It’s Not Just You, Microsoft 365 Is Down

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Heads up, workers of the world: Microsoft 365 is currently down. Microsoft’s flagship work suite, which includes tools like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, is currently experiencing issues impacting users. It’s not yet clear exactly why these problems are occurring, but according to Downdetector (owned by Lifehacker parent company Ziff Davis) thousands of users are reporting issues.

There are any number of causes that could trigger a widespread outage like this, and in all likelihood, Microsoft will have the issue isolated and fixed soon—especially considering how many companies and users rely on Microsoft 365 to function. But it does follow a number of high-profile outages this week. Just this morning, Yahoo! and AOL were both down. Last week, X experienced an outage, as did Verizon—quite famously, I might add.

[…]

Source: It’s Not Just You, Microsoft 365 Is Down | Lifehacker

Stanford scientists found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis

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A study led by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that an injection blocking a protein linked to aging can reverse the natural loss of knee cartilage in older mice. The same treatment also stopped arthritis from developing after knee injuries that resemble ACL tears, which are common among athletes and recreational exercisers. Researchers note that an oral version of the treatment is already being tested in clinical trials aimed at treating age-related muscle weakness.

Human cartilage samples taken from knee replacement surgeries also responded positively. These samples included both the supportive extracellular matrix of the joint and cartilage-producing chondrocyte cells. When treated, the tissue began forming new, functional cartilage.

Together, the findings suggest that cartilage lost due to aging or arthritis may one day be restored using either a pill or a targeted injection. If successful in people, such treatments could reduce or even eliminate the need for knee and hip replacement surgery.

A Direct Attack on Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease that affects about one in five adults in the United States and generates an estimated $65 billion each year in direct health care costs. Current treatments focus on managing pain or replacing damaged joints surgically. There are no approved drugs that can slow or reverse the underlying cartilage damage.

The new approach targets the root cause of the disease rather than its symptoms, offering a potential shift in how osteoarthritis is treated.

The Role of a Master Aging Enzyme

The protein at the center of the study is called 15-PGDH. Researchers refer to it as a gerozyme because its levels increase as the body ages. Gerozymes were identified by the same research team in 2023 and are known to drive the gradual loss of tissue function.

[…]

In most of these tissues, repair happens through the activation and specialization of stem cells. Cartilage appears to be different. In this case, chondrocytes change how their genes behave, shifting into a more youthful state without relying on stem cells.

[…]

Earlier research from Blau’s lab showed that prostaglandin E2 is essential for muscle stem cell function. The enzyme 15-PGDH breaks down prostaglandin E2. By blocking 15-PGDH or increasing prostaglandin E2 levels, researchers previously supported the repair of damaged muscle, nerve, bone, colon, liver, and blood cells in young mice.

This led the team to question whether the same pathway might be involved in cartilage aging and joint damage. When they compared knee cartilage from young and old mice, they found that 15-PGDH levels roughly doubled with age.

Regrowing Cartilage in Aging Knees

Researchers then injected older mice with a small molecule that inhibits 15-PGDH. They first administered the drug into the abdomen to affect the entire body, and later injected it directly into the knee joint. In both cases, cartilage that had become thin and dysfunctional with age thickened across the joint surface.

Additional tests confirmed that the regenerated tissue was hyaline cartilage rather than the less functional fibrocartilage.

“Cartilage regeneration to such an extent in aged mice took us by surprise,” Bhutani said. “The effect was remarkable.”

[…]

The researchers also tested cartilage taken from patients undergoing total knee replacement for osteoarthritis. After one week of treatment with the 15-PGDH inhibitor, the tissue showed fewer 15-PGDH-producing chondrocytes, reduced expression of cartilage degradation and fibrocartilage genes, and early signs of articular cartilage regeneration.

“The mechanism is quite striking and really shifted our perspective about how tissue regeneration can occur,” Bhutani said. “It’s clear that a large pool of already existing cells in cartilage are changing their gene expression patterns. And by targeting these cells for regeneration, we may have an opportunity to have a bigger overall impact clinically.”

Looking Toward Human Trials

Blau added, “Phase 1 clinical trials of a 15-PGDH inhibitor for muscle weakness have shown that it is safe and active in healthy volunteers. Our hope is that a similar trial will be launched soon to test its effect in cartilage regeneration. We are very excited about this potential breakthrough. Imagine regrowing existing cartilage and avoiding joint replacement.”

[…]

Source: Stanford scientists found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis | ScienceDaily

Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

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Microsoft’s January Windows update has delivered another blow for unsuspecting users – apps including Outlook might freeze when saving files to cloud storage services such as OneDrive or Dropbox.

The megacorp acknowledged the latest issue days after releasing an emergency out-of-band update to deal with connection and authentication failures in the Windows App. Yet another fault in the update caused some Windows 11 23H2 PCs to refuse to shut down or hibernate.

According to Microsoft, after installing the January 13 update, “some applications might become unresponsive or experience unexpected errors when opening files from or saving files to cloud-backed storage, such as OneDrive or Dropbox.”

One application is Outlook, which, when combined with a PST (Personal Storage Table) file on OneDrive, “might become unresponsive and fail to reopen unless its process is terminated in Task Manager, or the system is restarted.” Sent emails might also fail to appear.

The workaround for Outlook is to move the PST file out of OneDrive. Putting a PST file in OneDrive is generally not recommended except for backup purposes, though there are plenty of scenarios where users or administrators do so, and changing a workflow due to a bug introduced by an update is not ideal.

[…]

Source: Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive • The Register

Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2026

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[…]

one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.

In earlier, simpler internet times, RSS was the way to keep up to date with what was happening on all of your favorite sites. You would open your RSS reader and tap through newly published articles one by one, in chronological order, in the same way you would check your email. It was an easy way to keep tabs on what was new and what was of interest.

Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume “content.” (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It’s now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what’s new

[…]

The RSS standard actually remains the default way of distributing podcasts, with each new episode—together with the episode title, cover art, and descriptive blurb—appearing as a new entry in the feed of your podcast app of choice. When you subscribe to a new show through Pocket Casts or Apple Podcasts, you’re essentially pointing the app towards the RSS feed for the podcast you want to listen to, and it takes care of serving up each new episode.

In times gone by, websites would prominently display their RSS feed links somewhere on the front page. That’s less common now, but you can often find these feeds if you dig deeper or run a web search for them (incidentally, the Lifehacker RSS feed can be found here). Some sites offer multiple RSS feeds covering different categories of content, such as tech or sports.

Even when a site doesn’t explicitly offer RSS feeds, the best RSS readers can now produce their own approximation of them by watching for new activity on a site, so you can direct the app toward the site you want to keep tabs on

[…]

RSS is clearly useful if you have a selection of favorite websites and you want to skim through everything they publish (or everything they publish in a certain category, if the site has several feeds). No one is choosing what you see but you—you have more control over your news diet, free from any choices made by an algorithm.

Using RSS means you can catch up on everything, methodically and chronologically, even if you’ve been offline for a week (you don’t have to catch up on everything, of course—but you can, if you want, as your feed will operate on an infinite scroll). It’s also a cleaner, less cluttered way of using the internet, as you only need to click through on the specific articles you want to read.

[…]

RSS readers aren’t quite as ubiquitous as they once were, but you can still find quite a few if you take a look around.

Feedly

The best RSS reader currently in operation is arguably Feedly, which offers a bunch of features across free and paid-for plans (starting from $8 per month): It has a clean, clear interface, it can generate RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them, it can sort feeds in a variety of ways, it can incorporate email newsletters, and plenty more besides.

Feeder

Feeder is a good place to start for RSS newbies because it gets you up and running quickly, and offers a straightforward interface. It works seamlessly across all the major platforms, and if you need extra bells and whistles—including a real time dashboard, access to more feeds, and sophisticated filters for your feeds—paid plans start at $9.99 per month.

[…]

Source: Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2026 | Lifehacker

Threads Is Now Clearly More Popular Than X in Mobile App Form

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Matt Damon has claimed that Netflix pushes directors to reiterate the plot for viewers who are watching while on their phones.

The actor has just released new action film The Rip on the streaming platform, which sees him reunite with frequent collaborator Ben Affleck.

During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast alongside his co-star, Damon spoke about collaborating with Netflix, saying they want bigger action earlier in such films, and push for the plot to be repeated to accommodate attention spans.

“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces,” he said. “One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third… You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale.

“And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”

Affleck went on to praise Netflix series Adolescence, which became a huge success last year, and the fact that it “didn’t do any of that shit”.

[…]

Source: Threads Is Now Clearly More Popular Than X (in Mobile App Form), Report Says

Insane that people are still on X. Numbers for both platforms will be inflated due to embeds on web.

Netflix tells directors to repeat plot 3 times for people using phones while watching. Bore people who aren’t using phones, make them use their phones.

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Matt Damon has claimed that Netflix pushes directors to reiterate the plot for viewers who are watching while on their phones.

The actor has just released new action film The Rip on the streaming platform, which sees him reunite with frequent collaborator Ben Affleck.

During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast alongside his co-star, Damon spoke about collaborating with Netflix, saying they want bigger action earlier in such films, and push for the plot to be repeated to accommodate attention spans.

“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces,” he said. “One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third… You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale.

“And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”

Affleck went on to praise Netflix series Adolescence, which became a huge success last year, and the fact that it “didn’t do any of that shit”.

[…]

Source: Netflix tells directors to repeat plot for people using phones while watching, says Matt Damon

Posted in Art

Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous

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The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known as Promptware – maliciously engineered prompts designed to manipulate LLMs to compromise the CIA triad of these applications. While prior research warned about a potential shift in the threat landscape for LLM-powered applications, the risk posed by Promptware is frequently perceived as low. In this paper, we investigate the risk Promptware poses to users of Gemini-powered assistants (web application, mobile application, and Google Assistant). We propose a novel Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA) framework to assess Promptware risks for end users. Our analysis focuses on a new variant of Promptware called Targeted Promptware Attacks, which leverage indirect prompt injection via common user interactions such as emails, calendar invitations, and shared documents. We demonstrate 14 attack scenarios applied against Gemini-powered assistants across five identified threat classes: Short-term Context Poisoning, Permanent Memory Poisoning, Tool Misuse, Automatic Agent Invocation, and Automatic App Invocation. These attacks highlight both digital and physical consequences, including spamming, phishing, disinformation campaigns, data exfiltration, unapproved user video streaming, and control of home automation devices. We reveal Promptware’s potential for on-device lateral movement, escaping the boundaries of the LLM-powered application, to trigger malicious actions using a device’s applications. Our TARA reveals that 73% of the analyzed threats pose High-Critical risk to end users. We discuss mitigations and reassess the risk (in response to deployed mitigations) and show that the risk could be reduced significantly to Very Low-Medium. We disclosed our findings to Google, which deployed dedicated mitigations.

Source: [2508.12175] Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous

AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work

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Leaders of many organizations are urging their teams to adopt agentic AI to improve efficiency, but are finding it hard to achieve any benefit. Managers attempting to add AI agents to existing human teams may find that bots fail to faithfully follow their instructions, return pointless or obvious results or burn precious time and resources spinning on tasks that older, simpler systems could have accomplished just as well.

The technical innovators getting the most out of AI are finding that the technology can be remarkably human in its behavior. And the more groups of AI agents are given tasks that require cooperation and collaboration, the more those human-like dynamics emerge.

Our research suggests that, because of how directly they seem to apply to hybrid teams of human and digital workers, the most effective leaders in the coming years may still be those who excel at understanding the timeworn principles of human management.

We have spent years studying the risks and opportunities for organizations adopting AI. Our 2025 book, Rewiring Democracy, examines lessons from AI adoption in government institutions and civil society worldwide. In it, we identify where the technology has made the biggest impact and where it fails to make a difference. Today, we see many of the organizations we’ve studied taking another shot at AI adoption—this time, with agentic tools. While generative AI generates, agentic AI acts and achieves goals such as automating supply chain processes, making data-driven investment decisions or managing complex project workflows. The cutting edge of AI development research is starting to reveal what works best in this new paradigm.

[…]

Key Takeaways

Managers of hybrid teams can apply these ideas to design their own complex systems of human and digital workers:

DELEGATE.

Analyze the tasks in your workflows so that you can design a division of labour that plays to the strength of each of your resources. Entrust your most experienced humans with the roles that require context and judgment and entrust AI models with the tasks that need to be done quickly or benefit from extreme parallelization.

If you’re building a hybrid customer service organization, let AIs handle tasks like eliciting pertinent information from customers and suggesting common solutions. But always escalate to human representatives to resolve unique situations and offer accommodations, especially when doing so can carry legal obligations and financial ramifications. To help them work together well, task the AI agents with preparing concise briefs compiling the case history and potential resolutions to help humans jump into the conversation.

ITERATE.

AIs will likely underperform your top human team members when it comes to solving novel problems in the fields in which they are expert. But AI agents’ speed and parallelization still make them valuable partners. Look for ways to augment human-led explorations of new territory with agentic AI scouting teams that can explore many paths for them in advance.

Hybrid software development teams will especially benefit from this strategy. Agentic coding AI systems are capable of building apps, autonomously making improvements to and bug-fixing their code to meet a spec. But without humans in the loop, they can fall into rabbit holes. Examples abound of AI-generated code that might appear to satisfy specified requirements, but diverges from products that meet organizational requirements for security, integration or user experiences that humans would truly desire. Take advantage of the fast iteration of AI programmers to test different solutions, but make sure your human team is checking its work and redirecting the AI when needed.

SHARE.

Make sure each of your hybrid team’s outputs are accessible to each other so that they can benefit from each others’ work products. Make sure workers doing hand-offs write down clear instructions with enough context that either a human colleague or AI model could follow. Anthropic found that AI teams benefited from clearly communicating their work to each other, and the same will be true of communication between humans and AI in hybrid teams.

MEASURE AND IMPROVE.

Organizations should always strive to grow the capabilities of their human team members over time. Assume that the capabilities and behaviors of your AI team members will change over time, too, but at a much faster rate. So will the ways the humans and AIs interact together. Make sure to understand how they are performing individually and together at the task level, and plan to experiment with the roles you ask AI workers to take on as the technology evolves.

An important example of this comes from medical imaging. Harvard Medical School researchers have found that hybrid AI-physician teams have wildly varying performance as diagnosticians. The problem wasn’t necessarily that the AI has poor or inconsistent performance; what mattered was the interaction between person and machine. Different doctors’ diagnostic performance benefited—or suffered—at different levels when they used AI tools. Being able to measure and optimize those interactions, perhaps at the individual level, will be critical to hybrid organizations.

In Closing

We are in a phase of AI technology where the best performance is going to come from mixed teams of humans and AIs working together. Managing those teams is not going to be the same as we’ve grown used to, but the hard-won lessons of decades past still have a lot to offer.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Rotman Management Magazine.

Source: AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work – Schneier on Security

phonon laser created for tiny surface wave acoustic sensors (SAWS)

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Engineers have taken a major step toward producing the smallest earthquakes ever created, shrinking seismic-style vibrations down to the scale of a microchip.

The breakthrough centers on a device called a surface acoustic wave phonon laser. The technology could eventually enable more advanced chips for smartphones and other wireless electronics, helping make them smaller, faster, and more energy efficient.

The research was led by Matt Eichenfield, an incoming faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, along with scientists from the University of Arizona and Sandia National Laboratories. Their findings were published Jan. 14 in the journal Nature.

What Are Surface Acoustic Waves?

The new device relies on surface acoustic waves, commonly known as SAWs. These waves behave somewhat like sound waves, but instead of traveling through the air or deep inside a material, they move only along its surface.

[…]

“SAWs devices are critical to the many of the world’s most important technologies,” said Eichenfield, senior author of the new study and Gustafson Endowed Chair in Quantum Engineering at CU Boulder. “They’re in all modern cell phones, key fobs, garage door openers, most GPS receivers, many radar systems and more.”

[…]

Most existing SAW systems require two separate chips and an external power source. The new design combines everything into a single chip and could operate using just a battery while reaching much higher frequencies

[…]

the team built a bar-shaped device about half a millimeter long.

A Stack of Specialized Materials

The device consists of several layered materials. At its base is silicon, the same material used in most computer chips. Above that sits a thin layer of lithium niobate, a piezoelectric material. When lithium niobate vibrates, it produces oscillating electric fields, and those electric fields can also trigger vibrations.

The final layer is an extremely thin sheet of indium gallium arsenide. This material has unusual electronic properties and can accelerate electrons to very high speeds even under weak electric fields.

Together, these layers allow vibrations traveling along the lithium niobate surface to interact directly with fast-moving electrons in the indium gallium arsenide.

Making Waves Build Like a Laser

The researchers describe the device as working similarly to a wave pool.

When electric current flows through the indium gallium arsenide, surface waves form in the lithium niobate layer. These waves travel forward, strike a reflector, and then move backward, much like light reflecting between mirrors in a laser. Each forward pass strengthens the wave, while each backward pass weakens it.

“It loses almost 99% of its power when it’s moving backward, so we designed it to get a substantial amount of gain moving forward to beat that,” Wendt said.

After repeated passes, the vibrations grow strong enough that a portion escapes from one side of the device, similar to how laser light eventually exits its cavity.

Faster Waves, Smaller Devices

Using this approach, the team generated surface acoustic waves vibrating at about 1 gigahertz, meaning billions of oscillations per second. The researchers believe the same design could be pushed into tens or even hundreds of gigahertz.

Traditional SAW devices typically max out at around 4 gigahertz, making the new system far faster.

[…]

Source: Engineers just created a “phonon laser” that could shrink your next smartphone | ScienceDaily

To find out what SAWS are used for and how they work, check out: Trends and Applications of Surface and Bulk Acoustic Wave Devices: A Review

A lot of the applications are in MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) chips and signal filtering.

It seems to me that the biggest innovation must be that they reduced the spacial periodicity, allowing for a much higher frequency (see formula 1 in the above link)

[…] acoustic devices, especially FBARs, represent a broad market as RF filters, compared with conventional electromagnetic devices, thanks to much slower propagation velocity allowing for shorter wavelength and, thus, easy miniaturization and integration into circuits. We then presented another important field of applications of SAW and BAW/FBARs, namely as sensors and actuators. A section was dedicated for their application as physical sensors. Examples of their use for magnetic field, pressure, and temperature monitoring and detection were illustrated. In addition, their application in other fields such as mechanical (in automotive) and orientation measurements were presented. Some examples of SAW-based motors and actuators were also introduced. We then focused on SAW/BAW-based biochemical sensors, which are receiving increasing attention in the research field. Indeed, because of their performances, among them a high sensitivity, a versatile feature that makes them easily functionalized for selectivity, and low cost, they are widely used for gas, liquid, bio-sensing, etc. The sensing applications are still under development, with a rising demand especially for biosensors, since health concerns are more than ever a major topic. As of now, SAW and FBAR devices show a very good capacity for sensing DNA, RNA, proteins, and a wide variety of other bio-compounds. With the COVID-19 pandemic, several biosensors based on SAW and FBAR devices are also reported for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus and application for living-matter monitoring is under development, which could be helpful for fast screening of therapeutic nanodrugs, for example. Lastly, we presented current trends related to quantum acoustics, which studies the behavior of phonons and their interactions, as opportunities for new schemes to control quantum information and explore atomic physics beyond photonic systems[…]

Partly AI-generated folk-pop hit barred from Sweden’s official charts

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 A hit song has been excluded from Sweden’s official chart after it emerged the “artist” behind it was an AI creation.

I Know, You’re Not Mine – or Jag Vet, Du Är Inte Min in Swedish – by a singer called Jacub has been a streaming success in Sweden, topping the Spotify rankings.

However, the Swedish music trade body has excluded the song from the official chart after learning it was AI-generated.

Spotify Wrapped is taking over our feeds, but you don’t have outsource your relationship with music to AI | Liz Pelly
Read more

“Jacub’s track has been excluded from Sweden’s official chart, Sverigetopplistan, which is compiled by IFPI Sweden. While the song appears on Spotify’s own charts, it does not qualify for inclusion on the official chart under the current rules,” said an IFPI Sweden spokesperson.

Ludvig Werber, IFPI Sweden’s chief executive, said: “Our rule is that if it is a song that is mainly AI-generated, it does not have the right to be on the top list.”

[…]

IFPI Sweden acted after an investigative journalist, Emanuel Karlsten, revealed the song was registered to a Danish music publisher called Stellar and that two of the credited rights holders worked in the company’s AI department.

“What emerges is a picture of a music publisher that wants to experiment with new music and new kinds of artists. Who likes to push the limits of the audience’s tolerance threshold for artificial music and artificial artists,” wrote Karlsten.

In a statement, Stellar said: “The artist Jacub’s voice and parts of the music are generated with the help of AI as a tool in our creative process.”

[…]

Spotify does not require music to be labelled as AI-generated, but has been cracking down on AI-made spam tracks as every play more than 30 seconds long generates a royalty for the scammer behind it – and dilutes payments to legitimate artists.

Jacub is not the first AI artist to score a hit with audiences. A “band” called the Velvet Sundown amassed more than 1m streams on Spotify last year before it emerged the group was AI-generated, including its promotional images and backstory as well as the music. Its most popular song has now accumulated 4m streams on the platform.

[…]

Source: Partly AI-generated folk-pop hit barred from Sweden’s official charts | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

In other news, they have banned the use of synthesisers, DJs and autotune from the IFPI charts as well. Oh no, they didn’t. It will just take them a few decades to catch up again.

What Happened After Security Researchers Found 60 Flock Cameras Livestreaming to the Internet

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A couple months ago, YouTuber Benn Jordan “found vulnerabilities in some of Flock’s license plate reader cameras,” reports 404 Media’s Jason Koebler. “He reached out to me to tell me he had learned that some of Flock’s Condor cameras were left live-streaming to the open internet.”

This led to a remarkable article where Koebler confirmed the breach by visiting a Flock surveillance camera mounted on a California traffic signal. (“On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me — without any password or login — to the open internet… Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.”) Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics. Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces… The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist Benn Jordan and was shared with security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines, who recently found numerous vulnerabilities in several other models of Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras.
Jordan appeared this week as a guest on Koebler’s own YouTube channel, while Jordan released a video of his own about the experience. titled “We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds.” (Thanks to Slashdot reader beadon for sharing the link.) But together Jordan and 404 Media also created another video three weeks ago titled “The Flock Camera Leak is Like Netflix for Stalkers” which includes footage he says was “completely accessible at the time Flock Safety was telling cities that the devices are secure after they’re deployed.”

The video decries cities “too lazy to conduct their own security audit or research the efficacy versus risk,” but also calls weak security “an industry-wide problem.” Jordan explains in the video how he “very easily found the administration interfaces for dozens of Flock safety cameras…” — but also what happened next: None of the data or video footage was encrypted. There was no username or password required. These were all completely public-facing, for the world to see…. Making any modification to the cameras is illegal, so I didn’t do this. But I had the ability to delete any of the video footage or evidence by simply pressing a button. I could see the paths where all of the evidence files were located on the file system…

During and after the process of conducting that research and making that video, I was visited by the police and had what I believed to be private investigators outside my home photographing me and my property and bothering my neighbors. John Gaines or GainSec, the brains behind most of this research, lost employment within 48 hours of the video being released. And the sad reality is that I don’t view these things as consequences or punishment for researching security vulnerabilities. I view these as consequences and punishment for doing it ethically and transparently.

I’ve been contacted by people on or communicating with civic councils who found my videos concerning, and they shared Flock Safety’s response with me. The company claimed that the devices in my video did not reflect the security standards of the ones being publicly deployed. The CEO even posted on LinkedIn and boasted about Flock Safety’s security policies. So, I formally and publicly offered to personally fund security research into Flock Safety’s deployed ecosystem. But the law prevents me from touching their live devices. So, all I needed was their permission so I wouldn’t get arrested. And I was even willing to let them supervise this research.

I got no response.
So instead, he read Flock’s official response to a security/surveillance industry research group — while standing in front of one of their security cameras, streaming his reading to the public internet.

“Might as well. It’s my tax dollars that paid for it.”

” ‘Flock is committed to continuously improving security…'”

Source: What Happened After Security Researchers Found 60 Flock Cameras Livestreaming to the Internet | Slashdot

For more on why Flock cameras are problematic, read here

CD Project Takes down VR Mod for Cyberpunk – because it was paid

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Yes, the TOS don’t allow commercial mods, which has plusses and minusses. So, yes, technically CD Project Red is in the right. However, it takes a lot of work and time to do some of these mods and if you want to get paid for it that is your right. Just as much as it is your right to not buy it if you don’t like it. Whatever.

There are loads of paid external services that run on top of Amazon, Paypal, Ebay, Discord, most AI products are built on top of OpenAI, etc. It’s a valid (if risky, due to the dependency) way to create value for people.

It seems to me that the TOS are overextended though. How can you legally determine what someone will do with a product they bought? US law is pretty bizarre in that respect, just as companies can get away with not allowing reverse engineering and lock people into buying hugely overpriced repairs and replacement parts only from them. Maybe look at China to see how this kind of law kills innovation and look at monopolies to see how this drives costs up and removes choice for consumers.

[…] Now that the dust has settled, I’m even more sorry to announce that we are leaving behind an adventure that so many of you deeply loved and enjoyed. CD PROJEKT S.A. decided that they would follow in Take-Two Interactive Software’s steps and issued a DMCA notice against me for the removal of the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod.

At least they were a little more open about it, and I could get a reply both from their legal department and from the VP of business development. But in the end it amounted to the same iron-clad corpo logic: every little action that a company takes is in the name of money, but everything that modders do must be absolutely for free.

As usual they stretch the concept of “derivative work” until it’s paper-thin, as though a system that allows visualizing 40+ games in fully immersive 3D VR was somehow built making use of their intellectual property. And as usual they give absolutely zero f***s about how playing their game in VR made people happy, and they cannot just be grateful about the extra copies of the title they sold because of that—without ever having to pour money into producing an official conversion (no, they’re not planning to release their own VR port, in case you were wondering). […]

Source: Another one bites the dust | Patreon

Setapp Mobile shuts down alternative iOS app marketplace due to Apple’s crazy way of interpreting EU law

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Setapp Mobile, MacPaw’s ambitious alternative iOS app store for European Union users, will close its doors in February after just over a year of operation, the service said Thursday.

On a support page, MacPaw cited Apple’s “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model” as the reason.

Setapp Mobile shuts down, blaming Apple’s complex EU marketplace terms

The Ukraine-based developer’s message appeared to suggest the widely criticized marketplace model resulting from the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is not financially sustainable under current conditions. The shutdown affects only the iOS version of Setapp in the EU. The company’s established Mac subscription service will continue operating normally.

Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024 as an early responder to EU legislation forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores within EU borders. The service shuts down February 16, 2026. It marks an early setback for third-party app distribution on iOS in the EU.

What Setapp Mobile offered, and what users should do

Setapp Mobile provided EU-based iPhone users with a unique value proposition. They could access more than 50 premium iOS apps through a single monthly subscription, with no in-app purchases or advertisements. The service offered a simplified alternative to traditional app purchasing, bundling multiple paid applications into one payment.

[…]

Setapp Mobile’s closure highlights the hurdles facing alternative app marketplaces in the EU, despite the Digital Markets Act requiring Apple to permit third-party distribution channels. The most prominent challenge appears to be Apple’s Core Technology Fee and associated business terms, which critics argue make it difficult for competing stores to achieve profitability.

Epic Games, which operates the most well-known alternative marketplace on iOS, absorbs the fees that EU developers would otherwise pay when distributing through the Epic Games Store. However, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has publicly stated this approach is “not financially viable” long-term.

Sweeney characterized Apple’s fee structure as “ruinous for any hopes of a competing store getting a foothold.” And that prediction seems to hold true with Setapp Mobile’s closure.

[…]

Source: Setapp Mobile shuts down EU iOS app marketplace | Cult of Mac

For more on how Apple is like a tiny baby screaming it’s head off in the EU about wanting to stay a monopoly, read this and the links in the bottom

Turns Out Games Workshop Are Luddites, Bans Staff From Using AI in Its Content or Designs

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Warhammer maker Games Workshop has banned the use of AI in its content production and its design process, insisting that none of its senior managers are currently excited about the technology.

Delivering the UK company’s impressive financial results, CEO Kevin Rountree addressed the issue of AI and how Games Workshop is handling it. He said GW staff are barred from using it to actually produce anything, but admitted a “few” senior managers are experimenting with it.

Rountree said AI was “a very broad topic and to be honest I’m not an expert on it,” then went on to lay down the company line:

“We do have a few senior managers that are [experts on AI]: none are that excited about it yet. We have agreed an internal policy to guide us all, which is currently very cautious e.g. we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes or its unauthorised use outside of GW including in any of our competitions. We also have to monitor and protect ourselves from a data compliance, security and governance perspective, the AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not.

“We are allowing those few senior managers to continue to be inquisitive about the technology. We have also agreed we will be maintaining a strong commitment to protect our intellectual property and respect our human creators. In the period reported, we continued to invest in our Warhammer Studio — hiring more creatives in multiple disciplines from concepting and art to writing and sculpting. Talented and passionate individuals that make Warhammer the rich, evocative IP that our hobbyists and we all love.”

[…]

Source: Warhammer Maker Games Workshop Bans Its Staff From Using AI in Its Content or Designs, Says None of Its Senior Managers Are Currently Excited About the Tech – IGN

A bit sad that they have to go and ban it. You wonder if they are able to use a computer at all, or do they give hand painted stuff to the new fangled thing they call a printers?

Windows App breaks logins with first 2026 security patch

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Microsoft has kicked off 2026 with another faulty Windows update. This time, it is connection and authentication failures in Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 related to the Windows App.

The January 2026 security update, released on January 13, is the culprit. According to Microsoft, the update can result in credential prompt failures “during Remote Desktop connections using the Windows App on Windows client devices, impacting Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365.”

The upshot is that connecting to Windows 365 or Azure Virtual Desktop from the Windows App could be borked due to credential problems. Microsoft posted: “Investigation and debugging are ongoing, with coordination between Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows Update teams.”

The problem is widespread and appears to affect every supported version of Windows, from Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2016, right up to Windows 11 25H2. Windows Servers 2019 to 2025 are also affected.

Other than a swift uninstall of the update (which means losing important security fixes), Microsoft’s advice is to use the Remote Desktop Client to connect to Azure Virtual Desktop, or to use the Windows App web client.

Neither is an ideal solution. Microsoft said: “We are actively working on a resolution and plan to release an out-of-band (OOB) update in the coming days. Additional details will be shared as soon as they become available.”

Of the suggestion to use the Remote Desktop Client, one user wrote: “Thanks Microsoft, glad we spent ages migrating everyone over to Windows App.”

The Windows App is Microsoft’s one-stop shop for everything Windows launched via a rebranding exercise in 2024. According to Microsoft at the time, it “serves as your secure gateway to connect to Windows across Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, Remote Desktop, Remote Desktop Services, Microsoft Dev Box, and more.” Until, of course, it doesn’t.

Another user reported: “It throws an ‘Unable to Authenticate’ error every time you try to click the ‘Connect’ button from Windows App. It instantly fails with the ‘Unable to Authenticate’ error.”

[…]

Source: Windows App breaks logins with first 2026 security patch • The Register

My art in a gallery show was destroyed over ai use by a guy he ATE and chewed up and spit out my photos!

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r/aiwars - My art in a gallery show was destroyed over ai use by a guy he ATE and chewed up and spit out my photos!

my friend was there took pics of it as it was happening police took the guy away in handcuffs. Hazmat had to be called to sanitize the area. WTF! stay safe friends antis are unhinged and becoming concerning/unlawful.

Photos 5&6 are ai from photos with their face burred out. :/ Im probly pressing charges and filing a nco

I shall repair the piece, alot actually went into this install formatting, cropping and the hand cutting/ hanging etc. The subject matter was very personal.

Its NOT ok to destroy artwork you dont agree with!!

Source: My art in a gallery show was destroyed over ai use by a guy he ATE and chewed up and spit out my photos! | Reddit

What kind of world are we living in that someone thinks that this is OK?! IMHO it’s quite performative art itself and I hope this guy manages to ride the wave of fame this gives him!

China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, likely just to reserve the orbital area and stop others launching there – space squatting

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China has applied to launch nearly 200,000 satellites into Earth orbit, but the move may be an attempt at merely reserving orbital space rather than a genuine effort to build the largest mega-constellation in existence.

On December 29, the newly formed Institute of Radio Spectrum Utilisation and Technological Innovation in China filed proposals for two satellite constellations with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations body that allocates spectrum in space.

The constellations, which are called CTC-1 and CTC-2 and backed by the Chinese government, would each contain 96,714 satellites spread over an eye-watering 3660 orbits. For comparison, there are 14,300 active satellites in orbit today, about 9400 of which are SpaceX Starlink satellites operating in a handful of orbits, which beam internet connections to the ground. SpaceX has filed to launch 42,000 satellites with the ITU.

Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation, a US non-profit, says the Chinese filing might be a land grab of sorts. “It is possible they’re just trying to create some space for later on,” she says. “It is also possible that maybe they’re planning on something that big.”

Staking this claim with the ITU means that other satellite operators filing to launch into the same orbits must demonstrate to the ITU that they will not interfere with their operations. Under ITU rules, at least one satellite must be launched seven years after China’s initial filing, with another seven years then allowed to finish launching all the proposed satellites.

“If you file ahead of someone else, if you meet your deadlines, those other operators should not interfere with you,” says Tim Farrar, a satellite communications consultant in the US, adding that China’s large filing for so many different orbits might signal some uncertainty in the structure of this constellation. “It gives them freedom of choice of what they want to do,” he says. “There’s very little penalty to doing it this way.”

But even if the application is genuine, achieving it seems to be almost impossible. China launched 92 rockets in 2025, a record for the nation, but would need to launch more than 500 satellites a week to deploy 200,000 in seven years, requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of launches a year.

This wouldn’t be the first attempt at a land grab in space. In 2021, Rwanda filed for a constellation of 327,000 satellites with the ITU into 27 orbits. However, the filing hasn’t hampered the activity of Starlink and other operators. “People have not really changed what they’re doing,” says Farrar. “These Rwandan satellites don’t seem likely to be built in any significant quantity.”

But China’s application does highlight the growing competition in the mega-constellation field, particularly for space internet companies that aim to capture a potential market of tens or hundreds of millions of people and control the world’s flow of information. Currently, everyone is playing catch-up to compete with SpaceX. Amazon’s Project Leo in the US, formerly called Project Kuiper, has launched about 200 satellites of a planned 3236, while two major state-backed Chinese constellations called Qianfan and Guowang have launched a few hundred out of thousands of planned satellites.

“Fifteen years ago, the idea of having 1000 satellites in one constellation was crazy,” says Samson. “Now here we are with 9000-plus with Starlink.”

Source: China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, but what are they for? | New Scientist

Signal Founder Creates Truly Private GPT: Confer

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When you use an AI service, you’re handing over your thoughts in plaintext. The operator stores them, trains on them, and–inevitably–will monetize them. You get a response; they get everything.

Confer works differently. In the previous post, we described how Confer encrypts your chat history with keys that never leave your devices. The remaining piece to consider is inference—the moment your prompt reaches an LLM and a response comes back.

Traditionally, end-to-end encryption works when the endpoints are devices under the control of a conversation’s participants. However, AI inference requires a server with GPUs to be an endpoint in the conversation. Someone has to run that server, but we want to prevent the people who are running it (us) from seeing prompts or the responses.

Confidential computing

This is the domain of confidential computing. Confidential computing uses hardware-enforced isolation to run code in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The host machine provides CPU, memory, and power, but cannot access the TEE’s memory or execution state.

LLMs are fundamentally stateless—input in, output out—which makes them ideal for this environment. For Confer, we run inference inside a confidential VM. Your prompts are encrypted from your device directly into the TEE using Noise Pipes, processed there, and responses are encrypted back. The host never sees plaintext.

But this raises an obvious concern: even if we have encrypted pipes in and out of an encrypted environment, it really matters what is running inside that environment. The client needs assurance that the code running is actually doing what it claims.

[…]

Source: Private inference | Confer Blog

Passports, bank details compromised in Eurail / Interrail data breach

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Eurail has confirmed customer information was stolen in a data breach, according to notification emails sent out this week.

The European travel company, also known as Interrail to EU residents, initially posted the news on January 10, but affected customers, the number of whom was not disclosed, began receiving emails on January 13.

While the company’s investigation is ongoing, it revealed the data potentially affected includes:

  • First and last names
  • Dates of birth
  • Genders
  • Email addresses
  • Home addresses
  • Telephone numbers
  • Passport numbers
  • Passport issuing country
  • Passport expiration date

Customers who purchased a travel pass directly from Eurail/Interrail did not have a visual copy of their passports stored on company systems.

However, the same is not true for those who received a pass through the DiscoverEU program, an Erasmus-funded initiative that invites travelers to explore the EU by rail.

The European Commission published a separate notice about the Eurail breach, saying that in addition to the data specified in the company’s email, DiscoverEU travelers may also have photocopies of their IDs, bank account reference numbers, and health data compromised.

[…]

Source: Passports, bank details compromised in Eurail data breach • The Register

Europe is Rediscovering the Virtues of Cash

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After spending years pushing digital payments to combat tax evasion and money laundering, European Union ministers decided in December to ban businesses from refusing cash. The reversal comes as 12% of European businesses flatly refused cash in 2024, up from 4% three years earlier.

Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions in 2016 to just 52% in 2024. Sweden leads the digital shift where 90% of purchases now happen digitally and cash represents under 1% of GDP compared to 22% in Japan.

The policy change stems from concerns about financial inclusion for elderly and poor populations who struggle with digital systems. Resilience worries also drove the decision after Spaniards facing nationwide power cuts last spring found themselves unable to buy food. European officials worry about dependence on American payment giants Visa and MasterCard. The EU now recommends citizens store enough cash to survive a week without electricity or internet access.

Source: Europe is Rediscovering the Virtues of Cash | Slashdot

Also, when under digital attack it’s useful to be able to get at your money. This is not theoretical, bank attacks by the Russians regularly take down Finnish payment methods.

Google introduces personalised shopping ads to AI tools as all GPT makers push shopping through their chatbots

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The enshittification of GPT didn’t take long, did it?
Google is introducing new personalised advertising into its AI shopping tools, as it seeks to make money from the hundreds of millions of people who use its chatbot for free and gain market share from rival OpenAI.
Advertisers will be able to present exclusive offers to shoppers who are preparing to buy an item through Google’s AI mode, which is powered by its Gemini model, the Alphabet-owned tech giant announced on Sunday.
[…]
It also represents a move away from the tech giant’s traditional ‘sponsored’ ad placements in search results, which generate tens of billions of dollars for the company but has come under threat by the rise of AI chatbots.
[…]
“It essentially gives retailers the flexibility to deliver value to people shopping in AI mode, whether that’s a lower price, a special bundle or free shipping. In the moment, it matters most . . . to just close the sale,”
[…]
AI groups, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, have rushed to launch ecommerce features in their chatbots over the past year as they hunt for new ways to generate revenue from their popular but costly AI products.
OpenAI has been rolling out its checkout feature, first reported by the FT, which sees the AI start-up take a cut of the sales made on ChatGPT.
Microsoft launched its Copilot Checkout on Thursday, which also provides users with recommendations and checkout in its AI chats. The group said shopping through Copilot led to 53 per cent more purchases within 30 minutes of interaction compared to those without.
Google also introduced a “universal commerce protocol”, which it said would enable shopping agents to research products and make purchases without leaving its platform. The protocol was developed with large retailers and marketplaces including Walmart, Target and Shopify.
[…]
Google’s new ads feature will make use of the contextual information from peoples’ conversation with the chatbot in AI mode, and trigger offers on relevant products that user have clicked on.
Retailers can set up offers they want to be available, with Google then using AI to determine when it is best to display the deal to a potential customer.
Srinivasan said Google was “initially focusing on discounts for the pilot and will expand to support the creation of offers with other attributes that help shoppers prioritise value over price alone, such as bundles and free shipping”.
[…]

Source: Google introduces personalised shopping ads to AI tools

EU seeks feedback on Open Digital Ecosystems

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It’s important you give your feedback on this:

The European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy will set out:

  • a strategic approach to the open source sector in the EU that addresses the importance of open source as a crucial contribution to EU technological sovereignty, security and competitiveness
  • a strategic and operational framework to strengthen the use, development and reuse of open digital assets within the Commission, building on the results achieved under the 2020-2023 Commission Open Source Software Strategy.

Source: Call for evidence: European Open Digital Ecosystems

The US muscled the EU into adopting Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive, preventing reverse engineering in return for free trade. By implementing tariffs, the US broke that agreement. Theres no reason not to delete Article 6 of the EUCD, and all the other laws that prevent European companies from jailbreaking iPhones and making their own App Stores (minus Apples 30% commission), as well as ad-blockers for Facebook and Instagrams apps (which would zero out EU revenue for Meta), and, of course, jailbreaking tools for Xboxes, Teslas, and every make and model of every American car, so European companies could offer service, parts, apps, and add-ons for them. Video games need to be able to be run after official support shuts down and servers close down. We need to get out from under the high tech lock-in scams, we need to get rid of e-waste. We need to get back to ownership of the products we buy. This is an important part of digital sovereignity and in an uncertain world with unreliable partners, the importance of being able to follow EU values needs to be underscored. FOSS and allowing FOSS to develop is an important lynchpin of this.

Plug Into USB, Read Hostname And IP Address | Hackaday

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Ever wanted to just plug something in and conveniently read the hostname and IP addresses of a headless board like a Raspberry Pi? Chances are, a free USB port is more accessible than digging up a monitor and keyboard, and that’s where [C4KEW4LK]’s rpi_usb_ip_display comes in. Plug it into a free USB port, and a few moments later, read the built-in display. Handy!

The device is an RP2350 board and a 1.47″ Waveshare LCD, with a simple 3D-printed enclosure. It displays hostname, WiFi interface, Ethernet interface, and whatever others it can identify. There isn’t even a button to push; just plug it in and let it run.

Here’s how it works: once plugged in, the board identifies itself as a USB keyboard and a USB serial port. Then it launches a terminal with Ctrl-Alt-T, and from there it types and runs commands to do the following:

  1. Find the serial port that the RP2350 board just created.
  2. Get the parsed outputs of hostname, ip -o -4 addr show dev wlan0, ip -o -4 addr show dev eth0, and ip -o -4 addr show to gather up data on active interfaces.
  3. Send that information out the serial port to the RP2350 board.
  4. Display the information on the LCD.
  5. Update periodically.

The only catch is that the host system must be able to respond to launching a new terminal with Ctrl-Alt-T, which typically means the host must have someone logged in.

It’s a pretty nifty little tool, and its operation might remind you, in concept, of how BadUSB attacks happen: a piece of hardware, once plugged into a host, identifies itself to the host as something other than what it appears to be. Then it proceeds to input and execute actions. But in this case, it’s not at all malicious, just convenient and awfully cute.

Source: Plug Into USB, Read Hostname And IP Address | Hackaday

A Starlink satellite just exploded and left ‘trackable’ debris

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SpaceX said it experienced an anomaly with one if its Starlink satellites that was likely caused by a small explosion. “The anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km [2.5 miles] and the release of a small number of trackable low relatively velocity objects,” Starlink wrote in a post on X. Orbital tracking company LeoLabs assessed that the issue was caused by an “internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.”

SpaceX said it’s working with NASA and the US Space Force to track the remains of the object. “The satellite is largely intact, tumbling and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks,” the company said. It’s trajectory is well below the International Space Station (ISS) so it poses no risk to the lab or its crew. Starlink has yet to say how many pieces it’s tracking.

The incident happened just days after a Starlink satellite narrowly avoided a collision with a rival Chinese satellite from CAS Space last week. Starlink vice president Michael Nicholls said that the incident happened due to a lack of coordination between the two companies. “When satellite operators do not share emphemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space,” he wrote on X.

Starlink’s constellation consists of almost 9,300 active satellites making up around 65 percent of all orbiting spacecraft, not including defunct units. That number grew by more than 3,000 this year alone, launched aboard 121 separate SpaceX missions — around one every three days.

Source: A Starlink satellite just exploded and left ‘trackable’ debris

US bans new foreign-made drones and components

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The Federal Communications Commission has added foreign-made drones and their critical components to the agency’s “Covered List,” making them prohibited to import into the US. In a public notice published by the FCC, it said several national security agencies have determined that umanned aircraft systems (UAS) and their critical components produced in foreign countries pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States.

“UAS and UAS critical components must be produced in the United States,” the agency said. “UAS are inherently dual-use: they are both commercial platforms and potentially military or paramilitary sensors and weapons. UAS and UAS critical components, including data transmission devices, communications systems, flight controllers, ground control stations, controllers, navigation systems, batteries, smart batteries, and motors produced in a foreign country could enable persistent surveillance, data exfiltration, and destructive operations over U.S. territory, including over World Cup and Olympic venues and other mass gathering events.”

[…]

Source: US bans new foreign-made drones and components

So how are they going to reverse engineer all the great drones out there? None of them are being made in the US.