An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The death of the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of Internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 Internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. About 100,000 of those subscribers were reportedly getting the discount, which in some cases made Internet service free to the consumer. The $30 monthly broadband discounts provided by the ACP ended in May after Congress failed to allocate more funding. The Biden administration requested (PDF) $6 billion to fund the ACP through December 2024, but Republicans called the program "wasteful."

Republican lawmakers' main complaint was that most of the ACP money went to households that already had broadband before the subsidy was created. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel warned that killing the discounts would reduce Internet access, saying (PDF) an FCC survey found that 77 percent of participating households would change their plan or drop Internet service entirely once the discounts expired. Charter's Q2 2024 earnings report provides some of the first evidence of users dropping Internet service after losing the discount. "Second quarter residential Internet customers decreased by 154,000, largely driven by the end of the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program subsidies in the second quarter, compared to an increase of 70,000 during the second quarter of 2023," Charter said.

Across all ISPs, there were 23 million US households enrolled in the ACP. Research released in January 2024 found that Charter was serving over 4 million ACP recipients and that up to 300,000 of those Charter customers would be "at risk" of dropping Internet service if the discounts expired. Given that ACP recipients must meet low-income eligibility requirements, losing the discounts could put a strain on their overall finances even if they choose to keep paying for Internet service. [...] Light Reading reported that Charter attributed about 100,000 of the 154,000 customer losses to the ACP shutdown. Charter said it retained most of its ACP subscribers so far, but that low-income households might not be able to continue paying for Internet service without a new subsidy for much longer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: California's "Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act" (a.k.a. SB-1047) has led to a flurry of headlines and debate concerning the overall "safety" of large artificial intelligence models. But critics are concerned that the bill's overblown focus on existential threats by future AI models could severely limit research and development for more prosaic, non-threatening AI uses today. SB-1047, introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener, passed the California Senate in May with a 32-1 vote and seems well positioned for a final vote in the State Assembly in August. The text of the bill requires companies behind sufficiently large AI models (currently set at $100 million in training costs and the rough computing power implied by those costs today) to put testing procedures and systems in place to prevent and respond to "safety incidents."

The bill lays out a legalistic definition of those safety incidents that in turn focuses on defining a set of "critical harms" that an AI system might enable. That includes harms leading to "mass casualties or at least $500 million of damage," such as "the creation or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon" (hello, Skynet?) or "precise instructions for conducting a cyberattack... on critical infrastructure." The bill also alludes to "other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity" to those laid out explicitly. An AI model's creator can't be held liable for harm caused through the sharing of "publicly accessible" information from outside the model -- simply asking an LLM to summarize The Anarchist's Cookbook probably wouldn't put it in violation of the law, for instance. Instead, the bill seems most concerned with future AIs that could come up with "novel threats to public safety and security." More than a human using an AI to brainstorm harmful ideas, SB-1047 focuses on the idea of an AI "autonomously engaging in behavior other than at the request of a user" while acting "with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision."

To prevent this straight-out-of-science-fiction eventuality, anyone training a sufficiently large model must "implement the capability to promptly enact a full shutdown" and have policies in place for when such a shutdown would be enacted, among other precautions and tests. The bill also focuses at points on AI actions that would require "intent, recklessness, or gross negligence" if performed by a human, suggesting a degree of agency that does not exist in today's large language models. The bill's supporters include AI experts Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who believe the bill is a necessary precaution against potential catastrophic AI risks.

Bill critics include tech policy expert Nirit Weiss-Blatt and AI community voice Daniel Jeffries. They argue that the bill is based on science fiction fears and could harm technological advancement. Ars Technica contributor Timothy Lee and Meta's Yann LeCun say that the bill's regulations could hinder "open weight" AI models and innovation in AI research.

Instead, some experts suggest a better approach would be to focus on regulating harmful AI applications rather than the technology itself -- for example, outlawing nonconsensual deepfake pornography and improving AI safety research.

An anonymous reader shared this report from PC World: According to a tweet sent out by the Los Angeles Police Department's Wilshire division (spotted by Tom's Hardware), a small band of burglars is using Wi-Fi jamming devices to nullify wireless security cameras before breaking and entering.

The thieves seem to be well above the level of your typical smash-and-grab job. They have lookout teams, they enter through the second story, and they go for small, high-value items like jewelry and designer purses. Wireless signal jammers are illegal in the United States. Wireless bands are tightly regulated and the FCC doesn't allow any consumer device to intentionally disrupt radio waves from other devices. Similar laws are in place in most other countries. But signal jammers are electronically simple and relatively easy to build or buy from less-than-scrupulous sources.
The police division went on to recommend tagging value items like a vehicle or purse with Apple Air Tags — and "talk to your Wi-Fi provider about hard-wiring your burglar alarm system."

And among their other suggestions: Don't post on social media that you're going on vacation...

Law enforcement officials have identified the criminal behind "more than 20 bomb or shooting threats to schools and other places," reports CNN.

It was an 11-year-old boy: Investigators tracked the calls to a home in Henrico County, Virginia, just outside Richmond. Local deputies searched the home this month, and the 11-year-old boy who lived there admitted to placing the Florida swatting calls, as well as a threat made to the Maryland State House, authorities said. Investigators later determined that the boy also made swatting calls in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Alaska. The boy faces 29 felony counts and 14 misdemeanors, officials said. He's being held in a Virginia juvenile detention facility while Florida officials arrange for his extradition...

A 13-year-old boy was arrested in Florida in May, several days after the initial call, for making a copycat threat to Buddy Taylor Middle School, official said.

On Wednesday, Judge Nina Morrison ruled that cellphone searches at the border are "nonroutine" and require probable cause and a warrant, likening them to more invasive searches due to their heavy privacy impact. As reported by Reason, this decision closes the loophole in the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have exploited. Courts have previously ruled that the government has the right to conduct routine warrantless searches for contraband at the border. From the report: Although the interests of stopping contraband are "undoubtedly served when the government searches the luggage or pockets of a person crossing the border carrying objects that can only be introduced to this country by being physically moved across its borders, the extent to which those interests are served when the government searches data stored on a person's cell phone is far less clear," the judge declared. Morrison noted that "reviewing the information in a person's cell phone is the best approximation government officials have for mindreading," so searching through cellphone data has an even heavier privacy impact than rummaging through physical possessions. Therefore, the court ruled, a cellphone search at the border requires both probable cause and a warrant. Morrison did not distinguish between scanning a phone's contents with special software and manually flipping through it.

And in a victory for journalists, the judge specifically acknowledged the First Amendment implications of cellphone searches too. She cited reporting by The Intercept and VICE about CPB searching journalists' cellphones "based on these journalists' ongoing coverage of politically sensitive issues" and warned that those phone searches could put confidential sources at risk. Wednesday's ruling adds to a stream of cases restricting the feds' ability to search travelers' electronics. The 4th and 9th Circuits, which cover the mid-Atlantic and Western states, have ruled that border police need at least "reasonable suspicion" of a crime to search cellphones. Last year, a judge in the Southern District of New York also ruled (PDF) that the government "may not copy and search an American citizen's cell phone at the border without a warrant absent exigent circumstances."

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Researchers at Truffle Security have found, or arguably rediscovered, that data from deleted GitHub repositories (public or private) and from deleted copies (forks) of repositories isn't necessarily deleted. Joe Leon, a security researcher with the outfit, said in an advisory on Wednesday that being able to access deleted repo data -- such as APIs keys -- represents a security risk. And he proposed a new term to describe the alleged vulnerability: Cross Fork Object Reference (CFOR). "A CFOR vulnerability occurs when one repository fork can access sensitive data from another fork (including data from private and deleted forks)," Leon explained.

For example, the firm showed how one can fork a repository, commit data to it, delete the fork, and then access the supposedly deleted commit data via the original repository. The researchers also created a repo, forked it, and showed how data not synced with the fork continues to be accessible through the fork after the original repo is deleted. You can watch that particular demo [here].

According to Leon, this scenario came up last week with the submission of a critical vulnerability report to a major technology company involving a private key for an employee GitHub account that had broad access across the organization. The key had been publicly committed to a GitHub repository. Upon learning of the blunder, the tech biz nuked the repo thinking that would take care of the leak. "They immediately deleted the repository, but since it had been forked, I could still access the commit containing the sensitive data via a fork, despite the fork never syncing with the original 'upstream' repository," Leon explained. Leon added that after reviewing three widely forked public repos from large AI companies, Truffle Security researchers found 40 valid API keys from deleted forks. GitHub said it considers this situation a feature, not a bug: "GitHub is committed to investigating reported security issues. We are aware of this report and have validated that this is expected and documented behavior inherent to how fork networks work. You can read more about how deleting or changing visibility affects repository forks in our [documentation]."

Truffle Security argues that they should reconsider their position "because the average user expects there to be a distinction between public and private repos in terms of data security, which isn't always true," reports The Register. "And there's also the expectation that the act of deletion should remove commit data, which again has been shown to not always be the case."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car's movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker. This practice, disclosed in a letter (PDF) sent by Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, is yet another way in which automakers are tracking drivers (source may be paywalled; alternative source), often without their knowledge. Previous reporting in The New York Times which the letter cited, revealed how automakers including G.M., Honda and Hyundai collected information about drivers' behavior, such as how often they slammed on the brakes, accelerated rapidly and exceeded the speed limit. It was then sold to the insurance industry, which used it to help gauge individual drivers' riskiness.

The two Democratic senators, both known for privacy advocacy, zeroed in on G.M., Honda and Hyundai because all three had made deals, The Times reported, with Verisk, an analytics company that sold the data to insurers. In the letter, the senators urged the F.T.C.'s chairwoman, Lina Khan, to investigate how the auto industry collects and shares customers' data. One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Mr. Wyden's office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. According to the letter, Verisk paid Honda $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, or 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1 million, or 61 cents per car, over six years. G.M. would not reveal how much it had been paid, Mr. Wyden's office said. People familiar with G.M.'s program previously told The Times that driving behavior data had been shared from more than eight million cars, with the company making an amount in the low millions of dollars from the sale. G.M. also previously shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions. "Companies should not be selling Americans' data without their consent, period," the letter from Senators Wyden and Markey stated. "But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers' private data."

In a major victory for ride-hail companies, California Supreme Court upheld a law classifying gig workers as independent contractors, maintaining their ineligibility for benefits such as sick leave and workers' compensation. This decision concludes a prolonged legal battle and supports the 2020 ballot measure Proposition 22, despite opposition from labor groups who argued it was unconstitutional. Politico reports: Thursday's ruling capped a yearslong battle between labor and the companies over the status of workers who are dispatched by apps to deliver food, buy groceries and transport customers. A 2018 Supreme Court ruling and a follow-up bill would have compelled the gig companies to treat those workers as employees. A collection of five firms then spent more than $200 million to escape that mandate by passing the 2020 ballot measure Proposition 22 in one of the most expensive political campaigns in American history. The unanimous ruling on Thursday now upholds the status quo of the gig economy in California.

As independent contractors, gig workers are not entitled to benefits like sick leave, overtime and workers' compensation. The SEIU union and four gig workers, ultimately, challenged Prop 22 based on its conflict with the Legislature's power to administer workers' compensation, specifically. The law, which passed with 58 percent of the vote in 2020, makes gig workers ineligible for workers' comp, which opponents of Prop 22 argued rendered the entire law unconstitutional. [...] Beyond the implications for gig workers, the heavily-funded Prop 22 ballot campaign pushed the limits of what could be spent on an initiative, ultimately becoming the most expensive measure in California history. Uber and Lyft have both threatened to leave any states that pass laws not classifying their drivers as independent contractors. The decision Thursday closes the door to that possibility for California.

snydeq shares a report from CIO.com: ServiceNow has reported potential compliance issues to the US Department of Justice "related to one of its government contracts" as well as the hiring of the then-CIO of the US Army to be its head of global public sector, the company said in regulatory filings on Wednesday. The DOJ is looking into the matter. Following an internal investigation, ServiceNow said, its President and COO, CJ Desai, has resigned, while "the other individual has also departed the company." That executive, Raj Iyer, told CIO.com, "I resigned because I didn't want to be associated with this fiasco in any way. It's not my fault." CEO Bill McDermott told financial analysts in a conference call Wednesday that someone within ServiceNow had complained about the situation and that an internal probe "determined that our company policy was violated."

"Acting with total transparency, the company proactively disclosed the findings of the investigation to the proper government entities. And as a result, today, we're announcing the departure of the individual whose hiring was the subject of the original complaint," McDermott said. "We also came to a mutual agreement that CJ Desai, our President and COO, would offer his resignation from the company effective immediately. While we believe this was an isolated incident, we are further sharpening our hiring policies and procedures as a result of the situation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022. In a public GitHub repository committed in December of that year, someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers published what's known as a platform key, the cryptographic key that forms the root-of-trust anchor between the hardware device and the firmware that runs on it. The repository was located at https://github.com/raywu-aaeon..., and it's not clear when it was taken down. The repository included the private portion of the platform key in encrypted form. The encrypted file, however, was protected by a four-character password, a decision that made it trivial for Binarly, and anyone else with even a passing curiosity, to crack the passcode and retrieve the corresponding plain text. The disclosure of the key went largely unnoticed until January 2023, when Binarly researchers found it while investigating a supply-chain incident. Now that the leak has come to light, security experts say it effectively torpedoes the security assurances offered by Secure Boot.

Binarly researchers said their scans of firmware images uncovered 215 devices that use the compromised key, which can be identified by the certificate serial number 55:fb:ef:87:81:23:00:84:47:17:0b:b3:cd:87:3a:f4. A table appearing at the end of this article lists each one. The researchers soon discovered that the compromise of the key was just the beginning of a much bigger supply-chain breakdown that raises serious doubts about the integrity of Secure Boot on more than 300 additional device models from virtually all major device manufacturers. As is the case with the platform key compromised in the 2022 GitHub leak, an additional 21 platform keys contain the strings "DO NOT SHIP" or "DO NOT TRUST." These keys were created by AMI, one of the three main providers of software developer kits that device makers use to customize their UEFI firmware so it will run on their specific hardware configurations. As the strings suggest, the keys were never intended to be used in production systems. Instead, AMI provided them to customers or prospective customers for testing. For reasons that aren't clear, the test keys made their way into devices from a nearly inexhaustive roster of makers. In addition to the five makers mentioned earlier, they include Aopen, Foremelife, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, and Supermicro.

Cryptographic key management best practices call for credentials such as production platform keys to be unique for every product line or, at a minimum, to be unique to a given device manufacturer. Best practices also dictate that keys should be rotated periodically. The test keys discovered by Binarly, by contrast, were shared for more than a decade among more than a dozen independent device makers. The result is that the keys can no longer be trusted because the private portion of them is an open industry secret. Binarly has named its discovery PKfail in recognition of the massive supply-chain snafu resulting from the industry-wide failure to properly manage platform keys. The report is available here. Proof-of-concept videos are here and here. Binarly has provided a scanning tool here. "It's a big problem," said Martin Smolar, a malware analyst specializing in rootkits who reviewed the Binarly research. "It's basically an unlimited Secure Boot bypass for these devices that use this platform key. So until device manufacturers or OEMs provide firmware updates, anyone can basically... execute any malware or untrusted code during system boot. Of course, privileged access is required, but that's not a problem in many cases."

Binarly founder and CEO Alex Matrosov added: "Imagine all the people in an apartment building have the same front door lock and key. If anyone loses the key, it could be a problem for the entire building. But what if things are even worse and other buildings have the same lock and the keys?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Angry T-Mobile customers have filed a class action lawsuit over the carrier's decision to raise prices on plans that were advertised as having a lifetime price guarantee. "Based upon T-Mobile's representations that the rates offered with respect to certain plans were guaranteed to last for life or as long as the customer wanted to remain with that plan, each Plaintiff and the Class Members agreed to these plans for wireless cellphone service from T-Mobile," said the complaint (PDF) filed in US District Court for the District of New Jersey. "However, in May 2024, T-Mobile unilaterally did away with these legacy phone plans and switched Plaintiffs and the Class to more expensive plans without their consent."

The complaint, filed on July 12, has four named plaintiffs who live in New Jersey, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. They are seeking to represent a class of all US residents "who entered into a T-Mobile One Plan, Simple Choice plan, Magenta, Magenta Max, Magenta 55+, Magenta Amplified or Magenta Military Plan with T-Mobile which included a promised lifetime price guarantee but had their price increased without their consent and in violation of the promises made by T-Mobile and relied upon by Plaintiffs and the proposed class." The complaint seeks "restitution of all amounts obtained by Defendant as a result of its violation," plus interest. It also seeks statutory and punitive damages, and an injunction to prevent further "wrongful, unlawful, fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair conduct." The report notes that the lawsuit centers around T-Mobile's broken "Un-contract" promise made in January 2017, which assured customers that their T-Mobile One plan prices would never increase unless they decided to change their plans. Despite the guarantee, T-Mobile included a significant caveat in a FAQ on its website, stating they would only cover the final month's bill if the price was raised and the customer decided to cancel. Many customers missed this caveat, leading to confusion and frustration when prices were later hiked.

The lawsuit also addresses the transition from the "Un-contract" to a new "Price Lock" guarantee, which initially offered more protection but was later weakened, causing further dissatisfaction. The FCC said it has received around 1,600 complaints regarding these price hikes by late June.

According to Bloomberg, hackers have leaked internal documents stolen from Leidos Holdings, one of the largest IT services providers of the U.S. government. Reuters reports: The company recently became aware of the issue and believes the documents were taken during a previously reported breach of a Diligent Corp. system it used, the report said, adding that Leidos is investigating it. The Virginia-based company, which counts the U.S. Department of Defense as its primary customer, used the Diligent system to host information gathered in internal investigations, the report added, citing a filing from June 2023. A spokesperson for Diligent said the issue seems to be related to an incident from 2022, affecting its subsidiary Steele Compliance Solutions. The company notified impacted customers and had taken corrective action to contain the incident in November 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA): Alexey Soldatov, a Russian Internet pioneer and a founder of the first Internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of "abuse of power." Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill. Very few in Russia believe in the government charges against a man widely known as a Father of the Russian Internet -- and who is less well known as the father of Andrei Soldatov, one of this article's authors. Soldatov was accused of abuse of power when managing a pool of IP-addresses by an organization he had no position at. This legal absurdity was enough to see him imprisoned even though the court knew of Soldatov's illness, which meant the court had no legal right to pass a custodial sentence. His family believes that the decision is essentially a death sentence. The article details Soldatov's history and his pivotal role in creating the Relcom network, which connected Soviet research centers and established the Soviet Union's first link to the global internet in 1990. During the 1991 KGB coup attempt, Relcom remained operational, highlighting its role in bypassing traditional media control and connecting people both within the Soviet Union and globally.

According to the Washington Post (paywalled), the House Homeland Security Committee has called on the CrowdStrike CEO to testify over the major outage that brought flights, hospital procedures, and broadcasters to a halt on Friday. The outage was caused by a defective software update from the company that primarily affected computers runnings Windows, resulting in system crashes and "blue screen of death" errors. From the report: Republican leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee demanded that CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz commit by Wednesday to appearing on Capitol Hill to explain how the outages occurred and what "mitigation steps" the company is taking to prevent future episodes. [...] Reps. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and Andrew R. Garbarino (R-N.Y.), chairs of the Homeland Security Committee and its cybersecurity subcommittee, respectively, wrote in their letter that the outages "must serve as a broader warning about the national security risks associated with network dependency. Protecting our critical infrastructure requires us to learn from this incident and ensure that it does not happen again," the lawmakers wrote. CrowdStrike spokesperson Kirsten Speas said in an emailed statement Monday that the company is "actively in contact" with the relevant congressional committees and that "engagement timelines may be disclosed at Members' discretion," but declined to say whether Kurtz will testify.

The committee is one of several looking into the incident, with members of the House Oversight Committee and House Energy and Commerce Committee separately requesting briefings from CrowdStrike. But the effort by Homeland Security Committee leaders marks the first time the company is being publicly summoned to testify about its role in the disruptions. CrowdStrike has risen to prominence as a major security provider partly by identifying malicious online campaigns by foreign actors, but the outages have heightened concern in Washington that international adversaries could look to exploit future incidents. "Malicious cyber actors backed by nation-states, such as China and Russia, are watching our response to this incident closely," Green and Garbarino wrote. The outages, which disrupted agencies at the federal and state level, are also raising questions about how much businesses and government officials alike have come to rely on Microsoft products for their daily operations.

Switzerland has enacted the "Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Government Tasks" (EMBAG), mandating open-source software (OSS) in the public sector to enhance transparency, security, and efficiency. "This new law requires all public bodies to disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "This 'public money, public code' approach aims to enhance government operations' transparency, security, and efficiency." From the report: Making this move wasn't easy. It began in 2011 when the Swiss Federal Supreme Court published its court application, Open Justitia, under an OSS license. The proprietary legal software company Weblaw wasn't happy about this. There were heated political and legal fights for more than a decade. Finally, the EMBAG was passed in 2023. Now, the law not only allows the release of OSS by the Swiss government or its contractors, but also requires the code to be released under an open-source license "unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would exclude or restrict this."

Professor Dr. Matthias Sturmer, head of the Institute for Public Sector Transformation at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, led the fight for this law. He hailed it as "a great opportunity for government, the IT industry, and society." Sturmer believes everyone will benefit from this regulation, as it reduces vendor lock-in for the public sector, allows companies to expand their digital business solutions, and potentially leads to reduced IT costs and improved services for taxpayers.

In addition to mandating OSS, the EMBAG also requires the release of non-personal and non-security-sensitive government data as Open Government Data (OGD). This dual "open by default" approach marks a significant paradigm shift towards greater openness and practical reuse of software and data. Implementing the EMBAG is expected to serve as a model for other countries considering similar measures. It aims to promote digital sovereignty and encourage innovation and collaboration within the public sector. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office (BFS) is leading the law's implementation, but the organizational and financial aspects of the OSS releases still need to be clarified.

Researchers have identified a zero-day exploit for the Telegram messaging app on Android devices that could have allowed attackers to send malicious payloads disguised as legitimate files. From a report: The exploit was built to abuse a vulnerability that Slovakia-based firm ESET dubbed EvilVideo. Telegram fixed the bug earlier this month in versions 10.14.5 and above after researchers reported it. Threat actors had about five weeks to exploit the zero-day before it was patched, but it's not clear if it was used in the wild, ESET said. ESET discovered the exploit on an underground forum in early June. It was sold for an unspecified price by a user with the username "Ancryno." In its post, the seller showed screenshots and a video of testing the exploit in a public Telegram channel.

In unpatched versions of Telegram for Android, attackers could use the exploit to send malicious payloads via Telegram channels, groups and chats, making them appear as multimedia files. The exploit takes advantage of Telegram's default setting to automatically download media files. The option can be disabled manually, but in that case, the payload could still be installed on the device if a user tapped the download button in the top left corner of the shared file. If the user tried to play the "video," Telegram displayed a message that it was unable to play it and suggested using an external player. The hackers disguised a malicious app as this external player.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent Alphabet, has taken legal action against alleged vandals targeting its self-driving taxi fleet in San Francisco, according to court documents. The company, which operates ride-hailing services in several U.S. cities, has filed two lawsuits seeking substantial damages for incidents that reportedly resulted in extensive damage to vehicle tires and bodywork, Wired reported Monday.

Re-visiting the Napster era, Stephen Witt's book How Music Got Free has been adapted into a two-part documentary on Paramount+. But the documentary's director believes "The real innovative minds here were a bunch of rogue teenagers and a guy working a blue-collar factory job in the tiny town of Shelby, North Carolina," according to this article in the Guardian: By day, [Glover] worked at Universal Music's CD manufacturing plant in North Carolina, from which he smuggled out hot albums by stars like Mary J Blige and 50 Cent before they were even released. For the documentary, Glover spoke openly, and largely without regret, as did others who worked at that plant who did their own share of stealing. Part of their incentive was class revenge: while they were paid piddling wages by the hour, the industry used the products they manufactured to mint millions. To maximize profits on his end, Glover set up a subscription service to let those in his circle know what CDs and movies were coming. "He was doing what Netflix would later do," Stapleton said...

In the meantime, the record companies and their lobbying arm, the RIAA, focused their wrath on the most public face of file-sharing: Napster. In truth, all Fanning's company did was make more accessible the work the pirates innovated and first distributed... For its part, the music industry reacted in the worst way possible, PR-wise. They sued the kids who made up their strongest fanbase. "One of the key lessons we learned from this era is that you can't sue your way out of a situation like this," Witt said. "You have to build a new technology that supersedes what the pirates did."

Eventually, that's what happened, though the first attempts in that direction made things worse than ever for the labels and stars. When Apple first created the iPod in 2001, there wasn't yet an Apple store where listeners could purchase music legally. "It was just a place to put your stolen MP3s," said Witt. Labels couldn't sue Apple because of a ruling dictating that the manufacturer of a device couldn't be held responsible for piracy enacted by its users. While Steve Jobs later modified his approach, creating a way for fans to buy individual songs for the iPod, "that did more damage to the industry than anything", Witt said. "Whereas, before they could sell a $15 CD to fans who really just wanted one song, now those fans could get that song for just a dollar...."

Eventually, the collective efforts of the streaming companies returned the music industry to massive profitability, though often at the expense of its artists, who often receive a meager slice of the proceeds.... Things ended less favorably for the pirates, some of whom now have criminal records. Likewise, Glover served a short prison sentence though, today, he is chief maintenance technician at the Ryder Truck manufacturing plant in his home town.
A Forbes senior contributor (and director Alexandria Stapleton) believe that for the younger generation it may be "their first introduction to why the music industry is the way that they're used to."

And Stapleton says their sympathies are with those factory workers. Stapleton: They were completely underpaid. They were making literally nothing. It's important for people to understand that while the industry was charging $20 for a CD, it cost like 20 cents to make. That's a big profit margin. And to have a factory that was paying barely enough for people to put food on the table, I think there's something wrong with that...

Witt: It's amazing to think about what they were really doing, which was essentially filling the technological vacuum that the record industry was refusing to fill, right? The record industry was not building out the successor technology to the compact disc because the compact disc was just too profitable for them. Instead, a bunch of random teenagers built the next generation of technology for them, and yeah, it caused a lot of damage. But I don't think that teenagers were necessarily trying to hurt anyone... They weren't malicious. They just were fascinated by how this stuff worked. And of course, they were also completely entranced by the celebrity of the musicians themselves.
In the interview Witt adds that a lot of those teenagers "were really kind of traumatized by their experience with the FBI I would say, and they wanted to get that story out there."

The documentary was produced by LeBron James and Eminem, "who rode the tail end of the CD boom to stratospheric heights," remembers a Fast Company opinion columnist. (And 25 years later, that columnist has gone back to listening to vinyl records, which "reignited for me a long-missing air of full engagement... Technology marches forward, except when it occasionally lurches backward...")

A ransomware attack has taken down the computer system of America's largest trial court, reports the Associated Press: The cybersecurity attack began early Friday and is not believed to be related to the faulty CrowdStrike software update that has disrupted airlines, hospitals and governments around the world, officials said in a statement Friday. The court disabled its computer network systems upon discovery of the attack, and it will remain down through at least the weekend.
Friday's statement called it "a serious security event," adding that the court is receiving help from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. "At this time, the preliminary investigation shows no evidence of court users' data being compromised." Over the past few years, the Court has invested heavily in its cybersecurity operations, modernizing its cybersecurity infrastructure and making strategic staff investments in the Cybersecurity Division within Court Technology Services. As a result of this investment, the Court was able to quickly detect an intrusion and address it immediately.

Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, remediation, and recovery, the Court will not comment further until additional information is available for public release.
Sunday the Court posted on X.com that they're "working diligently to get the Court's network systems back up and running...

"When we have a better understanding of the extent to which the Court will be operational tomorrow, July 22, we will provide information and direction to court users and jurors, likely later this evening."

Slashdot covered Barrett Brown back in 2011 and 2012. The New York Times calls him "an activist associated with the hacker group Anonymous, and a political prisoner recently denied asylum in Britain, all of which sounds a bit dreary until we hear tell of it through Brown's unhinged self-regard."

They're reviewing Brown's "extraordinary" new memoir, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous," a book they call "deranged, hyperbolic, and true." A "machine" that focuses attention on little-known social issues, Anonymous has gone after the Church of Scientology, Koch Industries, websites hosting child pornography and the Westboro Baptist Church. The public tends to be confused by nebulous digital activities, so it was, in the collective's heyday, helpful to have Brown act as a translator between the hackers and mainstream journalists. "The year 2011 ended as it began," he writes, "with a sophisticated hack on a state-affiliated corporation that ostensibly dealt in straightforward security and analysis while secretly engaging in black ops campaigns against activists who'd proven troublesome to powerful clients."

This particular corporation was Stratfor, a company that spied on activists for the government... Brown waited for the feds to come back and drag him to jail. He also says he tried to get off suboxone in order to avoid the painful possibility of prison withdrawal, and stopped taking Paxil, inducing a manic state, all of which is given as explanation for his regrettable next move, which was to set up a camera and start talking. The feds had threatened his mother, he told the internet, and in response he was threatening Robert Smith, the lead agent on his case. He found himself in custody the same night.

Brown was then subjected to the kind of nonsense the Department of Justice is prone to inflicting on those involved in shadowy internet activities that, in fact, almost no one in the legal process understands. He was charged with participating in the hack of Stratfor, though he was not really involved and cannot code, and although the whole thing was organized by an F.B.I. informant. Brown had also retweeted a Fox News host's call to murder Julian Assange; the prosecution presented this as if he were himself calling for the murder of Assange. But generally, Brown's primary victim is himself. "My thirst for glory and hatred for the state," he writes, "were incompatible with an orthodox criminal defense, in which the limiting of one's sentence is the sole objective."

In his cell, with an eraser-less pencil he needs a compliant guard to repeatedly sharpen, he writes "The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail." His mother types it up; The Intercept publishes. He develops the character he will play in his memoir: a self-aware narcissist and addict. He wins a National Magazine Award, and is especially pleased that his column "Please Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels," wins while Franzen is in attendance.
"The state is an afterthought here — a litany of absurdist horrors too stupid to appall..." the review concludes.

"We're left with a man who refuses to look away from the deep structure of the world, an unstable position from which there is no sanctuary. My Glorious Defeats is deranged, hyperbolic and as true a work as I have read in a very long time."