China Accuses the NSA of Hacking a Top University To Steal Data

hackingbear shares a report from Gizmodo: China claims that America’s National Security Agency used sophisticated cyber tools to hack into an elite research university on Chinese soil. The attack allegedly targeted the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an (not to be confused with a California school of the same name), which is highly ranked in the global university index for its science and engineering programs. The U.S. Justice Department has referred to the school as a “Chinese military university that is heavily involved in military research and works closely with the People’s Liberation Army,” painting it as a reasonable target for digital infiltration from an American perspective.

China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) recently published a report attributing the hack to the Tailored Access Operations group (TAO) — an elite team of NSA hackers which first became publicly known via the Snowden Leaks back in 2013, helps the U.S. government break into networks all over the world for the purposes of intelligence gathering and data collection. [CVERC identified 41 TAO tools involved in the case.] One such tool, dubbed ‘Suctionchar,’ is said to have helped infiltrate the school’s network by stealing account credentials from remote management and file transfer applications to hijack logins on targeted servers. The report also mentions the exploitation of Bvp47, a backdoor in Linux that has been used in previous hacking missions by the Equation Group — another elite NSA hacking team. According to CVERC, traces of Suctionchar have been found in many other Chinese networks besides Northwestern’s, and the agency has accused the NSA of launching more than 10,000 cyberattacks on China over the past several years.

On Sunday, the allegations against the NSA were escalated to a diplomatic complaint. Yang Tao, the director-general of American affairs at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published a statement affirming the CVERC report and claiming that the NSA had “seriously violated the technical secrets of relevant Chinese institutions and seriously endangered the security of China’s critical infrastructure, institutions and personal information, and must be stopped immediately.”

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EA Announces Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat System For PC Games

Electronics Arts (EA) is launching a new kernel-level anti-cheat system that’s been developed in-house to protect its games from tampering and cheaters. It’ll debut first in FIFA 23 but not all of its games will implement the system. The Verge reports: Kernel-level anti-cheat systems have drawn criticism from privacy and security advocates, as the drivers these systems use are complex and run at such a high level that if there are security issues, then developers have to be very quick to address them. EA says kernel-level protection is “absolutely vital” for competitive games like FIFA 23, as existing cheats operate in the kernel space, so games running in regular user mode can’t detect that tampering or cheating is occurring. “Unfortunately, the last few years have seen a large increase in cheats and cheat techniques operating in kernel-mode, so the only reliable way to detect and block these is to have our anti-cheat operate there as well,” explains [Elise Murphy, senior director of game security and anti-cheat at EA].

EA’s anti-cheat system will run at the kernel level and only runs when a game with EAAC protection is running. EA says its anti-cheat processes shut down once a game does and that the anti-cheat will be limited to what data it collects on a system. “EAAC does not gather any information about your browsing history, applications that are not connected to EA games, or anything that is not directly related to anti-cheat protection,” says Murphy.

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iOS 16 To Gain ‘Clean Energy Charging’ Option Later This Year

Coinbase Exec’s Brother Pleads Guilty In Crypto Insider Trading Case

Nikhil Wahi, brother of former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi, pleaded guilty in a Monday hearing to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with an alleged insider trading scheme. Decrypt reports: “Less than two months after he was charged, Nikhil Wahi admitted in court today that he traded in crypto assets based on Coinbase’s confidential business information to which he was not entitled,” said Damien Williams of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York in a statement. “For the first time ever, a defendant has admitted his guilt in an insider trading case involving the cryptocurrency markets,” Williams continued. “Today’s guilty plea should serve as a reminder to those who participate in the cryptocurrency markets that the Southern District of New York will continue to steadfastly police frauds of all stripes and will adapt as technology evolves.”

Nikhil now awaits sentencing in December, which could mean up to 20 years in prison. He has also been ordered to give back the money earned as a result of the illicit Coinbase trading, Williams said. Back in July, the Justice Department charged Ishan, Nikhil, and their friend Sameer Ramani with wire fraud conspiracy and wire fraud as it relates to cryptocurrency insider trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission also filed charges against the trio. While he was working at Coinbase, Ishan allegedly shared his insider knowledge of upcoming Coinbase listing announcements with Nikhil and Sameer to then profit from the listings by purchasing the tokens before they went live on Coinbase. In August, Ishan pled not guilty to the DOJ’s charges. Now that his brother has pleaded guilty, it’s unclear how Ishan’s case will proceed and whether he will continue to fight the insider trading case.

According to the DOJ’s statement released Monday, Nikhil implicated his brother Ishan and admitted to receiving tips from him. Nikhil then reportedly used numerous different crypto wallets in others’ names to anonymize his insider trading. Concerns of insider trading at cryptocurrency exchanges extend beyond just this case, which is considered the first of its kind and is likely to set a precedent. Three Australian finance academics have posited that up to 25% of Coinbase listings in the past four years may have involved some insider trading.

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Uber Eats Will Begin Using Nuro Delivery Robots

Autonomous tech developer Nuro is teaming up with Uber Eats in a long-awaited partnership that will see the company’s latest robot take over the delivery of food to app users. Autoweek reports: The two companies signed a 10-year contract just a few days ago, paving the way for a wider rollout of Nuro’s driverless delivery robots, which have been operating on a limited scale in several cities. The partnership will kick off slowly, with Nuro deploying its robots to Houston and Mountain View, California, as a start, before the service makes a wider debut in the Bay Area.

Perhaps more importantly, Nuro’s delivery robots will allow Uber Eats to not have to pay a human driver, which is something that company has been working toward for years as part of its primary business as well. However, the lagging development of Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy, once widely expected to arrive around 2020, had stalled ambitions for Uber, which has struggled with profitability through normal operations with independent contractor drivers. Nuro delivery robots enjoyed renewed interest from business partners in the early months of the pandemic, but the company’s technology is now being viewed as a cost saver for operators rather than a method of more sanitary delivery.

Of course, a limited rollout in two cities plus plans to launch in the Bay Area won’t transform Uber Eats’ business model overnight. This could take years even with an unlimited supply of Nuro delivery robots — with regulatory approval still being the major impediment. That’s because commercial driverless permits are granted on a state-by-state basis, in addition to city and county approvals, which were hard enough for Nuro to obtain in the Bay Area, where Level 4 robotaxis are being tested. Nuro will need to focus its efforts in those areas where traffic is suitable for its robots.

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Comcast Starts Rolling Out 2-Gigabyte Download Speeds to Millions of US Homes

Comcast says it’s “evolving its entire network architecture” (along with its equipment and customer devices) — and it’s not just a multi-gig network. They’re calling it America’s fastest — and its largest. It’s being rolled out “immediately” to millions of homes and business, “combined with up to 5x-to-10x faster upload speeds.”

“Comcast plans on bringing multi-gig internet speeds to 34 cities across the U.S. by the end of this year,” reports the Verge, “and will later expand its reach to more than 50 million households by the end of 2025.”

According to a press release, the company has already started rolling out 2-gig speeds over its broadband network in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Augusta, Georgia; Panama City Beach, Florida; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Customers in these cities will also get to take advantage of upload speeds that Comcast says are five to 10 times faster than what it currently offers. The upload speeds appear to max out at 200Mbps, even with the new Gigabit x2 plan, but Comcast intends to change that. It’s launching multi-gig symmetrical speeds next year, which will enable multi-gig speeds for both downloads and uploads.
“As part of this initiative, Comcast is accelerating the transformation of its network to a virtualized cloud-based architecture that is fully prepared for 10G and DOCSIS 4.0…” explains the press release, “which will deliver multi-gig symmetrical speeds over the connections already installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses.”

The big advantage of digital network technology is “rather than maintaining, updating, and replacing traditional analog network appliances by hand — which can take days or even weeks — Comcast engineers can reliably maintain, troubleshoot, and upgrade core network components almost instantly, with a few keystrokes on a laptop or mobile app. This also makes the network much more energy efficient and is an important element of Comcast’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2035.”

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Does Computer Programming Really Help Kids Learn Math?

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

A new study on the Impact of Programming on Primary Mathematics Learning (abstract only, full article $24.95 on ScienceDirect) is generating some buzz on Twitter amongst K-12 CS educator types. It concluded that:

1. Programming did not benefit mathematics learning compared to traditional activities
2. There’s a negative though small effect of programming on mathematics learning
3. Mindful “high-road transfer” from programming to mathematics is not self-evident
4. Visual programming languages might distract students from mathematics activities

From the Abstract: “The aim of this study is to investigate whether a programming activity might serve as a learning vehicle for mathematics acquisition in grades four and five…. Classes were randomly assigned to the programming (with Scratch) and control conditions. Multilevel analyses indicate negative effects (effect size range 0.16 to 0.21) of the programming condition for the three mathematical notions.

“A potential explanation of these results is the difficulties in the transfer of learning from programming to mathematics.” The findings of the new study come 4+ years after preliminary results were released from the $1.5M 2015-2019 NSF-funded study Time4CS, a “partnership between Broward County Public Schools (FL), researchers at the University of Chicago, and [tech-bankrolled] Code.org,” which explored whether learning CS using Code.org’s CS Fundamentals curriculum may be linked to improved learning in math at the grade 3-5 level. Time4CS researchers concluded that the “quasi-experimental” study showed that “No significant differences in Florida State Assessment mathematics scores resulted between treatment and comparison groups.”

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Breakthrough: Air Pollution/Cancer Research Challenges the Science on Tumors

“Scientists have uncovered how air pollution causes lung cancer,” reports the Guardian, “in groundbreaking research that promises to rewrite our understanding of the disease.”

The BBC is calling it “a discovery that completely transforms our understanding of how tumours arise.”

The team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed that rather than causing damage, air pollution was waking up old damaged cells. One of the world’s leading experts, Prof Charles Swanton, said the breakthrough marked a “new era”. And it may now be possible to develop drugs that stop cancers forming.

The findings could explain how hundreds of cancer-causing substances act on the body. The classical view of cancer starts with a healthy cell. It acquires more and more mutations in its genetic code, or DNA, until it reaches a tipping point. Then it becomes a cancer and grows uncontrollably…. The researchers have produced evidence of a different idea. The damage is already there in our cell’s DNA, picked up as we grow and age, but something needs to pull the trigger that actually makes it cancerous….

Around one in every 600,000 cells in the lungs of a 50-year-old already contains potentially cancerous mutations. These are acquired as we age but appear completely healthy until they are activated by the chemical alarm and become cancerous. Crucially, the researchers were able to stop cancers forming in mice exposed to air pollution by using a drug that blocks the alarm signal.
The results are a double breakthrough, both for understanding the impact of air pollution and the fundamentals of how we get cancer.

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New Avatar Movie and Star Wars TV Trailers Revealed at D23 Conference

CNET reveals some Star Wars news shared at Disney’s three-day “D23 Expo.”

Fans were probably most thrilled by the reveal of a new Mandalorian trailer for the upcoming third season of the hit show that brought us Baby Yoda in all his cuteness… Lucasfilm also dropped a final trailer for upcoming Disney Plus series Andor. Diego Luna plays Cassian Andor as he’s recruited into the rebellion against the Empire. The show takes place five years before the events of Rogue One.

And the studio presented a trailer for Tales of the Jedi, which offers six original shorts about Ahsoka and Dooku, and arrives October 26. Fans also got a glimpse, though not a trailer, showing Jude Law, who’s starring in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, a story about a group of younglings lost in space.

Also revealed was a “developer update” trailer for the upcoming mobile game Avatar: Reckoning, as part of the news about other franchises:

James Cameron called in to the event from New Zealand to discuss Avatar: The Way of Water, and the crowd was given 3D glasses to watch some breathtaking footage [from] Cameron’s long-awaited sequel… ahead of its December 16 release.

An exclusive clip from The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania featured Kang holding Cassie Lang hostage and trying to force Scott to steal something for him. Also featured: Bill Murray!

Samuel L. Jackson returns as Nick Fury in a new Disney Plus show called Secret Invasion, where Fury and friends (Oscar-winner Olivia Colman among them!) takes on shape-changing Skrulls. The trailer looks intense.”

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NASA Makes RISC-V the Go-to Ecosystem for Future Space Missions

SiFive is the first company to produce a chip implementing the RISC-V ISA.

They’ve now been selected to provide the core CPU for NASA’s next generation High-Performance Spaceflight Computing processor (or HSPC).

HPSC is expected to be used in virtually every future space mission, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions.

HPSC will utilize an 8-core, SiFive® Intelligenceâ X280 RISC-V vector core, as well as four additional SiFive RISC-V cores, to deliver 100x the computational capability of today’s space computers. This massive increase in computing performance will help usher in new possibilities for a variety of mission elements such as autonomous rovers, vision processing, space flight, guidance systems, communications, and other applications….

The SiFive X280 is a multi-core capable RISC-V processor with vector extensions and SiFive Intelligence Extensions and is optimized for AI/ML compute at the edge. The X280 is ideal for applications requiring high-throughput, single-thread performance while under significant power constraints. The X280 has demonstrated a 100x increase in compute capabilities compared to today’s space computers..

In scientific and space workloads, the X280 provides several orders of magnitude improvement compared to competitive CPU solutions.

A business development executive at SiFive says their X280 core “demonstrates orders of magnitude performance gains over competing processor technology,” adding that the company’s IP “allows NASA to take advantage of the support, flexibility, and long-term viability of the fast-growing global RISC-V ecosystem.

“We’ve always said that with SiFive the future has no limits, and we’re excited to see the impact of our innovations extend well beyond our planet.”
And their announcement stresses that open hardware is a win for everybody:

The open and collaborative nature of RISC-V will allow the broad academic and scientific software development community to contribute and develop scientific applications and algorithms, as well optimizing the many math functions, filters, transforms, neural net libraries, and other software libraries, as part of a robust and long-term software ecosystem.

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