A Department of Justice filing aiming to recover fraudulently obtained cryptocurrency may have inadvertently revealed the scam's victims as the CEO and CFO of crypto payment firm MoonPay. From a report: The filing, which aims to seize around $40,350 in USDT frozen by Tether, reveals that two victims sent $250,300 in USDT to a person posing as Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the President Trump's inaugural committee.

However, records obtained from Binance revealed that the wallet that received the funds was registered to Ehiremen Aigbokhan, a man based in Lagos, Nigeria. The victims are identified in the filing only as "Ivan" and "Mouna." However, as outlet NOTUS noticed, Crypto payment firm Moonpay's CEO is Ivan Soto-Wright and its CFO is Mouna Ammari Siala. Furthermore, a wallet involved in the $250,300 transaction is listed by Etherscan as a MoonPay wallet.

Cognition AI, an artificial intelligence startup that offers a software coding assistant, said on Monday that it had bought rival Windsurf as part of an escalating battle to lead in the technology. From a report: The move follows a $2.4 billion deal by Google to acquire some of Windsurf's top executives and license the start-up's technology, which was revealed on Friday.

Google's deal appeared to leave Windsurf in a difficult position as a stand-alone start-up. OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, had also been in talks to buy Windsurf before the Google deal. "We've long admired the Windsurf team and what they've built," said Scott Wu, a co-founder of Cognition, in an email to employees viewed by The New York Times. "Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together."

Air India's chief executive urged staff to avoid drawing premature conclusions about what caused one of the airline's Boeing triangle jets to crash last month, after a preliminary investigation ruled out mechanical or maintenance issues, turning attention to the pilots' actions. WSJ: Campbell Wilson told staff that the probe into the crash was "far from over," according to an internal memo, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, in which he set out some of the findings of a report issued by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau at the end of last week.

Wilson's memo didn't mention one of the AAIB's findings: that the airplane's fuel-control switches had been turned off one by one, seconds after takeoff, starving both engines of fuel. The switches, which sit between the two seats in the cockpit, were turned back on about 10 seconds later, but the engines apparently couldn't fully restart and gain thrust fast enough, the report said.

The crash of the London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner killed all but one of the 242 passengers and crew on board, as well as 19 people on the ground, when the plane slammed into a residential area beyond the airport in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. In the memo, Wilson said "over the past 30 days, we've seen an ongoing cycle of theories, allegations, rumours and sensational headlines, many of which have later been disproven."

A scientific paper featuring an AI-generated image of a rat with an oversized penis was retracted three days after publication, highlighting broader problems plaguing academic publishing as researchers struggle with an explosion of scientific literature. The paper appeared in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology before widespread mockery forced its withdrawal.

Research studies indexed on Clarivate's Web of Science database increased 48% between 2015 and 2024, rising from 1.71 million to 2.53 million papers. Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan called the publishing system "broken and unsustainable," while University of Exeter researcher Mark Hanson described scientists as "increasingly overwhelmed" by the volume of articles. The Royal Society plans to release a major review of scientific publishing disruptions at summer's end, with former government chief scientist Mark Walport citing incentives that favor quantity over quality as a fundamental problem.

Google will merge ChromeOS and Android into a unified platform, according to Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem at Google. "We're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done," Samat said during a recent interview.

Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for superintelligence, intensifying his pursuit of a technology that he has chased with a talent war for top AI engineers. From a report: The social media giant is among the large technology companies that have chased high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages in recent months to fast-track work on machines that can outthink humans on most tasks.

Unveiling the spending commitment in a Threads post on Monday, CEO Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company's core advertising business to support the massive spending that has raised concerns among tech investors about potential payoffs. "We have the capital from our business to do this," Zuckerberg said. He also cited a report from a chip industry publication Semianalysis that said Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring online a 1-gigawatt-plus supercluster, which refers to a massive data center built to train advanced AI models.

VPN provider BulletVPN has shut down its servers with immediate effect, leaving subscribers without service regardless of their subscription terms. The company announced the closure on its website, citing "shifts in market demand, evolving technology requirements, and sustainability of operations."

Users with active subscriptions can receive a free six-month subscription to competitor Windscribe, "along with discounted long-term plans." Windscribe clarified it has not acquired BulletVPN or assumed control of its operations, and no user data including email addresses or account information was shared between the companies.

Bay Area Michelin-starred restaurants are conducting extensive background research on diners before they arrive, mining social media profiles and maintaining detailed guest databases to personalize dining experiences. Lazy Bear maintains records on 115,000 people and employs a guest services coordinator who creates weekly reports by researching publicly available social media information.

Staff study color-coded Google documents containing guest data before each service. SingleThread's reservation team researches social media, Google, and LinkedIn profiles for guests, where meals cost over $500 on weekends. General manager Akeel Shah told SFGate the information helps "tailor the experience and make it memorable." Acquerello has collected guest data for 36 years, initially handwritten in books. Co-owner Giancarlo Paterlini said their director of operations reviews each reservation for dining history and wine preferences to customize service.

A Japanese government survey found 26.7% of people in Japan used generative AI during fiscal 2024, which ended in March. The figure tripled from the previous year but remained far behind China's 81.2% and the United States' 68.8%.

People in their 20s led Japanese adoption at 44.7%, followed by those in their 40s and 30s. Among companies, 49.7% of Japanese firms planned to use generative AI, compared to more than 80% of companies in China and the US.

Researchers have created the world's first mRNA-based vaccine against a deadly, antibiotic-resistant bacterium — and they did it using the platform developed for COVID-19 vaccines.

Medical Express publishes their announcement: The vaccine developed by the team from the Institute for Biological Research and Tel Aviv University is an mRNA-based vaccine delivered via lipid nanoparticles, similar to the COVID-19 vaccine. However, mRNA vaccines are typically effective against viruses like COVID-19 — not against bacteria like the plague... In 2023, the researchers developed a unique method for producing the bacterial protein within a human cell in a way that prompts the immune system to recognize it as a genuine bacterial protein and thus learn to defend against it.

The researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Institute for Biological Research proved, for the first time, that it is possible to develop an effective mRNA vaccine against bacteria. They chose Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague — a disease responsible for deadly pandemics throughout human history. In animal models, the researchers demonstrated that it is possible to effectively vaccinate against the disease with a single dose.
The team of researchers was led by Professor Dan Peer at Tel Aviv University, a global pioneer in mRNA drug development, who says the success of the current study now "paves the way for a whole world of mRNA-based vaccines against other deadly bacteria."

"Steam quietly welcomed another indie game this week, but this one is distinctly different for a lot of reasons," writes Notebookcheck: Dogwalk, which debuted on July 11, is the kind of short, gentle experience that almost forces you to smile. Developed by Blender Studio, the game introduces players to a gorgeous winter landscape. You play as a cute, fluffy dog, with a small child in tow...

What's particularly interesting here is that Dogwalk is more than just another charming indie project. It's Blender Studio's showcase for what's possible using fully open-source tools. The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine. Unlike industry giants such as Unity or Unreal, Godot is completely open source, meaning it doesn't require developers to pay royalties or follow strict licensing agreements. This should make it great for small studios and independent creators, as it lowers the entry barrier to game creation.

Dogwalk is 100% free, which fits neatly into its open-source philosophy

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen says Ada, a system programming language whose initial development dates back to the late 1970s, could outlast similarly aged languages like Visual Basic, Perl, and Fortran in the language popularity race.

In comments on this month's Tiobe language popularity index, posted July 9, Jansen said the index has not seen much change among leading languages such as Python, C#, and Java over the past two years. But there is more movement among older languages such as Visual Basic, SQL, Fortran, Ada, Perl, and Delphi, said Jansen. Every time one of these languages is expected to stay in the top 10, it is replaced by another language, he said. Even more remarkably, newer languages have yet to rise above them. "Where are Rust, Kotlin, Dart, and Julia? Apparently, established languages are hot."
"Which one will win? Honestly, this is very hard to tell," Jansen writes, "but I would put my bets on Ada. With the ever-stronger demands on security, Ada is, as a system programming language in the safety-critical domain, likely the best survivor."

Perhaps proving his point, one year ago, Ada was ranked #24 — but on this month's index it ranks #9. (Whereas the eight languages above it all remain in the exact same positions they held a year ago...)

1. Python
2. C++
3. C
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Go
8. Visual Basic
9. Ada
10. Delphi/Object Pascal

Can carbon-reducing projects "offset" a company's emissions? "The reality has been less encouraging," according to a Science magazine editorial by Cary Coglianese, a law/political science professor at University of Pennsylvania, and Cynthia Giles, a former senior advisor at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In a new paper published Wednesday, they found that more than half of all currently-certified carbon auditors signed off on projects later found to be "overclaiming" carbon benefits.

Their conclusion? "Criticism should be directed not at individual auditors as much as the structure of the system that fosters these outcomes." Most carbon offset projects that have been closely scrutinized — including projects for forest protection, renewable energy, and methane-reducing methods of rice cultivation — have greatly exaggerated their climate benefits. More than 80% of issued credits might not reflect real emission reductions. This has alarmed potential offset purchasers and stalled carbon offset markets.

Efforts to resuscitate the beleaguered offset market tout third-party auditing as "essential" to ensuring credit integrity. That reliance is misplaced... [E]xtensive research from many contexts shows that auditors selected and paid by audited organizations often produce results skewed toward those entities' interests. A field experiment in India, for example, found that air and water pollution auditors who were randomly assigned and paid from a central fund reported emissions at levels 50 to 70% higher than auditors selected and paid by audited firms. Auditors — like all people — are subject to a well-established and largely unconscious cognitive phenomenon of self-serving bias, causing them to interpret evidence in favor of their clients...

[A]uditors have been required all along and have failed to prevent substantial credit overclaiming. It is rarely acknowledged that all of the credit overclaiming projects that have stirred so much controversy were ratified by third-party auditors under the same auditor selection and payment system that offset advocates rely on today... Auditors are unlikely to stay in business if they disapprove credits at the high rates that research suggests would be appropriate today...

Given the high planetary stakes in carbon policy choices being made now, it is past time to recognize that third-party auditors selected and paid by the audited organizations are not the bulwark for credit integrity they are claimed to be.

At an Amazon warehouse that employs 3,700 people, hundreds of workers recently lost their job, reports the New York Times.

"They are among thousands of foreign workers across the country who have been swept up in a quiet purge, pushed out of jobs in places where their labor was in high demand and at times won high praise." While raids to nab workers in the country without legal permission in fields and Home Depot parking lots have grabbed attention, the job dismissals at the Amazon warehouse are part of the Trump administration's effort to thin the ranks of immigrants who had legal authorization to work... Such dismissals are happening at many of Amazon's more than 1,000 facilities around the country, including in Massachusetts and the warehouse in Staten Island that fills orders for millions of New Yorkers. At one fulfillment center in Florida, hundreds were let go, a person familiar with the site said... "We're supporting employees impacted by the government's recent changes in immigration policy," Richard Rocha, an Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement. The company has pointed workers to various resources, including outside free or low-cost legal services...

The dismissals came with remarkable speed. On May 30, the Supreme Court granted temporary approval for the Trump administration to revoke a program known as "humanitarian parole," which had allowed more than 500,000 migrants feeling political turmoil in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to quickly get work permits if they had a fiscal sponsor... On June 12, the Department of Homeland Security said it had begun notifying enrollees that the program was ending, saying the immigrants had been poorly vetted and undercut American workers...

On June 22, Amazon told managers around the country in an email, which was obtained by The New York Times, that it had "received the first list from D.H.S. identifying impacted Amazon employees" from the parole program, as well as "some employees outside of this specific program whose work authorization is similarly affected." Amazon let the managers know that the next day, the affected workers would receive push notifications in the employee app about the change. Unless the workers could provide alternate work authorization documents in the next five days, they would be suspended without pay and ultimately dismissed.

Brian Witten, VP/CSO of automotive technology supplier Aptiv, warns that "While seven to 10 years may sound like a long way off, preparation for quantum threats must begin now, not once they have already materialized." Organizations need time to implement post-quantum cryptography (PQC) transition plans methodically — and that applies both to anyone with an IT infrastructure and to anyone building software-defined systems. "Current encryption, such as RSA and ECC [elliptic curve cryptography], will become obsolete once quantum computing matures," said Cigent cofounder John Benkert. "Management often assumes cybersecurity threats are only present-day problems. But this is a future-proofing issue — especially relevant for industries dealing with sensitive, long-lifespan data, like healthcare, finance or government." Remediation requires long-term planning. Organizations that wait until quantum computers have broken encryption to address the threat will find that it is too late.
Start by building an inventory of what needs to change, Witten recommends. (Fortunately, "It's a matter of using newer and different chips and algorithms, not necessarily more expensive components," he writes, also suggesting requests for proposals "should ask vendors to include a PQC update plan.")

Firmware will also need quantum-resistant digital signatures. ("Broken authentication lets bad things happen. Someone could remotely take over a vehicle, for instance, or send malicious code for autonomous execution later, even after the vehicle has gone offline.") And remember that post-quantum key sizes are larger, requiring more storage space. "In some cases, digitally signed messages with security information could triple in size, which could impact storage and bandwidth."

Thanks to Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185) for sharing the article.