off parts of the company such as the Chrome browser.

The US case will now move to a second "remedies" phase, which could also lead to Alphabet being broken up, said John Kwoka, a professor of economics at Northeastern University.

In September, the UK's competition watchdog provisionally found Google was using anti-competitive practices to dominate the market for online advertising technology.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

New JWST data strengthens earlier hints that K2-18b, a possible water world 120 light-years away, could host the chemical byproducts of life.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have picked up signs of a potential biosignature on a steamy, ocean-covered exoplanet called K2-18b—a biosignature that, on Earth, is produced by marine life.

The main character here is dimethyl sulfide, a molecule produced by many ocean denizens, but especially plankton. If the molecule is really floating around in the atmosphere of K2-18b, it raises the tantalizing possibility that something on the world might be alive. Or at least emitting suspiciously life-like chemical signals.

K2-18b, located 120 light-years away, has been on scientists' radar since NASA's Kepler space telescope spotted it in 2015. It's about 8.6 times the mass of Earth and orbits within the habitable (or "Goldilocks") zone of a red dwarf star.

Earlier observations from Hubble hinted that K2-18b had water vapor in its atmosphere, a claim later shown to be in error. But JWST has taken matters several steps further, doubling down on an earlier finding of dimethyl sulfide in the planet's atmosphere. The team behind the discovery, led by Nikku Madhusudhan from the University of Cambridge, includes researchers from five institutions.

The finding suggests that K2-18b may indeed be a Hycean world, or a water-covered planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. But the team's observations—made using JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and earlier data from NIRISS and NIRSpec—revealed methane and carbon dioxide, but very little ammonia, on the planet.

[...] Further observations will help to validate the team's findings. But to be clear, if life does exist on K2-18b, it's likely microbial given the apparent evidence, and not a sign of alien intelligence. As an important aside, microbial life—like plankton—existed on Earth for a billion years, a long but crucial chapter that paved the way for more complex organisms to emerge. Regardless, life has never been found beyond Earth, so confirming even a single amoeba on a distant world would be nothing short of revelatory.

At minimum, K2-18b is shaping up to be one of the most promising places to search for life beyond Earth. And at maximum—if further studies validate the recent findings—we may be getting our first chemical whiffs of a living ocean on another world.

[Source]: Gizmodo

[Journal Ref]: The Astrophysical Journal Letters

[Also Covered By] BBC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Taking a jolt of lightning also kills parasitic vines:

Getting hit by lightning is not usually a good thing. But one tropical tree species seems to harness heaven's wrath. Not only do the trees survive lightning strikes, but their height and voluminous crowns act as natural lightning rods, attracting strikes that damage foes and boost their competitive advantage in the dense jungle.

The finding, reported March 26 in New Phytologist, comes from a years-long effort at Barro Colorado Nature Monument in Panama, where scientists studied lightning's overall impact on the forest. Using a camera array, drones and ground teams, researchers tracked lightning strikes and their effects. The team expected to find only detrimental effects on trees; however, it soon became clear that Dipteryx oleifera, also called "almendro," benefited from the shock therapy to fend off rival trees and get rid of parasitic vines.

A particularly powerful impact on a liana-covered D. oleifera in 2019 is what cemented the idea of a link between the tree and lightning's beneficial effects, says forest ecologist Evan Gora of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. "It looked like a bomb went off." The strike damaged 115 surrounding trees, half of which died within two years. Additionally, all the liana vines that covered the D. oleifera perished. The impacted tree, however, was practically unscathed, standing tall and healthy with its direct competitors removed.

To confirm the suspected tree-lightning relationship, Gora and his colleagues documented the fate of 93 trees struck by lightning, including nine D. oleifera specimens. After two years, all the D. oleifera trees were doing fine — thriving, Gora says — in stark contrast to a 56 percent mortality rate among the other species.

One reason for this resilience is that, apart from a few ruffled leaves, D. oleifera trees aren't damaged by lightning. The electric shock, however, eliminates most of the parasitic lianas that grow on them. These vines are ubiquitous in the jungle, stealing light and nutrients from large trees.

Connections between the vines and branches on neighboring trees spread electrical current to those trees, damaging them as well. This frees up space, light and nutrients for the almendro trees. On average, about nine nearby trees were killed per strike.

In fact, growing next to a D. oleifera tree seems to be hazardous for neighboring trees, as the findings suggest that almendro trees actively attract lightning. They tend to grow taller and possess wider crowns than their neighbors, making them 68 percent more susceptible to strikes. One D. oleifera tree was struck twice in five years, and the researchers estimate that the typical tree is struck an average of five times over its 300-year lifespan.

The competitive advantage gained from these strikes increases the D. oleifera's reproductive success by 14 times, the researchers found.

upstart writes:

The Israeli spyware maker, still on the US Commerce Department's "blacklist," has hired a new lobbying firm with direct ties to the Trump administration, a WIRED investigation has found:

Shortly after Donald Trump declared victory in November, NSO Group cofounder and majority owner Omri Lavie rushed to X to congratulate him, speaking of a "new chapter where the world goes back to common sense," while accusing the outgoing Biden administration of being "weak." In another tweet, he gushed in Hebrew that Republicans "won in every category: the presidency, Congress, Senate, and the popular vote."

Lavie's enthusiasm is understandable. His company—frequently associated with alleged human rights abuses, most recently in February when journalists in Serbia were targeted with its Pegasus spyware—had a significant stake in a Trump victory, with the hopes of regaining the ability to freely do business with US entities. In a comment to Amnesty International, NSO stated, in part, that its "commitment to maintain the highest standard of ethical conduct as well as confidentiality towards our customers is paramount and is consistent with industry norms and our legal obligations."

The Israeli spyware vendor has been on the US Commerce Department's "blacklist" for more than three years, meaning it cannot do business with US companies without specific government approval. NSO Group poured at least $1.8 million into an aggressive pre-election lobbying effort, focusing primarily on Republican senators and representatives, with some meetings occurring as often as eight times. Yet the company remains on the Entity List.

Now, with a new occupant in the White House, NSO Group appears to be shifting its political strategy.

The company seems to have either terminated or altered its engagement with several of its previous lobbying consultancies in Washington—some of which were closely aligned with the Democrats—and has started working with a key new lobbying partner: the Vogel Group.

Founded by Alex Vogel, who served as chief counsel to former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, the Vogel Group is providing NSO Group with "strategic advisory on cybersecurity policy matters," according to lobbying disclosure documents filed on March 10.

[...] NSO Group's recent lobbying efforts appear to have mainly focused on Republican lawmakers, more than executive branch power players, particularly as the Biden administration had been engaged in a crackdown on commercial spyware. The company previously worked with several lobbying contractors, with whom it appears to have either terminated or altered its registrations.

[...] As of early March—before Vogel Group's registration as a lobbyist for NSO Group—there had been no indication that the Trump administration intended to remove the company from the Entity List, according to a source familiar with the administration's moves regarding spyware, who asked not to be named in order to discuss confidential matters. However, recent comments by NSO Group's Lavie soft-peddled the impact of the Entity List on the company's ability to operate in the US.

[...] ​​Lobbying efforts can target different parts of the US government. By lobbying the executive branch (the president and agencies), lobbyists can influence how laws are enforced rather than what the laws say. In contrast, when lobbying Congress, the focus is on passing, blocking, or amending laws by influencing legislators.

[...] Asked whether the Trump administration intends to uphold the EO, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to comment.