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Shadow IT Is Expanding Your Attack Surface. Here’s Proof

Shadow IT - the systems your security team doesn’t know about - is a persistent challenge. Policies may ban them, but unmanaged assets inevitably slip through. And if defenders don’t uncover them first, there’s always a risk attackers will. With just a few days of effort, Intruder’s security team uncovered multiple real-world examples of Shadow IT exposures: unsecured backups, open Git repositories, unauthenticated admin panels, and more. Every one of them contained highly sensitive data or cr

Japanese town proposes two-hour daily limit on smartphones

Japanese town proposes two-hour daily limit on smartphones There will be no penalties for breaking the rule, which will be passed in October if approved by lawmakers. Toyoake's mayor said the proposal - which only applies outside of work and study - would not be strictly enforced, but rather was meant to "encourage" residents to better manage their screen time. The proposal, believed to be the first of its kind in Japan, is currently being debated by lawmakers after being submitted by Toyoake

Crystal Dynamics announces layoffs, but says Tomb Raider will not be impacted

Crystal Dynamics, the studio behind the recent Tomb Raider games, announced an unspecified number of layoffs today. In a post on LinkedIn, the game developer kept the size of the cuts vague, only stating that "a number of our talented colleagues" would be impacted. In what's becoming an all-too-familiar refrain, the company cited "evolving business conditions" as the reason for the layoffs. "This decision was not made lightly," the post reads. "It was necessary, however, to ensure the long-term

Taylor Swift Is Engaged. Her Post Is Climbing Instagram's Most-Liked List

Nobody is shaking this off: Pop superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram on Tuesday, and the likes exploded like pyrotechnics at a concert. The post broke Instagram's record for reposts, even though, to be fair, reposting just started on Instagram in August. Still, the post hit 1 million reposts in less than 6 hours and earned 14 million likes in just the first hour. By Wednesday, it had topped 30 million likes, vaulting it to

Using information theory to solve Mastermind

How you've just played optimal Mastermind Mastermind is a game all about information. The Code Master selects one of \( 6^4 = 1\,296 \) secret codes. Each incorrect guess gives us information by eliminating some of these; the more codes that are ruled out, the more information that guess has provided. Let's quantify this insight! Suppose a guess gets some response that reduces the number of possible keys from some number \(n\) to a smaller \(n'<n\). The convention in information theory, a branc

Nx compromised: malware uses Claude code CLI to explore the filesystem

At least 1.4k people are learning today that they have a new repository prefixed by s1ngularity-repository in their GitHub account. This repository was created by a malicious post-install command discovered in the popular nx build kit. That malware steals wallets and API keys (`.npmrc`, env variables, etc.) and pushes them in that repository in the results.b64 file. Interestingly, the malware checks for the presence of Claude Code CLI or Gemini CLI on the system to offload much of the fingerprin

What It's Like to Work at a Body Farm

Somewhere out in the countryside, hidden behind a copse of trees, are fields full of dead human bodies. These corpses have been strategically laid out in rows, naked as the day they were born, and left to the mercy of the elements until all that’s left of them are bones. It sounds like a scene out of a horror film, but these places are real. They’re called taphonomic research facilities, or sometimes “body farms”—sites where forensic scientists study how the human body decomposes. (Don’t worry,

Taylor Swift Is Engaged. Her Post Smashed an Instagram Record

Nobody is shaking this off: Pop superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram on Tuesday, and the likes exploded like pyrotechnics at a concert. The post broke Instagram's record for reposts, even though, to be fair, reposting just started on Instagram in August. Still, the post hit 1 million reposts in less than 6 hours and earned 14 million likes in just the first hour. By Tuesday evening, it had topped 21.2 million likes. "Your E

OpenAI admits ChatGPT safeguards fail during extended conversations

OpenAI published a blog post on Tuesday titled "Helping people when they need it most" that addresses how its ChatGPT AI assistant handles mental health crises, following what the company calls "recent heartbreaking cases of people using ChatGPT in the midst of acute crises." The post arrives after The New York Times reported on a lawsuit filed by Matt and Maria Raine, whose 16-year-old son Adam died by suicide in April after extensive interactions with ChatGPT, which Ars covered extensively in

Taylor Swift Is Engaged, and Her Instagram Post Could Smash Records

Nobody is shaking this off: Pop superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram on Tuesday, and the likes exploded like pyrotechnics at a concert. "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married," Swift and Kelce wrote on an Instagram post showing multiple photos of the proposal. In the first photo, Kelce is kneeling in front of Swift in a breathtaking floral garden. The second photo shows them both standing and holding

OpenAI Warns Against Investing in Its Stock

OpenAI isn't a publicly-traded company — yet, at least — and as such, the company's express written consent is necessary for the sale or transfer of its equity. But that massive caveat has not, apparently, stopped sleazy operators from trying to rip would-be investors off with shady promises of buying into the red-hot artificial intelligence giant. In a new blog post, OpenAI warned that there are bad actors out there attempting to make "unauthorized opportunities to gain access" to the company

Playing every game of Wordle simultaneously

If you’ve fallen far enough down the Wordle rabbit hole you may have heard of Quordle, a version of Wordle where you solve four words at once. If you’re looking for more of a challenge, Britannica has you covered with Octordle, where you solve eight words at once. And of course any Wordler worth their salt should be able to handle sixteen words, like in Sedecordle. And no, it doesn’t stop there: Sexaginta-quattuordle isn’t real, it can’t hurt yo– One logical extreme of this trend would be to

The cost of interrupted work (2023)

Interruptions cost 23 minutes 15 seconds, right? 2023-11-05 You’ve likely read lots of blog posts stating that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to work after an interruption, context switch, or meeting. Thus, “do you have five minutes” ends up not only costing those few minutes, but instead about half an hour. But where does that number come from? I just wanted to quickly reference this fact to a colleague. Quick search for the reference, copy’n’paste it, in and out, 20 minutes

OpenAI warns against SPVs and other ‘unauthorized’ investments

In Brief In a new blog post, OpenAI warns against “unauthorized opportunities to gain exposure to OpenAI through a variety of means,” including special purpose vehicles, known as SPVs. “We urge you to be careful if you are contacted by a firm that purports to have access to OpenAI, including through the sale of an SPV interest with exposure to OpenAI equity,” the company writes. The blog post acknowledges that “not every offer of OpenAI equity […] is problematic” but says firms may be “attempt

Much of the World Stops Sending Mail to U.S.

Do you have a package coming your way from overseas? (I do, it’s a gift, and I’m very annoyed.) Hopefully it’s not urgent, because it’s going to be a minute before that thing gets to our shores. Questions surrounding the Trump administration’s ongoing tariff regime, including a policy to end an exemption from taxing small packages, have resulted in postal services across the world simply choosing not to ship to the United States until things get sorted out, according to Bloomberg. Central to th

Get That Stinky Compost Off Your Counter. Here's Where Food Scraps Should Really Go

Composting benefits the environment and your garden, but the odor is something to contend with. Fortunately, unpleasant smells aren't inevitable. Modern countertop composters and food scrap processors dry and grind waste within hours to maintain a fresh-smelling kitchen. We tested both the Lomi composter and Mill kitchen bin -- each performed admirably, though both require an investment of several hundred dollars. You don't need expensive gadgets to keep food scraps out of the landfill (and out

Digg’s new app is basic, but a great start

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Digg is making a comeback. With the backing of people like Digg cofounder Kevin Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Digg has ambitions to once again be the homepage of the internet. The revival is still in its very early days — the platform is still invite-only — but Digg launched its new mobile apps this week, and I installed the iOS app on my phone to see what it’s lik

Europol confirms $50,000 Qilin ransomware reward is fake

Europol has confirmed that a Telegram channel impersonating the agency and offering a $50,000 reward for information on two Qilin ransomware administrators is fake. The impostor later admitted it was created to troll researchers and journalists. "We were also surprised to see this story gaining traction," Europol told BleepingComputer on Monday. "The announcement didn't come from us." The statement comes after a new Telegram channel called @europolcti was created on August 16th, claiming to of

Nancy Mace Hitches Her Wagon to the Hertz AI-Scanner Controversy

Car rental giant Hertz is in the hot seat, after customers have come out of the woodwork to complain that the company’s newly instituted AI scanners are charging them outrageous fees over minor issues. Now the system reportedly has the attention of one of Congress’s most artificially intelligent members. The company recently rolled out the scanners as part of a partnership with Israeli firm UVeye, whose products were originally developed as a homeland security device—designed to detect guns and

Using Podman, Compose and BuildKit

Using Podman, Compose and BuildKit 2025-02-23 For my day job, I need to build and run a Docker Compose project. However, because Docker doesn’t play well with nftables and I prefer a rootless + daemonless approach, I’m using Podman. Podman supports Docker Compose projects with two possible solutions: either by connecting the official Docker Compose CLI to a Podman socket, either by using their own drop-in replacement. They ship a small wrapper to select one of these options. (The wrapper has t

Introduction to AT Protocol

Some time ago I wrote a long blog post I called “Complete guide to Bluesky”, which explains how all the user-facing features of Bluesky work and various tips and tricks. This one is meant to be a bit like a developer version of that – I want to explain in hopefully understandable language what all the pieces of the network architecture are and how they all fit together. I hope this will let you understand better how Bluesky and the underlying protocol works, and how it differs from e.g. the Fedi

Introduction to Bluesky's AT Protocol

Some time ago I wrote a long blog post I called “Complete guide to Bluesky”, which explains how all the user-facing features of Bluesky work and various tips and tricks. This one is meant to be a bit like a developer version of that – I want to explain in hopefully understandable language what all the pieces of the network architecture are and how they all fit together. I hope this will let you understand better how Bluesky and the underlying protocol works, and how it differs from e.g. the Fedi

The value of hitting the HN front page

I’ve been a member of Hacker News (HN) since 2012. You can see my profile here. (Thanks to Jeff Beard for introducing me to it so many years ago.) I currently hover around the upper 30s on the top 100 leader list. I’ve talked about that community with the good folks at RedMonk. After submitting thousands of stories, including over 400 with more than 100 points, here are outcomes I expect from a high ranking HN post. Traffic The first is the traffic. It’s not uncommon to get thousands of visit

Topics: don hn post traffic ve

The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page

I’ve been a member of Hacker News (HN) since 2012. You can see my profile here. (Thanks to Jeff Beard for introducing me to it so many years ago.) I currently hover around the upper 30s on the top 100 leader list. I’ve talked about that community with the good folks at RedMonk. After submitting thousands of stories, including over 400 with more than 100 points, here are outcomes I expect from a high ranking HN post. Traffic The first is the traffic. It’s not uncommon to get thousands of visit

Topics: don hn post traffic ve