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Submission + - Clickfix is in the wild, Gizmodo currently under attack

Submitted by 278MorkandMindy
278MorkandMindy writes: While I knew about clickfix, I didn't expect it to hit "mainstream" websites.

The "open powershell, then ctrl-v" is a dead giveaway, but only for those with medium Internet literacy. Looks like a reCaptcha, although 4 steps to "confirm your identity" seemed a little much.

Let your less tech savy friends know.

Submission + - Microsoft discovers new lightweight backdoor that steals cryptocurrency (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Ars Technica reports Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers. The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases.

“The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure,” Microsoft said Thursday. “Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor.”

“This malware family shows how lightweight, script-based stealers can deliver outsized impact when paired with anonymized communications and runtime tasking,” Microsoft said. “The combination of Tor-routed C2, clipboard targeting, screenshot capture, and remote code execution gives attackers both immediate monetization paths and continued control over compromised devices.”

Big question is "What's in your crypto wallet?"

Submission + - Student Loan Borrowers Will Get Interest Rate Cut If They Sign Up For Auto Pay (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Student loan borrowers who enroll in automatic payments will get a much bigger discount on interest starting July 1, the U.S. Department of Education says. Auto pay has long offered a modest discount off borrowers' interest rate -- .25 percentage points — but after millions of borrowers opted out during the long COVID repayment pause, with some making no payments for years, the nation's student debt portfolio swelled to $1.7 trillion. On Thursday, the department said it will temporarily increase its auto pay interest rate discount to one full percentage point. Practically, that means an undergraduate borrower with a loan at the current 6.39% would see their interest rate drop temporarily to 5.39%. The rate cut will last for two years, from July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2028. Borrowers already enrolled in auto pay do not need to act. They will automatically receive the rate cut. [...] The department says borrowers will have until Sept. 30 to sign up for auto pay and qualify for the two-year interest discount.

Submission + - OpenAI just exposed how bad AI still is at real science (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: OpenAI introduced LifeSciBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems on realistic life science research tasks rather than simple biology questions. While OpenAIâ(TM)s top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, it achieved a pass rate of just 36.1 percent, failing nearly two-thirds of benchmark tasks. The company says the results highlight progress in scientific communication and evidence synthesis, but also reveal persistent weaknesses in artifact-heavy and design-oriented scientific work.

Submission + - Trump administration is U-turning on plan closing ocean monitoring system (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: The Trump administration is U-turning on its controversial decision to dismantle a critical ocean monitoring system that provides vital information on the health of the world’s oceans, after a bipartisan backlash in Congress.

The National Science Foundation, which funds the $386 million deep-ocean system, announced it would be pulling up buoys and other underwater equipment from arrays in late May. Thursday, NSF announced it will halt these plans and convene an expert panel to “identify a sustainable path” forward. The NSF’s about-face comes amid intense backlash to its original decision. Experts feared the US was taking eyes off the oceans as they endure a period of huge change, with off-the-chart temperatures fueling devastating storms and threatening fisheries.

Ocean scientists CNN previously spoke to said ditching the monitoring system was “foolish” and “counterintuitive.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raised objections. “Dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative is supreme stupidity, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and destroying a vital source of climate data,” Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, wrote in a statement.
  House Science Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, said the NSF’s reversal was welcome but cautioned it was not yet clear “how much damage they have already done.”

“This should have never happened,” she told CNN in a statement. “This pathetic scheme was illegal. NSF is governing via chaos and reactionary nonsense. Scientists and coastal economies that depend on this data deserve better.”

The NSF said it “remains committed to ocean sciences, to responsible stewardship of its research infrastructure and to supporting the stakeholders that depend on it.”

Submission + - The Korean Telecom Giant at the Center of Anthropic's Mythos Controversy (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Trump administration’s move to impose export controls on Anthropic’s most powerful AI technology followed a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to its Claude Mythos model, according to people familiar with the matter. US officials were concerned about what they alleged were SK Telecom’s ties to China, those people said. Those concerns appear to have compounded when Amazon later flagged vulnerabilities to the White House it identified in Fable 5, a highly safeguarded version of Mythos that Anthropic released to the public on June 9. The Amazon researchers claimed that it was possible to circumvent some of Fable 5’s guardrails and access Mythos’ formidable cybercapabilities, though Anthropic and outside cybersecurity experts have argued these risks are not unique to Claude.

The confluence of events is what ultimately led the White House to determine that it could not trust Anthropic to safeguard its most advanced AI technology, according to a person close to the administration. On Friday, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to revoke access to Mythos and Fable 5 for all foreign nationals, including immigrants inside the US. Rather than gate access to its technology based on nationality, a process that would be difficult to implement while also preserving privacy, Anthropic decided it was better to disable access to the models entirely. The White House and Anthropic still remain at odds after days of negotiations about bringing Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back online.

Submission + - Paint is already peeling in renovated Washington Reflecting Pool after 2 weeks. (cnn.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: CNN, Reuters and other sources are reporting that the paint on Washington's newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Thursday was peeling away from the bottom and into the algae-tinted water, less than two weeks after announcement of the job's completion. The historic pool was drained and refinished in a $14.7 million no-bid contract.

Tim Auerhahn, a pool infrastructure expert and the chairman of the Aquatic Council, said it’s difficult to tell from the videos what was causing the “apparent delamination.”

“A coating system can fail for several reasons, including substrate preparation, surface contamination, application conditions, adhesion issues, product selection, mechanical damage, environmental exposure, or a combination of factors,” Auerhahn said.

The larger question, he added, is whether this represents a localized issue in that part of the pool or a larger, more systemic issue with the coating. “If the coating is losing adhesion in multiple locations, that could indicate a more significant concern,” he said.

Submission + - Meta lobbies Congress for protection from child-harm lawsuits (aol.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Meta Platforms has lobbied the U.S. Congress for legal immunity from child-harm claims tied to social media products such as Instagram, as it faces thousands of lawsuits from young users and their families, according to a source familiar with the matter and proposed legislative language reviewed by Reuters.

If adopted by lawmakers and passed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the U.S. Senate, such a provision could undermine thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other online platforms over harms to children. Meta and Google's YouTube face a combined $6 million in damages after they lost the first case at trial early this year.

While legislators have given no indication of adopting the language, the lobbying effort shows the kind of legal protections Meta is seeking amid the biggest attempt to regulate online platforms in the U.S. since the 1990s.

Submission + - Trump Admin Backs Off Plans To Kill Ocean Monitoring (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network’s role in tracking climate change. But the OOI also provides data that’s useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it’s reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.

[...] The OOI is a federally supported resource that provides ocean data for use by academic researchers, government planners, and private companies. It consists of arrays of monitoring systems in several locations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like currents, salinity, chemical levels, temperatures, and tectonic activity. (There are over 100 individual entries on the page that display the data gathered by the system.) Obviously, there are many potential uses of that data. The fact that it has been gathered continuously for a decade means it can help track changes in how carbon dioxide and heat enter the oceans. This is probably what made it a target for the climate change denialists who helped set the Trump administration’s policy.

Those policymakers are perfectly happy to annoy people with environmental concerns, but they apparently neglected to consider how upset everyone else would be about losing access to the other data. The ensuing public backlash led the Senate on Wednesday to unanimously agree with a measure that would block the government from taking down the OOI. Today’s decision may indicate that the administration recognized it had gotten itself into a fight it knew it was losing.

Submission + - Bernie Sanders Unveils $7 Trillion Plan To Give Americans Control of AI Industry (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As artificial intelligence companies reshape the economy and race toward trillion-dollar valuations, Sen. Bernie Sanders is proposing a sweeping transfer of wealth and power from the industry to the American public. The legislation, shown first to The Associated Press, would create a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission and financed through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies. Sanders estimates that the tax would create a nearly $7 trillion fund that would generate hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing.

“The benefits cannot simply go to the handful of wealthy corporations. They will be shared by the American people,” the independent Vermont senator said in an interview Wednesday. “The public has got to have a significant seat at the table to make sure that terrible things do not happen to ordinary people, and that in fact, AI benefits ordinary people, not hurts them,” Sanders said. [...] The 50% tax would apply to AI companies that reach $200 million in annual AI sales. Any new AI company that reaches that benchmark would also be subject to the tax. It would create a sovereign wealth fund — similar to those used by countries around the world and some U.S. states — that Sanders estimates would be worth around $7 trillion. Unlike a traditional tax, the proposal would require companies to transfer stock rather than cash, effectively making the American public a major shareholder in the country’s largest AI firms.

A seven-person independent commission — nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate — would manage the fund and use its voting shares “to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them,” the bill summary says. Sanders proposes that a 5% annual dividend from the fund would provide direct payments of more than $1,000 to every American. If companies grow, the gains would be used for public goods such as education, housing and health care. Sanders argues taxpayers would not bear the losses if AI company valuations decline. “We’re not going to lose any money, even if there is a bust in the bubble,” Sanders said. The commission would be directed to “to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them,” according to the summary.

Submission + - We Could Have Had Cell Phones 40 Years Sooner (rodmartin.org) 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The holdup was not technology, but government. What else do we not have because of Washington?

The basic idea of the cellphone was introduced to the public in 1945 – not in Popular Mechanics or Science, but in the down-home Saturday Evening Post. Millions of citizens would soon be using "handie-talkies," declared J.K. Jett, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Licenses would have to be issued, but that process "won't be difficult." The revolutionary technology, Jett promised in the story, would be formulated within months.

But permission to deploy it would not. The government would not allocate spectrum to realize the engineers' vision of "cellular radio" until 1982, and licenses authorizing the service would not be fully distributed for another seven years. That's one heck of a bureaucratic delay.

Submission + - Y2K bug is back (vanheusden.com)

Submitted by folkert
folkert writes: Back in the previous century, people were afraid they were scared for when the date would change from 1999 to 2000. You see back in that old century, people used to only store two digits for the year and as you can imagine, this will go wrong in the year 2000. Tons of money has been spend to eradict that problem. But one bug stayed under the radar. For at least 26 years no-one noticed that the PDP-11 with BSD could break somewhat. Check the URL for the background and the fix.

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