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NBC reports that America's "Teamsters" labor union was hit by a ransomware attack demanding $2.5 million back in 2019. "But unlike many of the companies hit by high-profile ransomware attacks in recent months, the union declined to pay, despite the FBI's advice to do so, three sources familiar with the previously unreported cyberattack told NBC News." Personal information for the millions of active and retired members was never compromised, according to a Teamsters spokesperson, who also said that only one of the union's two email systems was frozen along with other data. Teamsters officials alerted the FBI and asked for help in identifying the source of the attack. They were told that many similar hacks were happening and that the FBI would not be able to assist in pursuing the culprit. The FBI advised the Teamsters to "just pay it," the first source said. "They said 'this is happening all over D.C. ... and we're not doing anything about it,'" a second source said. Union officials in Washington were divided over whether to pay the ransom — going so far as to bargain the number down to $1.1 million, according to the sources — but eventually sided with their insurance company, which urged them not to pony up... The Teamsters decided to rebuild their systems, and 99 percent of their data has been restored from archival material — some of it from hard copies — according to the union's spokesperson. The FBI's communications office did not reply to repeated requests for comment. The FBI's stance is to discourage ransomware payments. NBC News draws a lesson from the fact that it took nearly two years for this story to emerge. "An unknown number of companies and organizations have been extorted without ever saying a word about it publicly."

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Burning dollars faster than liquid oxygen and hydrogen

$28m has secured someone a seat on the first crewed flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard, with the mystery bidder scoring the right to breathe the same air as fellow passenger Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.…

My God! It's full of Bork!

Bork!Bork!Bork! A black oblong of purest bork glares balefully over shoppers in Plymouth, southwest England. An echo from an alternative future or just big-screen borkage?…

Sutherland Spaceport: A Prime location?

Interview We spoke to Chris Larmour, the CEO of UK rocketeers Orbex, about the challenges of launching a rocket from the UK and scaling things up.…

If we trust it, crooks will too – meaning Plod can get their kiloscrote nab

Column Back in October, a call by spy agencies to weaken end-to-end encryption "because of the children" provoked a bit of analysis on how many times UK Home Secretaries had banged the same drum. All of them, it turned out. All of the time.…

Pandemic has opened a can of worms for our work goals with what comes next

Feature It may not be your fault that your broadband is crap, but it is your problem when you're interviewing over Zoom or even Teams.…

UPS = Uninterruptable Pager Spying

Who, Me? We go Down Under for today's Who, Me? with a slightly NSFW tale of an incomplete checklist, a surprise outage, and an even more surprised gerbil.…

"Within a decade, quantum computers could be powerful enough to break the cryptographic security that protects cell phones, bank accounts, email addresses and — yes — bitcoin wallets," writes CNBC. But fortunately, that would happen only if we do nothing in the meantime, they're told by Thorsten Groetker, former Utimaco CTO "and one of the top experts in the field of quantum computing." Crypto experts told CNBC they aren't all that worried about quantum hacking of bitcoin wallets for a couple of different reasons. Castle Island Ventures founding partner Nic Carter pointed out that quantum breaks would be gradual rather than sudden. "We would have plenty of forewarning if quantum computing was reaching the stage of maturity and sophistication at which it started to threaten our core cryptographic primitives," he said. "It wouldn't be something that happens overnight." There is also the fact that the community knows that it is coming, and researchers are already in the process of building quantum-safe cryptography. "The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has been working on a new standard for encryption for the future that's quantum-proof," said Fred Thiel, CEO of cryptocurrency mining specialist Marathon Digital Holdings. NIST is running that selection process now, picking the best candidates and standardizing them. "It's a technical problem, and there's a technical solution for it," said Groetker. "There are new and secure algorithms for digital signatures. ... You will have years of time to migrate your funds from one account to another." Groetker said he expects the first standard quantum-safe crypto algorithm by 2024, which is still, as he put it, well before we'd see a quantum computer capable of breaking bitcoin's cryptography. Once a newly standardized post-quantum secure cryptography is built, Groetker said, the process of mass migration will begin. "Everyone who owns bitcoin or ethereum will transfer [their] funds from the digital identity that is secured with the old type of key, to a new wallet, or new account, that's secured with a new type of key, which is going to be secure," he said. There will still be the problem of users who forget their password or died without sharing their key. But in those scenarios, CNBC suggests, "an organization could lock down all accounts still using the old type of cryptography and give owners some way to access it."

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How to bust the bottlenecks without breaking the bank

Webcast We all know HPC and AI datasets are going to be massive. But they’re also very different, the former being focused around large, sequential files, while the former are much more random.…

Crims now know what not to trust, and how to stymie future infiltrations

Comment In April 1943, Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed when the US Air Force shot down the plane carrying him to Balalae Airfield in the Solomon Islands.…

The New York Times shares footage from a flying car's test flight in California — "a single-person aircraft for use in rural areas — essentially a private flying car for the rich — that could start selling this year." (You can read the text of the article here.) "It may look like a strange beast, but it will change the way transportation happens," they're told by Marcus Leng, the Canadian inventor who designed the aircraft (which he named BlackFly): BlackFly is what is often called a flying car. Engineers and entrepreneurs like Mr. Leng have spent more than a decade nurturing this new breed of aircraft, electric vehicles that can take off and land without a runway. They believe these vehicles will be cheaper and safer than helicopters, providing practically anyone with the means of speeding above crowded streets. "Our dream is to free the world from traffic," said Sebastian Thrun, another engineer at the heart of this movement. That dream, most experts agree, is a long way from reality. But the idea is gathering steam. Dozens of companies are now building these aircraft, and three recently agreed to go public in deals that value them as high as $6 billion. For years, people like Mr. Leng and Mr. Thrun have kept their prototypes hidden from the rest of the world — few people have seen them, much less flown in them — but they are now beginning to lift the curtain... Others are building larger vehicles they hope to deploy as city air taxis as soon as 2024 — an Uber for the skies. Some are designing vehicles that can fly without a pilot. One of the air taxi companies, Kitty Hawk, is run by Mr. Thrun, the Stanford University computer science professor who founded Google's self-driving car project. He now says that autonomy will be far more powerful in the air than on the ground, and that it will enter our daily lives much sooner. "You can fly in a straight line and you don't have the massive weight or the stop-and-go of a car" on the ground, he said... The next few years will be crucial to the industry as it transitions from what Silicon Valley is known for — building cutting-edge technology — to something much harder: the messy details of actually getting it into the world.

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Dr Rachid Yazami shares his predictions for EV batteries with The Register

Feature Morocco-born Dr Rachid Yazami has lived all over the world, thanks to an invention he made in his first year as a PhD student – the graphite anode – which is one of the key components that make lithium-ion batteries perform so well.…

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: The "Group of Seven" (or G7) nations are some of the world's largest economies — the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, and Japan. On Sunday they pledged $2 billion to help developing countries pivot away from fossil fuels and pledged an "overwhelmingly decarbonized" electricity sector by 2030. The New York Times calls these "major steps in what leaders hope will be a global transition to wind, solar and other energy that does not produce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions." Politico's Ryan Heath argues "The language on a 'green revolution' is quite strong — there's plenty of detail missing, but it gives climate campaigners a lot to hit leaders with if they fail to deliver. And it's a big deal for the G-7 to agree to 'to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.'" Other reports from Politico's writers: "Boris Johnson admitted that the world's richest economies had not managed to secure a widely advertised 1 billion vaccine doses to send to developing countries. The final communique says the group will deliver 870 million doses over the next year." "The G-7 nations called for a 'timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened' investigation into the origins of Covid-19, including in China. WHO's first crack at an investigation — released in March — called a lab leak 'extremely unlikely,' but China didn't grant access to key documents and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called that investigation 'highly deficient' this morning. The U.S. government remains split between two origin theories."

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As in it's stopped selling the ladders needed to clamber up and do maintenance. Thankfully the internet can help

IBM has pulled up the ladder behind customers of its Blue Gene/Q supercomputers.…

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition. The question is how international will they be...? The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China... Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...." If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

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Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Reuters: Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday. A set of "neuro-rights" should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York's Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards. Five rights would guard the brain against abuse from new technologies — rights to identity, free will and mental privacy along with the right of equal access to brain augmentation advances and protection from algorithmic bias, the group says. "If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people," Yuste said during an online panel at the Web Summit, a global tech conference. "This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

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The government in Pakistan's largest province, Punjab, has decided to block SIM cards of unvaccinated citizens, reports the Hindustan Times (one of the largest newspapers in India), citing reports from news agency ANI. Dr. Rashid, the provincial health minister in Pakistan's Punjab, said that there has been a "considerable decrease" in Covid-19 cases in the province due to mass vaccinations. However, a report compiled by the Punjab primary health department shows that the province still failed to achieve its set target for Covid-19 vaccination, reports ARY News, adding that around 300,000 recipients of the first dose of the vaccine never returned for the second dose since the start of Pakistan's mass inoculation drive on February 2.

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Long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob writes: The old RAD/content authoring system, ToolBook, appears to be entering the final phase of its EOL process. Sumtotal/Skillsoft (the current owner, under which meaningful development effectively ceased) 'may' refuse software activations after the end of 2021, and does not provide a format-compatible replacement. Similarly, they are halting their support services, and will not allow contracts to be renewed. This may have significant ramifications for the education/training sector, and I have reason to believe that the body of the work dependent on this software is significantly larger than one might expect out of a wayward VisualBasic competitor from the 90s. The software, which was offered for sale until relatively recently (I'm unsure of the date of cutoff), has not received an update since 2014, nor a major version update since 2011. As such, I'd like to increase the visibility of this particular EOL, in the hopes that interested parties will take notice and have an opportunity to begin the process of moving their courseware out of this format... If one has never encountered this software before, it is "interesting", to say the least, as is the history of Asymetrix (one of Paul Allen's ventures) and later Sumtotal Systems, through 90s and early 2000s. If one does not care to look into it, it can be thought of as some sort of bizarro-world amalgam of features from Visual Basic and HyperCard.

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Freenode's Linux support channel has an official web page at freenode.linux.community, which now bears this announcement: 22+ year old ##linux on freenode has been seized by freenode staff The community's (multi-platform) site reminds visitors of the alternative channels #linux on Libera and Linux.Chat on Discord. But they're not the only ones making changes. "[T]he FSF and GNU have decided to relocate our IRC channels to Libera.Chat," reads an official announcement on the FSF blog. "Effective immediately, Libera is the official home of our channels, which include but are not limited to all those in the #fsf, #gnu, and #libreplanet namespaces." As we have had nearly twenty years of positive experiences with the Freenode staff, most of whom now comprise the staff of the Libera network, we are confident in their technical and interpersonal expertise, as well as their ability to make the network as long-lasting and integral to the free software community as they made Freenode. We look forward to joining the large number of free software and free culture projects who have already made Libera.Chat their home, and hope to stay there for many years to come. Also making a move: freenode's #Python channel. Software developer Ned Batchelder, one of the channel's operators (and also an architect at edX), shared a recent experience in a new blog post this morning. When they'd decided to move #python to the new Libera.chat network (run by former Freenode staffers), they also stayed in Freenode's channel "to let people know where everyone had gone." Yesterday, after a heated debate in the Freenode channel where I was accused of splitting the community, I got k-lined (banned entirely from Freenode). The reason given was "spamming", because of my recurring message about the move to Libera. Then the entire Freenode #python channel was closed... Was it malice or was it mistake? Does it matter? It's not a good way to run a network. After the channel was closed, people asking staff about what happened were banned from asking. That wasn't a mistake... [T]he new staff seems to be using force to silence people asking questions. It's clear that transparency is not a strong value for them. Setting aside network drama, the big picture here is that the Freenode #python community isn't split: it's alive and well. It's just not on Freenode anymore, it's on Libera. Freenode was a good thing. But the domain name of the server was the least important part of it, just a piece of technical trivia. There's no reason to stick with Freenode just because it is called Freenode. As with any way of bringing people together, the important part is the people. If all of the people go someplace else, follow them there, and continue. See you on Libera.

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"Apple paid a multimillion dollar settlement to a woman after iPhone repair techs posted risque pictures from her phone to Facebook," reports the Washington Post, citing legal documents obtained by the Telegraph. An unnamed Oregon college student "sent her phone to Apple for repairs after it stopped working" in 2016, and the iPhone ended up at Apple-approved repair contractor Pegatron... Two iPhone repair technicians in Sacramento, uploaded "10 photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video" to her Facebook account, resulting in "severe emotional distress" for the young woman, according to the Telegraph's review of legal records. Pegatron, a major Apple manufacturer with facilities across the globe, had to reimburse Apple for the settlement and face insurers who didn't want to pay for it, according to the news outlet... The settlement isn't the first time Apple has had to handle the misdeeds of employees. In 2019, a California woman alleged that an Apple store employee had texted a private picture on her phone to himself. That employee was no longer working for the company after Apple conducted its investigation. Apple store employees at a Brisbane, Australia, location were fired in 2016 for taking candid pictures of female employees and customers' bodies and stealing photos from consumers' phones to rank their bodies. "Apple keeps a firm grip on the repair of its devices, arguing that allowing only approved retailers and vendors to repair its products ensures the privacy of its customers," the article points out. "The revelation of the lawsuit pokes holes in the company's stance that only authorized retailers can keep customer information secure."

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