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On my linux machines, I run a virus scanner . . .

  • regularly
  • when I remember to enable it
  • only when I want to manually check files
  • only on my work computers
  • never
  • I don't have any linux machines, you insensitive clod!

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:10 | Votes:117

posted by jelizondo on Thursday October 23, @10:45PM   Printer-friendly

Why did NASA's chief just shake up the agency's plans to land on the Moon?:

NASA acting Administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency's plans to return humans to the Moon.

Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA's projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back.

"They're behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese," Duffy said of SpaceX. "He wants to get there in his term. So I'm in the process of opening that contract up. I think we'll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We're going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first."

There are a couple of significant takeaways from this interview. First is the public acknowledgement by a senior NASA official that the space agency's current timeline of a 2027 landing is completely untenable. And secondly, the timing of Duffy's public appearances on Monday morning seems tailored to influence a fierce, behind-the-scenes battle to hold onto the NASA leadership position.

SpaceX won a contract from NASA, worth $2.9 billion, in April 2021 to develop and modify its ambitious Starship rocket to serve as a "human landing system" (HLS). This rocket would work in concert with NASA's Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft to get humans from Earth, to the lunar surface, and back. Two years later Blue Origin, a rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, won a second contract, worth $3.4 billion, to develop a second lander.

Duffy is correct that SpaceX is moving slower than anticipated. The company must still cross several technical hurdles before it can provide landing services to NASA. In their funded contracts for reusable landers, SpaceX and Blue Origin must refuel their vehicles in low-Earth orbit, something that has never been done before on a large scale.

When Duffy says "companies like Blue" may get involved, he is not referring to the existing contract, in which Blue Origin will not deliver a ready-to-go lunar lander until the 2030s. Rather he is almost certainly referring to a plan developed by Blue Origin that uses multiple Mk 1 landers, a smaller vehicle originally designed for cargo only. Ars reported on this new lunar architecture three weeks ago, which company engineers have been quietly developing. This plan would not require in-space refueling, and the Mk 1 vehicle is nearing its debut flight early next year.

Duffy also cites "maybe others" getting involved. This refers to a third option. In recent weeks, officials from traditional space companies have been telling Duffy and the chief of staff at the Department of Transportation, Pete Meachum, that they can build an Apollo Lunar Module-like lander within 30 months. Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator, favors this government-led approach, sources said.

On Monday, in a statement to Ars, a Lockheed Martin official confirmed that the company was ready if NASA called upon them.

"Throughout this year, Lockheed Martin has been performing significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers that would provide options to NASA for a safe solution to return humans to the Moon as quickly as possible," said Bob Behnken, vice president of Exploration and Technology Strategy at Lockheed Martin Space. "We have been working with a cross-industry team of companies and together we are looking forward to addressing Secretary Duffy's request to meet our country's lunar objectives."

NASA would not easily be able to rip up its existing HLS contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin, as, especially with the former, much of the funding has already been awarded for milestone payments. Rather, Duffy would likely have to find new funding from Congress. And it would not be cheap. This NASA analysis from 2017 estimates that a cost-plus, sole-source lunar lander would cost $20 billion to $30 billion, or nearly 10 times what NASA awarded to SpaceX in 2021.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk, responding to Duffy's comments, seemed to relish the challenge posed by industry competitors.

"SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry," Musk said on the social media site he owns, X. "Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words."

Duffy's remarks on television on Monday morning, although significant for the broader space community, also seemed intended for an audience of one—President Trump.

The president appointed Duffy, already leading the Department of Transportation, to lead NASA on an interim basis in July. This came six weeks after the president rescinded his nomination of billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman, for political reasons, to lead the space agency.

Trump was under the impression that Duffy would use this time to shore up NASA's leadership while also looking for a permanent chief of the space agency. However, Duffy appears to have not paid more than lip service to finding a successor.

Since late summer there has been a groundswell of support for Isaacman in the White House, and among some members of Congress. The billionaire has met with Trump several times, both at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, and sources report that the two have a good rapport. There has been some momentum toward the president re-nominating Isaacman, with Trump potentially making a decision soon. Duffy's TV appearances on Monday morning appear to be part of an effort to forestall this momentum by showing Trump he is actively working toward a lunar landing during his second term, which ends in January 2029.

Duffy has appeared to enjoy the limelight that comes with leading NASA. In the future, one source said, "Duffy wants to be president." The NASA position has afforded him greater visibility, including television appearances, to expand his profile in a positive way. "He doesn't want to give up the job," the source added.

A Republican advisor to the White House told Ars that it is good that Duffy has moved beyond his rhetoric about NASA beating China to the Moon and to look for creative tactics to land there. But, this person said, the mandate from the Trump administration is to dominate the emerging commercial space industry, not hand out large cost-plus contracts.

"Duffy hasn't implemented any of the strategic reforms of Artemis that the president proposed this spring," the Republican source said. "He has the perfect opportunity during the current shutdown, but there is no sign of any real reform under his leadership. Instead, Duffy is being co-opted by the deep state at NASA."


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Thursday October 23, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the fire-up-your-vibe-coding-machines dept.

With bonuses, maximum rewards can be as high as $5 million:

Since launching its bug bounty program nearly a decade ago, Apple has always touted notable maximum payouts—$200,000 in 2016 and $1 million in 2019. Now the company is upping the stakes again. At the Hexacon offensive security conference in Paris on Friday, Apple vice president of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić announced a new maximum payout of $2 million for a chain of software exploits that could be abused for spyware.

The move reflects how valuable exploitable vulnerabilities can be within Apple's highly protected mobile environment—and the lengths the company will go to to keep such discoveries from falling into the wrong hands. In addition to individual payouts, the company's bug bounty also includes a bonus structure, adding additional awards for exploits that can bypass its extra secure Lockdown Mode as well as those discovered while Apple software is still in its beta testing phase. Taken together, the maximum award for what would otherwise be a potentially catastrophic exploit chain will now be $5 million. The changes take effect next month.

"We are lining up to pay many millions of dollars here, and there's a reason," Krstić tells WIRED. "We want to make sure that for the hardest categories, the hardest problems, the things that most closely mirror the kinds of attacks that we see with mercenary spyware—that the researchers who have those skills and abilities and put in that effort and time can get a tremendous reward."

[...] In addition to higher potential rewards, Apple is also expanding the bug bounty's categories to include certain types of one-click "WebKit" browser infrastructure exploits as well as wireless proximity exploits carried out with any type of radio. And there is even a new offering known as "Target Flags" that puts the concept of capture the flag hacking competitions into real-world testing of Apple's software to help researchers demonstrate the capabilities of their exploits quickly and definitively.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Thursday October 23, @01:19PM   Printer-friendly

One topic dominated the recent 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, and it wasn't AI:

Unlike any tech conference I've attended in the last few years, the top issue at the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe at the École Polytechnique Paris was not AI. Shocking, I know. Indeed, OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez commented, "Did you notice what I didn't talk about in my keynote? I made no mention of AI." But one issue that did appear -- and would show up over and over again in the keynotes, the halls, and the vendor booths -- was digital sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty is the ability of a country, organization, or individual to control its own digital infrastructure, technologies, data, and online processes without undue external dependency on foreign entities or large technology companies. In other words, Europeans are tired of relying on what they see as increasingly unreliable American companies and the US government.

Carrez explained: "We've seen old alliances between the US and the EU being questioned or leveraged for immediate gains. We have seen the very terms of exchange of goods changing almost every day. And as a response to that, in Europe, we're moving to digital sovereignty." That shift, in turn, means open-source software.

"The world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure," continued Carrez, "that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI, containers and trusted execution environments. Open infrastructure allows nations and organizations to maintain control over their applications, their data, and their destiny while benefiting from global collaboration."

Carrez thinks a better word for what Europe wants is not isolation from the US: "What we're really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience. Resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source," he concluded, "allows us to be sovereign without being isolated."

[...] To make life easier for users -- and to turn a profit, naturally -- many European companies are now offering technology programs to help users achieve digital sovereignty. These programs include Deutsche Telekom, with its Open Telekom Cloud, and OVH, STACKIT, and VanillaCore. Each of these companies relies on OpenStack to power its European-based cloud offerings for individuals, companies, and governments. In addition, other European open-source-based tech businesses, such as SUSE and NextCloud, offer digital sovereignty solutions using other programs.

In conversations at the conference, it became clear that while the changes in American government policy have been worrying Europeans, it's not just politics that has them concerned. People are also upset about Microsoft's 365 price increases. Another tech business issue that's unnerved them is Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and its subsequent massive price increases. This has led to a rise in the use of open-source office software, such as LibreOffice, and its web-based brother, Collabora Online, and the migration of VMware customers to OpenStack-based services.

The sovereignty issue is not going to go away. As Carrez said in a press conference: "It's extremely top of mind in the EU right now, it's what everyone is just talking about, and it's what everybody is doing." Open source is essential to this movement. As Mike McDonough, head of software product management for Catchengo, a "sovereign by design" cloud company, said: "No one can lock you up; no one can take it away from you, and if someone decides to fork the code, you can continue adopting it anywhere in the world."

All in all, participants agreed that Europe's sovereign cloud movement is reaching critical mass as governments and enterprises move data back from the US-based hyperscalers. European organizations are realizing they need more private infrastructure capacity and local talent to run big cloud initiatives. So, they're turning to open source because, as Carrez concluded, "what makes us resilient is our open-source community."


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Thursday October 23, @08:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the run-forrest-run dept.

OpenAI launches Atlas broswer.

https://chatgpt.com/atlas

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-unveils-ai-browser-atlas-2025-10-21/

OpenAI on Tuesday unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, a long-anticipated artificial intelligence-powered web browser built around its popular chatbot, in a direct challenge to Google Chrome's dominance.

The launch marks OpenAI's latest move to capitalize on 800 million weekly active ChatGPT users, as it expands into more aspects of users' online lives by collecting data about consumers' browser behavior. It could accelerate a broader shift toward AI-driven search, as users increasingly turn to conversational tools that synthesize information instead of relying on traditional keyword-based results from Google — intensifying competition between OpenAI and Google.

https://apnews.com/article/openai-atlas-web-browser-chatgpt-google-ai-f59edaa239aebe26fc5a4a27291d717a

OpenAI said Atlas launches Tuesday on Apple laptops and will later come to Microsoft's Windows, Apple's iOS phone operating system and Google's Android phone system.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it a "rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about and how to use one."

But analyst Paddy Harrington of market research group Forrester said it will be a big challenge "competing with a giant who has ridiculous market share."

OpenAI's browser is coming out just a few months after one of its executives testified that the company would be interested in buying Google's industry-leading Chrome browser if a federal judge had required it to be sold to prevent the abuses that resulted in Google's ubiquitous search engine being declared an illegal monopoly.

But U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta last month issued a decision that rejected the Chrome sale sought by the U.S. Justice Department in the monopoly case, partly because he believed advances in the AI industry already are reshaping the competitive landscape.

I have just installed Lynx.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Thursday October 23, @03:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the people-said-he-was-visionary dept.

The HyperCard inventor was a huge proponent of taking lower doses of 5-MeO-DMT, which is widely considered the strongest psychedelic in the world:

Bill Atkinson was a computing pioneer who, in the 1980s, effectively made Apple computers usable for everyday people by transforming code into windows, menus, and graphics.

But few people know that later in life he was a secret advocate of what's widely considered the world's most potent psychedelic: 5-MeO-DMT.

The hallucinogen, also called "the God molecule," is a compound found in the venomous secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad named Incilius alvarius (it's commonly called Bufo alvarius) and is known to bring about ego death, a total dissolution of the senses, and a euphoric feeling of existential connectedness, all in a roughly 20-minute trip. Atkinson, who died from pancreatic cancer on June 5 at the age of 74, was a member of a close-knit, private online community of 5-MeO-DMT enthusiasts called OneLight, where he went by the alias "Grace Within."

Several of Atkinson's friends and fellow psychonauts tell WIRED their "beloved" Atkinson played a key role in helping people access smaller doses of 5-MeO-DMT, which can be made synthetically, as he believed it would maximize the benefits of the potentially dangerous drug while minimizing harm. "The same creative mind who affected personal computers so profoundly continued to influence human evolution through his efforts to make the miracle of 'bufo' safer and more manageable," says friend Charles Lindsay, an artist who has worked with the SETI Institute, which works to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. "He truly pushed boundaries. That requires a willingness to consider what might easily be deemed ridiculous." Or, he adds, "risky."

[...] Wishing to spread the gospel about how to use the drug more responsibly, six sources confirmed to WIRED that Atkinson was behind a pseudonymously published manual that contains step-by-step production photos detailing how to produce lower-dose 5-MeO-DMT vape pens known as "LightWands." The guide was published online, on the psychedelic educational nonprofit Erowid. It was first posted in 2021, before it was updated in the month before Atkinson's death. Atkinson collaborated with the makers of the pens—also members of OneLight—to help refine the manufacturing process and make the vaporization process safer, friends say.

"My deepest gratitude goes first to this amazing molecule and to all those who have given of their heart, mind, and courage to bring it to our world," Atkinson wrote pseudonymously on Erowid, outlining how "many of the most beautiful and healing insights are found at lower levels of Jaguar." (Jaguar is the name given by psychologist and psychedelics pioneer Ralph Metzner to 5-MeO-DMT.)

Atkinson—who was also a keen nature photographer—first smoked 5-MeO-DMT in 2012, according to OneLight member Axle Davids, but his relationship with psychedelics goes back much further. In 1985, Atkinson took LSD. He wrote about that experience in 2020: "For the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone." He explained how his LSD trip inspired him to develop HyperCard, a Mac application that wove text, graphics, and sound together in a format that predated the World Wide Web and popularized hyperlinking. "I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge," he wrote.

In his final years, he gave away up to 1,000 LightWand kits containing low- to medium-dose 5-MeO-DMT pens and mentored other creators in the OneLight community, according to Davids. Giving people access to lower doses is important, particularly because some are "hypersensitive" to 5-MeO-DMT, he says: "They can lose consciousness. They can purge and choke on their vomit. They can lose their shit entirely."

[...] Atkinson's use of "the God molecule" appeared to contribute toward a spiritual shift and an interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, says MacNiven. "Bill was a completely non-spiritual guy in the beginning," he says. "Then he became extremely spiritual, talking about past lives and future lives."

According to a "Request for Prayers" Atkinson posted on the OneLight forum in November 2024, revealing his identity to the wider community and disclosing he had terminal cancer, he said he had taken the intense African psychedelic iboga in 2017 and that it helped him accept death. "From my Iboga experience seven years ago, I know for certain that my consciousness will continue after I leave my body behind," Atkinson wrote, signing off the letter with his name instead of his pseudonym. "I have no existential fear of death. Actually more anticipation and curiosity."


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Wednesday October 22, @11:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the filled-to-the-brim-with-girlish-glee dept.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-exploit-cisco-snmp-flaw-to-deploy-rootkit-on-switches/
https://archive.ph/crr3o

Threat actors exploited a recently patched remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2025-20352) in older, unprotected Cisco networking devices to deploy a Linux rootkit and gain persistent access.

The security issue leveraged in the attacks affects the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) in Cisco IOS and IOS XE and leads to RCE if the attacker has root privileges.

According to cybersecurity company Trend Micro, the attacks targeted Cisco 9400, 9300, and legacy 3750G series devices that did not have endpoint detection response solutions.

In the original bulletin for CVE-2025-20352, updated on October 6, Cisco tagged the vulnerability as exploited as a zero day, with the company's Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) saying it was "aware of successful exploitation."

Trend Micro researchers track the attacks under the name 'Operation Zero Disco' because the malware sets a universal access password that contains the word "disco."

The report from Trend Micro notes that the threat actor also attempted to exploit CVE-2017-3881, a seven-year-old vulnerability in the Cluster Management Protocol code in IOS and IOS XE.

The rootkit planted on vulnerable systems features a UDP controller that can listen on any port, toggle or delete logs, bypass AAA and VTY ACLs, enable/disable the universal password, hide running configuration items, and reset the last write timestamp for them.

In a simulated attack, the researchers showed that it is possible to disable logging, impersonate a waystation IP via ARP spoofing, bypass internal firewall rules, and move laterally between VLANs.

Although newer switches are more resistant to these attacks due to Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) protection, Trend Micro says that they are not immune and persistent targeting could compromise them.

After deploying the rootkit, the malware "installs several hooks onto the IOSd, which results in fileless components disappearing after a reboot," the researchers say.
The researchers were able to recover both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of the SNMP exploit.

Trend Micro notes that there currently exists no tool that can reliably flag a compromised Cisco switch from these attacks. If there is suspicion of a hack, the recommendation is to perform a low-level firmware and ROM region investigation.

A list of the indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with 'Operation Zero Disco' can be found here.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 22, @06:27PM   Printer-friendly

Geostationary satellites are broadcasting large volumes of unencrypted data to Earth, including private voice calls and text messages as well as consumer internet traffic, researchers have discovered.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Maryland, College Park, say they were able to pick up large amounts of sensitive traffic largely by just pointing a commercial off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky from the roof of a university building in San Diego.

In its paper, Don't Look Up: There Are Sensitive Internal Links in the Clear on GEO Satellites [PDF], the team describes how it performed a broad scan of IP traffic on 39 GEO satellites across 25 distinct longitudes and found that half of the signals they picked up contained cleartext IP traffic.

This included unencrypted cellular backhaul data sent from the core networks of several US operators, destined for cell towers in remote areas. Also found was unprotected internet traffic heading for in-flight Wi-Fi users aboard airliners, and unencrypted call audio from multiple VoIP providers.

According to the researchers, they were able to identify some observed satellite data as corresponding to T-Mobile cellular backhaul traffic. This included text and voice call contents, user internet traffic, and cellular network signaling protocols, all "in the clear," but T-Mobile quickly enabled encryption after learning about the problem.

More seriously, the team was able to observe unencrypted traffic for military systems including detailed tracking data for coastal vessel surveillance and operational data of a police force.

In addition, they found retail, financial, and banking companies all using unencrypted satellite communications to link their internal networks at various sites. The researchers were able to see unencrypted login credentials, corporate emails, inventory records, and information from ATM cash dispensers.

Reg readers will no doubt find this kind of negligence staggering after years of security breaches and warnings about locking down sensitive data. As the researchers note in their report: "There is a clear mismatch between how satellite customers expect data to be secured and how it is secured in practice; the severity of the vulnerabilities we discovered has certainly revised our own threat models for communications."

The team noted that the sheer level of unencrypted traffic observed results from a failure to encrypt at multiple levels of the communications protocol stack.

At the satellite link/transport layer, streams using MPEG encoding have the option to use MPEG scrambling. While TV transponders mostly do this, only 10 percent of the non-TV transponders did. Only 20 percent of transponders had encryption enabled for downlinks, and just 6 percent consistently used IPsec at the network layer.

The report notes that organizations with visibility into these networks have been raising alarms for some time. It cites a 2022 NSA security advisory about GEO satellite links that warns: "Most of these links are unencrypted, relying on frequency separation or predictable frequency hopping rather than encryption to separate communications."

The team states that it obtained clearance from legal counsel at their respective institutions for this research, and that it securely stored any unencrypted data collected from transmissions. It also claims that it made efforts to contact the relevant parties wherever possible to inform them of the security shortcomings.

T-Mobile has been in touch with a statement since the publication of the story:

"T-Mobile immediately addressed a vendor's technical misconfiguration that affected a limited number of cell sites using geosynchronous satellite backhaul in remote, low-population areas, as identified in this research from 2024. This was not network-wide, is unrelated to our T-Satellite direct-to-cell offering, and we implemented nationwide Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) encryption for all customers to further protect signaling traffic as it travels between mobile handsets and the network core, including call set up, numbers dialed and text message content.

"We appreciate our collaboration with the security research community, whose work helps reinforce our ongoing commitment to protecting customer data and enhances security across the industry."

Eavesdropping on Internal Networks via Unencrypted Satellites
https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/
https://archive.ph/kpA93

We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens' voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth.

A Surprising Amount of Satellite Traffic Is Unencrypted - Schneier on Security:

Full paper. News article.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 22, @01:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-so-fast dept.

Larry Sanger says the website has become biased against conservative and religious viewpoints, but sees a way to fix it:

Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia millions of people treat as an authoritative source of information, is systemically biased against conservative, religious, and other points of view, according to the site's co-founder, Larry Sanger.

Sanger, 57, who now heads the Knowledge Standards Foundation, believes Wikipedia can be salvaged either by a renewed emphasis on free speech withttps://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/hin the organization or by a grassroots campaign to make diverse viewpoints heard.

Failing that, Sanger said, government intervention may be required to pierce the shell of anonymity that now protects Wikipedia's editors from defamation lawsuits by public figures who believe the site portrays them unfairly.

[...] "Basically, it's required now, even for the sake of neutrality, that they take a side when [they believe] one side is clearly wrong," Sanger said. "Pretensions of objectivity are out the window."

[...] "You simply may not cite as sources of Wikipedia articles anything that has been branded as right wing," he said. [...] "Even now, people are still sort of waking up to the reality that Wikipedia does, on many pages ... act as essentially propaganda."

[...] On his website, Sanger outlines a series of ideas for returning Wikipedia to its original stance on fairness and free speech. A handful of his ideas center on increasing transparency into site management, such as revealing who Wikipedia's leaders are, allowing the public to rate articles, ending decision-making by consensus, and adopting a legislative process for determining editorial policy.

Related: Elon Musk Plans to Take on Wikipedia With 'Grokipedia'


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Wednesday October 22, @08:58AM   Printer-friendly

Malicious app required to make "Pixnapping" attack work requires no permissions:

Android devices are vulnerable to a new attack that can covertly steal two-factor authentication codes, location timelines, and other private data in less than 30 seconds.

The new attack, named Pixnapping by the team of academic researchers who devised it, requires a victim to first install a malicious app on an Android phone or tablet. The app, which requires no system permissions, can then effectively read data that any other installed app displays on the screen. Pixnapping has been demonstrated on Google Pixel phones and the Samsung Galaxy S25 phone and likely could be modified to work on other models with additional work. Google released mitigations last month, but the researchers said a modified version of the attack works even when the update is installed.

Pixnapping attacks begin with the malicious app invoking Android programming interfaces that cause the authenticator or other targeted apps to send sensitive information to the device screen. The malicious app then runs graphical operations on individual pixels of interest to the attacker. Pixnapping then exploits a side channel that allows the malicious app to map the pixels at those coordinates to letters, numbers, or shapes.

"Anything that is visible when the target app is opened can be stolen by the malicious app using Pixnapping," the researchers wrote on an informational website. "Chat messages, 2FA codes, email messages, etc. are all vulnerable since they are visible. If an app has secret information that is not visible (e.g., it has a secret key that is stored but never shown on the screen), that information cannot be stolen by Pixnapping."

The new attack class is reminiscent of GPU.zip, a 2023 attack that allowed malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites. It worked by exploiting side channels found in GPUs from all major suppliers. The vulnerabilities that GPU.zip exploited have never been fixed. Instead, the attack was blocked in browsers by limiting their ability to open iframes, an HTML element that allows one website (in the case of GPU.zip, a malicious one) to embed the contents of a site from a different domain.

Pixnapping targets the same side channel as GPU.zip, specifically the precise amount of time it takes for a given frame to be rendered on the screen.

"This allows a malicious app to steal sensitive information displayed by other apps or arbitrary websites, pixel by pixel," Alan Linghao Wang, lead author of the research paper "Pixnapping: Bringing Pixel Stealing out of the Stone Age," explained in an interview. "Conceptually, it is as if the malicious app was taking a screenshot of screen contents it should not have access to. Our end-to-end attacks simply measure the rendering time per frame of the graphical operations to determine whether the pixel was white or nonwhite."

[...] In an online interview, paper coauthor Ricardo Paccagnella described the attack in more detail:

Step 1: The malicious app invokes a target app to cause some sensitive visual content to be rendered.

Step 2: The malicious app uses Android APIs to "draw over" that visual content and cause a side channel (in our case, GPU.zip) to leak as a function of the color of individual pixels rendered in Step 1 (e.g., activate only if the pixel color is c).

Step 3: The malicious app monitors the side effects of Step 2 to infer, e.g., if the color of those pixels was c or not, one pixel at a time.

Steps 2 and 3 can be implemented differently depending on the side channel that the attacker wants to exploit. In our instantiations on Google and Samsung phones, we exploited the GPU.zip side channel. When using GPU.zip, measuring the rendering time per frame was sufficient to determine if the color of each pixel is c or not. Future instantiations of the attack may use other side channels where controlling memory management and accessing fine-grained timers may be necessary (see Section 3.3 of the paper). Pixnapping would still work then: The attacker would just need to change how Steps 2 and 3 are implemented.

[...] In an email, a Google representative wrote, "We issued a patch for CVE-2025-48561 in the September Android security bulletin, which partially mitigates this behavior. We are issuing an additional patch for this vulnerability in the December Android security bulletin. We have not seen any evidence of in-the-wild exploitation."

Pixnapping is useful research in that it demonstrates the limitations of Google's security and privacy assurances that one installed app can't access data belonging to another app. The challenges in implementing the attack to steal useful data in real-world scenarios, however, are likely to be significant. In an age when teenagers can steal secrets from Fortune 500 companies simply by asking nicely, the utility of more complicated and limited attacks is probably of less value.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Wednesday October 22, @04:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the noise dept.

The noise of Bitcoin mining is driving Americans crazy

"It echoes across agricultural land and forests, chasing away deer. It seeps into walls, vibrating bedrooms and dinner tables." One resident said it was as though a "jet engine is forever stationed nearby".

Bitcoin mining has exploded in the US over the past decade, particularly in the wake of Donald Trump's re-election to the White House and his embrace of cryptocurrency. But it's an energy-intensive process: the powerful computers that create and protect the cryptocurrency need fans on the go constantly to cool them down. And across rural, mostly Republican towns, residents are getting sick of the noise – and getting sick, full stop.

Much of America's Bitcoin mining industry is in Texas, said Time, "home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians". In Granbury, where Marathon – one of the world's largest Bitcoin holders – has a mine, a group of people are being "worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses". Some were experiencing fainting spells, chest pains, migraines and panic attacks; others were "wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea. The mine is causing "mental and physical" health issues, said one ears, nose, and throat specialist based in Granbury. "Imagine if I had vuvuzela in your ear all the time."

Granbury Residents Demand Answers from MARA's Bitcoin Mine As Lawsuit Over Noise Nuisance Continues

Texas state court rejected MARA's dismissal bid, now residents are demanding that the cryptomine turn over documents

Granbury, TX —

Today, Citizens Concerned About Wolf Hollow, a community group composed of Granbury residents and represented by Earthjustice, filed a motion to compel in its lawsuit against MARA Holdings, Inc, asking the Texas State Court to require the cryptomining plant to turn over key information pertaining to the excessive noise the facility creates and the resulting nuisance level conditions. This comes on the heels of the Court denying MARA's motion to dismiss earlier this summer, a decision which allows the community group to move forward in the lawsuit. The cryptomining company has withheld basic information and documentation related to the excessive noise generated by its 24/7 cryptocurrency mining operations — noise that has caused ongoing harm to the surrounding community. Now, the community group is demanding answers, seeking much needed information including the equipment used at the plant, any mitigation measures the company has taken, and detailed noise pollution data.

(YT Warning) I Live 500 Feet From A Bitcoin Mine. My Life Is Hell.

In Texas, the legal limit for noise is 85dB. Researchers have found that prolonged exposure can impact hearing and cardiovascular health, increased blood pressure and heart rate.
Other potential risks include headaches, dizziness, and psychological effects.

85dB is considered industrial noise inside of a plant. That would mean that you would have to wear hearing protection all the time at your home.
...

Teresa lives 18 miles from Corsicana, Texas, where Riot Platforms is building out what is expected to be one of the largest bitcoin mining operations in the world. We decided, well, what better place to build a one gigawatt site?

Teresa is concerned about Bitcoin's demand for water. Corsicana's mine is projected to use up to 1.5 million gallons of water per day.That's an eighth of the city's water supply. She took us to nearby Navarro Lake, which she says dries up every 4 to 5 years.

"So this is the lake that you are concerned that that the Bitcoin mining companies could be drawing water from?"
"Yes. You've got a lot of people that have moved into this area. The last thing we needed was more pressure on this lake. I know I can survive without electricity. I do know that. I can't survive without water."

...

All of this makes it even more damning that the politicians representing the residents we spoke to are all in on Bitcoin. Which brings us to the crypto money in politics.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz received a $350,000 donation from Bitcoin Freedom PAC in 2024, in a tight reelection race against Democratic challenger Colin Allred. The same year, Cruz announced he was getting into the Bitcoin business himself, announcing on X he bought his own miners and started running them in Iran, Texas. Cruz was commended by Marathon Digital's CEO and welcomed to the club.
...

According to Public Citizen, crypto corporations provided nearly half of the $248 million in corporate money to influence federal elections in 2024 and the industry has gotten exactly what they paid for. Efforts to regulate crypto at the state and federal level have been largely unsuccessful.

Rural Cheyenne Residents Have A Noisy New Neighbor — A Bitcoin Miner

Michigan school sues over constant noise from Bitcoin mining rigs

Norway Considers Restricting Bitcoin Mining

The Norwegian government will consider by autumn the possibility of banning the establishment of new cryptocurrency mining enterprises using energy-intensive algorithms like Proof-of-Work (PoW).

According to the head of the Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation, Karianne Tung, this activity "offers little to local communities in terms of jobs and income."

"This is energy we could use differently – in industry or for the operation of socially beneficial data centres," she added.

The authorities will conduct a comprehensive study of the sector. Existing enterprises are required to register by July 1.

Energy Minister Terje Aasland referred to the additional burden mining places on generating capacity, networks, and infrastructure.

"By prohibiting energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining, we can free up land, electricity, and network capacity for other purposes that contribute more to value creation, jobs, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions," he stated.


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posted by hubie on Tuesday October 21, @11:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the turning-it-off-and-on-again dept.

Amazon accidentally turned off large portions of the internet on Monday morning.

A problem at Amazon's cloud computing service disrupted internet use around the world early Monday, taking down dozens of online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.

About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem. AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to some of the world's biggest organizations. Its customers include government departments, universities and businesses, including The Associated Press.

Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system, which converts web addresses into IP addresses so websites and apps can load on internet-connected devices.

"The world now runs on the cloud," and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, Burgess said.

Several major apps were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal and Zoom faced lengthy outages, as did Amazon's own services, including its Ring video surveillance products.

Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to have at least 30% of the total cloud market.

Amazon did not give a reason for what caused the outage.

https://apnews.com/article/amazon-east-internet-services-outage-654a12ac9aff0bf4b9dc0e22499d92d7
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/amazon-dns-outage-breaks-much-of-the-internet/


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posted by mrpg on Tuesday October 21, @06:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the closing-in dept.

Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.

Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people's brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn't seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?

[...] AI companies are determined to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs

[...] Digital multitasking gives you a false sense of being on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything

[...] Are schools equipped to produce creative thinkers – or is the education system going to churn out mindless, AI-essay writing drones?

The Guardian


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posted by hubie on Tuesday October 21, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly

The war against drones is heating up with airports around the world reporting incursions by these robotic flying pests. Cost effective solutions are still thin on the ground. With countries like Russia and China on the warpath there is a need to step up development and research for better drone management solutions. On the back of drone developments in the Ukraine war, a new R&D facility is being planned for Adelaide in South Australia to accelerate the development of next generation counter drone technology.

ASX-listed technology company DroneShield has announced it will build a new $13m research facility in Adelaide as it moves to "accelerate the development" of its next-generation counter-drone products amid a world of "surging" drone attacks.

The investment was expected to create about 20 high-skilled engineering roles in the city, focused radiofrequency electronics, electronic warfare and systems integration, the company said.

The facility will be led by Jeff Wojtiuk, a former Lockheed Martin Australia engineer.

The facility is expected to be fully operational by March next year.

[Ed. question: If you were a betting person, where are you putting your money for the most effective counter? EMP? Kinetic? Lasers? Drone attacking drones?]


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posted by hubie on Tuesday October 21, @09:15AM   Printer-friendly

An interesting article on the economics of AI Chips by Mihir Kshirsagar

This week, Open AI announced a multibillion-dollar deal with Broadcom to develop custom AI chips for data centers projected to consume 10 gigawatts of power. This investment is separate from another multibillion-dollar deal OpenAI struck with AMD last week. There is no question that we are in the midst of making one of the largest industrial infrastructure bets in United States history. Eight major companies—Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, and others—are expected to invest over $300 billion in AI infrastructure in 2025 alone. Spurred by news about the vendor-financed structure of the AMD investment and a conversation with my colleague Arvind Narayanan, I started to investigate the unit economics of the industry from a competition perspective.

What I have found so far is surprising. It appears that we're making important decisions about who gets to compete in AI based on financial assumptions that may be systematically overstating the long-run sustainability of the industry by a factor of two. That said, I am open to being wrong in my analysis and welcome corrections as I write these thoughts up in an academic article with my colleague Felix Chen.

Here is the puzzle: the chips at the heart of the infrastructure buildout have a useful lifespan of one to three years due to rapid technological obsolescence and physical wear, but companies depreciate them over five to six years. In other words, they spread out the cost of their massive capital investments over a longer period than the facts warrant—what The Economist has referred to as the "$4trn accounting puzzle at the heart of the AI cloud."

Center for Information Technology Policy (Princeton University)


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posted by hubie on Tuesday October 21, @04:27AM   Printer-friendly

For those interested in scanning files for malware and other threat detection under Linux and using the GNOME desktop, Lenspect is a new GNOME-aligned application that is a GUI powered by VirusTotal for being a Linux-native security threat scanner.

As noted by This Week in GNOME, Lenspect has launched as a security threat scanner built atop Google-owned VirusTotal. In turn users of this GNOME-focused desktop application need to have their own VirusTotal API key.

Lenspect is written in Python and makes use of the GTK toolkit. Lenspect 1.0 was released last week as the project's inaugural release. Lenspect is licensed under the GPLv3.

Lenspect is available via Flathub or its sources can be grabbed from GitHub.


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