Month: March 2025

Researchers have discovered multiple Android apps, some that were available in Google Play after passing the company’s security vetting, that surreptitiously uploaded sensitive user information to spies working for the North Korean government.

Samples of the malware—named KoSpy by Lookout, the security firm that discovered it—masquerade as utility apps for managing files, app or OS updates, and device security. Behind the interfaces, the apps can collect a variety of information including SMS messages, call logs, location, files, nearby audio, and screenshots and send them to servers controlled by North Korean intelligence personnel. The apps target English language and Korean language speakers and have been available in at least two Android app marketplaces, including Google Play.

Think twice before installing

The surveillanceware masquerades as the following five different apps:

Read full article

Comments

Cottman Avenue in northern Philadelphia is a busy but slightly down-on-its-luck urban thoroughfare that has had a strange couple of years.

You might remember the truly bizarre 2020 press conference held—for no discernible reason—at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a half block off Cottman Avenue, where a not-yet-disbarred Rudy Giuliani led an farcical ensemble of characters in an event so weird it has been immortalized in its own, quite lengthy, Wikipedia article.

Then in 2023, a truck carrying gasoline caught fire just a block away, right where Cottman passes under I-95. The resulting fire damaged I-95 in both directions, bringing down several lanes and closing I-95 completely for some time. (This also generated a Wikipedia article.)

Read full article

Comments

On Wednesday, a ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee accused the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of "misusing law enforcement" to claw back climate funds and "humor" Donald Trump’s "vindictive political whims."

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) requested information about a supposed criminal investigation into the EPA's $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).

Whitehouse alleged that there was no basis to freeze the funding. He claimed that Bondi and Patel "reverted to a pretextual criminal investigation to provide an alternative excuse to interfere" after "EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced via social media that he had 'found' $20 billion in EPA funds at Citibank and falsely suggested that the use of a financial agent agreement—a commonly used financial tool that presidential administrations have used for centuries—was improper."

Read full article

Comments

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they'll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can perform in ways that are impossible to match with classical computation (one of the more recent examples coming just last year). In most cases to date, however, those claims were quickly followed by some tuning and optimization of classical algorithms that boosted their performance, making them competitive once again.

Today, we have a new entry into the claims department—or rather a new claim by an old entry. D-Wave is a company that makes quantum annealers, specialized hardware that is most effective when applied to a class of optimization problems. The new work shows that the hardware can track the behavior of a quantum system called an Ising model far more efficiently than any of the current state-of-the-art classical algorithms.

Knowing what will likely come next, however, the team behind the work writes, "We hope and expect that our results will inspire novel numerical techniques for quantum simulation."

Read full article

Comments

The AOOSTAR G-Flip is an upcoming mini PC with a few unusual features. For one thing, it has an AMD Strix Point processor, with support for up to a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 12-core, 24-thread CPU and 16-core RDNA 3.5 graphics. That’s uncommon, but not exactly unique though. What is strange about  this little computer though, […]

The post AOOSTAR G-Flip mini PC features Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and a flip-up display appeared first on Liliputing.

On Wednesday, Google DeepMind announced two new AI models designed to control robots: Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER. The company claims these models will help robots of many shapes and sizes understand and interact with the physical world more effectively and delicately than previous systems, paving the way for applications such as humanoid robot assistants.

It's worth noting that even though hardware for robot platforms appears to be advancing at a steady pace (well, maybe not always), creating a capable AI model that can pilot these robots autonomously through novel scenarios with safety and precision has proven elusive. What the industry calls "embodied AI" is a moonshot goal of Nvidia, for example, and it remains a holy grail that could potentially turn robotics into general-use laborers in the physical world.

Along those lines, Google's new models build upon its Gemini 2.0 large language model foundation, adding capabilities specifically for robotic applications. Gemini Robotics includes what Google calls "vision-language-action" (VLA) abilities, allowing it to process visual information, understand language commands, and generate physical movements. By contrast, Gemini Robotics-ER focuses on "embodied reasoning" with enhanced spatial understanding, letting roboticists connect it to their existing robot control systems.

Read full article

Comments

Kensington may be planning to launch a new version of its Expert Mouse wireless trackball that keeps many of the features of the current model, while adding a few bells and whistles that could make for a more versatile computer input device. The company recently won an IF Design Guide award for a previously unannounced […]

The post Kensington Expert Mouse TB800 EQ is a multi-function trackball mouse appeared first on Liliputing.

The PicoCalc is a new handheld with a retro design. At first glance it looks more like a graphing calculator than a modern handheld device. But it sports a QWERTY keyboard, a 4 inch display, and a mainboard designed to accommodate a Raspberry Pi Pico. Available for $75 from the Clockwork Pi store, it’s also the […]

The post Clockwork PicoCalc is a retro handheld powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico appeared first on Liliputing.

The Federal Trade Commission is moving to push back a trial set to determine if Amazon tricked customers into signing up for Prime subscriptions.

At a Zoom status hearing on Wednesday, the FTC officially asked US District Judge John Chun to delay the trial. According to the FTC's attorney, Jonathan Cohen, the agency needs two months to prepare beyond the September 22 start date, blaming recent "staffing and budgetary shortfalls" stemming from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), CNBC reported.

"We have lost employees in the agency, in our division, and on our case team," Cohen said, explaining that "there is an extremely severe resource shortfall in terms of money and personnel," Bloomberg reported. Cuts are apparently so bad, Cohen told Chun that the FTC is stuck with a $1 cap on any government credit card charges and "may not be able to purchase the transcript from Wednesday’s hearing," Bloomberg reported.

Read full article

Comments

Hand clapping is ubiquitous behavior for humans across time and cultures, serving many different purposes: to signify approval with applause, for instance, or to keep time to music. Acousticians often use a hand clap as a cheap substitute for pricey equipment to make acoustic measurements in architecture. While the basic physical mechanism is simple, the underlying physical mechanisms are less well-understood.

A new paper published in the journal Physical Review Research provides experimental support for the hypothesis that hand clapping essentially acts like a Helmholtz resonator—akin to the hum generated by blowing across the top of a bottle, or the hiss one hears when holding a conch shell to one's ear.

In 2020, engineers Nikolaos Papadakis and Georgios Stavroulakis, both at the Technical University of Crete, recruited 24 students to clap their hands once in different venues, varying their hand configurations in 11 different ways—changing the angle of the hands with respect to one another, for instance, or changing how many fingers of one hand overlapped with the fingers or palms of the other.

Read full article

Comments