It was inevitable, really. In the early days of the internet, Tucows was known as a reliable place to find and download new software. Today, however, most people are happy to use a modern App Store — Microsoft and Apple both run their own — or navigate to developer websites directly. And if you’re looking for inspiration, there’s always Product Hunt. Tucows has decided, therefore, to finally shut down Tucows Downloads. “Tucows Downloads is old,” Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows said. “Old sites are a maintenance challenge and therefore a risk.“
It’s a decision that the team has been mulling for some time. “We talked about shutting the site down before,” Noss explained. But the site’s history, combined with a sense of sentimentality, gave them pause. In 2016, the company decided to treat Tucows Downloads as a public service, rather than a legacy moneymaker. It stripped the site of ads, admitting that the site had become “less relevant when looking at the balance sheet” anyway. Now, though, the company is ready to move on. It has enough work as a domain registrar, domain name seller and the company behind Ting, an internet service provider in the US.
You probably don’t need someone to tell you that magnets and life-saving medical devices don’t mix, but Apple wants to make that patently clear. MacRumors has learned that Apple recently updated a support document to warn against keeping the iPhone 12 and MagSafe accessories too close to pacemakers, defibrillators and other implants that might respond to magnets and radios. You should keep them at least six inches away in regular use, or at least a foot away if the iPhone is wirelessly charging.
The company maintained that the extra number of magnets shouldn’t increase the risks compare to past iPhone models. Still, the notice comes days after doctors reported that the new phones could interfere with implants. In a test, they found that an iPhone 12 kicked a defibrillator implant into a suspended state when it got near.
There are many times where someone shares data as an image, whether intentionally due to software constraints (ie Twitter) or as a result of not understanding the implications (image inside a PDF or in a Word Doc). xkcd.com jokingly refers to this as .norm or as the Normal File Format. While it’s far from ideal or a real file format, it’s all too common to see data as images in the “wild”. I’ll be using some examples from Twitter images and extracting the raw data from these. There are multiple levels of difficulty, namely that screenshots on Twitter are not uniform, often of relatively low quality (ie DPI), and contain additional “decoration” like colors or grid-lines. We’ll do our best to make it work!
This application provides display and control of Android devices connected on USB (or over TCP/IP). It does not require any root access. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS.
A London ad agency that counts Atlantic Records, Suzuki, and Penguin Random House among its clients has had its files dumped online by a ransomware gang, The Register can reveal.
The7stars, based in London’s West End, filed [PDF] revenues of £379.36m up from £326m, gross billing of £426m and net profit of £2.1m for the year ended 31 March 2020.
In the same accounts filed with UK register Companies House, it boasted of its position as the “largest independently owned media agency in the UK by a significant factor”, making it a juicy target for the Clop ransomware extortionists.
The attack appears to have happened after 15 December, when The7stars’ annual return was prepared for filing with Companies House. While the document talks in length about its healthy financial performance, it mentions nothing about cyber risks or attacks.
Screenshots published on the Clop gang’s Tor website show scans of passports, invoices, what appears to be a photo from a staff party and, ironically, a “data protection agreement.”
Publication of stolen files on a ransomware crew’s website is typically an indicator that a ransom demand has been rebuffed, though more aggressive tactics seen in the last year include pre-emptive leaking of stolen data as an apparent incentive for marks to pay up quickly.
The agency’s client list includes Led Zeppelin’s former label Atlantic Records, Japanese motorbike maker Suzuki, and British train operating companies including Great Western Railway, among others. It is very unlikely that those companies will have been directly affected, though it appears Clop wants to give the impression that it has stolen commercially sensitive documents relating to The7stars’ clients.
Struggling retailer GameStop’s stock curiously hit an all time high today. But it’s not because Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo suddenly decided to stop selling their games digitally. And it’s not because a new set of Funko Pops has taken the internet’s imagination by storm.
No, the stock price jumped to an all-time high because some institutional investors bet on the company to fail, and a bunch of amateurs on social media decided to call their bluff and try getting rich in the process.
GameStop has struggled to reinvent itself as video games have increasingly gone digital. Now, established investors and Reddit day-traders are going to war over its future, and making the company’s stock price do ridiculous things in the process.
At the beginning of the year, GameStop’s stock was trading at just under $20 a share. In the weeks since, it’s more than tripled in value reaching just over $73 at its highest point today. “GameStop is up 174% in January to date, with its average daily rolling 10-day volatility peaking at the highest level in the nearly two decades the stock has been trading,” Bloomberg reported.
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As Ars Technicareported earlier this week, some investors spent last fall shorting GameStop’s stock, effectively speculating that it was overvalued and would implode, possibly making them a bunch of money in the process.
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Meanwhile, people hanging out on subreddits like Wallstreetbets (self-described as “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal”) and the finance influencer realm of TikTok (nicknamed FinTok) started putting their money behind GameStop’s longevity.
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“[E]ssentially, people on WallStreetBets, along with several YouTube and TikTok investors guessed as long as a year ago that if they bought shares of GameStop at a low price, the short sellers would eventually be forced to cover their short en masse, which would drive the price up,” wrote Vice in another great explainer published this week.
Shorting seemed like a sensible bet considering months of bad news and poor financial reports coming out of GameStop. But then, as Vice pointed out, Reddit finance personalities began musing about how they thought GameStop was actually a great investment opportunity. The logic was based on how many other investors were already short selling it. Just today, CNBC reported that GameStop is “the single most shorted name in the U.S. stock market.”
If someone shorts a stock, i.e. sells it and gives the original owner an IOU, and then that original owner needs the stock back, they need to “cover” the short by buying additional stock. This helps pump up the price of the stock even further, making it more valuable and potentially creating a feedback loop where it just goes up and up and up as everyone scrambles to buy back from the same limited pool of shares.
One of the GameStop short sellers is Andrew Left, called “Wall Street’s Bounty Hunter” by The New York Times because of his reputation for shorting companies he considers weak and following up by publishing research about why the company is going to fail, or, in some cases, alleging outright fraud. Yesterday, Left put out a six and a half minute video on YouTube making his case for why GameStop is doomed. WallStreetBets in turn organized what finance pundit Jim Cramer called “an ambush,” pumping up up GameStop’s stock in a coordinated campaign to “squeeze” Left, forcing him to buy tons of stock of his own to “cover” his position and in turn making their shares worth even more. Jim Cramer is an absolute goon, but if anything fits the bill of “Mad Money” it’s this.
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As with everything on the internet, what may have started as some people trying to (and succeeding at) making a bunch of quick cash has become much more, including a sort of crusade against Left as well as an unlikely source of GameStop fandom.
Earlier this month, GameStop announced Ryan Cohen would be taking a seat on its board. Cohen is formerly the CEO of the pet food website Chewy.com, but he’s already become a golden boy meme in the world of GameStop stocks. Search his name on Twitter and you’ll find people tweeting things like “Papa Cohen will take us all to mars suit up homies it will be a bumpy ride to the [rocket emoji] so u don’t fall off.”
Millions of users of the dating site MeetMindful got some unpleasant news on Sunday. ZDNet reported that the hacker group ShinyHunters, the same group who leaked millions of user records for the company that listed the “Camp Auschwitz” shirts, has dumped what appears to be data from the dating site’s user database. The leak purportedly contains the sensitive information of more than 2.28 million of the site’s registered users.
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According to ZDNet, the 1.2 gigabyte file was shared as a free download “on a publicly accessible hacking forum known for its trade in hacked databases.” It included troves of sensitive and identifiable user information, including real names, email addresses, city, state, and ZIP code details, birth dates, IP addresses, Facebook user IDs, and Facebook authentication tokens, among others. Messages, however, were not exposed.
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According to its Crunchbase profile, MeetMindful is a dating site platform for “people who are into health, well-being, and mindfulness.” It was founded in 2013, is based in Denver, Colorado, and is still active.
Here’s where it starts to get a little strange, though. The site’s listedsocialmedia channels have been inactive for months, which is interesting considering that major dating apps have been growing during the pandemic. I mean, don’t they want to encourage their users to date (safely)? From the outside, the service seems like dead zone. Who knows though, it could be all the rage inside the site itself.
The uncrewed combat aircraft will be designed to fly at high-speed alongside fighter jets, armed with missiles, surveillance and electronic warfare technology to provide a battle-winning advantage over hostile forces. Known as a ‘loyal wingman’, these aircraft will be the UK’s first uncrewed platforms able to target and shoot down enemy aircraft and survive against surface to air missiles.
In a boost for Northern Ireland’s defence industry, Spirit AeroSystems, Belfast, have been selected to lead Team MOSQUITO in the next phase of the Project. Utilising ground-breaking engineering techniques, the team will further develop the RAF’s Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Aircraft (LANCA) concept, with a full-scale vehicle flight-test programme expected by the end of 2023.
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This game changing research and development project will ensure the final aircraft design will be capable of being easily and affordably updated with the latest technology so we remain one step ahead of our adversaries. The aircraft’s flexibility will provide the optimum protection, survivability and information as it flies alongside Typhoon, F-35 Lightning, and later, Tempest as part of our future combat air system.
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ANCA originated in 2015 in Dstl to understand innovative Combat Air technologies and concepts that offer radical reductions in cost and development time and is a RAF Rapid Capabilities Office led project under the Future Combat Air System Technology Initiative (FCAS TI). The UK MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) provides the project management and is the MOD’s technical authority for LANCA and Project Mosquito on behalf of the RCO.
