ReHacked vol. 274: S. Korean telecom company attacks torrent users with malware, Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work and more
Korean news organization JTBC recently discovered through an in-depth investigation that KT Corporation, one of the largest telecom providers in South Korea, deliberately infected over 600,000 users with malware over their use of torrent services.
The issue began in May 2020 when Webhard, a Korean cloud service provider, was inundated with user complaints of unexplained errors. The company discovered that its Grid Program, which relies on BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing, had been compromised. An anonymous representative of Webhard said, “There is a suspicion of a hacking attack on our grid service. It’s very malicious, interfering with it.”
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He says the trouble with generative AI is that, while it’s perfectly capable of performing a certain set of tasks, it can’t do everything a human can, and humans tend to overestimate its capabilities. “When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that,” Brooks said. “And they’re usually very over-optimistic, and that’s because they use a model of a person’s performance on a task.”
OpenDNS Suspends Service in France Due to Canal+ Piracy Blocking Order * TorrentFreak #copyrights
This month, a French court went along with a demand from Canal+ to tighten up previously obtained anti-piracy measures. The court ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to poison their DNS records to prevent these third-party services acting as workarounds for existing pirate site blockades. Cisco's response became evident on Friday when it withdrew its OpenDNS service from the entire country.
Google Arts & Culture #art #rabbithole
Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn | CBC News #economy #society
A consumer group is urgently calling on the federal government to follow other jurisdictions in the U.S and Europe and bring in legislation to stem the slide toward a cashless society.
Only 10 per cent of transactions in Canada today are done using cash, according to Carlos Castiblanco, an economist with the group Option Consommateurs.
How Coffee Helped the Union Caffeinate Their Way to Victory in the Civil War | Smithsonian #history
Coffee replaced tea as the U.S. drink of choice around the time of the American Revolution. From the moment patriots tossed chests of tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773, drinking coffee—and boycotting tea—became a sure sign of loyalty to the cause of independence. Pretty soon, the country was obsessed: By the 1830s, coffee consumption was outstripping tea by five to one. In 1832, Andrew Jackson replaced army alcohol rations with coffee, in hopes of energizing the troops and reducing instances of drunken insubordination. By 1860, the U.S. was importing six pounds of the stuff each year for every man, woman and child in the country—and at the outbreak of the Civil War, Americans were drinking twice as much coffee as they were 30 years before.
But the war introduced a problem for the Union’s coffee drinkers. The sudden demand for more coffee as a crucial army provision combined with the blockade of the Southern ports created a crisis. What the Union could import was hardly enough to keep its army supplied, let alone to caffeinate Northern civilians in the manner to which they’d become accustomed.
Panama Papers: Court acquits all 28 charged with money laundering #economy #law #politics #crime
A Panamanian court has acquitted all 28 people charged with money laundering in connection with the Panama Papers scandal, concluding a trial that began in April.
The secret financial documents were leaked in 2016, revealing how some of the world's richest and most powerful people use tax havens to hide their wealth.
Among those exonerated were Jurgen Mossack and the late Ramon Fonseca, founder of Mossack Fonseca, the defunct law firm at the centre of the scandal.
You Can Now See Thousands of Pablo Picasso's Works in a New Online Archive | Smithsonian #art
You don’t have to travel all the way to Paris to see Pablo Picasso’s work: Thousands of the Spanish artist’s pieces are now accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, thanks to a new online archive created by the Picasso Museum.
The museum has digitized thousands of Picasso’s artworks, essays, poems, interviews and other memorabilia, including items that have never been seen by the public before.
Small Businesses in Crisis As Rising Numbers Unable To Pay Rent - Newsweek #economy
The state with the highest delinquency rate in the country was Texas with 52 percent of small business owners unable to pay their rent in full and on time in April, followed by Massachusetts (47 percent), California (46 percent), Maryland (42 percent), New York and Washington State (39 percent). The lowest delinquency rate was in Colorado, with 26 percent.
Sean Endicott quoted a CNBC interview with Microsoft’s CEO of AI, and it’s nothing if not entertaining! #copyrights
“With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding,” said Suleyman.Microsoft informs customers that Russian hackers spied on emails | Reuters #security
Russian hackers who broke into Microsoft's (MSFT.O)
, opens new tab systems and spied on staff inboxes earlier this year also stole emails from its customers, the tech giant said on Thursday, around six months after it first disclosed the intrusion.
The disclosure underscores the breadth of the breach as Microsoft faces increasing regulatory scrutiny over the security of its software and systems against foreign threats. An allegedly Chinese hacking group that separately breached Microsoft last year stole thousands of U.S. government emails.
US sanctions 12 Kaspersky Lab execs for working in Russian tech sector #privacy #security
The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned twelve Kaspersky Lab executives for operating in the technology sector of Russia.
These sanctions came after the Biden administration announced yesterday the ban of sales and software updates for Kaspersky antivirus software in the USA, which started in July, over potential cybersecurity risks to national security.
In addition, the Department of Commerce designated AO Kaspersky Lab and OOO Kaspersky Group (Russia), and Kaspersky Labs Limited (United Kingdom) to the Entity List, preventing any US business from conducting business with them.
Nine astronauts on the space station briefly moved to their docked return spacecraft late Wednesday (June 26) as a satellite broke up in low Earth orbit.
The Expedition 71 crew on the International Space Station (ISS) went to their three spacecraft, including Boeing Starliner, shortly after 9 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT), according to a brief NASA update on X, formerly known as Twitter. As the ISS follows a time zone identical to GMT, according to the European Space Agency, the astronauts were likely in their sleep period when the incident occurred.
The procedure was a "precautionary measure", NASA officials added, stating that the crew only stayed in their spacecraft for about an hour before they were "cleared to exit their spacecraft, and the station resumed normal operations."
ID Verification Service for TikTok, Uber, X Exposed Driver Licenses #privacy
A company that verifies the identities of TikTok, Uber, and X users, sometimes by processing photographs of their faces and pictures of their drivers’ licenses, exposed a set of administrative credentials online for more than a year potentially allowing hackers to access that sensitive data, according to screenshots and data obtained by 404 Media.
Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn | Ars Technica #computers #history #promemoria
LWN.net reckons that Finger, 84, contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or 1,464 commits total, at least since kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes precarious nature of contributing to the kernel, this is on its own an impressive achievement—especially for someone with no formal computer training and who considered himself a scientist.
Paul Allen’s Living Computers Museum And Labs To Be Auctioned | Hackaday #computers #history #hardware
After the Living Computers museum in Seattle closed like so many museums and businesses in 2020 with the pandemic, there were many who feared that it might not open again. Four years later this fear has become reality, as the Living Computers: Museum + Labs (LCM+L, for short) entire inventory is being auctioned off. This occurs only 12 years after the museum and associated educational facilities were opened to the public. Along with Allen’s collection at the LCM+L, other items that he had been collecting until his death in 2018 will also be auctioned at Christie’s, for a grand total of 150 items in the Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection.
China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe returns world’s first samples from far side of the moon | China | The Guardian #space #nature
China has become the first country to gather samples from the far side of the moon and bring them back to Earth in a landmark achievement for the Beijing space programme.
A re-entry capsule containing the precious cargo parachuted into a landing zone in the rural Siziwang Banner region of Inner Mongolia on Tuesday after being released into Earth’s orbit by the uncrewed Chang’e-6 probe.
Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says | AP News #software #copyrights
Microsoft violated European Union antitrust rules with “possibly abusive” practices by tying its Teams messaging and videoconferencing app to its widely used business software, the bloc said.
The European Commission said Monday it informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that the U.S. tech giant has been “restricting competition” by bundling Teams with core office productivity applications such as Office 365 and Microsoft 365.
LockBit claims the hack of the US Federal Reserve #security #privacy
The Lockbit ransomware group announced that it had breached the systems of Federal Reserve of the United States and exfiltrated 33 TB of sensitive data, including “Americans’ banking secrets.”
The Lockbit ransomware group added the Federal Reserve to the list of victims on its Tor data leak site and threatened to leak the stolen data on 25 June, 2024 20:27:10 UTC.
The group hasn’t published any sample of the stolen data.
Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission - Neowin #privacy #software
Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11's initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it.
Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet and signed into a Microsoft account) will get to their desktops with OneDrive already syncing stuff from folders like Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos. Depending on how much is stored there, you might end up with a desktop and other folders filled to the brim with shortcuts to various stuff right after finishing a clean Windows installation.
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