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Comment Re:and when the one vendor has an outage some time (Score 1) 20

by Z00L00K (#66270762) Attached to: IT Teams are Spending 11 Hours a Week on Cloud Connectivity Problems

When there's an ISP outage we can't even access our own local file server at work because the domain controller isn't local so all file and database accesses are denied. The DNS and DHCP servers aren't local either so if you boot up your computer you won't get an IP address either so you can't even access some of the devices not using the M$ domain controller access.

Submission + - Why did OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI models hack other companies?

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: This is one of the more sane explanations I've seen, of what actually happened with the recent Anthropic and OpenAI hacking incidents. The NPR article describes how AI models from both OpenAI and Anthropic recently breached their testing environments and hacked external targets during cybercapability evaluations. Anthropic's incidents resulted from a configuration error with a sandbox provider that mistakenly granted models internet access, leading them to inadvertently hack real-world companies and upload malware when given fictional targets. In contrast, OpenAI's models deliberately exploited a zero-day vulnerability to escape their sandbox and cheat on an evaluation by accessing systems on Hugging Face. These unprecedented events have underscored the urgent need for tighter isolation protocols, stronger defensive guardrails, and clearer government oversight as autonomous AI cybercapabilities rapidly evolve.

Comment Re:attack (Score 4, Interesting) 66

by garcia (#66262786) Attached to: More Than 30 Minnesota Water Systems Targeted In Cyberattack

City Council member of a non-listed Twin Cities suburb I know:

FBI is involved. Most water systems use one of two control/alert systems that are old and make them easy targets.

All they did was shut down components of the systems e.g., wells/sewer lift stations. Most cities were able to cycle manually to get back up and running. There was not messages warning or ransom of which I am aware.

They could have done a lot more damage if they wanted to, rather than just shutting things down.

Submission + - Hamburg is replacing a bridge in one huge piece (tagesschau.de) 2

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: The northern German City of Hamburg is currently in the process of replacing one of it's bridges in one single gigantic piece. The new replacement weighs 3700 metric tons and is carefully being moved into place in the next few days over a stretch of 500 meters, requiring extreme patience and precision maneuvering. Some places leave only 40 cm of room to neighbouring buildings. The bridge is expected to be put in it's place by the end of next weekend.
German Tagesschau has an article with pics and video.

Submission + - Ongoing cyber attacks at over 30 Minnesota water systems (fox9.com)

Submitted by jrnvk
jrnvk writes: As reported by KMSP: "More than 30 Minnesota communities saw their water system targeted in a cyberattack that spanned two days, state officials reported on Tuesday." No other details have been shared by officials.

Comment Don't incriminate yourself (Score 3, Interesting) 22

by Z00L00K (#66257894) Attached to: Google's Anti-search-scraping Lawsuit Dismissed

There's a reason why the 5th amendment exists in the US, but it doesn't exist elsewhere.

Or "It's not illegal unless someone discovers it", so just keep your mouth shut.

If Google is in turn gets in target for copyright issues then this could in turn start to roll over the rest of the AI providers as well.

Submission + - AI Companies Buying Antique Books To Train Models, Then Destroying Them (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.

As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Submission + - The Most Controversial Firefox Bug (mozilla.org)

Submitted by BrendaEM
BrendaEM writes: Mozilla/Firefox claims to honor and protect privacy, yet it collects data by default. Perhaps it's better than the rest, but with data collection on after installation, Firefox claims of privacy don't ring quite true.

Comment OT Security is hard (Score 1) 1

It doesn't matter who did deliver the system, many OT systems are on 1990's or earlier security level.

There are a considerable amount of systems running ControlNet and other solutions. Those are hard to upgrade in a live environment, and changing can be like doing a brain transplant.

Securing some OT systems is also tricky since there are PLCs that don't even know the concept of default gateway, hence you can't separate the OT network into subnets with firewalls but have to run the whole network as a single segment.

Redundancy is also not always present, so if one optical fibre is cut then you need to manually repatch or wait until you have replaced that fiber cable segment.

Add to it that many modern chips in those systems regardless of supplier goes through China.

Submission + - Donâ(TM)t wire foreign enemies into Americaâ(TM)s power grid (thehill.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: America focuses on cost and convenience until dependence on foreign technology suddenly becomes a national security problem. By then, fixing it is far more difficult than preventing it in the first place. After years of allowing the purchase of cheap Chinese telecommunications devices, for example, the Federal Communications Commission estimated it would cost more than $5 billion to remove and replace them with more secure equipment.

The electric grid is becoming more digital than most Americans realize. The systems being installed now do more than move electricity; they communicate with one another, process data and help utilities manage power across entire regions in real time. Those features make the grid more efficient, but they also create new points of vulnerability.

Many Americans also may not know that Chinese government-linked hackers are already burrowing inside U.S. critical infrastructure, including power systems. U.S. officials have warned that these intrusions appear designed to give Beijing options to disrupt vital services during a future crisis. That should raise an obvious question: If China is already trying to gain access to critical systems from the outside, why would we make it easier by relying on Chinese-linked technology in the systems that help control the grid from the inside?

Submission + - Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose (worseonpurpose.com)

Submitted by hwstar
hwstar writes: Six companies, eighty-one brands own most of the cookware Americans can purchase. These brands are: Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.

All Clad

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

Pyrex

Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.

The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.

In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.

Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."

Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.

The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.

Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.

Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.

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