Month: April 2024

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Federal prosecutors indicted a Nebraska man on charges he perpetrated a cryptojacking scheme that defrauded two cloud providers—one based in Seattle and the other in Redmond, Washington—out of $3.5 million.

The indictment, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and unsealed on Monday, charges Charles O. Parks III—45 of Omaha, Nebraska—with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions in connection with the scheme. Parks has yet to enter a plea and is scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Omaha on Tuesday. Parks was arrested last Friday.

Prosecutors allege that Parks defrauded “two well-known providers of cloud computing services” of more than $3.5 million in computing resources to mine cryptocurrency. The indictment says the activity was in furtherance of a cryptojacking scheme, a term for crimes that generate digital coin through the acquisition of computing resources and electricity of others through fraud, hacking, or other illegal means.

Enlarge / The smaller Pixel 9, with three cameras?! (credit: OnLeaks and 91 mobiles )

Google has been doing a lot of work in Android to support satellite-based messaging, and it sure would be nice if someone actually shipped some hardware it could use. Despite the feature launching with the iPhone 14 in 2022, Android manufacturers haven't been super receptive to copying the idea of satellite messaging. Qualcomm and satellite company Iridium built a working solution and incorporated it into Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, only for zero Android manufacturers to support the feature, leading to the dissolution of the partnership. If Google wants an Android satellite SMS phone to play with, it seems like it will need to build the device itself.

Reliable leaker Kamila Wojciechowska over at Android Authority says Google is working on doing just that. It looks like the Pixel 9 will be getting emergency satellite SOS. Since the Pixel 6, Pixel phones have been the rare devices that don't use Qualcomm modems. Google partners with Samsung and bases its Pixel Tensor chips on Samsung Exynos chips, and that means using Samsung's (usually much maligned) modems, too. Citing a source, Wojciechowska says the Pixel 9 would use the new Exynos Modem 5400, along with its optional NTN (non-terrestrial network) capabilities, allowing the phone to be "the first to support Android’s native satellite implementation." The initial service provider would be T-Mobile (just like the good old days).

The move would make sense. The whole original point of the Nexus/Pixel line was to give Google something to build Android on. By incorporating the latest hardware features into the next Pixel, Android gets a target to program for and test on. Otherwise, we'd have a chicken-and-egg problem where no one makes the hardware because there's no software support, and no one makes software because there's no hardware to program for. Google just does it all at once.

Enlarge / Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting on February 23, 2024. (credit: MANDEL NGAN / Contributor | AFP)

A judge has preliminarily blocked what Media Matters for America (MMFA) described as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's attempt to "rifle through" confidential documents to prove that MMFA fraudulently manipulated X (formerly Twitter) data to ruin X's advertising business, as Elon Musk has alleged.

After Musk accused MMFA of publishing reports that Musk claimed were designed to scare advertisers off X, Paxton promptly launched his own investigation into MMFA last November.

Suing MMFA over alleged violations of Texas' Deceptive Trade Practices Act—which prohibits "disparaging the goods, services, or business of another by false or misleading representation of facts"—Paxton sought a wide range of MMFA documents through a civil investigative demand (CID). Filing a motion to block the CID, MMFA told the court that the CID had violated the media organization's First Amendment rights, providing evidence that Paxton's investigation and CID had chilled MMFA speech.

Enlarge (credit: Henrik Sorensen)

From ‘80s new wave to ‘90s grunge to the latest pop single, music has changed a lot over the decades. Those changes have come not only in terms of sound, though; lyrics have also evolved as time has passed.

So what has changed about the lyrics we can’t get out of our heads? After analyzing 12,000 English-language pop, rock, rap, R&B, and country songs released between 1970 and 2020, researcher Eva Zangerle of Innsbruck University and her team have found that lyrics have been getting simpler and more repetitive over time. This trend is especially evident in rap and rock, but it applies to other genres as well. Another thing Zangerle’s team discovered is that lyrics tend to be more personal and emotionally charged now than they were over 50 years ago.

Know the words…

“Just as literature can be considered a portrayal of society, lyrics also provide a reflection of a society’s shifting norms, emotions, and values over time,” the researchers wrote in a study recently published in Scientific Reports.