India's government gave nearly early household a bank account offering app-based digital money transfers, reports the Economist. But that's just the beginning: Take a walk on Mumbai's Juhu beach and little has changed in five years — except for the QR codes adorning every food stall. Go to São Paulo in Brazil, Beijing in China, or many other cities across the emerging world and you find something similar. "Most people only want to use UPI," says Govind, a seaside-snack vendor at Juhu, referring to India's fast-growing payments network. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a platform that allows free and fast account-to-account transfers using fintech apps such as PhonePe or Google Pay. Unlike Alipay in China, it is open, so users are not locked into a single company and can take their financial history to competitors, notes Praveena Rai, the chief operating officer of the National Payments Corporation of India (NpCI), which manages the platform. And it is facilitated by QR codes or easy-to-remember virtual IDs.

UPI is drawing attention from across the world. "Look at what India has accomplished with the UPI, Aadhaar and the payments stack," Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, has marvelled. Overall, it processed over $1trn in transactions in 2022, equivalent to a third of India's GDP. It was bolstered by the government's surprise "demonetisation" of 2016, when multiple high-denomination banknotes were discontinued. UPI also benefited when covid left consumers scared of cash. It has grown from around 17% of 31bn digital transactions in 2019 to 52% of 88.4bn transactions by 2022. "India leads the world in real-time digital payments by clocking almost 40% of all such transactions," Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has boasted.

The Indian model is inspiring others. Brazil's Pix, which facilitates bank-to-bank payments with a small fee, was launched in November 2020. It now accounts for some 30% of Brazil's electronic payments (credit and debit cards take up around 20% each). Such open instant-payment systems are an alternative both to the bank/card model in the rich world and to the closed fintech one in China... The hope is that UPI and similar systems might now let some poorer countries leapfrog the West... Mr Nilekani hopes UPI will eventually be used everywhere. "If I go to Lulu in Dubai or Harrods in London, I should be able to make a payment with UPI." That would surely create new competition for the bank/card behemoths in the West.

An anonymous reader shared ths report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Asus router users around the world took to the Internet to report that their devices suddenly froze up for no apparent reason and then, upon rebooting repeatedly, stopped working every few minutes as device memory became exhausted.

Two days later, the Taiwan-based hardware maker has finally answered the calls for help. The mass outage, the company said, was the result of "an error in the configuration of our server settings file." After fixing the glitch, most users needed to only reboot their devices. In the event that didn't fix the problem, the company's support team advised users to save their current configuration settings and perform a factory reset. The company also apologized...

Asus still hasn't provided details about the configuration error. Various users have offered explanations online that appear to be correct. "On the 16th, Asus pushed a corrupted definition file for ASD, a built-in security daemon present in a wide range of their routers," one person wrote. "As routers automatically updated and fetched the corrupted definition file, they started running out of filesystem space and memory and crashing."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: When the French government formed a new anti-piracy agency called Hadopi, the mission was to significantly disrupt BitTorrent and similar peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Hadopi was a pioneer of the so-called "graduated response" scheme which consists of monitoring a file-sharer's internet activities and following up with a warning notice to deter their behavior. Any future incidents attract escalating responses including fines and internet disconnections. Between 2010 and 2020, Hadopi issued 12.7 million warning notices at a cost to French taxpayers of 82 million euros. The program's effect on overall piracy rates remains up for debate but according to French internet rights groups, Hadopi doesn't just take citizens' money. When it monitors citizens' internet activities, retains huge amounts of data, and then links identities to IP addresses to prevent behavior that isn't a "serious crime," Hadopi violates fundamental rights.

Despite its authorization under the new law, the official launch of the Hadopi agency in 2009 met with significant opposition. File-sharers had issues with the program for obvious reasons but for digital rights group La Quadrature du Net, massive internet surveillance to protect copying rights had arrived at the expense of citizens' fundamental right to privacy. La Quadrature's opposition to the Hadopi anti-piracy program focuses on the law crafted to support it. One of the implementing decrees authorizes the creation of files containing internet users' IP addresses plus personal identification data obtained from their internet service providers. According to the digital rights group's interpretation of EU law, that is unlawful.

With support from the Federation of Associative Internet Service Providers, French Data Network, and Franciliens.net, in 2019 La Quadrature filed an appeal before the Council of State (Conseil d'Etat), requesting a repeal of the decree that authorizes the processing of personal information. The Council of State referred the matter to the Constitutional Council and its subsequent decision gave La Quadrature the impression that Hadopi's position was untenable. For their part, Hadopi and the government reached the opposite conclusion. The Council of State heard La Quadrature's appeal and then referred questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for interpretation under EU law. In CJEU Advocate General Szpunar's non-binding opinion issued last October, friction between privacy rights and the ability to enforce copyrights were on full display. [...] Faced with an opinion that recognizes difficulties faced by rightsholders but runs up against case-law, AG Szpunar proposed "readjustment of the case-law of the Court." This would ensure that rightsholders retain the ability to enforce their rights, when an IP address is the only means by which an infringer can be identified (CJEU, pdf). The first court hearing occurred on Tuesday, and a further legal opinion is expected in late September 2023. The ruling from the CJEU is expected before the end of the year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission sided with Starlink in a battle against Dish Network today, rejecting a Dish proposal that could have degraded Internet service for Starlink satellite users. In a 4-0 vote, the FCC decided not to authorize high-powered terrestrial mobile service in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band that is already used by Starlink customer terminals for downloads. The vote "ensure[s] the present and future of satellite services in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band. We recognize that millions of people rely on services in this band -- and we want to see that continue," FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said at today's meeting. The band is also used for satellite TV.

In its announcement of the vote, the FCC said it "declin[ed] to authorize two-way, high-powered terrestrial mobile use due to a significant risk of harmful interference to existing and emergent services, particularly in the growing satellite broadband market." Dish already uses spectrum from the 12.2-12.7 GHz band for satellite TV and wants to use the band for cellular service as well. While the FCC rejected the mobile proposal, it said it would investigate the potential to expand terrestrial fixed use or permit unlicensed use in that spectrum. Specifically, the FCC will seek comment on allowing point-to-point fixed links in 12.2-12.7 GHz at higher power levels than the current rules allow and on "adding indoor-only underlay and unlicensed use." The agency also teed up a plan that could eventually allow mobile broadband in the adjacent 12.7-13.25 GHz band. "Thank you to the 100K+ Starlink customers who spoke up, the FCC voted to protect high-speed satellite Internet users from harmful interference," Starlink wrote on Twitter today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Bluesky Social, the popular new beta social network, is taking a big open-source step forward. On May 15th, 2023, it open-sourced the codebase for its Bluesky Social app on GitHub. This fits well with its plans. From the start, its owner, BlueSky Public Benefit LLC, a public benefit corporation, was building an "open and decentralized" social network.

Unlike Twitter, which is still tripping over its own open source feet, Bluesky client code is for anyone who wants to work on improving the code or use it as the basis for their own social network. Twitter's recommendation code, on the other hand, is essentially unusable. The Bluesky code, licensed under the MIT License, can be used now. Indeed, while it's been out for only about 24 hours, it's already been forked 88 times and has earned over 1,300 GitHub Stars.

While it's specifically the Bluesky Social app's codebase, it's also a resource for AT Protocol programmers. This protocol supports a decentralized social network. Its features include connecting with anyone on a server that supports AT Protocol; controlling how users see the world via an open algorithm market; and enabling users to change hosts without losing their content, followers, or identity. The code itself is written in React Native. This is an open-source, user-interface JavaScript software framework. It's used primarily to build applications that run on both iOS and Android devices.

BT Group, Britain's biggest broadband and mobile provider, will cut up to 55,000 jobs including contractors by 2030 -- potentially over 40% of its workforce -- as it completes its fibre roll-out and adapts to new technologies such as AI. From a report: The company has been working through a transformation plan to build a national fibre network under boss Philip Jansen, as well as rolling out high-speed 5G mobile services. The former state monopoly reported on Thursday pro forma revenue and core earnings growth for the first time in six years in the year to the end of March, but the cost of transforming the business, and the hit to its free cash flow took a toll, sending its shares down 7% in morning trade. Jansen said after completing the fibre roll-out, digitising the way it worked, adopting artificial intelligence (AI) and simplifying its structure, BT would rely on a much smaller workforce and significantly reduced cost base by the end of the 2020s. "New BT Group will be a leaner business with a brighter future," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers on Tuesday unveiled a major discovery -- malicious firmware that can wrangle a wide range of residential and small office routers into a network that stealthily relays traffic to command-and-control servers maintained by Chinese state-sponsored hackers. A firmware implant, revealed in a write-up from Check Point Research, contains a full-featured backdoor that allows attackers to establish communications and file transfers with infected devices, remotely issue commands, and upload, download, and delete files. The implant came in the form of firmware images for TP-Link routers. The well-written C++ code, however, took pains to implement its functionality in a "firmware-agnostic" manner, meaning it would be trivial to modify it to run on other router models.

The main purpose of the malware appears to relay traffic between an infected target and the attackers' command and control servers in a way that obscures the origins and destinations of the communication. With further analysis, Check Point Research eventually discovered that the control infrastructure was operated by hackers tied to Mustang Panda, an advanced persistent threat actor that both the Avast and ESET security firms say works on behalf of the Chinese government.

The researchers discovered the implant while investigating a series of targeted attacks against European foreign affairs entities. The chief component is a backdoor with the internal name Horse Shell. The three main functions of Horse Shell are: a remote shell for executing commands on the infected device; file transfer for uploading and downloading files to and from the infected device; and the exchange of data between two devices using SOCKS5, a protocol for proxying TCP connections to an arbitrary IP address and providing a means for UDP packets to be forwarded. The SOCKS5 functionality seems to be the ultimate purpose of the implant. By creating a chain of infected devices that establish encrypted connections with only the closest two nodes (one in each direction), it's difficult for anyone who stumbles upon one of them to learn the origin or ultimate destination or the true purpose of the infection. As Check Point researchers wrote: "Learning from history, router implants are often installed on arbitrary devices with no particular interest, with the aim to create a chain of nodes between the main infections and real command and control," Check Point researchers wrote in a shorter write-up. "In other words, infecting a home router does not mean that the homeowner was specifically targeted, but rather that they are only a means to a goal."

Mobile-phone operators in Nigeria including MTN Group and Airtel Africa will stop providing dedicated text message services to banks until the lenders pay 120 billion naira ($259 million) in arrears. From a report: The operators will disconnect the so-called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data based on their contracts with the lenders, Gbenga Adebayo, chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria said in a telephone interview on Monday. Some banks will be disconnected as early as today, he said. The service is crucial for the poor in Africa's most-populous nation, where as many as 40% don't have bank accounts. USSD is used for financial transactions such as transfers, bill payments and airtime recharges. For two years, Nigeria's mobile network operators and banks haven't been able to agree on the appropriate USSD pricing model, the mode of collection and liability for unremitted fees from the lenders. The telecom operators say arrears have risen from 42 billion naira in 2021. The industry regulator and the Central Bank of Nigeria intervened in the dispute that year leading to an agreement for a flat fee of 6.98 naira per transaction.

Serverless JavaScript is hosted in an edge network or by an HTTP caching service (and only runs when requested), explains Cloudflare. "Developers can write and deploy JavaScript functions that process HTTP requests before they travel all the way to the origin server."

Their platform for serverless JavaScript will soon have built-in AI features, Cloudflare's CTO announced today, "so that developers have a rich toolset at their disposal. A developer platform without AI isn't going to be much use. It'll be a bit like a developer platform that can't do floating point arithmetic, or handle a list of data. We're going to see every developer platform have AI capability built in because these capabilities will allow developers to make richer experiences for users...

As I look back at 40 years of my programming life, I haven't been this excited about a new technology... ever. That's because AI is going to be a pervasive change to how programs get written, who writes programs and how all of us interact with software... I think it'll make us more productive and make more people programmers.
But in addition, developers on the platform will also be able to train and upload their own models to run on Cloudflare's global network: Unlike a database where data might largely be stored and accessed infrequently, AI systems are alive with moving data. To accommodate that, platforms need to stop treating data as something to lock in developers with. Data needs to be free to move from system to system, from platform to platform, without transfer fees, egress or other nonsense. If we want a world of AI, we need a world of data fluidity.

"Deep in a pine forest in Wilcox County, Alabama, three workers dangled from the top of a 350-foot cellular tower," reports the New York Times. "They were there to rip out and replace Chinese equipment from the local wireless network..." As the United States and China battle for geopolitical and technological primacy, the fallout has reached rural Alabama and small wireless carriers in dozens of states. They are on the receiving end of the Biden administration's sweeping policies to suppress China's rise, which include trade restrictions, a $52 billion package to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing against China and the divestiture of the video app TikTok from its Chinese owner. What the wireless carriers must do, under a program known as "rip and replace," has become the starkest physical manifestation of the tech Cold War between the two superpowers. The program, which took effect in 2020, mandates that American companies tear out telecom equipment made by the Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE. U.S. officials have warned that gear from those companies could be used by Beijing for espionage and to steal commercial secrets.

Instead, U.S. carriers have to use equipment from non-Chinese companies. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program, would then reimburse the carriers from a pot of $1.9 billion intended to cover their costs. Similar rip-and-replace efforts are taking place elsewhere. In Europe, where Huawei products have been a key part of telecom networks, carriers in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden have also been swapping out the Chinese equipment because of security concerns, according to Strand Consult, a research firm that tracks the telecom industry. "Rip-and-replace was the first front in a bigger story about the U.S. and China's decoupling, and that story will continue into the next decade with a global race for A.I. and other technologies," said Blair Levin, a former F.C.C. chief of staff and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

But cleansing U.S. networks of Chinese tech has not been easy. The costs have already ballooned above $5 billion, according to the F.C.C., more than double what Congress appropriated for reimbursements. Many carriers also face long supply chain delays for new equipment. The program's burden has fallen disproportionately on smaller carriers, which relied more on the cheaper gear from the Chinese firms than large companies like AT&T and Verizon. Given rip-and-replace's difficulties, some smaller wireless companies now say they may not be able to upgrade their networks and continue serving their communities, where they are often the only internet providers. "For many rural communities, they are faced with the disastrous choice of having to continue to use insecure networks that are ripe for surveillance or having to cut off their services," said Geoffrey Starks, a Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C.

Last month, Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican of Nebraska, introduced a bill to close the gap in rip-and-replace funding for carriers... In January, the F.C.C. said it had received 126 applications seeking funding beyond what it could reimburse. Lawmakers had underestimated the costs of shredding Huawei and ZTE equipment, and new equipment and labor costs have risen. The F.C.C. said it could cover only about 40 percent of the expenses. Some wireless carriers immediately paused their replacement efforts. "Until we have assurance of total project funding, this project will continue to be delayed as we await the necessary funding required to build and pay for the new network equipment," United Wireless of Dodge City, Kansas, wrote in a regulatory filing to the F.C.C. in January.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The U.S. government is seeking to turn metro areas in middle America into the next hot spots of tech innovation with an initial $500 million investment. The Department of Commerce announced Friday its first notice of funding opportunity, or NOFO, for the Regional Technology and Innovation Hub program, known as Tech Hubs. It kicks off the process for eligible groups around the country to apply to be designated as Tech Hubs. That designation gives them the chance to take advantage of the funds to make their regions attractive places for entrepreneurs and technologists to live and work.

Congress authorized $10 billion for the program between fiscal years 2023 and 2027, of which $500 million is available to be distributed this year. Under the current funding opportunity, a total of $15 million in planning grants will be made available to applicants designated as Tech Hubs. Later this year, the Department will seek to award five to 10 designated Tech Hubs grants of $50 million to $75 million each to help build out capacity in their region, according to a Department of Commerce official. President Joe Biden requested $4 billion be made available for Tech Hubs in next year's budget.

Eligible applicants are groups made up of at least one entity from each of the following categories: a higher education institution, subdivision of local or state government, industry or firm in relevant tech or manufacturing field, economic development group, and labor organization or workforce training group. Under the statute, Tech Hubs should focus on a specific set of key areas of technology, which include artificial intelligence, robotics, natural disaster prevention, biotechnology, cybersecurity, energy efficiency and more. The department must designate at least 20 Tech Hubs under the law. The hope is that the infusion of funds will help regions across the country become essential centers of innovation and create more well-paying jobs across a greater swath of the nation. "America leads the world in technological innovation. But the sad reality is that our tech ecosystem is extremely concentrated," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters on a briefing call Thursday, noting that 80% of U.S. venture capital money is invested in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Northeast and Southern California. "There's so much more potential for tech innovation all across the country. In the U.S. we have the best research institutions in the world. That's indisputable. And frankly, many of them are in America's heartland, far from the coast."

"President Biden is so clear on one point, which is that everyone in America deserves a fair shot at economic opportunity, no matter where they live, and they shouldn't have to move in order to get a good job," Raimondo said. "Nobody should have to leave their family or support system or network to move to New York or San Francisco just to get a good job."

TV providers in the U.S. collectively lost 2.3 million customers in the first quarter of 2023. "With the Q1 decline, total pay-TV penetration of occupied U.S. households (including for internet services like YouTube TV and Hulu) dropped to 58.5% -- its lowest point since 1992," reports Variety, citing a report from MoffettNathason. "As of the end of Q1, U.S. pay-TV services had 75.5 million customers, down nearly 7% on an annual basis." From the report: Cable TV operators' rate of decline in Q1 reached -9.9% year over year, while satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network fell -13.4%. In addition, so-called "virtual MVPDs" (multichannel video programming distributors) lost 264,000 customers in Q1, among the worst quarters to date for the segment. "The picture is not one that suggests that a plateau in the rate of decline is coming any time soon," Moffett wrote.

Comcast, the largest pay-TV provider in the country, dropped 614,000 video customers in Q1 -- the most of any single company -- to stand at 15.53 million at the end of the period. Asked about dwindling video business on the company's earnings call, David Watson, president and CEO of Comcast Cable, acknowledged the reality of cord-cutting and said the operator's approach is "to not subsidize unprofitable video relationships." He added, "We'll fight hard, whether it's acquisition, base management or retention. So it's important to us, but we have figured out a way to manage it financially."

Google's YouTube TV was the only provider tracked by MoffettNathanson that picked up subs in Q1, adding an estimated 300,000 subscribers in the period (to reach about 6.3 million) and netting 1.4 million subscribers over the past year. Hulu, meanwhile, has barely grown over the past three years (and loss about 100,000 live TV subs in Q1), Moffett noted, while FuboTV lost 160,000 subscribers in North America in the first quarter to mark its worst quarterly loss on record. MoffettNathason argues that the "pay TV floor" is between 50 million and 60 million U.S. homes. "As things stand, we expect cord-cutting to grow even worse and the long-theorized 'floor' to be breached."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After the release of Apple's AirTags, Google suddenly has interest in the Bluetooth tracker market. The company has already quietly rolled out what must be the world's largest Bluetooth tracking network via Android's 3 billion active devices, and now trackers are starting to plug in to that network. Google is taking the ecosystem approach and letting various companies plug in to the Android Bluetooth tracking network, which has the very derivative name of "Find My Device." While these Bluetooth trackers are great for finding your lost car keys on a messy desk, they can also work as worldwide GPS trackers and locate items much farther away, even though they don't have GPS. The IDs of Bluetooth devices are public, so Tile started this whole idea of crowdsourced Bluetooth tracker location, called the "Tile Network." Every phone with the Tile app installed scans Bluetooth devices in the background and, using the phone GPS, uploads their last seen location to the cloud. This location data is only available to the person who owns the Tile, but every Tile user works to scan the environment and upload any Tiles the app can see. [...]

Now, third-party Bluetooth trackers for Android's network are starting to arrive. The two companies that have announced products are Chipolo and Pebblebee, both of which seem to be cloning the Tile line of products. Both offer normal keychain tracker tags and slim credit card format trackers. The worst habits of Tile include making completely disposable products because the batteries can't be changed, but it looks like our clones have mostly avoided that. All of Pebblebee's Find My Device products are rechargeable, which is great, while the Chipolo keychain tracker has a replaceable CR2032 battery. Only the Chipolo wallet tracker is disposable (boo!). All these tags will show up in the Find My Device app, right alongside your Android phones, headphones, and whatever else you have that plugs in to the network. They also have a speaker, like normal, so you can make them ring when you're near them. Both sets of products are up for preorder now.

Ahead of Imgur's ban of sexually explicit content, Reddit announced Thursday that it will allow users to upload NSFW images from desktops in adult subreddits. The feature was already available on the social network's mobile app. TechCrunch reports: "This now gives us feature parity with our mobile apps, which (as you know) already has this functionality. You must set your community to 18+ if your community's content will primarily be not safe for work (NSFW)," the company said.

Reddit's announcement comes days after Imgur said that the image hosting platform was banning explicit photos from May 15. At that time, the company said that explicit content formed a risk to Imgur's "community and its business." Banning this type of content would "protect the future of the Imgur community." Many of Reddit's communities rely on Imgur's hosting services. However, the social network allowing native NSFW uploads through desktop might be the most logical solution going forward.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this week, Microsoft released a patch to fix a Secure Boot bypass bug used by the BlackLotus bootkit we reported on in March. The original vulnerability, CVE-2022-21894, was patched in January, but the new patch for CVE-2023-24932 addresses another actively exploited workaround for systems running Windows 10 and 11 and Windows Server versions going back to Windows Server 2008. The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. Secure Boot has been enabled by default for over a decade on most Windows PCs sold by companies like Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, and others. PCs running Windows 11 must have it enabled to meet the software's system requirements.

Microsoft says that the vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker with either physical access to a system or administrator rights on a system. It can affect physical PCs and virtual machines with Secure Boot enabled. We highlight the new fix partly because, unlike many high-priority Windows fixes, the update will be disabled by default for at least a few months after it's installed and partly because it will eventually render current Windows boot media unbootable. The fix requires changes to the Windows boot manager that can't be reversed once they've been enabled. Additionally, once the fixes have been enabled, your PC will no longer be able to boot from older bootable media that doesn't include the fixes. On the lengthy list of affected media: Windows install media like DVDs and USB drives created from Microsoft's ISO files; custom Windows install images maintained by IT departments; full system backups; network boot drives including those used by IT departments to troubleshoot machines and deploy new Windows images; stripped-down boot drives that use Windows PE; and the recovery media sold with OEM PCs.

Not wanting to suddenly render any users' systems unbootable, Microsoft will be rolling the update out in phases over the next few months. The initial version of the patch requires substantial user intervention to enable -- you first need to install May's security updates, then use a five-step process to manually apply and verify a pair of "revocation files" that update your system's hidden EFI boot partition and your registry. These will make it so that older, vulnerable versions of the bootloader will no longer be trusted by PCs. A second update will follow in July that won't enable the patch by default but will make it easier to enable. A third update in "first quarter 2024" will enable the fix by default and render older boot media unbootable on all patched Windows PCs. Microsoft says it is "looking for opportunities to accelerate this schedule," though it's unclear what that would entail.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a collaborative investigation between Motherboard, lavialibera, and IrpiMedia: Mafioso Bartolo Bruzzaniti needed everyone to do their job just right. First, the Colombian suppliers would hide a massive amount of cocaine inside bananas at the port city of Turbo, Colombia. That shipping container would then be transported across the ocean to Catania, in Sicily, Italy. A corrupt port worker on the mafia's payroll would wave the shipment through and had advised the group how to package the drugs. This was so the cocaine could remain undetected even if the worker was forced to scan the shipment. Another group of on-the-ground mafiosos would then unload the cocaine outside of the port.

In March 2021, Bruzzaniti, an alleged member of the infamous 'Ndrangheta mafia group and who says Milan belongs to him "by right," asked his brother Antonio to go fetch something else crucial to the traffickers' success. "Go right now," Bruzzaniti wrote in a text message later produced in court records. "It's needed urgently." Investigators know what Bruzzaniti said because European authorities had penetrated an encrypted phone network called Sky and harvested around a billion of the users' messages. These phones are the technological backbone of organized crime around the world.

The thing Antonio needed to urgently fetch was a phone from a different encrypted phone network, one that the authorities appear to have not compromised and which the mafia have been using as part of their operations. To that phone, a contact sent one half of the shipping container's serial number. A reporting collaboration between Motherboard, lavialibera, and IrpiMedia has identified that encrypted phone as being run by a company called No. 1 Business Communication (No. 1 BC). The investigation has found members of the mafia and other organized crime groups turning to No. 1 BC as authorities cracked down on other platforms. The collaboration has identified multiple key players in No. 1 BC's development, sales, and legal structure. "Take the bc1 right away," Bruzzaniti wrote in another text, referring to the No. 1 BC phone.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: Now, frustrated with a lack of transparency and trust around official accounts of UFO phenomena, a team of developers has decided to take matters into their own hands with an open source citizen science project called Sky360, which aims to blanket the earth in affordable monitoring stations to watch the skies 24/7, and even plans to use AI and machine learning to spot anomalous behavior. Unlike earlier 20th century efforts such as inventors proposing "geomagnetic detectors" to discover nearby UFOs, or more recent software like the short-lived UFO ID project, Sky360 hopes that it can establish a network of autonomously operating surveillance units to gather real-time data of our skies. Citizen-led UFO research is not new. Organizations like MUFON, founded in 1969, have long investigated sightings, while amateur groups like the American Flying Saucer Investigating Committee of Columbus even ran statistical analysis on sightings in the 1960s (finding that most of them happened on Wednesdays). However, Sky360 believes that the level of interest and the technology have now both reached an inflection point, where citizen researchers can actually generate large-scale actionable data for analysis all on their own.

The Sky360 stations consist of an AllSkyCam with a wide angle fish-eye lens and a pan-tilt-focus camera, with the fish-eye camera registering all movement. Underlying software performs an initial rough analysis of these events, and decides whether to activate other sensors -- and if so, the pan-tilt-focus camera zooms in on the object, tracks it, and further analyzes it. According to developer Nikola Galiot, the software is currently based on a computer vision "background subtraction" algorithm that detects any motion in the frame compared to previous frames captured; anything that moves is then tracked as long as possible and then automatically classified. The idea is that the more data these monitoring stations acquire, the better the classification will be. There are a combination of AI models under the hood, and the system is built using the open-source TensorFlow machine learning platform so it can be deployed on almost any computer. Next, the all-volunteer team wants to create a single algorithm capable of detection, tracking and classification all in one.

All the hardware components, from the cameras to passive radar and temperature gauges, can be bought cheaply and off-the-shelf worldwide -- with the ultimate goal of finding the most effective combinations for the lowest price. Schematics, blueprints, and suggested equipment are all available on the Sky360 site and interested parties are encouraged to join the project's Discord server. There are currently 20 stations set up across the world, from the USA to Canada to more remote regions like the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic [...] Once enough of the Sky360 stations have been deployed, the next step is to work towards real-time monitoring, drawing all the data together, and analyzing it. By striving to create a huge, open, transparent network, anyone would be free to examine the data themselves.

In June of this year, Sky360, which has a team of 30 volunteer developers working on the software, hopes to release its first developer-oriented open source build. At its heart is a component called 'SimpleTracker', which receives images frame by frame from the cameras, auto-adjusting parameters to get the best picture possible. The component determines whether something in the frame is moving, and if so, another analysis is performed, where a machine learning algorithm trained on the trajectories of normal flying objects like planes, birds, or insects, attempts to classify the object based on its movement. If it seems anomalous, it's flagged for further investigation.

Chinese police have arrested a man for using ChatGPT to create a fake news article about a train crash, under a new law governing "deep synthesis technologies" introduced by China this year. CNBC reports: Police in Gansu province in northwest China detained a man, surnamed Hong, who they said allegedly fabricated a news story regarding a train crash that caused nine deaths. The authorities found that more than 20 accounts had posted this article on a blogging platform owned by Chinese search giant Baidu and they'd garnered more than 15,000 views. Hong allegedly used ChatGPT to create slightly different versions of the fake news article to pass duplication checks on the Baidu-owned platform.

The Gansu police authorities arrested Hong under the first-of-its kind law governing "deep synthesis technologies" which China introduced this year. Deep synthesis technologies refer to AI being used to generate text, images, video or other media. The law states that deep synthesis services cannot be used to disseminate fake news. China drafted the law as ChatGPT was taking off and going viral, as authorities looked to get ahead of the technology. China's internet is heavily censored and controlled. Beijing has sought to introduce laws governing new technologies which could present concerns to the central government. ChatGPT is blocked in China but can be accessed with the use of a virtual private network -- a software that can help bypass the country's internet restrictions.

CoinDesk reports that Binance "temporarily paused bitcoin withdrawals Sunday morning U.S. time as the Bitcoin blockchain became overwhelmed with pending transactions and sky-high fees." The company resumed withdrawals within two hours of its initial Twitter posting about the withdrawals.

On-chain data shows that there are nearly 400,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions, which is higher than anything seen during the bull runs of 2018 and 2021. The average transaction fee has also doubled since March, pushing it to a two-year high. The current transaction fee is just over $8, a 309% change from a year ago.
In an earlier CoinDesk article, an executive at Luxor Technologies, a full-stack Bitcoin mining pool, blamed the rising fees on the adoption of the new BRC-20 token standard, a new way to "inscribe" additional data during transactions. But meanwhile, an anonymous reader shared another report from Mashable about Binance: Bloomberg reported that the crypto exchange (currently the world's largest) is facing a U.S. Department of Justice probe over possibly allowing Russians to move money in a way that would violate U.S. sanctions... It's worth noting that no formal accusation has been made against Binance, as this is just a probe. It may be some time before accusations manifest — if they manifest at all. In 2021, Binance was under a similar investigation related to possible money laundering.
But another Reuters article adds that Bloomberg's sources "also said that Binance is discussing the possibility of settling with the Department of Justice regarding previous allegations that the exchange was also used to move money to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran."

And elsewhere, Reuters reports: Israel has seized around 190 crypto accounts at crypto exchange Binance since 2021 , including two it said were linked to Islamic State and dozens of others it said were owned by Palestinian firms connected to the Islamist Hamas group, documents released by the country's counter-terror authorities show...

In a blog post after its publication, Binance said that Reuters was "deliberately leaving out critical facts." The exchange has been "working closely with international counter-terrorism authorities" on the seizures, Binance said. "With regard to the specific organizations mentioned in the article, it's important to clarify that bad actors don't register accounts under the names of their criminal enterprises," it said...

Under Israeli law, the country's defense minister can order the seizure and confiscation of assets that the ministry deems related to terrorism... The seizures by Israel's National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing highlight how governments are targeting crypto companies in their efforts to prevent illegal activity. Binance, founded in 2017 by CEO Changpeng Zhao, says on its website it reviews information requests from governments and law enforcement agencies on a case-by-case basis, disclosing information as legally required.

Binance has also said it checks users for connections to terrorism and has "continued to invest tremendous resources to enhance its compliance program," it told U.S. senators in March in response to their requests for information on Binance's regulatory compliance and finances.

This year's Kentucky Derby was won by a 15-to-1 longshot named Mage, reports sports magazine the Athletic. It was only the horse's third race — but the story gets even stranger: Mage is owned by a collective of horse racing fans that doesn't follow your standard ownership structure. Fans can purchase shares of a horse for as little as $50. It's a publicly owned racehorse. Mage has 391 owners on the Commonwealth app. Many were at the 2023 Kentucky Derby wearing Mage hats and they were shown on NBC's lead up to the Kentucky Derby.
The Commonwealth app even tried to arrange watch parties for the horse race across the country. Shareholders own 25% of the racehorse, reports Sporting News: Although horses are the most common commodity, there are golfers on the app as well, specifically Joey Vrzich and Cooper Dossey, whom it says are "coming Spring 2023." Commonwealth has a partnership with WinStar Farm, a premiere breeder of thoroughbreds... "Together we are going to revolutionize the ownership experience and give the world access to horses that were once unavailable to the public," Brian Doxtator, CEO of Commonwealth said, per the collective's website.

According to Action Network's Darren Rovell, Commonwealth owners will be paid out $94.52 per share (prior to taxes) for the win.
Before the race the Athletic sports magazine asked seven experts for their picks — and only one of them had even mentioned Mage. (The Athletic's senior sports betting editor correctly picked Mage and "Angel of Empire" to finish somewhere in the top three positions.) But just for fun, the Athletic also asked three AI chatbots — and none of them picked the winner: Bing AI: That's a tough question. I don't have a personal preference, but based on the odds and the past performances, I think Forte has a good chance of winning. He has been very consistent and impressive in his races, and he has a top trainer and jockey. He also has a favorable post position at No. 14, which gives him some room to maneuver and avoid traffic. But as I said, anything can happen in the Kentucky Derby, and there are many other talented horses in the field. It will be an exciting race to watch.


Google Bard: I like the chances of Tapit Trice to win the 2023 Kentucky Derby. He is the second-lowest odds horse at 5-1, and has won twice and finished second twice in six career races. He has one of the best pedigrees a horse could ask for, being sired by Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner. He is also coming off an impressive showing in the 2023 Blue Grass Stakes, where he finished second just barely behind Verifying.

Here are some other horses that I like to finish in the money... The Kentucky Derby is always a tough race to predict, but I think these horses have a good chance of winning or finishing in the money. [Bard then listed five more of the 18 horses — one of which ultimately finished third.]


Chat GPT: As an artificial intelligence language model, I don't have personal opinions or preferences. However, based on the current information I have, I cannot accurately predict the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Horse racing involves many variables, including the skill of the jockey, the health and performance of the horse, and even the weather conditions on race day. The outcome of any given race is always uncertain and subject to chance. It's important to note that gambling can be risky, and I don't encourage it.