Month: October 2023

Enlarge (credit: Miragec/Getty Images)

Google has been caught hosting a malicious ad so convincing that there’s a decent chance it has managed to trick some of the more security-savvy users who encountered it.

Screenshot of the malicious ad hosted on Google. (credit: Malwarebytes)

Looking at the ad, which masquerades as a pitch for the open-source password manager Keepass, there’s no way to know that it’s fake. It’s on Google, after all, which claims to vet the ads it carries. Making the ruse all the more convincing, clicking on it leads to ķeepass[.]info, which when viewed in an address bar appears to be the genuine Keepass site.

Screenshot showing keepass.info in the URL and Keepass logo. (credit: Malwarebytes)

A closer link at the link, however, shows that the site is not the genuine one. In fact, ķeepass[.]info —at least when it appears in the address bar—is just an encoded way of denoting xn--eepass-vbb[.]info, which it turns out, is pushing a malware family tracked as FakeBat. Combining the ad on Google with a website with an almost identical URL creates a near perfect storm of deception.

Enlarge / The four private astronauts who flew into orbit with SpaceX on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, the first fully commercial human spaceflight mission to low-Earth orbit. (credit: Inspiration4/John Kraus)

There are three US companies now capable of flying people into space—SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic—and representatives from those three companies told lawmakers on Wednesday that the industry is not yet mature enough for a new set of federal safety regulations for their customers.

A nearly 20-year moratorium on federal regulations regarding the safety of passengers on commercial human spaceflight missions is set to expire on January 1. It was scheduled to lapse at the beginning of October, but Congress added a three-month extension to a stopgap spending bill signed into law to prevent a government shutdown.

That allows a bit more time for lawmakers to write a more comprehensive commercial space bill addressing several issues important to the commercial space industry. These include industry-wide concerns about the Federal Aviation Administration's ability to quickly license commercial launch and reentry operations, a hurdle SpaceX is eager to overcome as it waits for FAA approval to launch the second full-scale test flight of its giant Starship rocket.

Enlarge / Medical examiner or forensic scientist with dead man's corpse in morgue. (credit: Getty Images)

Authorities on Tuesday reported removing the improperly stored remains of at least 189 people from a southern Colorado funeral home where the owner said he practiced taxidermy.

The home, the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, had claimed to conduct environmentally friendly "green" burials. It first came to the attention of local authorities after reports of a putrid smell pouring from the company's neglected building. On October 4, local and federal authorities executed a search warrant and initially found 115 improperly stored bodies at the facility, which is around 100 miles south of Denver and sits in Fremont County.

That same day, a Colorado state official— Zen Mayhugh, the program director of the Office Funeral Home and Crematory Registration—spoke directly with the owner and operator of Return to Nature, Jon Hallford. In the conversation, Hallford acknowledged that he had a "problem" at the facility and claimed he practiced taxidermy there.

Enlarge / Apple's Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) Pro cable connector in its reinforced, grounded metal shell (left) and its single-piece crimped cable strain relief (right). (credit: Lumafield)

When Apple finally made the move to USB-C, it did so in a very Apple way. That includes the offering of a $130 Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) Pro cable, one that's actually $160 if you need the full 3 meters. Could one cable, an object whose job is to transfer power and data and be completely unnoticed, be worth that kind of cash?

Lumafield, maker of manufacturing-minded industrial CT scanners, studied this question across three dimensions. After scanning Apple's top-of-the-line cable, a $10 Amazon Basics model, and USB-C cables costing $5.59 and $3.89, Lumafield had no definitive answer other than "we buy cables that meet our needs" and that "there’s plenty of room for clever engineering and efficient manufacturing" inside a seemingly defined spec like USB-C.

But we can say that if your goal is to buy one cable that will hold up to abuse, work with the power and data speeds of today and a reasonably distant tomorrow, and remove cables from your list of things that might be the problem? Lumafield's images show why Apple's alpha-cable might just be worth it.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Tesla posted its financial results for the third quarter of 2023 on Wednesday afternoon. It's not been the best three months for the company—Tesla is still profitable, but its margins are shrinking, and its expenses are rising, both consistent trends since the start of the year. It also delivered fewer cars than in Q2 and will need to find homes for nearly half a million more EVs by the end of the year if it's to keep to its target of 1.8 million cars in 2023.

Tesla brought in $23.4 billion in total revenue for Q3 2023, a 9 percent increase year over year. But gross profits are down 22 percent year over year, with net income decreasing 44 percent, despite Tesla selling more than 90,000 electric vehicles in Q3 2023 than Q2 2022. Tesla has engaged in several rounds of price cuts in the US and abroad and says that currency fluctuations also cost the company $400 million.

But there were some bright spots on the balance sheet. Automotive regulatory credit revenues doubled to $554 million for Q3, and its energy generation and storage business, as well as its services, increased their revenues slightly. Tesla has also increased its R&D spending to $1.2 billion. Tesla's cash, cash equivalents, and investments also grew by $3 billion to $26.1 billion. And the company says it continues to reduce the cost of goods sold per vehicle.

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Westend61)

Kiwi Farms—a website credited with launching a range of targeted harassment campaigns, which Cloudflare considers its most dangerous customer ever—has remained online despite immense pressure to dismantle the website. But now it looks like Kiwi Farms may be facing its biggest threat yet. This week, an unexpected court ruling has shown "how copyright law could be a Kiwi Farms killer," tech law expert Eric Goldman wrote in his blog.

Goldman's blog analyzed a judgment issued Monday by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which reversed a lower court's decision to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed by Russell Greer. According to Greer, Kiwi Farms targeted him with a harassment campaign so extreme that he wrote a book to explain why the harassment should stop. Kiwi Farms then uploaded the book and a song that Greer wrote, allegedly sharing his copyrighted materials to encourage users to continue mocking Greer.

Greer's troubles with Kiwi Farms started when he sued pop star Taylor Swift in 2016. That's when Kiwi Farms users "began 'a relentless harassment campaign,'" Greer alleged, including “direct harassment via phone, email, and social media." Kiwi Farms' “schemes" allegedly "successfully got him fired from his workplace and evicted” and led to "the creation of 'false social media profiles that impersonate him with names ... that mock his physical and developmental disabilities.'” Kiwi Farms frequently targets people with physical and mental disabilities, Greer told the court.