An investigation has uncovered a sprawling network of hidden cameras in Chinese hotel rooms that livestream guests — including couples having sex — to paying subscribers on Telegram. Over 18 months, the BBC identified six websites and apps on the messaging platform that claimed to operate more than 180 spy cams across Chinese hotels, not just recording but broadcasting live.
One site, monitored for seven months, cycled through 54 different cameras, roughly half active at any given time. Subscribers pay 450 yuan (~$65) per month for access to multiple live feeds, archived clips, and a library of more than 6,000 edited videos dating back to 2017.
The BBC traced one camera to a hotel room in Zhengzhou, where researchers found it hidden inside a wall ventilation unit and hardwired into the building’s electricity supply. A commercially available hidden-camera detector failed to flag it. China introduced regulations last April requiring hotel owners to check for hidden cameras, but the BBC found the livestreaming sites still operational.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Disney+ subscribers in some European countries have lost access to advanced HDR features like Dolby Vision and HDR10+, TechRadar and FlatpanelsHD report. The issue was first spotted by German Disney+ subscribers on Reddit, but currently also impacts subscribers in Portugal, Poland, France and the Netherlands, according to FlatpanelsHD.
“Dolby Vision support for content on Disney+ is currently unavailable in several European countries due to technical challenges,” Disney said in a statement. “We are actively working to restore access to Dolby Vision and will provide an update as soon as possible. 4K UHD and HDR support remain available on supported devices.”
If the issue is in fact a technical one, it seems like it could be around for the long-term. Disney has removed any reference to Dolby Vision from its Disney+ video quality support page in Germany. As of now, the company lists HDR10 as its default HDR format, despite Dolby Vision support being a feature of Disney+ for several years now.
FlatpanelsHD writes that the real issue might be legal, rather than technological. A company called InterDigital won an injunction in a German court against Disney in November 2025 because it violated at least one of the company’s patents on streaming video technology. The injunction specifically requires Disney to stop violating InterDigital’s patent on “a method for dynamically overlaying a first video stream with a second video stream comprising, for example, subtitles.” It’s not entirely clear how that plays into the company offering Dolby Vision and HDR10+ in Europe, but it would explain why subscribers in Germany were some of the first people to notice Dolby Vision’s absence.
Engadget has contacted Disney for more information about Disney+’s missing HDR support and whether InterDigital’s injunction played a role. We’ll update this article if we hear back.
Mentions of Dolby Vision and HDR10+ were also stripped out of the US version of Disney+’s video quality support page. InterDigital hasn’t won an injunction in the US, but the company is pursuing a patent case against Disney in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. That doesn’t necessarily mean Dolby Vision support will be taken from US subscribers next, but it does suggest there’s more happening here than just technical challenges.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/disney-loses-access-to-dolby-vision-and-hdr10-in-some-european-countries-193930091.html?src=rss
Engineers at Blue Origin have been grappling with a seemingly eternal debate that involves the New Glenn rocket and the economics of flying it.
The debate goes back at least 15 years, to the early discussions around the design of the heavy lift rocket. The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines?
Around the same time, in the early 2010s, SpaceX was also trading the economics of reusing the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. Eventually SpaceX founder Elon Musk abandoned his goal of a fully reusable Falcon 9, choosing instead to recover payload fairings and push down manufacturing costs of the upper stage as much as possible. This strategy worked, as SpaceX has lowered its internal launch costs of a Falcon 9, even with a new second stage, to about $15 million. The company is now focused on making the larger Starship rocket fully reusable.
Build a Rocket Boy seems more interested in investigating leaks than improving the game
When you sign up for a subscription on Substack, you’re thinking you’ll receive newsletters and posts from online creators, not lose the data you share with the platform. But like any digital service, the data you provide when signing up is at the mercy of Substack, or anyone who happens to gain access to that data. Unfortunately, that’s now the case.
As reported by BleepingComputer, Substack recently disclosed a significant data breach. The company’s CEO, Chris Best, sent users a notice of the breach this week, sharing that email addresses, phone numbers, and “other internal metadata” were shared from Substack accounts without their permission. The company reportedly discovered the breach on Feb. 3, even though hackers accessed the data itself in October of 2025. That means the data was in unauthorized hands for roughly four months before Substack identified the breach.
Best explained that Substack has since fixed the problem with the system that allowed an unauthorized third party to access this data. The company is launching an investigation and is reportedly taking steps to prevent this type of breach from happening going forward. On the bright side, Best claims that credit card numbers, passwords, and financial information were not accessed in the breach.
What Best doesn’t share is the scope of the breach. For that, we have to turn to BleepingComputer, which found a post from a “threat actor” on the hacking forum BreachForums. The actor posted a database of 697,313 Substack records, sharing that the Substack user base is much larger, but the scraping method was “noisy and patched fast.” This actor says the data compromised includes email addresses, phone numbers, names, user IDs, Stripe IDs, profile pictures, and bios—a bit more detailed than the report from Substack’s CEO.
700,000 records isn’t the same as 700,000 users: Each record is something like an email address or a phone number, which means one Substack user could have lost multiple records in the breach. Still, it’s a large number of data points, and is little consolation to the users who have lost information here.
Unfortunately, there’s not much users can do to mitigate a data breach once it’s happened. The data stolen from Substack is already lost, and you won’t be able to undo that. However, there are some steps you can take to protect yourself in the wake of the breach, and to prevent this data loss in the future.
First, closely monitor your incoming texts and emails. Hackers will take advantage of the data here to target Substack users in phishing schemes. If you receive messages from strangers, or even suspicious messages claiming to come from Substack, exercise caution. As per usual, never click on links in messages from senders you don’t know, and, even more importantly, never download files or applications if instructed.
You may also want to consider masking your email address going forward. Use a service like Apple’s “Hide My Email” or DuckDuckGo’s email protection to generate a “burner” address each time you need to share your email with a service. The service will send messages to the burner address, which gets forwarded to your real address. That way, the service doesn’t know your real address, and, if hacked, won’t compromise it. Hackers will only get the burner, which you can shut down at any time.
The long wait for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is nearly over, as the film hits theaters on April 1. To keep the hype train rolling, Illumination and Universal Pictures have dropped a short new teaser. It’s exactly 30 seconds long, so you’ll probably be seeing it again on TV this Sunday during the Super Bowl.
It does feature some nifty footage that we haven’t seen before, including a hungry Yoshi absolutely devouring a Magikoopa. There are also shots highlighting the star cannons from The Super Mario Galaxy games and one shot that shows Rosalina bodying Bowser Jr.
There seems to be a plot point in which Princess Peach and Toad head to some sort of sci-fi mega-city, which should be fun. There’s an Octoomba living there, another shout-out to the OG Wii game.
As previously stated, the hotly-anticipated sequel arrives on April 1. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a total smash, grossing nearly $1.4 billion and becoming one of the most successful animated films ever made. We found the original to be a fun, but safe, trip to the Mushroom Kingdom.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-new-trailer-for-the-super-mario-galaxy-movie-shows-yoshi-absolutely-devouring-a-magikoopa-191807037.html?src=rss
Noble Audio has announced the Sceptre, a pocket-sized USB-C Bluetooth transmitter meant to boost wireless audio quality from phones, laptops and tablets. The device is intended to exceed the quality offered by a device’s existing hardware.
Sceptre is powered by Qualcomm’s QCC5181 Bluetooth chipset and supports LDAC, aptX Adaptive, AAC and SBC codecs. Of course, to take advantage of the high quality codecs you’ll need a pair of headphones that support them. The dongle has a reported wireless range of roughly 66 feet.
Listeners use the Noble app for initial pairing and can then move the dongle between compatible USB-C devices. It also supports pass-through charging with USB-C so users can charge their devices while listening. The company says Sceptre is compatible with iOS, Android and Windows, and the company confirmed with Engadget that iPhones 15 and newer are supported.
We’ve been pleased in the past with Noble Audio products, like the FoKus Apollo headphones, or the FoKus Rex5 earbuds. The Sceptre from Noble Audio is available for $70.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/noble-audio-has-released-a-usb-c-bluetooth-dongle-for-high-fidelity-transmission-191655786.html?src=rss
I’m just a humble immigrant, but as a mere (legal!) guest in the U.S., I can’t help but notice that the country is rather, shall we say, politically divided these days (sorry if pointing that out seems rude). It seems international scammers have also noticed—and are taking advantage in subtle ways.
Recently, investor Fred Benenson blogged about a sophisticated phishing campaign targeting SendGrid users. Phishers sent emails claiming the company was going to add a large “Support ICE” button at the bottom of every outgoing email unless users opted out. The emails also featured a large blue button promising to help you disable the message, which, when clicked, naturally led to a fake version of SendGrid that would allow the scammers to steal login information.
As scams go, it’s not a bad play: Phishing emails work best when they induce a sense of panic—that way you’re less likely to think critically about them, and just act. It’s not hard to imagine this particular email being effective, given the political climate right now. Say you’re running a fair trade coffee company—you wouldn’t want a giant “Support ICE” button below your signature at this moment in history.
But the trick didn’t just target left-wing organizations: Variations on the theme claimed the company was going to add pro-LGBT+ and Black Lives Matter banners as well. The differing political messages aren’t really the point of the scam, you see—the point is to get business owners to panic about projecting the “wrong” values so that they will click the link and give away their login information. Scammers rely on psychological tricks to rope in their victims, all of them designed to get you to stop thinking rationally. Exploiting America’s political divide seems to be an excellent way to do that.
This is just the latest example of a scam that uses politics as a tool. Back in 2020, a fake Black Lives Matter voting campaign spread malware by pretending to be from a county official looking for feedback on the then-exploding political movement. People on both side of the partisan divide ended up clicking through and getting infected.
And then there are the campaigns where people pretend to be politicians and beg for donations: Back in 2024 Lifehacker reported on a rash of political donation scams that popped up during the presidential election cycle. That trend is still growing, according to Stacey Wood, a fraud expert writing for Psychology Today. “What is especially challenging for consumers and voters is that legitimate campaign operatives use many of the same common persuasion techniques employed by scammers,” she writes.
All of which is to say that international scammers have equal access to American media outlets, are aware of our political divides, and are effective at using them to exploit your emotions in order to steal your money.
What can you do to protect yourself? First, be aware of the tricks that scammers use, and always approach your email inbox with skepticism. Before you click any link from an unfamiliar sender or in an unsolicited email, hover over it to see if it’s going to a website that looks legit. Even better: Avoid clicking links altogether, and head to the website for a given service directly by typing it into your browser.
Remember, it’s easier to fall for a scam than you think, so it pays to be skeptical, especially when you encounter a call to action designed to get you to react in a panic.
Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has paid $70 million for the domain AI.com — the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal’s broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.
The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller. Marszalek plans to debut the site during a Super Bowl ad this weekend, offering a personal “AI agent” that lets consumers send messages, use apps and trade stocks. The previous domain sale record was nearly $50 million for Carinsurance.com, per GoDaddy.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Jackal is a new top-down action game that moves fast and feels great to play
Here’s what people were reading the most on FOSS Force during the month of January, 2026.
The post FOSS Force’s Top Ten for January appeared first on FOSS Force.
Conspiracies spread online thanks to spoofed accounts
Discover the differences between Podman and Docker, including daemonless architecture, rootless containers, systemd integration, and more. Learn which container management tool suits your needs best.
‘You’ve got to deceive the company,’ Kazutaka Kodaka says
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) — signed contracts for cloud computing services that can’t yet be filled and haven’t yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Game of Thrones actor can be seen parachuting across a lake in tactical gear