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Submission + - Swiss Illegal Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Shut Down (europa.eu)

Submitted by krouic
krouic writes: From 24 to 28 November 2025, Europol supported an action week conducted by law enforcement authorities from Switzerland and Germany in Zurich, Switzerland. The operation focused on taking down the illegal cryptocurrency mixing service ‘Cryptomixer’, which is suspected of facilitating cybercrime and money laundering.
Three servers were seized in Switzerland, along with the cryptomixer.io domain. The operation resulted in the confiscation of over 12 terabytes of data and more than EUR 25 million worth of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. After the illegal service was taken over and shut down, law enforcement placed a seizure banner on the website.

Submission + - Oracle's credit status under pressure (latimes.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'A gauge of risk on Oracle Corp.’s debt reached a three-year high in November, and things are only going to get worse in 2026 unless the database giant is able to assuage investor anxiety about a massive artificial intelligence spending spree, according to Morgan Stanley.'

First sign of the boom's inevitable collapsing?

Submission + - Torrent Giant YTS Returns to .LT Domain After .MX "Vanishes" (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by cristiroma
cristiroma writes: After five years of operating in relatively stable waters, popular torrent site YTS is on the move again. The site’s Mexican domain name, YTS.mx, suddenly stopped resolving yesterday and has effectively vanished. While the official reason remains unclear, the YTS operators decided to return to one of their previous homes, YTS.lt.

With millions of regular users, YTS is arguably the most visited torrent site on the internet today.

The current operators ‘unofficially’ took over the YTS brand in 2015 after the original group threw in the towel. Since then, it has amassed a rather impressive user base.

After adopting one of the most iconic piracy brands, YTS faced its fair share of legal troubles. In 2019, the popular torrent site and its operator were accused of mass copyright infringement in multiple lawsuits filed by filmmakers in the United States. Surprisingly, YTS managed to settle these lawsuits to live another day, although that came at a price.

YTS also dealt with various domain name challenges. When the site first entered the scene, it was operating from the YTS.ag domain name, which it traded in for YTS.am a few years later. In 2019, the torrent site moved to YTS.lt, which it swapped for the YTS.mx domain in 2020.

Legal Pressure?
While it is apparent that the .MX domain name issues are serious, it is not immediately clear what caused them. TorrentFreak asked Registry .MX for a comment on the situation, but the organization did not immediately respond.

Submission + - Conde Nast fined €750,000 for placing cookies without consent (noyb.eu)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: In December 2019, noyb had filed complaints against three providers of French websites, because they had implemented cookie banners that turned a clear “NO” into “fake consent”. Even if a user went through the trouble of rejecting countless cookies on the eCommerce page CDiscount, the movie guide Allocine.fr and the fashion magazine Vanity Fair, these websites sent digital signals to tracking companies claiming that users had agreed to being tracked online. CDiscount sent “fake consent” signals to 431 tracking companies per user, Allocine to 565, and Vanity Fair to 375, an analysis of the data flows had shown.

Today, almost six (!) years after these complaints had originally been filed, the French data protection authority CNIL has finally reached a decision in the case against Vanity Fair: Conde Nast, the publisher behind Vanity Fair, has failed to obtain user consent before placing cookies. In addition, the company failed to sufficiently inform its users about the purpose of supposedly “necessary” cookies. Thirdly, the implemented mechanisms for refusing and withdrawing consent was ineffective. Conde Nast must therefore pay a fine of €750.000.

Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica.

Submission + - Australia spent $62 million to update their weather web site and made it worse (bbc.com)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: Australia last updated their weather site a decade ago. In October, during one of the hottest days of the year, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) revealed its new web site and was immediately castigated for doing so. Complaints ranged from a confusing layout to not being able to find information. Farmers were particularly incensed when they found out they could no longer input GPS coordinates to find forecasts for a specific location. When it was revealed the cost of this update was A$96.5 million ($62.3 million), 20 times the original cost estimate, the temperature got even hotter.

With more than 2.6 billion views a year, Bom tried to explain that the site's refresh — prompted by a major cybersecurity breach in 2015 — was aimed at improving stability, security and accessibility. It did little to satisfy the public.

Some frustrated users turned to humour: "As much as I love a good game of hide and seek, can you tell us where you're hiding synoptic charts or drop some clues?"

Malcolm Taylor, an agronomist in Victoria, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the redesign was a complete disaster.

"I'm the person who needs it and it's not giving me the information I need," the plant and soil scientist said.

As psychologist and neuroscientist Joel Pearson put it, "First you violate expectations by making something worse, then you compound the injury by revealing the violation was both expensive and avoidable. It's the government IT project equivalent of ordering a renovation, discovering the contractor has made your house less functional, and then learning they charged you for a mansion."

Comment Sanctity? (Score 1) 34

The human mind evolved to be evil and degenerate by nature. That's why so much of humanity are murderous savages today and the rest are just in remission.

The human mind is the root of all evil. To prevent evil requires psychological manipulation to modify behavior.
How that gets done is academic.

Submission + - Elon Musk's Grok Goes Haywire, Boasts About Billionaire's Pee-Drinking Skills (mediaite.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: After the AI assistant praised Musk’s physique and claimed he ranked “among the top 10 minds in history, rivaling polymaths like da Vinci or Newton,” social media users quickly discovered that Grok was programmed to say positive things about Musk, no matter the topic.

But according to 404 Media, in a series of deleted X posts, Grok boasted that Musk had the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” that he was “the ultimate throat goat” whose “blowjob prowess edges out Trump’s,” and that he should have won a 2016 porn industry award instead of porn star Riley Reid.

Submission + - An ancient planet smashed into Earth. We now know its origin (dw.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Space scientists are largely agreed that about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth, then a hot ball of molten iron and other elements, was hit by another Mars-sized protoplanet. This hypothetical world is called Theia, named for a titaness of Greek mythology.

Theia was completely destroyed by this impact, but likely lives on beneath our feet, as fragments from this doomed world fused with the early Earth.

Submission + - CERN can now produce antihydrogen atoms eight times faster than before (home.cern)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: CERN is reporting that a new cooling technique means that the ALPHA experiment at their Antimatter Factory can produce antihydrogen atoms, the simplest form of atomic antimatter, eight times faster than before – over 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in a matter of hours.

Producing and trapping antihydrogen is an extremely complicated process. Previous methods took 24 hours to trap just 2,000 atoms, limiting the scope of experiments at ALPHA. The Swansea-led team has changed that.

Using laser-cooled beryllium ions, the team has demonstrated that it is possible to cool positrons to less than 10 Kelvin (below –263C), significantly colder than the previous threshold of about 15 Kelvin. These cooler positrons dramatically boost the efficiency of antihydrogen production and trapping—allowing a record 15,000 atoms to be trapped in less than seven hours.

Alternate article in Phys.org.

Submission + - OnlyFans Institutes Criminal Background Checks for US Creators (xbiz.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: OnlyFans will screen creators in the United States for criminal convictions, CEO Keily Blair has announced in a post on LinkedIn.

“I am very proud to add our partnership with Checkr Trust to our onboarding process in the US,” Blair writes. “Checkr, Inc. helps OnlyFans to prevent people who have a criminal conviction that may impact our community's safety from signing up as a Creator on OnlyFans.”

Checkr is a screening service that bills itself as delivering “instant criminal and public record checks covering 99% of the U.S. population.” The company lists Uber, Instacart, DoorDash and Netflix among its clients.

Submission + - Moss spores survive 9 months outside International Space Station (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: To find out, Fujita's team subjected Physcomitrium patens, a well-studied moss commonly known as spreading earthmoss, to a simulated a space environment, including high levels of UV radiation, extreme high and low temperatures, and vacuum conditions.

They tested three different structures from the moss—protenemata, or juvenile moss; brood cells, or specialized stem cells that emerge under stress conditions; and sporophytes, or encapsulated spores—to find out which had the best chance of surviving in space.

The researchers found that UV radiation was the toughest element to survive, and the sporophytes were by far the most resilient of the three moss parts. None of the juvenile moss survived high UV levels or extreme temperatures. The brood cells had a higher rate of survival, but the encased spores exhibited ~1,000x more tolerance to UV radiation. The spores were also able to survive and germinate after being exposed to 196C for over a week, as well as after living in 55C heat for a month.

Submission + - NASA Is Tracking a Vast Anomaly Growing in Earth's Magnetic Field (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: For years, NASA has monitored a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for decades, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

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