Linux fréttir

US task force aims to plug security leaks in water sector

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 18:32
From a trickle to a flood, threats now seen as too great to ignore

US government is urging state officials to band together to improve the cybersecurity of the country's water sector amid growing threats from foreign adversaries.…

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Apex Legends Hacker Said He Hacked Tournament Games 'For Fun'

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 18:01
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Sunday, the world of video games was shaken by a hacking and cheating scandal. During a competitive esports tournament of Apex Legends, a free-to-play shooter video game played by hundreds of thousands of players daily, hackers appeared to insert cheats into the games of two well-known streamers -- effectively hacking the players midgame. "Wait, what the fuck? I'm getting hacked, I'm getting hacked bro, I'm getting hacked," said one of the players allegedly compromised during a livestream of the gameplay. The incidents forced the organizers of the Apex Legends Global Series tournament, which has a $5 million total prize pool, to postpone the event indefinitely "due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised." As the midgame hacks were underway, the game's chatbot displayed messages on-screen that appeared to come from the hackers: "Apex hacking global series, by Destroyer2009 &R4andom," the messages read. In an interview with TechCrunch, the hacker Destroyer2009 took credit for the hacks, saying that he did it "just for fun," and with the goal of forcing the Apex Legends' developers to fix the vulnerability he exploited. The hacks sent the Apex Legends community into a frenzy, with countless streamers reacting to the incidents, and some players suggesting Apex Legends is not safe to play, because every player could be at risk of getting hacked not only in-game, but potentially having their computers hacked, too. Destroyer2009 declined to provide details of how he allegedly pulled off hacking the two players midgame, or what specific vulnerabilities he exploited. "I really don't want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal," the hacker said. The only thing Destroyer2009 said regarding the technique he used was that the vulnerability "has nothing to do with the server and I've never touched anything outside of the Apex process," and that he did not hack the two players' computers directly. The hacks "never went outside of the game," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 17:41
Um. Let's successfully land on Moon without immediately faceplanting first, amirite?

All aboard the space train – DARPA has commissioned defense contractor Northrop Grumman to figure out what would be necessary for a railroad network on the Moon.…

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Why Do People Let Their Life Insurance Lapse?

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 17:20
The abstract of a new paper published on Journal of Financial Economics: We study aggregate lapsation risk in the life insurance sector. We construct two lapsation risk factors that explain a large fraction of the common variation in lapse rates of the 30 largest life insurance companies. The first is a cyclical factor that is positively correlated with credit spreads and unemployment, while the second factor is a trend factor that correlates with the level of interest rates. Using a novel policy-level database from a large life insurer, we examine the heterogeneity in risk factor exposures based on policy and policyholder characteristics. Young policyholders with higher health risk in low-income areas are more likely to lapse their policies during economic downturns. We explore the implications for hedging and valuation of life insurance contracts. Ignoring aggregate lapsation risk results in mispricing of life insurance policies. The calibrated model points to overpricing on average. In the cross-section, young, low-income, and high-health risk households face higher effective mark-ups than the old, high-income, and healthy.

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US may sanction those rumored to be in covert Huawei chip network

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 17:10
Crouching entity list candidate, hidden semiconductor ... or that's the idea, anyway

The US government is considering measures against a number of Chinese semiconductor companies linked with technology giant Huawei, in what appears to be further escalation of Washington's chip wars strategy.…

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Intel Awarded Up To $8.5 Billion in CHIPS Act Grants, With Billions More in Loans Available

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 16:40
The White House said Wednesday Intel has been awarded up to $8.5 billion in CHIPS Act funding, as the Biden administration ramps up its effort to bring semiconductor manufacturing to U.S. soil. From a report: Intel could receive an additional $11 billion in loans from the CHIPS and Science Act, which was passed in 2022. The awards will be announced by President Joe Biden in Arizona on Wednesday. The money will help "leading-edge semiconductors made in the United States" keep "America in the driver's seat of innovation," U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. Intel and the White House said their agreement is nonbinding and preliminary and could change. Intel has long been a stalwart of the U.S. semiconductor industry, developing chips that power many of the world's PCs and data center servers. However, the company has been eclipsed in revenue by Nvidia, which leads in artificial intelligence chips, and has been surpassed in market cap by rival AMD and mobile phone chipmaker Qualcomm.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 16:15
Twitter tipster points to suspicious signs from author producing thousands of recipes

Late last year, Sam Altman, the optimistic CEO of chatbot manufacturer OpenAI, predicted artificial general intelligence would be with us in five years, give or take.…

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London Clinic probes claim staffer tried to peek at Princess Kate's records

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 15:30
First: not being able buy a meat pie with a credit card. Now this.

The London Clinic where the Princess of Wales had surgery at the start of this year says it is investigating claims that an employee had tried to access her medical records.…

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Ethereum Foundation Under Investigation by 'State Authority'

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 15:28
CoinDesk: The Ethereum Foundation -- the Swiss non-profit organization at the heart of the Ethereum ecosystem -- is under investigation by an unnamed "state authority," according to the group's website's GitHub repository. The scope of the investigation and its focus was unknown at press time. According to the GitHub commit dated Feb. 26, 2024, "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality." The investigation comes during a time of change for Ethereum's technology. Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain by market cap after Bitcoin, launching in 2015 following an initial coin offering for the chain's native ETH token. Earlier this month, the chain underwent a major technical upgrade, dubbed Dencun, designed to bring down transaction costs for users of Ethereum-based layer-2 platforms.

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OpenAI's Chatbot Store is Filling Up With Spam

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 15:20
An anonymous reader shares a report: When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI's generative AI models, onstage at the company's first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to "accomplish all sorts of tasks" -- from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers. "Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, they can be more helpful to you," Altman said. "You can build a GPT ... for almost anything." He wasn't kidding about the anything part. TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI's official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI's moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Canadian arrested for stealing secret to speedy Tesla battery production, say feds

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 15:05
Special tech allegedly lets Musk's assembly lines produce 5-10 times more kit than rivals

Canadian battery exec Klaus Pflugbeil, a 58-year-old who lives in Ningbo, China, was arrested in Long Island yesterday for trying to sell undercover agents "battery assembly trade secrets" so crucial to Tesla's ops that it spent millions on them.…

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Users Ditch Glassdoor, Stunned By Site Adding Real Names Without Consent

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 14:40
Readers waspleg and SpzToid shared the following report: Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent. Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a professional networking app that integrated with Glassdoor last July. This acquisition meant that every Glassdoor user was automatically signed up for a Fishbowl account. And because Fishbowl requires users to verify their identities, Glassdoor's terms of service changed to require all users to be verified. Ever since Glassdoor's integration with Fishbowl, Glassdoor's terms say that Glassdoor 'may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties. We may also use personal data you provide to us via your resume(s) or our other services.' This effort to gather information on Fishbowl users includes Glassdoor staff consulting publicly available sources to verify information that is then used to update Glassdoor users' accounts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Serial extortionist of medical facilities pleads guilty to cybercrime charges

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 14:33
Robert Purbeck even went as far as threatening a dentist with the sale of his child’s data

A cyberattacker and extortionist of a medical center has pleaded guilty to federal computer fraud and abuse charges in the US.…

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OpenAI To Release 'Materially Better' GPT-5 For Its Chatbot Mid-Year, Report Says

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 14:05
An anonymous reader shares a report: The generative AI company helmed by Sam Altman is on track to put out GPT-5 sometime mid-year, likely during summer, according to two people familiar with the company. Some enterprise customers have recently received demos of the latest model and its related enhancements to the ChatGPT tool, another person familiar with the process said. These people, whose identities Business Insider has confirmed, asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely. "It's really good, like materially better," said one CEO who recently saw a version of GPT-5. OpenAI demonstrated the new model with use cases and data unique to his company, the CEO said. He said the company also alluded to other as-yet-unreleased capabilities of the model, including the ability to call AI agents being developed by OpenAI to perform tasks autonomously. The company does not yet have a set release date for the new model, meaning current internal expectations for its release could change. OpenAI is still training GPT-5, one of the people familiar said. After training is complete, it will be safety tested internally and further "red teamed," a process where employees and typically a selection of outsiders challenge the tool in various ways to find issues before it's made available to the public.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel scores $8.5B in government cheddar to supercharge fab builds

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 14:00
Department of Commerce says it's the largest such investment in US semiconductor manufacturing

Intel is set to grab up to $8.5 billion in direct funding and up to $11 billion in loans from the US government under the CHIPS and Science Act to help build out its semiconductor manufacturing capacity.…

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Stalkerware usage surging, despite data privacy concerns

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 13:15
At least 31,031 people affected last year

Stalkerware has reached "pandemic proportions," according to Kaspersky, which documented a total of 31,031 people affected by the intrusive software in 2023 – up almost six percent on the prior year.…

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'Disabling Cyberattacks' Are Hitting Critical US Water Systems, White House Warns

Slashdot - Wed, 2024-03-20 13:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Biden administration on Tuesday warned the nation's governors that drinking water and wastewater utilities in their states are facing "disabling cyberattacks" by hostile foreign nations that are targeting mission-critical plant operations. "Disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States," Jake Sullivan, assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Michael S. Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in a letter. "These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities." [...] "Drinking water and wastewater systems are an attractive target for cyberattacks because they are a lifeline critical infrastructure sector but often lack the resources and technical capacity to adopt rigorous cybersecurity practices," Sullivan and Regan wrote in Tuesday's letter. They went on to urge all water facilities to follow basic security measures such as resetting default passwords and keeping software updated. They linked to this list of additional actions, published by CISA and guidance and tools jointly provided by CISA and the EPA. They went on to provide a list of cybersecurity resources available from private sector companies. The letter extended an invitation for secretaries of each state's governor to attend a meeting to discuss better securing the water sector's critical infrastructure. It also announced that the EPA is forming a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force to identify vulnerabilities in water systems. The virtual meeting will take place on Thursday. "EPA and NSC take these threats very seriously and will continue to partner with state environmental, health, and homeland security leaders to address the pervasive and challenging risk of cyberattacks on water systems," Regan said in a separate statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Euclid space telescope needs de-icing

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 12:30
Warm water and a scraper not an option when you're 1.5 million kilometers from home

Less than 12 months into its six-year survey mission, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid telescope is experiencing optical issues that require European teams to devise a de-icing procedure.…

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Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 11:52
First they came for McDonald's and I did not speak out because I have even worse taste in food

A princess is AWOL, the government refuses to admit defeat, and now pastry purveyor Greggs is unable to process card payments. How many more national crises can the Great British public weather before the streets burn?…

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Back of the net? Google's DeepMind is coming for football tactics

TheRegister - Wed, 2024-03-20 11:02
2026 FIFA World Cup in US could be first to see ML models play a part... and you thought video referees were crap

A team at Google's DeepMind claim to have demonstrated the efficacy of an AI model in predicting outcomes in soccer football game set pieces, as well as generating on-field tactics.…

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