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Kimsuky gang proves that with the right wording, you can turn generative AI into a counterfeit factory

North Korean spies used ChatGPT to generate a fake military ID for use in an espionage campaign against a South Korean defense-related institution, according to new research.…

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from IEEE Spectrum: The world's largest airplane, when it's built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that's sprouted wings — aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale. Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it'll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it's transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn't be moved over land, since they wouldn't fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails. So the WindRunner's developer, Radia of Boulder, Colorado, has staked its business model on the idea that the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there... Radia's plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may sound audacious — an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia's supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job — the only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger. Bigger turbines, after all, can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is: Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble...? Having fewer total turbines means a wind farm could space them farther apart, avoiding airflow interference. The turbines would be nearly twice as tall, so they'll reach a higher, gustier part of the atmosphere. And big turbines don't need to spin as quickly, so they would make economic sense in places with average wind speeds around 5 meters per second compared with the roughly 7 m/s needed to sustain smaller units. "The result...is more than a doubling of the acres in the world where wind is viable," says Mark Lundstrom [Radia's founder and CEO]. The executive director at America's National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation points out that one day blades could just be 3D-printed on-site — negating the need for the airplane altogether. But 3D printing for turbines is still in its earliest stages.

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Chip giant accused of breaching conditions of $6.9B Mellanox takeover

China has dealt Nvidia another blow, finding the chipmaker in violation of the country's anti-monopoly Law and escalating a long-running regulatory headache into a full investigation.…

Downdetector logged 40,000 reports before service flickered back

Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband network went dark today as thousands of users around the globe reported connectivity issues.…

As post-cyberattack layoffs begin, labor org argues UK goverment should step in

The UK's chief automotive workers' union is calling on the government to establish a Covid-esque furlough scheme for the thousands of individuals who face losing their jobs due to the cyber-related downtime at Jaguar Land Rover.…

Sign 'relationship agreement' as Bharti Mittal and Vittal take non-exec directorships

BT - Britain's former state-owned telecoms monopoly - has confirmed that execs from Bharti Global, its largest shareholder, are joining the board with immediate effect.…

Ministers concerned Treasury governance team may be distracted about supervising vital efforts

UK ministers have questioned the government's decision to seemingly downgrade huge public sector tech projects as HM Treasury takes a greater role in so-called "mega-projects."…

India's IT services industry saw entry-level hiring collapse by 70% between fiscal years 2023 and 2024, as the country's four largest IT exporters reduced fresh graduate recruitment from 225,000 to 60,000. Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys shed a combined 38,000 employees in fiscal 2024, marking the sector's first workforce contraction in decades. Studies indicate generative AI could automate 30-40% of junior developer and tester tasks. The proportion of employees under 30 at Infosys declined from 81% in 2010 to a projected 53% by fiscal 2025. India adds 8-9 million people to its workforce annually while the IT sector projects just 50,000 net new jobs per year from fiscal 2026-28. The graduate unemployment rate exceeds 13%, nearly triple the national average.

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Peers will quiz campaigners on whether Ofcom's new measures will actually work, or just add more compliance pain

The House of Lords is about to put the latest child-protection plans of UK regulator the Office of Communications (Ofcom) under the microscope.…

"These are the last days of social media as we know it," argues a humanities lecturer from University College Cork exploring where technology and culture intersect, warning they could be come lingering derelicts "haunted by bots and the echo of once-human chatter..." "Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks... " In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's largest repositories of AI-generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half-coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney... While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement. And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as "mostly reliable" — down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s... Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize. Systems designed to surface peer-to-peer engagement are now systematically filtering out such activity, because what counts as engagement has changed. Engagement is now about raw user attention — time spent, impressions, scroll velocity — and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to. "These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content," the article suggests, "but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care..." Social media giants have stopped growing exponentially, while a significant proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds even took deliberate mental health breaks from social media in 2024, according to an American Psychiatric Association poll.) And "Some creators are quitting, too. Competing with synthetic performers who never sleep, they find the visibility race not merely tiring but absurd." Yet his 5,000-word essay predicts social media's death rattle "will not be a bang but a shrug," since "the model is splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs — a billion little gardens." Intentional, opt-in micro-communities are rising in their place — like Patreon collectives and Substack newsletters — where creators chase depth over scale, retention over virality. A writer with 10,000 devoted subscribers can potentially earn more and burn out less than one with a million passive followers on Instagram... Even the big platforms sense the turning tide. Instagram has begun emphasizing DMs, X is pushing subscriber-only circles and TikTok is experimenting with private communities. Behind these developments is an implicit acknowledgement that the infinite scroll, stuffed with bots and synthetic sludge, is approaching the limit of what humans will tolerate.... The most radical redesign of social media might be the most familiar: What if we treated these platforms as public utilities rather than private casinos...? Imagine social media platforms with transparent algorithms subject to public audit, user representation on governance boards, revenue models based on public funding or member dues rather than surveillance advertising, mandates to serve democratic discourse rather than maximize engagement, and regular impact assessments that measure not just usage but societal effects... This could take multiple forms, like municipal platforms for local civic engagement, professionally focused networks run by trade associations, and educational spaces managed by public library systems... We need to "rewild the internet," as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon mentioned in a Noema essay. We need governance scaffolding, shared institutions that make decentralization viable at scale... [R]eal change will come when platforms are rewarded for serving the public interest. This could mean tying tax breaks or public procurement eligibility to the implementation of transparent, user-controllable algorithms. It could mean funding research into alternative recommender systems and making those tools open-source and interoperable. Most radically, it could involve certifying platforms based on civic impact, rewarding those that prioritize user autonomy and trust over sheer engagement. "Social media as we know it is dying, but we're not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces..." "The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones."

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There's more than warm power supplies and wonky capacitors

Opinion The Voyager space probes are dear to the hearts of every geek who can remember the 1980s.…

Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI

Who, Me? It's Monday morning, and a week of possibilities presents itself to IT pros everywhere. Which is why The Register brings you another edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we remind you what not to do with your day, your week, and your career, by sharing stories of your worst workplace mistakes and the contortions you made to survive them.…

Virtualization tool for hyperscalers now scales to 8,192 vCPUs

The Cloud Hypervisor project has introduced a No AI code policy.…

"Engineers from Ohio State University are developing a new way to power rocket engines," reports Gizmodo, "using liquid uranium for a faster, more efficient form of nuclear propulsion that could deliver round trips to Mars within a single year..." Nuclear propulsion uses a nuclear reactor to heat a liquid propellant to extremely high temperatures, turning it into a gas that's expelled through a nozzle and used to generate thrust. The newly developed engine concept, called the centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket (CNTR), uses liquid uranium to heat rocket propellant directly. In doing so, the engine promises more efficiency than traditional chemical rockets, as well as other nuclear propulsion engines, according to new research published in Acta Astronautica... Traditional chemical engines produce about 450 seconds of thrust from a given amount of propellant, a measure known as specific impulse. Nuclear propulsion engines can reach around 900 seconds, with the CNTR possibly pushing that number even higher. "You could have a safe one-way trip to Mars in six months, for example, as opposed to doing the same mission in a year," Spencer Christian, a PhD student at Ohio State and leader of CNTR's prototype construction, said in a statement. CNTR promises faster routes, but it could also use different types of propellant, like ammonia, methane, hydrazine, or propane, that can be found in asteroids or other objects in space. "Some potential hurdles include ensuring that the methods used for startup, operation and shutdown avoid instabilities," according to the researchers' announcement, as well as "envisioning ways to minimize the loss of uranium fuel and accommodate potential engine failures." But "This team's CNTR concept is expected to reach design readiness within the next five years..."

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The UK's data-protecting Information Commissioner's Office has issued a warning about what it calls a worrying trend, reports the BBC: "students hacking their own school and college IT systems for fun or as part of dares." Since 2022, the the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has investigated 215 hacks and breaches originating from inside education settings and says 57% were carried out by children. Other breaches are thought to come from staff, third party IT suppliers and other organisations with access. According to the new data, almost a third of the breaches involved students illegally logging into staff computer systems by guessing passwords or stealing details from teachers. In one incident, a seven-year-old was involved in a data breach and subsequently referred to the National Crime Agency's Cyber Choices programme to help them understand the seriousness of their actions... In another incident three Year 11 students aged 15 or 16 unlawfully accessed school databases containing the personal information of more than 1,400 students. The pupils used hacking tools downloaded from the internet to break passwords and security protocols. When questioned, they said they were interested in cyber security and wanted to test their skills and knowledge. Another example the ICO gave is of a student illegally logging into their college's databases with a teachers' details to change or delete personal information belonging to more than 9,000 staff, students and applicants. The system stored personal information such as name and home address, school records, health data, safeguarding and pastoral logs and emergency contacts. Schools are facing an increasing number of cyber attacks, with 44% of schools reporting an attack or breach in the last year according the government's most recent Cyber Security Breaches Survey. "Youth cyber crime culture is a growing threat linked to English-speaking teen gangs," the article argues, noting breaches at major companies to suggest it's a kind of "gateway" crime. The ICO's principal cyber specialist tells the BBC that "What starts out as a dare, a challenge, a bit of fun in a school setting can ultimately lead to children taking part in damaging attacks on organisations or critical infrastructure."

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PLUS: Japan woos Micron, again; China launches chip dumping probe; Mitsubishi expands opsec empire; and more!

Criminals appear to be moving cyber-scam centers to vulnerable countries.…

RestOfWorld.org reports on "a global crisis nobody anticipated when governments started subsidizing electric vehicles..." "EVs can lose almost half their driving distance when temperatures drop, and the billions spent on improving technology have failed to fix this fundamental limitation." In January, Seattle-based Recurrent, a company that tests and analyzes EVs, found an average range loss of 20% in extreme cold... Lithium-ion batteries rely on chemical reactions that slow dramatically in cold weather. When temperatures plunge, the electrolyte thickens, ions move sluggishly, and charging becomes not just inefficient but potentially dangerous. Charging in cold weather has been identified as a primary cause of thermal acceleration, which can lead to fires... The failure pattern repeats globally wherever cold weather meets inadequate infrastructure. Manufacturers, too, have acknowledged the problem. Chinese EV maker BYD's user manual, for instance, advises drivers to charge indoors, with the heating on. That advice is useless for farmers parking in open courtyards. In fact, research across 293 Chinese cities "found that many drivers in colder regions buy EVs only as supplementary vehicles," according to the article, "while still relying on gasoline-powered cars during winter." The article also tells the story of an apple grower chilly Kashmir, India who discovered that his Chinese three-wheeler lost 60% of its 10-hour charge overnight. This made it impossible to begin the 56-kilometer (35-mile) trip on a route with no charging stations — and prevented him from selling his produce while it was fresh (to earn the highest prices). And the problem affects the entire region: Desperate drivers have formed WhatsApp groups, such as "EV Apple Transporters" and "Battery Help Kashmir," sharing increasingly absurd workarounds. Some have wrapped batteries in quilts; others have hauled power packs weighing 90 kilograms (over 200 pounds) into their homes for the night. One driver parked his battery in the living room. "The blankets caused overheating on the road; water bottles leaked into the circuits," [orchard owner] Sajad Ahmad said. "We became mechanics, engineers, and fools all at once." EVs are also not considered cost-efficient. "Diesel vans are expensive, but they can do four or five trips a day," Mohammad Yaseen, a driver based in Shopian, told Rest of World. "With EVs, one half-trip and you're stuck." Norway, where winter temperatures average minus 7 degrees Celsius (19 degrees Fahrenheit), achieved 89% EV market share with its comprehensive infrastructure. It offers more than 200 models for year-round usage. "The ability to preheat batteries upon fast charging in winter is by far the most important improvement we have seen in the past five years," Christina Bu, secretary-general of the Norwegian EV Association, told Rest of World. "These features are standard in Norway's mature market, but remain absent from basic models exported to developing countries."

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PLUS: China's Great Firewall springs a leak; FBI issues rare 'Flash Alert' of Salesforce attacks; $10m bounty for alleged Russian hacker; and more

Infosec In Brief 15 ransomware gangs, including Scattered Spider and Lapsus$, have announced that they are going dark, and say no more attacks will be carried out in their name.…

Last year Amazon's robotaxi service Zoox held a training session for 20 Las Vegas firefighters, police officers, and other first responders, reports the Washington Post, calling it "a new ritual for emergency workers across the country, as autonomous vehicles begin to spread beyond the handful of cities that served as initial testing grounds..." Questions that came up included: What can first responders do if the nearly 6,000-pound vehicle is blocking a roadway? (Better to pull, not push.) What happens if the vehicle loses its connectivity? (It's designed to pull over.) And can first responders manually shut off the vehicle? (Not yet, but Zoox is working on it....) The vehicles' operators claim they drive more safely than humans, but anything can happen on public roads, and first responders need to know how to intervene if a robotaxi is caught in a collision that traps passengers, catches fire or gets caught doing something that demands a traffic stop... Alphabet's Waymo, which has more than 2,000 vehicles completing hundreds of thousands of paid trips each week across San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta, has trained more than 20,000 first responders in how to interact with its vehicles, the company said. Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment on how many first responders the company has trained, but a representative from the Austin Police Department confirmed that fire, police and transit workers were trained on the company's Robotaxi before the company launched commercial service in June. Tesla, Waymo and Zoox say their vehicles can detect the lights and sirens of emergency vehicles and automatically attempt to pull over. Waymo says its vehicles can interpret first responders' hand signals.... The first responders appeared excited about the potential of the company's artificial intelligence technology to ferry visitors up and down the Vegas Strip without concern that a driver might be inebriated. They were also wary of problems that might unfold: Autonomous vehicles are electric, and when electric vehicles catch fire, they're difficult to extinguish, the firefighters said. The first responders also worried that a secondary air bag deployment could injure an emergency responder, a common concern with conventional vehicles. And if a police officer wanted to view the footage a Zoox vehicle captured on the road, would the company be willing to share it? Turning over footage would require a subpoena, a Zoox official responded. But "those who've been through the trainings and have seen large-scale commercial rollouts say it's difficult to anticipate all the potential issues in a specific market," the article points out. Darius Luttropp, former deputy chief of operations for the San Francisco Fire Department, told the Post last year that Waymo vehicles had blocked city firefighters from leaving and entering firehouses, and also crashed into their equipment. Lt. William White of the Austin Police Department told the Post that more than once Waymo vehicles failed to recognize an officer on a motorcycle with their police lights activated.

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"There has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhone," notes Apple's security blog, pointing out that "The only system-level iOS attacks we observe in the wild come from mercenary spyware... historically associated with state actors and [using] exploit chains that cost millions of dollars..." But they're doing something about it — this week announcing a new always-on memory-safety protection in the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air (including the kernel and over 70 userland processes)... Known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS share a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: they exploit memory safety vulnerabilities, which are interchangeable, powerful, and exist throughout the industry... For Apple, improving memory safety is a broad effort that includes developing with safe languages and deploying mitigations at scale... Our analysis found that, when employed as a real-time defensive measure, the original Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) release exhibited weaknesses that were unacceptable to us, and we worked with Arm to address these shortcomings in the new Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) specification, released in 2022. More importantly, our analysis showed that while EMTE had great potential as specified, a rigorous implementation with deep hardware and operating system support could be a breakthrough that produces an extraordinary new security mechanism.... Ultimately, we determined that to deliver truly best-in-class memory safety, we would carry out a massive engineering effort spanning all of Apple — including updates to Apple silicon, our operating systems, and our software frameworks. This effort, together with our highly successful secure memory allocator work, would transform MTE from a helpful debugging tool into a groundbreaking new security feature. Today we're introducing the culmination of this effort: Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), our comprehensive memory safety defense for Apple platforms. Memory Integrity Enforcement is built on the robust foundation provided by our secure memory allocators, coupled with Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) in synchronous mode, and supported by extensive Tag Confidentiality Enforcement policies. MIE is built right into Apple hardware and software in all models of iPhone 17 and iPhone Air and offers unparalleled, always-on memory safety protection for our key attack surfaces including the kernel, while maintaining the power and performance that users expect. In addition, we're making EMTE available to all Apple developers in Xcode as part of the new Enhanced Security feature that we released earlier this year during WWDC... Based on our evaluations pitting Memory Integrity Enforcement against exceptionally sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks from the last three years, we believe MIE will make exploit chains significantly more expensive and difficult to develop and maintain, disrupt many of the most effective exploitation techniques from the last 25 years, and completely redefine the landscape of memory safety for Apple products. Because of how dramatically it reduces an attacker's ability to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities on our devices, we believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.

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