Industry News

Cisco Talos, a US cybersecurity firm, said it detected the OfflRouter virus in Ukrainian networks embedded in text documents “with potentially confidential information” during a “threat-hunting exercise.”

The virus remains active in Ukraine and could potentially upload documents of unsuspecting users whose computer is infected with the virus, it said.

The ability of the United States to intercept and store Americans’ text messages, calls, and emails in pursuit of foreign intelligence was not only extended but enhanced over the weekend in ways likely to remain enigmatic to the public for years to come.

On Saturday, US president Joe Biden signed a controversial bill extending the life of a warrantless US surveillance program for two years, bringing an end to a months-long fight in Congress over an authority that US intelligence agencies acknowledge has been widely abused in the past.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman thinks that Apple's M4 chips for Macs are coming sooner rather than later—possibly as early as "late this year," per a report from earlier this month. Now Gurman says Apple could completely skip the M3 generation for some Macs, most notably the Mac mini.

By the end of Friday, the size of the reward for mining bitcoin will have been cut in half. The event—known as the halving—takes place roughly once every four years, and it can be fatal for the mining companies that compete for the newly minted cryptocurrency.

“You don’t see that in any other industry,” says Charles Chong, director of strategy at Foundry, a company that mines bitcoin and provides services to other miners. “You’re on a treadmill. If you don’t keep running, you are going to get left behind.” The only mercy, he says, is that “you get a lot of time to prepare.”

An AI test pilot has successfully flown a jet fighter in dogfights against human opponents. It's the latest development for DARPA's Air Combat Evaluation program, which is trying to develop aerospace AI agents that can be trusted to perform safely.

Human test pilots have a bit of a reputation thanks to popular culture—from The Right Stuff to Top Gun: Maverick, the profession has been portrayed as a place for loose cannons with a desire to go fast and break the rules. The reality is pretty far from that these days, especially where DARPA is concerned.

Two of the biggest deepfake pornography websites have now started blocking people trying to access them from the United Kingdom. The move comes days after the UK government announced plans for a new law that will make creating nonconsensual deepfakes a criminal offense.

A TikTok ban is back on the table after the House approved a new bill on Saturday addressing the issues that stalled it out in the Senate.

The bill would allow the Biden administration to ban TikTok nationwide if it doesn’t divest from its China-based owner, Bytedance, within a year. It’s different from a similar bill passed in the House last month and gives TikTok an additional six months to find a US buyer. The previous bill stalled out in the Senate after Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell raised several issues, including the short timeline for divestiture.

A jury has unanimously convicted Avi Eisenberg in the US Department of Justice's first case involving cryptocurrency open-market manipulation, the DOJ announced Thursday. The jury found Eisenberg guilty of commodities fraud, commodities market manipulation, and wire fraud in connection with the manipulation on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange called Mango Markets.

An executive producer of the Netflix hit What Jennifer Did has responded to accusations that the true crime documentary used AI images when depicting Jennifer Pan, a woman currently imprisoned in Canada for orchestrating a murder-for-hire scheme targeting her parents.

Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government.