Dan Guido's cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits claims its clients range from Facebook to DARPA. CNET tells the story of what happened after someone stole Guido's electric scooter: The cybersecurity CEO, located in Brooklyn, New York, had hidden two Apple AirTags inside the black scooter, concealed with black duct tape. He set out the next day to locate the vehicle with help from the little Bluetooth trackers. Spoiler alert: He succeeded.

Guido works at the New York City-based Trail of Bits, a cybersecurity research and consulting firm that serves clients in the defense, tech, finance and blockchain industries. He chronicled his hunt for the scooter in a series of tweets Monday, sharing both the challenges and successes of his wild journey... After some convincing, two police officers eventually agreed to accompany him to the scooter's location. Then, they spotted something promising: an e-bike store.

After venturing inside, Guido received a ping, alerting him the elusive scooter was nearby...
Guido's tweets document the rest of the big confrontation. "As I further inspect the scooter, the cops start asking questions: Do you sell used e-bikes? Do you collect info from the seller? Do you ask they prove ownership? What is the contact info for the person who dropped this scooter off? No, No, No, and we don't know...

"An employee inside realizes we're investigating further. He immediately becomes agitated: I should be happy I got my scooter back and leave. It's my fault for getting it stolen. I'm screwing up his day. This isn't how we do things in Brooklyn. More joined in..."

Among Guido's final tweets of advice: "Limit your in-person interactions and always involve the police. Don't try to retrieve your stolen goods until you have backup."

Apple Insider adds that "This Apple Insider. "">isn't the first time that Apple's AirTags have been used to locate missing or stolen items. Back in July, a tech enthusiast said he used the tracking accessories to find his missing wallet hours after losing it on the New York City subway."

"It was pretty strange when Russia decided to announce last week that it had successfully run tests between June 15 and July 15 to show it could disconnect itself from the internet," writes an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The tests seem to have gone largely unnoticed both in and outside of Russia, indicating that whatever entailed did not involve Russia actually disconnecting from the global internet... since that would be impossible to hide. Instead, the tests — and, most of all, the announcement about their success — seem to be intended as some kind of signal that Russia is no longer dependent on the rest of the world for its internet access. But it's not at all clear what that would even mean since Russia is clearly still dependent on people and companies in other countries for access to the online content and services they create and host — just as we all are...

For the past two years, ever since implementing its "sovereign internet law" in 2019, Russia has been talking about establishing its own domestic internet that does not rely on any infrastructure or resources located outside the country. Presumably, the tests completed this summer are related to that goal of being able to operate a local internet within Russia that does not rely on the global Domain Name System to map websites to specific IP addresses. This is not actually a particularly ambitious goal — any country could operate its own domestic internet with its own local addressing system if it wanted to do so instead of connecting to the larger global internet... The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California San Diego maintains an Internet Outage Detection and Analysis tool that combines three data sets to identify internet outages around the world... The data sets for Russia from June 15 through July 15, the period of the supposed disconnection tests, shows few indications of any actual disconnection other than a period around July 5 when unsolicited traffic from Russia appears to have dropped off.

Whatever Russia did this summer, it did not physically disconnect from the global internet. It doesn't even appear to have virtually disconnected from the global internet in any meaningful sense. Perhaps it shifted some of its critical infrastructure systems to rely more on domestic service providers and resources. Perhaps it created more local copies of the addressing system used to navigate the internet and tested its ability to rely on those. Perhaps it tested its ability to route online traffic within the country through certain chokepoints for purposes of better surveillance and monitoring. None of those are activities that would be immediately visible from outside the country and all of them would be in line with Russia's stated goals of relying less on internet infrastructure outside its borders and strengthening its ability to monitor online activity.

But the goal of being completely independent of the rest of the world's internet infrastructure while still being able to access the global internet is a nonsensical and impossible one. Russia cannot both disconnect from the internet and still be able to use all of the online services and access all of the websites hosted and maintained by people in other parts of the world, as appears to have been the case during the monthlong period of testing... Being able to disconnect your country from the internet is not all that difficult — and certainly nothing to brag about. But announcing that you've successfully disconnected from the internet when it's patently clear that you haven't suggests both profound technical incompetence and a deep-seated uncertainty about what a domestic Russian internet would actually mean.

Weight lifting was one of just nine sports at the first Olympics in 1896, but its days on the summer program may be numbered. From a report: After decades of rampant doping, bribery, vote-rigging and corruption at weight lifting's highest levels, the International Olympic Committee finally took action last year by threatening to drop the sport from the Games in the coming months if the International Weightlifting Federation does not introduce a host of fixes, including rigorous drug testing measures and governance reforms.

The prognosis is not good. The leaders of the weight lifting federation failed during a key vote on June 30 to get the support needed to pass a new constitution aimed at addressing concerns from the Olympic committee. Delegates from the United States, Germany and China, among others, could not persuade their counterparts from the former Soviet republics, Latin America and other "old guard" weight lifting nations that would be hurt by tighter antidoping measures. If the federation, known as the I.W.F., cannot keep weight lifting on the Olympic program, millions of dollars would be cut off from a sport that lacks major television contracts or sponsors. Already, the I.O.C. had reduced the number of lifters in Tokyo to 196 from 260 during the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. The number will be cut again, to 120, at the Paris Games in 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams and charged him with murder (Williams maintains that Herring was hit in a drive-by shooting). A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams' car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m. - the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot. How did they know that's where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place. Except that's not entirely true, according to recent court filings.

That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive - a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams' public defender. The company's algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd's murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks. But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and "reclassified" the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after "post-processing," another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert's coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams' car was seen on camera. "Through this human-involved method, the ShotSpotter output in this case was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecution's murder case against Mr. Williams," the public defender wrote in the motion.

The document is what's known as a Frye motion - a request for a judge to examine and rule on whether a particular forensic method is scientifically valid enough to be entered as evidence. Rather than defend ShotSpotter's technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams. The case isn't an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities. Motherboard's review of court documents from the Williams case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including testimony from ShotSpotter's favored expert witness, suggests that the company's analysts frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments - some of which appear to be grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.

The price of bitcoin has come crashing below the $30,000 mark for the first time in a month. "At the time of this writing, Bitcoin is trading at $29,694.34," writes Paul Lilly via HotHardware. "That's down from around $31,000 yesterday, and less than half of where Bitcoin peaked at in April of this year, when it topped $60,000." From the report: Will it go back up? Probably, but for Bitcoin investors, there are definitely reasons to be cautious, outside of the normal volatility associated with cryptocurrencies. For one, China is cracking down on cryptocurrency in general. As such, crypto miners recently dumped a bunch of used GeForce RTX 3060 cards on eBay for relatively cheap (compared to what they had been selling for), as well as ASIC hardware, the latter of which is what Bitcoin miners use these days. But it's not just China.

Malaysian police recently seized and then steamrolled 1,069 ASIC mining rigs after discovering that miners had illegally tapped into a power grid to steal electricity for their operations. Talk about sending a strong message. In addition, six people were arrested, jailed, and fined (but hey, at least they weren't steamrolled). Tighter regulations in various territories could affect Bitcoin's value, too. For example, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said lawmakers must "act quickly" to construct and adopt new rules on stablecoins. "Bringing together regulators will enable us to assess the potential benefits of stablecoins while mitigating risks they could pose to users, markets, or the financial system," Yellen said in a statement. "In light of the rapid growth in digital assets, it is important for the agencies to collaborate on the regulation of this sector and the development of any recommendations for new authorities." It's worth noting that other cryptocurrencies are down too. Dogecoin is down more than 5 percent to $0.16, while Ethereum dropped more than 3 percent to $1,755.99. Just over two months ago it was at nearly $3,900.

In two hours, Richard Branson (and five other Virgin Galactic employees) will attempt a historic flight to the edge of outer space. Bloomberg points out it will be followed 9 days later by Jeff Bezos's rocket trip with Blue Origin on July 20.

"Yeah, there's a little bit of competition in the who's going first or when things are happening," Virgin President Mike Moses, a former space shuttle manager at NASA, told CBS News. "But it's really not a race. It's not a competition. I know that sounds maybe a little shallow or disingenuous, but it's not. "It's a small community. I know dozens of people who work at Blue Origin, I know dozens and dozens of people at SpaceX, and we all used to work together at NASA. And I wish every single one of them the best.... Because all of us together is what's going to get humans into space and our culture to recognize that space travel is the foundation for the future for everyone..."

"This has been a long journey for him," Mike Moses said of Branson. "He's like a kid in a candy store here in training this week. He's bouncing around, he's happy, excited. ... But that excitement is really infectious. And so the whole crew is feeling it."
CNN points out that Branson has "narrowly avoided being killed numerous times in his nearly 71 years," including dangerous stunts like bunjee jumping that left him bloody and injured, as well as accidents during long-distance balloon flights while attempting to set records.

Here's how Branson describes some of them in his second autobiography, "Finding My Virginity," which includes an appendix called "75 Close Shaves": 1972: Survived a fishing boat sinking on honeymoon with my first wife, Kristen, off Mexico. We decided to jump off the boat and swim for shore, while the others stayed put -- we were the only survivors.

1976: Flew a microlight aircraft by mistake. It was the first time I'd sat in it, I had no idea how to fly it and accidentally took off. I was pulling wires out desperately. I cut the engine and managed to crash-land into a field. My instructor died in an accident the next day...

1986: On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord...

1989: I decided to make an entrance to my wedding with Joan, dangling from a helicopter in an all-white suit. I dropped into the shallow end of the pool by mistake, smashed my legs, and spent the whole wedding hobbling.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Stat News: Death rates are declining for more than half of the most common forms of cancer in the U.S., according to a sweeping annual analysis released Thursday. The new report -- released by the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other collaborators -- found that between 2014 and 2018, death rates dropped for 11 out of 19 of the most common cancers among men and 14 of the 20 most prevalent cancers among women.

Accelerating declines in lung cancer deaths may account for much of the overall progress seen in recent years, the authors of the report said. Over the past two decades, the death rate for lung cancer has declined even faster than the rate at which patients are diagnosed with the disease. And while part of the early success in preventing lung cancer can be attributed to the massive drop in smoking rates, the authors note the most recent downward trends seem to correspond with the approval of new treatments for non-small cell lung cancer that improved the likelihood of survival. Death rates from melanoma also saw an accelerated decline in the past decade, despite a growing number of diagnoses. Like in lung cancer, authors point to the introduction of novel treatments around the same time as the turnaround on the death rate. New targeted and immune checkpoint inhibitors were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011, one year before major declines in death rates were seen in women and two years before they were seen in men.

While the report showed improved survival rates for many patients over recent years, others, such as prostate, colorectal, or female breast cancers, have seen progress stalled or stopped. Breast cancer continues to be one of the three deadliest cancers for women of all races, and the most frequently fatal cancer for Hispanic women. While the rates of death from breast cancer are declining, the pace of the decline has slowed over the past two decades, according to the report. And across the board, racial health disparities persist. Black women and white women are diagnosed with breast cancer at similar rates, but the mortality rate for Black women is 40% higher. Overall, cancer is more common among white individuals than Black individuals, but Black people die from cancer at higher rates. [The report] emphasized the importance of preventive measures for certain cancers, noting that while cancers related to smoking have continued to decrease, those related to excess body weight have increased. Early and consistent access to screenings has also been critical, as demonstrated by the apparent effect of adapted screening guidelines for colorectal cancer.

An anonymous reader writes: One in five Americans uses a Fitbit, Apple Watch or other wearable fitness tracker. And over the past year, several studies have suggested that the devices -- which can continually collect data on heart rates, body temperature, physical activity and more -- could help detect early signs of Covid-19 symptoms. Now, research suggests that these wearables can also help track patients' recovery from the disease, providing insight into its long-term effects. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Network Open, researchers studying Fitbit data reported that people who tested positive for Covid-19 displayed behavioral and physiological changes, including an elevated heart rate, that could last for weeks or months. These symptoms lasted longer in people with Covid than in those with other respiratory illnesses, the scientists found.

The new study focuses on a subset of 875 Fitbit-wearing participants who reported a fever, cough, body aches or other symptoms of a respiratory illness and were tested for Covid-19. Of those, 234 people tested positive for the disease. The rest were presumed to have other kinds of infections. Participants in both groups slept more and walked less after they got sick, and their resting heart rates rose. But these changes were more pronounced in people with Covid-19. "There was a much larger change in resting heart rate for individuals who had Covid compared to other viral infections," said Jennifer Radin, an epidemiologist at Scripps who leads the DETECT trial. "We also have a much more drastic change in steps and sleep." The scientists also found that about nine days after participants with Covid first began reporting symptoms, their heart rates dropped. After this dip, which was not observed in those with other illnesses, their heart rates rose again and remained elevated for months. It took 79 days, on average, for their resting heart rates to return to normal, compared with just four days for those in the non-Covid group.

This prolonged heart rate elevation may be a sign that Covid-19 disrupts the autonomic nervous system, which regulates basic physiological processes. The heart palpitations and dizziness reported by many people who are recovering from Covid may be symptoms of this disruption. Sleep and physical activity levels also returned to baseline more slowly in those with Covid-19 compared to those with other ailments, Dr. Radin and her colleagues found. The researchers identified a small subset of people with Covid whose heart rates remained more than five beats per minute above normal one to two months after infection. Nearly 14 percent of those with the disease fell into this category, and their heart rates did not return to normal for more than 133 days, on average. These participants were also significantly more likely to report having had a cough, shortness of breath and body aches during the acute phase of their illness than did other Covid patients.

Americans gobbled up fewer fossil fuels in 2020 than they have in three decades, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The Verge reports: Consumption of petroleum, natural gas, and coal dropped by 9 percent last year compared to 2019, the biggest annual decrease since the EIA started keeping track in 1949. The COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for much of the fall as people stayed home to curb the spread of the virus and used less gas. In April 2020, oil prices nosedived below zero because there was so little demand. The U.S. transportation sector alone used up 15 percent less energy in 2020 compared to the year before. Higher temperatures last winter also helped to cut energy demand for heating, according to the EIA. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels plummeted to a near 40-year low.

That downward trend will have to continue in order to stave off the climate crisis. Upon rejoining the Paris climate agreement, President Joe Biden committed the U.S. to slash its planet-heating pollution in half this decade from near-peak levels it reached in 2005. That's part of a global effort to keep global warming from surpassing a point that life on Earth would struggle to adapt to, a global average temperature that's roughly 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. To hit that goal, there should be no further investments in new fossil fuel projects, according to a recent landmark report from the International Energy Agency. The oil and gas industries are already feeling the crunch from lawsuits and activist investors forcing them to move faster toward more sustainable forms of energy.

It's now being called "the single biggest global ransomware attack on record," with thousands of victims in at least 17 different countries breached with ransomware Friday, reports the Associated Press, citing new details provided by cybersecurity researchers.

An affiliate of the Russia-linked gang REvil deployed the ransomware "largely through firms that remotely manage IT infrastructure for multiple customers." A broad array of businesses and public agencies were hit by the latest attack, apparently on all continents, including in financial services, travel and leisure and the public sector — though few large companies, the cybersecurity firm Sophos reported... The Swedish grocery chain Coop said most of its 800 stores would be closed for a second day Sunday because their cash register software supplier was crippled. A Swedish pharmacy chain, gas station chain, the state railway and public broadcaster SVT were also hit. In Germany, an unnamed IT services company told authorities several thousand of its customers were compromised, the news agency dpa reported...

CEO Fred Voccola of the breached software company, Kaseya, estimated the victim number in the low thousands, mostly small businesses like "dental practices, architecture firms, plastic surgery centers, libraries, things like that." Voccola said in an interview that only between 50-60 of the company's 37,000 customers were compromised. But 70% were managed service providers who use the company's hacked VSA software to manage multiple customers. It automates the installation of software and security updates and manages backups and other vital tasks...

Dutch researchers said they alerted Miami-based Kaseya to the breach and said the criminals used a "zero day," the industry term for a previously unknown security hole in software. Voccola would not confirm that or offer details of the breach — except to say that it was not phishing. "The level of sophistication here was extraordinary," he said. When the cybersecurity firm Mandiant finishes its investigation, Voccola said he is confident it will show that the criminals didn't just violate Kaseya code in breaking into his network but also exploited vulnerabilities in third-party software...

Kaseya, which called on customers Friday to shut down their VSA servers immediately, said Sunday it hoped to have a patch in the next few days.
The attacks may have been timed to exploit America's three-day weekend celebrating the nation's founding, according to experts interviewed by the Associated Press. America's National Security advisor is now urging all who believed they were compromised to alert the FBI.

"The attack comes less than a month after Biden pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop providing safe haven to REvil and other ransomware gangs whose unrelenting extortionary attacks the U.S. deems a national security threat."

UPDATE: Bleeping Computer notes the exploited vulnerability "had been previously disclosed to Kaseya by security researchers from the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), and Kaseya was validating the patch before they rolled it out to customers."

In a statement today, DIVD posted that "During the last 48 hours, the number of Kaseya VSA instances that are reachable from the internet has dropped from over 2,200 to less than 140 in our last scan today... A good demonstration of how a cooperative network of security-minded organizations can be very effective during a nasty crisis."

Bitcoin mining just became easier and more profitable, reports CNBC: The world has known for months that more than half the world's bitcoin miners would be going dark as China cracked down on mining. Now that it's happened, the bitcoin algorithm has adjusted accordingly to make sure miner productivity doesn't continue to fall off a cliff. That adjustment — which took effect early Saturday morning — also means that way more cash is going to the bitcoin miners who remain online. "This will be a revenue party for miners," said bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi. "They suddenly own a meaningfully larger piece of the pie, meaning they earn more bitcoin every day..."

"For the first time in the bitcoin network's history, we have a complete shutdown of mining in a targeted geographic region that affected more than 50% of the network," said Darin Feinstein, founder of Blockcap and Core Scientific. More than 50% of the hashrate — the collective computing power of miners worldwide — has dropped off the network since its market peak in May. Fewer people mining means that fewer blocks are solved each day. Typically, it takes about 10 minutes to complete a block, but Feinstein told CNBC the bitcoin network has slowed down to 14- to 19-minute block times. This is precisely why bitcoin re-calibrates every 2016 blocks, or about every two weeks, resetting how tough it is for miners to mine.

On Saturday, the bitcoin code automatically made it about 28% less difficult to mine — a historically unprecedented drop for the network — thereby restoring block times back to the optimal 10-minute window...

"We are expecting a period of much higher mining profitability for Compass Mining clients," said Whit Gibbs, CEO and founder of Compass, a bitcoin mining service provider. "We expect miners to be approximately 35% more profitable." Blockcap's Feinstein agrees. "We are expecting a revenue and profit increase for the foreseeable future. This was an unexpected gift to the network, not just on revenues but on decentralization and sustainable energy metrics."
CNBC also spoke to the former Chief Mining Officer at Greenridge Generation, the New York-based, coal-fired power plant that converted to large-scale bitcoin mining.

"Zhang estimates revenues of $29 per day for those using the latest-generation Bitmain miner, versus $22 per day prior to the change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After coming close to imposing a near-total ban on municipal broadband networks, Ohio's Republican-controlled legislature has reportedly dropped the proposed law in final negotiations over the state budget. The final budget agreement "axed a proposal to limit local governments from offering broadband services," The Columbus Dispatch wrote. With a June 30 deadline looming, Ohio's House and Senate approved the budget and sent it to Gov. Mike DeWine for final approval on Monday night, the Dispatch wrote.

As we wrote earlier this month, the Ohio Senate approved a version of the budget containing an amendment (PDF) that would have forced existing municipal broadband services to shut down and prevented the formation of new public networks. The proposed law was reportedly "inserted without prior public discussion," and no state senator publicly sponsored the amendment. It was approved in a party-line vote as Democrats opposed the restrictions in municipal broadband. The House version did not contain the amendment, and it was dropped during negotiations between the House and Senate.

Lawmakers apparently relented to public pressure from supporters of municipal broadband and cities and towns that operate the networks. People and businesses from Fairlawn, where the city-run FairlawnGig network offers fiber Internet, played a significant role in the protests. FairlawnGig itself asked users to put pressure on lawmakers, and the subscribers did so in great numbers. "We had a real grassroots movement here in Fairlawn. We are thrilled our residents, subscribers, and businesses came together and helped us defeat this amendment," Fairlawn Service Director Ernie Staten said yesterday, according to an article by the Community Networks team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). "We appreciate that the State of Ohio recognizes that municipal broadband has a place in this state and we hope to continue this great endeavor." Fairlawn subscribers sent more than 700 emails telling lawmakers, "Don't take this (municipal broadband) away!" Staten said. The report notes that while Ohio's legislature isn't banning public networks, at least for now, it "is apparently not letting municipal networks apply for a new round of funding."

"While Staten celebrated the removal of the budget amendment, he called the victory 'bittersweet,' as municipalities and electric cooperatives in the state do not have access to the proposed $250 million broadband expansion grant program that will be established when, and if, Gov. Dewine signs the budget into law," the ILSR wrote. The outcome of that isn't certain yet. "We have been asking for a small definition change to add municipalities and electric coops, but unless they changed the language, I believe the House version stands," Staten told the ILSR.

Westland Real Estate Group patrols its 1,000-unit apartment complex in Las Vegas with "a conical, bulky, artificial intelligence-powered robot" standing just over 5 feet tall, according to NBC News. Manufactured by Knightscope, the robot is equipped with four internal cameras capturing a constant 360-degree view, and can also scan and record license plates (as well as the MAC addresses of cellphones). But is it doing any good? As more government agencies and private sector companies resort to robots to help fight crime, the verdict is out about how effective they are in actually reducing it. Knightscope, which experts say is the dominant player in this market, has cited little public evidence that its robots have reduced crime as the company deploys them everywhere from a Georgia shopping mall to an Arizona development to a Nevada casino. Knightscope's clients also don't know how much these security robots help. "Are we seeing dramatic changes since we deployed the robot in January?" Dena Lerner, the Westland spokesperson said. "No. But I do believe it is a great tool to keep a community as large as this, to keep it safer, to keep it controlled."

For its part, Knightscope maintains on its website that the robots "predict and prevent crime," without much evidence that they do so. Experts say this is a bold claim. "It would be difficult to introduce a single thing and it causes crime to go down," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, comparing the Knightscope robots to a "roving scarecrow." Additionally, the company does not provide specific, detailed examples of crimes that have been thwarted due to the robots.
The robots are expensive — they're rented out at about $70,000-$80,000 a year — but growth has stalled for the two years since 2018, and over four years Knightscope's total clients actually dropped from 30 to just 23. (Expenses have now risen — partly because the company is now doubling its marketing budget.)

There's also a thermal scanning feature, but Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University, still called these robots an "expensive version of security theater." And NBC News adds that KnightScope's been involved "in both tragic and comical episodes." In 2016, a K5 roaming around Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, hit a 16-month-old toddler, bruising his leg and running over his foot. The company apologized, calling it a "freakish accident," and invited the family to visit the company's nearby headquarters in Mountain View, which the family declined. The following year, another K5 robot slipped on steps adjacent to a fountain at the Washington Harbour development in Washington, D.C., falling into the water. In October 2019, a Huntington Park woman, Cogo Guebara, told NBC News that she tried reporting a fistfight by pressing an emergency alert button on the HP RoboCop itself, but to no avail. She learned later the emergency button was not yet connected to the police department itself... [The northern California city] Hayward dispatched its robot in a city parking garage in 2018. The following year, a man attacked and knocked over the robot. Despite having clear video and photographic evidence of the alleged crime, no one was arrested, according to Adam Kostrzak, the city's chief information officer.
The city didn't renew its contract "due to the financial impact of Covid-19 in early 2020," the city's CIO tells NBC News. But the city had already spent over $137,000 on the robot over two years.

Bloomberg Businessweek describes what happened when an anonymous donor started "seeding" the tiny El Salvadoran surfing village of El Zonte (population: 3,000) with Bitcoin, turning it into the world's biggest Bitcoin experiment. Workers now receive their salaries and pay bills in Bitcoin, tourists can buy pupusas with a special Bitcoin payment app, and community projects are financed with Bitcoin donations. According to Jorge Valenzuela, an upbeat 32-year-old surfing aficionado who leads the volunteers, "it has changed my town...." [T]he most striking thing these days is the orange "B" — the international symbol for Bitcoin — splashed on garbage cans, near the entrance of the dirt-floor pizza joint, and hanging on the wall near the surf shack at the beachfront hotel. The town has never had a bank. Now the lone ATM buys and sells Bitcoin... In El Zonte, Bitcoin is a possible solution to an actual problem, as opposed to a solution in search of a problem, which is how critics describe its role in, say, the U.S...

But it was the pandemic that ultimately jump-started the project. When El Salvador's tourism industry and El Zonte's economy collapsed, Michael Peterson started making monthly transfers of about $35 in Bitcoin to 500 families around town [on behalf of an anonymous donor]. He used Wallet of Satoshi, one of the many existing smartphone apps created for small transactions using Bitcoin, which is notoriously impractical — expensive and slow — for everyday purchases. As more stores began asking how they could accept Bitcoin, Peterson decided El Zonte needed its own app. The Bitcoin Beach Wallet, which launched in September, similarly uses technology that allows for small transactions. It shows users how much they hold in Bitcoin and greenbacks and where they can spend it. Shops in town price everything in dollars, whether the underlying transaction is in Bitcoin or not. A cappuccino always costs $3.50, even if Bitcoin's value has just jumped or dropped. In this way, it behaves more like a token than a currency...

He says that 18 months after the project launched, roughly 90% of El Zonte's households are interacting with the currency regularly. "It's crazy how fast Bitcoin has caught on," he says. Businesses are using it on their own to pay bills and accept payments. Residents use transfers to the Strike app, the ATM, and peer-to-peer transactions to move money back and forth between Bitcoin and cash... Many business owners say it makes up just a small fraction of sales. Although some 85% of families have access to smartphones, many still live in cramped houses with dirt floors and tin roofs. But for others, it's clearly been life-altering. A construction crew chief pays his dozen or so employees in Bitcoin. He was sick of losing them for a half-day every month so they could travel to the nearest bank, an hourlong bus ride away, on payday...

El Zonte is among the longest-running experiments of its kind, but it's still largely untested. "I'd be very interested in seeing what happens if we enter a bear market," says McCormack, the British podcaster. "If you're a shop owner and you have $50 a day in Bitcoin sales and all the sudden that goes up to $60, that's cool. But what happens when it starts going down to $40 or $30?"

Dartmouth's Geisel medical school is dropping its investigation into alleged online cheating, the New York Times reports: In March, Dartmouth charged 17 students with cheating based on a review of certain online-activity data on Canvas — a popular learning-management system where professors post assignments and students submit their work — during remote exams. The school quickly dropped seven of the cases after at least two students argued that administrators had mistaken automated Canvas activity for human cheating. Now Dartmouth is also dropping allegations against the remaining 10 students, some of whom faced expulsion, suspension, course failures and misconduct marks on their academic records that could have derailed their medical careers.

"I have decided to dismiss all the honor code charges," Duane Compton, dean of the medical school, said in an email to the Geisel community Wednesday evening, adding that the students' academic records would not be affected. "I have apologized to the students for what they have been through."

Dartmouth's decision to dismiss the charges followed a software review by The New York Times, which found that students' devices could automatically generate Canvas activity data even when no one was using them. Dartmouth's practices were condemned by some alumni along with some faculty at other medical schools.

A Dartmouth spokesman said the school could not comment further on the dropping of the charges for privacy reasons.
"The moral of the current story is clear," argued the Times reporter on Twitter.

"Colleges that use surveillance tech can end up erroneously accusing some of their best students."

A multi-platform Python-based malware targeting Windows and Linux devices has now been upgraded to worm its way into Internet-exposed VMware vCenter servers unpatched against a remote code execution vulnerability. BleepingComputer reports: The malware, dubbed FreakOut by CheckPoint researchers in January (aka Necro and N3Cr0m0rPh), is an obfuscated Python script designed to evade detection using a polymorphic engine and a user-mode rootkit that hides malicious files dropped on compromised systems. FreakOut spreads itself by exploiting a wide range of OS and apps vulnerabilities and brute-forcing passwords over SSH, adding the infected devices to an IRC botnet controlled by its masters. The malware's core functionality enables operators to launch DDoS attacks, backdoor infected systems, sniff and exfiltrate network traffic, and deploy XMRig miners to mine for Monero cryptocurrency.

As Cisco Talos researchers shared in a report published today, FreakOut's developers have been hard at work improving the malware's spreading capabilities since early May, when the botnet's activity has suddenly increased. "Although the bot was originally discovered earlier this year, the latest activity shows numerous changes to the bot, ranging from different command and control (C2) communications and the addition of new exploits for spreading, most notably vulnerabilities in VMWare vSphere, SCO OpenServer, Vesta Control Panel and SMB-based exploits that were not present in the earlier iterations of the code," Cisco Talos security researcher Vanja Svajcer said. FreakOut bots scan for new systems to target either by randomly generating network ranges or on its masters' commands sent over IRC via the command-and-control server. For each IP address in the scan list, the bot will try to use one of the built-in exploits or log in using a hardcoded list of SSH credentials.

NBC News reports: Facebook is grappling with a reputation crisis in the Middle East, with plummeting approval rates and advertising sales in Arab countries, according to leaked documents obtained by NBC News.

The shift corresponds with the widespread belief by pro-Palestinian and free speech activists that the social media company has been disproportionately silencing Palestinian voices on its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — during this month's Israel-Hamas conflict... Instagram has taken the greatest reputational hit, according to a presentation authored by a Dubai-based Facebook employee that was leaked to NBC News, with its approval ratings among users falling to a historical low.

The social media company regularly polls users of Facebook and Instagram about how much they believe the company cares about them. Facebook converts the results into a 'Cares About Users' metric which acts as a bellwether for the apps' popularity. Since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas conflict, the metric among Instagram users in Facebook's Middle East and North Africa region is at its lowest in history, and fell almost 5 percentage points in a week, according to the research... Instagram's score measuring whether users think the app is good for the world, referred to as 'Good For World,' has also dropped in the region to its lowest level after losing more than 5 percentage points in a week...

The low approval ratings have been compounded by a campaign by pro-Palestinian and free speech activists to target Facebook with 1-star reviews on the Apple and Google app stores. The campaign tanked Facebook's average rating from above 4 out of 5 stars on both app stores to 2.2 on the App Store and 2.3 on Google Play as of Wednesday. According to leaked internal posts, the issue has been categorized internally as a "severity 1" problem for Facebook, which is the second highest priority issue after a "severity 0" incident, which is reserved for when the website is down. "Users are feeling that they are being censored, getting limited distribution, and ultimately silenced," one senior software engineer said in a post on Facebook's internal message board. "As a result, our users have started protesting by leaving 1 star reviews."

Internal documents connect the reputational damage to a decline in advertising sales in the Middle East. According to the leaked presentation, Facebook's ad sales in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq dropped at least 12 percent in the 10 days after May 7.
NBC adds that pro-Palestinian civil society group believe Israel is flooding Facebook with reports of violations. "The Israeli government is spending millions on digital tools and campaigns targeting social media content," said Mona Shtaya from 7amleh, a nonprofit that focuses on Palestinians' digital rights.

The article points out that Israel "also funds a program that pays students to post and report content on social media in what is described as 'online public diplomacy.'"

According to The Guardian, a man in Catalonia died after becoming trapped inside a large dinosaur statue while trying to retrieve his smartphone. From the report: Officers were called to the statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a satellite town of Barcelona, after a man and his son noticed something inside the papier-mache stegosaurus on Saturday afternoon. A spokeswoman for the regional police force, the Mossos d'Esquadra, said the death of the 39-year-old man was not being treated as suspicious.

"A father and son noticed that there was something inside and raised the alarm," she said. "We found the body of a man inside the leg of this dinosaur statue. It's an accidental death; there was no violence. This person got inside the statue's leg and got trapped. It looks as though he was trying to retrieve a mobile phone, which he'd dropped. It looks like he entered the statue head first and couldn't get out." "We're still waiting for the autopsy results, so we don't know how long he was in there, but it seems he was there for a couple of days," she added. Slashdot reader shanen submitted this story with the following commentary: Not sure what the technology link is. Smartphones make people stupid? Dinosaurs are scientific, but this is ridiculous? It would be funny, but it's too gruesome. But I guess I'll go ahead and submit it in the Darwin Awards category. Maybe a better title is man kills himself with dinosaur and smartphone? Death by paper mache?

Last year author Sonia Shah predicted that after pandemic-induced lockdowns finally ended, "The hype around online education will be abandoned, as a generation of young people forced into seclusion will reshape the culture around a contrarian appreciation for communal life."

This week the Atlantic's technology staff writer is now suggesting that "As the stress of the pandemic is beginning to recede, our relationship with the internet might be renegotiated..." As vaccination rates tick up, and IRL social life resumes, it's getting easier to imagine that we're on the brink of something big: a coordinated withdrawal from swiping and streaming, a new consensus that staying home to watch Netflix is no longer a chill Friday-night plan, but an affront. Could this be real? Are we about to start the summer of a Great Offlining...?

A few signs that this movement could be upon us: Netflix reported its worst first quarter in eight years, after seeing historic growth in 2020. Tinder conceded that more than half of its Gen Z users have no intention of using its videochat features ever again. Clubhouse downloads dropped significantly in April, prompting worry that the app was always just "a temporary salve to being stuck inside."

On The Cut, Safy-Hallan Farah has predicted a post-pandemic future in which our culture prioritizes, among other things, "earnestness," "communism," and "being extremely offline." The writer Luke Winkie forecasts a 10-week period of everyone abandoning the internet, adding that "offline is going to hit like a drug." Discourse's Patrick Redford put it best, writing that "the idea of further screen-only interaction with my friends and loved ones after a year overstuffed with them makes me want to toss my phone into the Pacific Ocean...."

[B]ut it's hard to imagine that a Great Offlining is really in the cards. Instead, we could be heading for a Great Rebalancing, where we reconfigure how we do our work and how we organize our time on the internet. We've grown more aware of how we rely on one another — online as well as off — and of the tools we have or could build for responding to a crisis. The biggest tech companies' accrual of power remains one of the most serious problems of my lifetime, but I no longer talk about the internet itself as if it were an external and malignant force, now that I've lived in such intimate contact with it for so long.

Slashdot reader esm88 shares the BBC's story about a couple who experienced "a knock on the door from the police" investigating child abuse images posted online. "The couple insisted they had nothing to do with it. But the next few months were 'utter hell' as they attempted to clear their names," before their case was finally dropped in March: In February, a conversation with a friend who worked in cyber-security alerted them to the possibility that their router, supplied by their broadband provider Vodafone, might hold clues to what had happened. They had not changed the default passwords for either the router itself or the admin webpage, leaving it susceptible to brute force attacks. "We think of ourselves as competent users but we are not IT experts," said Matthew. "No-one told us to change the password and the setting up of the router didn't require us to go on to the admin menu, so we didn't.

"It came with a password, so we plugged it in and didn't touch anything."

Ken Munro, a security consultant with Pen Test Partners, told the BBC that it can take "a matter of minutes" for criminals to piggyback on insecure wireless connections... "So what I guess has happened here, is that the hacker has cracked the wi-fi password and then made changes to the router configuration, so their illicit activities on the internet appear to be coming from the innocent party." In March, when the couple's devices were returned and the case closed, the police officer assigned to liaise with them seemed to corroborate that unauthorised use of their wi-fi was to blame. But it couldn't be proved... The problem is industry-wide, points out Mr Munro.

"Internet service providers have started to improve matters to make these attacks harder, by putting unique passwords on each router. However, it will take years for all of the offending routers to be replaced," he said.