Israeli outlet Calcalist: Nvidia is in advanced negotiations to acquire AI infrastructure orchestration and management platform Run:ai, Calcalist has learned. The value of the deal is estimated at many hundreds of millions of dollars and could even reach $1 billion. The companies did not respond to Calcalist's request for comment.

Run:ai raised $75 million in a Series C round in March 2022 led by Tiger Global Management and Insight Partners, who also led the previous Series B round. The round included the participation of additional existing investors, TLV Partners, and S Capital VC, bringing the total funding raised to date to $118 million.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records. From a report: The scam also involved misrepresenting results on malware repository VirusTotal as infections on the user's own computer. (Update: after the publication of this piece the FTC announced that Restoro and Reimage will pay $26 million to settle the FTC's charges.)

The move is the latest from the FTC in a series of actions in the privacy and cybersecurity space. In January, the FTC banned a data broker called X-Mode from selling sensitive location data after I revealed it was harvesting location data from Muslim prayer and dating apps. In this case, the FTC says it went "undercover" against the two related companies, called Restoro and Reimage, to buy the deceiving software and have phone calls with company representatives. "Since at least January 2018, Defendants have operated a tech support scheme that has bilked tens of millions of dollars from consumers, particularly older consumers," the FTC's complaint reads. The complaint is seeking a permanent injunction against the two companies as well as monetary relief.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have urged the US Copyright Office to broaden exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Section 1201. Specifically, the two agencies are advocating for the extension of the right to repair to include "commercial and industrial equipment," which includes McDonald's ice cream machines that are notorious for breaking down. The Verge reports: Exemptions to DMCA Section 1201 are issued every three years, as per the Register of Copyrights' recommendation. Prior exemptions have been issued for jailbreaking cellphones and repairing certain parts of video game consoles. The FTC and DOJ are asking the Copyright Office to go a step further, extending the right to repair to "commercial and industrial equipment." The comment (PDF) singles out four distinct categories that would benefit from DMCA exemptions: commercial soft serve machines; proprietary diagnostic kits; programmable logic controllers; and enterprise IT. 'In the Agencies' view, renewing and expanding repair-related exemptions would promote competition in markets for replacement parts, repair, and maintenance services, as well as facilitate competition in markets for repairable products," the comment reads.

The inability to do third-party repairs on these products not only limits competition, the agencies say, but also makes repairs more costly and can lead to hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost sales. Certain logic controllers have to be discarded and replaced if they break or if the passwords for them get lost. The average estimated cost of "unplanned manufacturing downtime" was $260,000 per hour, the comment notes, citing research from Public Knowledge and iFixit. As for soft serve machines, breakdowns can lead to $625 in lost sales each day. Business owners can't legally fix them on their own or hire an independent technician to do so, meaning they have to wait around for an authorized technician -- which, the comment says, usually takes around 90 days.

Refund fraud groups are exploiting lenient refund policies, resulting in significant losses for retailers like Amazon and prompting civil lawsuits and arrests. The scheme has become so pervasive that groups now market their services on Reddit, TikTok and Telegram. CNBC reports: Fraud groups are taking advantage of retailers' lenient return policies, experts told CNBC, which often include unlimited free returns and sometimes even a preference that customers keep the items. It's ballooned into a massive problem for retailers, costing them more than $101 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail. The figure includes multiple forms of fraud, such as sending back clothing after it's been worn, known as "wardrobing," and returning shoplifted merchandise, the survey said.

In December, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Page and 47 other people across the globe with alleged ties to Rekk, accusing them of conspiring to steal millions of dollars worth of products in a refund fraud operation. Amazon described these services as "illegitimate 'businesses'" that look to "exploit the refund process for their own financial gain to the detriment of honest consumers and retailers who must bear the brunt of increased costs, decreased inventory, and service disruption that impacts genuine customers." An Amazon spokesperson said the company is addressing the issue "head on" through specialized teams and machine learning tools that detect and prevent refund fraud.

Here's how it works: A shopper buys a product online and sends the order information to a group such as Rekk, which then poses as the customer in requesting a refund. Amazon refunds the money to the customer, who then pays the fraud group usually between 15% and 30% of the refund amount, often via PayPal or with bitcoin. That means the customer ends up buying the product for what amounts to a huge discount. The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees -- those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state. State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a "war on our ranching" and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits. Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane -- a potent greenhouse gas that's roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.

For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations' annual climate summit. But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S.

Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal's muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- have passed laws addressing the use of the word "meat" in such products' packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.

After 10 years and billions of dollars spent in development, Apple abruptly canceled its ambitious car project known as "Titan," shifting its focus and resources on the company's artificial intelligence division. In a recent Q&A on Monday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled) shared some new insights about the project and how involved the Apple Silicon team was before it was shut down. According to Gurman, Apple was planning to power the "AI brain" of the car with a custom Apple Silicon chip that would have the equivalent power of four M2 Ultra chips (the most powerful Apple has to date) combined. 9to5Mac reports: A single M2 Ultra chip consists of 134 billion transistors and features a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, and a dedicated 32-core Neural Engine. M2 Ultra powers the current generation of Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Interestingly, Gurman says that the development of this new chip for the car was "nearly finished" before the project was discontinued. As some of the engineers working on the car project were reassigned to other teams at Apple, the company could reuse the engineering of this new chip for future projects.

After weeks of testing, an electronic system for filing returns directly to the IRS is now available for taxpayers from 12 selected states. From a report: The new system, called Direct File, is a free online tool. Taxpayers in the selected states who have very simple W-2s and claim a standard deduction may be eligible to use it this tax season to file their federal income taxes. The program will also offer a Spanish version, which will be available starting at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday. The Treasury Department estimates that one-third of all federal income tax returns filed could be prepared using Direct File and that 19 million taxpayers may be eligible to use the tool this tax season.

"Direct File will offer millions of Americans a free and simple way to file their taxes, with no expensive and unnecessary filing fees and no upselling, putting hundreds of dollars back in the pocket of working families each year, consistent with President Biden's pledge to lower costs," said National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard. Certain taxpayers in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California and New York can participate. Direct File can only be used to file federal income taxes, taxpayers from states that require filing state taxes will need to do so separately.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the past 10 years it has remained one of the modern era's greatest mysteries. A commercial airliner with a strong safety record carrying 239 people vanishing from the map, spawning a wide variety of competing theories, books and documentaries and leaving the families of those left behind asking themselves every March 8 -- what happened to those aboard Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

In an era when black boxes have been successfully hauled up from the very depths of the ocean and whole chunks of a downed airliner painstakingly pieced back together to determine what caused a catastrophe, the fate of MH370 remains infuriatingly elusive. It is a plane crash without a plane. A disaster without conclusive proof of what happened to its victims. A story that anyone who embarks on a commercial flight can instantly relate to but one that, for now at least, doesn't have a closing chapter.

[...] This week, many loved ones of those missing returned to Malaysia to urge local authorities to relaunch a search ahead of Friday's anniversary. [...] Aviation experts tell CNN that improved detection technology will likely bring families closer to the missing plane than they ever have been, if a search were to be relaunched. But that will not be cheap. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent scouring more than 710,000 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean until 2018, but nothing transpired that moved our understanding on from that already available since the very early days.

41 state attorneys general penned a letter to Meta's top attorney on Wednesday saying complaints are skyrocketing across the United States about Facebook and Instagram user accounts being stolen, and declaring "immediate action" necessary to mitigate the rolling threat. Wired: The coalition of top law enforcement officials, spearheaded by New York attorney general Letitia James, says the "dramatic and persistent spike" in complaints concerning account takeovers amounts to a "substantial drain" on governmental resources, as many stolen accounts are also tied to financial crimes -- some of which allegedly profits Meta directly.

"We have received a number of complaints of threat actors fraudulently charging thousands of dollars to stored credit cards," says the letter addressed to Meta's chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead. "Furthermore, we have received reports of threat actors buying advertisements to run on Meta." "We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company," the officials add. "Proper investment in response and mitigation is mandatory."

"A ransomware gang once thought to have been crippled by law enforcement has snarled prescription processing for millions of Americans over the past week..." reports the Washington Post.

"The hackers stole data about patients, encrypted company files and demanded money to unlock them, prompting the company to shut down most of its network as it worked to recover." Insurance giant UnitedHealthcare Group said the hackers struck its Change Health business unit, which routes prescription claims from pharmacies to companies that determine whether patients are covered by insurance and what they should pay... Change Health and a rival, CoverMyMeds, are the two biggest players in the so-called switch business, charging pharmacies a small fee for funneling claims to insurers. "When one of them goes down, obviously it's a major problem," said Patrick Berryman, a senior vice president at the National Community Pharmacists Association...

UnitedHealth estimated that more than 90 percent of the nation's 70,000-plus pharmacies have had to alter how they process electronic claims as a result of the Change Health outage. But it said only a small number of patients have been unable to get their prescriptions at some price. At CVS, which operates one of the largest pharmacy networks in the nation, a spokesperson said there are "a small number of cases in which our pharmacies are not able to process insurance claims" as a result of the outage. It said workarounds were allowing it to fill prescriptions, however...

For pharmacies that were not able to quickly route claims to a different company, the Change Health outage left pharmacists to try to manually calculate a patient's co-pay or offer them the cash price. Compounding the impact, thousands of organizations cut off Change Health from their systems to ensure the hackers did not infect their networks as well... The attack on Change Health has left many pharmacies in a cash-flow bind, as they face bills from the companies that deliver the medication without knowing when they will be reimbursed by insurers. Some pharmacies are requiring customers to pay full price for their prescriptions when they cannot tell if they are covered by insurance. In some cases, that means people are paying more than $1,000 out of pocket, according to social media posts.

The situation has been "extremely disruptive," said Erin Fox, associate chief pharmacy officer at University of Utah Health. "At our system, our retail pharmacies were providing three-day gratis emergency supplies for patients who could not afford to pay the cash price," Fox said by email. "In some cases, like for inhalers, we had to send product out at risk, not knowing if we will ever get paid, but we need to take care of the patients." Axis Pharmacy Northwest near Seattle is "going out on a limb and dispensing product with absolutely no inkling if we'll get paid or not," said Richard Molitor, the pharmacist in charge. UPDATE: CNN reports Change Healthcare has now announced "plans for a temporary loan program to get money flowing to health care providers affected by the outage." It's a stop-gap measure meant to give some financial relief to health care providers, which analysts say are losing millions of dollars per day because of the outage. Some US officials and health care executives told CNN it may be weeks before Change Healthcare returns to normal operations.
"Once standard payment operations resume, the funds will simply need to be repaid," the company said in a statement. Change Healthcare has been under pressure from senior US officials to get their systems back online. Officials from the White House and multiple federal agencies, including the department of Health and Human Services, have been concerned by the broad financial and health impact of the hack and have been pressing for ways to get Change Healthcare back online, sources told CNN...

In a message on its website Friday afternoon, Change Healthcare also said that it was launching a new version of its online prescribing service following the cyberattack.
Thanks to Slashdot reader CaptainDork for sharing the news.

In a series of tests using fake data, a U.S. government watchdog was able to steal more than 1GB of seemingly sensitive personal data from the cloud systems of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The experiment is detailed in a new report by the Department of the Interior's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), published last week. TechCrunch reports: The goal of the report was to test the security of the Department of the Interior's cloud infrastructure, as well as its "data loss prevention solution," software that is supposed to protect the department's most sensitive data from malicious hackers. The tests were conducted between March 2022 and June 2023, the OIG wrote in the report. The Department of the Interior manages the country's federal land, national parks and a budget of billions of dollars, and hosts a significant amount of data in the cloud. According to the report, in order to test whether the Department of the Interior's cloud infrastructure was secure, the OIG used an online tool called Mockaroo to create fake personal data that "would appear valid to the Department's security tools."

The OIG team then used a virtual machine inside the Department's cloud environment to imitate "a sophisticated threat actor" inside of its network, and subsequently used "well-known and widely documented techniques to exfiltrate data." "We used the virtual machine as-is and did not install any tools, software, or malware that would make it easier to exfiltrate data from the subject system," the report read. The OIG said it conducted more than 100 tests in a week, monitoring the government department's "computer logs and incident tracking systems in real time," and none of its tests were detected nor prevented by the department's cybersecurity defenses.

"Our tests succeeded because the Department failed to implement security measures capable of either preventing or detecting well-known and widely used techniques employed by malicious actors to steal sensitive data," said the OIG's report. "In the years that the system has been hosted in a cloud, the Department has never conducted regular required tests of the system's controls for protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access." That's the bad news: The weaknesses in the Department's systems and practices "put sensitive [personal information] for tens of thousands of Federal employees at risk of unauthorized access," read the report. The OIG also admitted that it may be impossible to stop "a well-resourced adversary" from breaking in, but with some improvements, it may be possible to stop that adversary from exfiltrating the sensitive data.

Thrasio, which acquires third-party Amazon sellers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and received commitments for $90 million in new financing from existing shareholders, it said on Wednesday. From a report: Thrasio also entered into a restructuring agreement with some of its lenders to reduce debt of $495 million from its existing debt pile, it said in a statement. It listed its estimated assets in the range of $1 billion to $10 billion and estimated liabilities of $500 million to $1 billion, according to a document filed with the New Jersey bankruptcy court. Billions of dollars, primarily in loans and other debt instruments, were invested into newly-formed startups aggregating third-party merchants on Amazon's marketplace during the COVID-19 pandemic as investors bet heavily on a prolonged explosion in online shopping. But as lockdowns eased and consumers returned to brick-and-mortar stores, sales growth on Amazon slowed, leaving these heavily-indebted "roll-up" companies struggling to service interest payments.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Canada has proposed new rules that would compel digital platforms to remove online content that features the sexual exploitation of children or intimate images without consent of the individuals involved. From a report: The rules were years in the making, and represent the third and possibly final installment of measures aimed at regulating digital platforms. Measures introduced since 2022 aim to increase the amount of domestic, Canadian-made content on streaming services, such as Netflix, and require digital platforms to help Canadian news-media outlets finance their newsroom operations. The legislation needs to be approved by Canada's Parliament before it takes effect.

Canada said its rules are based on concepts introduced by the European Union, the U.K. and Australia. Canadian officials say the proposed measures would apply to social-media platforms, adult-entertainment sites where users can upload content, and live-streaming services. These services, officials said, are expected to expeditiously remove two categories of content: That which sexually exploits a child or an abuse survivor, and intimate content broadcast without an individual's consent. The latter incorporates so-called revenge porn, or the nonconsensual posting or dissemination of intimate images, often after the end of a romantic relationship. Officials said private and encrypted messaging services are excluded from the proposed regulations.

Canadian officials said platforms will have a duty to either ensure the material is not published, or take it down once notified. Canada also intends to set up a new agency, the Digital Safety Commission, to enforce the rules, order harmful content taken down, and hold digital services accountable. Platforms that violate the rules could face a maximum penalty of up to 25 million Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $18.5 million, officials said.

Dr. Ruth Gottesman, a longtime professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is making free tuition available to all students going forward. From a report: The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students going forward. The donor, Dr. Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.

The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protege of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Mr. Buffett built. The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it is going to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city's poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county in New York. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city's wealthiest borough.

While her husband ran an investment firm, First Manhattan, Dr. Gottesman had a long career at Einstein, a well-regarded medical school, starting in 1968, when she took a job as director of psychoeducational services. She has long been on Einstein's board of trustees and is currently the chair. In recent years, she has become close friends with Dr. Philip Ozuah, the pediatrician who oversees the medical college and its affiliated hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, as the chief executive officer of the health system. That friendship and trust loomed large as she contemplated what to do with the money her husband had left her.

Social media platform Reddit has struck a deal with Google to make its content available for training the search engine giant's AI models. Reuters: The contract with Alphabet-owned Google is worth about $60 million per year, according to one of the sources. The deal underscores how Reddit, which is preparing for a high-profile stock market launch, is seeking to generate new revenue amid fierce competition for advertising dollars from the likes of TikTok and Meta Platform's Facebook.

A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a speaker's pulse racing or "umms" lengthening, a generative AI bot that mimics their voice could simply take over. That cutting-edge idea wasn't revealed at a big company event or in an academic journal. Instead, it appeared in a 1,500-word post on a little-known, free website called TDCommons.org that Google has quietly owned and funded for nine years. WIRED: Until WIRED received a link to an idea on TDCommons last year and got curious, Google had never spoken with the media about its website. Scrolling through TDCommons, you can read Google's latest ideas for coordinating smart home gadgets for better sleep, preserving privacy in mobile search results, and using AI to summarize a person's activities from their photo archives. And the submissions aren't exclusive to Google; about 150 organizations, including HP, Cisco, and Visa, also have posted inventions to the website.

The website is a home for ideas that seem potentially valuable but not worth spending tens of thousands of dollars seeking a patent for. By publishing the technical details and establishing "prior art," Google and other companies can head off future disputes by blocking others from filing patents for similar concepts. Google gives employees a $1,000 bonus for each invention they post to TDCommons -- a tenth of what it awards its patent seekers -- but they also get an immediately shareable link to gloat about otherwise secretive work.

"Apple will reportedly have to pay around €500 million (about $539 million USD) in the EU," reports the Verge, "for stifling competition against Apple Music on the iPhone. Financial Times reported this morning that the fine comes after regulators in Brussels, Belgium investigated a Spotify complaint that Apple prevented apps from telling users about cheaper alternatives to Apple's music service.... The EU whittled its objections down to oppose Apple's refusal to let developers even link out to their own subscription sign-ups within their apps — a policy that Apple changed in 2022 following regulatory pressure in Japan.

$500 million may sound like a lot, but a much bigger fine of close to $40 billion (or 10 percent of Apple's annual global turnover) was on the table when the EU updated its objections last year. Apple was charged over a billion dollars in 2020, but French authorities dropped that to about $366 million after the company appealed.
The Verge cites an Apple spokesperson who said a year ago that the EU case "has no merit."

Reuters that the EU's fine "is expected to be announced early next month, the Financial Times said."

More from Politico The fine would be the EU's first ever against Apple and is expected to be announced early next month, according to the FT report. It is the result of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple's "anti-steering" requirements breach the bloc's abuse of dominance rules, harming music consumers "who may end up paying more" for apps... The Commission will rule that Apple's actions are illegal and against EU competition rules, according to the report.
"The EU executive will ban Apple's practice of barring music services from letting users know of cheaper alternatives outside the App Store, according to the newspaper."

"For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world's oceans," reports Wired.

"In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs and have stayed that way since..." Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. "It's really getting to be strange that we're just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long...." Unlike land, which rapidly heats and cools as day turns to night and back again, it takes a lot to warm up an ocean that may be thousands of feet deep. So even an anomaly of mere fractions of a degree is significant. "To get into the two or three or four degrees, like it is in a few places, it's pretty exceptional," says McNoldy.

So what's going on here? For one, the oceans have been steadily warming over the decades, absorbing something like 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have added to the atmosphere...

A major concern with such warm surface temperatures is the health of the ecosystems floating there: phytoplankton that bloom by soaking up the sun's energy and the tiny zooplankton that feed on them. If temperatures get too high, certain species might suffer, shaking the foundations of the ocean food web. But more subtly, when the surface warms, it creates a cap of hot water, blocking the nutrients in colder waters below from mixing upwards. Phytoplankton need those nutrients to properly grow and sequester carbon, thus mitigating climate change...

Making matters worse, the warmer water gets, the less oxygen it can hold. "We have seen the growth of these oxygen minimum zones," says Dennis Hansell, an oceanographer and biogeochemist at the University of Miami. "Organisms that need a lot of oxygen, they're not too happy when the concentrations go down in any way — think of a tuna that is expending a lot of energy to race through the water."
But why is this happening? The article suggests less dust blowing from the Sahara desert to shade the oceans, but also 2020 regulations that reduced sulfur aerosols in shipping fuels. (This reduced toxic air pollution — but also some cloud cover.)

There was also an El Nino in the Pacific ocean last summer — now waning — which complicates things, according to biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. "One of our challenges is trying to tease out what these natural variations are doing in relation to the steady warming due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere."

But the article points out that even the Atlantic ocean is heating up — and "sea surface temperatures started soaring last year well before El Niño formed." And last week the U.S. Climate Prediction Center predicted there's now a 55% chance of a La Nina in the Atlantic between June and August, according to the article — which could increase the likelihood of hurricanes.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 for sharing the article.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: A Ukrainian cybercrime kingpin who ran some of the most pervasive malware operations faces 40 years in prison after spending nearly a decade on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List. Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov, 37, pleaded guilty this week in the US to two charges related to his leadership role in both the Zeus and IcedID malware operations that netted millions of dollars in the process. Penchukov's plea will be seen as the latest big win for US law enforcement in its continued fight against cybercrime and those that enable it. However, authorities took their time getting him in 'cuffs. [...]

"Malware like IcedID bleeds billions from the American economy and puts our critical infrastructure and national security at risk," said US attorney Michael Easley for the eastern district of North Carolina. "The Justice Department and FBI Cyber Squad won't stand by and watch it happen, and won't quit coming for the world's most wanted cybercriminals, no matter where they are in the world. This operation removed a key player from one of the world's most notorious cybercriminal rings. Extradition is real. Anyone who infects American computers had better be prepared to answer to an American judge."

This week, he admitted one count of conspiracy to commit a racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations (RICO) act offense relating to Zeus, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in relation to IcedID. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. His sentencing date is set for May 9, 2024. Zeus malware, a banking trojan that formed a botnet for financial theft, caused over $100 million in losses before its 2014 dismantlement. Its successor, SpyEye, incorporated enhanced features for financial fraud. Despite the 2014 takedown of Zeus, Penchukov moved on to lead IcedID, a similar malware first found in 2017. IcedID evolved from banking fraud to ransomware, severely affecting the University of Vermont Medical Center in 2020 with over $30 million in damages.

Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing. From a report: These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors. The shift reflects growing concern that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren't moving fast enough to prevent the destructive effects of heat waves, storms and floods made worse by climate change. Geoengineering isn't a substitute for reducing emissions, according to scientists and business leaders involved in the projects. Rather, it is a way to slow climate warming in the next few years while buying time to switch to a carbon-free economy in the longer term.

Three field experiments are under way in the U.S. and overseas. This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean. Scientists hope bigger, brighter clouds will reflect sunlight away from the Earth, shade the ocean surface and cool the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, where warming ocean temperatures have contributed to massive coral die-offs. The research project, known as marine cloud brightening, is led by Southern Cross University as part of the $64.55 million, or 100 million Australian dollars, Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. The program is funded by the partnership between the Australian government's Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and includes conservation organizations and several academic institutions.