Month: February 2023

Enlarge / Entrance to Fox News headquarters at NewsCorp Building in New York. (Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and several other news outlets, said that hackers were inside its network for nearly two years and made off with private documents and emails.

News Corp. first disclosed the breach in February 2022, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and an article in The Wall Street Journal. The company said at the time that it discovered “persistent cyberattack activity” a month earlier in a third-party cloud service it used. Security firm Mandiant, which aided News Corp. in investigating the intrusion, told the WSJ it believed the attack was conducted by a threat actor aligned with the Chinese government.

Last week, News Corp. sent a breach notification letter to at least one affected employee that provided additional details.

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  The Nokia G22. You can open it. [credit: iFixit ]

HMD and its licensed Nokia brand is taking a swing at a repairable smartphone with the Nokia G22. Like Google and Samsung, HMD has struck up a partnership with iFixit to offer official parts and repair guides online. Besides the partnership, HMD goes one step further and claims: "Starting with Nokia G22, we’ll be designing and building smartphones that are easier to repair." It's great to see a company tout attempts at a more repairable design, but there isn't much in the G22 that makes it more repairable than a normal cheap phone.

The phone is a low-end $179 (179 euro) device with a 6.52-inch, 90 Hz, 1200×720 LCD. The SoC is a 'Unisoc T606'—a 12 nm chip with two Cortex A75 Arm cores, two A55 cores, and an ARM Mali-G57 MP1. It has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 5050 mAh battery with 20 W charging. The phone has a side fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, MicroSD slot, and, if you get the "TA-1528" model, NFC. The phone comes with Android 12 and has two years of major OS updates and three years of monthly security updates, which are both pretty good for a cheap phone. It'll be for sale on March 8 in the UK for 149.99 pounds ($179), with sales also happening in Europe and Australia eventually.

As for iFixit's half of this partnership, there are four parts for sale in the parts store: A screen for $53, a battery for $26, a charge port for $20, and a new plastic back panel for $26. There are also the usual high-quality guides from iFixit that detail every screw and clip you'll have to deal with to replace those parts, along with a recommended list of tools.

Enlarge (credit: Peter Dazeley | The Image Bank)

Over the past few years, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) saw worrying trends indicating that teen sextortion is on the rise online and, in extreme cases, leads to suicides. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of sextortion cases reported on NCMEC’s online tipline more than doubled. At the start of 2022, nearly 80 percent of those cases involved teens suffering financial sextortion—pressured to send cash or gift cards or else see their sexualized images spread online.

NCMEC already manages a database that works to stop the spread of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), but that tool wouldn't work for confused teens ashamed of struggling with sextortion, because it gathers information with every report that is not anonymized. Teens escaping sextortion needed a different kind of tool, NCMEC realized, one that removed all shame from the reporting process and worked more proactively, allowing minors to anonymously report sextortion before any of their images are ever circulated online.

Today, NCMEC officially launched that tool—Take It Down. Since its soft launch in December, already more than 200 people have used it to block uploads or remove images of minors shared online, NCMEC’s communications and brand vice president, Gavin Portnoy, told Ars.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

A sheriff's office in Illinois said it was initially thwarted from tracking a stolen car with a 2-year-old boy inside when Volkswagen's Car-Net service refused to provide access to the tracking system because the car's subscription had expired.

"While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said in a statement posted on Facebook about the incident on February 23. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen."

Volkswagen Car-Net lets owners track and control their vehicles remotely. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article, "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV." The article continued:

Apple's 1983 Lisa computer will be auctioned alongside other old-school Apple tech next month. (credit: Julien's Auctions)

Over 500 Apple computers and related accessories are being auctioned off next month online and in Beverley Hills, California. The auction will feature numerous products dating from 1977 to 2008, including Macintosh systems from the '80s, more modern machines like the 2001 iMac G3, and old-school accessories like RH Electronics' Mac N' Frost external fan and surge protector.

Auction house Julien's Auctions has dabbled in Apple auctions before. Sadly, that includes the auction of Steve Jobs' Birkenstocks for a disturbing $218,750. Its upcoming auction, announced last week and spotted by sites like PetaPixel, features classic Apple items accrued by Swiss collector Hanspeter Luzi.

Julien's will auction the Apple II Plus ('78-'82) with a monitor, printer, two disk drives, two gaming paddles, and a manual. (credit: Julien's Auctions)

The auction house's announcement describes Luzi as a late historian with many hobbies who maintained a collection of old sewing machines that are now part of Germany's Sewing Machine Museum.