WordPress co-creator (and Automattic CEO) Matt Mullenweg "has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members," reports TechCrunch, "some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project." Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications' lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his "vision for a new WordPress era," alluding to a potential fork in the form of "federated and independent repositories." Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed these thoughts in a separate blog post. WP Engine indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand. Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork.
But when Automattic slashed its contributions to Wordpress.org, things heated up: This spurred de Valk to take to X.com on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his "team stands ready." Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, in a sarcasm-laden blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the "push it needs to get off the ground," he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts. "I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort," Mullenweg wrote.

At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed he was deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it's worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly established non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a "neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources" around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem. Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she hadn't been involved in the project since 2020...

It's worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through that channel, be it to the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with.
Rand-Hendriksen posted on BlueSky: So why is he targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge.
And while Mullenweg headlined his blog post "Joost/Karim Fork," Rand-Hendriksen wrote on BlueSky "there is no fork in the works as far as I know. He made that up, as he has done before. Heather and I have no involvement with any of this so I don't know why he grouped the five of us together like this. It smells like attempted harassment."

Later Rand-Hendriksen claimed "this is not the first time he's accused critics of forking WordPress" and that he's "convinced any fork will fail... I think he thinks saying someone is forking WordPress is an epic burn that discredits them in the eyes of the community."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who get their coffee hit in the morning reap benefits that are not seen in those who have shots later in the day, according to the first major study into the health benefits of the drink at different times. Analysis of the coffee consumption of more than 40,000 adults found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease during a 10-year follow-up period than those who went without. But the benefits to heart health appeared to vanish in people who drank coffee throughout the day, the researchers found, with medical records showing no significant reduction in mortality for all-day drinkers compared with those who avoided coffee. [...]

The study suggests that a morning dose of coffee is better for the heart than an evening one, but it does not explain why. One possible explanation is that drinking coffee later in the day can disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin. This in turn affects sleep, inflammation and blood pressure, all of which can harm heart health. In an accompanying editorial, Prof Thomas Luscher, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in London, notes that many all-day drinkers sleep poorly, adding that coffee seems to suppress melatonin, a hormone that is important for inducing sleep in the brain. The effects are driven largely by caffeine, but coffee contains hundreds of other bioactive compounds that affect our physiology. The researchers say some substances in the blood that drive inflammation often peak in the morning and could be countered by anti-inflammatory compounds in a morning coffee. "This explanation applies to both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee," they write. "Overall, we must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy," Luscher writes. "Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!"

The study has been published in the European Heart Journal.

Bruce66423 writes: A few hours before the ball dropped on New Year's Eve, the computer dispatch system for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department crashed, rendering all patrol car computers nearly useless and forcing deputies to handle all calls by radio, according to officials and sources in the department. Department leaders first learned of the problem around 8 p.m., when deputies at several sheriff's stations began having trouble logging onto their patrol car computers, officials told The Times in a statement.

The department said it eventually determined its computer-aided dispatch program -- known as CAD -- was "not allowing personnel to log on with the new year, making the CAD inoperable." It's not clear how long it will take to fix the problem, but in the meantime deputies and dispatchers are handling everything old-school -- using their radios instead of patrol car computers.

"It's our own little Y2K," a deputy who was working Wednesday morning told The Times. The deputy, along with three other department sources who spoke to The Times about the problem, asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the record and feared retaliation.

Japan Airlines said it was hit by a cyberattack Thursday, causing delays to more than 20 domestic flights but the carrier said there was no impact on flight safety. From a report: JAL said the problem started Thursday morning when the company's network connecting internal and external systems began malfunctioning. The airline said the cyberattack had delayed 24 domestic flights for more than 30 minutes, and the impact could expand later in the day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Boston Globe: Every weekday morning at 8:30, Preston Thorpe makes himself a cup of instant coffee and opens his laptop to find the coding tasks awaiting his seven-person team at Unlocked Labs. Like many remote workers, Thorpe, the nonprofit's principal engineer, works out in the middle of the day and often stays at his computer late into the night. But outside Thorpe's window, there's a soaring chain-link fence topped with coiled barbed wire. And at noon and 4 p.m. every day, a prison guard peers into his room to make sure he's where he's supposed to be at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine, where he's serving his 12th year for two drug-related convictions in New Hampshire, including intent to distribute synthetic opioids.

Remote work has spread far and wide since the pandemic spurred a work-from-home revolution of sorts, but perhaps no place more unexpectedly than behind prison walls. Thorpe is one of more than 40 people incarcerated in Maine's state prison system who have landed internships and jobs with outside companies over the past two years -- some of whom work full time from their cells and earn more than the correctional officers who guard them. A handful of other states have also started allowing remote work in recent years, but none have gone as far as Maine, according to the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, the nonprofit leading the effort.

Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds. Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers' wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get re-entry support for housing and job searches before they're released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date resumes, a nest egg -- and the hope that they're less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by.

WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg is trolling contributors and users of the WordPress open-source project by requiring them to check a box that says "Pineapple is delicious on pizza." From a report: The change was spotted by WordPress contributors late Sunday, and is still up as of Monday morning. Trying to log in or create a new account without checking the box returns a "please try again" error.

Last week, as part of the ongoing legal battle between WP Engine and Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, a judge ordered Mullenweg to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org that required users to pledge that they were not affiliated with WP Engine before logging in.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Former Intel chief Pat Gelsinger, who stepped down from his leadership post a week ago, is inviting people to join him in prayer and fasting for the struggling chipmaker's employees.

"Every Thursday I do a 24 hour prayer and fasting day," Gelsinger wrote on X on Sunday morning. "This week I'd invite you to join me in praying and fasting for the 100K Intel employees as they navigate this difficult period. Intel and its team is of seminal importance to the future of the industry and US."

MojoKid writes: Intel officially revealed its next generation discrete graphics cards, code named Battlemage, this morning. There are two midrange cards in the series so far, branded Arc B580 and Arc B570, though future higher-end B700 series cards are unknown currently. The graphics architecture for Battlemage is Xe2, and it debuted in the iGPU on Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V mobile processors earlier this year.

Arc B580 is paired to 12GB of GDDR6 memory operating at an effective data rate of 19Gbps over a 192-bit interface, and its average GPU clock should hover around 2,670MHz. The Arc B570 is based on the same slice of silicon, but scales things down with 10GB of GDDR6 memory operating at the same speed as the B580, but connected over a narrower 160-bit interface. The B570's average GPU clock will also be lower, in the 2,500MHz range. Performance-wise, Intel is projecting that Arc B580 will be about 10% faster than an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 on average but will be priced at $249 USD, undercutting GeForce RTX 4060 substantially while offering 4GB more onboard graphics memory. Arc B580 cards are due to arrive in market this month, with Arc B570 arriving in January 2025 at $219 USD.

A broad coalition of Canada's major news organizations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC, is suing tech giant OpenAI, saying the company is illegally using news articles to train its ChatGPT software. From a report: It's the first time all of a country's major news publishers have come together in litigation against OpenAI. The suit, filed in Ontario's Superior Court of Justice Friday morning, seeks punitive damages, disgorgement of any profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations' articles, and an injunction barring OpenAI from using any of the news articles in the future.

"Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies' journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It's illegal," said a joint statement from the media organizations, which are represented by law firm Lenczner Slaght.

CNN reports that investigators "are trying to crack the mystery of how two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea were cut within hours of each other." But there's now two competing viewpoints, "with European officials saying they believe the disruption was an act of sabotage and U.S. officials suggesting it was likely an accident." The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were "deeply concerned" about the incident and raised the possibility that it was part of a "hybrid warfare," specifically mentioning Russia in their statement. Their assessment was not plucked out of thin air. Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Europe after a string of suspicious incidents, arson attacks, explosions and other acts of sabotage across multiple European countries were traced back to Moscow. And the disruption to the cables came just weeks after the US warned that Moscow was likely to target critical undersea infrastructure. This followed months of suspicious movements of Russian vessels in European waters and the significant beefing up of a dedicated Russian secretive marine unit tasked with surveying the seabed...

But two US officials familiar with the initial assessment of the incident told CNN on Tuesday the damage was not believed to be deliberate activity by Russia or any other nation. Instead, the two officials told CNN they believed it likely caused by an anchor drag from a passing vessel. Such accidents have happened in the past, although not in a quick succession like the two on Sunday and Monday.
Cloudflare's blog also reminds readers that the two cable cuts resulted in little-to-no observable impact
Cloudflare attributes this largely to "the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe." (Their Cloudflare Radar graphs show that after the Sweden-Lithuania cable cut "there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged.") Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com illustrates, at least in part, the resilience in connectivity enjoyed by these two countries. In addition to the damaged cable, it shows that Lithuania is connected to neighboring Latvia as well as to the Swedish mainland. Over 20 submarine cables land in Sweden, connecting it to multiple countries across Europe. In addition to the submarine resilience, network providers in both countries can take advantage of terrestrial fiber connections to neighboring countries, such as those illustrated in a European network map from Arelion (formerly Telia), which is only one of the large European backbone providers.

Less than a day later, the C-Lion1 submarine cable, which connects Helsinki, Finland and Rostock Germany was reportedly damaged during the early morning hours of Monday, November 18... In this situation as well, as the Cloudflare Radar graphs below show, there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged...

Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com shows that both Finland and Germany also have significant redundancy and resilience from a submarine cable perspective, with over 10 cables landing in Finland, and nearly 10 landing in Germany, including Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1), which connects to the United States over two distinct paths. Terrestrial fiber maps from Arelion and eunetworks (as just two examples) show multiple redundant fiber routes within both countries, as well as cross-border routes to other neighboring countries, enabling more resilient Internet connectivity.
See also Does the Internet Route Around Damage?

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Past corporate-sponsored Hour of Code tutorials for the nation's schoolchildren have blurred the lines between coding lessons and product infomercials. So too is the case again with this year's newly-announced Hour of Code 2024 flagship tutorials, which include Microsoft Minecraft, Amazon Music, and Transformers One movie-themed intros to coding. The press release announcing the tutorials from tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which organizes the Hour of Code and counts Microsoft and Amazon as $30+ million donors, boasts of its "decade of partnership with [Microsoft] Minecraft this year, reaching more than 300 million sessions of Minecraft Hour of Code since 2015!"

Interestingly, The Transformers (Paramount Pictures, which released Transformers One in the U.S., is a $25,000+ Code.org donor) is cited as one of the OG's of children's Saturday morning cartoon advertising (aka 30-minute commercials) that prompted the Children's Television Act (CTA) of 1990, an act of Congress that ordered the FCC to put in place regulations to protect children from advertising. Throughout the 1980s, Action for Children's Television (ACT) criticized children's television programs that "blur(red) the distinction between program content and commercial speech."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE: It's early on a Sunday morning in late 1994, and you're shuffling your way through Fitzrovia in Central London, bloodstream still rushing after a long night at Bagley's. The sun comes up as you come down. You navigate side streets that you know like the back of your hand. But your hand's stamped with a party logo. And your brain's kaput. Coffee... yes, coffee. Good idea. Suddenly, you find yourself outside a teal blue cafe. Walking in is like entering an alien world; rows of club kids, tech heads, and game developers sit in front of desktops, lost in the primitive version of some new reality. Tentacular cables hang from the ceiling. Ambient techno reverberates from wall to wall. Cigarette smoke fills the air.

Welcome to Cyberia, the world's first internet cafe. Which, if you're too young to remember, are basically cafes with computers in them. It all began when Eva Pascoe, a Polish computing student living in London, crossed paths with Tim Berners Lee and other early internet mavericks at the dawn of the 90s. "I was very interested in cyberfeminism and wanted to figure out how women could reclaim tech," she recalls. The internet was still in its infancy. Diabolically slow dial-up modems only emerged around 1992; the World Wide Web was a pipe dream until 1993 and hardly anyone had the internet at home. But there wasn't just a lack of javascript; Eva remembers there being no good java, either. "There were no coffee shops in London," she says, which today seems ludicrous. "Just greasy spoons and everyone drank tea. I wanted a European-style cafe."

Linking up with like-minded pioneers David Rowe and husband and wife Keith and Gene Teare, Eva found a spot on the corner of Whitfield Street and launched Cyberia there in 1994. With Hackers-style aesthetics and futuristic furniture, it was based around a U-shaped layout that meant visitors could see each other's screens. "I wanted women to feel safe, because a lot of the stuff on the net was dodgy," she explains. Many of Eva's mates chipped in to help out -- architects, interior designers, graphic artists, publishers, and ravers among them.

And then there was the Amish community in Pennsylvania. Eva had to fly out there to negotiate for the "Cyberia.com" domain name they had bought. "It was a proper barn with horse carts and a wall of modems as they were running a bulletin board and an early ecommerce company. Apparently, there was always one family nominated to be the tech support," she remembers. Back in London, Cyberia quickly became a hotspot. "Virtually the second we opened, we had three lines deep around the block," she says. It's hard to imagine, but nowhere else in the world was doing what they were doing. It was the world's first cybercafe. "If you wanted to collect your emails, we were the only place in town," Eva says. Cyberia opened around 20 cafes worldwide, including branches in Bangkok, Paris, and Rotterdam. "For a fleeting moment it became like a sexier version of Richard Branson's Virgin empire: there was Cyberia Records, Cyberia Channel (a pioneering streaming service), Cyberia Payments, the Cyberia magazine, a Cyberia show on UK TV -- even a Cyberia wedding," writes VICE's Kyle MacNeill. He attended Cyberia's 30th birthday party in September and spoke with some of the cafe's original innovators, "shooting the shit about the good times and the not-so-good coffee."

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Tuesday morning, the air quality in India's capital under a widely used index stood at 485. While that is almost five times the threshold for healthy breathing, it felt like a relief: The day before, the reading had shot up to 1,785. Infinitesimal air particles were still clogging lungs and arteries, but it was possible to see sunlight again, and to smell things.

[...] Every year this suffocating smog accompanies the drop in temperatures as the plains of north India shed their unbearable heat for wintertime cool. And like clockwork, political leaders roll out emergency measures intended to quit making the problem worse. Yet India seems powerless to reduce the effects of this public health catastrophe, as its politicians stay busy trading blame and trying to outmaneuver one another in legal battles.

The haze was so shocking this week that Delhi's chief minister, Atishi, who goes by one name, declared it a "medical emergency" endangering the lives of children and older people. The Supreme Court, whose members also live in the capital, chided the national government for responding too slowly and ordered special measures: halting construction work and blocking some vehicles from the roads. Schools were closed indefinitely to protect students.

China has activated the world's most advanced hypergravity machine to advance studies in geological processes, material behavior, and deep-sea energy exploration. Located in Hangzhou, The Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) will be able to produce forces thousands of times stronger than Earth's gravity. Interesting Engineering reports: The facility will house three primary hypergravity centrifuges and 18 onboard units. These centrifuges, machines designed to spin containers rapidly, force heavier materials to the edges or bottom by creating hypergravity conditions, as reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The first centrifuge's main engine, resembling two massive arms holding experimental baskets, has been installed. According to the Hangzhou government, the fabrication of the remaining two centrifuges and 10 onboard units is underway.

[...] CHIEF will surpass the capabilities of the US Army Corps of Engineers' hypergravity facility, which has a capacity of 1,200 g-t (gravity acceleration x ton). Once completed, CHIEF will feature a capacity of 1,900 g-t, making it the most advanced facility of its kind, reports SCMP. The project includes six hypergravity experiment chambers, each dedicated to a specific area, such as slope and dam engineering, seismic geotechnics, deep-sea exploration, deep-earth studies, geological processes, and materials processing.

OpenAI has acquired the chat.com domain name, likely for well over $10 million. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a one-word tweet this morning, simply stating, "chat.com." Domain Name Wire reports: The chat.com domain name has changed hands for the third time in two years. HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah kicked off the buying last year, plunking down over $15.5 million for the domain name. He turned around and sold the domain shortly thereafter for a profit.

"It's that time again," writes USA Today, noting that Sunday morning millions of Americans (along with millions more in Canada, Europe, parts of Australia, and Chile) "will set their clocks back an hour, and many will renew their twice-yearly calls to put an end to the practice altogether..." Experts say the time changes are detrimental to health and safety, but agree that the answer isn't permanent DST. "The medical and scientific communities are unified ... that permanent standard time is better for human health," said Erik Herzog, a professor of biology and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis and the former president of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms...

Springing forward an hour in March is harder on us than falling back in November. The shift in spring is associated with an increase in heart attacks, and car accident rates also go up for a few days after, he said. But the answer isn't permanent daylight saving time, according to Herzog, who said that could be even worse for human health than the twice-yearly changes. By looking at studies of people who live at the easternmost edge of time zones (whose experience is closest to standard time) and people who live at the westernmost edge (more like daylight saving time), scientists can tell that health impacts of earlier sunrises and sunsets are much better. Waking up naturally with the sun is far better for our bodies than having to rely on alarm clocks to wake up in the dark, he said.

Herzog said Florida, where [Senator Marco] Rubio has championed the Sunlight Protection Act, is much less impacted by the negative impacts of daylight saving time because it's as far east and south as you can get in the U.S., while people in a state like Minnesota would have much more time in the dark in the morning.
The article also reminds U.S. readers that "No state can adopt permanent daylight saving time unless U.S. Congress passes a law to authorize it first." Nevertheless... Oklahoma became the most recent state to pass a measure authorizing permanent daylight saving time, pending Congressional approval, in April. Nineteen other states have passed laws or resolutions to move toward daylight saving time year-round, if Congress were ever to allow it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures...

Only two states and some territories never have to set their clocks forward or backward... [Hawaii and Arizona, except for the Navajo Nation.]

Zoox, an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, is set to roll out dozens of its purpose-built robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas, starting with employee rides in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and the Las Vegas Strip. "We have achieved that internal safety readiness" required to launch the service, said co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a decade after Zoox was founded and four years since it was acquired by Amazon and unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi. In that time, the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has gone through the full hype cycle that led to multi-billion-dollar valuations and later a wave of shutdowns and consolidation. "We still exist," Levinson said, in a nod to the tumult the industry has gone through in recent years.

Levinson said Zoox is going to take a "measured approach" to rolling out its robotaxi service, and noted that his company has been working closely with local and federal safety regulators. "I can say that in the next few weeks, we're actually going to have a couple dozen Zoox robotaxis across our Foster City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, geofences that will expand several fold over the next year," he said. "And then, you know, 2026 is when we're going to really start cranking out production vehicles at very large scale."

He also said Zoox will launch an "explorer" program of early riders who will be able to use the robotaxis for free before opening the service up to paying customers. (Rival Waymo operated a similar invite-only early rider program before opening its service to the paying public.) These early riders, or explorers, will gain access to the Zoox vehicles early next year starting with Las Vegas, Levinson said. The Zoox AVs will operate throughout the "most busy 16 hours" of the day, Levinson said, noting that it's "so boring at four in the morning, we don't think we would learn very much."

For months, the Colorado Department of State inadvertently exposed partial passwords for voting machines in a public spreadsheet. "While the incident is embarrassing and already fueling accusations from the state's Republican party, the department said in a statement that it 'does not pose an immediate security threat to Colorado's elections, nor will it impact how ballots are counted,'" reports Gizmodo. From the report: Colorado NBC affiliate station 9NEWS reported that Hope Scheppelman, vice chair of the state's Republican party, revealed the error in a mass email sent Tuesday morning, which included an affidavit from a person who claimed to have downloaded the spreadsheet and discovered the passwords by clicking a button to reveal hidden tabs.

In its statement, the Department of State said that there are two unique passwords for each of its voting machines, which are stored in separate places. Additionally, the passwords can only be used by a person who is physically operating the system and voting machines are stored in secure areas that require ID badges to access and are under 24/7 video surveillance.

"The Department took immediate action as soon as it was aware of this, and informed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which closely monitors and protects the [country's] essential security infrastructure," The department said, adding that it is "working to remedy this situation where necessary." Colorado voters use paper ballots, ensuring that a physical paper trail that can be used to verify results tabulated electronically.

Apple has updated the iMac lineup with an M4 chip. The new iMac, announced this morning, includes an M4 chip with an 8-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU. The entry-level model costs $1,299 with two Thunderbolt USB-C 4 ports, while the higher-end models start at $1,499 and have four ports. The Verge: It's also bundled with accessories that now use USB-C charging ports instead of Lightning. Like the prior model, the new iMac has a 24-inch, 4.5K display. However, Apple is offering a new "nano-texture glass option" for $200 extra, which is supposed to help reduce reflections and glare.

Additionally, the iMac's base RAM has been doubled to 16GB over the prior model, with the ability to configure the higher-end option with up to 32GB. Apple's new iMac also comes with a 12MP webcam, along with new Apple Intelligence features that are starting to roll out today, such as AI-powered writing and editing features and a redesigned Siri.

The Russian Foreign Ministry says it had been targeted by a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). "A massive cyberattack from abroad began this morning on the infrastructure of the official website, the Russian Foreign Ministry's portal," said spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. She noted that the ministry regularly encounters similar attacks, but today's attack was "unprecedented in scale." Reuters notes that the attack coincided with the major BRICS summit taking place in the country.

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