Since it debuted several years back, tech enthusiasts have been deeply in love with the Flipper Zero. The tiny penetration testing device makes hacking anything fun and easy, and at $170, it’s not exactly what you’d call a heavy financial lift. Yet while acme hackers may be having a field day with it, the Flipper…
Source: Gizmodo – You Should Probably Buy a Flipper Zero Before It’s Too Late
One of the lingering aftereffects of childhood trauma may be painful headaches as an adult, research published Wednesday suggests. The study, a meta-analysis of existing evidence, found that people who reported traumatic events in their childhood were noticeably more likely to report headache disorders than those…
Source: Gizmodo – Childhood Trauma Might Raise Risk of Headaches in Adulthood
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon has more than 181 million users in the European Union and directly employs more than 150,000 people in the region, the company said on Wednesday, in its first store transparency report as required by the EU Digital Services Act (DSA). In August, the Digital Services Act (DSA) imposed new rules on content moderation, user privacy and transparency for platforms and search engines labelled as very large online platforms (VLOP), which were defined as having more than 45 million users in the EU.
Amazon has challenged its inclusion in the group, saying it was not the largest retailer in any of the EU countries in which it operates. Germany is by far the biggest market for Amazon store with more than 60 million monthly active users, followed by Italy with 38 million users, according to the report. The company has corporate offices across 50 European cities and 250 logistics centers in the block. In the first half of 2023, the company said it took 274 million actions on its own initiative to remove content that violates policy, or other types of non-illegal content. Amazon also received 8,863 legal requests from EU governments for information about users of its service in the first half of 2023.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon Discloses 181 Million Users In EU In First Store Transparency Report
Pebble, the first of the would-be Twitter replacements to emerge after Elon Musk bought Twitter, is shutting down. The social media platform — previously known as T2 to indicate a desire to build a Twitter clone — was founded by former Twitter employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle. Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Pebble was an early-stage, Twitter-like social network. Its goal was to become the “place to have the authentic conversations we’ve always wanted to have.” Its founders, who were largely Twitter alumni, designed Pebble to look and feel like pre-Musk Twitter, with a 280-character limit and direct messaging. I rather liked it, but it appears I was in the minority. Pebble was always a bit rough around the edges, and it never made it past about 20,000 users.
In what was still a surprising announcement, Pebble revealed its plans to shut down operations on November 1, 2023. In a letter to users, Pebble said: “The painful truth, however, is that we were not growing quickly enough for investors to believe that we will break out. Combine that with a crowded space of alternatives — and the uphill climb is even steeper. In order to continue to build out a complete Pebble, we would have needed more investment, and more time.” That was not to be — and Pebble’s backers ran out of money and time.
A spokesperson for the platform stated: “While we are immensely proud of what we achieved with our dedicated team and an incredible community, the reality is that our growth rate was not meeting the expectations set by our investors.” With the digital landscape burgeoning with alternative platforms, Pebble was competing in an increasingly crowded marketplace. As the platform prepares for its final curtain call, the team behind Pebble is shifting its focus to showing gratitude to its supportive community. They are exploring potential avenues to ensure that the connections formed on Pebble can continue in another guise. Further details are expected to be shared soon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Twitter Alternative Pebble, Previously Known As T2, Is Shutting Down
Enlarge / A tiny fleck of paint, taken from the Mona Lisa, is revealing insights into previously unknown steps of Leonardo da Vinci’s process. (credit: Public domain)
When Leonardo da Vinci was creating his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, he may have experimented with lead oxide in his base layer, resulting in trace amounts of a compound called plumbonacrite. It forms when lead oxides combine with oil, a common mixture to help paint dry, used by later artists like Rembrandt. But the presence of plumbonacrite in the Mona Lisa is the first time the compound has been detected in an Italian Renaissance painting, suggesting that da Vinci could have pioneered this technique, according to the authors of a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Fewer than 20 of da Vinci’s paintings have survived, and the Mona Lisa is by far the most famous, inspiring a 1950s hit song by Nat King Cole and featuring prominently in last year’s Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery, among other pop culture mentions. The painting is in remarkably good condition given its age, but art conservationists and da Vinci scholars alike are eager to learn as much as possible about the materials the Renaissance master used to create his works.
There have been some recent scientific investigations of da Vinci’s works, which revealed that he varied the materials used for his paintings, especially concerning the ground layers applied between the wooden panel surface and the subsequent paint layers. For instance, for his Virgin and Child with St. Anne (c. 1503–1519), he used a typical Italian Renaissance gesso for the ground layer, followed by a lead white priming layer. But for La Belle Ferronniere (c. 1495–1497), da Vinci used an oil-based ground layer made of white and red lead.
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Source: Ars Technica – Leonardo da Vinci used toxic pigments when he painted the Mona Lisa
After over 100 days of withholding work, SAG-AFTRA is working on a counteroffer to the proposal from four CEOs who met with them on Tuesday. The CEOs are represented by the AMPTP, but Variety reports that their personal involvement was to “impress on SAG-AFTRA leadership the economic stakes as the stalemate drags on.”
Source: Gizmodo – The SAG Strike Continues as It Holds Out Against Reported Cancellation Threats
Meta’s increasingly aggressive push to promote Threads seems to be paying off. Mark Zuckerberg said the app currently has “just under” 100 million monthly active users, and that he thinks there’s a “good chance” the app could reach 1 billion users in the next couple of years.
“I thought for a long time, there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive and I think that if we keep at this for a few more years, then I think we have a good chance of achieving our vision there,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
Threads’ growth has been closely watched since its July launch. The app saw 100 million sign-ups in its first week, but quickly saw engagement drop off amid complaints about limited functionality and feeds flooded with posts from brands. But Meta has steadily added new features, and engagement seems to have rebounded in recent weeks as Elon Musk makes unpopular changes to X, like stripping headlines from links. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Threads has recently succeeded in attracting former “power users” from X.
Threads’ growth wasn’t the only bright spot for Meta, which reported just over $34 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 23 percent increase from last year. There are no 3.9 billion people who use one of the company’s each month, a new high for the social media company. During a call with analysts, Zuckerberg said that Meta’s recent focus on “efficiency,” which resulted in the company shedding more than 20,000 jobs over the last year, has been an effective strategy that will continue as the company faces “a very volatile world.”
Zuckerberg also shared that Meta would be increasingly focused on generative AI going forward. “We’re going to continue deprioritizing a number of non-AI projects across the company to shift people towards working on AI instead,” Zuckerberg said.
Those AI investments, however, won’t come at the expense of new spending on the metaverse. Reality Labs, Meta’s division overseeing its AR and VR spending, continued its multibillion-dollar losing streak. Revenue from Reality Labs sank to just $210 million, with losses climbing to $3.7 billion for the quarter and more than $11 billion since the start of 2023. Meta CFO Susan Li said the losses were expected to accelerate further in the coming year due to “ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”
Zuckerberg, who has recently attempted to highlight AI advancements within AR and VR, said that the technology has the potential to reshape all of the company’s services. “Generative AI is going to transform meaningfully how people use each of the different apps that we build,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mark-zuckerberg-threads-has-just-under-100-million-monthly-active-users-222548501.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Mark Zuckerberg: Threads has ‘just under’ 100 million monthly active users
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
A relentless team of pro-Russia hackers has been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in widely used webmail software in attacks targeting governmental entities and a think tank, all in Europe, researchers from security firm ESET said on Wednesday.
The previously unknown vulnerability resulted from a critical cross-site scripting error in Roundcube, a server application used by more than 1,000 webmail services and millions of their end users. Members of a pro-Russia and Belarus hacking group tracked as Winter Vivern used the XSS bug to inject JavaScript into the Roundcube server application. The injection was triggered simply by viewing a malicious email, which caused the server to send emails from selected targets to a server controlled by the threat actor.
“In summary, by sending a specially crafted email message, attackers are able to load arbitrary JavaScript code in the context of the Roundcube user’s browser window,” ESET researcher Matthieu Faou wrote. “No manual interaction other than viewing the message in a web browser is required.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Pro-Russia hackers target inboxes with 0-day in webmail app used by millions
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Two Ukrainian hacktivist groups are claiming to have broken into Russia’s largest private bank, Alfa-Bank. In a blog post last week, the hackers from groups called KibOrg and NLB shared screenshots of what appears to be an internal database belonging to Alfa-Bank, as well as personal details of several Russian individuals as “confirmation” of the breach. Within the database, the hackers say there are over 30 million records including names, birthdates, account numbers and phone numbers of Russian customers.
Adding some legitimacy to those claims, a Ukrainian intelligence official who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation confirmed to NPR that Ukraine’s top counterintelligence agency, the SBU, helped the hacktivists breach Alfa-Bank. The official did not share additional details about how the SBU participated or any further plans for sharing the stolen data. Ukrainian journalists including from cybersecurity website The Record previously reported on the connection to the SBU. While the hacktivists did not immediately respond to a request to discuss the breach, they wrote in the blog post — posted on their own site — that they would be sharing the data obtained from Alfa-Bank with investigative journalists. Alfa-Bank has not publicly responded to the news of the hack.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ukrainian Hackers and Intel Officers Partner Up In Apparent Hack of a Top Russian Bank
Enlarge / The side view of the spider (on the left) in the ear canal with the exoskeleton in the background. (credit: The New England Journal of Medicine ©2023.)
While brain worms have made many horrifying headlines this year, the good folks at the New England Journal of Medicine offer some fresh nightmare fuel ahead of Halloween: an ear spider. And there’s a video.
In a short clinical report published in this week’s issue, doctors in Tainan City, Taiwan, detail the case of a 64-year-old woman who sought care at an otolaryngology (ENT) clinic. She came in complaining of having an incessant ruckus in her left ear for the previous four days. On the first day of symptoms, the woman said she was awoken by a feeling of a wee creature crawling in her ear canal. That feeling was then followed by days of clicking, beating, and rustling noises.
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Source: Ars Technica – Teeny jumping spider found in woman’s ear after days of torturous racket
If you’ve seen The Conjuring 2—or even if you’re just a fan of ghost lore—you know the broad strokes of the story behind The Enfield Poltergeist, based on a much-publicized haunting case in late-1970s north London. Just in time for Halloween, the new Apple TV+ series aims to dig even deeper into the mystery.
Source: io9 – Apple TV+’s The Enfield Poltergeist Pokes Into the Case That Inspired The Conjuring 2
Enlarge / Apple TV’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. (credit: YouTube/Apple TV+)
Apple announced monthly price hikes for several online services on Wednesday, including its catchall Apple One subscription service.
Apple TV+ will jump from $6.99 to $9.99 per month, while Apple Arcade will go from $4.99 to $6.99 monthly. Apple News+ used to cost $9.99 per month, but now it’s $12.99.
Those three services are bundled alongside iCloud and (in the Premier tier) Fitness+ in Apple One, the company’s pseudo-Amazon Prime all-in-one offering. That service will also increase in price. Individual plans will go from $16.95 to $19.95 monthly, family plans will go from $22.95 to $25.95, and Premier plans will now cost $37.95 instead of $32.95.
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Source: Ars Technica – Apple raises prices of Apple TV+ and other services
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On Friday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago released a research paper outlining “Nightshade,” a data poisoning technique aimed at disrupting the training process for AI models, reports MIT Technology Review and VentureBeat. The goal is to help visual artists and publishers protect their work from being used to train generative AI image synthesis models, such as Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion.
The open source “poison pill” tool (as the University of Chicago’s press department calls it) alters images in ways invisible to the human eye that can corrupt an AI model’s training process. Many image synthesis models, with notable exceptions of those from Adobe and Getty Images, largely use data sets of images scraped from the web without artist permission, which includes copyrighted material. (OpenAI licenses some of its DALL-E training images from Shutterstock.)
AI researchers’ reliance on commandeered data scraped from the web, which is seen as ethically fraught by many, has also been key to the recent explosion in generative AI capability. It took an entire Internet of images with annotations (through captions, alt text, and metadata) created by millions of people to create a data set with enough variety to create Stable Diffusion, for example. It would be impractical to hire people to annotate hundreds of millions of images from the standpoint of both cost and time. Those with access to existing large image databases (such as Getty and Shutterstock) are at an advantage when using licensed training data.
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Source: Ars Technica – University of Chicago researchers seek to “poison” AI art generators with Nightshade
Researchers have devised an attack that forces Apple’s Safari browser to divulge passwords, Gmail message content, and other secrets by exploiting a side channel vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices. From a report: iLeakage, as the academic researchers have named the attack, is practical and requires minimal resources to carry out. It does, however, require extensive reverse-engineering of Apple hardware and significant expertise in exploiting a class of vulnerability known as a side channel, which leaks secrets based on clues left in electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or other manifestations of a targeted system. The side channel in this case is speculative execution, a performance enhancement feature found in modern CPUs that has formed the basis of a wide corpus of attacks in recent years. The nearly endless stream of exploit variants has left chip makers — primarily Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD — scrambling to devise mitigations.
The researchers implement iLeakage as a website. When visited by a vulnerable macOS or iOS device, the website uses JavaScript to surreptitiously open a separate website of the attacker’s choice and recover site content rendered in a pop-up window. The researchers have successfully leveraged iLeakage to recover YouTube viewing history, the content of a Gmail inbox — when a target is logged in — and a password as it’s being autofilled by a credential manager. Once visited, the iLeakage site requires about five minutes to profile the target machine and, on average, roughly another 30 seconds to extract a 512-bit secret, such as a 64-character string.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Hackers Can Force iOS and macOS Browsers To Divulge Passwords
Data from a meteorite impact on Mars that was recorded by NASA’s InSight lander in 2021 is now helping to clear up some confusion about the red planet’s interior makeup. A pair of studies published today in the journal Nature separately determined that Mars’ iron-rich core is smaller and denser than previous measurements suggested, and it’s surrounded by molten rock.
The now defunct InSight lander, which arrived on Mars in November 2018, spent four years recording seismic waves produced by marsquakes so scientists could get a better understanding of what’s going on beneath the planet’s surface. But, estimates of the Martian core based on InSight’s initial readings from nearby quakes didn’t quite add up. At the time, scientists found the core’s radius to be somewhere between 1118 and 1149 miles — much larger than expected — and that it contained a perplexingly high amount of lighter elements complementing its heavy liquid iron.
The numbers for those light elements were “bordering on the impossible,” said Dongyang Huang of ETH Zurich, a co-author of one of the studies. “We have been wondering about this result ever since.” Then, a breakthrough came when a meteorite struck Mars in September 2021 all the way across the planet from where InSight is positioned, generating seismic waves that ETH Zurich doctoral student Cecilia Duran said “allowed us to illuminate the core.”
Based on those measurements, the two teams have found that Mars’ core more likely has a radius of about 1013-1060 miles. This, the ETH Zurich team notes, is about half the radius of Mars itself. A smaller core would also be more dense, meaning the previously inexplicable abundance of light elements may actually exist in smaller, more reasonable amounts. This is all surrounded by a layer of molten silicates about 90 miles thick, the teams found, which skewed the initial estimates. And, it’s unlike anything found in Earth’s interior.
According to Vedran Lekic from University of Maryland, a co-author of the second paper, the layer serves as somewhat of a “heating blanket” for the core that “concentrates radioactive elements.” Studying it could help scientists uncover answers about Mars’ formation and its lack of an active magnetic field.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mars-core-looks-bigger-than-it-is-because-its-wrapped-in-radioactive-magma-211359695.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Mars’ core looks bigger than it is because it’s wrapped in radioactive magma
Telegram restricted access to Hamas channels for Android users, as reported by CNBC Wednesday, less than two weeks after CEO Pavel Durov defended keeping them open. The messaging app with 700 million monthly active users reportedly blocked the official channel of Hamas and its military wing, hamas_com and al-Qassam…
Source: Gizmodo – Telegram Blocks Hamas Channels on Android After CEO Defended Keeping Them Open
A new X-Men fashion collection is here for anyone who feels like their true alma mater is Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The folks at Bioworld’s Heroes & Villains—the elevated fandom brand that takes in-universe inspired looks and brings them to your closet—are rolling out their merry Marvel holidays line…
Source: Gizmodo – A New X-Men Collection From Heroes & Villains Kicks Off the Fandom Holidays
It’s finally happening: X (formerly known as Twitter) has begun rolling out yet another feature nobody asked for. Now, users will have the option to call each other via audio and video calls on the platform. This doesn’t come as a total surprise, as CEO Linda Yaccarino previously confirmed that video chat would be coming to the social media site back in August. It’s just the latest step in X’s evolution to becoming the “everything” app overlord owner Elon Musk wants it to be.
After opening X, some users are greeted with a prompt announcing “Audio and Video calls are here!” The prompt also included instructions on how to review who can call or make other changes to how the feature works. These options can be found in the settings section of your Direct Messages. If you have no interest in allowing people on X to call you, you can go to your DMs and look for the Settings menu, which looks like a tiny gear. From there, you can disable the calling option. However, if you do want to keep it on, you can choose to allow calls from verified users, people in your address book or just people you follow.
X doesn’t have the best track record of creating a safe space, especially for minority communities, so it’s not hard to see why many people would prefer to opt out of using this feature. Additionally, not everyone will receive the prompt about the new calling feature, which is enabled by default. It’s probably smart to see if it’s already available on your account then you decide whether you’d like to keep it on.
Perhaps the folks at X will rethink this one, and maybe we can trade this feature to save Circles. But if this is a feature that must exist, it would have been a better move to allow users to turn it on themselves, instead of having it on automatically. Some users may not find out about the feature until a random troll decides to call and antagonize them.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-is-rolling-out-audio-and-video-calling-feature-nobody-asked-for-205836943.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – X is rolling out audio and video calling feature nobody asked for
Apple released its iOS 17.1 Wednesday, which introduces new features for AirDrop, Apple Music, and others. The update also fixed radiation issues for the iPhone 12 brought up by French regulators.
Source: Gizmodo – Apple Music, AirDrop Revamped in iOS 17.1 Update
Apple is looking to completely overhaul its AirPods lineup, according to a report from Bloomberg. The revamped AirPods and AirPods Max will launch in 2024, and the Pro model will see changes in 2025. Said changes include tweaks to their design, charging case, and audio quality.
Source: Gizmodo – Apple to Revamp AirPods Lineup in 2024 and 2025
