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Researchers said that a tip from a child led them to discover aggressive adware and exorbitant prices lurking in iOS and Android smartphone apps with a combined 2.4 million downloads from the App Store and Google Play.

Posing as apps for entertainment, wallpaper images, or music downloads, some of the titles served intrusive ads even when an app wasn’t active. To prevent users from uninstalling them, the apps hid their icon, making it hard to identify where the ads were coming from. Other apps charged from $2 to $10 and generated revenue of more than $500,000, according to estimates from SensorTower, a smartphone-app intelligence service.

The apps came to light after a girl found a profile on TikTok that was promoting what appeared to be an abusive app and reported it to Be Safe Online, a project in the Czech Republic that educates children about online safety. Acting on the tip, researchers from security firm Avast found 11 apps, for devices running both iOS and Android, that were engaged in similar scams.

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  You might be thinking "Hey, that's only 16 USB ports!" Never fear, gentle reader—there are another four USB headers on the board. They're for connecting to chassis-mounted ports. [credit: Portwell ]

Industrial PC company Portwell is offering an unusual server motherboard. The PEB-9783G2AR is a FlexATX board designed for use in low-profile chassis, supporting Intel Comet Lake-S CPUs and up to 128GiB of DDR4 ECC RAM. This, and the rest of the board's specs, are pretty normal—but then there's the 20 USB 3.2 type-A ports.

Yes, that's right, 20 USB ports. Sixteen of them are mounted on the motherboard itself and rear-facing; the other four are headers available for cable connections to chassis-mounted ports. Tom's Hardware covered this board and speculated that the massive array of USB ports would be useful to cryptocurrency miners for use with external GPUs (though some commenters disagreed).

The cryptocurrency angle is interesting, but it's probably a bit off the mark—Portwell's own press release pushes automation and robotics as applications for the new board. Portwell marketing engineer Maria Yang says that the ports "[allow] customers to connect to many peripheral devices such as cameras that can be used for robot and vehicle navigation."