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Miljödata meltdown leaves 200 local authorities scrambling over 1.5 BTC

Sweden's municipal governments have been knocked offline after ransomware crooks hit IT supplier Miljödata, reportedly demanding the bargain-basement sum of $168,000.…

Microsoft blames incoming UK Online Safety Act, says you have until 2026

Microsoft has begun emailing users of its Xbox gaming platform with likely unwelcome news: users will need to verify their age if they want to keep access to the company's various social services, and it's blaming the UK Online Safety Act.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: German banks blocked PayPal payments totalling more than 10 billion euros ($11.7 billion) over fraud concerns, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported on Wednesday, without specifying its sources. The payments were halted on Monday after lenders flagged millions of suspicious direct debits from PayPal that appeared last week, the newspaper said. Asked to comment on the report, a PayPal spokesperson said a temporary service interruption had affected "certain transactions from our banking partners and potentially their customers", but that the issue had now been resolved.

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US payments platform back in action, says it's informing affected customers

Shoppers and merchants in Germany found themselves dealing with billions of euros in frozen transactions this week, thanks to an apparent failure in PayPal's fraud-detection systems.…

Apology issued after names tied to redress scheme revealed in mass mailing

A London law firm leaked the details of nearly 200 people who requested to receive updates about the redress scheme set up for victims of abuse at the hands of the Church of England (CoE).…

Labor group says new technologies could increase inequality if we're not careful

AI-Pocalypse Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms.…

A U.S.-China research team has developed the world's first one-step process to convert mixed plastic waste into gasoline and hydrochloric acid with up to 95-99% efficiency, all at room temperature and ambient pressure. InterestingEngineering reports: As the authors put it, "The method supports a circular economy by converting diverse plastic waste into valuable products in a single step." To carry out the conversion, the team combines plastic waste with light isoalkanes, hydrocarbon byproducts available from refinery processes. According to the paper, the process yields "gasoline range" hydrocarbons, mainly molecules with six to 12 carbons, which are the primary component of gasoline. The recovered hydrochloric acid can be safely neutralized and reused as a raw material, potentially displacing several high-temperature, energy-intensive production routes described in the paper. "We present here a strategy for upgrading discarded PVC into chlorine-free fuel range hydrocarbons and [hydrochloric acid] in a single-stage process," the researchers said. Reported conversion efficiencies underscore the potential for real-world use. At 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), the process reached 95 percent conversion for soft PVC pipes and 99 percent for rigid PVC pipes and PVC wires. In tests that mixed PVC materials with polyolefin waste, the method achieved a 96 percent solid conversion efficiency at 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit). The team describes the approach as applicable beyond laboratory-clean samples. "The process is suitable for handling real-world mixed and contaminated PVC and polyolefin waste streams," the paper states. SCMP points to an ECNU social media post citing the study, which characterized the achievement as a first, efficiently converting difficult-to-degrade mixed plastic waste into premium petrol at ambient temperature and pressure in a single step.

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UK starts early warning system combing through stuff that folks flush away

The UK Health Security Agency is looking to set up an early warning system ahead of future pandemics, launching a £1.3 million (around $1.75 million) program to identify "cutting-edge technologies" which could turn people's pee and poop into valuable data on the spread of viruses.…

Idit Levine on going from startup to a billion-dollar valuation

Interview "I feel that a founder always needs to be a little bit stupidly optimistic." Solo.io CEO Idit Levine has been on an interesting journey in cloud computing since starting the networking and API management company in 2017.…

13 governments sound the alarm about ongoing unpleasantness

China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies continue their years-long hacking campaign targeting critical industries around the world, according to a joint security alert from cyber and law enforcement agencies across 13 countries.…