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Foundation warns federated servers face biggest risk, but single-instance users can take their time

The maintainers of the federated secure chat protocol Matrix are warning users of a pair of "high severity protocol vulnerabilities," addressed in the latest version, saying patching them requires a breaking change in servers and clients.…

You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI

People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you.…

An encounter with the healthcare system reveals sickening decisions about data

Column We already live in a world where pretty much every public act - online or in the real world - leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I'd seriously imagined.…

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully completed its first-ever national security mission, launching the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite in 48 years. Space.com reports: The mission saw the company's powerful new Vulcan Centaur rocket take off from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Vulcan launched with four side-mounted solid rocket boosters in order to generate enough thrust to send its payload directly into geosynchronous orbit on one of ULA's longest flights ever, a seven-hour journey that will span over 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers), according to ULA. The payload launching on Tuesday's mission was the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite to be launched in 48 years. It is what's known as a position, navigation and timing (PNT) satellite, a type of spacecraft that provides data similar to that of the well-known GPS system. This satellite will be testing many experimental new technologies that are designed to make it resilient to jamming and spoofing, according to Andrew Builta with L3Harris Technologies, the prime contractor for the PNT payload integrated onto a satellite bus built by Northrop Grumman. The satellite, identified publicly only as Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), features a phased array antenna that allows it to "focus powerful beams to ground forces and combat jamming environments," Builta said in a media roundtable on Monday (Aug. 11). GPS jamming has become an increasingly worrisome problem for both the U.S. military and commercial satellite operators, which is why this spacecraft will be conducting experiments to test how effective these new technologies are at circumventing jamming attacks. In addition, the satellite features a software architecture that allows it to be reprogrammed while in orbit. "This is a truly game-changing capability," Builta said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Agency asks for ideas from US industry as orbit decays

NASA is seeking solutions for a way to raise the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory despite the spacecraft being marked for termination after FY2026 under the agency's budget proposal.…

Minnesota’s capital is the latest to feature on Interlock’s leak blog after late-July cyberattack

The Interlock ransomware gang has flaunted a 43GB haul of files allegedly stolen from the city of Saint Paul, following a late-July cyberattack that forced the Minnesota capital to declare a state of national emergency.…