Meta's AI chatbot will now use personal data from users' Facebook and Instagram accounts for personalized responses in the United States and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The upgraded Meta AI can remember user preferences from previous conversations across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, such as dietary choices and interests. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the feature helps create personalized content like bedtime stories based on his children's interests. Users cannot opt out of the data-sharing feature, a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Meta has set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's technology, including two focusing on how High-Flyer reduced training costs, and one on what data High-Flyer may have used, The Information's Kalley Huang and Stephanie Palazzolo report. China's DeepSeek is a large-language open source model that claims to rival offerings from OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta Platforms, while using a much smaller budgets.

At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream."

The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships." But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with "more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize" — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt. The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of "focus music". After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — "Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!" — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: "=CountChar (Lower (D5),"W")" allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter "W" appeared in a spreadsheet.
ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's "worth checking out for the opening theme song alone."

The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event "the Super Bowl for Excel nerds". Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said...

"You'd never see this with Google Sheets. You'd never get this level of passion."

"An underwater data cable between Sweden and Latvia was damaged early on Sunday," reports the Financial Times, "in at least the fourth episode of potential sabotage in the Baltic Sea that has caused concern in Nato about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure..." Criminal investigations have started in Latvia and Sweden, and a ship has been seized as part of the probes, according to Swedish prosecutors, who did not identify the vessel. Previous incidents have been linked to Russian and Chinese ships...

The latest incident comes as the three Baltic states are preparing to disconnect their electricity systems from the former Soviet network in early February and integrate themselves into the continental European grid, with some fearing further potential disruption ahead of that. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have joined the EU and Nato since regaining their independence after their forced annexation by the Soviet Union, and see their switch to the European electricity system as their final integration into the west. KÄ(TM)stutis Budrys, Lithuania's foreign minister, said navigation rules in the Baltic Sea needed to be reviewed "especially when it comes to the use of anchors" and added there were now so many incidents that there was little chance they could all be accidents.

Repair of data cables has tended to take much less time than that for gas or electricity connections, and the Latvian state radio and television centre said it had found alternative routes for its communications.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok's parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter... The new proposal would allow the U.S. government to own up to half of that new structure once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, said the person, who was not authorized to speak about the proposal. The person said Perplexity's proposal was revised based off of feedback from the Trump administration. If the plan is successful, the shares owned by the government would not have voting power, the person said. The government also would not get a seat on the new company's board.

Under the plan, ByteDance would not have to completely cut ties with TikTok, a favorable outcome for its investors. But it would have to allow a "full U.S. board control," the person said.

Under the proposal, the China-based tech company would contribute TikTok's U.S. business without the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app, according to a document seen by the Associated Press.

Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering tech news from 100 countries. And they've just announced the winners in their 2024 international photography contest.

"From Cape Verde to Bhutan, we received 227 entries from over 45 countries around the world, featuring everything from sprawling mines to biometric facial scans." Like last year, the majority of the entries in our 2024 photography contest captured on-the-ground realities of how technology is transforming lives in every corner of the world. We received submissions from over 45 countries, showcasing a stunning variety of perspectives on the intersection of technology and daily life.

Beyond striking visuals, the photographs tell us stories of how tech plays a role in local communities, from iris-scanning payment systems inside refugee camps to EV battery-powered music gatherings. The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives.
An "honorable mention" photo shows immigrants from Africa arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa after a perilous boat journey. ("Upon their arrival, these refugees borrowed a smartphone from a bystander and started a video call to let their relatives know they survived the journey.") And the top photo shows a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent using a cellphone to collect facial scans from migrants entering the country from Mexico. ("After they make the crossing into the U.S., migrants are subjected to further data collection, including DNA samples.")

Biometric data collection was a recurring theme. A photo from Jordan shows a Syrian boy paying for groceries with an iris scanner at a supermarket "run jointly by the World Food Programme and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees." Eye-scanning technology is being used there "to ensure people use only their own credit and not borrowed or stolen cards. After having their iris scanned, Syrian refugees living in the camp can make use of services such as health care and shopping, using just their eyes."

Another recurring theme was energy. There's a lovely "honorable mention" photo from the Philippines showing two young people on a beach playing basketball "under the towering blades of the windmills in Bangu... Renewable energy has transformed this community, cutting household expenses and powering opportunities once thought to be out of reach." The third-place photo shows six children in a distant tent in "a mountainous, subarctic forest" in Mongolia" — all gathered around a laptop "to watch a documentary about a Norwegian reindeer herder" who had visited their region. ("Modern technology such as solar panels, car batteries, and the occasional Wi-Fi connection allows these families to stay connected with the world.") One photo shows a young boy carrying a solar panel down from the roof in a remote village in Jharkhand, India.

Another photo documents the largest salt flat in Argentina, part of the so-called "lithium triangle" with parts of Chile and Bolivia. A salt miner says "They started looking for lithium there in 2010. We made them stop; it was hurting the environment and affecting the water. But now they are back and I am afraid. Everything we have could be lost."

And a photo from Nigeria shows two people wearing traditional African attire but adorned with "goggles crafted from repurposed VHS tapes". RestofWorld says the goggles "represent how individuals and communities reclaim and reinterpret technology for art, commentary, and resilience. This practice reflects a community's ability to find new life in what others might discard, highlighting a deep relationship with both old and new technologies."

For the first time in America, an empty self-driving car has been involved in a fatal collision. But it was "hit from behind by a speeding car that was going about 98 miles per hour," a local news site reports, citing comments from Waymo. ("Two other victims were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. A dog also died in the crash, according to the San Francisco Fire Department.")

Waymo's self-driving car "is not being blamed," notes NBC Bay Area. Instead the Waymo car was one of six vehicles "struck when a fast-moving vehicle slammed into a line of cars stopped at a traffic light..." The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires self-driving car companies, like Waymo, to report each time their vehicles are involved in an accident, regardless of whether the autonomous vehicle was at fault. According to NHTSA, which began collecting such data in July 2021, Waymo's driverless vehicles have been involved in about 30 different collisions resulting in some type of injury. Waymo, however, has noted that nearly all those crashes, like Sunday's collision, were the fault of other cars driven by humans. While NHTSA's crash data doesn't note whether self-driving vehicles may have been to blame, Waymo has previously noted that it only expects to pay out insurance liability claims for two previous collisions involving its driverless vehicles that resulted in injuries.

In December, Waymo touted the findings of its latest safety analysis, which determined its fleet of driverless cars continue to outperform human drivers across major safety metrics. The report, authored by Waymo and its partners at the Swiss Reinsurance Company, reviewed insurance claim data to explore how often human drivers and autonomous vehicles are found to be liable in car collisions. According to the study, Waymo's self-driving vehicles faced about 90% fewer insurance claims relating to property damage and bodily injuries compared to human drivers... The company's fleet of autonomous vehicles have traveled more than 33 million miles and have provided more than five million rides across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin...

In California, there are more than 30 companies currently permitted by the DMV to test driverless cars on the open road. While most are still required to have safety drivers sitting in the front seat who can take over when needed, Waymo remains the only fleet of robotaxis in California to move past the state's testing phase to, now, regularly offer paid rides to passengers.
Their article adds that while Sunday's collision marks the first fatal crash involving a driverless car, "it was nearly seven years ago when another autonomous vehicle was involved in a deadly collision with a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, though that self-driving car had a human safety driver behind the wheel. The accident, which occurred in March 2018, involved an autonomous car from Uber, which sold off its self-driving division two years later to a competitor."

In other news, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was attacked by a mob in Los Angeles last night, according to local news reports. "Video footage of the incident appears to show the vehicle being stripped of its door, windows shattered, and its Jaguar emblems removed. The license plate was also damaged, and the extent of the vandalism required the vehicle to be towed from the scene."

The Los Angeles Times reminds its readers that "Last year, a crowd in San Francisco's Chinatown surrounded a Waymo car, vandalized it and then set it ablaze..."

This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints." If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it." Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured... But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification... [Doctorow says this is "why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web"] IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform...
But then Doctorow argues that "Legacy social media is at a turning point," citing as "a credible threat" new systems built on open standards like Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto): I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse — it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet — and not just the Fediverse — then you should share this goal, too... Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks — the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
Doctorow argues that federated and "federatable" social media "disciplines enshittifiers" by freeing social media's captive audiences.

"Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else."

A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..."

"[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft." Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok's China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app's algorithm, data collection and software updates will be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok's web infrastructure... "The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok," said the person directly involved in the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations. "ByteDance wouldn't completely go away, but it would minimize Chinese ownership...." Officials from Oracle and the White House held a meeting on Friday about a potential deal, and another meeting has been scheduled for next week, according to the source involved in the discussions, who said Oracle is interested in a TikTok stake "in the tens of billions," but the rest of the deal is in flux...

Under a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, TikTok must execute what is known as "qualified divestiture" from ByteDance in order to stay in business in the U.S... A congressional staffer involved in talks about TikTok's future, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said binding legal agreements from the White House ensuring ByteDance cannot covertly manipulate the app will prove critical in winning lawmakers' approval. "A key part is showing there is no operational relationship with ByteDance, that they do not have control," the Congressional staffer said. "There needs to be no backdoors where China can potentially gain access...."

Chinese regulators, who have for years opposed the selling of TikTok, recently signaled that they would not stand in the way of a TikTok ownership change, saying acquisitions "should be independently decided by the enterprises and based on market principles." The statement, at first, does not seem to say much, but negotiators in the White House believe it indicates that Beijing is not planning to block a deal that gives American investors a majority-stake position in the company.
"Meanwhile, Apple and Google still have not returned TikTok to app stores..."

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps' further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon... [and] challenge Meta's social media empire... "Help us put control back into the hands of the people!" [Daniel Supernault, the Canadian-based developer behind the federated apps] said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter's Thursday launch.

As of the time of writing, the campaign has raised $58,383 so far. While the goal on the Kickstarter site has been surpassed, Supernault said that he hopes to raise $1 million or more so he can hire a small team... A fourth project, PubKit, is also a part of these efforts, offering a toolset to support developers building in the fediverse... The stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to register the Pixelfed Foundation as a not-for-profit and grow its team beyond volunteers. This could help address the issue with Supernault being a single point of failure for the project... Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko made a similar decision earlier this month to transition to a nonprofit structure. If successful, the campaign would also fund a blogging app as an alternative to Tumblr or LiveJournal at some point in the future.

The funds will also help the apps manage the influx of new users. On Pixelfed.social, the main Pixelfed instance, (like Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), there are now more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the mobile app's launch, according to the campaign details shared with TechCrunch. The server is also now the second-largest in the fediverse, behind only Mastodon.social, according to network statistics from FediDB. New funds will help expand the storage, CDNs, and compute power needed for the growing user base and accelerate development. In addition, they'll help Supernault dedicate more of his time to the apps and the fediverse as a whole while also expanding the moderation, security, privacy, and safety programs that social apps need.

As a part of its efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the fediverse.
The Kickstarter campaign promises "authentic sharing reimagined," calling the apps "Beautiful sharing platforms that puts you first. No ads, no algorithms, no tracking — just pure photography and authentic connections... More Privacy, More Safety. More Variety. " Pixelfed/Loops/Sup/Pubkit isn't a ambitious dream or vaporware — they're here today — and we need your support to continue our mission and shoot for the moon to be the best social communication platform in the world.... We're following the both the Digital Platform Charter of Rights & Ethical Web Principles of the W3C for all of our projects as guidelines to building platforms that help people and provide a positive social benefit.
The campaign's page says they're building "a future where social networking respects your privacy, values your freedom, and prioritizes your safety."

2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup"
2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas"

"Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production."

"Back in 2020, electric vehicle maker Canoo snagged a $2.4 billion valuation before it had shipped a single car," remembers SFGate. "Now, just months after yanking its headquarters from Los Angeles County to Texas, the company has gone belly-up." In its four-year span as a public company, Canoo battled investor lawsuits, Securities and Exchange Commission charges, executive departures and a mixed reception of its cars. Auto tech blogger Steven Symes recently likened Canoo's cargo-style van to an "eraser on wheels."
"Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public," notes TechCrunch. "Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first in June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electric, and Arrival all filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their various home countries." In the years since it went public, [Canoo] made a small number of its bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners — some paying — willing to trial the vehicles. The U.S. Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or had Canoo vehicles.

TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550."

Another example from The New York Times: An information technology engineer, Mr. Gustab listed his iPhone 15 Pro with TikTok downloaded onto it for $3,000 on Facebook Marketplace. That's about three times the cost of a brand-new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $1,200, still more than almost every brand-new iPhone and nearly twice as much as a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro without TikTok.
Business Insider reports the search term iPhone TikTok "yielded more than 45,000 results" on eBay...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. auto safety agency said on Friday it is reconsidering a landmark rule from the administration of former President Joe Biden requiring nearly all new cars and trucks by 2029 to have advanced automatic emergency braking systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would delay the effective date to March 20 to give the new Trump administration time to further review the regulation.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, representing General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen and other automakers, last week filed suit to block the rule, saying the regulation is "practically impossible with available technology." The group asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn the rule, saying the requirement that cars and trucks must be able to stop and avoid striking vehicles in front of them at up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph) is unrealistic. It unsuccessfully asked NHTSA last year to reconsider the rule. Come 2029, all cars sold in the U.S. "must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them at speeds up to 62 mph," reports Car and Driver."

"Additionally, the system must be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. As a final parameter, the federal standard will require the system to apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected."

According to the NHTSA, the rule will save at least 360 lives annually and prevent more than 24,000 injuries.

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, Nvidia's CUDA 12.8 release notes signal the transition of Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs to the legacy driver branch. As a result, there will be no more new feature updates for these architectures; however, CUDA and gaming driver support will remain for now. From the report: It's crucial to highlight that this has nothing to do with GeForce gaming driver support. In fact, Maxwell and Pascal continue to be on the support list for the GeForce RTX series driver, unlike Kepler. Nvidia didn't detail whether or when it'll drop support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs for the gaming driver.

Nvidia has not issued an exact date for the end of full support for these three GPU architectures, but it will soon. The current CUDA toolkit still supports the three affected architectures, but they won't receive future updates. Once the move goes through, the only remaining GTX-series GPUs with full support will be the GTX 16-series, based on the RTX 20-series' Turing architecture.

Longtime Slashdot reader shanen writes: What matters to you when buying a new smartphone? How can we make the recurring topic relevant without more SCREAMS about "dupe"? I do have a bit of recent research I could share -- quite a bit of fresh data since my latest search started a couple of months ago. Or perhaps I could start with a summary of the useful bits from an ancient Ask Slashdot discussion about batteries?

Seems funny to ask about relevant books, even though two come to mind already. One is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, where he argues that smartphone use by preadolescents is destroying their personalities. The other is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who doesn't actually say much about them, but I still think they should have been included in the the big table of examples at the end of the prologue. The "system" of smartphones is antifragile, even though the earliest models were quite fragile. The essence of this question is about which current smartphone models are the most robust...

Maybe I should include a list of my own criteria so far? However, would would just be responses to the problems with my current Samsung Galaxy and the Oppo I had before that. I've already determined that the two main problems with those models don't exist with any of the current options offered by my phone company... And the ancient battery problems are still lurking, too.

Battery cars on Britain's roads are lasting as long as petrol and diesel cars, according to a study that has found a rapid improvement in electric vehicle reliability. From a report: An international team of researchers has estimated that an electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels, according to a peer-reviewed study published on Friday in the journal Nature Energy. The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory annual MOT tests of roadworthiness.

Automotive engineers have long suspected electric cars will be more reliable than petrol or diesel cars, because they contain many fewer moving parts. Data has been limited, however, because the earliest mass-market electric cars are only just reaching the end of their lives. The researchers, from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Bern, Switzerland, used MOT data to estimate the failure rate of all cars -- ignoring scrappage in the first few years, which is most likely to be related to accidents. The analysis found that Tesla cars had the longest lifespan among battery cars.

Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business." Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant -- available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram -- to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model."

Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them.

This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent "warning alerts" on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history deleted, even if they're located in another country.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that. J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.

The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology's Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice. "While this is not the first discovery of magic packet malware, there have only been a handful of campaigns in recent years," the researchers wrote. "The combination of targeting Junos OS routers that serve as a VPN gateway and deploying a passive listening in-memory only agent, makes this an interesting confluence of tradecraft worthy of further observation." The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don't know how the backdoor got installed.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from MotorTrend: A coming ground-fault circuit-interrupter revision could make slow-charging your car nearly impossible. The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) publishes a new National Electric Code every three years, and we almost never notice or care. But the next one, NFPA 70 2026, has the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) electric-vehicle charging subcommittee, OEMs, and companies in the EV Supply Equipment (EVSE, or charger) biz mightily concerned. That's because it proposes to require the same exact ground-fault circuit-interrupter protection that makes you push that little button on your bathroom outlet every time the curling iron won't heat up. Only now, that reset button will often be down in an electric panel, maybe locked in a room where you can't reset it. If EV drivers can't reliably plug in and expect their cars to charge overnight at home or while at work, those cars will become far less practical. [...]

The national code doesn't care what you're plugging in, but vehicle chargers deserve their own carve-out. That's because no current ever flows until the charger has verified a solid ground connection from car to charger and from charger to electrical panel. They also include their own GFPE (Ground Fault Protection of Equipment), which is intended to protect equipment and is permitted to trip at values larger than 5mA, often in the 15-20mA range. That's why this new code REALLY needs to set a higher supply-side cutout (like what is allowed for marine vehicle shore power, which is up to 30mA). Because even if the Special Purpose GFCI with its 15-20mA trip level were allowed, it would be a 50/50 chance that any fault would trip the electrical-supply breaker or the device's internal breaker. But while the device is programmed to automatically reset and try again, the panel requires a manual reset. There is one EV-charger carve-out: Bi-directional chargers are exempt.

This problematic application of 5 mA trip to most 240-volt equipment was added into this regulation late, during a second draft, and now the only way to head it off is for interested parties (SAE, OEMs, and EVSE manufacturers) to register their notice of motion in February for consideration in March. This isn't a government regulation, so it's utterly unaffected by the change in federal administration. These are functionary folks with minimal experience of EV charging, so the arguments must aim to convince the NFPA that implementing this code as is could grossly embarrass the Agency. (Understanding that any such embarrassment will only arise after buildings and projects are completed under the new code.)