180573246
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Since the United States reopened its embassy in Cuba in 2015, a number of personnel have reported a series of debilitating medical ailments which include dizziness, fatigue, problems with memory, and impaired vision. For ten years these sudden and unexplained onsets have been studied with no conclusive evidence one way or the other. Now comes word a device, purchased by the Pentagon, has been tested which may be linked to what is known as Havana Syndrome.
Two unnamed sources said officials in the previous administration, under former President Joe Biden, had purchased the device for an eight-figure sum. The funding was provided by the Department of Defense, according to the report.
Speculation had swirled some form of directed-energy weapon could have been behind the baffling illness, and that Russian technology could be behind the symptoms. Moscow has denied any involvement.
The device acquired by Homeland Security Investigations—part of DHS—produces pulsed radio waves, one source told CNN. It contains Russian components but is not entirely Russian-made, they added.
180128281
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smooth wombat writes:
Michael Burry recently said he believes the AI market is in a bubble. Why should anyone listen to him? He's the guy who famously predicted the subprime mortgage crisis and made $100 million for himself, and $725 million for his hedge fund investors, by shorting the mortgage bond market. Will he be right in his most recent prediction? Only time will tell, but according to Jason Alexander at Forbes, Burry, and many others, are looking at AI the wrong way. For him, there is no AI bubble. Instead, AI is following the pattern of the electrical grid, the phone system and yes, the internet, all of which looked irrational at the time. His belief is people are applying outdated models to the AI buildout which makes it seem an irrational bubble. His words:
The irony is that the “AI bubble” narrative is itself a bubble, inflated by people applying outdated analogies to a phenomenon that does not fit them. Critics point to OpenAI’s operating losses, its heavy compute requirements and the fact that its expenses dwarf its revenues.
Under classical software economics, these would indeed be warning signs. But AI is not following the cost structures of apps or social platforms. It is following the cost structures of infrastructure.
The early electrical grid looked irrational. The first telephone networks looked irrational. Railroads looked irrational. In every major infrastructural transition, society endured long periods of heavy spending, imbalance and apparent excess. These were not signs of bubbles. They were signs that the substrate of daily life was being rebuilt.
OpenAI’s spending is no more indicative of a bubble than Edison’s power stations or Bell’s early switchboards. The economics only appear flawed if one assumes the system they are building already exists.
What we are witnessing is not a speculative mania but a structural transformation driven by thermodynamics, power density and a global shift toward energy-based intelligence.
The bubble narrative persists because many observers are diagnosing this moment with the wrong conceptual tools. They are treating an energy-driven transformation as if it were a software upgrade.
180075578
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies knowingly helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job, and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT job. The FBI is even warning companies that North Koreans working remotely can steal source code and extort money from the company, money which goes to fund the North Korean government. Now, five more people have plead guilty to knowingly helping North Koreans infiltrate U.S. companies as remote IT workers.
The five people are accused of working as “facilitators” who helped North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press release.
These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un’s regime $2.2 million in revenue, said the DOJ.
Three of the people — U.S. nationals Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis — each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy.
Prosecutors accused the three of helping North Koreans posing as legitimate IT workers, whom they knew worked outside of the United States, to use their own identities to obtain employment, helped them remotely access their company-issued laptops set up in their homes, and also helped the North Koreans pass vetting procedures, such as drug tests.
The fourth U.S. national who pleaded guilty is Erick Ntekereze Prince, who ran a company called Taggcar, which supplied to U.S. companies allegedly “certified” IT workers but whom he knew worked outside of the country and were using stolen or fake identities. Prince also hosted laptops with remote access software at several residences in Florida, and earned more than $89,000 for his work, the DOJ said.
Another participant in the scheme who pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy and another count of aggravated identity theft is Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, who prosecutors accuse of stealing U.S. citizens’ identities and selling them to North Koreans so they could get jobs at more than 40 U.S. companies.
177003563
submission
smooth wombat writes:
With the implementation of tariffs on nearly every country which does business with the U.S., some companies are already raising prices to account for the increaesed cost of products. Other companies have not yet implemented price increasd, but are warning customers to expect higher prices in the near future. As a result, companies are now adding a "tariff surcharge" to all purchases.
Dame, a sexual wellness brand that makes adult toys and personal care products, has implemented a $5 "Trump tariff surcharge" that is automatically added to customers' online shopping carts at checkout.
Dame CEO Alexandra Fine said the fee doesn't cover all of its extra costs and that the company is analyzing its pricing given that most of its products are made in China. "Our whole industry is in China, so we've already seen the impact," she told CBS MoneyWatch.
Fine also said she wants to be transparent with customers about what is happening, rather than quietly inflating prices.
"The intention of adding the Trump tariff surcharge as a line item at checkout was to remind people that this is an extra tax on us. I wanted people to understand why it's more expensive — that it's because of political decisions that were made," she said.
177003065
submission
smooth wombat writes:
The Social Security Administration has announced the only method it will communicate with the public or media is through posts on Twitter (X). This change took place after large numbers of communications staff were either fired or reassigned, sometimes to less senior positions. SSA Midwest-West (MWW) Regional Commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis told employees in a call Thursday that those regional offices will no longer issue press releases or “Dear Colleague” letters to advocate groups.
SSA is centralizing its process for responding to all inquiries, except those coming from members of Congress. For non-congressional inquiries, SSA regional offices will send their draft responses to SSA’s deputy commissioner of operations for review.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that SSA technicians received an email that read: “Effective immediately, do not respond directly to any public or congressional inquiries.”
176994253
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wiredmikey writes:
President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum revoking any active security clearance held by former CISA chief Chris Krebs and ordering an immediate review of the cybersecurity agency’s conduct during Krebs’ tenure. The order directs federal agencies to terminate any active security clearances held by Krebs and to suspend clearances held by individuals affiliated with entities associated with him, including the cybersecurity company SentinelOne, pending a national interest review. The White House memo also alleges that during his time in government, Krebs engaged in activities that it claims were inconsistent with the administration’s policies on free speech and government neutrality.
176805911
submission
fahrbot-bot writes:
The Guardian (and others) is reporting that a reporter at The Atlantic was accidentally included in a group text on Signal that discussed upcoming military strikes in Yemen by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.
Senior members of Donald Trump’s cabinet have been involved in a serious security breach while discussing secret military plans for recent US attacks on the Houthi armed group in Yemen.
In an extraordinary blunder, key figures in the Trump administration – including the vice-president, JD Vance, the defence secretary Pete Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard – used the commercial chat app Signal to convene and discuss plans – while also including a prominent journalist in the group.
Signal is not approved by the US government for sharing sensitive information.
Others in the chat included the Trump adviser Stephen Miller; Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles; and the key Trump envoy Steve Witkoff.
The breach was revealed in an Atlantic article published on Monday by Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic magazine, who discovered that he had been included in a Signal chat called “Houthi PC Small Group” and realizing that 18 other members of the group included Trump cabinet members.
Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he was unaware of the incident, saying, “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic.” [Which kind of misses the point.]
176333709
submission
smooth wombat writes:
The man who espouses "free speech" has announced he will be "fixing" Community Notes on Twitter because they repeatedly contradict what Trump says. He claims a cabal of governments and media are using Notes to game the system.
Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."
Yaccarino invited audience members to "think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time," but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.
Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a "neon sore thumb."
175988917
submission
smooth wombat writes:
After going dark for 12 hours in response to a U.S. law saying it must divest from Chinese ownership, TikTok came back on line when the new administration took office. However, once up and running, users found one unexpected change. Anti-Trump content is now being censored. Words, phrases, and videos which were readily accessible pre-blackout were now unavailable or being removed entirely.
A post on X, formerly Twitter, which has received 4.5 million views at the time of reporting, claims that "TikTok is now region locking Americans from looking up things like "fascism" and "Donald Trump rigged election"."
The post includes two screenshots of the TikTok app. The screenshot is of the search page, and in both the search term is "Donald Trump rigged election." The post states that: "On the left are results from a device in America, and on the right are results from one in the UK."
The post on the left shows a results page stating "No results found," while on the left it shows two videos of the President.
Another post from the account Dustin Genereux said that, "Censorship on TikTok is at an all time high with accounts being deleted, posts going back years being flagged, people losing access to the creator fund for saying anything Anti-Trump, MAGA, Elon, etc. But free speech and all that right?"
175400579
submission
seeker writes:
Russia has been credited with assassination and attempted assassination using chemical weapons in the UK and with the assassination of US resident and former Russian citizen media czar Mikhail Lesin
More recently it was found to be plotting to assassinate the CEO of Reinmetal, the German arms maker.
Now it has upped it game: incendiaries on commercial aircraft.
175169481
submission
smooth wombat writes:
With all the devastation going on in the Southeast due to Hurricane Helene, any impact to the tech industry might not be high on the list of things to worry about. However, a tiny town in North Carolina is indispensable to tech, and its flooding could have a large impact. Why? Spruce Pine has one of the largest sources of pure quartz used in the semiconductor and solar panel industry on the planet.
“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors.
“Purity really does matter,” he says. “You're talking about a process to create the silicon wafers that later become silicon chips, where one single atom being in the wrong place” could derail production.
175160875
submission
Arrogant-Bastard writes:
A recent Rand report (PDF) discusses the large-scale use of bots powered by LLMs to manipulate/astroturf social media. An introduction to the report ominously notes: "[...] we have to assume that AI manipulation is ubiquitous, it's proliferating, and we're going to have to learn to live with it. That's a really scary thing.”
175137735
submission
smooth wombat writes:
It's taken time, but some bosses are now firing Gen Z workers who were hired straight out of college only months before. Over half of employers say they've done so, and more have indicated they will do so in the near future. Some employers have gone so far as to say they are hesitant to hire college grads again.
Employers’ gripe with young people today is their lack of motivation or initiative—50% of the leaders surveyed cited that as the reason why things didn’t work out with their new hire.
Bosses also pointed to Gen Z being unprofessional, unorganized and having poor communication skills as their top reasons for having to sack grads.
Leaders say they have struggled with the latest generation’s tangible challenges, including being late to work and meetings often, not wearing office-appropriate clothing, and using language appropriate for the workspace.
174797718
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Purchased for $44 billion after an acrimonious attempt to back out of the deal, it is looking like Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter is the worst leveraged buyout since the 2008 global financial crisis. At last check, the company is worth only one quarter of its purchase price, a plummet exacerbated by Musk telling advertisers to ‘Go fuck yourself’ when they chose not to advertise on the site.
Typically, Wall Street banks will underwrite the debt financing from major deals, later packaging and selling the debt on to professional investors like hedge funds and pension plans in a matter of weeks or sometimes months. But the poor timing of the October 2022 Twitter deal, struck just when borrowing costs began to soar, combined with the dire financials of the social media company, soured any appetite on the part of money managers.
Nearly two years on, investment banks have been unable to offload the debt, tying up precious capital and limiting their ability to originate and finance more deals. In fact, no LBO debt has sat longer on balance sheet since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, according to new information from PitchBook LCD cited by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
The previous record was 13 months stemming from the 2007 acquisition of car-parts group Tower Automotive by private equity firm Cerberus during the peak of the subprime bubble.
174619590
submission
smooth wombat writes:
Deepfake scams are becoming more prolific and their quality will only improve over time. However, one question can stop them dead in their tracks. Such was the case with Ferrari earlier this month when a suspicious executive saved the company from being the latest victim.
The voice impersonating Vigna was convincing — a spot-on imitation of the southern Italian accent.
The Vigna deepfaker began explaining that he was calling from a different mobile phone number because he needed to discuss something confidential — a deal that could face some China-related snags and required an unspecified currency-hedge transaction to be carried out.
The executive was shocked and started to have suspicions, according to the people. He began to pick up on the slightest of mechanical intonations that only deepened his suspicious.
“Sorry, Benedetto, but I need to identify you,” the executive said. He posed a question: What was the title of the book Vigna had just recommended to him a few days earlier (it was Decalogue of Complexity: Acting, Learning and Adapting in the Incessant Becoming of the World by Alberto Felice De Toni)?
With that, the call abruptly ended. Ferrari opened an internal investigation, the people said. Representatives for the Maranello, Italy-based company declined to comment on the matter.
