Industry News

China is going back to the Moon for more samples.

On Friday the country launched its largest rocket, the Long March 5, carrying an orbiter, lander, ascent vehicle, and a return spacecraft. The combined mass of the Chang'e-6 spacecraft is about 8 metric tons, and it will attempt to return rocks and soil from the far side of the Moon—something scientists have never been able to study before in-depth.

A Florida resident was sentenced to 78 months for running a counterfeit scam that generated $100 million in revenue from fake networking gear and put the US military's security at risk, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday.

Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the web’s most prolific—and increasingly dangerous—scammers.

 The Iranian state-sponsored hacker group known as APT42 is impersonating well-known news outlets and think tanks to target journalists, researchers and activists in Western countries and the Middle East, researchers say.

For example, in a campaign that started in 2021 and is still ongoing, the hackers masqueraded as The Washington Post, The Economist and The Jerusalem Post to harvest login credentials from anyone who clicked on fake website links, according to research released this week by Google-owned Mandiant. APT42’s primary goal is espionage.

Cybersecurity researchers from JFrog recently discovered three malicious campaigns in Docker Hub - Docker’s cloud-based registry service for storing and sharing container images. These campaigns contained millions of repositories that pushed generic trojan malware to the developers.

The conclusion of JFrog’s findings is that with open-source repositories such as Docker Hub, keeping them clean of malware is an immensely difficult task.

On Tuesday, the US General Services Administration began an auction for the decommissioned Cheyenne supercomputer, located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The 5.34-petaflop supercomputer ranked as the 20th most powerful in the world at the time of its installation in 2016. Bidding started at $2,500, but its price is currently $270,085.

Microsoft has poured over $100 billion into developing its Bing search engine over the past two decades but has little market share to show for it. About nine out of every 10 web searches in the US are made through Google, with Bing splitting the remaining queries with a long list of small competitors.

On Thursday the US government asked a federal judge in Washington, DC, to rule that Google maintains that lead illegally, by unfairly manipulating users to keep Microsoft and other competitors down.

The Biden administration is asking the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to tightening the digital security of their software and cloud services. The voluntary pledge, first reported by WIRED, represents the latest effort by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to build support for its Secure by Design initiative, which encourages tech vendors to prioritize cybersecurity while developing and configuring their products.

In mid-June 2019, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella received a rude awakening in an email warning that Google had officially gotten too far ahead on AI and that Microsoft may never catch up without investing in OpenAI.

With the subject line "Thoughts on OpenAI," the email came from Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, who is also the company’s executive vice president of AI. In it, Scott said that he was "very, very worried" that he had made "a mistake" by dismissing Google's initial AI efforts as a "game-playing stunt."

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced the launch of an iOS mobile app for its Claude 3 AI language models that are similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. It also introduced a new subscription tier designed for group collaboration. Before the app launch, Claude was only available through a website, an API, and other apps that integrated Claude through API.