WordPress sites are being compromised through malicious plugins that display fake software updates and error messages, leading to the installation of information-stealing malware. BleepingComputer reports: Since 2023, a malicious campaign called ClearFake has been used to display fake web browser update banners on compromised websites that distribute information-stealing malware. In 2024, a new campaign called ClickFix was introduced that shares many similarities with ClearFake but instead pretends to be software error messages with included fixes. However, these "fixes" are PowerShell scripts that, when executed, will download and install information-stealing malware. Last week, GoDaddy reported that the ClearFake/ClickFix threat actors have breached over 6,000 WordPress sites to install malicious plugins that display the fake alerts associated with these campaigns. "The GoDaddy Security team is tracking a new variant of ClickFix (also known as ClearFake) fake browser update malware that is distributed via bogus WordPress plugins," explains GoDaddy security researcher Denis Sinegubko. "These seemingly legitimate plugins are designed to appear harmless to website administrators but contain embedded malicious scripts that deliver fake browser update prompts to end-users." The malicious plugins utilize names similar to legitimate plugins, such as Wordfense Security and LiteSpeed Cache, while others use generic, made-up names. Website security firm Sucuri also noted that a fake plugin named "Universal Popup Plugin" is also part of this campaign. When installed, the malicious plugin will hook various WordPress actions depending on the variant to inject a malicious JavaScript script into the HTML of the site. When loaded, this script will attempt to load a further malicious JavaScript file stored in a Binance Smart Chain (BSC) smart contract, which then loads the ClearFake or ClickFix script to display the fake banners. From web server access logs analyzed by Sinegubko, the threat actors appear to be utilizing stolen admin credentials to log into the WordPress site and install the plugin in an automated manner.

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NASA will rely on SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two crewed missions to the ISS in 2025 while evaluating whether Boeing's Starliner requires another test flight for certification. SpaceNews reports: In an Oct. 15 statement, NASA said it will use Crew Dragon for both the Crew-10 mission to the ISS, scheduled for no earlier than February 2025, and the Crew-11 mission scheduled for no earlier than July. Crew-10 will fly NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers along with astronaut Takuya Onishi from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. NASA has not yet announced the crew for the Crew-11 mission. Earlier this year, NASA had hoped that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner would be certified in time to fly the early 2025 mission. Problems with the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, led NASA to conclude in July that the spacecraft would not be certified in time. It delayed that Starliner-1 mission from February to August 2025, moving up Crew-10 to February. NASA also announced then that it would prepare Crew-11 in parallel with Starliner-1 for launch in that August 2025 slot. "The timing and configuration of Starliner's next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing's path to system certification is established," NASA said in its statement about the 2025 missions. "NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025."

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Our stories come from you, our readers- which, it's worth reminding everyone, keep those submissions coming in. There's nothing on this site without your submissions.

Now, we do get some submissions which don't make the page. Frequently, it's simply because we simply don't have enough context from the submission to understand it or comment on it effectively. Often, it's just not that remarkable. And sometimes, it's because the code isn't a WTF at all.

So I want to discuss some of these, because I think it's still interesting. And it's unfair to expect everyone to know everything, so for the submitters who discover they didn't understand why this code isn't bad, you're one of today's lucky 10,000.

We start with this snippet, from Guss:

#define FEATURE_SENSE_CHAN (1 << 0) #define FEATURE_SENSE_PEER (1 << 1)

Guss writes:

The Asterisk open source telephony engine has some features that need to know from which direction they've been invoked in a two-way call. This is called "sense" in the Asterisk lingo, and there are two macros defined in the source which allow you to textually know if you're talking about this direction or the other. This of course stands for 1 and 0 respectively, but they couldn't have just simply go on and say that - it has to be "interesting". Do also note, as this is a macro, it means that whenever someone sets or tests the "sense", another redundant bit shift operation is done.

First, minor detail- this stands for 1 and 2 respectively. And what's important here is that these fields are clearly meant to be a bitmask. And when we're talking about a bitmask, using bitshift operators makes the code more clear. And we can generally rely on a shift by zero bits to be a no-op, and any compiler should be smart enough to spot that and optimize the operation out. Hell, a quick check with GCC shows that even the (1 << 1) gets optimized to just the constant 0x2.

Not a WTF, but it does highlight something we've commented on in the past- bitmasks can be confusing for people. This is a good example of that. But not only is this not a WTF, but it's not even bad code.

(Now, it may be the case that these are never really used as a bitmask, in which case, that's a mild WTF, but that's not what Guss was drawing our attention to)

In other cases, the code is bad, but it may be reacting to the badness it's surrounded by. Greg inherited this blob from some offshore contractors:

RegistryKey RK = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\\XXXXX\\YYYYY"); string BoolLog = ""; if (RK != null) BoolLog = ((string)RK.GetValue("LogSocket", "")).ToLower(); if (BoolLog == "true" || BoolLog == "yes" || BoolLog == "1") { ... }

Now, seeing a string variable called BoolLog is a big red flag about bad code inbound. And we see handling some stringly typed boolean data to try and get a truth value. Which all whiffs of bad code.

But let's talk about the Windows Registry. It's typed, but the types are strings, lists of strings, and various numeric types. There's no strictly boolean type. And sure, while explicitly storing a 1 in a numeric field is probably a better choice for the registry than string booleans, there are reasons why you might do that (especially if you frequently need to modify Registry keys by hand, like when you're debugging).

The real WTF, in this case, isn't this code, but is instead the Windows Registry. Having a single tree store be the repository for all your system configuration sounds like a good idea on paper, but as anyone who's worked with it has discovered- it's a nightmare. The code here isn't terrible. It's not good, but it's a natural reaction to the terrible world in which it lives.

Sometimes, the code is actually downright awful, but it's just hard to care about too much. Rudolf was shopping for bulk LEDs, which inevitably leads one to all sorts of websites based in China offering incredibly cheap prices and questionable quality control.

The site Rudolf was looking at had all sorts of rendering glitches, and so out of curiosity, he viewed the source.

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang2055{\fonttbl{\f0\froman\fcharset0 Times New Roman;}{\f1\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}} {\*\generator Msftedit 5.41.21.2509;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\f0\fs24 <html>\par \par <head> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://totally-fine-leds-really-its-fine.ch"> \par

Here we see someone wrote their HTML in WordPad, and saved the file as an RTF, instead of a plain text file. Which sure, is bad. But again, we need to put this in context: this almost certainly isn't the page for handling any transactions or sales (that almost certainly uses a prebaked ecommerce plugin). This is their approach to letting "regular" users upload content to the site- frequently documentation pages. This isn't a case where some developer should have known better messed up- this is almost certainly some sales person who has an HTML template to fill in and upload. It probably stretches their technical skills to the limit to "Save As…" in WordPad.

So the code isn't bad. Again, the environment in which it sits is bad. But this is a case where the environment doesn't matter- these kinds of sites are really hoping to score some B2B sales in bulk quantities, and "customer service" and "useful website" isn't going to drive sales better than "bargain basement prices" will. They're not trying to sell to consumers, they're trying to sell to a company which will put these into consumer products. Honestly, we should be grateful that they at least tried to make an HTML file, and didn't just upload PDFs, which is usually what you find on these sites.

Sometimes, we don't have a WTF. Sometimes, we have a broken world that we can just do our best no navigate. We must simply do our best.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly. The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple's move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a "Return to Windows," followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux. The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit. 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years, its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books, and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News. So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps. Late last week, Hansson had an update: it's more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into existing racks and power allowances, estimating seven years' life for that hardware, and eventually transferring its 10 petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and have more storage available. "The motto of the 2010s and early 2020s -- all-cloud, everything, all the time -- seems to finally have peaked," Hansson writes. "And thank heavens for that!" He adds the caveat that companies with "enormous fluctuations in load," and those in early or uncertain stages, still have a place in the cloud.

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Amazon has reached its goal set earlier this year to completely get rid of plastic air pillows at its warehouses by the end of the year. "As of October 2024, we've removed all plastic air pillows from our delivery packaging used at our global fulfillment centers," the e-commerce giant said in an October 9th blog post. The Verge reports: It's a welcome change following years of pressure from environmental groups to stop plastic pollution flooding into oceans. The company is still working to reduce the use of single-use plastics more broadly in its packaging. The most prolific type of plastic litter near coastlines is plastic film -- a material that makes up those once ubiquitous air pillows, according to Oceana. That film also happens to be the "deadliest" type of plastic pollution for large mammals like whales and dolphins that might ingest it, Oceana says. The company swapped out plastic air pillows and single-use delivery bags for paper and cardboard alternatives in Europe in 2022. It also ditched plastic film packaging at its facilities in India in 2020. The US is Amazon's largest market, and the company hasn't managed to fully eliminate plastic packaging in North America just yet. It says it plans to reduce the amount of deliveries containing "Amazon-added plastic delivery packaging" in North America to just one-third of shipments by December, down from two-thirds in December 2023.

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According to an internal Border Patrol memo, nearly one-third of the surveillance cameras along the U.S.-Mexico border don't work. "The nationwide issue is having significant impacts on [Border Patrol] operations," reads the memo. NBC News reports: The large-scale outage affects roughly 150 of the 500 cameras perched on surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border. It was due to "several technical problems," according to the memo. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, blamed outdated equipment and outstanding repair issues. The camera systems, known as Remote Video Surveillance Systems, have been used since 2011 to "survey large areas without having to commit hundreds of agents in vehicles to perform the same function." But according to the internal memo, 30% were inoperable. It is not clear when the cameras stopped working.Two Customs and Border Protections officials said that some repairs have been made this month but that there are still over 150 outstanding requests for camera repairs. The officials said there are some areas that are not visible to Border Patrol because of broken cameras. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said the agency has installed roughly 300 new towers that use more advanced technology. "CBP continues to install newer, more advanced technology that embrace artificial intelligence and machine learning to replace outdated systems, reducing the need to have agents working non-interdiction functions," the spokesperson said. The agency points the finger at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is responsible for servicing the systems and repairing the cameras. "The FAA, which services the systems and repairs the cameras, has had internal problems meeting the needs of the Border Patrol, the memo says, without elaborating on what those problems are," reports NBC News. While the FAA is sending personnel to work on the cameras, Border Patrol leaders are considering replacing them with a contractor that can provide "adequate technical support for the cameras." Further reading: U.S. Border Surveillance Towers Have Always Been Broken (EFF)

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TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, fired an intern for "maliciously interfering" with the training of one of its AI models. However, the firm "rejected claims about the extent of the damage caused by the unnamed individual, saying they 'contain some exaggerations and inaccuracies,'" reports the BBC. From the report: The Chinese technology giant's Doubao ChatGPT-like generative AI model is the country's most popular AI chatbot. "The individual was an intern with the [advertising] technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab," ByteDance said in a statement. "Their social media profile and some media reports contain inaccuracies." Its commercial online operations, including its large language AI models, were unaffected by the intern's actions, the company added. ByteDance also denied reports that the incident caused more than $10 million of damage by disrupting an AI training system made up of thousands of powerful graphics processing units (GPU). As well as firing the person in August, ByteDance said it had informed the intern's university and industry bodies about the incident.

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An anonymous reader writes: T-Mobile and AT&T say US regulators should drop a plan to require unlocking of phones within 60 days of activation, claiming that locking phones to a carrier's network makes it possible to provide cheaper handsets to consumers. "If the Commission mandates a uniform unlocking policy, it is consumers -- not providers -- who stand to lose the most," T-Mobile alleged in an October 17 filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The proposed rule has support from consumer advocacy groups who say it will give users more choice and lower their costs. T-Mobile has been criticized for locking phones for up to a year, which makes it impossible to use a phone on a rival's network. T-Mobile claims that with a 60-day unlocking rule, "consumers risk losing access to the benefits of free or heavily subsidized handsets because the proposal would force providers to reduce the line-up of their most compelling handset offers." If the proposed rule is enacted, "T-Mobile estimates that its prepaid customers, for example, would see subsidies reduced by 40 percent to 70 percent for both its lower and higher-end devices, such as the Moto G, Samsung A15, and iPhone 12," the carrier said. "A handset unlocking mandate would also leave providers little choice but to limit their handset offers to lower cost and often lesser performing handsets." In July, the FCC approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the unlocking policy in a 5-0 vote. The FCC is proposing "to require all mobile wireless service providers to unlock handsets 60 days after a consumer's handset is activated with the provider, unless within the 60-day period the service provider determines the handset was purchased through fraud."

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Disney has appointed former Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman to replace Nike Executive Chairman Mark Parker as board chairman starting in January 2024, "as the media giant lays the groundwork to name a successor for CEO Bob Iger in early 2026," reports CNBC. Iger's contract has been extended until the end of 2026 to ensure the company finds the right fit. CNBC reports: Gorman joined Disney's board less than a year ago and was named the head of the succession planning committee in August. He will continue to lead that committee after he takes over as board chairman from Nike Executive Chairman Parker. "The Disney board has benefited tremendously from James Gorman's expertise and guidance, and we are lucky to have him as our next chairman -- particularly as the board continues to move forward with the succession process," Iger said in a statement. "I'm extremely grateful to Mark Parker for his many years of board service and leadership, which have been so valuable to this company and its shareholders, and to me as CEO." [...] Disney had initially targeted 2025 to announce a successor, as CNBC reported last year. Pushing the date back to early 2026 will give the board more time to conduct due diligence on both internal and external candidates, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.

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In a new teardown video published last week, iFixit reveals a Quest 2 headset "hiding inside" the cheaper yet enhanced Quest 3S. The Verge reports: The first hint of that is the headset's Fresnel lenses, which iFixit's Shahram Mokhtari writes in a blog post are "100% compatible" with those used by the Quest 2. The headset has the older headset's IPD adjustment mechanism, as well; and it shares the same single LCD panel, rather than using one panel per eye, like the Meta Quest 3. Legacy parts aside, iFixit found that the 3S uses two IR sensors for depth mapping instead of a single depth sensor. That "rare iterative improvement over the Quest 3" performed "exceptionally well in unlit spaces," Mokhtari writes in the blog. And of course, it uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 SoC as the Quest 3, and works with Meta's newer Touch Plus controllers, which are sold separately. The Quest 3S "costs $299.99, while the Quest 3 is $499.99," notes The Verge. So, not only is the 3S cheaper but replacement parts should be easier to find since the Quest 2 "has already been around for four years."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: A production company for Blade Runner 2049 has sued (PDF) Tesla, which allegedly fed images from the movie into an artificial intelligence image generator to create unlicensed promotional materials. Alcon Entertainment, in a lawsuit filed Monday in California federal court, accuses Elon Musk and his autonomous vehicle company of misappropriating the movie's brand to promote its robotaxi at a glitzy unveiling earlier this month. The producer says it doesn't want Blade Runner 2049 to be affiliated with Musk because of his "extreme political and social views," pointing to ongoing efforts with potential partners for an upcoming TV series. The complaint, which brings claims for copyright infringement and false endorsement, also names Warner Bros. Discovery for allegedly facilitating the partnership. "Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk's massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account," states the complaint. "Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk." [...] The lawsuit cites an agreement, the details of which are unknown to Alcon, for Warners to lease or license studio lot space, access and other materials to Tesla for the event. Alcon alleges that the deal included promotional elements allowing Tesla to affiliate its products with WBD movies. WBD was Alcon's domestic distributor for the 2017 release of Blade Runner 2049. It has limited clip licensing rights, though not for Tesla's livestream TV event, the lawsuit claims. Alcon says it wasn't informed about the brand deal until the day of the unveiling. According to the complaint, Musk communicated to WBD that he wanted to associate the robotaxi with the film. He asked the company for permission to use a still directly from the movie, which prompted an employee to send an emergency request for clearance to Alcon since international rights would be involved, the lawsuit says. The producer refused, spurring the creation of the AI images. [...] Alcon seeks unspecified damages, as well as a court order barring Tesla from further distributing the disputed promotional materials. Musk referenced Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner movie during the robotaxi event. "You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don't know if we want that future," he said. "I believe we want that duster he's wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse." I, Robot director Alex Proyas also took to X last week, writing: "Hey Elon, Can I have my designs back please?"

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Researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the Arkansas government announced on Monday that they had found a trove of lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicle batteries, in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. From a report: With the help of water testing and machine learning, the researchers determined that there might be five million to 19 million tons of lithium -- more than enough to meet all of the world's demand for the metal -- in a geological area known as the Smackover Formation. Several companies, including Exxon Mobil, are developing projects in Arkansas to produce lithium, which is dissolved in underground brine. Energy and mining companies have long produced oil, gas and other natural resources in the Smackover, which extends from Texas to Florida. And the federal and state researchers said lithium could be extracted from the waste stream of the brines from which companies extracted other forms of energy and elements. The energy industry, with the Biden administration's encouragement, has been increasingly working to produce the raw materials needed for the lithium-ion batteries in the United States. A few projects have started recently, and many more are in various stages of study and development across the country. Most of the world's lithium is produced in Australia and South America. A large majority of it is then processed in China, which also dominates the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries. "The potential for increased U.S. production to replace imports has implications for employment, manufacturing and supply chain resilience," David Applegate, the director of the United States Geological Survey, said in a statement announcing the study. "This study illustrates the value of science in addressing economically important issues."

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Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged the company's late entry into AI, stating, "We weren't the first to do intelligence." Despite this admission, Cook defended Apple's approach, claiming it will be "the best for the customer." The tech giant plans to roll out initial AI features on October 28, with more advanced capabilities expected in 2025. However, internal studies suggest Apple's AI lags behind competitors, with Siri reportedly 25% less accurate than ChatGPT. Cook remains optimistic, asserting that AI will make users' time on iPhones "profoundly different."

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Actor Nicolas Cage warned young performers about the dangers of AI in film production during his speech at the Newport Beach Film Festival on Sunday. Cage urged actors to protect their craft from employment-based digital replica (EBDR) technology, which allows studios to manipulate performances post-filming. "This technology wants to take your instrument," Cage said. He explained that EBDR enables studios to alter actors' faces, voices, and body language after shooting, potentially compromising artistic integrity. Cage cited his cameo in "The Flash" as an example of EBDR use. He advised actors to consider their rights when approached with contracts permitting EBDR, coining the phrase "MVMFMBMI: my voice, my face, my body, my imagination."

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Apple's latest iOS update has removed the "C" button from its Calculator app, replacing it with a backspace function. The change, part of iOS 18, has sparked debate among users accustomed to the traditional clear function. The removal of the "C" button represents a significant departure from decades-old calculator design conventions, The Atlantic writes. From the story: The "C" button's function is vestigial. Back when calculators were commercialized, starting in the mid-1960s, their electronics were designed to operate as efficiently as possible. If you opened up a desktop calculator in 1967, you might have found a dozen individual circuit boards to run and display its four basic mathematical functions. Among these would have been an input buffer or temporary register that could store an input value for calculation and display. The "C" button, which was sometimes labeled "CE" (Clear Entry) or "CI" (Clear Input), provided a direct interface to zero out -- or "clear" -- such a register. A second button, "AC" (All Clear), did the same thing, but for other parts of the circuit, including previously stored operations and pending calculations. (A traditional calculator's memory buttons -- "M+," "M-," "MC" -- would perform simple operations on a register.) By 1971, Mostech and Texas Instruments had developed a "calculator on a chip," which condensed all of that into a single integrated circuit. Those chips retained the functions of their predecessors, including the ones that were engaged by "C" and "AC" buttons. And this design continued on into the era of pocket calculators, financial calculators, and even scientific calculators such as the ones you may have used in school. Some of the latter were, in essence, programmable pocket computers themselves, and they could have been configured with a backspace key. They were not.

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Baidu CEO Robin Li has proclaimed that hallucinations produced by large language models are no longer a problem, and predicted a massive wipeout of AI startups when the "bubble" bursts. From a report: "The most significant change we're seeing over the past 18 to 20 months is the accuracy of those answers from the large language models," gushed the CEO at last week's Harvard Business Review Future of Business Conference. "I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved â" meaning when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer," he added. Li also described the AI sector as in an "inevitable bubble," similar to the dot-com bubble in the '90s. "Probably one percent of the companies will stand out and become huge and will create a lot of value or will create tremendous value for the people, for the society. And I think we are just going through this kind of process," stated Li. The CEO also guesstimated it will be another 10 to 30 years before human jobs are displaced by the technology. "Companies, organizations, governments and ordinary people all need to prepare for that kind of paradigm shift," he warned.

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Intel and Boeing, once exemplars of American manufacturing prowess, now face existential crises. Their market values have plummeted, jeopardizing not just shareholder wealth but national security. The U.S. is losing its edge in manufacturing high-tech products, crucial in its geopolitical contest with China, a story on WSJ argues. Unlike past manufacturing declines, Intel and Boeing's woes stem from internal missteps, prioritizing financial performance over engineering excellence. Their potential demise threatens America's semiconductor and commercial aircraft industries, with far-reaching consequences for the nation's technological ecosystem. While government intervention is controversial, national security concerns may necessitate support. WSJ adds: So, much as national leaders would like to ignore these companies' woes, they can't. National security dictates the U.S. maintain some know-how in making aircraft and semiconductors. Certainly other countries feel that way: European governments heavily subsidized Airbus. China is pursuing dominance in key technologies regardless of the cost. Its so-called Big Fund has sunk roughly $100 billion into semiconductors while aid to Comac had reached $72 billion in 2020, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Until Comac succeeds in gaining significant global market share, it will continue to run big losses and be bailed out by the Chinese government," said Atkinson, whose organization gets support from Boeing. Both political parties have bought into the idea that manufacturing is special and thus deserving of public support. That raises the question: which manufacturing, and what kind of support? The goal of manufacturing strategy shouldn't be just producing jobs but great, world-beating products. [...]

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News Corp's Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post have sued Perplexity, a startup that calls itself an "AI-powered Swiss Army Knife for information discovery and curiosity," alleging copyright infringement. From a report: "Perplexity is a generative artificial intelligence company that claims to provide its users accurate and up-to-date news and information in a platform that, in Perplexity's own words, allows users to 'Skip the Links' to original publishers' websites," the companies said in the federal lawsuit, filed Monday. "Perplexity attempts to accomplish this by engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers' copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders. This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce."

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jd writes: Linus Torvalds is not a happy camper and is condemning hardware vendors for poor security and the plethora of actual and theoretical attacks, especially as some of the new features being added impact the workarounds. These workarounds are now getting very expensive, CPU-wise. TFA quotes Linus Torvalds: "Honestly, I'm pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks that have never actually shown themselves to be used in practice. "So I think this time we push back on the hardware people and tell them it's *THEIR* damn problem, and if they can't even be bothered to say yay-or-nay, we just sit tight. Because dammit, let's put the onus on where the blame lies, and not just take any random shit from bad hardware and say 'oh, but it *might* be a problem.'"

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chalsall writes: After more than six years of work since the last discovery, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has found the 52nd known Mersenne Prime number. This is also the largest prime number known to humans. The number is 2^136,279,841-1, which is 41,024,320 decimal digits long. Luke Durant, a researcher from San Jose, CA, found it after contributing a fantastic amount of compute to the GIMPS project.

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