“A bipartisan proposal in both the House and Senate would sharply limit the ability to seize emails without notice to the owner,” writes longtime Slashdot reader hawk. “It places a six-month limit on the length of gag orders in warrants.” The Hill reports: The Government Surveillance Transparency Act, sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers from both chambers, puts limitations on gag orders that seek to block tech companies from altering users whose data has been seized. It targets a practice brought into the spotlight after journalists from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post all had their records seized by the Department of Justice (DOJ). The bill requires law enforcement agencies to notify surveillance subjects that their email, location and web browsing data has been seized, aligning with current practices for phone records and bank data.

“When the government obtains someone’s emails or other digital information, users have a right to know,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a release. “Our bill ensures that no investigation will be compromised, but makes sure the government can’t hide surveillance forever by misusing sealing and gag orders to prevent the American people from understanding the enormous scale of government surveillance, as well as ensuring that the targets eventually learn their personal information has been searched.”

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Source: Slashdot – Bipartisan Proposed Legislation To Curtail Secretive Email Seizure

The price of Cashio’s dollar-pegged stablecoin CASH has fallen from $1 to $0.00005 after an “infinite mint glitch” enabled attackers to mint tokens without providing collateral. Decrypt reports: Cashio developer 0xGhostChain took to Twitter to warn people “not to mint any CASH,” adding that the team “are investigating the issue and we believe we have found the root cause. Please withdraw your funds from pools. We will publish a postmortem ASAP.” According to DeFiLlama, roughly $28 million of value has been drained from Cashio’s protocol due to the exploit. Still, Samczsun, a research partner at Web3 investment firm Paradigm, shared a bleaker picture on Twitter today. The researcher wrote: “Another day, another Solana fake account exploit. This time, Cashio App lost around $50M (based on a quick skim). How did this happen?” The project has not responded to Decrypt to confirm the scale of the attack.

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Source: Slashdot – Solana Stablecoin Project Cashio Plummets To Zero After Multi-Million Dollar Hack

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Cybersecurity researchers investigating a string of hacks against technology companies, including Microsoft and Nvidia, have traced the attacks to a 16-year-old living at his mother’s house near Oxford, England. Four researchers investigating the hacking group Lapsus$, on behalf of companies that were attacked, said they believe the teenager is the mastermind.

The teen is suspected by the researchers of being behind some of the major hacks carried out by Lapsus$, but they haven’t been able to conclusively tie him to every hack Lapsus$ has claimed. The cyber researchers have used forensic evidence from the hacks as well as publicly available information to tie the teen to the hacking group. Bloomberg News isn’t naming the alleged hacker, who goes by the online alias “White” and “breachbase,” who is a minor and hasn’t been publicly accused by law enforcement of any wrongdoing. Another member of Lapsus$ is suspected to be a teenager residing in Brazil, according to the investigators. One person investigating the group said security researchers have identified seven unique accounts associated with the hacking group, indicating that there are likely others involved in the group’s operations. The teen is so skilled at hacking — and so fast– that researchers initially thought the activity they were observing was automated, another person involved in the research said. […]

The teenage hacker in England has had his personal information, including his address and information about his parents, posted online by rival hackers. At an address listed in the leaked materials as the teen’s home near Oxford, a woman who identified herself as the boy’s mother talked with a Bloomberg reporter for about 10 minutes through a doorbell intercom system. The home is a modest terraced house on a quiet side street about five miles from Oxford University. The woman said she was unaware of the allegations against her son or the leaked materials. She said she was disturbed that videos and pictures of her home and the teen’s father’s home were included. The mother said the teenager lives at that address and had been harassed by others, but many of the other leaked details couldn’t be confirmed. She declined to discuss her son in any way or make him available for an interview, and said the issue was a matter for law enforcement and that she was contacting the police.

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Source: Slashdot – Teen Suspected By Cyber Researchers of Being Lapsus$ Mastermind

Arizona residents can now add their drivers’ license, or state ID, to Apple Wallet, which lets them use an iPhone, or Apple Watch, to check in at selected TSA checkpoints. Apple Insider reports: As Apple continues to discuss bringing digital drivers’ licenses to US states, Arizona has become the first to take the system live for its residents. “We’re thrilled to bring the first driver’s license and state ID in Wallet to Arizona today,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, in a statement, ” and provide Arizonans with an easy, secure, and private way to present their ID when traveling, through just a tap of their iPhone or Apple Watch.” “We look forward to working with many more states and the TSA to bring IDs in Wallet to users across the US,” she continued.

At launch, Wallet can be only be used at an unspecified number of TSA security checkpoints at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Apple also announced that the states of Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio, and the territory of Puerto Rico plan to bring the technology to its residents. This is in addition to seven other states that Apple previously announced.

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Source: Slashdot – Arizona Is First State To Launch Drivers’ License In Apple Wallet

Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. From the report: Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.

Although GIFs are synonymous with animated internet memes these days, that wasn’t the reason Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color at a time when internet speeds were glacial compared to what they are today. “He invented GIF all by himself — he actually did that at home and brought it into work after he perfected it,” Kathaleen said. “He would figure out everything privately in his head and then go to town programming it on the computer.”

If you want to go more in-depth into the history of the GIF, the Daily Dot has a good explainer of how the format became an internet phenomenon. In 2013, Wilhite weighed in on the long-standing debate about the correct pronunciation of the image format. He told The New York Times, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

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Source: Slashdot – Stephen Wilhite, Creator of the GIF, Has Died

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Instagram will let users switch their feeds so they view the most recent posts first, relenting after years of complaints about the photo app’s current ranking that chooses the order of posts based on a user’s behavior. Meta’s Instagram is introducing two options for its feed, “Following” and “Favorites,” according to a blog post Wednesday. Following works the way Instagram did up until 2016: it shows posts in reverse-chronological order. Favorites allows further curation, letting users list up to 50 accounts they wish to see higher in their feeds. “We want people to feel good about the time they spend on Instagram, by giving them ways to shape their experience into what’s best for them,” the company said in a statement Wednesday.

Instagram introduced an algorithmic ordering for its feed because professional users, such as influencers and brands, had started posting so frequently and strategically that they would drown out content from regular users, people familiar with the matter have said. Regular users started to think their friends weren’t using Instagram. The 2016 algorithm was trained so that it showed people whatever content would inspire them to post more, the people said. While the change did help increase visibility for content from users’ friends and family, it drew backlash from professionals, whose follower growth started slowing, as well as regular users, who didn’t like the decrease in control. Instagram says people are more satisfied with the current algorithm’s ordering, “so we are not defaulting people into a chronological feed experience,â Instagram said in its statement. “To use Favorites and Following, tap on Instagram in the top left corner of your home page to choose what you see.”

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Source: Slashdot – Instagram To Allow Users To See Most Recent Posts First

In three weeks of fighting, Russia has lost at least 270 tanks, according to the open source weapons tracking site Oryx — almost 10% of its estimated active force. From a report: Ukraine’s defense is proving so effective, in fact, that many analysts are attributing the failure of Russia’s offense not only to its commanders, or to its tanks, but to the very idea of the tank itself, as a front-line weapon platform that can gain ground. The emerging evidence of tanks’ tactical weakness is “striking,” as one expert put it, and it has opened up a debate about whether tanks might be on their way to joining chariots and mounted cavalry in the boneyard of military history.

Cheap, low-flying drones are striking tanks from above. Soldiers are using charred suburban landscape to ambush tanks with a new generation of fire-and-forget weapons that makes tank-killing unsettlingly simple, even in the hands of a volunteer. “An infantry that is determined to fight is now super-empowered by having things like a huge number of point-and-shoot disposable anti-tank rockets,” Edward Luttwak, a military strategist who consults for governments around the world, told Insider. Tanks have ruled land warfare for more than 80 years. It’s their job to punch through enemy positions so infantry can flood in and hold the newly gained ground. Tanks have long been susceptible to soldier-carried weapons like bazookas and recoilless rifles, as well as improvised explosives such as the anti-tank “sticky bombs” seen in the film “Saving Private Ryan.”

But looking at the ineffectiveness of Russian tank attacks in Ukraine, one can see how technology — particularly advances in high explosives and guided missiles — is further tipping the odds to favor anti-tank defenders, to the point where tanks could arguably be rendered obsolete. One defense analyst who spoke with Insider compared the role of tanks to that of the Swiss pikemen, Renaissance-era fighters armed with pikes and halberd who once were an army’s frontlines. This vanguard role, held then by foot soldiers and now by tanks, will likely shift to drones, robotic vehicles, and long-range strike systems. “Tanks are going to move, over time, into more of a mopping-up role,” said Paul Scharre, a former US Army Ranger and a director of studies at the Center for a New American Security.

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Source: Slashdot – Ukraine Has Destroyed Nearly 10% of Russia’s Tanks, Making Experts Ask: Are Tanks Over?