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Less than two weeks into his new gig, Yoon cozies up to Biden as China and DPRK loom

US president Biden and South Korea's new president Yoon Suk Yeol have pledged further co-operation in many technologies, including joint efforts to combat North Korea.…

The BBC reports on "the next generation of genetic modification technology" — which goes beyond simply introducing a "lab-tweaked gene" into an organism. Instead it introduces a "gene drive" — a lab-tweaked gene "that targets and removes a specific natural gene." if an animal (parent A) that contains a gene drive mates with one that doesn't (parent B), then in the forming embryo that starts to combine their genetic material, parent A's gene drive immediately gets to work. It recognises the natural gene version of itself in the opposite chromosome from parent B, and destroys it, by cutting it out of the DNA chain. Parent B's chromosome then repairs itself — but does so, by copying parent A's gene drive. So, the embryo, and the resulting offspring, are all but guaranteed to have the gene drive, rather than a 50% chance with standard GM — because an embryo takes half its genes from each parent. Gene drives are created by adding something called Crispr, a programmable DNA sequence, to a gene. This tells it to target the natural version of itself in the DNA of the other parent in the new embryo. The gene drive also contains an enzyme that does the actual cutting. It is hoped that gene drives can be used to greatly reduce the numbers of malarial mosquitos, and other pests or invasive species.... One organisation at the forefront of this is Target Malaria, which has developed gene drives that stop mosquitos from producing female offspring. This is important for two reasons — only the females bite, and without females, mosquito numbers will plummet. The core aim is to greatly reduce the number of people who die from malaria — of which there were sadly 627,000 in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. It could also slash the economic impact of the disease. With 241 million cases in 2020, mostly in Africa, malaria is estimated to cost the continent $12bn (£9.7bn) in reduced economic output every year.... One of the world's pioneering developers of gene drives is US biologist Kevin Esvelt, an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He first came up with the technology back in 2013.... Prof Esvelt adds that this technology is being provided by something called "daisy chain". This is where a gene drive is designed to become inert after a few generations. Or halving its spread every generation until it eventually stops. Using this technology he says it is possible to control and isolate the spread of gene drives. "A town could release GM organisms with its boundaries to alter the local population [of a particular organism] while minimally affecting the town next door," he says. The technology has not been authorized for use "in the wild," the article points out. But there are currently no bans on laboratories researching it.

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Michael Dell could be the key to any deal

Broadcom is in early talks to buy VMware, according to The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Reuters.…

Nicholas Weaver is a senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. But he's also a raging cryptocurrency skeptic, arguing that cryptocurrency is useless and destructive, and should "die in a fire." In a recent interview in Current Affairs he promulgates what he calls Weaver's Iron Law of Blockchain. "When somebody says you can solve X with blockchain, they don't understand X, and you can ignore them." So for those pushing cryptocurrency for "Banking the unbanked," Weaver points to M-Pesa, a payment system Vodafone started in Kenya in 2007 "about the same time as Bitcoin..." It has eaten the Third World. It's huge. Because it just basically attaches a balance to your phone account. And you can text to somebody else to transfer money that way.... So even with the most basic dumb phone you have easy-to-use electronic money. And this has taken over multiple countries and become a huge primary payment system. [Whereas] the cryptocurrency doesn't work." Weaver also contends that when companies say they accept payments in Bitcoin, "They're lying." (They're using a service which pays them in "actual money" after performing conversions on any Bitcoin proferred-up by a customer.) He believes cryptocurrency is only seriously used for payments for ransomware and drug deals — the things that non-decentralized currencies are legally obligated to block. The reason I've gotten so sour on the cryptocurrency space is the ransomware. It's doing tens to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to the global economy. And it only exists because people can pay in Bitcoin. Weaver also believes cryptocurrency lets venture capitalists "carry out securities fraud as a business model" when they sell one of their startup's tokens to retail investors. This is blatantly an unlicensed security. This is blatant securities fraud, but they didn't commit the securities fraud. It was just the companies they invested in that did the securities fraud, and the SEC has not been proactively enforcing this. They only retroactively enforce against the initial coin offerings after they fail.... and when things fail, the only people to prosecute are the companies, not Andreessen Horowitz itself. So they've been able to make securities fraud a business in such a way that they are legally remote, so you will not be able to throw them in jail.... The SEC has the authority to stop those proactively rather than reactively. They choose not to.... Basically, there's a fear among regulators — that I think started in the '80s — of being accused of "stifling innovation." There's no innovation to stifle. So regulate away. He's also skeptical of cryptocurrency's other supposed advantages. Weaver argues cryptocurrency incentivizes green power "the same way that a whole bunch of random shootings would incentivize bulletproof vests." And even as an investment vehicle, Weaver sees it as "a self-created pyramid scheme." [Y]ou have to keep getting new suckers in. As soon as the number of suckers dries up, it collapses. And because it's not zero-sum, but deeply negative-sum, there are actually a lot of mechanisms that can cause it to collapse suddenly to zero. We saw this just the other day with the Terra stablecoin and the Luna side token. So when asked for the future of cryptocurrency, Weaver predicts "It will implode spectacularly." (By which he means it will "collapse greatly.") The only question is when. I thought it would have actually imploded a year ago. But basically, what we saw with Terra and Luna, where it collapsed suddenly due to these downward positive feedback loops — situations where basically the system is designed to collapse utterly and quickly — those will happen to the larger cryptocurrency space.... [T]he Washington Nationals just the other day started doing a lot of tweets for their business relationship with Terra. That was $5 million for five years prepaid in advance in cash. So for the next five years, the Washington Nationals are obliged to hype a cryptocurrency that failed spectacularly already. Thanks to Slashdot reader sdinfoserv for sharing the article...

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Adds 'feature activation' for Intel silicon, but Chipzilla still isn't saying what that means

Linus Torvalds has released version 5.18 of the Linux kernel.…

If you'd like to deter "digital voyeurs," Popular Science points out that you can ask the map apps from Google, Apple, and Microsoft "to draw a veil of privacy across your property. "You'd be in good company too: Apple CEO Tim Cook had his home blurred from mapping apps after issues with a stalker." There is something to bear in mind before you do this, though: you may not be able to reverse the process. The blur could be there for good. This is the case for Google Maps, and while Apple and Microsoft don't specify whether blurs on their services are permanent, they may follow the same protocol or decide to do so in the future. The case for blurring? "Having strangers from all over the world stare at your home isn't necessarily something you want to happen — but it can be done in seconds on the mapping apps we all carry around on our phones." ("Stop people from peering at your place," suggests the article's subtitle.) But is there also a case against demanding platforms blur what's essentially just the exterior of a building? Where's the boundary where we're honoring the wishes of the privacy-conscious — and does the public ever have a right to see? Share your own thoughts in the comments. And would you blur your house on every map app? (Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article...)

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SlashData's "State of the Developer Nation" surveyed more than 20,000 developers in 166 countries, taken from December 2021 to February 2022, reports InfoWorld. It found the most popular programming language is JavaScript — followed by Python (which apparently added 3.3 million new net developers in just the last six months). And Rust adoption nearly quadrupled over the last two years to 2.2 million developers. InfoWorld summarizes other findings from the survey: Java continues to experience strong and steady growth. Nearly 5 million developers have joined the Java community since the beginning of 2021. PHP has grown the least in the past six month, with an increase of 600,000 net new developers between Q3 2021 and Q1 2022. But PHP is the second-most-commonly used language in web applications after JavaScript. Go and Ruby are important languages in back-end development, but Go has grown more than twice as fast in the past year. The Go community now numbers 3.3 million developers. The Kotlin community has grown from 2.4 million developers in Q1 2021 to 5 million in Q1 2022. This is largely attributed to Google making Kotlin its preferred language for Android development.

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Slovakia's eastern border touches Ukraine's western border — and Saturday Bloomberg uncovered an emerging controversy. "A flood of posts pushing misinformation in Slovakia is putting the spotlight on Facebook for facilitating the spread of pro-Russian theories on the war in neighboring Ukraine, ranging from claims that Kyiv is secretly developing biological weapons to questioning whether President Vladimir Putin's invasion even happened at all." The dispute took center stage this week when members of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence called out Meta and its chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, for facilitating the dangerous spread of pro-Russia disinformation in the country of 5.3 million. According to the GLOBSEC security think tank, the intensity of false messages is worse here than anywhere else in ex-communist central Europe. That has buoyed support for Putin, with more than a quarter of Slovaks saying they back his actions, even as the administration in Bratislava tries to shelter the refugees and send weapons to Kyiv to aid in its defense.... The committee said that the US and Slovak governments had repeatedly asked Meta to take action against messages that include posts accusing Ukrainians of supporting Fascism, killing their fellow countrymen and demonizing the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled abroad to escape the war. "Half of the population is prone to believe in some kind of misinformation or conspiracy theories," said GLOBSEC analyst Dominika Hajdu. At present, Meta has only one fact-checker dedicated to Slovakia, where about 2.7 million people, or almost half of the population, have Facebook accounts, making it the most widely used social-media platform, according to the US committee members' letter. They described the staffing level as "wildly inadequate...." Slovakia isn't alone. In February, the prime ministers of Poland and the Baltic trio Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania demanded executives in charge of Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter "take a stand" against Russian disinformation. Slovokia's prime minister decried the situation in a Facebook post of his own. "Never before in history has freedom of speech been abused in favor of murder and destruction on such a mass scale and with such a devastating effect." A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg that when fact-checkers identify false information, Facebook positions this false content "lower in Feed so fewer people see it." "We're also giving people more information to decide what to read, trust, and share by adding warning labels on content rated false."

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After nearly 20 years, Hollywood Designer 6.0 is "very stable and mature", write its developers — envisioning both hobbyist and professional users (with its support for modern graphics-editing features like filter effects and vector graphics) in its massive new evolution. Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma explains: Airsoft Softwair has released Hollywood Designer 6.0, "a full-blown multimedia authoring system that runs on top of Hollywood and can be used to create all sorts of multimedia-based applications, for example presentations, slide shows, games, and applications. Thanks to Hollywood, all multimedia applications created using Hollywood Designer can be exported as stand-alone executables for the following systems: AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, WarpOS, MorphOS, AROS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS." The current version of Hollywood is v9.1 with various updated add-ons. To see earlier versions of Hollywood 9.0 & Designer 5.0 in action have a look at Kas1e's short demonstration on AmigaOS4 / AmigaOne X5000.

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"NASA has released a huge new report that astronomers are calling Hubble's magnum opus," reports New Atlas. "Analyzing 30 years of data from the famous space telescope, the new study makes the most precise measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding." Astronomers have known for the better part of a century that the universe is expanding, thanks to the observation that galaxies are moving away from us — and the farther away they are, the faster they're traveling. The speed at which they're moving, relative to their distance from Earth, is a figure called the Hubble constant, and measuring this value was one of the primary missions of the space telescope of the same name. To measure the Hubble constant, astronomers study distances to objects whose brightness is known well — that way, the dimmer it appears, the farther away it is. For relatively close objects within our galaxy or in nearby ones, this role is filled by Cepheids, a class of stars that pulse in a predictable pattern. For greater distances, astronomers use what are called Type Ia supernovae — cosmic explosions with a well-defined peak brightness.... For the new study, a team of scientists has now gathered and analyzed the most comprehensive catalog of these objects so far, to make the most precise measurement of the Hubble constant yet. This was done by studying 42 galaxies that contained both Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae, as imaged by the Hubble telescope over the last 30 years. "This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it," said Adam Riess, lead scientist of the team. "This is likely Hubble's magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble's life to even double this sample size." The article points out that these detailed real-world observations of the Hubble "constant" now show a small discrepancy, which suggests "new physics could be at work." And it's the new James Webb Space Telescope that will now be studying these same phenomena at an even higher resolution.

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The Drive's Adam Kehoe noticed something during this week's UFO hearings in the U.S. Congress. "After intense public speculation, stacks of official documents obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act, ambiguous statements from top officials, and an avalanche of media attention, it has now been made clear that the mysterious swarming of U.S. Navy ships off the Southern California coast in 2019 was caused by drones, not otherworldly UFOs or other mysterious craft. "Raising even more questions, a similar drone swarm event has occurred off another coast, as well." These revelations came from top Department of Defense officials during a recent and much-anticipated house hearing on UFOs, which you can read all about here. The strange series of events in question unfolded around California's Channel Islands in July of 2019. On multiple evenings, swarms of unidentified drones were spotted operating around U.S. Navy vessels. In numerous instances, the drones flew within close proximity to ships, even crossing directly over their decks. The behavior provoked defensive reactions from the ships, including the deployment of emergency security teams... Deck logs demonstrate that the Navy appears to have drilled and implemented a variety of counter-drone techniques in response to these incidents. This eventually included the deployment of Northrop Grumman's Drone Restricted Access Using Known EW (DRAKE) platform. The DRAKE system is a man-portable backpack that allows sailors to use radio frequency signals to interrupt the control links of drones. The DRAKE system appears to have been actually deployed in one of the incidents.... It is entirely unclear where the drones were operating from, how they were controlled, or who was controlling them. Still, the Navy could identify the objects as drones without those questions being fully answered at this time.... The Department of Defense's open acknowledgment of these drone swarm events just off U.S. shores shows that the threat is not theoretical. It is also not a future threat. Significant drone swarm events have occurred in the last three years, unknown to the public, and evidently unresolved by defense authorities. Judging by what is known to date about the 2019 incident, it is clear that the United States is not well-positioned to detect, identify and neutralize such threats. It remains to be seen what level of priority these issues will receive by lawmakers in relation to more speculative questions surrounding UAP. If anything else, top confirmation that adversaries are operating swarms among America's most powerful weapons in training areas where their most sensitive capabilities are put to use should make national headlines, but because it was buried in sensationalism around UFOs, it clearly did not.

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"62-year-old Val Kilmer was just 26 when he played Iceman in the 1986 movie Top Gun," remembers long-time Slashdot reader destinyland. But in 2015 Kilmer lost his voice to throat cancer, remembers Parade: In his 2020 memoir I'm Your Huckleberry, Kilmer joked that he has less of a frog in his throat and more of a "buffalo." He said, "Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood, has become an hourly struggle." Kilmer has teamed up with Sonantic, a U.K.-based software firm that uses artificial intelligence to copy voices for actors and production studios, to replicate his speech, using old recordings of his voice and existing footage. Kilmer elaborates on the process of finding his voice again through AI in a video posted to YouTube in August 2021. In his new AI-enhanced voice, which does indeed emulate the speech audiences are familiar with, Kilmer says: "People around me struggle to understand me when I'm talking, but despite all that, I still feel I'm the exact same person, still the same creative soul. A soul that dreams ideas and stories constantly. "But now I can express myself again, I can bring these dreams to you, and show you this part of myself once more. A part that was never truly gone, just hiding away." Kilmer's health struggles, his childhood tragedies and his ambitious career were recently documented in the acclaimed 2021 feature-length doc Val, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Top Gun: Maverick screened at the Cannes Film Festival to rapturous reviews, with thunderous fanfare including an air show. Though reports say audiences gave the action picture (currently sitting at a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) a five-minute standing ovation, with audible responses throughout the picture, mainly at the groundbreaking stunt work, it's also been reported an audience-favorite scene is the "overwhelming" emotional response to the reunion of Tom Cruise and Kilmer.

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Munich-based developer Aaron Ardiri is Slashdot reader #245,358, with a profile that still identifies him as a Palm OS developer. Which surprised me, because Palm OS's last update was in 2007. (Then again, ardiri's Slashdot profile also still includes his screen name on AOL Instant Messenger.) So, a long-time Slashdot reader. And this week he stopped by to share a little history — in more ways than one. ardiri writes: Before the iOS and Android entered the scene — heck, even before the smartphone concept — was the handheld personal digital assistant, with the likes of Newton, Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Palm OS had a thriving gaming scene; with the likes of emulators and implementations/clones of classics such as LodeRunner, Lemmings, and the classic Game and Watch. But the real news of ardiri's original submission is hidden in its headline. "Palm OS developer releases source to classic games, 20+ years after release." Written mainly in C and optimizations in assembler — maybe these games will make their way to the various Arduino like micro-controllers out there; designed for low memory, low processing power environments they would port perfectly.

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CNBC visited a company that burns trash from a California landfill, and then "harnesses steam to make enough electricity to power 18,000 homes in the area" — which turns out to be part of a surprisingly large industry: A portion of the waste comes from companies including American Airlines, Quest Diagnostics, Sunny Delight and Subaru.... Major retailers like Amazon also use this combustion method to dispose of returns they deem unfit to recycle, resell, or donate.... The U.S. is one of the most wasteful developed countries in the world. Of the record 292 million tons of waste generated by Americans each year, more than half is landfilled, about a third is recycled, and 12% is incinerated at waste-to-energy facilities, according to the World Bank. Online commerce poses a particular problem. Not only are internet purchases breaking records in terms of volume, but roughly 20% of items get returned, which is a higher number than for in-store purchases. Returns solutions provider Optoro says U.S. returns generate an estimated 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste each year. But the article also points out that more than half of U.S. states define waste-to-energy as a renewable energy source." Unlike landfills, many governments and non-governmental organizations consider it a source of greenhouse gas mitigation. That includes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where Susan Thorneloe leads research on materials management. U.S. climate experts say these are the three reasons the burning process produces a net reduction of greenhouse gasses. First, it keeps waste out of landfills, which emit methane that the EPA estimates is 86 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Second, waste-to-energy facilities reduce the need for mining because they recover 700,000 tons of metal each year. And finally, they produce energy, reducing the need to burn fossil fuels.... The steam can also be captured and piped up to a mile away to heat or cool entire buildings, like Target Field in Minneapolis.... The EPA estimates that for every megawatt-hour of electricity generated, waste-to-energy emits an average of just over half a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent gasses. Landfills emit six times that, and coal plants emit nearly double. At least some scientists CNBC spoke to said that air pollution technology has advanced so much in the last two decades that most common toxins have largely been eliminated.

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Big OEMs hogging production and COVID causing supply issues

The system-on-chip (SoC) side of the semiconductor industry is poised for growth between now and 2026, when it's predicted to be worth $6.85 billion, according to an analyst's report. …

"Serial entrepreneur" Gary Vaynerchuk launched a four-day conference "exploring digital ownership and the way emerging technologies could interact with art, sports and entertainment," reports the Pioneer Press: It's billed as an event "featuring icons of business, sports, music, arts, Web3, and popular culture in conversation to build lasting relationships, share ideas, and connect with the community." VeeCon is expected to draw over 10,000 visitors from around world who will hear from 150 speakers, from New Age guru Deepak Chopra to filmmaker Spike Lee and the ubiquitous rapper Snoop Dogg. [Also speaking: Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister] Tickets were sold in the form of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens sold on the blockchain, a digital ledger of transactions. Much of the conference will dive into the potential applications for NFTs. Ami Barzelay, chief product officer of Crinkle, a shopping rewards optimizer, described NFT ownership as "digital bragging rights." An NFT, which could be an image, song or video, can be copied and enjoyed by anyone in the world, but it may have just one owner. The NFT market, still in its infancy, has seen wild swings in what people are willing to pay for digital assets, which Barzelay has experienced first-hand. He said that for fun, he paid $100 for a video clip of Tiger Woods and later sold it for $5,000. There is inherent skepticism and fear around buying and selling things that don't exist in the physical world, which VeeCon aims to address. The article quotes Vaynerchuk as saying "Education and communication solve everything," adding later that "NFTs are really fun for collectability, but it is a tiny part of the consumer blockchain." CNBC points out that holders of the NFT-format tickets "also are given exclusive access to the annual event for three years after the NFT's purchase." Though they also end on a skeptical note: "Right now the overwhelming energy of the space is very short term. I would call it greed. Many are not spending their time on education," Vaynerchuk said. "The reality is that all that behavior is going to lead to 97-98% of these current projects losing value over the next 24-36 months because the supply and demand curves will not work out." The event's schedule included happy hours that were officially hosted by Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan. On Twitter one attendee reported from the festival that digital artist Beeple "just got caked in the face in front of 7,000 people by Steve Aoki and it was incredible."

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Plus: Next PyTorch release will support Apple GPUs so devs can train neural networks on their own laptops

In brief Miscreants can easily steal someone else's identity by tricking live facial recognition software using deepfakes, according to a new report.…

This week New York's attorney general announced they're officially "launching investigations into the social media companies that the Buffalo shooter used to plan, promote, and stream his terror attack." Slashdot reader echo123 points out that Discord confirmed that roughly 30 minutes before the attack a "small group" was invited to join the shooter's server. "None of the people he invited to review his writings appeared to have alerted law enforcement," reports the New York Times., "and the massacre played out much as envisioned." But meanwhile, another Times article tells a tangentially-related story from 2019 about what ultimately happened to "a partial recording of a livestream by a gunman while he murdered 51 people that day at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand." For more than three years, the video has remained undisturbed on Facebook, cropped to a square and slowed down in parts. About three-quarters of the way through the video, text pops up urging the audience to "Share THIS...." Online writings apparently connected to the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store Saturday said that he drew inspiration for a livestreamed attack from the Christchurch shooting. The clip on Facebook — one of dozens that are online, even after years of work to remove them — may have been part of the reason that the Christchurch gunman's tactics were so easy to emulate. In a search spanning 24 hours this week, The New York Times identified more than 50 clips and online links with the Christchurch gunman's 2019 footage. They were on at least nine platforms and websites, including Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, 4chan and the video site Rumble, according to the Times' review. Three of the videos had been uploaded to Facebook as far back as the day of the killings, according to the Tech Transparency Project, an industry watchdog group, while others were posted as recently as this week. The clips and links were not difficult to find, even though Facebook, Twitter and other platforms pledged in 2019 to eradicate the footage, pushed partly by public outrage over the incident and by world governments. In the aftermath, tech companies and governments banded together, forming coalitions to crack down on terrorist and violent extremist content online. Yet even as Facebook expunged 4.5 million pieces of content related to the Christchurch attack within six months of the killings, what the Times found this week shows that a mass killer's video has an enduring — and potentially everlasting — afterlife on the internet. "It is clear some progress has been made since Christchurch, but we also live in a kind of world where these videos will never be scrubbed completely from the internet," said Brian Fishman, a former director of counterterrorism at Facebook who helped lead the effort to identify and remove the Christchurch videos from the site in 2019.... Facebook, which is owned by Meta, said that for every 10,000 views of content on the platform, only an estimated five were of terrorism-related material. Rumble and Reddit said the Christchurch videos violated their rules and they were continuing to remove them. Twitter, 4chan and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment For what it's worth, this week CNN also republished an email they'd received in 2016 from 4chan's current owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura. The gist of the email? "If I liked censorship, I would have already done that." But Slashdot reader Bruce66423 also shares an interesting observation from The Guardian's senior tech reporter about the major tech platforms. "According to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, there is a tech solution to this uniquely tech problem. Tech companies just aren't financially motivated to invest resources into developing it." Farid's work includes research into robust hashing, a tool that creates a fingerprint for videos that allows platforms to find them and their copies as soon as they are uploaded... Farid: It's not as hard a problem as the technology sector will have you believe... The core technology to stop redistribution is called "hashing" or "robust hashing" or "perceptual hashing". The basic idea is quite simple: you have a piece of content that is not allowed on your service either because it violated terms of service, it's illegal or for whatever reason, you reach into that content, and extract a digital signature, or a hash as it's called.... That's actually pretty easy to do. We've been able to do this for a long time. The second part is that the signature should be stable even if the content is being modified, when somebody changes say the size or the color or adds text. The last thing is you should be able to extract and compare signatures very quickly. So if we had a technology that satisfied all of those criteria, Twitch would say, we've identified a terror attack that's being live-streamed. We're going to grab that video. We're going to extract the hash and we are going to share it with the industry. And then every time a video is uploaded with the hash, the signature is compared against this database, which is being updated almost instantaneously. And then you stop the redistribution. It's a problem of collaboration across the industry and it's a problem of the underlying technology. And if this was the first time it happened, I'd understand. But this is not, this is not the 10th time. It's not the 20th time. I want to emphasize: no technology's going to be perfect. It's battling an inherently adversarial system. But this is not a few things slipping through the cracks.... This is a complete catastrophic failure to contain this material. And in my opinion, as it was with New Zealand and as it was the one before then, it is inexcusable from a technological standpoint. "These are now trillion-dollar companies we are talking about collectively," Farid points out later. "How is it that their hashing technology is so bad?

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As Pwn2Own Vancouver comes to a close, a whopping $1,115,000 has been awarded by Trend Micro and Zero Day Initiative. The 15th anniversary edition saw 17 "contestants" attacking 21 targets, reports Hot Hardware — though "the biggest payouts were for serious exploits against Microsoft's Teams utility." While Teams isn't technically a part of Windows, it does come bundled with all new installs of Windows 11, which means that these exploits are practically Windows exploits. Hector "p3rr0" Peralta, Masato Kinugawa, and STAR Labs each earned $150,000 for major exploits of the utility. Windows 11 itself wasn't spared, though. Marcin Wiazowski and STAR Labs each earned $40,000 for privilege escalation exploits on Microsoft's operating system on day one, and on day two, TO found a similar bug for a $40,000 payout of his own. Day three saw no less than three more fresh exploits against Windows 11, all in the serious privilege escalation category; all three winners pocketed another $40,000.... Other targets attacked at Pwn2Own 2022 included Mozilla Firefox (hacked), Apple Safari (hacked), and Ubuntu Desktop (hacked)... Of course, details of the hacks aren't made public, because they're zero-days, after all. That means that they haven't been patched yet, so releasing details of the exploits could allow malicious actors to make use of the bugs. Details will be revealed 3 months from now, during which time Microsoft, Tesla, Apple, and others should have their software all sewn up. With all the points totalled, the winner was Singapore-based cybersecurity company Star Labs, which was officially crowned "Master of Pwn" on Saturday. "They won $270,000 and 27 points during the contest," explains the official Twitter feed for Zero Day Initiative (the judges for the event). A blog post from Zero Day Initiative describes all 21 attacks, including six successful attacks against Windows, three successful attacks against Teams — and four against Ubuntu Desktop.

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2016: "Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 Employees For Creating Millions of Phony Accounts" 2017: "Up To 1.4M More Fake Wells Fargo Accounts Possible" The headlines kept coming.... ("Wells Fargo Hit With 'Unprecedented' Punishment Over Fake Accounts..." "Wells Fargo Employee Informed the Bank of Fake Customer Accounts in 2006") But this week the New York Times reported a new allegation — involving fake job interviews: Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews. For many open positions, employees would interview a "diverse" candidate — the bank's term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank's yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else. He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the "fake interviews" were "inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong." Wells Fargo said Mr. Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee. Mr. Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank's wealth management unit to interview "diverse" candidates — even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate. Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it...

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