How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People. No surprise: it became much more negative, less affirming/protective and more skeptical/restrictive.
Ancient Slashdot reader Mark Round writes: Longtime reader here (since mid-1999 -- Hot Grits! Oog the Caveman! Beowulf clusters!), and I can still remember posting back on Slashdot's own 5th anniversary. Time's rolled on: my own blog just turned 25, and it's now roughly 40 years since I first sat down at a computer. So I went digging through archive.org, old backups, and a box of ZIP disks, and wrote up a long look back at four decades of computing through the one website that's been my online home along the way. It runs from my first 8-bit micro and a 1,200-baud modem through discovering the actual Internet at university (and burning far too many hours on Slashdot and sister sites like freshmeat.net), past gloriously pimped-out Enlightenment Linux desktops, all the way to the modern cloud-native world. Plenty of dodgy screenshots, terrible code, and fond memories of long-gone haunts like kuro5hin.org and Linux Coffee Talk along the way.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft, its friends, and international law enforcement - with an AI assist - disrupted two widely used pieces of malware and their infrastructure, in what Redmond describes as a novel approach to cybercrime disruption that targets the cyberattack supply chain instead of a single tool or service. “What’s new is how we’re combining AI analysis with an expanded use of that law,” Steven Masada, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, said in a Wednesday blog, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Typically Microsoft uses RICO and other US laws to take legal action against a single cybercrime service or infrastructure. The disruption involved the takedown, suspension, and blocking of more than 200 domains and command-and-control (C2) servers that formed the backbone of StealC and Amadey infrastructure. Multiple security companies, including ESET, BitSight, Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions (MBSD), IBM X-Force, and Proofpoint, also played a role in dismantling the alleged operations. Combined with the earlier SocGholish disruption announced last week, a Europol-led law enforcement coalition flagged and restricted cryptocurrency assets valued at more than $47 million and recovered about 27 million stolen credentials. StealC and Amadey are two separate malwares developed by different criminal crews, but they used the same infrastructure and were operating in concert. StealC collects multiple browser credentials and cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, chats from messaging apps, and other sensitive data, and exfiltrates the stolen goods to a C2 server. It also works as a secondary loader, allowing criminals who rent the stealer to download additional malware on compromised devices. Amadey is a malware-as-a-service used to deliver StealC and other stealers, plus other types of malware including remote access trojans, cryptominers, and ransomware. In just the first two weeks of May, Amadey and StealC were linked to more than 140,000 infected computers globally, according to Microsoft. “It’s no longer enough to go after threats one by one,” said Masada. “We need to interrupt how the attacks are put together.” In this case, Redmond’s investigators used Copilot and other AI tools to analyze both malwares and their infrastructure, “asking questions in plain English instead of manually combing through complex code,” Masada wrote. “That helped surface key details, uncover hidden data, and test findings in a fraction of the time, turning what would have taken hours or days into minutes and enabling the team to spot connections faster.” One of these key details: both Amadey and StealC used the same infrastructure. This allowed Redmond’s legal team to treat both malwares as part of a single conspiracy under RICO and bring civil claims against five defendants allegedly involved across both operations. “Defendants comprise a group of cybercriminals operating a Malware as a Service enterprise that leverages malicious software commonly known as the Amadey Malware Suite and StealC Malware Suite (the "MaaS Enterprise"),” the court documents say. “Through the Maas Enterprise, Defendants and their accomplices have victimized hundreds of thousands of innocent computer users, including many users of Microsoft's software and services.” ®
Keir Starmer came to power without a strategic concept of post-Brexit Britain’s place in the world. His successor must not repeat that mistake
Sir Keir Starmer had years in opposition to prepare for government. His likely successor, Andy Burnham, has weeks. Unlike the outgoing prime minister, Mr Burnham will bring past ministerial experience to the top job as well as lessons learned as the mayor of Greater Manchester. But as every veteran of No 10 attests, the pressures in that building – the intensity and unpredictability of events – are like nothing else.
To take office without clear priorities or a sense of how to drive an agenda through the machinery of government is a recipe for drift and loss of control, bouncing from one crisis to the next. That was Sir Keir’s fate. His failure to use the run-up to power more fruitfully accounts in large part for the truncation of his tenure.
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Continue reading...Deutsche Bahn widely criticised after hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded in operator’s latest setback
Germany’s rail network ground to a halt late on Tuesday as a result of maintenance work that went wrong, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers unable to get home as the national operator faced widespread criticism over the chaos.
The Deutsche Bahn (DB) meltdown was initially thought to have been caused by a cyber-attack, but it later emerged that it was likely to have been triggered by a scheduled attempt to replace an ageing component in the railway’s internal communication network, without which the trains are unable to run.
Continue reading...Woman detained at airport after allegedly making racist remarks directed at workers unloading baggage, police say
Brazil’s federal police have detained a Spanish citizen in São Paulo’s international Guarulhos airport for racism, in the latest of a series of high-profile arrests of foreign tourists on similar grounds.
Brazil has some of the strictest anti-racism laws in Latin America. Insulting a person on the basis of race carries a penalty of imprisonment from two to five years and a fine.
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