The United Kingdom's government is planning to ban public sector and critical infrastructure organizations from paying ransoms after ransomware attacks. From a report: The list of entities that would have to follow the new proposed legislation includes local councils, schools, and the publicly funded National Health Service (NHS). "Ransomware is estimated to cost the UK economy millions of pounds each year, with recent high-profile ransomware attacks highlighting the severe operational, financial, and even life-threatening risks. The ban would target the business model that fuels cyber criminals' activities and makes the vital services the public rely on a less attractive target for ransomware groups," the UK government said. "We're determined to smash the cyber criminal business model and protect the services we all rely on as we deliver our Plan for Change. By working in partnership with industry to advance these measures, we are sending a clear signal that the UK is united in the fight against ransomware," Security Minister Dan Jarvis added.

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For the first time ever, a CCTV camera in Myanmar captured real-time footage of a supershear strike-slip earthquake moving at 3.7 miles per second. According to seismologists at Japan's Kyoto University, the analysis has "led to new findings based on real-time visual evidence of tectonic motion," reports Popular Science. From the report: The magnitude 7.7 event took place on March 28 along the Sagaing Fault with an epicenter near Myanmar's second-largest city, Mandalay. Although the initial rupture process lasted barely 80 seconds, it and numerous aftershocks were ultimately responsible for 5,456 confirmed deaths and over 11,000 injuries. Later evaluations indicated the quake was the second deadliest in modern history, as well as the most powerful to hit Myanmar in over a century. According to a separate group's paper published in the same journal, the southern portion of the rupture occurred at an astonishing 3.7 miles per second -- fast enough to qualify as "supershear velocity." Amid the catastrophe, an outdoor CCTV camera about 74.5 miles south of the epicenter recorded a visceral illustration of its power. Over just a few moments, what at first looks like a single chunk of the ground appears to suddenly divide and horizontally shift past one another in opposite directions. Completely by accident, the camera recorded a direct look of a strike-slip fault, something previously analyzed by remote seismic instruments. To researchers at Kyoto University, the clip wasn't just a jaw-dropping scene -- it was an opportunity to study a strike-slip fault using visual data. You can watch the footage on YouTube.

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Conspiracy theorists drastically overestimate how many people share their beliefs, according to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Researchers conducted eight studies involving over 4,000 US adults and found that while participants believed conspiracy claims just 12% of the time, believers thought they were in the majority 93% of the time. The study examined beliefs about claims such as the Apollo Moon landings being faked and Princess Diana's death not being an accident. In one example, 8% of participants believed the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag operation, but that group estimated 61% of people agreed with them. "It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that's been observed," said co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University. The findings suggest overconfidence serves as a primary driver of conspiracy beliefs.

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I am on record as not particularly loving JSON as a serialization format. It's fine, and I'm certainly not going to die on any hills over it, but I think that as we stripped down the complexity of XML we threw away too much.

On the flip side, the simplicity means that it's harder to use it wrong. It's absent many footguns.

Well, one might think. But then Hootentoot ran into a problem. You see, an internal partner needed to send them a JSON document which contains a JSON document. Now, one might say, "isn't any JSON object a valid sub-document? Can't you just nest JSON inside of JSON all day? What could go wrong here?"

"value":"[{\"value\":\"1245\",\"begin_datum\":\"2025-05-19\",\"eind_datum\":null},{\"value\":\"1204\",\"begin_datum\":\"2025-05-19\",\"eind_datum\":\"2025-05-19\"}]",

This. This could go wrong. They embedded JSON inside of JSON… as a string.

Hootentoot references the hottest memes of a decade and a half ago to describe this Xzibit:

Yo dawg, i heard you like JSON, so i've put some JSON in your JSON

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Government funding for a program that hunts for threats on America's critical infrastructure networks expired on Sunday, preventing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from analyzing activity that could indicate a cyberattack, the program director told Congress on Tuesday. From a report: Nate Gleason leads a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) focused on nation-state threats against critical infrastructure, and this includes the CyberSentry Program. It's a public-private partnership, managed by CISA, that looks for malicious activity on IT and operational technology (OT) networks in America's energy, water, healthcare, and other critical facilities. This includes threats along the lines of China's Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon intrusions -- network activity that may look like, or even start as, espionage, but ultimately enables the digital invaders to backdoor critical orgs and deploy cyber weapons to aid in a kinetic war.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Using brain scans from a very large database, British researchers determined that during the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022, people's brains showed signs of aging, including shrinkage, according to the report published in Nature Communications. People who got infected with the virus also showed deficits in certain cognitive abilities, such as processing speed and mental flexibility. The aging effect "was most pronounced in males and those from more socioeconomically deprived backgrounds," said the study's first author, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham, via email. "It highlights that brain health is not shaped solely by illness, but also by broader life experiences." Overall, the researchers found a 5.5-month acceleration in aging associated with the pandemic. On average, the difference in brain aging between men and women was small, about 2.5 months. "We don't yet know exactly why, but this fits with other research suggesting that men may be more affected by certain types of stress or health challenges," Mohammadi-Nejad said. [...] The study wasn't designed to pinpoint specific causes. "But it is likely that the cumulative experience of the pandemic -- including psychological stress, social isolation, disruptions in daily life, reduced activity and wellness -- contributed to the observed changes," Mohammadi-Nejad said. "In this sense, the pandemic period itself appears to have left a mark on our brains, even in the absence of infection." "The most intriguing finding in this study is that only those who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed any cognitive deficits, despite structural aging," said Jacqueline Becker, a clinical neuropsychologist and assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This speaks a little to the effects of the virus itself." The study may shed light on conditions like long Covid and chronic fatigue, though it's still unclear whether the observed brain changes in uninfected individuals will lead to noticeable effects on brain function.

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Olof Kyros Gustafsson, former CEO of Escobar, pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges related to the company's phone scam operation. The Department of Justice says Gustafsson took orders for phones branded with Pablo Escobar's likeness but failed to deliver products, instead transferring customer money for personal use. When customers sought refunds, Gustafsson fraudulently referred payment processors to certificates of ownership as proof of delivery. The phones were Samsung devices with gold stickers. Gustafsson faces up to 20 years in prison and $1.3 million in restitution at his December 5th sentencing.

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Researchers from La Sapienza University in Rome have developed "WhoFi," a system that uses the way a person's body distorts Wi-Fi signals to re-identify them across different locations -- even if they're not carrying a phone. By training a deep neural network on these subtle signal distortions, the researchers claim WhoFi is able to achieve up to 95.5% accuracy. The Register reports: "The core insight is that as a Wi-Fi signal propagates through an environment, its waveform is altered by the presence and physical characteristics of objects and people along its path," the authors state in their paper. "These alterations, captured in the form of Channel State Information (CSI), contain rich biometric information." CSI in the context of Wi-Fi devices refers to information about the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic transmissions. These measurements, the researchers say, interact with the human body in a way that results in person-specific distortions. When processed by a deep neural network, the result is a unique data signature. Researchers proposed a similar technique, dubbed EyeFi, in 2020, and asserted it was accurate about 75 percent of the time. The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture. "The encouraging results achieved confirm the viability of Wi-Fi signals as a robust and privacy-preserving biometric modality, and position this study as a meaningful step forward in the development of signal-based Re-ID systems," the authors say.

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Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that makes a $49.99 AI-powered wearable that passively listens to conversations and generates personalized summaries and suggestions. "You can also give the device permission to access your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar events to help inform its AI-generated insights, as well as create a searchable history of your activities," adds The Verge. From the report: When asked about Amazon's plans to apply the same privacy measures offered by Bee, such as its policy against storing audio, Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller says the company "cares deeply" about customer privacy and security, adding that the company will work with Bee to give users "even greater control over" their devices when the deal closes. "We've been strong stewards of customer data since our founding, and have never been in the business of selling our customers' personal information to others," Miller says. "We design our products to protect our customers' privacy and security and to make it easy for them to be in control of their experience -- and this approach would of course apply to Bee." Miller also says the terms of the deal are "confidential," and all Bee employees have "received offers to join Amazon."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: At the 2025 RISC-V Summit in China, Nvidia announced that its CUDA software platform will be made compatible with the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) on the CPU side of things. The news was confirmed during a presentation during a RISC-V event. This is a major step in enabling the RISC-V ISA-based CPUs in performance demanding applications. The announcement makes it clear that RISC-V can now serve as the main processor for CUDA-based systems, a role traditionally filled by x86 or Arm cores. While nobody even barely expects RISC-V in hyperscale datacenters any time soon, RISC-V can be used on CUDA-enabled edge devices, such as Nvidia's Jetson modules. However, it looks like Nvidia does indeed expect RISC-V to be in the datacenter. Nvidia's profile on RISC-V seems to be quite high as the keynote at the RISC-V Summit China was delivered by Frans Sijsterman, who appears to be Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Nvidia. The presentation outlined how CUDA components will now run on RISC-V. A diagram shown at the session illustrated a typical configuration: the GPU handles parallel workloads, while a RISC-V CPU executes CUDA system drivers, application logic, and the operating system. This setup enables the CPU to orchestrate GPU computations fully within the CUDA environment. Given Nvidia's current focus, the workloads must be AI-related, yet the company did not confirm this. However, there is more. Also featured in the diagram was a DPU handling networking tasks, rounding out a system consisting of GPU compute, CPU orchestration, and data movement. This configuration clearly suggests Nvidia's vision to build heterogeneous compute platforms where RISC-V CPU can be central to managing workloads while Nvidia's GPUs, DPUs, and networking chips handle the rest. Yet again, there is more. Even with this low-profile announcement, Nvidia essentially bridges proprietary CUDA stack to an open architecture, one that seems to develop fast in China. Yet, being unable to ship flagship GB200 and GB300 offerings to China, the company has to find ways to keep its CUDA thriving.

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