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Friday 2025/07/25
UK Student Jailed For Selling Phishing Kits Linked To $135M of Fraud
2025-07-25 01:40:00+00:00
A 21-year-old student who designed and distributed online kits linked to $175 million worth of fraud has been jailed for seven years. From a report: Ollie Holman created phishing kits that mimicked government, bank and charity websites so that criminals could harvest victims' personal information to defraud them. In one case a kit was used to mimic a charity's donation webpage so when someone tried to give money, their card details were taken and used by criminals.
Holman, of Eastcote in north-west London, created and supplied 1,052 phishing kits that targeted 69 organisations across 24 countries. He also offered tutorials in how to use the kits and built up a network of almost 700 connections. The fake websites supplied in the kits had features that allowed information such as login and bank details to be stored. It is estimated Holman received $405,000 from selling the kits between 2021 and 2023. The kits were distributed through the encrypted messaging service Telegram.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Scientists Are Developing Artificial Blood That Could Save Lives In Emergencies
2025-07-25 01:00:00+00:00
Scientists at the University of Maryland are developing ErythroMer, a freeze-dried artificial blood substitute made from hemoglobin encased in fat bubbles, designed to be shelf-stable for years and reconstituted with water in emergencies. With promising animal trial results and significant funding from the Department of Defense, the team aims to begin human testing within two years. NPR reports: "The No. 1 cause of preventable death on the battlefield is hemorrhage still today," says Col. Jeremy Pamplin, the project manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "That's a real problem for the military and for the civilian world." [Dr. Allan Doctor, a scientist at the University of Maryland working to develop the artificial blood substitute] is optimistic his team may be on the brink of solving that problem with ... ErythroMer. Doctor co-founded KaloCyte to develop the blood and serves on the board and as the firm's chief scientific officer.
"We've been able to successfully recapitulate all the functions of blood that are important for a resuscitation in a system that can be stored for years at ambient temperature and be used at the scene of an accident," he says. [...] Doctor's team has tested their artificial blood on hundreds of rabbits and so far it looks safe and effective. "It would change the way that we could take care of people who are bleeding outside of hospitals," Doctor says. "It'd be transformative." [...]
While the results so far seem like cause for optimism, Doctor says he still needs to prove to the Food and Drug Administration that his artificial blood would be safe and effective for people. But he hopes to start testing it in humans within two years. A Japanese team is already testing a similar synthetic blood in people. "I'm very hopeful," Doctor says. While promising, some experts remain cautious, noting that past attempts at artificial blood ultimately proved unsafe. "I think it's a reasonable approach," says Tim Estep, a scientist at Chart Biotech Consulting who consults with companies developing artificial blood. "But because this field has been so challenging, the proof will be in the clinical trials," he adds. "While I'm overall optimistic, placing a bet on any one technology right now is overall difficult."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Will Shed 24,000 Employees This Year, Retreat In Germany, Poland, Costa Rica, and Ohio
2025-07-24 23:42:00+00:00
Intel announced it will cut approximately 24,000 jobs in 2025 and cancel or scale back projects in Germany, Poland, Costa Rica, and Ohio as part of CEO Lip-Bu Tan's sweeping restructuring efforts. By the end of the year, the struggling chipmaker plans to have "just around 75,000 'core employees' in total," according to The Verge. "It's not clear if the layoffs will slow now that we're over halfway through the year, but Intel states today that it has already 'completed the majority of the planned headcount actions it announced last quarter to reduce its core workforce by approximately 15 percent.'" From the report: Intel employed 109,800 people at the end of 2024, of which 99,500 were "core employees," so the company is pushing out around 24,000 people this year -- shrinking Intel by roughly one-quarter. (It has also divested other businesses, shrinking the larger organization as well.) [...] Today, on the company's earnings call, Intel's says that Intel had overinvested in new factories before it had secured enough demand, that its factories had become "needlessly fragmented," and that it needs to grow its capacity "in lock step" with achieving actual milestones. "I do not subscribe to the belief that if you build it, they will come. Under my leadership, we will build what customers need when they need it, and earn their trust," says Tan.
Now, in Germany and Poland, where Intel was planning to spend tens of billions of dollars respectively on "mega-fabs" that would employ 3,000 workers, and on an assembly and test facility that would employ 2,000 workers, the company will "no longer move forward with planned projects" and is apparently axing them entirely. Intel has had a presence in Poland since 1993, however, and the company did not say its R&D facilities there are closing. (Intel had previously pressed pause on the new Germany and Poland projects "by approximately two years" back in 2024.)
In Costa Rica, where Intel employs over 3,400 people, the company will "consolidate its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica into its larger sites in Vietnam." Metzger tells The Verge that over 2,000 Costa Rica employees should remain to work in engineering and corporate, though. The company is also cutting back in Ohio: "Intel will further slow the pace of construction in Ohio to ensure spending is aligned with market demand." Intel CFO David Zinsner says Intel will continue to make investments there, though, and construction will continue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD CEO Sees Chips From TSMC's US Plant Costing 5%-20% More
2025-07-24 22:40:00+00:00
AMD CEO Lisa Su said that chips produced at TSMC's new Arizona plant will cost 5-20% more than those made in Taiwan, but emphasized that the premium is worth it for supply chain resilience. Bloomberg reports: AMD expects its first chips from TSMC's Arizona facilities by the end of the year, Su said. The extra expense is worth it because the company is diversifying the crucial supply of chips, Su said in an interview with Bloomberg Television following her onstage appearance. That will make the industry less prone to the type of disruptions experienced during the pandemic. "We have to consider resiliency in the supply chain," she said. "We learned that in the pandemic."
TSMC's new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield -- the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch -- Su told the audience at the forum.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Trump, Who Promised To Save TikTok, Threatens To Shut Down TikTok
2025-07-24 22:00:00+00:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Donald Trump vowed to save TikTok before taking office, claiming only he could make a deal to keep the app operational in the US despite national security concerns. But then, he put Vice President JD Vance in charge of the deal, and after months of negotiations, the US still doesn't seem to have found terms for a sale that the Chinese government is willing to approve. Now, Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has confirmed that if China won't approve the latest version of the deal -- which could result in a buggy version of TikTok made just for the US -- the administration is willing to shut down TikTok. And soon.
On Thursday, Lutnick told CNBC that TikTok would stop operating in the US if China and TikTok owner ByteDance won't sell the app to buyers that Trump lined up, along with control over TikTok's algorithm. Under the deal Trump is now pushing, "China can have a little piece or ByteDance, the current owner, can keep a little piece," Lutnick said. "But basically, Americans will have control. Americans will own the technology, and Americans will control the algorithm." However, ByteDance's board has long maintained that the US can alleviate its national security fears -- that China may be using the popular app to manipulate and spy on Americans -- without forcing a sale. In January, a ByteDance board member, Bill Ford, told World Economic Forum attendees that a non-sale option "could involve a change of control locally to ensure" TikTok "complies with US legislation" without selling off the app or its algorithm.
At this point, Lutnick suggested that the US is unwilling to bend on the requirement that the US control the recommendation algorithm, which is viewed as the secret sauce that makes the app so popular globally. ByteDance may be unwilling to sell the algorithm partly because then it would be sharing its core intellectual property with competitors in the US. Earlier this month, Trump had claimed that he wasn't "confident" that China would approve the deal, even though he thought it was "good for China." Analysts have suggested that China views TikTok as a bargaining chip in its tariff negotiations with Trump, which continue to not go smoothly, and it may be OK with the deal but unwilling to release the bargaining chip without receiving key concessions from the US. For now, the US and China are enjoying a 90-day truce that could end in August, about a month before the deadline Trump set to sell TikTok in mid-September.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google URL Shortener Links Will Stop Working Next Month
2025-07-24 21:20:00+00:00
New submitter davecotter writes: So Google's staring at its old goo.gl links and thinking, "Why is this perfectly functioning service still even a thing?" After many businesses and users adopted it like it was the second coming of the way-too-long hyperlink, Google's now decided to yank the plug. Starting August 23, 2024, you'll get a flashy "don't say we didn't warn you" pop-up, and by August 25, 2025, goo.gl links (unless made by Google itself) will vanish into the 404 abyss.
Translation: Thanks for trusting us -- now pack up and find a new shortener.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple Releases Public Betas of Its New Software Updates With Liquid Glass
2025-07-24 20:40:00+00:00
Apple has released the first public betas of its upcoming operating systems with its new design language called Liquid Glass. The list of new betas includes iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26. The Verge's Jay Peters reports: The design language is inspired by visionOS and, as the name implies, features a lot of transparency. I felt it was a wild change to my iPhone when I tried the first developer beta, and Apple has already tweaked some of the translucency and changed how Control Center looks in subsequent betas.
The new operating systems also have an updated numbering scheme: they now all end with 26, taking cues from how the car industry names its cars after the following year. It's a simpler and better system, if you ask me, and it should make it easier to know if you're on the newest software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Starlink Suffers Worldwide Outage
2025-07-24 20:24:00+00:00
Longtime Slashdot reader gbkersey shares a report from The Mirror: Elon Musk's satellite internet Starlink has been hit with a global outage preventing thousands of users from accessing the internet. According to DownDetector, reports of issues began to surge around 8pm GMT, with nearly 60,000 global users affected at the peak of the outage. "Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution," the company said in a post on X. "We appreciate your patience, we'll share an update once this issue is resolved."
Outages are being reported across the U.S., as well as along the Ukrainian frontline. Meanwhile, more than 10,000 people in the UK have logged issues with Starlink since 8pm this evening. "The majority of the reports (64%) are concerning a total blackout, while the rest point to internet problems," the report says.
Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google's New 'Web Guide' Uses AI To Organize the Search Results Page
2025-07-24 20:03:00+00:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Beyond AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google is working on "Web Guide" to better organize Search results into categories with additional context and insights. Simply, "Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways." There are headers and summaries before you see two or so links, with the ability to load "More." The goal is to make it "easier to find information and web pages," with this AI organization better surfacing pages "that you may not have previously discovered."
It leverages a "custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web." It uses a query fan-out technique, like AI Mode, to perform "multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results." Google says Web Guide is ideal for both open-ended searches ("how to solo travel in Japan"), and detailed queries in multiple sentences: "My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?"
In the latter example, grouping will see "pages related to specific aspects of your query." This is available in Search Labs (Web Guide) by going to the "Web" tab/filter. As such, you can switch to "All" for the usual experience. However, Google will experiment with showing AI-organized results in the All tab and other parts of Search over time. Further reading: Google Users Are Less Likely To Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results, Pew Research FindsRead more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft CEO Addresses 'Enigma' of Layoffs
2025-07-24 18:07:00+00:00
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed growing internal unease at the company Thursday morning in a company-wide memo that acknowledged the "uncertainty and seeming incongruence" of conducting layoffs while achieving record profits and AI investments. The tech giant has eliminated more than 15,000 positions in 2025, including 9,000 cuts in early July alone, marking one of the most aggressive periods of job reductions in Microsoft's history.
Nadella described this as the "enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value," noting that Microsoft is thriving by "every objective measure" with strong market performance and record capital investments. "Progress isn't linear. It's dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it's also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before," he added. Microsoft President Brad Smith said that an estimated $80 billion in capital expenditures over the past year created pressure to reduce operating costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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An Inventor Is Injecting Bleach Into Cancerous Tumors - and Wants to Bring the Treatment To the US
2025-07-24 17:25:00+00:00
A Chinese inventor with no medical training is charging cancer patients $20,000 to inject highly concentrated chlorine dioxide -- a toxic bleach solution -- directly into their tumors, and is working with a former pharmaceutical executive to bring the unproven treatment to the United States, Wired reports.
Xuewu Liu uses injections containing 20,000 parts per million of chlorine dioxide, significantly higher than the 3,000 ppm concentrations typically found in oral bleach solutions peddled by pseudoscience promoters. One patient told WIRED her tumor grew faster after Liu's injections and suspects the treatment caused her cancer to spread to her skin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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'Boiling Frog' Effect Makes People Oblivious To Threat of Climate Crisis, Shows Study
2025-07-24 16:44:00+00:00
An anonymous reader shares a report: Surveys show that the increasing number of extreme climate events, including floods, wildfires and hurricanes, has not raised awareness of the threats posed by climate change. Instead, people change their idea of what they see as normal. This so-called "boiling frog effect" makes gradual change difficult to spot.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania wondered if climate change could be made more obvious by presenting it in binary terms. Local newspaper archives describing ice skating on Lake Carnegie when it froze in winter inspired a simple experiment. Some test subjects were shown temperature graphs of a fictional town's winter conditions; others had a chart showing whether or not a fictional lake froze each year. The result, published in Nature, showed those who receiving the second graphic consistently saw climate change as more real and imminent.
Binary data gives a clearer impression of the "before" and "after." The disappearing ice is more vivid and dramatic than a temperature trace, even though the underlying data is the same. "We are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats," says Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study. These results should help drive more effective ways of communicating the impact of climate change in future by finding simple binary, black-and-white examples of its effects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Satellite Imagery and Phone Data Reveal Romance Scam Centers Still Expanding Despite Crackdowns
2025-07-24 16:09:00+00:00
Massive mobile device tracking data has exposed the interconnected network of Myanmar's expanding scam centers, revealing how trafficked workers circulate between compounds despite February crackdowns. Analysis of 4.9 million location records from 11,930 mobile devices between January 2024 and May 2025 showed five devices visited all three major compounds -- Yatai New City, Apolo Park, and Yulong Bay Park -- plus the raided KK Park and Huanya Park facilities.
Workers are forced into romance scams, deceiving victims into believing they're in romantic relationships before extracting money. A South Asian man held six months at KK Park worked 16 hours daily conducting these online deceptions while enduring beatings and electric shocks for poor performance. Nikkei's investigation combined satellite imagery analysis, social media posts from Chinese platform Douyin, and open-source intelligence techniques to document continued construction at eight of 16 suspected sites. Myanmar authorities deported over 66,000 foreign nationals involved in these online fraud operations between October 2023 and June 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NFTs Qualify For Trademark Protection, Ninth Circuit Rules
2025-07-24 15:24:00+00:00
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that NFTs qualify as "goods" under the Lanham Act, entitling them to trademark protection. The decision in Yuga Labs v. Ryder Ripps establishes that brand owners can sue NFT copycats with the same legal tools used against counterfeit sneakers or handbags.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Board Game Crowdfunding Platform Gamefound Acquires Indiegogo
2025-07-24 14:42:00+00:00
Board game crowdfunding platform Gamefound is acquiring Indiegogo, planning to integrate the latter's 38 million global members with its crowdfunding technology. Both platforms will continue operating separately, though Gamefound campaigns will appear on both sites for additional exposure.
Indiegogo will immediately adopt Gamefound's flat 5% fee structure with no additional promotional charges, replacing its current pricing model. The platform will also implement Gamefound's tipping policy that directs 100% of tips to creators outside the checkout process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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