An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The FBI is warning that the BADBOX 2.0 malware campaign has infected over 1 million home Internet-connected devices, converting consumer electronics into residential proxies that are used for malicious activity. The BADBOX botnet is commonly found on Chinese Android-based smart TVs, streaming boxes, projectors, tablets, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. “The BADBOX 2.0 botnet consists of millions of infected devices and maintains numerous backdoors to proxy services that cyber criminal actors exploit by either selling or providing free access to compromised home networks to be used for various criminal activity,” warns the FBI.

These devices come preloaded with the BADBOX 2.0 malware botnet or become infected after installing firmware updates and through malicious Android applications that sneak onto Google Play and third-party app stores. “Cyber criminals gain unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the product with malicious software prior to the users purchase or infecting the device as it downloads required applications that contain backdoors, usually during the set-up process,” explains the FBI. “Once these compromised IoT devices are connected to home networks, the infected devices are susceptible to becoming part of the BADBOX 2.0 botnet and residential proxy services4 known to be used for malicious activity.”

Once infected, the devices connect to the attacker’s command and control (C2) servers, where they receive commands to execute on the compromised devices, such as [routing malicious traffic through residential IPs to obscure cybercriminal activity, performing background ad fraud to generate revenue, and launching credential-stuffing attacks using stolen login data]. Over the years, the malware botnet continued expanding until 2024, when Germany’s cybersecurity agency disrupted the botnet in the country by sinkholing the communication between infected devices and the attacker’s infrastructure, effectively rendering the malware useless. However, that did not stop the threat actors, with researchers saying they found the malware installed on 192,000 devices a week later. Even more concerning, the malware was found on more mainstream brands, like Yandex TVs and Hisense smartphones. Unfortunately, despite the previous disruption, the botnet continued to grow, with HUMAN’s Satori Threat Intelligence stating that over 1 million consumer devices had become infected by March 2025. This new larger botnet is now being called BADBOX 2.0 to indicate a new tracking of the malware campaign. “This scheme impacted more than 1 million consumer devices. Devices connected to the BADBOX 2.0 operation included lower-price-point, ‘off brand,’ uncertified tablets, connected TV (CTV) boxes, digital projectors, and more,” explains HUMAN.

“The infected devices are Android Open Source Project devices, not Android TV OS devices or Play Protect certified Android devices. All of these devices are manufactured in mainland China and shipped globally; indeed, HUMAN observed BADBOX 2.0-associated traffic from 222 countries and territories worldwide.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is launching with a handful of new games, but for many of the people getting one this week, the main thing to play on it is software made for the original Switch.

We’ve known for months that the Switch 2 would maintain backward compatibility with the vast majority of Switch games, but one major question was whether the Switch 2’s improved hardware would benefit older Switch games in some way. Especially in recent years, first- and third-party Switch games have struggled with the original system’s aging Nvidia chipset, which was already a bit dated when the system came out in 2017.

After a day or so of testing various Switch games on the Switch 2, we can report firsthand that Switch games can look dramatically better on the new system. For games that Nintendo has taken the trouble to update—those with Switch 2 upgrade packs and those with free updates—players can expect higher resolutions, better frame rates, less texture and character pop-in, and smoother animations all around. Even games that haven’t been updated for the Switch 2 can run a bit more consistently on the new systems, though games without Switch 2-specific updates don’t improve as much as games with updates.

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Your smartphone has ruined your life. You’re hopelessly addicted to the empty dopamine drip doled out by apps and algorithms that know you better than you know yourself. You recognize this. But also, you’re no hermit: You need to be able to keep in touch with friends and family with phone calls and text messages, just minus the baggage that comes with a modern iPhone or Android. A dumbphone might seem to be the answer to all your problems, but it’s probably not.

I am often inundated with articles and videos trying to convince me that switching to a dumbphone is the key to living a balance, fruitful life—so much so that I really considered getting one. I still might, someday, but the more I’ve thought about the matter, I’ve come to the conclusion that a dumbphone solves a few problems while introducing many more.

Switching might free me from endlessly scrolling my social media accounts, but I’d lose access to a high-quality camera that’s always with me. I wouldn’t need to deal with notifications from apps that only care about maximizing my screen time, but I’d lose my personal GPS. And I’d still be able to call and text, but I’d miss tools like iMessage and FaceTime that are critical for staying connected. I’m not ready to give all that up.

It’s true that the dumbphone market is adapting take care of some of these weaknesses, offering devices with features like cameras, navigation apps, note-taking apps, and more. But why bother dropping a considerable amount of money for a device like that when I already have a device I can make adjustments to instead?

So, that’s what I did—I took my very smart, very addicting) iPhone, and made it dumber. Here are the steps I took, plus some extra tips you can try yourself (while the instructions may vary, these tips will apply to Android phones as well):

I deleted as many apps as possible

Apps accumulate on my phone like cables in a junk drawer. I really only use a handful of them, but after testing apps on my phone for years, they’ve really added up. Making my phone dumber provided an opportunity to go through and clean house.

My advice is to be as brutal as possible here. The first app on my list, AdGuard, stays, because I need an ad blocker to make the modern internet usable. (Yes, I want a working internet on my dumb iPhone, and one that blocks predatory apps to boot.) But Amazon? Bye. Bluesky? Adios. ChatGPT? Lol.

The priority is to eliminate apps that distract you or suck you in for hours of meaningless activity. Social media is a prime target, but even that gets dicey. Can you really ditch all social media on your smartphone? Some can, but others will find that extreme, or borderline impossible. (More on that in the next section.)

Here’s a helpful tip: If you can access a social media site in a web browser, do that instead, and delete the app. Don’t keep Facebook’s predatory app on your iPhone, and if you must visit Meta’s flagship platform, do so on Safari. That way, yu’ll have better privacy protections against Meta’s tracking, and you’ll have a worse experience, since the Facebook web app is terrible. Good—that means you’ll spend less time on it.

I set Screen Time limits for any apps I can’t delete

As much as it wastes my time, I can’t delete Instagram. While 90% of my use involves mindless scrolling, the other 10% is legitimate socializing that I would very much miss should I ditch the app entirely. There are other apps on my iPhone I feel similarly about, and it’s been a daily battle to use them responsibly.

If you have a similar crop of apps you can’t part with, I highly recommend setting up Screen Time limits. It’s easy to do, and lets you choose the amount of time you can use an app each day. For example, I have Instagram set to 35 minutes of daily use, but I could choose to give myself more time on weekends, or any day that I feel like. You can also enable this feature for websites, so if you are accessing Instagram via Safari instead of the app, you can set limits for there too.

With this App Limit set, Instagram will run like it usually does until that 35th minute. Once the time limit is up, the app is replaced by a blank screen, letting me know that I’ve used my time allotment for the day. Hopefully, I then decide to do something else with my time (maybe put away my phone?), but I don’t have to: The feature gives you the option to extend the time limit by one or 15 minutes, or disable it for the rest of the day. It’s not the best solution for anyone lacking willpower, and I’ve definitely been guilty of extending my time limits again and again. But more often than not, the lock-out screen gets me to leave Instagram for the day. If I only burn 35 minutes watching reels instead of two hours, that’s fine by me.

You can get started setting Scrren Time limits via Settings > Screen Time > App Limits.

I disabled notifications for everything

Smartphone notifications are out of control. These alerts should tell me whether I have a new message or when some critical update needs my attention. If you use system notifications to let me know your app has an amazing sale going on, I’m instantly deleting it.

But even when notifications are appropriate, they’re too much. Likely part of what you hate about your iPhone are the constant distractions and disruptions from system alerts—not only are the unnecessary ones annoying, the legitimate ones steal your attention too. Before you know it, you’ve wasted another hour scrolling on Instagram just because someone replied to a message with a thumbs-up.

You don’t need a dumbphone to eliminate these distractions, though: just disable as many notifications as you can. Any time you download a new app—which you should do sparingly on your new dumb iPhone—don’t allow any notifications. For apps already on your phone, go to Settings > Notifications and disable notifications en masse. You can also attack them as the notifications come in: Swipe left on alerts in Notification Center, tap “Options,” then choose “Turn Off All Notifications.”

This too is challenging. I keep notifications on for my chat apps, since I don’t want to miss important (or funny) updates from friends and family. I did manage to disable Instagram notifications, which has its pros and cons. I’m not sucked into each and every alert I get, but I frequently miss DMs from friends. There are always tradeoffs when prioritizing your time.

I made my Lock Screen uninviting

Apple has made it easy to make your Lock Screen look awesome. The consequence, however, is that your iPhone looks a bit too inviting each time you pick it up. There’s an easy solution to that: Make it look boring AF.

I set my Lock Screen wallpaper to black, so no graphics or colors catch my eye. I allowed myself to add some Weather widgets, including current conditions, UV index, and sunrise/sunset, as I figure having the weather on my Lock Screen means one less reason to unlock my iPhone. (I used to have a News widget there instead, by it often caused me to open my phone in reaction to crazy headlines, which are in no short supply in 2025.)

My Home Screen is dead simple too

Following suit, my Home Screen is also as bland as possible. I use the same black wallpaper, and I’ve abstained from widgets. As much as I like the aesthetics of the calendar and clock widgets, I don’t want to spend any more time on this page than I have to.

As such, I’ve strategically placed the apps I use most (and which, notably, aren’t brain rot traps) on the Home Screen. I could keep this page totally blank, but why not keep the boring, useful apps at easy reach? That way, my brain doesn’t have extra time to think, “Wait, maybe we should just open YouTube instead” as I swipe to the App Library.

In my dock live my Phone, Messages, Camera, and Music apps. In two layers above it live Notes, Reminders, Maps, and Libby. (My hope is that keeping Libby in sight at all time will encourage me to read more, rather than scroll, scroll, scroll.) For all other apps, I rely on the App Library, which is only a swipe away.

You can really get creative with this. Through different apps or hacks, you can emulate the experience of dumbphones like the Light Phone, which simply shows you a list of app titles to choose from instead of wowing you with graphics and animations. Dumb Phone is one such app: After installing it, you select a group of apps you want to see on your Home Screen, and Dumb Phone lists those in a widget one-by-one. Change the color of your wallpaper to match the widget, adjust a few settings, and presto—you own faux Light Phone.

This isn’t really my cup of tea—I still enjoy a traditional home screen/app icons experience—but if you think you’d prefer the look, give it a try. (Just make sure to hit the “X” in the top right corner during setup if you don’t want to pay for the subscription.)

Go grayscale, baby

If there’s one tip to take away from this piece, it’s that you should turn your phone to grayscale. This color filter makes everything on your smartphone, well, gray, wiping away all of the bright, fun colors that make it engaging and welcoming to use.

This has been common advice for combating smartphone addiction for years, and while it’s certainly not a cure-all, it does really help. Scrolling on Instagram isn’t nearly as addicting when everything looks washed out, and it certainly doesn’t make me want to spend time watching shows or movies on my phone. If you’ve eliminated notifications entirely, you won’t notice the benefit in how a gray notification badge is far less intriguing than its bright red counterpart—but then, you’ve won that battle already.

As always, a caveat: I like my dumb iPhone, but I don’t want to punish myself. If someone sends me a video, or if I see something cool online that deserves to be seen in color, I’ll switch off grayscale temporarily. Does that defeat the purpose of my dumb iPhone? Possibly, but I’m making my own rules here.

Set a greyscale shortcut

The best compromise I’ve found is to assign the grayscale filter to the power button’s accessibility shortcut. You’ll find this under Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut. Choose “Color Filters,” then triple-click the power button any time you want to toggle grayscale on or off.

Other ways to make your iPhone dumber and less fun to use

The above is what I’ve done to make my iPhone less addicting, and, overall, it’s helped. I’m not sure if it’s the changes themselves, or how the changes constantly remind me to use my device with intention, but, either way, I’ve been reducing my screen time, and making what remains more productive. That’s a win-win.

There are other ways you can make your iPhone less appealing to use, and, thus, reclaim your screen time as well. Here are some suggestions:

• Use a matte screen protector: These screen protectors cut down on glare, but also emulate the experience of an e-ink screen. That might help any other Libby users out there who want a more soothing reading experience.

• Disable Face ID/Touch ID: Remember the days of punching in your passcode each and every time you unlocked your iPhone? It sucked. Force yourself to do it again. Knowing that you’ll need to enter your passcode any time you want to check your phone might break the habit of mindless pickups. (Better yet, set an alphanumeric password. That’ll show you.)

• Keep Low Battery Mode on at all times: If you have a Pro iPhone, your display has a buttery-smooth 120Hz refresh rate. Turning on Low Power Mode drops it down to 60Hz, which, while standard for many iPhone users, looks choppy after you’re used to 120Hz.

Will I keep my iPhone dumb forever?

Am I committed to my new dumber iPhone lifestyle? I’m not sure. If I could wager a guess, I think what’s going to happen is this: I’ll eventually switch off grayscale, add a nice Lock Screen and a well-curated Home Screen, but keep my minimal notifications and limited app selection. I like the idea of maintaining a “normal” iPhone experience, but without many of the things that make it a distraction—even if that means ditching some of the more extreme dumbphone-like measures.

Knowing that, I’m thus far happy I did not spend hundreds of dollars on a dedicated dumbphone. Something tells me that I would be itching to switch back to my iPhone in a heartbeat.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wants to enforce a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by making states ineligible for broadband funding if they try to impose any limits on development of artificial intelligence.

The House previously approved a budget bill that contained a fairly straightforward provision to ban state AI regulation for 10 years. Cruz, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, yesterday released budget reconciliation text that takes a different approach to preventing states from regulating AI.

Cruz’s approach may be an attempt to get around the Senate’s Byrd Rule, which limits the inclusion of “extraneous matter” in budget reconciliation legislation. He wants to make it impossible for states to receive money from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program if they try to regulate AI. Cruz released a summary that says his bill “forbids states collecting BEAD money from strangling AI deployment with EU-style regulation.”

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President Donald Trump plans to extend the pause on enforcing the TikTok ban once again, The Wall Street Journal reports. Trump previously extended the pause on April 4 to give TikTok, its potential US buyers and the Chinese government more time to reach an agreement, but the deal has made little progress since then.

The current pause on enforcement is supposed to end on June 19. Given the state of the negotiations between the US and China, the odds of a deal being reached before then seem highly unlikely. The issue hasn’t been helped by the fluctuating tariffs the Trump administration has attempted to levy on goods manufactured outside of the US, which started on April 2 and at one point included a 125 percent tariff on everything shipped from China.

The two countries are expected to restart trade negotiations at some point in the near-future, according to The New York Times, but there’s been no public mention of a TikTok sale being a key part of the discussion. A number of investors are still looking to own a piece of the US version of the app, including the software company Oracle, which has a pre-existing relationship with TikTok as a cloud provider.

The TikTok ban went into effect on January 19. TikTok tried to appeal the ban beforehand, but the Supreme Court ultimately decided to uphold it, prompting Trump’s first executive order pausing the ban on January 20, 2025.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/trump-reportedly-plans-to-extend-the-pause-on-the-tiktok-ban-yet-again-200408397.html?src=rss

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Garmin’s Forerunner 265 was the first modern running watch I spent a lot of time with—you can read my review here about how it drew me back into tracking all my run data, for better or for worse. But there are some things that, in hindsight, I wish I had understood better at the start of the journey. Here are the biggest ones that you might like to know about.

Why it has so many dang buttons

The 265 (and other recent Forerunners) seem to have too many buttons. What do we need five of them for, when we’re doing most things from the touchscreen anyway? Garmin’s Vivoactive line gets away with having just two, as do the Coros Pace 3 and Pace Pro, which have all the same main functions as the 265. 

But as soon as I saw the previous generation—the Forerunner 255—I understood. The 265 stands on the shoulders of giants, as the Forerunner 2xx series has long been beloved by runners—before the 265 was the 255, and before that the 245, and before that the 235. (Remember when Strava reported that the 235, then an eight-year-old watch, was the most popular running watch worldwide?) 

The 255 and its ancestors did not have a touchscreen, nor did they have AMOLED displays. They used a “light” button in the top left to turn on the backlight so you could read the screen in the dark, and two buttons below that (“up” and “down”) to scroll through menu options. And once you have five buttons, why not use them for more? Long pressing the light button now brings up a shortcut menu, long pressing the “up” button brings up settings, and long pressing the bottom button can bring up your music controls. 

Once you know what the buttons are used for—or assign your own shortcuts, which you can do in settings—they’re pretty handy.

Why it thinks I need so much “recovery” time

After each workout, the 265 (and many other Garmins) will tell you how many hours of recovery it thinks you need. That makes it sound like you should rest until time is up—so if I have a 24-hour recovery time, I should wait until tomorrow for my next workout. Makes sense, since I was probably going to do that anyway. 

But sometimes, after a hard effort, the watch will give me a recovery time of, say, 78 hours. I’m really not supposed to run again for that long? Not even an easy run? 

That’s not what it means, of course. As Garmin explains, recovery time is the amount of time until you will maximally benefit from another similarly hard workout. So if I just did an hour’s worth of brutal track intervals, I won’t get much benefit from doing the same workout tomorrow. I could go ahead and do an easy run tomorrow, and schedule another track session a few days from now. 

In other words, the “recovery” time is just how long you should wait before doing another very hard workout, not until you can work out at all.

The daily suggested workouts should only be taken as suggestions

Daily suggested workouts are a great feature of the Forerunner 265 and several other Garmin watches. DSW, as I call them, live on the watch and can’t be accessed directly from the Garmin Connect app—at least in theory. 

There is a “Garmin coach” feature that you can set up in the app, which works the same way as the DSW, giving you a workout each day based on what it thinks you need. The factors that go into this include how recovered you are, and what races you have on your calendar. 

I love the DSW when I’m not sure what run to do on a given day, or if I know I want a certain type of workout but don’t want to have to design it myself. But I don’t follow them slavishly, for two reasons. 

One is that you can’t plan for DSW. You might see that tomorrow is a seven-mile long run, but then you wake up to find it’s been switched to a two-mile recovery run because you didn’t sleep so well. On these days, just go run the seven-miler anyway, and don’t worry about what Garmin says. Or preview the upcoming workouts (under Training > Workouts > Daily Suggestions) and pick a future workout that speaks to you. 

The other problem is that, without long-term planning, you don’t know if the DSW will actually get you ready for the race you’re training for. Garmin forums and subreddits are full of people who are getting unsettlingly close to their marathon date and haven’t yet had any seriously long runs. You need mileage to be ready for a long-distance race, both in terms of your long runs and your total weekly workload. 

If you want to use Garmin workouts to train you for a long race, do yourself a favor and grab a tried-and-true marathon plan, like one of these from Hal Higdon. Make sure you get in a similar amount of mileage each week, whether your Garmin tells you to or not.

You can download some pretty sweet watch faces

I’m not sure why I spent so long using the stock watch faces, even though I found them kind of boring. The 265 doesn’t have as many color options for them as later watches like the 570, so there are only a handful of designs and a handful of (mostly neon) color options to choose from. 

But if you’re willing to venture into the Connect IQ store, you have more options. It feels a bit sketchy if you’re purchasing a watch face—payment isn’t handled through the platform directly—but there are some real gems in there, including some that are made by Garmin and some that are free or have a free version. Around Christmas time I went for this cheesy wreath, and my everyday favorite is Big Easy with the blue theme. It’s the one you can see in the photo above, and unlike most third-party faces, it can show all my favorite complications, including weekly running mileage, which I have at the bottom.

Chinese student enrollment at American universities has dropped to 277,000 in the 2023-24 academic year, down from a peak of 372,000 in 2019-20, according to data in a new report examining shifting global education patterns. The decline accelerated following the State Department’s May 28th announcement of an “aggressive” campaign to revoke visas for Chinese students in “critical fields” of science and engineering, as well as those with unspecified Communist Party “connections.”

The trend reflects broader economic and geopolitical pressures beyond visa restrictions. Chinese families increasingly view American education as too expensive amid China’s economic downturn and property market decline, while domestic employers have grown suspicious of foreign-educated graduates. Meanwhile, Chinese students are choosing alternatives including Britain, which hosted nearly 150,000 Chinese students in 2023-24, and regional destinations like Japan, where Chinese enrollment increased to 115,000 in 2023 from under 100,000 in 2019.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Gemini’s settings, you’ll find an option called “Saved Info.” Google describes this as a place where you can store information “about your life and preferences” to get better results from its chatbot. I’m here to tell you that might be the least useful way to use this feature. It’s much more powerful as a way to build your own shortcuts right into Gemini.

You can find this feature by selecting Settings in your Gemini app or on the web. Click “Saved info” and you’ll find an empty page and an Add button. Click this and you’ll be given an empty box, where you can write a sort of pre-prompt instruction. Each block seems to have a limit of around 1,500 characters, though there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many of these blocks you can store.

Google shows examples that include simple instructions, like “I prefer short, concise responses” or only recommending vegetarian recipes. But this space is a lot more powerful than that.

How Gemini uses the “Saved Info” prompts

I first noticed this when I was trying out Gemini’s Canvas for drafting documents. Typing (or saying) “Convert all the subheadings in this document to H2s” is often more cumbersome than just doing it myself. But with Saved Info, I can write a variation of that instruction that tells Gemini to carry out that action if I simply type “H2s”. 

This works because every chat you start with Gemini will reference anything stored here as a set of universal context blocks. Before processing whatever prompt you give, Gemini will read your Saved Info first and treat it as instructions that come before anything in the conversation itself.

Using “Saved Info” to tweak document templates

This trick also works for more complex instructions. For example, let’s imagine you need to write a lot of cover letters and want to tailor them to each job you’re applying to. You could add this block to Saved Info:

“If a prompt begins with ‘cover letter’, create a draft of a cover letter in the Canvas. A cover letter should be no more than 3 paragraphs. If the prompt includes a person’s name, address the letter to that person. If the prompt includes ‘skills:’ then incorporate the skills mentioned after that into the context of the letter. Sign all cover letters as [YOUR NAME].”

With these instructions, you could invoke Gemini to create a draft of a cover letter for you with just a few words. You could even expand this further by providing an entire cover letter template (as long as it’s under the character limit) and instruct Gemini to only make simple changes based on the criteria you provide.

One of the biggest problems with using generative AI to write for you is that it can be a bit dicey for anything other than first drafts. And if you have to babysit it every step of the way, you might as well write the whole thing yourself. This approach, however, gives you more leeway to write for yourself, while still automating the more tedious aspects of tweaking a document for every person you’re sending it to.

Customize your smart home instructions

Another handy example, if you have smart home gadgets connected through Google Home, is that you can turn simple commands into more complex ones. For example, when I sit down to watch a movie, I usually want to turn off the overhead lights, but turn on the LED backlight strip behind my TV. It’s not a huge pain to say “Turn off overhead living room lights and turn on TV backlight” but it’s a bit of a mouthful.

Since Gemini is the default smart assistant on my phone, though, I can add the following prompt to “Saved Info”:

If a prompt consists solely of ‘movie time,’ then turn off overhead lights in the living room, and turn on TV backlight.

Now, I pull up Gemini on my phone, say “movie time” and it translates the instructions and passes it to Google Home. Note: This requires enabling and connecting the Google Home Gemini app (which is, confusingly, not the Google Home mobile app, but an extension inside Gemini itself).

Automate commands in plain English, no code required

We’re pretty big fans of automating tasks, especially with services like IFTTT, but the downside is that sometimes they can get a bit tech-y or complicated. What’s so appealing about this particular trick with Gemini is that you can write instructions in plain, human-readable language.

One of the most interesting use cases I tried was the following prompt:

If a prompt consists of ‘grammar check,’ then read the document at the included link. Check it for grammatical errors. Then, in the Gemini Canvas, create a draft of an email with a brief summary of any issues found. Keep the summary brief.

While this doesn’t work 100% of the time on all links (mainly due to how Gemini filters external text for security concerns), I didn’t need to do any additional coding or messing with settings to make this command work. I wrote two words, “grammar check,” and pasted a link to one of my recent articles. The result was a report that said there were no grammatical issues. (Thanks, Lifehacker editors.)

Be careful with how much you leave in Gemini’s hands

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Gemini successfully parsing instructions is not the same as successfully carrying out instructions. In the grammar check example above, I was impressed that Gemini understood how to reference longer instructions from shorthand, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would successfully catch every grammatical issue.

The Saved Info trick is incredibly handy for automating repetitive prompts, but if there’s a task you wouldn’t trust Gemini with before, this won’t make it more trustworthy now. Maybe you don’t trust Gemini to catch grammatical errors to your standards, but think it’s fine for summarizing the contents of a link. With a couple simple tweaks, you can adjust the above command to that task, no coding required.

Millions of low-cost devices for media streaming, in-vehicle entertainment, and video projection are infected with malware that turns consumer networks into platforms for distributing malware, concealing nefarious communications, and performing other illicit activities, the FBI has warned.

The malware infecting these devices, known as BadBox, is based on Triada, a malware strain discovered in 2016 by Kaspersky Lab, which called it “one of the most advanced mobile Trojans” the security firm’s analysts had ever encountered. It employed an impressive kit of tools, including rooting exploits that bypassed security protections built into Android and functions for modifying the Android OS’s all-powerful Zygote process. Google eventually updated Android to block the methods Triada used to infect devices.

The threat remains

A year later, Triada returned, only this time, devices came pre-infected before they reached consumers’ hands. In 2019, Google confirmed that the supply-chain attack affected thousands of devices and that the company had once again taken measures to thwart it.

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