French company Nawa technologies says it's already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long. NewAtlas reports: Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits. It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today's typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they're typically stuck on in a jumbled, "tangled spaghetti" fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.

Nawa's vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else. The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions -- the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery -- since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. "The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometres through the lithium material," Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, "instead of micrometres with a plain electrode."

Nintendo is about to release its biggest product for the holiday season, where it will be up against new-generation consoles from rivals Microsoft and Sony. An early look at the new Mario Kart game for the Switch, featuring augmented reality and your living room as the race track, indicates that Nintendo will be just as competitive. From a report: In Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which becomes available from the Japanese gaming giant on Oct. 16, players use their Switch consoles to race and around their home. The action places animated objects in real-world surroundings, along the lines of Pokemon Go. Here's how it works: You, holding your Switch, play through what would look like a regular game of Mario Kart if not for your couch and dinner table in the background. You'll steer around a real toy kart on a track you've plotted out in your house. A camera attached to the kart feeds footage to your Switch screen, allowing you to take control of Mario or Luigi as they collect mushrooms and drive laps.

The game, previewed over a Zoom call with a Nintendo representative, looks fun and challenging, with a robust selection of options such as custom races and environments. Everything one might expect from a Mario Kart game is here, from the sound effects to the prominent presence of Lakitu, a friendly monster who sits on a cloud and referees the race, occasionally using a fishing rod to rescue you from danger. You can build elaborate racing tracks out of furniture and cardboard, limited only by the size of your room, which may be a drag for those in New York apartments.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the better part of the last decade, Google's Chromecast dongles were the company's primary homegrown solution for streaming video to your TV. But with the recent explosion in streaming services, even the most sophisticated Chromecast wasn't really cutting it anymore, which is something the new Chromecast with Google TV is hoping to change in a big way, but bringing an actual streaming device OS to a Chromecast dongle. The big change for this new $50 Chromecast is that it's not your typical Chromecast at all. Sure, it still plugs in via HDMI and you can still use it to stream videos and content to your TV from your phone. However, instead of being based around the very basic Chromecast interface, this new Chromecast runs on Android TV platform which Google has improved with an enhanced UI and a few new features, which is where the Google TV part of Chromecast with Google TV comes in.

And when you factor in the Chromecast with Google TV's new dedicated remote these upgrades could completely change how you watch and interact with content. Starting with the hardware, the Chromecast with Google TV consists of two parts: there's the dongle that plugs into your TV and Google's included remote. For the Chromecast with Google TV, Google is going with a simple ovular puck that comes in three different colors (Snow, Sunrise, and Sky) and features an attached HDMI cable that plugs into your TV along with a USB-C port and bundled cable that you'll need to plug in for power. The Chromecast with Google TV comes with support for 4K video at 60 fps with HDR via Dolby Vision, which ticks all the major boxes when it comes to streaming video quality.

Twitter is notifying developers today about a possible security incident that may have impacted their accounts. From a report: The incident was caused by incorrect instructions that the developer.twitter.com website sent to users' browsers. The developer.twitter.com website is the portal where developers manage their Twitter apps and attached API keys, but also the access token and secret key for their Twitter account. In an email sent to developers today, Twitter said that its developer.twitter.com website told browsers to create and store copies of the API keys, account access token, and account secret inside their cache, a section of the browser where data is saved to speed up the process of loading the page when the user accessed the same site again. This might not be a problem for developers using their own browsers, but Twitter is warning developers who may have used public or shared computers to access the developer.twitter.com website -- in which case, their API keys are now most likely stored in those browsers.

Last week, voters and election administrators who emailed Leanne Jackson, the clerk of rural Hamilton County in central Texas, received bureaucratic-looking replies. "Re: official precinct results," one subject line read. The text supplied passwords for an attached file. But Jackson didn't send the messages. From a report: Instead, they came from Sri Lankan and Congolese email addresses, and they cleverly hid malicious software inside a Microsoft Word attachment. By the time Jackson learned about the forgery, it was too late. Hackers continued to fire off look-alike replies. Jackson's three-person office, already grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, ground to a near standstill. "I've only sent three emails today, and they were emails I absolutely had to send," Jackson said Friday. "I'm scared to" send more, she said, for fear of spreading the malware. The previously unreported attack on Hamilton illustrates an overlooked security weakness that could hamper the November election: the vulnerability of email systems in county offices that handle the voting process from registration to casting and counting ballots. Although experts have repeatedly warned state and local officials to follow best practices for computer security, numerous smaller locales like Hamilton appear to have taken few precautionary measures.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials have helped local governments in recent years to bolster their infrastructure, following Russian hacking attempts during the last presidential election. But desktop computers used each day in small rural counties to send routine emails, compose official documents or analyze spreadsheets can be easier targets, in part because those jurisdictions may not have the resources or know-how to update systems or afford security professionals familiar with the latest practices. A ProPublica review of municipal government email systems in swing states found that dozens of them relied on homebrew setups or didn't follow industry standards. Those protocols include encryption to ensure email passwords are secure and measures that confirm that people sending emails are who they purport to be. At least a dozen counties in battleground states didn't use cloud-hosted email from firms like Google or Microsoft. While not a cure-all, such services improve protections against email hacks.

"A successful basic-income trial in Stockton, California, has inspired a chain of similar pilots in other cities," reports Business Insider: The city council of Saint Paul, Minnesota, voted to approve funding for a pilot there on Wednesday. The program is set to begin this fall and will give up to 150 low-income families $500 per month for up to 18 months — no strings attached... "I think there's a budding realization that not only is this a good thing for us to try, but that we may not have any other option," St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter said on a Wednesday press call...

"We're obviously seeing an unprecedented crisis in our communities across our country," Carter said. "We're coming to a recognition that we don't have a funding problem. We have a priorities problem."
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced he was donating $3 million to a coalition of "Mayors for a Guaranteed Income." The group currently has 25 mayors -- two who are already overseeing pilot programs in their own cities -- while Chicago, Newark, and Atlanta "have created task forces to help design their programs," and the mayor of Pittsburgh would like to launch one of their own by the end of the year.

In another article, Business Insider created a map showing the locations of 48 basic income programs that have happened around the world (based on data from the Stanford Basic Income Lab). But they also provide this summary of their current state: So is basic income the real deal or a pipe dream? The results are still unclear. Some, like the initial pilots for Uganda's Eight program, were found to result in significant multipliers on economic activity and well-being. Other programs, however, returned mixed results that made further experimentation difficult. Finland's highly-touted pilot program decreased stress levels of recipients across the board, but didn't positively impact work activity.

The biggest difficulty has been in keeping programs going and securing funding. Ontario's three-year projects were prematurely cancelled in 2018 before they could be completed and assessed, and the next stages of Finland's program are in limbo. Likewise in the U.S., start-up incubator Y Combinator has been planning a $60M basic income study program, but can't proceed until funding is secured.

Mozilla is shutting down two of its legacy products, Firefox Send and Firefox Notes, the company announced today. From a report: "Both services are being decommissioned and will no longer be a part of our product family," a Mozilla spokesperson told ZDNet this week. Of the two, the most beloved was Firefox Send, a free file-sharing service, and one of the few that supported sharing files in encrypted formats. Launched in March 2019, the service gained a dedicated fanbase but Send was taken offline earlier this summer after ZDNet reported on its constant abuse by malware groups. At the time, Mozilla said that Send's shutdown was temporary and promised to find a way to curb the service's abuse in malware operations. But weeks later, things changed after Mozilla leadership laid off more than 250 employees as part of an effort to re-focus its business on commercial products.

rastos1 writes: Starting with Windows Insiders preview build 20211, WSL 2 will be offering a new feature: wsl --mount. This new parameter allows a physical disk to be attached and mounted inside WSL 2, which enables you to access filesystems that aren't natively supported by Windows (such as ext4).

A major focus of any smartphone release is the camera. For a while, all eyes were on the camera's hardware -- megapixels, sensors, lenses, and so on. But since Google's Pixel was introduced, there's been a lot more interest in the camera's software and how it takes advantage of the computer it's attached to. Marc Levoy, former distinguished engineer at Google, led the team that developed computational photography technologies for the Pixel phones, including HDR+, Portrait Mode, and Night Sight, and he's responsible for a lot of that newfound focus on camera processing. An excerpt from the wide-ranging interview: Nilay Patel: When you look across the sweep of smartphone hardware, is there a particular device or style of device that you're most interested in expanding these techniques to? Is it the 96-megapixel sensors we see in some Chinese phones? Is it whatever Apple has in the next iPhone? Is there a place where you think there's yet more to be gotten?
Marc Levoy: Because of the diminishing returns due to the laws of physics, I don't know that the basic sensors are that much of a draw. I don't know that going to 96 megapixels is a good idea. The signal-to-noise ratio will depend on the size of the sensor. It is more or less a question of how big a sensor can you stuff into the form factor of a mobile camera. Before, the iPhone smartphones were thicker. If we could go back to that, if that would be acceptable, then we could put larger sensors in there. Nokia experimented with that, wasn't commercially successful.
Other than that, I think it's going to be hard to innovate a lot in that space. I think it will depend more on the accelerators, how much computation you can do during video or right after photographic capture. I think that's going to be a battleground.

Nilay Patel:When you say 96 is a bad idea -- much like we had megahertz wars for a while, we did have a megapixel war for a minute. Then there was, I think, much more excitingly, an ISO war, where low-light photography and DSLRs got way better, and then soon, that came to smartphones. But we appear to be in some sort of megapixel count war again, especially on the Android side. When you say it's not a good idea, what makes it specifically not a good idea?
Marc Levoy: As I said, the signal to noise ratio is basically a matter of the total sensor size. If you want to put 96 megapixels and you can't squeeze a larger sensor physically into the form factor of the phone, then you have to make the pixels smaller, and you end up close to the diffraction limit and those pixels end up worse. They are noisier. It's just not clear how much advantage you get. There might be a little bit more headroom there. Maybe you can do a better job of de-mosaicing -- meaning computing the red, green, blue in each pixel -- if you have more pixels, but there isn't going to be that much headroom there. Maybe the spec on the box attracts some consumers. But I think, eventually, like the megapixel war on SLRs, it will tone down, and people will realize that's not really an advantage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this week, an advertising agency emerged with a video bragging about an ad-campaign concept: We'll invade gaming-filled Twitch chat rooms and post ads for your brand for cheap. The attached video was exactly the kind of cringe you might expect from "brand engages with video game culture," with edgy yet inoffensive quotes, footage of fake games, and digitally altered voices. But what looked like a fake ad concept has turned out to be very real -- and after examining how Twitch works, the whole thing looks like a possible FTC violation.

The ad campaign, run by the Ogilvy agency on behalf of Burger King, relied on a common Twitch trope of donating to game-streaming hosts. "Affiliate" Twitch users are eligible to receive cash from viewers, either in the form of flat-rate subscriptions or variable one-time donations, and hosts often encourage this by adding text-to-voice automation to the process. So if you pay a certain amount, a voice will read your statement out loud -- and hosts usually retroactively react to weird and offensive statements made by these systems instead of pre-screening them. (They're busy playing a game, after all.) Ogilvy's promotion revolved around the low cost of entry for these text-to-voice prompts. Their ads, written to promote a fast-food chain, were attached to specific dollar amounts. One example, as explained by Twitch streamer Ross "RubberNinja" O'Donovan (not to be confused with that other Ninja), went as follows: "I just donated $5 to tell you that you can spend $5 and get [a combined meal on our app]. It seems like a twisted strategy." O'Donovan went on to post his disdain for American fast food and compared it to what he ate when he lived in Australia, which prompted Ogilvy's "THE_KING_OF_STREAM" account to donate another $5 and make a joke about Australian food. Ogilvy had described the ad campaign as run by a "bot," implying automation, but O'Donovan's example implies some form of human control and curation in terms of reacting to Twitch host pushback.

In a Thursday report, Kotaku's Nathan Grayson went sniffing around to discover many other examples of Ogilvy's ads playing out on real Twitch channels over the course of the week -- and the Kotaku report quoted pretty much all of those hosts decrying this practice. [...] More crucially for Ogilvy and Burger King, however, is the matter of how those ads appeared: as sneaky "fan" declarations in chat rooms. Though the campaign was largely run by the aforementioned "THE_KING_OF_STREAM" account and appeared as such in Twitch chat rooms, it wasn't in any way represented by Twitch as a sponsor's account, nor were the posts labeled as "#ad" or other clear markings. As O'Donovan and other streamers have made clear, that kind of transparency would have gotten such chat statements instantly deleted or modded for violating individual channel rules. While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has clear guidance about "deceptive" online advertising, and it demands that channel hosts comply with FTC guidance to make sure sponsored statements are easily identified, Ogilvy may have slipped through the FTC's current guidance cracks.

Christine Ro from the BBC writes about the private agents in Japan, called "wakaresaseya," that you can hire to seduce your spouse or their partner. From the report: The industry is still serving a niche market. One survey showed around 270 wakaresaseya agencies advertising online. Many are attached to private-detective firms, similar to private investigators in other countries (who can also become entangled in relationship dissolution). "Wakaresaseya service costs quite a lot of money," acknowledges [Yusuke Mochizuki, an agent of the "farewell shop" First Group], so clients tend to be well-off. Mochizuki, a former musician who has turned his lifelong interest in detective work into a career, says that he might charge 400,000 yen for a relatively straightforward case in which there's plenty of information about the target's activities, but more if the target is, for example, a recluse. Fees can go as high as 20 million yen if a client is a politician or a celebrity, requiring the highest level of secrecy. (While Mochizuki says that his firm has a high success rate, a consultancy that provides advice on the industry points out that potential clients should be sceptical of such claims, and prepared for possible failure.)

Although some features of the wakaresaseya industry are unique to Japan, similar services exist around the world. They may be less formalized honeytrap or con-artist arrangements, or they may be part of the private-investigations industry. Conventionally "the Western perspective was to sensationalize the industry and almost exoticise it. There's this false exoticisation of Japan that occurs in the West quite frequently." It's difficult to gain a full understanding of the people affected by the wakaresaseya industry, because according to Scott, "people are very reluctant to be seen as associated with it, let alone a victim of it." The industry has a seedy reputation.

As TV and radio producer Mai Nishiyama comments; "There's a market for everything in Japan." This includes a variety of relationship-based services like renting faux family members and the additional services offered by wakaresaseya firms, such as assistance with romantic reconciliation, separating a child from an unsuitable girlfriend or boyfriend or preventing revenge porn. Agents can also be hired to gather evidence that will help a wronged spouse collect consolation money, which is compensation for the dissolution of a relationship. Although the Yamagami International Law Office hasn't worked with wakaresaseya agents, lawyer Shogo Yamagami notes that some clients do work with private agents more generally to obtain evidence of adultery. The consolation payment system means that hiring wakaresaseya agents can be beneficial not just emotionally, but also in practical monetary terms.

The New York Times tells the story of the 17-year-old "mastermind" arrested Friday for the takeover of dozens of high-profile Twitter accounts.

They report that Graham Ivan Clark "had a difficult family life" and "poured his energy into video games and cryptocurrency" after his parents divorced when he was 7, and he grew up in Tampa, Florida with his mother, "a Russian immigrant who holds certifications to work as a facialist and as a real estate broker." By the age of 10, he was playing the video game Minecraft, in part to escape what he told friends was an unhappy home life. In Minecraft, he became known as an adept scammer with an explosive temper who cheated people out of their money, several friends said.... In late 2016 and early 2017, other Minecraft players produced videos on YouTube describing how they had lost money or faced online attacks after brushes with Mr. Clark's alias "Open...."

Mr. Clark's interests soon expanded to the video game Fortnite and the lucrative world of cryptocurrencies. He joined an online forum for hackers, known as OGUsers, and used the screen name Graham$... Mr. Clark described himself on OGUsers as a "full time crypto trader dropout" and said he was "focused on just making money all around for everyone." Graham$ was later banned from the community, according to posts uncovered by the online forensics firm Echosec, after the moderators said he failed to pay Bitcoin to another user who had already sent him money to complete a transaction.

Still, Mr. Clark had already harnessed OGUsers to find his way into a hacker community known for taking over people's phone numbers to access all of the online accounts attached to the numbers, an attack known as SIM swapping. The main goal was to drain victims' cryptocurrency accounts. In 2019, hackers remotely seized control of the phone of Gregg Bennett, a tech investor in the Seattle area. Within a few minutes, they had secured Mr. Bennett's online accounts, including his Amazon and email accounts, as well as 164 Bitcoins that were worth $856,000 at the time and would be worth $1.8 million today... In April, the Secret Service seized 100 Bitcoins from Mr. Clark, according to government forfeiture documents... Mr. Bennett said in an interview that a Secret Service agent told him that the person with the stolen Bitcoins was not arrested because he was a minor... By then, Mr. Clark was living in his own apartment in a Tampa condo complex...

[L]ess than two weeks after the Secret Service seizure, prosecutors said Mr. Clark began working to get inside Twitter. According to a government affidavit, Mr. Clark convinced a "Twitter employee that he was a co-worker in the IT department and had the employee provide credentials to access the customer service portal."
The plan was to sell access to the breached Twitter accounts, but Clark apparently began cheating his customers again, the Times reports — "reminiscent of what Mr. Clark had done earlier on Minecraft..."

"Mr. Clark, who prosecutors said worked with at least two others to hack Twitter but was the leader, is being charged as an adult with 30 felonies."

An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American: For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic events: dogs barking incessantly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds... Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, both in Germany, along with a multinational team of colleagues, say they have managed to precisely measure increased activity in a group of farm animals prior to seismic activity...

The researchers used highly sensitive instruments that record accelerated movements — up to 48 each second — in any direction. During separate periods totaling about four months in 2016 and 2017, they attached these biologgers and GPS sensors to six cows, five sheep and two dogs living on a farm in an earthquake-prone area of northern Italy. A total of more than 18,000 tremors occurred during the study periods, with more seismic activity during the first one — when a magnitude 6.6 quake and its aftershocks struck the region. The team's work was published in July in Ethology...

Analyzing the increased movements as a whole, the researchers claim, showed a clear signal of anticipatory behavior hours ahead of tremors. "It's sort of a system of mutual influence," Wikelski says. "Initially, the cows kind of freeze in place — until the dogs go crazy. And then the cows actually go even crazier. And then that amplifies the sheep's behavior, and so on...." This "swarm intelligence" can happen within or across species, Wikelski says. For example, "we did a study on Galápagos marine iguanas, and we know that they are actually listening in to mockingbirds' warnings about the Galápagos hawks," he adds. "These kinds of systems exist all over the place. We're just not really tuned in to them yet."

The researchers say the farm animals appeared to anticipate tremors anywhere from one to 20 hours ahead, reacting earlier when they were closer to the origin and later when they were farther away. This finding, the authors contend, is consistent with a hypothesis that animals somehow sense a signal that diffuses outward.

China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place, reports the Atlantic's deputy editor, and "because a new regulation requires telecom firms to scan the face of anyone who signs up for cellphone services, phones' data can now be attached to a specific person's face."

But the article also warns that when it comes to AI-powered surveillance, China "could also export it beyond the country's borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats" and "shift the balance of power between the individual and the state worldwide..." The country is now the world's leading seller of AI-powered surveillance equipment.... China uses "predatory lending to sell telecommunications equipment at a significant discount to developing countries, which then puts China in a position to control those networks and their data," Michael Kratsios, America's CTO, told me. When countries need to refinance the terms of their loans, China can make network access part of the deal, in the same way that its military secures base rights at foreign ports it finances. "If you give [China] unfettered access to data networks around the world, that could be a serious problem," Kratsios said...

Having set up beachheads* in Asia, Europe, and Africa, China's AI companies are now pushing into Latin America, a region the Chinese government describes as a "core economic interest." China financed Ecuador's $240 million purchase of a surveillance-camera system. Bolivia, too, has bought surveillance equipment with help from a loan from Beijing. Venezuela recently debuted a new national ID-card system that logs citizens' political affiliations in a database built by ZTE.
* The article provides these additional examples:

• In Malaysia, the government is working with Yitu, a Chinese AI start-up, to bring facial-recognition technology to Kuala Lumpur's police...
• Chinese companies also bid to outfit every one of Singapore's 110,000 lampposts with facial-recognition cameras.
• In South Asia, the Chinese government has supplied surveillance equipment to Sri Lanka.
• On the old Silk Road, the Chinese company Dahua is lining the streets of Mongolia's capital with AI-assisted surveillance cameras.
• In Serbia, Huawei is helping set up a "safe-city system," complete with facial-recognition cameras and joint patrols conducted by Serbian and Chinese police aimed at helping Chinese tourists to feel safe.
• Kenya, Uganda, and Mauritius are outfitting major cities with Chinese-made surveillance networks...

After scrubbing several attempts for weather concerns, technical issues, and even a range violation due to a nearby boat, SpaceX succeeded in static-fire testing the latest prototype of its Starship vehicle on Thursday. Ars Technica reports: At 3:02pm local time in South Texas, the single Raptor engine attached to the Starship prototype dubbed Serial Number 5, or SN5, roared to life for a few seconds. In video shared by NASASpaceflight.com, the test appeared to be nominal, evidently providing SpaceX engineers with the confidence they need in the latest iteration of Starship. Shortly after the test, the founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, Elon Musk, confirmed that the static fire meant the company now plans to move forward with a short test flight of the vehicle. Based upon a notification from the US Federal Aviation Administration, this 150-meter flight test could take place as soon as Sunday, with a launch window opening at 8am local time (13:00 UTC). This would be the first flight test of Starship hardware since a stubby prototype -- Starhopper -- soared to 150 meters in late August 2019. That test, in which a single Raptor engine powered the vehicle upward and laterally for about 100 meters before landing, was successful in demonstrating thrust and vector control of the methane-fueled engine.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has temporarily suspended the Firefox Send file-sharing service as the organization investigates reports of abuse from malware operators and while it adds a "Report abuse" button. The browser maker took down the service today after ZDNet reached out to inquire about Firefox Send's increasing prevalence in current malware operations. Since last year, several malware operations have hosted payloads on the service. This includes ransomware gangs like REvil/Sodinokibi, financial crime crews like FIN7, the Zloader and Ursnif banking trojans operations, and government surveillance groups targeting human rights defenders. Reasons include the fact that Firefox Send doesn't have an Report Abuse mechanism, all file uploads are encrypted (useful to dodge malware scanners), and the Firefox URL is whitelisted in most orgs (useful for bypassing email filters).

According to Hollywood Reporter, "Amazon Studios has licensed the rights to the best-selling video game franchise Fallout, with married writers and showrunners Joy and Nolan attached to oversee the potential TV series." From the report: The project is currently in development but has a series commitment penalty attached. That means that if Amazon execs like the script, Fallout would bypass the traditional pilot stage and go directly to series (or if it is passed over, all involved would be paid out as if it had). A writer is not currently attached.

Making its debut in 1997, Fallout is set in the future envisioned by Americans in the late 1940s when the country explodes upon itself through a nuclear war in 2077. The series takes place in a harsh wasteland set against the previous generation's utopian idea of a better world through nuclear energy. Joy and Nolan will exec produce the series via their Kilter Films banner in association with game publishers Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks. Kilter's Athena Wickham, Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard and Bethesda Softworks' James Altman will also exec produce.

A hacker group going by the name of 'Cl0ud SecuritY' is breaking into old LenovoEMC (formerly Iomega) network-attached storage (NAS) devices, wiping files, and leaving ransom notes behind asking owners to pay between $200 and $275 to get their data back. From a report: Attacks have been happening for at least a month, according to entries on BitcoinAbuse, a web portal where users can report Bitcoin addresses abused in ransomware, extortions, cybercrime, and other online scams. Attacks appear to have targeted only LenovoEMC/Iomega NAS devices that are exposing their management interface on the internet without a password. ZDNet was able to identify around 1,000 such devices using a Shodan search.

"An innocent man faced a torrent of online threats and abuse after being mistakenly identified in a viral video in which an angry cyclist hurt a child," reports the BBC: Mr. Weinberg was falsely identified when the wrong date was attached to the initial appeal made by the police in Bethesda, U.S. Mr. Weinberg used the popular fitness tracking app Strava, which showed him as having been on the Maryland bike trail on that day.

However on the correct date he was working at home...

Once his address had been shared by others — a practice known as doxxing — the police had to patrol the area for his safety, reported New York magazine... Mr. Weinberg has since received dozens of apologies from people who abused him online.
Weinberg mistakenly thought his app only shared his bike-ride routes with his network of friends, New York Magazine reports.

They add that Weinberg also discovered tweets wrongly accusing another man — a former police officer in Maryland — which had been retweeted and liked more than half a million times. And that the woman who'd posted Weinberg's home address later "deleted it and posted an apology, writing that in all of her eagerness to see justice served, she was swept up in the mob that so gleefully shared misinformation, depriving someone of their own right to justice.

"Her correction was shared by fewer than a dozen people."

Homeowners and pool operators are turning to artificial intelligence for an extra layer of safety to prevent drownings in backyard and public pools. From a report: The detection systems, which use submerged cameras and a form of AI known as computer vision, analyze live videos of swimmers and send alerts if they spot a person who appears to be drowning. Jenny Naggatz, 33, of Gulf Breeze, Fla., installed an AI device from technology company Coral Detection Systems in her family's pool to safeguard her two children, both of whom are under 4. Coral Detection's triangle-shaped device sits in the corner of a pool with an attached camera hanging a few inches below the water surface. "It has definitely given me more peace of mind," Ms. Naggatz said. "I'm just as careful around the water as I would be without it, but it's just another layer of protection."

The safety of young children around swimming pools remains a cause for concern, according to a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission report released last week. On average, 379 children under 15 drowned each year in pools, spas or hot tubs from 2015 through 2017, the most recent statistics available, and hit a peak of 395 in 2017, the commission said. Noting that most child drownings occur at home during the summer months, the commission urged caution given that Covid-19 measures had confined more families to their homes and delayed the opening of public pools. AI drowning-detection products are not intended to replace adult supervision or lifeguards, but rather to serve as an extra safeguard.