Submission + - Thousands Detained at KK Park Scam Operation (theguardian.com)

Submitted by newcastlejon
newcastlejon writes: Military personnel in Myanmar have raided an online scam operation at the KK Park complex, which is near Myanmar's border with Thailand. Around two thousand people have been detained and dozens of Starlink terminals have been seized.

Operations at KK Park are known to exploit victims of human trafficking, thousands of which were liberated earlier this year during a joint operation between Myanmar and Thailand.

From The Guardian:

Myanmar is notorious for hosting scam operations responsible for defrauding people all over the world. These usually involve gaining victims’ confidence online with romantic ploys and bogus investment pitches.

The centres are infamous for recruiting workers from other countries under false pretences, promising them legitimate jobs and then holding them captive and forcing them to carry out criminal activities.

Maj Gen Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, on Monday night accused the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organisation opposed to army rule, of being involved in the scam projects at KK Park.

The allegation was previously made based on claims that a company backed by the Karen group allowed the land to be leased. However, the group, which is part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar’s civil war, deny any involvement in the scams.

Submission + - Microsoft's update also breaks USB scanners (slashdot.org) 2

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Not requesting a dupe, but the story died too soon for me to add the data point. I don't use the scanner often enough, eh? Not sure how to revive interest, but I actually think some stories should move down the top page more slowly, and this is one that probably deserved more than the standard one-day lifetime. Not sure when I remembered that some "USB topic" had gone past on Slashdot recently...

So I searched google and for some strange reason the google didn't return any links to the horse's mouth at Microsoft. What?

That provoked me into trying Bing and then Copilot, which produced a rather hilarious and infuriating discussion. Some of it might be amusing here, but I don't need the headache of getting sued by Microsoft if I dared to quote what their AI said. Much of the discussion involved "regression testing" and how little anyone should trust Microsoft. Confessions from the jackass's mouth?

Submission + - Life-Changing Eye Implant Helps Blind Patients Read Again (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of blind patients can now read again after being fitted with a life-changing implant at the back of the eye. A surgeon who inserted the microchips in five patients at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London says the results of the international trial are "astounding." Sheila Irvine, 70, who is registered blind, told the BBC it was "out of this world" to be able to read and do crosswords again. "It's beautiful, wonderful. It gives me such pleasure."

The technology offers hope to people with an advanced form of dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), called geographic atrophy (GA), which affects more than 250,000 people in the UK and five million worldwide. In those with the condition — which is more common in older people — cells in a tiny area of the retina at the back of the eye gradually become damaged and die, resulting in blurred or distorted central vision. Colour and fine detail are often lost.

The new procedure involves inserting a tiny 2mm-square photovoltaic microchip, with the thickness of a human hair, under the retina. Patients then put on glasses with a built-in video camera. The camera sends an infrared beam of video images to the implant at the back of the eye, which sends them on to a small pocket processor to be enhanced and made clearer. The images are then sent back to the patient's brain, via the implant and optic nerve, giving them some vision again. The patients spent months learning how to interpret the images.

Submission + - Claude Code Gets a Web Version (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Anthropic has added web and mobile interfaces for Claude Code, its immensely popular command-line interface (CLI) agentic AI coding tool. The web interface appears to be well-baked at launch, but the mobile version is limited to iOS and is in an earlier stage of development. The web version of Claude Code can be given access to a GitHub repository. Once that’s done, developers can give it general marching orders like “add real-time inventory tracking to the dashboard.”

As with the CLI version, it gets to work, with updates along the way approximating where it’s at and what it’s doing. The web interface supports the recently implemented Claude Code capability to take suggestions or requested changes while it’s in the middle of working on a task. (Previously, if you saw it doing something wrong or missing something, you often had to cancel and start over.) Developers can run multiple sessions at once and switch between them as needed; they’re listed in a left-side panel in the interface.

Alongside this web and mobile rollout, Anthropic has also introduced a new sandboxing runtime to Claude Code that, along with other things, aims to make the experience both more secure and lower friction. In the past, Claude Code worked by asking permission before making most changes and steps along the way. Now, it can instead be given permissions for specific file system folders and network servers. That means fewer approval steps, but it’s also more secure overall against prompt injection and other risks.

Submission + - Network security devices endanger orgs with '90s era flaws (csoonline.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Built to defend enterprise networks, network edge security devices are becoming liabilities, with an alarming rise in zero-day exploits of what experts describe as basic vulnerabilities, writes CSO's Lucian Constantin in a report on the state of the security product industry. 'Attackers constantly evolve their techniques. Security engineering, inherently challenging, can’t fix everything. All software products have vulnerabilities, even security tools. These would be valid responses if we were dealing with complex flaws, says Benjamin Harris, CEO of cybersecurity and penetration testing firm watchTowr. “But these are vulnerability classes from the 1990s, and security controls to prevent or identify them have existed for a long time. There is really no excuse.”' Constantin talks with security experts on the rising use of network security device vulnerabilities for initial access —and with the vendors on what steps they are taking to stem the tide.

Submission + - Feds Pump the Brakes on Autonomous Trucks (reason.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: An obscure federal rule is slowing the self-driving revolution. When trucks break down, operators are required to place reflective warning cones and road flares around the truck to warn other motorists. The regulations are exacting: Within 10 minutes of stopping, three warning signals must be set in specific locations around the truck.

Aurora asked the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) to allow warning beacons to be fixed to the truck itself—and activated when a truck becomes disabled. The warning beacons would face both forward and backward, would be more visiblethan cones (particularly at night), and wouldn't burn out like road flares. Drivers of nonautonomous vehicles could also benefit from that rule change, as they would no longer have to walk into traffic to place the required safety signals.

In December 2024, however, the DOT denied Aurora's request for an exemption to the existing rules, even though regulators admitted in the Federal Register that no evidence indicated the truck-mounted beacons would be less safe.

Submission + - Major AWS outage takes down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, Signal, and more (theverge.com)

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently experiencing a major outage that has taken down online services, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. The AWS status checker is reporting that multiple services are “impacted” by operational issues, and that the company is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region” — though outages are also impacting services in other regions globally.

Slashdot Top Deals