Ha Dang, a self-taught accountant from Scunthorpe who trained via YouTube, won the inaugural Microsoft Excel UK Championships on September 30. The victory earned him a spot at the Microsoft Excel World Championships in Las Vegas, a three-day tournament inside a 30,000-square-foot esports arena where players compete for $5,000 and are broadcast on ESPN.

Thirty competitors sat shoulder to shoulder through three gruelling rounds of spreadsheet challenges. Each round featured a custom case with seven levels of increasing difficulty. The second round case, Right Royal Battle Part II, took 80 drafts to perfect. Players calculated troop sizes from emoji battalions and army movements across fourteenth-century France. Hadyn Wiseman, who once held the Guinness World Record for most backflips in a minute, placed fourth. Lara Holding-Jones finished thirteenth. Jaq Kennedy founded the UK chapter last year. National chapters have since formed in Germany, Brazil, and Chile.

Air pollution increases the likelihood of people becoming frail in middle and old age, according to an international review of studies. The Guardian: The review team found 10 studies that looked at outdoor air pollution and frailty. The people studied came from 11 countries including China, the UK, Sweden, South Africa and Mexico. Two of the studies showed that men were more vulnerable than woman, with a stronger association between particle pollution and frailty. The risk of frailty increased with outdoor particle pollution. For the UK, this could mean about 10-20% of frailty cases are attributable to air pollution.

Exposure to secondhand smoking was the environmental factor that presented the greatest risk of frailty. The risk of frailty was increased by about 60% for people who breathed other people's smoke at home. Using solid fuels for cooking or home heating also carried an extra risk of frailty. This was about half the risk of living with a smoker, based on studies from six countries.

James Marriott, writing in a column: The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. "To engage with the written word," the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, "means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning."

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis. In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports "shocking and dispiriting" falls in children's reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, "books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures."

[...] What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience's attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

Meta will begin using data from AI chatbot conversations and other AI-powered products to fuel targeted advertising across Facebook and Instagram, with no way to opt out. The policy change, effective December 16, excludes users in South Korea, the UK, and the EU due to stricter privacy laws. TechCrunch reports: If a user chats with Meta AI about hiking, for example, the company may show ads for hiking gear. However, Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez tells TechCrunch that the privacy update is broader than just Meta AI and applies to the company's other AI offerings. That means Meta may use data from AI features in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses -- including voice recordings, pictures, and videos analyzed with AI -- to further target its ad products.

Meta may also use data from its new AI-video feed, Vibes, and its AI image generation product, Imagine. Conversations with Meta AI will only influence ads on Facebook and Instagram if a user is logged into the same account across products. [...] Meta says the company has "no plans imminently" to put ads in its AI products, though CEO Mark Zuckerberg has suggested they may be coming in the future.

The UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users' data, despite US claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant's encryption. Financial Times: The UK Home Office demanded in early September that Apple create a means to allow officials access to encrypted cloud backups, but stipulated that the order applied only to British citizens' data, according to people briefed on the matter.

A previous technical capability notice (TCN) issued in January sought global access to encrypted user data. That move sparked a diplomatic clash between the UK and US governments and threatened to derail the two nations' efforts to secure a trade agreement.

In February, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the UK. "Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users," Apple said on Wednesday. "We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy." It added: "As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will."

Britain's net public debt has climbed from 35% of GDP in 2005 to 95% today. The government is borrowing over 4% of GDP annually despite no emergency comparable to the financial crisis or pandemic that drove much of the earlier increase. The belt-tightening needed to stabilize debt levels amounts to about 2% of GDP. The Labour government holds a 157-seat majority in Parliament and has four years until the next election.

Britain spends about 6% of GDP supporting pensioners, an increase of over a third this century. Some 15% of the working-age population now claims jobless allowances following a surge in disability claims since the pandemic. Labour attempted to reduce spending on pensioners and welfare this year but reversed both reform plans after political outcry from within the party.

Tax revenue is already on course to reach 38% of GDP, a historical high for Britain. Labour promised before the election not to raise broad-based taxes on income and consumption. Four in five Britons say the government is mismanaging the economy. Yields on long-term government debt exceed those in any other major rich economy. The economy grew faster than any other G7 country in the first half of 2025, but the fiscal adjustment that would bring Britain to a primary surplus of less than 0.5% remains politically elusive.

Independent UK bookshops will now be able to sell ebooks via a new platform (Bookshop.org's expansion), keeping 100% of profits and offering a non-Amazon way to reach digital readers. "Bookshops now have an additional tool in their fight against Amazon," said Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org UK. "Digital readers don't depend on Amazon's monopoly any more, now that they can find ebooks at the same price on Bookshop.org." The Guardian reports: Bookshop.org launched in the UK in November 2020 as a platform for independent bookshops to sell physical books. Bookshops receive 30% of the cover price from each sale they generate; so far, the UK site has generated 4.5 million pounds for independent bookshops. Customers will also now be able to buy ebooks through a bookshop of their choice. Profits from orders without a specified bookshop will be added to a shared pool, which will be distributed among all participating bookshops on the platform. [...]

The platform will launch with a catalogue of more than a million ebooks from all major publishers. It will be available online via a web browser and through the Bookshop.org apps on Apple and Android. "Due to Amazon's proprietary digital rights management [DRM] software and publishers' DRM requirements, it's not currently possible to buy DRM-protected ebooks from Bookshop.org or local bookshops and read them on your Kindle," said Bookshop.org. However, the site is working with the e-reader company Kobo to support Kobo devices "later this year," and longer term would "love to offer our own eInk device."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A Chinese national has been convicted following an international fraud investigation which resulted in what's believed to be the single largest cryptocurrency seizure in the world. The Metropolitan Police says it recovered 61,000 bitcoin worth more than $6.7 billion in current prices. Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, pleaded guilty on Monday at Southwark Crown Court of illegally acquiring and possessing the cryptocurrency. A second person appeared in court on Tuesday to admit to their role in the scheme.

Malaysian national Seng Hok Ling, of Matlock, Derbyshire, pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court of entering into a money laundering arrangement on or before April 23, 2024. According to the charge, he had been dealing in cryptocurrency on Qian's behalf, "knowing or suspecting his actions would facilitate the acquisition or control of criminal property by another." Between 2014 and 2017 Qian led a large-scale scam in China which involved cheating more than 128,000 victims and storing the stolen funds in bitcoin assets, the Met said in a statement.

It said the 47-year-old's guilty plea followed a seven-year probe into a global money laundering web which began when it got a tipoff about the transfer of criminal assets. Qian had been "evading justice" for five years up to her arrest, which required a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions, said Detective Sergeant Isabella Grotto, who led the Met's investigation. She fled China using false documents and entered the UK, where she attempted to launder the stolen money by buying property, said the Met. "By pleading guilty today, Ms Zhang hopes to bring some comfort to investors who have waited since 2017 for compensation, and to reassure them that the significant rise in cryptocurrency values means there are more than sufficient funds available to repay their losses," said Qian's solicitor Roger Sahota, of Berkeley Square Solicitors.

"Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasingly being used by organised criminals to disguise and transfer assets, so that fraudsters may enjoy the benefits of their criminal conduct," added deputy chief Crown prosecutor, Robin Weyell. "This case, involving the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the UK, illustrates the scale of criminal proceeds available to those fraudsters."

Imgur, a popular image hosting platform with more than 130 million users, has stopped being available in the UK after regulators signalled their intention to impose penalties over concerns around children's data. From a report: The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said that it has reached provisional findings in an investigation in the parent company of image hosting site, Imgur. Its probe was launched earlier this year, as part of the regulator's Children's Code strategy, which is intended to set the standards for how online services handle the personal information of young people. BBC adds: The UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), said it recently notified the platform's parent company, MediaLab AI, of plans to fine Imgur after probing its approach to age checks and use of children's personal data.

The UK government will underwrite a $2 billion loan guarantee to Jaguar Land Rover in a bid to support its suppliers as a cyber-attack continues to halt production at the car maker. BBC: Business Secretary Peter Kyle said the loan, from a commercial bank, would protect jobs in the West Midlands, Merseyside and across the UK. The manufacturer has been forced to suspend production for weeks after being targeted by hackers at the end of August. There have been growing concerns some suppliers, mostly small businesses, could go bust due to the prolonged shutdown.

About 30,000 people are directly employed at the company's UK plants with about 100,000 working for firms in the supply chain. Some of these firms supply parts exclusively to JLR, while others sell components to other carmakers as well. It is believed to be the first time that a company has received government help as a result of a cyber-attack.

"Swiss voters have backed plans for electronic identity cards by a wafer-thin margin," reports the Guardian, "in the second nationwide vote on the issue." In a referendum on Sunday, 50.4% of voters supported an electronic ID card, while 49.6% were against, confounding pollsters who had forecast stronger support for the "yes" vote. Turnout was 49.55%, higher than expected... [V]oters rejected an earlier version of the e-ID in 2021, largely over objections to the role of private companies in the system. In response to these concerns, the Swiss state will now provide the e-ID, which will be optional and free of charge... To ensure security the e-ID is linked to a single smartphone, users will have to get a new e-ID if they change their device... An ID card containing biometric data — fingerprints — will be available from the end of next year.

Critics of the e-ID scheme raised data protection concerns and said it opened the door to mass surveillance. They also fear the voluntary scheme will become mandatory and disadvantage people without smartphones. The referendum was called after a coalition of rightwing and data-privacy parties collected more than 50,000 signatures against e-ID cards, triggering the vote.
"To further ease privacy concerns, a particular authority seeking information on a person — such as proof of age or nationality, for example — will only be able to check for those specific details," notes the BBC: Supporters of the Swiss system say it will make life much easier for everyone, allowing a range of bureaucratic procedures — from getting a telephone contract to proving you are old enough to buy a bottle of wine — to happen quickly online. Opponents of digital ID cards, who gathered enough signatures to force another referendum on the issue, argue that the measure could still undermine individual privacy. They also fear that, despite the new restrictions on how data is collected and stored, it could still be used to track people and for marketing purposes.
The BBC adds that the UK government also announced plans earlier this week to introduce its own digital ID, "which would be mandatory for employment. The proposed British digital ID would have fewer intended uses than the Swiss version, but has still raised concerns about privacy and data security."

The Guardian reports: The referendum came soon after the UK government announced plans for a digital ID card, which would sit in the digital wallets of smartphones, using state-of-the-art encryption. More than 1.6 million people have signed a petition opposing e-ID cards, which would be mandatory for people working in the UK by 2029.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

"Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is launching paid subscriptions for users who do not want to see adverts in the UK," reports the BBC: The company said it would start notifying users in the coming weeks to let them choose whether to subscribe to its platforms if they wish to use them without seeing ads. EU users of its platforms can already pay a fee starting from €5.99 (£5) a month to see no ads — but subscriptions will start from £2.99 a month for UK users.

"It will give people in the UK a clear choice about whether their data is used for personalised advertising, while preserving the free access and value that the ads-supported internet creates for people, businesses and platforms," Meta said. But UK users will not have an option to not pay and see "less personalised" adverts — a feature Meta added for EU users after regulators raised concerns...

Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps — with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google... [Meta] reiterated its critical stance on the EU on Friday, saying its regulations were creating a worse experience for users and businesses unlike the UK's "more pro-growth and pro-innovation regulatory environment".
"Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps," according to the BBC, "with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google."

Even users not paying for an ad-free experience have "tools and settings that empower people to control their ads experience," according to Meta's announcement. The include Ad Preferences which influences data used to inform ads including Activity Information from Ad Partners. "We also have tools in our products that explain 'Why am I seeing this ad?' and how people can manage their ad experience. We do not sell personal data to advertisers."

The BBC reports that a million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that the human species "began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study." It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.

The scientists claim their analysis "totally changes" our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history. But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain.

The discovery, published in the leading scientific journal Science, shocked the research team, which included scientists from a university in China and the UK's Natural History Museum. "From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?" said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis. "But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we're actually very excited."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Computer Weekly: Policing data hosted in Microsoft's hyperscale cloud infrastructure could be processed in more than 100 countries, but the tech giant is obfuscating this information from its customers, Computer Weekly can reveal. According to documents released by the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) under freedom of information (FoI) rules, Microsoft refused to hand over crucial information about its international data flows to the SPA and Police Scotland when asked...

The tech giant also refused to disclose its own risk assessments into the transfer of UK policing data to other jurisdictions, including China and others deemed "hostile" in the DPIA documents. This means Police Scotland and the SPA — which are jointly rolling out Office 365 — are unable to satisfy the law enforcement-specific data protection rules laid out in Part Three of the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA18), which places strict limits on the transfer of policing data outside the UK. The same documents also contain an admission from Microsoft — given while simultaneously refusing to divulge key information about data flows — that it is unable to guarantee the sovereignty of policing data held and processed within its O365 infrastructure. This echoes the statements senior Microsoft representatives made to the French senate in June 2025, in which they admitted the company cannot guarantee the sovereignty of European data stored and processed in its services generally.

The revelation that Microsoft may access customer data from more than 100 countries is a result of the correspondence previously disclosed under Freedom of Information and reported on by Computer Weekly... All in all, an analysis of Microsoft's distributed documentation — conducted by independent security consultant Owen Sayers and shared with Computer Weekly — suggests that Microsoft personnel or contractors can remotely access the data from 105 different countries, using 148 different sub-processors. Despite technically being public, Sayers highlighted how this information is not transparently laid out for Microsoft customers, and is distributed across different documents contained in non-indexed webpages.... "[A]ny normal amount of due diligence — even if it is conducted by skilled persons will likely fail to see the full scope of offshoring in play," he said...

Microsoft did not contest the accuracy of the remote access location figures cited by Computer Weekly in this story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Renewable energy sources could power datacenters at a lower cost than relying on nuclear generation from small modular reactors (SMRs), claims a recently revealed study. ... [A]nalysis from the Centre for Net Zero (CNZ) says it would cost 43 percent less to power a 120 MW data facility with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy, when compared with an SMR. It claims that a microgrid comprising offshore wind, solar, battery storage, and backed up by gas generation, would be significantly cheaper to run annually than procuring power sourced from a nuclear SMR.

[...] CNZ describes itself as an open research institute, founded by Octopus Energy Group in the UK, and claims to advise the State of California and Europe's International Energy Agency as well as the British government. While CNZ's study applies to the UK sector, where energy costs are among the highest in the industrialized world, it is likely that the overall conclusion would still be valid in other countries as well. Its analysis shows that renewables can meet 80 percent of the constant demand from a large datacenter over the course of a year. Offshore wind can provide the majority of load requirements, with gas generation backed by battery storage as a stopgap source of power representing the most cost-optimal mix.

Greater capacity in the on-site battery storage system would reduce the reliance on gas power, and this would likely happen over time as the cost of such systems is expected to come down, the report claims. But perhaps the real kicker is that CNZ estimates that microgrids powered largely by renewables could be built in approximately five years, while operational SMRs are not expected to be widely available until sometime in the next decade. CNZ says that it calculated the typical yearly resource cost (capex and opex) of powering a datacenter with a nuclear SMR, and modeled this using Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA), an open source energy modeling tool, against two renewable energy scenarios. One was the wind, solar, battery, and gas mix, while the other omitted solar.

Digital ID will be mandatory in order to work in the UK, as part of plans to tackle illegal migration. From a report: Sir Keir Starmer said the new digital ID scheme would make it tougher to work in the UK illegally and offer "countless benefits" to citizens. However, opposition parties argued the proposals would not stop people crossing the Channel in small boats.

The prime minister set out his plans in a broader speech to a gathering of world leaders, in which he said it had been "too easy" for people to work illegally in the UK because the centre-left had been "squeamish" about saying things that were "clearly true."

Addressing the Global Progressive Action Conference in London - attended by politicians including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney - Sir Keir said it was time to "look ourselves in the mirror and recognise where we've allowed our parties to shy away from people's concerns."

"It is not compassionate left-wing politics to rely on labour that exploits foreign workers and undercuts fair wages," he said. "The simple fact is that every nation needs to have control over its borders. We do need to know who is in our country."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With AI chatbots growing in popular usage, it was only a matter of time before large numbers of people began applying them to the stock market. In fact, at least 1 in 10 retail investors now consult ChatGPT or other AI chatbots for stock-picking advice, according to a Reuters report published Thursday. Data from a survey by trading platform eToro of 11,000 retail investors worldwide suggests that 13 percent of individual investors already use AI tools like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini for stock selection, while about half say they would consider using these tools for portfolio decisions.

Unlike algorithmic trading, where computers automatically execute thousands of trades per second, investors are using ChatGPT as an advisory tool in place of human experts. They type questions, read the AI model's analysis, and then manually decide whether to place trades through their brokers. Reuters spoke with Jeremy Leung, who analyzed companies for investment bank UBS for almost two decades. Leung now relies on ChatGPT for his multi-asset portfolio. "I no longer have the luxury of a Bloomberg terminal, or those kinds of market-data services which are very, very expensive," Leung told Reuters. "Even the simple ChatGPT tool can do a lot and replicate a lot of the workflows that I used to do."

Reuters reports that financial products comparison website Finder asked ChatGPT in March 2023 to select stocks from high-quality businesses based on criteria like debt levels and sustained growth. Since then, the resulting 38-stock portfolio has reportedly grown in value nearly 55 percent. That performance beat the average of the UK's 10 most popular funds by almost 19 percentage points. But there's a huge caveat to that kind of AI success story: US stocks sit near record highs, Reuters notes, with the S&P 500 index up 13 percent this year after surging 23 percent last year. Those are conditions that can make almost any stock-picking strategy look smart.

Reuters frames the AI trading advice trend as a case of new technology tools "democratizing," or opening up, investment analysis once reserved for institutional investors with expensive data terminals. But experts warn that AI models can confabulate financial data and lack access to real-time market information, making them risky substitutes for professional advice. "AI models can be brilliant," Dan Moczulski, UK managing director at eToro, told Reuters. "The risk comes when people treat generic models like ChatGPT or Gemini as crystal balls." He noted that general AI models "can misquote figures and dates, lean too hard on a pre-established narrative, and overly rely on past price action to attempt to predict the future."

Jaguar Land Rover has halted production for nearly a month following a major cyberattack, costing an estimated 30,000 vehicles and billions in lost revenue. "The company said on Tuesday that production would be halted for another week until at least October 1, which increased concerns that a full return to production could be months away," reports The Times. From the report: David Bailey, professor of business economics at Birmingham University, said the JLR statement did not commit to reopening production on October 1 and even if it did "it's not going to be back to normal, but phased production start with some lines opening before others, as we saw after the Covid closure back in 2020." He said: "It's 24 days [shutdown] as of September 24. So that is roughly 1,000 cars a day, 24,000 cars not produced. So by then, that's about 1.7 billion pounds in lost revenue. By October 1, it will be a hit to revenue of something like 2.2 billion pounds. It's pretty massive. JLR can get through, but they're going to be burning through cash this month."

Bailey also raised concerns that smaller companies further down the supply chain lacked the cash reserves to withstand the shutdown. The company directly employs more than 30,000 people, and it is estimated that approximately 200,000 workers in the supply chain depend on work from JLR. "The union has said that in some cases, staff have been told to go and apply for universal credit. There are firms I know that have applied for bank loans to keep going. But even then, you know they're approaching the limit of what they do. There's an added knock-on effect that some of the suppliers also supply other car assemblers, Toyota or Mini. So some of those are concerned that bits of the supply chain may go under and affect them as well, because the industry is so connected. One way or another, the government's going to take a hit. Either through some sort of emergency support, whether that's furlough or emergency short-term loans or through unemployment benefit, if this carries on."

There has been uncertainty over the extent of the cyberattack and exactly how the company has been affected, as well as who is responsible for it. According to one source, some JLR staff were still unable last week to access the Slack messaging system through the company's "one sign on" system. The JLR statement added: "We have made this decision to give clarity for the coming week as we build the timeline for the phased restart of our operations and continue our investigation."

Nearly a quarter of workers aged 18-34 fear they'll lose their jobs to AI within two years, according to a Deutsche Bank survey of 10,000 people across the US and major European economies. The survey, conducted from June through August, found 24% of younger respondents scored their concern at 8 or above on a 10-point scale, compared to just 10% among workers 55 and older. Workers anticipate growing AI risk over time. 22% expressed high concern over a five-year horizon versus 18% for the two-year timeframe, the bank wrote in a report, reviewed by Slashdot.

Americans show greater concern than Europeans across all time periods, scoring roughly five percentage points higher. The survey also revealed major differences in AI adoption patterns. The US leads workplace adoption at 56%, while Spain shows the highest home adoption at 68% over three months. Germany and the UK demonstrate contrasting behaviors -- both countries report similar home usage above 50%, but workplace adoption differs significantly at 41% for Germany versus 5% for the UK. Training gaps persist across regions. Only one in four European respondents has received AI training at work compared to nearly one in three Americans, though 52% of Europeans and 54% of Americans want employer-led AI training.

mrspoonsi writes: The US Secret Service says it has dismantled a network of more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards in the New York area that were capable of crippling telecom systems.

The devices were "concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the UN General Assembly now under way in New York City" and an investigation has been launched, it adds in a press statement.

The Secret Service says the dangers posed included "disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks, and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises."