An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The number of phishing websites tied to domain name registrar Freenom dropped precipitously in the months surrounding a recent lawsuit from social networking giant Meta, which alleged the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains. Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called "country code top level domains" (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau. Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, but the registrar also reserves the right to take back free domains at any time, and to divert traffic to other sites -- including adult websites. And there are countless reports from Freenom users who've seen free domains removed from their control and forwarded to other websites.

By the time Meta initially filed its lawsuit in December 2022, Freenom was the source of well more than half of all new phishing domains coming from country-code top-level domains. Meta initially asked a court to seal its case against Freenom, but that request was denied. Meta withdrew its December 2022 lawsuit and re-filed it in March 2023. "The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers' identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes," Meta's complaint charged. "Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers." Meta pointed to research from Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered in 2021 and again last year that the five ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up half of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.

Interisle partner Dave Piscitello said something remarkable has happened in the months since the Meta lawsuit. "We've observed a significant decline in phishing domains reported in the Freenom commercialized ccTLDs in months surrounding the lawsuit," Piscitello wrote on Mastodon. "Responsible for over 60% of phishing domains reported in November 2022, Freenom's percentage has dropped to under 15%." Piscitello said it's too soon to tell the full impact of the Freenom lawsuit, noting that Interisle's sources of spam and phishing data all have different policies about when domains are removed from their block lists.

Delaware's low elevation mixed with crowded beaches and limited exit routes make the state particularly vulnerable to massive flooding, but officials hope an influx of federal infrastructure money will trigger future evacuation plans automatically via artificial intelligence. From a report: The Biden administration was set to announce a total of $53 million in grants Thursday to Delaware and seven other states aimed at high-tech solutions to traffic congestion problems. Although the money comes from the infrastructure law the president signed in 2021, many of the programs -- including the $5 million for flood response efforts in Biden's home state -- have evolved since then.

"What's new is the predictive analysis; the machine learning," U.S. Federal Highway Administrator Shailen Bhatt, Delaware's former transportation secretary, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "Because now we have access to all this data, it's hard for us as humans to figure out what is data and what is actionable information." Delaware officials pull off evacuation-type procedures every week during the tourism season, with long lines of cars headed to the beaches on weekend mornings and back at night. But flooding presents a unique problem -- including standing water on roads that can make the most direct routes out of town even more treacherous than simply sheltering in place.

The two Koreas are elevating a space race aimed at modernizing how each country monitors the other's improving military firepower. From a report: As hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough have dimmed in recent years, North and South Korea have grown more antagonistic toward one another and upped their displays of military might. They have traded missile tests. Pyongyang has sent drones that flew over downtown Seoul. South Korea has sharpened security and defense ties with the U.S. and Japan. The rise in tensions has elevated the importance -- and need -- for spy-satellite technology that neither country now has. South Korea cleared a significant technological marker on Thursday, launching multiple commercial satellites aboard a homegrown rocket for the first time. North Korea's Kim Jong Un regime stands poised to soon fly its first military reconnaissance satellite.

Nuri, South Korea's three-stage liquid-fuel rocket, blasted off at 6:24 p.m. local time Thursday from the Naro Space Center in Goheung, a city on the country's southern coast. The 200-ton rocket launched into space and deployed eight satellites into orbit about 342 miles above Earth, about 13 minutes after liftoff. Seoul has the clear technological advantage, weapons analysts say, though Pyongyang has been quick to advance its sanctioned missile program to develop long-range rockets that can carry satellites. Both nations remain years away from having a full-fledged network of spy satellites. But attaining the technology would allow the countries to identify military targets to precisely launch strikes during potential conflict without relying on their allies' satellite technology for information. In North Korea's case, space-based satellite technology is essential for its nuclear strategy. Having eyes in the sky would serve as an additional asset to launching nuclear strikes with better accuracy, said Yang Uk, a military expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Seoul. Should the technology progress enough, North Korea could potentially identify nuclear strike targets in the U.S., he added.

Firefox users have been complaining about very intrusive full-screen advertisements promoting Mozilla VPN displayed in the web browser when navigating an unrelated page. From a report: The ads popping in Firefox disable the web browser's functionality, denying users access to the interface and graying out everything in the background until they close them. Some users reported on Reddit that the annoying full-screen ads even cause Firefox to become unresponsive for up to 30 seconds, forcing them to terminate the browser's process. [...] BleepingComputer has contacted Mozilla about the matter and received the following statement following the barrage of complaints from Firefox users: "We're continuously working to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back. We apologize for any confusion or concern."

Ford CEO Jim Farley said Tesla's Superchargers may become the standard for EV charging in the U.S., a day after the Michigan-based company struck a deal allowing Ford owners to gain access to the rival charging stations in North America. From a report: "I think there's a chance you know," Farley said on Friday in response to a question on CNBC on whether Tesla Superchargers will become the standard for EV charging. Farley told CNBC that General Motors and other automakers are going to "have a big choice to make" in selecting between Tesla's EV chargers and the Combined Charging System (CCS). CCS is one of several competing charging plug standards for DC fast charging. "The CCS standard plays a crucial role in establishing an extensive network of fast charging stations across North America," General Motors said. Since 2012, Tesla has developed and deployed its own high-speed vehicle charger, called Supercharger, which can add up to 322 miles (518 km) of range in just 15 minutes. Farley told CNBC on Friday that Ford had about 10,000 fast chargers and the agreement with Tesla will "double that."

Liam Proven, reporting for The Register: Over 21 years after it first came out, the Microsoft operating system that will not die is receiving another lease of life. It's possible to activate new installations, safely and securely, without a crack, off line. A blog post on tinyapps has revealed the hot news that nobody sane has been waiting for: the algorithm that Microsoft uses to validate Windows XP product keys has been cracked and reimplemented. As a result it's now possible to generate valid activation codes for Windows XP, without an internet connection, even though Microsoft has turned off all the activation servers.

This is not a recommendation But first, a word of caution and restraint. Please don't take this article as a recommendation to run Windows XP. It wasn't the most secure of operating systems back in 2001, and you really should not be running it in 2023 -- especially not on anything that is connected to the internet. However, saying that, the problem is that sometimes people need to. There is, for example, hardware out there that only works with Windows XP and won't work with anything newer... and some of it might be very expensive hardware, which is still perfectly functional -- but which requires a long-obsolete version of Windows to operate it. If you are lumbered with such a device, or you have got some single specific and very particular piece of software that you need to run and which doesn't work properly on any newer version of Windows, then you may be forced to use XP. If so, one of the problems is that Microsoft has turned off the activation servers, so even if you install clean fresh copy, you can no longer activate it over the Internet. (Allegedly, the telephone activation service still works, if that's an option for you.)

Portugal has banned companies from 'high-risk' countries and jurisdictions from supplying equipment for its fifth-generation phone network, becoming the latest western nation to effectively block China's Huawei from its market. From a report: The country will prohibit the use of equipment in its 5G wireless network from suppliers based outside the European Union or from states that don't belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to a government statement posted online Thursday.

Britain's competition watchdog on Friday said social media giant Meta had offered to limit its use of other businesses' advertising data for its Facebook Marketplace service to address the regulator's competition concerns. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to accept the commitments, which include advertisers being able to opt out of allowing their data to be used to improve the Facebook Marketplace classified ads platform. CMA executive director of enforcement Michael Grenfell said: "Reducing the risk of Meta unfairly exploiting the data of businesses who advertise on its platform for its own competitive advantage could help many UK businesses who advertise there. We are now consulting on these commitments which we believe, at this stage, will address our concerns."

The Tesla Model Y has become the world's best-selling car in the first quarter of 2023, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics, making it the first time an electric vehicle (EV) has achieved this milestone. Electrek reports: The Model Y has dethroned the Toyota Corolla as the world's best-selling car in Q1 and looks like it may well maintain this position for the full year. JATO Dynamics analyst Felipe Munoz compiled the data for Motor1, showing that the Model Y had 267,200 sales in Q1, according to data from 53 markets and projections/estimates for the rest of the world. This put it ahead of the Corolla at 256,400 sales for the same period and significantly ahead of the other top-five cars, the Hilux, RAV4, and Camry, all from Toyota.

While we don't know if this placing will continue for the rest of the year, Model Y sales have been continually growing, whereas Corolla sales are trending slightly downward. One model is new and based on new technology, and the other is an old standard -- though the current iteration of both models came out in a similar time frame, 2018 for the Corolla and 2019 for Model Y. And given Tesla's massive price cuts this year on Model Y, this will surely make the car accessible to more people compared to 2022.

Indeed, Model Y sales are already growing compared to last year. In 2022, Tesla had two of the top ten cars in the world, with Model Y achieving 759k sales. That gives it an average quarterly run rate of 189k, and this year's Q1 number is a significant increase from that. If Model Y continues at this rate or sales continue to grow at all for the rest of this year, it will exit 2023 with over 1 million sales. The only other vehicle in the world to sell 1 million units last year was the Toyota Corolla, at 1.12 million. So it might be close at year's end, but we think it's likely that Model Y will maintain its position. "The achievement is even more impressive given Model Y's pricing and availability," adds Electrek. "While the Model Y does have broad availability in the world's largest markets, the Corolla is available everywhere. And despite recent price cuts, the Model Y at ~$40k (after credits) is still significantly more expensive than a base-model Corolla at $21k."

In other EV news, Ford and Tesla announced a partnership that will allow Ford owners access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers across the U.S. and Canada starting early next year. "And, Ford's next-generation of EVs -- expected by mid-decade -- will include Tesla's charging plug, allowing owners of Ford vehicles to charge at Tesla Superchargers without an adapter, making Ford among the first automakers to explicitly tie into the network," reports CNBC.

IBM has announced its goal to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computing machine within the next 10 years in collaboration with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago. MIT Technology Review reports: Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years. IBM made the announcement on May 22 at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan. The company will partner with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago in a $100 million dollar initiative to push quantum computing into the realm of full-scale operation, where the technology could potentially tackle pressing problems that no standard supercomputer can solve.

Or at least it can't solve them alone. The idea is that the 100,000 qubits will work alongside the best "classical" supercomputers to achieve new breakthroughs in drug discovery, fertilizer production, battery performance, and a host of other applications. "I call this quantum-centric supercomputing," IBM's VP of quantum, Jay Gambetta, told MIT Technology Review in an in-person interview in London last week. [...] IBM has already done proof-of-principle experiments (PDF) showing that integrated circuits based on "complementary metal oxide semiconductor" (CMOS) technology can be installed next to the cold qubits to control them with just tens of milliwatts. Beyond that, he admits, the technology required for quantum-centric supercomputing does not yet exist: that is why academic research is a vital part of the project.

The qubits will exist on a type of modular chip that is only just beginning to take shape in IBM labs. Modularity, essential when it will be impossible to put enough qubits on a single chip, requires interconnects that transfer quantum information between modules. IBM's "Kookaburra," a 1,386-qubit multichip processor with a quantum communication link, is under development and slated for release in 2025. Other necessary innovations are where the universities come in. Researchers at Tokyo and Chicago have already made significant strides in areas such as components and communication innovations that could be vital parts of the final product, Gambetta says. He thinks there will likely be many more industry-academic collaborations to come over the next decade. "We have to help the universities do what they do best," he says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: People trying to use Discord are being asked to identify an object that does not exist. The object in question is a "Yoko," which appears to be a kind of mix between a snail and a yoyo. Multiple people have reported seeing a prompt to identify a Yoko when asked to solve a simple captcha prompt while trying to use Discord. The picture of the Yoko, as well as the other images in the captcha, appear generated by AI. Another user complained on Twitter that they'd failed to pass a captcha to log into Discord when it asked him to identify images of a puzzle cube. Again, the pictures appeared to be AI generated.

Discord's captchas are run by a company called hCaptcha. "The technology that generates these prompts is proprietary to our third-party partner and Discord does not directly determine what is presented to users," Discord told Motherboard. "While most hCaptcha interactions do not result in a visual challenge, many variants are used at any given time," a spokesperson for hCaptcha told Motherboard. "This particular question was a brief test seen by a small number of people, but the sheer scale of hCaptcha (hundreds of millions of users) means that when even a few folks are surprised by a challenge this often produces some tweets."

The issue with hCaptcha's strange AI generated prompts highlights two issues with machine learning systems. The first is that the AI systems require an enormous amount of human input to not be terrible. Typically image labeling is outsourced to foreign workers who do it for pennies on the dollar. The other is the issue of data drift. The longer these machine learning systems run, the more input they require. Inevitably, they begin to use data they've generated to train themselves. Systems that train on themselves long enough become AI Hapsburgs, churning out requests to identify incomprehensible objects like "Yokos."

Intel has proposed a potential simplification of the x86 architecture by creating a new x86S architecture that removes certain old features, such as 16-bit and some elements of 32-bit support. A technical note on Intel's developer blog proposes the change, with a 46-page white paper (PDF) providing more details. The Register reports: The result would be a family of processors which boot straight into x86-64 mode. That would mean bypassing the traditional series of transitions -- 16-bit real mode to 32-bit protected mode to 64-bit long mode; or 16-bit mode straight into 64-bit mode -- that chips are obliged to go through as the system starts up. [...] Some of the changes are quite dramatic, although the impact upon how most people use computers today would probably be invisible -- which is undoubtedly the idea.

Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, one of most established and active players in the space, is going beyond just blockchain and highlighting a focus on a broader array of "frontier tech" that includes artificial intelligence, two sources with knowledge of the matter told The Block. From a report: The change is subtlety visible on the firm's website, with the company now calling itself a "research-driven technology investment firm" as opposed to one that specifically invested in âoedisruptive crypto/Web3 companies and protocols.â The revision appears to have gone live around May 3, according to the Wayback Machine that's operated by the Internet Archive. A line that said "we believe crypto will define the next few decades" was removed from the home page, which now makes no mention of web3 or blockchains. One source who was not authorized to speak publicly said the change didn't mean the company was shying away from crypto but rather highlighting its reach into adjacent areas.

Traders betting against Nvidia suffered massive losses as the chipmaker's stock surged to a record high after it forecasts sales that far surpassed the average analyst estimate. From a report: Short sellers are facing $2.3 billion in paper losses on Thursday alone amid the tech giant's 27% intraday jump, data from S3 Partners LLC show. That's pushed mark-to-market losses for the contrarian traders to $8.1 billion in 2023 as Nvidia's price has more than doubled this year.

YouTube is getting rid of Stories, a feature for temporary posts, beginning in June. Users won't be able to post Stories starting June 26th, and existing posts will expire after seven days. From a report: Stories were first introduced in 2017 under the name Reels and were available to users with over 10,000 subscribers. Similar to Instagram (which in turn lifted the concept from Snapchat), YouTube Stories disappeared after a set amount of time; creators could use Stories to post updates or behind-the-scenes content to promote their channel. But looking around today, it doesn't seem to have caught on -- access was limited, few creators seem to be regularly posting Stories, and the feature doesn't get much promotion even from YouTube. In the absence of Stories, YouTube wants creators to instead post content to other surfaces on the platform: Community Posts and Shorts. The company recently expanded access to Community Posts, a text-based updates feature, and added the ability to have posts expire after a certain period. Creators can also share polls, quizzes, images, and videos as Community Posts, which appear in a tab on channels.

Google's "Search Generative Experience" is a plan to put ChatGPT-style generative AI results right in your Google search results page, and the company announced the feature is beginning to roll out today. At least, the feature is rolling out to the mobile apps for people who have been on the waitlist and were chosen as early access users. From a report: Unlike the normally stark-white Google page with 10 blue links, Google's generative AI results appear in colorful boxes above the normal search results. Google will scrape a bunch of information from all over the Internet and present it in an easy list, with purchase links to Best Buy and manufacturers' websites. If this ever rolls out widely, it would be the biggest change to Google Search results ever, and this design threatens to upend the entire Internet. One example screenshot of a "Bluetooth speaker" search on desktop shows a big row of "Sponsored" shopping ads, then the generative AI results start to show up in a big blue box about halfway down the first page. The blue box summarizes a bunch of information harvested from somewhere and lists several completely unsourced statements and opinions about each speaker. In Google's example, users are never told where this information comes from, so they can't make any judgment as to its trustworthiness.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After song lyrics website Genius sued Google in 2019 for allegedly breaching its terms of service by copying its lyrics transcriptions in search results, the United States Supreme Court invited the US solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, to weigh in on how the US viewed the case. The question before Prelogar was whether federal copyright law preempted Genius' terms of service, which prohibits any of its website visitors from copying lyrics for commercial uses. Yesterday, Prelogar responded, filing a brief that sided with Google. She denied that Genius' case was a good vehicle to test whether copyright law preempted state-law contract claims and recommended that the court deny Genius' petition to review the case.

The key issue was that Genius' terms of service may not be a valid contract because website visitors don't have to directly agree to the website's terms and may not even be aware they exist. Because of this, Prelogar said it was unclear whether any court would find that Google -- or any visitor to Genius' site -- ever agreed to not copy the lyrics. Reviewing Genius' arguments, Prelogar said that the Supreme Court should not review the case because "there is little indication that any other court of appeals would reach a different outcome in this case." A Google spokesperson told Ars that Google continues to dispute Genius' claims it copied song lyrics. "The Solicitor General and multiple courts continue to find that Genius' claims have no merit," Google's spokesperson told Ars. "We include lyrics in search results to help you quickly find what you are looking for. We license the lyrics text from third parties, and we do not crawl or scrape websites to source lyrics."

Nintendo is facing a potential class-action lawsuit filed by a young gamer and backed by his father, alleging that the microtransactions in the mobile game Mario Kart Tour are "immoral." Axios reports: The suit calls for refunds for all minors in the U.S. who paid to use Mario Kart Tour's "Spotlight Pipes," which delivered players in-game rewards using undisclosed odds. Until last year, Mario Kart Tour players could spend real money to repeatedly activate the pipes, in the hope they'd randomly produce useful upgrades. The suit alleges that Nintendo intentionally made the game difficult to proceed in without paying, using "dark patterns," an industry term for tricking consumers, to steer players toward spending more.

The suit was filed in March but emerged on the federal docket last week after it was moved out of state court. Its plaintiff, identified as N.A., spent more than $170 on Mario Kart Tour microtransactions, via his father's credit card, which was linked to their Nintendo user account. "Defendant's lootbox mechanism capitalized on and encouraged addictive behaviors akin to gambling," according to N.A.'s suit. It states that minors are particularly susceptible to systems that involve surprise rewards. Axios notes that Nintendo "discontinued use of spotlight pipes in Mario Kart Tour last September, switching to a system that lets players directly purchase items offered in its in-game shop."

Waymo and Uber announced a new partnership today that will make robotaxis available via the Uber app in Phoenix. The Verge reports: A "set number" of Waymo vehicles will be available to Uber riders and Uber Eats delivery customers in Phoenix, where the Alphabet company recently doubled its service area to 180 square miles. The partnership was described as "multi-year," with the goal of bringing together "Waymo's world-leading autonomous driving technology with the massive scale of Uber's ridesharing and delivery networks."

Katherine Barna, a spokesperson for Waymo, declined to disclose the number of vehicles that would be hail-able through Uber's app, though she did share that the vehicles will not be exclusive to Uber. For example, Phoenix residents can also summon a Waymo vehicle through the company's Waymo One app.

At its Build 2023 conference this week, Microsoft announced Windows 11 will soon be able to run Win32 apps in isolation mode. XDA Developers reports: Starting [today], Microsoft is launching a preview of Win32 apps in isolation for Windows 11 customers. As the name suggests, it will allow users to run Win32 apps in an isolated environment so that they can be sandboxed from the rest of the operating system in order to further strengthen security. The idea is to leverage Windows 11's isolation capabilities to run Win32 apps in an environment where they don't have access to critical Windows components and subsystems. This will ensure that if someone runs a compromised Win32 app in isolation, it will be very difficult for an attacker to break through the sandbox and penetrate the rest of the system. This capability will be available in public preview for both enterprise customers and consumers.