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schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting "for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday. An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University. China is developing the "ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing," Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. "Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic." Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning which was aligned with China's broader intent to deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan. [...] Wray said China's hackers o

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from Reuters: Aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman is working with SpaceX [...] on a classified spy satellite project already capturing high-resolution imagery of the Earth, according to people familiar with the program. The program, details of which were first reported by Reuters last month, is meant to enhance the U.S. government's ability to track military and intelligence targets from low-Earth orbits, providing high-resolution imagery of a kind that had traditionally been captured mostly by drones and reconnaissance aircraft. The inclusion of Northrop Grumman, which has not been previously reported, reflects a desire among government officials to avoid putting too much control of a highly-sensitive intelligence program in the hands of one contractor, four people familiar with the project told Reuters. 'It is in the government's interest to not be totally invested in one company run by one person,' one of the people said

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: If you think you've been seeing an awful lot more Reddit results lately when you search on Google, you're not imagining things. The internet is in upheaval, and for website owners the rules of "winning" Google Search have never been murkier. Google's generative AI search engine is coming from one direction. It's creeping closer to mainstream deployment and bringing an existential crisis for SEOs and website makers everywhere. Coming from the other direction is an influx of posts from Reddit, Quora, and other internet forums that have climbed up through the traditional set of Google links. Data analysis from Semrush, which predicts traffic based on search ranking, shows that traffic to Reddit has climbed at an impressive clip since August. Semrush estimated that Reddit had over 132 million visitors in August 2023. At the time of publishing, it was projected to have over 346 million visitors in April 2024. None of this is accid

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation. The Framework 16 review unit as a reminder was configured with the 8-core / 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS Zen 4 SoC with Radeon RX 7700S graphics, a 512GB SN810 NVMe SSD, MediaTek MT7922 WiFi, and a 2560 x 1600 display. In the few months of testing out the Framework 16 predominantly under Linux it's been working out very well. With also having a Windows 11 partition as shipped by Framework, after updating that install it made for an interesting comparison against the Ubuntu 23.10 and Ubuntu 24.04 performance. The same Fra

Netflix on Thursday reported a 16% rise in memberships in the first quarter, reaching 269.6 million, beating Wall Street expectations. Starting next year, the company will no longer provide quarterly membership numbers or average revenue per user starting next year. CNBC reports: "As we've noted in previous letters, we're focused on revenue and operating margin as our primary financial metrics -- and engagement (i.e. time spent) as our best proxy for customer satisfaction," the company said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. "In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential." Netflix said now that it is generating substantial profit and free cash flow -- as well as developing new revenue streams like advertising and a password-sharing crackdown -- its membership numbers are not the only factor in the company's growth. It said the metric lost significance after it started to offer multiple price points for me

U.S. telecom provider Frontier Communications shut down its systems after a cybercrime group breached some of its IT systems in a recent cyberattack. BleepingComputer reports: Frontier is a leading U.S. communications provider that provides gigabit Internet speeds over a fiber-optic network to millions of consumers and businesses across 25 states. After discovering the incident, the company was forced to partially shut down some systems to prevent the threat actors from laterally moving through the network, which also led to some operational disruptions. Despite this, Frontier says the attackers could access some PII data, although it didn't disclose if it belonged to customers, employees, or both. "On April 14, 2024, Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. [..] detected that a third party had gained unauthorized access to portions of its information technology environment," the company revealed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. "Based on the Comp

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law. The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had to grapple with the question of "whether the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone was testimonial," the ruling (PDF) in United States v. Jeremy Travis Payne said. "To date, neither the Supreme Court nor any of our sister circuits have addressed whether the compelled use of a biometric to unlock an electronic device is testimonial." A three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit ruled unanimously against Payne, affirming a US District Court's denial of Payne's motion to suppress evidence. Payne was a Califo

A software glitch in the "ticket in, cash out" (TICO) machines at Star Casino in Sydney, Australia, saw it inadvertently give away $2.05 million over several weeks. This glitch allowed gamblers to reuse a receipt for slot machine winnings, leading to unwarranted cash payouts which went undetected due to systematic failures in oversight and audit processes. The Register reports: News of the giveaway emerged on Monday at an independent inquiry into the casino, which has had years of compliance troubles that led to a finding that its operators were unsuitable to hold a license. In testimony [PDF] given on Monday to the inquiry, casino manager Nicholas Weeks explained that it is possible to insert two receipts into TICO machines. That was a feature, not a bug, and allowed gamblers to redeem two receipts and be paid the aggregate amount. But a software glitch meant that the machines would return one of those tickets and allow it to be re-used -- the barcode it bore was not recognized as hav

WhatsApp users in the U.S. will soon see support for real-time AI image generation. The Verge reports: As soon as you start typing a text-to-image prompt in a chat with Meta AI, you'll see how the image changes as you add more detail about what you want to create. In the example shared by Meta, a user types in the prompt, "Imagine a soccer game on mars." The generated image quickly changes from a typical soccer player to showing an entire soccer field on a Martian landscape. If you have access to the beta, you can try out the feature for yourself by opening a chat with Meta AI and then start a prompt with the word "Imagine." Additionally, Meta says its Meta Llama 3 model can now produce "sharper and higher quality" images and is better at showing text. You can also ask Meta AI to animate any images you provide, allowing you to turn them into a GIF to share with friends. Along with availability on WhatsApp, real-time image generation is also available to US users through Meta AI for t

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Consumers have grown accustomed to the prospect that their personal data, such as email addresses, social contacts, browsing history and genetic ancestry, are being collected and often resold by the apps and the digital services they use. With the advent of consumer neurotechnologies, the data being collected is becoming ever more intimate. One headband serves as a personal meditation coach by monitoring the user's brain activity. Another purports to help treat anxiety and symptoms of depression. Another reads and interprets brain signals while the user scrolls through dating apps, presumably to provide better matches. ("'Listen to your heart' is not enough," the manufacturer says on its website.) The companies behind such technologies have access to the records of the users' brain activity -- the electrical signals underlying our thoughts, feelings and intentions. On Wednesday, Governor Jared Polis of Colorado signed a bil