Month: March 2023

Enlarge / Hong Kong customs said it seized about $3.8 million in tech, including these HP laptops, on Monday. (credit: Hong Kong Customs)

The recent chip shortage showed us how far people will go to obtain rare components and gadgets. Those who couldn't wait for new electronics battled enormous price tags, frustrating lottery systems, questionable sellers, and unreliable stock. But just as people will go to extremes to buy tech, extreme measures can be taken to sell them.

In 2023, the gray market for PC components, including CPUs, SSDs, and HDDs, and devices like phones and computers in mainland China appears thriving. Just ask the China and Hong Kong customs agents who have been announcing seizure after seizure of tech hardware, including a batch reportedly worth about $3.8 million obtained on Monday.

510,000 electronics seized

Hong Kong customs announced it seized 508,000 PC parts, including CPUs, computer hard drives, and RAM sticks, with an estimated market value of around $3.5 million. There were also 2,000 electronic devices, like laptops, phones, dash cams, and styli for touchscreens, that are estimated to be worth about $255,000.

Enlarge

The support team for 3CX, the VoIP/PBX software provider with more than 600,000 customers and 12 million daily users, was aware its desktop app was being flagged as malware, but decided to take no action for a week when it learned it was on the receiving end of a massive supply chain attack, a thread on the company’s community forum shows.

“Is anyone else seeing this issue with other A/V vendors?” one company customer asked on March 22, in a post titled “Threat alerts from SentinelOne for desktop update initiated from desktop client.” The customer was referring to an endpoint malware detection product from security firm SentinelOne. Included in the post were some of SentinelOne’s suspicions: the detection of shellcode, code injection to other process memory space, and other trademarks of software exploitation.

Is anyone else seeing this issue with other A/V vendors?

Post Exploitation
Penetration framework or shellcode was detected
Evasion
Indirect command was executed
Code injection to other process memory space during the target process' initialization
\Device\HarddiskVolume4\Users\**USERNAME**\AppData\Local\Programs\3CXDesktopApp\3CXDesktopApp.exe
SHA1 e272715737b51c01dc2bed0f0aee2bf6feef25f1

I'm also getting the same trigger when attempting to redownload the app from the web client ( 3CXDesktopApp-18.12.416.msi ).

Defaulting to trust

Other users quickly jumped in to report receiving the same warnings from their SentinelOne software. They all reported receiving the warning while running 18.0 Update 7 (Build 312) of the 3CXDesktopApp for Windows. Users soon decided the detection was a false positive triggered by a glitch in the SentinelOne product. They created an exception to allow the suspicious app to run without interference. On Friday, a day later, and again on the following Monday and Tuesday, more users reported receiving the SentinelOne warning.

Enlarge / The crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a film with many references to Starfleet Academy. (credit: Paramount)

There's officially another Star Trek series on the way, and this time it's one we've been hearing rumors about since 2018: Starfleet Academy.

Announced today in a press release and reported by Deadline, the CBS Studios-produced series will follow a group of teenage Starfleet Academy students as they come of age while enduring rigorous training for future interstellar missions.

The central characters will reportedly have to navigate friendships, rivalries, and romances as they face a new enemy that threatens the Federation.

Enlarge / Stills from an AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that has been heating up the Internet. (credit: chaindrop / Reddit)

Amid this past week's controversies in AI over regulation, fears of world-ending doom, and job disruption, the clouds have briefly parted. For a brief and shining moment, we can enjoy an absolutely ridiculous AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that is now lighting up our lives with its terrible glory.

On Monday, a Reddit user named "chaindrop" shared the AI-generated video on the r/StableDiffusion subreddit. It quickly spread to other forms of social media and inspired mixed ruminations in the press. For example, Vice said the video will "haunt you for the rest of your life," while the AV Club called it the "natural end point for AI development."

We're somewhere in between. The 20-second silent video consists of 10 independently generated two-second segments stitched together. Each one shows different angles of a simulated Will Smith (at one point, even two Will Smiths) ravenously gobbling up spaghetti. It's entirely computer-generated, thanks to AI.