SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Disney is reportedly cutting staff across ABC News Group and its entertainment network as media layoffs continue:

The popular political poll news and analysis website, 538, is being shut down as part of a broader shuttering effort across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday night.

Disney is reportedly cutting 200 positions across ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, including shutting down the data-driven 538.

[...] FiveThirtyEight, which is named after the number of electors in the US electoral college, has become a popular website for predictions, analysis and watching the polls in the months and days leading up to election night.

But the website's workforce had been slowly dwindling for a couple of years. The 15 employees still with the outlet make up less than half of the team from 2023, when it had about 35 employees.

The decline began when 538's founder, Nate Silver, left the company two years ago when his Disney contract expired.

[...] The broader media landscape has been hit with mass layoffs seemingly nonstop for months. Last month, MSNBC announced a massive shakeup at the network that included letting go of Joy Reid and her production team, as well as no longer using the Spanish-language network Telemundo.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Short-cut method pinpoints a galaxy apparently formed from just hydrogen and helium:

Staring deep into space and far back in time, a team of astronomers may have spotted a galaxy full of stars made from only the primordial gas created in the Big Bang. Such "population III stars" would have formed from hydrogen and helium and nothing else, and researchers have been searching for them for decades, racking up many disputed sightings. If confirmed, the discovery, made with NASA's JWST space observatory, opens a window on the starting point of the chemical enrichment of the universe, in which the heavier elements needed to make planets and life began to be forged in stellar explosions.

"It's very exciting," says astronomer Elka Rusta of the University of Florence. "We hypothesize that [population III stars] exist from theory, but they have never been directly observed."

The nature of population III stars remains uncertain. Most theorists think they were huge, with masses up to 1000 times that of the Sun, 10 times larger than any star around today. That's because a cloud of gas collapsing to form a star needs to cool, which requires ionizing the atoms in the gas when they collide. But tightly bound hydrogen and helium atoms are hard to ionize, unlike the heavier elements found in later generations of stars. So a cloud of primordial gas would just keep growing as it pulled in more gas under its own gravity, reaching an enormous size before finally becoming dense enough to ignite nuclear fusion in its core.

The gigantic stars that resulted would also burn hot and fast, ending in a supernova explosion after just a few million years. That brief first flash of population III stars is hard for astronomers to spot in galaxies that went on to shine steadily for billions of years with smaller, longer lived stars. But the spectrum of the light from the giant stars might give them away. Different elements absorb and emit characteristic wavelengths of light. Population III stars would produce very strong emission lines for hydrogen and helium and would lack completely spectral lines produced by heavier elements.

canopic jug writes:

These days most ISPs allow self-hosting to some extent. Programmer Mira Welner has published a 15-step tutorial to getting a working static web site up and running on a Raspberry Pi:

While tutorials abound in regards to getting a basic webserver set up, there is a difference between a functional server and a good usable website. I've been working on getting my personal site set up over the course of the past five years, spending an hour or so every month working on improving the Pi. I never intended for this personal project to become so lengthy or complex, but eventually I ended up with a fairly robust system for running, maintaining, and editing my website. This tutorial will describe what I've learned throughout the process of creating this site in 15 steps, so that you can use it to create and maintain your own sites.

This tutorial assumes that you already know how to use the command line, and that you have some understanding of HTML and CSS. That is about it.

Any always-on system is going to need to draw as little current as possible, and it is hard to beat a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which uses under 150 mA. This tutorial stands out as better than most others because of the small details filled in necessary to go from "Hello, World" page to a working, public web site.

Previously:
(2025) AI Haters Build Tarpits to Trap and Trick AI Scrapers That Ignore Robots.Txt
(2025) A Better DIY Seismometer Can Detect Faraway Earthquakes
(2024) How the Raspberry Pi is Transforming Synthesizers
(2023) Free Raspberry Pi 4B in Abandoned Scooters
... and many more.

Original Submission

X Outage: Thousands Report Issues With Elon Musk's Platform

upstart writes:

X outage: Thousands report issues with Elon Musk's platform:

Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced massive outages throughout Monday morning that impacted thousands of users in the US and UK.

The outage came as platform monitor Downdetector said it had seen tens of thousands of reports from US users of technical issues affecting the platform.

There were more than 8,000 outage reports from UK users shortly before 14:00 GMT, following a brief but notable surge of reports on Monday morning.

Connection issues lasted for some users into the afternoon.

Many users trying to access the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop site during Monday's outages were met with a loading icon.

Musk claims the outages stemmed from a "massive cyber-attack" that originated "in the Ukraine area".

But the technology billionaire, who has been a frequent critic of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky, offered no evidence to support the claim and did not say whether or not he thought state actors were involved.

Earlier, he posted on X that "either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved".

[...] "We're not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with [Internet Protocol] addresses originating in the Ukraine area," Musk said in an interview with the Fox Business channel.

Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said its own metrics suggested the outages could well be linked to a cyber-attack.

"What we've been seeing is consistent with what we've seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform," he told the BBC.

Elon Musk Claims X Being Targeted in 'Massive Cyberattack' as Service Goes Down

upstart writes:

Elon Musk claims X being targeted in 'massive cyberattack' as service goes down:

Elon Musk's X social media platform is experiencing multiple outages. Downdetector.com says more than 28,000 users reported an outage at 11:28 a.m.

The social media platform X (FKA Twitter) went down three separate times with the longest outage lasting several hours starting around 7 a.m. PT/10 a.m. ET.

No official words has come from X save for a single tweet from owner Elon Musk claiming that the outage was due to a 'massive cyberattack.'

More than 40,000 Downdetector reports poured in from users during the second outage — around 35,000 during the third outage — stating that they couldn't even get the X website to load, and it spiked hard again for a third one.

Elon Musk Says DOGE Involvement is Making It Harder to Run His Businesses

upstart writes:

Elon Musk says DOGE involvement is making it harder to run his businesses:

In an interview with Fox's Larry Kudlow on Monday, billionaire Elon Musk admitted that his involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Donald Trump's initiative to reduce federal spending, is making it tougher to run his many businesses: X, Tesla, xAI, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and Starlink.

"How are you running your other businesses?" Kudlow asked at one point. "With great difficulty," Musk replied. "Frankly, I can't believe I'm here doing this."

Musk and DOGE, which has around 100 staffers — a number that Musk expects to climb to 200 — have been criticized for overpromising and underdelivering on spending cuts across U.S government agencies. Government contracting experts say that DOGE's online record of reductions contains inaccurate information and inflates claims of "savings" by including misleading math about contract cancellations.

DOGE has also put the U.S.'s data and computing infrastructure at risk through its work, according to cybersecurity analysts. DOGE staffers, some of whom have little experience working with government systems, have reportedly accessed agency data through insecure means and copied that data onto unprotected servers.

[...] While Musk complains that his work advising DOGE has stretched him thin, the billionaire has been accused of using the initiative to weaken regulations that oversee his business ventures.

When asked by Kudlow if he would extend his involvement in DOGE by "another year," Musk said, "Yeah." "We're just getting things done, as opposed to writing a report," Musk added. "Like, reports don't mean anything. You've got to actually take action."

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3 

A Paleoarchaean Impact Crater in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia

upstart writes:

A Paleoarchaean impact crater in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia:

The role of meteorite impacts in the origin, modification, and destruction of crust during the first two billion years of Earth history (4.5–2.5 billion years ago; Ga) is disputed. Whereas some argue for a relatively minor contribution overall, others have proposed that individual giant impactors (10–50 km diameter) can initiate subduction zones and deep mantle plumes, arguably triggering a chain of events that formed cratons, the ancient nuclei of the continents. The uncertainty is compounded by the seeming absence of impact structures older than 2.23 Ga, such that the evidence for the terrestrial impact flux in the Hadean and Archaean eons is circumstantial. Here, we report the discovery of shatter cones in a complex, dominantly metasedimentary layer, the Antarctic Creek Member (ACM), in the centre of the East Pilbara Terrane, Western Australia, which provide unequivocal evidence for a hypervelocity meteorite impact. The shocked rocks of the crater floor are overlain by (unshocked) carbonate breccias and pillow lavas, stratigraphically constraining the age of the impact to 3.47 Ga and confirming discovery of the only Archaean crater known thus far.

With more than a million craters exceeding 1 km in diameter, and around forty more than 100 km across1,2, the Moon preserves an exquisite record of the intense bombardment endured by bodies in the inner solar system during the first billion years or so of its history (Fig. 1a)3. On Earth, this early impact record has seemingly been lost, reflecting the destructive efficiency of erosion and subduction in recycling primary (basaltic, oceanic) crust back into the convecting mantle. Nevertheless, the oldest parts of many cratons, the ancient Archaean (4.0–2.5 billion years ago; Ga) nuclei of the continents, formed at or before 3.5 Ga4, and should preserve some evidence for an impact flux that would have exceeded that of a similar area of the Moon of comparable age5,6,7 (Fig. 1a). However, the oldest recognized terrestrial impact structure, at Yarrabubba, Western Australia, is dated at 2.23 Ga8. Where are all the Archaean craters?

Finding direct evidence for Archaean impacts (i.e., craters or impact structures8), and thereby better constraining the Archaean impact flux, is important. Large impactors (here bodies or  10 km in diameter) travelling in excess of 10 km.s–1 deliver enormous quantities of kinetic energy, most of which will decay to heat, warming the crust and upper mantle9, with potential consequences for plausible tectonic modes on the early Earth10,11. Further, numerical models have shown that individual bolide impacts can instigate subduction, mantle upwellings (plumes), and voluminous production of primary (basaltic) crust12,13,14. Moreover, impacts provide a ready mechanism to fracture (brecciate) the crust and, in the presence of a hydrosphere15, drive intense hydrothermal alteration of this regolith, concentrating key mineral deposits16. Notably, impact craters may have provided the physical and chemical environments required for life to emerge on Earth and elsewhere17,18.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/infosec_in_brief/

Infosec in Brief -- Microsoft has spotted a malvertising campaign that downloaded nastyware hosted on GitHub and exposed nearly a million devices to information thieves.

Discovered by Microsoft Threat Intelligence late last year, the campaign saw pirate vid-streaming websites embed malvertising redirectors to generate pay-per-view or pay-per-click revenue from malvertising platforms.

"These redirectors subsequently routed traffic through one or two additional malicious redirectors, ultimately leading to another website, such as a malware or tech support scam website, which then redirected to GitHub," according to Microsoft's threat research team.

GitHub hosted a first-stage payload that installed code that dropped two other payloads. One gathered system configuration info such as data on memory size, graphics capabilities, screen resolution, the operating system present, and user paths.

Third-stage payloads varied but most "conducted additional malicious activities such as command and control (C2) to download additional files and to exfiltrate data, as well as defense evasion techniques."

The attackers built four to five redirect layers in the campaign, each of which followed on from the GitHub dropper to install more nastiness that it appears were designed to steal information including stored browser credentials.

Microsoft noted that the malicious repos have since been taken down, and provided plenty of indicators of compromise and other valuable information in its report to aid in hunting down and stopping related campaigns.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US supreme court weakens rules on discharge of raw sewage into water supplies:

The US supreme court has weakened rules on the discharge of raw sewage into water supplies in a 5-4 ruling that undermines the 1972 Clean Water Act.

The CWA is the principal law governing pollution control and water quality of the nation's waterways.

The Republican super majority court ruled on Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot employ generic, water body-focused pollution discharge limits to Clean Water Act permit holders, and must provide specific limitations to pollution permittees.

The ruling is a win for San Francisco, which challenged nonspecific, or "narrative," wastewater permits that the EPA issues to protect the quality of surface water sources like rivers and streams relied upon for drinking water.

In a 5-4 ruling written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court blocked the EPA from issuing permits that make a permittee responsible for surface water quality, or "end result" permits – a new term coined by the court.

"The agency has adequate tools to obtain needed information from permittees without resorting to end-result requirements," wrote Justice Samuel Alito, who was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, along with Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined part of the majority opinion.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

[Ed note: Most of the headlines for this story uses the security vendor's description of this is a "backdoor", which is getting called out as deliberate clickbait and hype given the physical access needed to load malicious code --hubie]

Undocumented commands found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices

The ubiquitous ESP32 microchip made by Chinese manufacturer Espressif and used by over 1 billion units as of 2023 contains an undocumented "backdoor" that could be leveraged for attacks.

The undocumented commands allow spoofing of trusted devices, unauthorized data access, pivoting to other devices on the network, and potentially establishing long-term persistence.

This was discovered by Spanish researchers Miguel Tarascó Acuña and Antonio Vázquez Blanco of Tarlogic Security, who presented their findings yesterday at RootedCON in Madrid.

"Tarlogic Security has detected a backdoor in the ESP32, a microcontroller that enables WiFi and Bluetooth connection and is present in millions of mass-market IoT devices," reads a Tarlogic announcement shared with BleepingComputer.

"Exploitation of this backdoor would allow hostile actors to conduct impersonation attacks and permanently infect sensitive devices such as mobile phones, computers, smart locks or medical equipment by bypassing code audit controls."

The researchers warned that ESP32 is one of the world's most widely used chips for Wi-Fi + Bluetooth connectivity in IoT (Internet of Things) devices, so the risk of any backdoor in them is significant.

anubi writes:

Just how tiny can something be made...and still have it work?

https://www.earth.com/news/unexpected-find-inside-the-eye-of-a-tiny-wasp-megaphragma-viggianii/

Megaphragma wasps do more than just outsmart thrips. They also show how far miniaturization can go before basic features stop working.

Most insects rely on their eyes for movement and exploration. Ommatidia form the building blocks of these compound eyes and act like small detectors for incoming light.

In Megaphragma viggianii, researchers have counted a total of 29 ommatidia, which is extremely low compared to the number in the eyes of bigger insects.

Each tiny ommatidium uses a lens that measures around 8 micrometers, but that's still enough to focus light onto specialized structures below.

The rhabdom within each ommatidium (the optical units that make up the insect's compound eye) has stayed thick enough – about 2 micrometers – to catch adequate light and send signals to the brain.

This balance between lens size and rhabdom thickness seems to preserve clear vision during daylight hours.

Packed pigment granules line the sides of each ommatidium. They block stray light that might otherwise blur the wasp's vision.

Maintaining sight at such a small scale may demand a lot of energy. Some data hint at heavy loads of mitochondria in these photoreceptor cells, suggesting that vision comes with a metabolic price.

Roughly a third of the ommatidia cluster near the dorsal region of the eye. These specialized structures appear to detect polarized light, a feature known to help insects orientate under open skies.

In many insects, the dorsal rim area is essential for successful navigation and migration. It provides steady guidance, even when visual landmarks are absent.

In addition, a few unique photoreceptor cells hide behind the first row of ommatidia. They are positioned to receive light indirectly.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

CISA has warned US federal agencies to secure their systems against attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in Cisco and Windows systems:

While the cybersecurity agency has tagged these flaws as actively exploited in the wild, it has yet to provide specific details regarding this malicious activity and who is behind it.

The first flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-20118) enables attackers to execute arbitrary commands on RV016, RV042, RV042G, RV082, RV320, and RV325 VPN routers. While it requires valid administrative credentials, this can still be achieved by chaining the CVE-2023-20025 authentication bypass, which provides root privileges.

Cisco says in an advisory published in January 2023 and updated one year later that its Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of CVE-2023-20025 publicly available proof-of-concept exploit code.

The second security bug (CVE-2018-8639) is a Win32k elevation of privilege flaw that local attackers logged into the target system can exploit to run arbitrary code in kernel mode. Successful exploitation also allows them to alter data or create rogue accounts with full user rights to take over vulnerable Windows devices.

According to a security advisory issued by Microsoft in December 2018, this vulnerability impacts client (Windows 7 or later) and server (Windows Server 2008 and up) platforms.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Built by the Norwegian startup 1X, the Neo Gamma humanoid robot is designed to complete mundane household tasks:

A Norwegian robotics firm has unveiled a knitted-nylon-covered humanoid robot designed to complete household chores.

"Neo Gamma," built by robotics company 1X, is a bipedal android equipped to perform everyday tasks such as vacuuming, tidying clothes and making coffee.

In a promotional video released Feb 21. On YouTube, the machine is shown serving tea, fixing a wonky picture frame, carrying laundry, hoovering, wiping windows and collecting groceries, before taking a seat as its human owners eat.

Although the company has said the humanoid robot is not ready to go on sale to the public, they claim the new model has been made available for limited testing in some homes. This will enable engineers to test the robot's navigational, speech and body language artificial intelligence (AI) features. These capabilities are being developed in-house, although ChatGPT developer OpenAI was an early investor.

"There is a not-so-distant future where we all have our own robot helper at home, like Rosey the Robot or Baymax," Bernt Børnich, the CEO of 1X, said in a statement. "But for humanoid robots to truly integrate into everyday life, they must be developed alongside humans, not in isolation."

"The home provides real-world context and the diversity of data needed for humanoids to grow in intelligence and autonomy. It also teaches them the nuances of human life — how to open the door for the elderly, move carefully around pets, or adapt to the unpredictability of the surrounding world," Børnich said.

[...] Its multi-joined hands use elastic motors that mimic human tendons, and it has four microphones and a speaker system integrated into its body to communicate with humans. Its knitted exterior was designed to reduce the force of potential impacts with the exterior environment and increase its overall safety.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An international team of researchers has revealed evidence of bygone “vacation-style” sandy beaches on Mars: underground rock layers that testify to an ancient northern ocean with gently lapping waves, as detailed in a study published January 14 in the journal PNAS. Their work bolsters previous research suggesting that Mars once hosted large bodies of water and a potentially habitable environment.

“We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas,” Benjamin Cardenas, a geologist at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of the study, said in a university statement. “We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand—a proper, vacation-style beach.”

Cardenas and his colleagues studied geological data collected by the Chinese Zhurong rover in 2021 in an area of Mars called Utopia Planitia. Zhurong comes equipped with ground-penetrating radar, a tool that “gives us a view of the subsurface of the planet, which allows us to do geology that we could have never done before,” said Michael Manga, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who also participated in the study.

The radar data revealed underground rock layers bearing a striking resemblance to geological structures on Earth called “foreshore deposits”—downward sloping formations shaped by water currents pulling sediments into oceans. The researchers confirmed the similarities by comparing the Mars data to radar images of Earthly coastal deposits—even the angles of the underground Martian slopes aligned with those on our planet.

“This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water,” Cardenas explained. “When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life.”

After making sure that the formation couldn’t be explained by other factors such as rivers, wind, or volcanic activity, the researchers suggest that the Martian formations, as well as the thickness of their sediments, imply the presence of a bygone oceanic coast.

[...] If Mars really had oceanfront property, its ancient shores might be some of the best places to hunt for signs of past life. Future missions could help settle the question: Did microbes once call these beaches home, or were they just waves rolling over an empty, lifeless world?

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00554-w

A slimy barrier lining the brain's blood vessels could hold the key to shielding the organ from the harmful effects of ageing, according to a study in mice.

The study showed that this oozy barrier deteriorates with time, potentially allowing harmful molecules into brain tissue and sparking inflammatory responses. Gene therapy to restore the barrier reduced inflammation in the brain and improved learning and memory in aged mice. The work was published today in Nature1.

The finding shines a spotlight on a cast of poorly understood molecules called mucins that coat the interior of blood vessels throughout the body and give mucus its slippery texture, says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-prizewinning chemist at Stanford University in California and a lead author of the study. "Mucins play a lot of interesting roles in the body," she says. "But until recently, we didn't have the tools to study them. They were invisible."

Mucins are large proteins decorated with carbohydrates that form linkages with one another, creating a water-laden, gel-like substance. They are crucial constituents of the blood–brain barrier, a system that restricts the movement of some molecules from the blood into the brain.

Researchers have long sought ways to sneak medicines past this barrier to treat diseases of the brain. Previous work also showed that the integrity of the barrier erodes with age2, suggesting that it could be an important target for therapies to combat diseases associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer's disease.

But scientists knew little about the contribution of mucins to these changes, until Sophia Shi, a graduate student at Stanford, decided to focus on a mucin-rich layer called the glycocalyx, which lines blood vessels. Shi and her colleagues looked at what happens to the glycocalyx in the brain as mice age. "The mucins on the young blood vessels were thick and juicy and plump," says Bertozzi. "In the old mice, they were thin and lame and patchy."

[Ed's Note: Unable to access the full article. If you have full access please leave a link in the comments.--JR]

Journal Reference:
Ledford, Heidi. 'Slime' keeps the brain safe ― and could guard against ageing, (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-025-00554-w)

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying

At EFF we spend a lot of time thinking about Street Level Surveillance technologies—the technologies used by police and other authorities to spy on you while you are going about your everyday life—such as automated license plate readers, facial recognition, surveillance camera networks, and cell-site simulators (CSS). Rayhunter is a new open source tool we've created that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot that we hope empowers everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out CSS around the world:

CSS operate by conducting a general search of all cell phones within the device's radius. Law enforcement use CSS to pinpoint the location of phones often with greater accuracy than other techniques such as cell site location information (CSLI) and without needing to involve the phone company at all. CSS can also log International Mobile Subscriber Identifiers (IMSI numbers) unique to each SIM card, or hardware serial numbers (IMEIs) of all of the mobile devices within a given area. Some CSS may have advanced features allowing law enforcement to intercept communications in some circumstances.

What makes CSS especially interesting, as compared to other street level surveillance, is that so little is known about how commercial CSS work. We don't fully know what capabilities they have or what exploits in the phone network they take advantage of to ensnare and spy on our phones, though we have some ideas.

We also know very little about how cell-site simulators are deployed in the US and around the world. There is no strong evidence either way about whether CSS are commonly being used in the US to spy on First Amendment protected activities such as protests, communication between journalists and sources, or religious gatherings. There is some evidence—much of it circumstantial—that CSS have been used in the US to spy on protests. There is also evidence that CSS are used somewhat extensively by US law enforcement, spyware operators, and scammers. We know even less about how CSS are being used in other countries, though it's a safe bet that in other countries CSS are also used by law enforcement.

CSS (also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers) are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower.

CSS operate by conducting a general search of all cell phones within the device's radius. Law enforcement use CSS to pinpoint the location of phones often with greater accuracy than other techniques such as cell site location information (CSLI) and without needing to involve the phone company at all. CSS can also log International Mobile Subscriber Identifiers (IMSI numbers) unique to each SIM card, or hardware serial numbers (IMEIs) of all of the mobile devices within a given area. Some CSS may have advanced features allowing law enforcement to intercept communications in some circumstances.

[...] Until now, to detect the presence of CSS, researchers and users have had to either rely on Android apps on rooted phones, or sophisticated and expensive software-defined radio rigs. Previous solutions have also focused on attacks on the legacy 2G cellular network, which is almost entirely shut down in the U.S. Seeking to learn from and improve on previous techniques for CSS detection we have developed a better, cheaper alternative that works natively on the modern 4G network.

[...] Rayhunter works by intercepting, storing, and analyzing the control traffic (but not user traffic, such as web requests) between the mobile hotspot Rayhunter runs on and the cell tower to which it's connected. Rayhunter analyzes the traffic in real-time and looks for suspicious events, which could include unusual requests like the base station (cell tower) trying to downgrade your connection to 2G which is vulnerable to further attacks, or the base station requesting your IMSI under suspicious circumstances.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Asteroid Mining Startup Loses Its Spacecraft Somewhere Beyond the Moon:

A privately built spacecraft is tumbling aimlessly in deep space, with little hope of being able to contact its home planet. Odin is around 270,000 miles (434,522 kilometers) away from Earth, on a silent journey that's going nowhere fast.

California-based startup AstroForge launched its Odin spacecraft on February 26 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The probe was headed toward a small asteroid to scan it for valuable metals, in service of the company's ambitious goal of mining asteroids for profit. AstroForge was also hoping to become the first company to launch a commercial mission to deep space with its in-house spacecraft, a dream that fell apart shortly after launch.

After Odin separated from the rocket, the company's primary ground station in Australia suffered major technical issues due to a power amplifier breaking, delaying AstroForge's first planned attempt to contact the spacecraft, the company revealed in an update on Thursday. The mission went downhill from there, as several attempts to communicate with Odin failed and the spacecraft's whereabouts were unknown. "I think we all know the hope is fading as we continue the mission," AstroForge founder Matt Gialich said in a video update shared on X.

AstroForge is working on developing technologies for mining precious metals from asteroids millions of miles away. The company launched its first mission in April 2023 to demonstrate its ability to refine asteroid material in orbit. Its initial task also did not go as planned, as the company struggled to communicate with its satellite.

For its second mission, AstroForge opted to build its spacecraft in-house to avoid some of the problems encountered during its first mission, Gialich told Gizmodo in an interview last year. AstroForge built the $3.5 million spacecraft in less than ten months. "We know how to build these craft. These have been built before. They just cost a billion fucking dollars. How do we do it for a fraction of the cost?" Gialich is quoted as saying in AstroForge's recent update. "At the end of the day, like, you got to fucking show up and take a shot, right? You have to try."