Industry News

A dual Canadian-Russian national has been sentenced to four years in prison for his role in infecting more than 1,000 victims with the LockBit ransomware and then extorting them for tens of millions of dollars.

Mikhail Vasiliev, a 33-year-old who most recently lived in Ontario, Canada, was arrested in November 2022 and charged with conspiring to infect protected computers with ransomware and sending ransom demands to victims. Last month, he pleaded guilty to eight counts of cyber extortion, mischief, and weapons charges.

Alyssa Videlock was 11 years old when she started searching for people like her on the internet. What she found, back in the early 2000s, was not at all what she’d hoped for. “Being trans online was not really a thing,” she says. “There was fetish stuff for it, and there were stories about transformation. But it was either porn or … porn.”

At this point in the progression of machine-learning AI, we're accustomed to specially trained agents that can utterly dominate everything from Atari games to complex board games like Go. But what if an AI agent could be trained not just to play a specific game but also to interact with any generic 3D environment? And what if that AI was focused not only on brute-force winning but instead on responding to natural language commands in that gaming environment?

A US federal jury has convicted a dual Russian-Swedish national, Roman Sterlingov, for operating Bitcoin Fog, "the longest-running bitcoin money laundering service on the darknet," the Department of Justice announced yesterday.

This morning, the US House of Representatives voted to essentially ban TikTok, unless Chinese-owned Bytedance divests from the app entirely. If passed in the Senate, TikTok would have about six months to untangle itself from its China-based owner.

In speeches leading up to the vote on H.R. 7521, known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, members of Congress highlighted the many security concerns with the app, including the potential for employees at the Chinese company to access American user data, and the spread of pro-China propaganda.

The intelligence community says that China, Russia and Iran are capable of and willing to launch cyberattacks seeking to disrupt the U.S. presidential election in November, according to an assessment released Monday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The annual threat assessment which collates findings from U.S. spy agencies released at the cusp of a high profile Senate hearing examining worldwide threats to U.S. national security, which included vast analysis of cyber and technology threats.

After suing OpenAI this month, alleging the company has become too closed, Elon Musk says he will release his “truth-seeking” answer to ChatGPT, the chatbot Grok, for anyone to download and use.

“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X today. That suggests his AI company, xAI, will release the full code of Grok and allow anyone to use or alter it. By contrast, OpenAI makes a version of ChatGPT and the language model behind it available to use for free but keeps its code private.

After a year of eyebrow-raising headlines about government whistleblowers alleging that the military was running secret programs focused on alien spaceships and a months-long study and dogged investigative work through the shadows of classified Pentagon programs, the United States Defense Department announced Friday that it found no evidence that the government is covering up contact with extraterrestrials.

L33tdawg: Gotta love the pronunciation :D 

Last week, the developers behind the popular Switch emulator Yuzu took down their GitLab and web presence in the face of a major lawsuit from Nintendo. Now, a new project built from the Yuzu source code, cheekily named Suyu, has arisen as "the continuation of the world's most popular, open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu."

On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected "botnet-like" activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted about the announcement, which came via Midjourney's official Discord channel.