Month: June 2022

Enlarge / An Eastern Gray Wolf is a mix of Siberian ancestry and coyote DNA. (credit: Michael Cummings)

Man's best friend was the first of many animals humans have domesticated. But there was no clear before-and-after moment where dogs were suddenly a distinct population of wolves. While some ancient skeletons are clearly dogs, there are a lot of ambiguous skeletons earlier than that. It's possible to get a sense of what happened using the genomes of modern and ancient dogs. But this analysis depends heavily on what you think the wolf populations dogs were derived from look like.

Now, researchers have generated a much clearer picture of the last 100,000 years of wolf evolution. The picture it paints is a population that remained a single unit despite being spread across continents in the Arctic, with the population sporadically refreshed from a core centered in Siberia. Many breeds of dogs seem to have been derived from a population of East Asian wolves. But others seem to have also received significant input from a Middle East population—but it's unclear whether that population was wolves or dogs.

Wolves around the north

The ability to sequence ancient DNA was essential to this new work, which involved obtaining DNA from 66 wolf skeletons that collectively span about 100,000 years of evolution, including most of the last ice age. Wolves are found in the Northern Hemisphere, and the skeletons used here tend to be closer to the Arctic (probably in part because DNA survives better in cooler climes). But they are widely distributed, with Europe, Asia, and North America represented. The researchers also included five ancient wolf genomes that others had analyzed, along with some genomes of modern wolves.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

In online crime forums, specialization is everything. Enter YTStealer, a new piece of malware that steals authentication credentials belonging to YouTube content creators.

“What sets YTStealer aside from other stealers sold on the Dark Web market is that it is solely focused on harvesting credentials for one single service instead of grabbing everything it can get ahold of,” Joakim Kennedy, a researcher at security firm Intezer wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “When it comes to the actual process, it is very similar to that seen in other stealers. The cookies are extracted from the browser’s database files in the user’s profile folder.”

As soon as the malware obtains a YouTube authentication cookie it opens a headless browser and connects to YouTube’s Studio page, which content creators use to manage the videos they produce. YTStealer then extracts all available information about the user account, including the account name, number of subscribers, age, and whether channels are monetized.

Enlarge (credit: Douglas Rissing | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Retaliating TikTok users have created an online blitz of protest videos following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and many of these videos claimed to be doxxing the five conservative judges who cast the votes denying the federal right to abortion.

Vice reports that some TikTok videos with thousands of likes, comments, and views had shared home addresses and "supposed credit card information" of conservative judges Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett. According to Snopes and Vice, it has yet to be proven whether the credit card information was accurate or not.

Some, but not all of these videos have been swiftly removed by TikTok. Even if they were removed, though, the information shared in videos is often simply reposted through "smaller and smaller accounts," Vice reported.