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Names, phone numbers, physical addresses also included in Shiny Hunters alleged data dump

Names, phone numbers, physical addresses also included in Shiny Hunters alleged data dump

Logistics technology company Pitney Bowes, which makes franking machines for US postage, is the latest scalp claimed by ShinyHunters and its ongoing spree of pay-or-leak attacks against major organizations.…

That 'yet' is sure doing a lot of heavy lifting if the budget for science is slashed

That 'yet' is sure doing a lot of heavy lifting if the budget for science is slashed

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has appeared before the US House Appropriations Committee to explain the proposed Trump administration plan to cut $5.6 billion from the space agency's budget.…

RISC-V-based systems pack 32 Blackhole accelerators in a 6U, $110K chassis

RISC-V-based systems pack 32 Blackhole accelerators in a 6U, $110K chassis

Tenstorrent on Tuesday announced the general availability of its Galaxy Blackhole AI compute platform.…

DMA enforcers want rival assistants to get same deep device access as Gemini

DMA enforcers want rival assistants to get same deep device access as Gemini

Those pencil pushers at the European Commission are drawing up measures to ensure Google opens up its Android smartphone platform to something few users asked for – competing AI services.…

£125k and a pension await whoever can herd 6 departments onto single platform without losing will to live

Later today, prospective candidates will log onto a UK government call to convince themselves that £125k a year is worth the trouble of tackling a technological landscape swamped by colliding projects.…

Pair accused of creating literal flame war as bonkers conspiracy theories grow

Pair accused of creating literal flame war as bonkers conspiracy theories grow

Two men face charges over a series of arson attacks on 5G masts spanning two years following a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) investigation.…

Researchers say infrasound -- low-frequency vibrations from things like pipes, HVAC systems, and traffic that humans can't consciously hear -- may help explain why some old buildings feel unsettling or "haunted." Rodney Schmaltz, senior author and professor at MacEwan, says: "Consider visiting a supposedly haunted building. Your mood shifts, you feel agitated, but you can't see or hear anything unusual. In an old building, there is a good chance that infrasound is present, particularly in basements where aging pipes and ventilation systems produce low-frequency vibrations. If you were told the building was haunted, you might attribute that agitation to something supernatural. In reality, you may simply have been exposed to infrasound." ScienceBlog.com reports: Infrasound sits below roughly 20 Hz, the lower limit of what the human ear can ordinarily detect. It's generated by storms, by volcanic activity, by tectonic rumblings deep in the Earth's crust, and (this is the part that matters) by the mundane mechanical heartbeat of cities: ageing pipes, HVAC systems, traffic, industrial machinery. "Infrasound is pervasive in everyday environments, appearing near ventilation systems, traffic, and industrial machinery," says Schmaltz. Most of the time, we walk through it without a second thought. The question the team wanted to answer was whether walking through it was actually doing something to us, whether the frequency was registered somewhere below consciousness, somewhere we couldn't readily name. The experimental setup was deliberately ordinary. Thirty-six undergraduate students filed one at a time into isolated testing rooms and sat alone with a piece of music, either a calming instrumental or a horror-themed ambient track designed to provoke discomfort. Hidden subwoofers, including a 12-inch unit positioned in an adjacent hallway and a 16-inch speaker oriented toward the ceiling in a neighboring room, pumped infrasound at approximately 18 Hz into half those spaces. The participants had no idea. That last point turned out to be rather important. When the team ran the numbers, they found that participants couldn't reliably identify whether infrasound had been present. Their guesses were, statistically speaking, no better than chance. And according to Schmaltz, participants' beliefs about whether the infrasound was on had no detectable effect on their cortisol or mood. The physiological response didn't care what the participants thought was happening. It just happened anyway. What happened, specifically, was this: those exposed to infrasound reported higher irritability, lower interest in the music, and a tendency to rate the music as sadder, irrespective of whether it was the calming or the horror track. Cortisol levels, measured before and about 20 minutes after exposure, were also elevated. Kale Scatterty, the PhD student who led the work, notes that irritability and cortisol do tend to move together under ordinary stress, but adds that "infrasound exposure had effects on both outcomes that went beyond that natural relationship." That distinction matters more than it might seem. Previous theories about infrasound and paranormal experience have often leaned on anxiety as the explanatory mechanism, the idea that low-frequency sound triggers a kind of free-floating dread that the mind then reaches for supernatural explanations to account for. The new data don't really support that picture. Measures of anxiety didn't budge significantly. What went up was irritability and disinterest, a kind of sour, low-grade aversion rather than fear. That's perhaps a more honest description of how a lot of ghost stories actually feel in the telling: not screaming terror, but wrong atmosphere, a sense of unease that never quite crystallizes into something you can point at. The study has been published this week in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sign-in failures, unexpected sign-outs... just another day for users

Sign-in failures, unexpected sign-outs... just another day for users

Users of Microsoft Outlook on iOS are continuing to experience outages more than 24 hours after glitches first surfaced, despite Microsoft's assurances it rolled back the configuration change and restored services.…

Linux vendor touts European independence at SUSECON as majority stakeholder quietly explores its options

Linux vendor touts European independence at SUSECON as majority stakeholder quietly explores its options

European-based SUSE devoted much of the annual SUSECON event to its sovereignty-focused pitch - even as reports swirl that its majority stakeholder is exploring a $6 billion sale which could land the Linux vendor in American hands.…

Execs in the C-suite thought they could swap models in a week. They were hallucinating

Execs in the C-suite thought they could swap models in a week. They were hallucinating

Opinion The days when you could jump from one frontier AI model to another at the drop of a hat are going away as vendor lock-in starts to kick in, and prices increase.…

Comparison between 2 vendors was never meant to be seen ... or made

The UK's pensions and welfare ministry has slammed its outsourcing provider, SSCL, for sharing a document the department says it "inadvertently provided", a document that later surfaced in a legal dispute over a £370 million contract.…

Last time an idea like this came up, Meta packed up its toys and went home