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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sometimes getting more than what you asked for is nice. Finding cash in a jacket you haven't worn in a while, getting an extra chicken nugget at the drive-thru, discovering a hidden track on an album — those are all pleasant surprises. This one isn't: A cyber threat intelligence firm called Prodaft revealed that "Chemia," a game previously available via Steam's Early Access program, shipped with three strains of malware.

"Chemia" was described on its Steam page as "a gripping survival crafting game set in a world ravaged by a catastrophic natural disaster," which requires players to "gather resources, craft vital equipment, and navigate this hazardous world if [they] hope to survive." The game wasn't publicly available—Steam users had to request access to the playtest—which makes the fact that it contained malware seem even sleazier.

Prodaft said that "Chemia" shipped with the Fickle Stealer, Vidar Stealer, and HijackLoader malware. The first two are infostealers that look to compromise a victim's cryptocurrency wallets as well as user data from web browsers, password managers, and other apps; the last can be used to deploy other malware in the future.

"Chemia" was still available on Steam the morning of July 25, two days after Prodaft shared its findings, but it was removed sometime during the process of writing this post. The developer was listed as Aether Forge Studios, but I couldn't find any websites, social media profiles, or other online references bearing that name with specific references to "Chemia."

This incident should serve as a helpful reminder not to assume that software is safe simply because it's distributed through a trusted platform like Steam—especially if it's being offered by an unknown developer that otherwise doesn't seem to exist. (Especially if the same name is being used by other groups that don't have clear ties to the game.)

Prodaft shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) related to the versions of Fickle Stealer, Vidar Stealer, and HijackLoader that were embedded in "Chemia" on GitHub. The company included these IOCs as part of a broader collection of materials related to the activity of a group called EncryptHub that has been carrying out "highly sophisticated spear-phishing attacks" since at least June 26, 2024.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) In Person and Virtual Tickets Being Sold

Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 16 is scheduled for August 15-17 2025. In Person as well as Virtual tickets are on sale now.

The Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference series is a hacker convention sponsored by the security hacker magazine 2600

Talks so far!

For an example of past content, here is the page for HOPE XV "Talks" with recordings from 2014.

If you're like me, you're cheap and will just wait for the talks from #16 to (hopefully) drop at the site, but I thought I would post the information about this event anyway for those who may be interested.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Over the weekend, the world's most famous Finn pushed out the latest version of the Linux kernel – and warned of upcoming disruption.

Linux kernel 6.16 was released after what was apparently a relaxed end of the development cycle. (We suppose this could be interpreted as a subtle dig at certain file system developers, but then again, Torvalds is not famed for subtlety.)

As kernel releases go, this one is almost unusually modest. It doesn't have any huge blockbuster new features, but does contain a large number of bugfixes and code. Phoronix estimates that it has 38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files. Remember when the central design ethos of UNIX was that it was small and simple and clean? Well, no, me neither, because around the time The Reg FOSS desk first touched a computer keyboard, UNIX System III came out, one of the first releases that unified different codebases, and also one of the first commercial editions from AT&T. But that was the idea, right?

Kernel 6.16 supports Intel's 2023 Advanced Performance Extensions, which means improved vector instructions and doubling the number of general-purpose registers available. (Only certain CPU models benefit from the full-width version of the new vector instructions, though, which is arguably an example of the sort of moves that caused Intel to falter in recent years.)

Two of the built-in file systems get performance tweaks that allow for larger individual blocks of data. XFS, open sourced by SGI at the turn of the century, now gets larger atomic writes. Meanwhile, ext4 gets bigalloc and large folio support, which can make some operations about one-third faster. Btrfs and NFS both get tweaks, too.

On pretty much any Unix, when a program crashes, it emits a core dump and saves it in the current working directory. Among other improvements, now a core can be sent over an AF_SOCKET instead. This means both functional improvements as well as security ones.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Boston Dynamics' Spot the dog robot has had many careers: bomb disposal expert, police officer, dancer, industrial inspector, cheerleader, Solid Snake impersonator, etc.

In the UK seaside town of Eastbourne, Domino's is using a version of the machine, called Domidog, that has been modified so it can navigate sandy environments – a tricky task for a four-legged robot.

Spot utilizes its array of sensors, cameras, and autonomous navigation to deliver a freshly cooked pizza from the local store to customers on the beach, avoiding the crowds and other obstacles.

Domino's Pinpoint Delivery option lets customers set a precise location for their pizza delivery. A worker loads the latitude/longitude (and a safety geofence) into Spot's "Scout" mission tablet and straps the insulated pizza pod to its back. The robot then sets off on its journey, with a remote supervisor watching proceedings from a nearby shaded tent – UK law still requires line-of-sight for public trials.

Customers receive a push alert when Domidog is near. Pressing "Signal Driver" will set off a strobing color pattern so the robot (or its supervisor) can spot the person in the crowd.

According to the restaurant chain, Spot's job doesn't end with the delivery of the food. The robot will hang around and guard against the scourge of British seasides: seagulls. These huge and often aggressive birds are notorious for swooping out of the air and stealing food directly from people's hands – something this writer can attest to.

Although Spot has been used in the military and we've seen similar robots carrying weaponry, Domidog's method of protecting pizza from the gulls is a humane one: waving its arm attachment at the birds should they get too close. It will stay in this sentry mode for a couple of minutes, which will hopefully send a threatening message to the seagulls.

Spot remains Boston Dynamics' flagship platform for industrial inspection, safety, and R&D. The base unit costs around $75,000. With extras such as the $30,000 arm and $18,000 to $35,000 sensor payloads, a fully loaded unit can fall into the $110,000 to $150,000 range. For a much cheaper robot, Unitree's flipping, fighting, and conversational R1 humanoid is "just" $5,900.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

This week, an app for women called "Tea" became the #1 downloaded app on the Apple App Store. Unfortunately for the women, the app also required them to give the developer a picture of their ID and location details for verification. Today, someone hacked it and put nearly 60 gigabytes of private data on 4chan:

According to Tea's preliminary findings, the breach allowed access to approximately 72,000 images, broken down into two groups: 13,000 images of selfies and photo identification that people had submitted during account verification and 59,000 images that were publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments and direct messages.

Those images had been in a "legacy data system" that contained information from more than two years ago, the company said in statement. "At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that current or additional user data was affected."

[...] In the privacy section on its website, Tea says: "Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction. Please be aware, however, that despite our efforts, no security measures are impenetrable."

Tea said it has launched a full investigation to assess the scope and impact of the breach.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-modern-tattooers-ancient-ice-mummies.html

An international team of archaeologists has used high-resolution digital imaging techniques to examine tattoos on a more than 2,000-year-old ice mummy from the Pazyryk culture of Siberia, shedding light on individual craftsmanship in prehistoric Siberian tattooing for the first time.

Tattooing was likely widespread during prehistory, but the lack of surviving tattoos means it is difficult to investigate. The so-called "ice mummies" of the Altai mountains are an exception, since their deep burial chambers encased in permafrost sometimes preserve the skin (and therefore tattoos) of those buried within.

"The tattoos of the Pazyryk culture- Iron Age pastoralists of the Altai Mountains -have long intrigued archaeologists due to their elaborate figural designs," states senior author of the research, Dr. Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern.

Despite this, detailed studies of the tattoos are rare, as high-resolution images were not previously available. Therefore, most studies have been based on early schematic drawings of the tattoos.

"Prior scholarship focused primarily on the stylistic and symbolic dimensions of these tattoos, with data derived largely from hand-drawn reconstructions," explains Dr. Caspari. "These interpretations lacked clarity regarding the techniques and tools used and did not focus much on the individuals but rather the overarching social context."

To provide a more accurate means to explore ancient tattooing, archaeologists produced a 3-dimensional scan of one tattooed Pazyryk mummy using newly available sub-millimeter resolution, digital near-infrared photography.

By working with modern tattooers, they examined the tattoos in greater detail than ever before, identifying the individual tools and techniques used to make them. Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.

The researchers found that the tattoos on the right forearm were more detailed and technical than those on the left. This suggests that different tattooers, or the same tattooer during different stages of their development, contributed to the art.

Importantly, this indicates tattooing was not simply a form of decoration to the Pazyryk culture, but rather a skilled craft that required formal training and technical ability.

"The study offers a new way to recognize personal agency in prehistoric body modification practices," says Dr. Caspari. "Tattooing emerges not merely as symbolic decoration but as a specialized craft—one that demanded technical skill, aesthetic sensitivity, and formal training or apprenticeship."

By identifying the individual hands behind ancient tattoos for the first time, the researchers show that prehistoric tattooers in Siberia were not unlike modern professionals today.

"This made me feel like we were much closer to seeing the people behind the art, how they worked and learned and made mistakes," Dr. Caspari concludes. "The images came alive."

More information: High-resolution near-infrared data reveal Pazyryk tattooing methods, Antiquity (2025). doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10150

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-bans-libreoffice-developers-account-without-warning-rejects-appeal/

Recently, we reported on LibreOffice, accusing Microsoft of intentionally using complex file formats as a tactic to lock in users to Microsoft Office, hindering open source alternatives like LibreOffice.

Now, Microsoft has banned LibreOffice developer, Mike Kaganski, from using its services, citing an "activity that violates [its] Services Agreement".

According to Mike, this happened last Monday when he tried to send a technical email to the LibreOffice dev mailing list, which is a normal part of his routine, but Thunderbird returned an error saying the message couldn't be sent. His account was blocked upon retry, and he found himself completely logged out of his Microsoft account.

He guessed that his mail and account were getting flagged by a bot or something, since he was quite sure that nothing in the mail violated Microsoft's terms of service.

cereal_burpist writes:

Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs

Workers at a site in South Carolina that once made key parts for nuclear bombs in the United States have found a radioactive wasp nest but officials said there is no danger to anyone. Employees who routinely check radiation levels at the Savannah River Site near Aiken found a wasp nest on July 3 on a post near tanks where liquid nuclear waste is stored, according to a report from the US Department of Energy.

The nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations, officials said. The workers sprayed the nest with insect killer, removed it and disposed of it as radioactive waste. No wasps were found. The report said there is no leak from the waste tanks, and the nest was likely radioactive through what it called "onsite legacy radioactive contamination" from the residual radioactivity left from when the site was fully operational.

The watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch said the report was at best incomplete since it doesn't detail where the contamination came from, how the wasps might have encountered it and the possibility there could be another radioactive nest if there is a leak somewhere. Knowing the type of wasp nest could also be critical — some wasps make nest out of dirt and others use different material which could pinpoint where the contamination came from, Tom Clements, executive director of the group, wrote in a text message. "I'm as mad as a hornet that SRS didn't explain where the radioactive waste came from or if there is some kind of leak from the waste tanks that the public should be aware of," Clements said.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/scientists-use-peacock-feathers-to-make-frickin-laser-beams/

Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured.

[...] Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

[...] There have been prior examples of random laser emissions in everything from stained bovine bones and blue coral skeletons to insect wings, parrot feathers, and human tissue, as well as salmon iridiphores.

[...] The authors of this most recent study were interested in whether they could produce similar laser emissions using peacock feathers and hopefully identify the specific mechanism. They cut away any excess lengths of barbs and mounted the feathers on an absorptive substrate. They then infused the feathers with common dyes by pipetting the dye solution directly onto them and letting them dry. The feathers were stained multiple times in some cases. Then they pumped the samples with pulses of light and measured any resulting emissions.

[...] The team observed laser emissions in two distinct wavelengths for all color regions of the feathers' eyespots, with the green color regions emitting the most intense laser light. However, they did not observe any laser emission from feathers that were only stained once, just in sample feathers that underwent multiple wetting and complete drying cycles.

[...] The authors were unable to identify the precise microstructures responsible for the lasing; it does not appear to be due to the keratin-coated melatonin rods. Co-author Nathan Dawson of Florida Polytechnic University suggested to Science that protein granules or similar small structures inside the feathers might function as a laser cavity. He and his colleague think that one day, their work could lead to the development of biocompatible lasers that could safely be embedded in the human body for sensing, imaging, and therapeutic purposes.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Microsoft tries to predict all the jobs where humans are doomed by the AI-overlords. It's a bit odd. They are basically predicting that everything that requires some kind of creativity or artistic endeavors will be replaced by AI. But all the hard manual labor will not. So sort of the exact opposite of what we wanted? We wanted machines to do all the boring hard work so we, the humans, could do the artistic and creative things. Now we are just going to be slaves to the machines then? Servants refilling their coolant and washing the server room floors.

Jobs least at risk are the once that require a body. Interacting with something else, another body or a large heavy machine. That is until the robot-ai-overlords come along and take those to. Then it's the Matrix farm for us all ...

https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-reveals-40-jobs-about-to-be-destroyed-by-and-safe-from-ai

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/working-with-ai-measuring-the-occupational-implications-of-generative-ai/?msockid=3e17f0da45306c3d2926e6e2445b6d7d

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel provided more detail about the scope of its planned job cuts and other business changes while sharing its second-quarter earnings results. Reports in April suggested that Intel could eliminate around 20 percent of its staff in a restructuring plan. Today, the chipmaker said it anticipates having a core workforce of 75,000 employees by the end of 2025, down from 99,500 at the start of the year.

The numbers are even more dramatic when considering the company's downsizing efforts as a whole. This time last year, the chipmaker employed 116,500 across the globe, not including workers at its subsidiaries, and that number has fallen precipitously since. As of June 28, the company had 96,400 workers, meaning it's planning a reduction of more than 20,000 employees over the second half of the year.

These cuts are part of the company's current goal to bring its non-GAAP operating expenses down to $17 billion this year, then to $16 billion at the end of 2026. The effort to rein in spending is also leading Intel to abandon some previously announced expansions. The business will no longer embark on new projects in Germany and Poland, and it said it will consolidate its Costa Rican testing and assembly operations into existing efforts in Vietnam and Malaysia. Finally, it will also "slow the pace" of its stateside growth at a construction site in Ohio.

"Our operating performance demonstrates the initial progress we are making to improve our execution and drive greater efficiency," said Lip-Bu Tan, who has been forthright about his plans to downsize since assuming the CEO title in March. Tan was brought in to replace Pat Gelsinger in an effort to turn around Intel's business following a long, slow slide into financial trouble.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Trump caving on Nvidia H20 export curbs may disrupt his bigger trade war:

The next front in Donald Trump's trade war will be chip tariffs—which could come by next month—but national security experts are warning that the president may have already made a huge misstep that threatens to disrupt both US trade and national security.

In a letter Monday to Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 20 policymakers and professionals with a background in national security policy urged Trump to reverse course and block exports of Nvidia's H20 chips to China.

In April, the Trump administration decided against imposing additional export curbs on H20 chips after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid $1 million for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, NPR reported. Apparently, Nvidia's promise to invest $500 billion in AI data centers helped persuade Trump to change course, as did the terms of a temporary truce with China, in which the US promised to halt H20 chip controls in exchange for China restoring imports of rare earth minerals into the US.

In their letter, national security experts expressed "deep concern" that Trump may not have considered how Nvidia's H20 chips could endanger the US military's "edge in artificial intelligence" while serving as a "potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities."

While these chips can't be used for AI training like the Blackwell and H100 chips still restricted by export curbs, they're "optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models," experts warned.

Most likely, China will use the chips for AI models deployed by its military to "enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms, and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making," experts said. In that way, "by supplying China with these chips, we are fueling the very infrastructure that will be used to modernize and expand the Chinese military," they warned.

The Trump administration is notably investigating how chip tariffs and imports could harm national security, with a report due out in two weeks, Lutnick announced today. That report will supposedly help Trump determine if relying too much on other countries for chips poses a national security threat.

But experts seem to fear that Trump isn't paying enough attention to how exports of US technology could threaten to not only supercharge China's military and AI capabilities but also drain supplies that US firms need to keep the US at the forefront of AI innovation.

"More chips for China means fewer chips for the US," experts said, noting that "China's biggest tech firms, including Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba," have spent $16 billion on bulk-ordered H20 chips over the past year.

Meanwhile, "projected data center demand from the US power market would require 90 percent of global chip supply through 2030, an unlikely scenario even without China joining the rush to buy advanced AI chips," experts said. If Trump doesn't intervene, one of America's biggest AI rivals could even end up driving up costs of AI chips for US firms, they warned.

"We urge you to reverse course," the letter concluded. "This is not a question of trade. It is a question of national security."

jelizondo writes:

TechCrunch has an interesting article about an engineer who is challenging the Defense Behemoths.

In the summer of 2021, Dimitrious Kottas made a move that would be unfathomable to most Silicon Valley engineers: after leaving his coveted position at Apple's Special Projects Group, he packed up his life in California and moved back to Athens to start a defense company.

Three and a half years later, his startup, Delian Alliance Industries, has set up solar-powered surveillance towers that monitor some of Greece's borders around the clock and detect wildfires on remote islands, along with a pipeline of other products, including concealed sea drones designed to keep enemies at bay.

But Kottas' most ambitious bet isn't on any particular technology — it's really that a small Greek startup can break through Europe's notoriously splintered defense market.

After earning recognition for his academic work at the University of Minnesota on GPS-denied navigation – research that he says has been cited over 1,400 times – he joined Apple in 2016, where he spent six years working on autonomous systems featuring cameras, lidars, and radars.

"At the heart of autonomy is perception," Kottas explained, describing how machines must understand not just where objects are but what they're doing and what they intend to do. "This lies at the heart of autonomy, and given autonomy is going to be at the heart of all future weapon systems, that's the core technology that's going to drive change in the defense industry over the next decade."

Rather than attempting to build the next-generation fighter jet, Kottas began with something pragmatic that he could sell more immediately: surveillance towers. The move was seemingly ripped from the playbook of eight-year-old weapons maker Anduril, which started off with software-augmented surveillance towers that it sold to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The most striking example is a two-meter suicide vessel that comes packed in a cylinder and is deployable months in advance on the seabed at depths where satellites and drones can't detect it. When remotely activated, it appears "out of nowhere to the enemy," Kottas told TechCrunch, adding that Delian has patented this approach, which uses commercial materials to manufacture the weapons at "large scale and really at extremely low cost."

Here's where Kottas' story gets more complicated. Despite Delian's technological achievements and operational success in Greece, the broader European market remains a formidable challenge. U.S. officials have reportedly been pressuring European countries to continue buying weapons from U.S. outfits. Further, European countries have long favored their homegrown defense companies

upstart writes:

A secretive space plane is set to launch and test quantum navigation technology:

On Monday, the Space Force announced that it will fly the small, Space Shuttle-shaped vehicle on the program's eighth mission next month. The launch of the vehicle, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to occur no earlier than August 21 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

There are two active X-37Bs in the Space Force fleet, both built by Boeing. The first made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the two uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights. The first made its longest and latest flight from 2020 to 2022 over a span of 908 days. The second flew more recently, landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.

It's likely that the first of these two vehicles, both of which are about 29 feet (9 meters) long and roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA's Space Shuttle orbiters, will launch next month.

Over the past decade and a half, the Space Force has largely remained silent about the purpose of this space plane, flying classified payloads and providing only limited information about the purpose of each flight.

However, for this flight, OTV-8, the military has provided a bit more detail about its intentions. The vehicle will fly with a service module that will expand its capacity for experiments, allowing the space plane to host payload for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit.

The mission's goals include tests of "high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies."

upstart writes:

Anthropic unveils new rate limits to curb Claude Code power users:

Anthropic says its rolling out new weekly rate limits for Claude to curb usage among subscribers who are running its AI coding tool, Claude Code, "continuously in the background, 24/7." Anthropic says the rate limits also aim to stop a handful of users who are violating Claude's usage policy by sharing accounts and reselling access to Claude Code.

The new rate limits will go into effect August 28 for subscribers to Anthropic's $20-per-month Pro plan, as well as its $100- and $200-per-month Max plans, the company said Monday in an email to subscribers and a post on X.

Anthropic says its existing usage limits, which reset every five hours, will remain in place. The company is also introducing two new weekly rate limits that reset every seven days; one is an overall usage limit, whereas the other is specific to Anthropic's most advanced AI model, Claude Opus 4. Anthropic says Max subscribers can purchase additional usage, beyond what the rate limit provides, at standard API rates.

The announcement comes just weeks after Anthropic quietly introduced rate limits for Claude Code. The company said at the time it was aware of the issues but declined to elaborate further. While Anthropic's AI coding tool has been a hit with developers, the company seems to be having a difficult time serving it broadly. Anthropic's status page shows that Claude Code has experienced a partial or major outage at least seven times in the last month — perhaps because some power users seem to be running Claude Code nonstop.

"Claude Code has experienced unprecedented demand since launch," said Anthropic spokesperson Amie Rotherham in an email to TechCrunch about the weekly rate limits. Rotherham notes that "most users won't notice a difference," and that this limit will affect less than 5% of subscribers, based on their current usage patterns.