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Flowers, tried six times over 1996 murders of four people, faced execution before supreme court tossed his conviction

Curtis Flowers, a Black man who spent more than 22 years in prison and was on death row in Mississippi before the US supreme court threw out his conviction and death sentence, has died. He was 56.

Flowers’ family confirmed that he died on Wednesday at his home in Mississippi, attorney Rob McDuff told the Associated Press on Thursday.

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Officials clarified execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, army psychiatrist who killed 13 people, will be livestreamed

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. Officials later clarified the execution will be livestreamed and that more details would follow, the Associated Press reported.

In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad would carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.

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De dagelijks uitgezonden reality-spelserie won donderdagavond de belangrijke televisieprijs ten koste van Kassa en Woeste Grond. Presentator Jan Versteegh kreeg ook de Televizier-Ring Presentator.

The FBI announced that it has seized seven web domains linked to hacking tools allegedly operated by a Chinese security firm called Integrity Technology Group and used by Beijing-backed cyber operatives to scan a South Carolina power company's network and other critical infrastructure systems for vulnerabilities. In a subsequent advisory, the FBI and other government agencies in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain warned that Chinese government-linked attackers, enabled by Integrity Tech, are using botnets, malware, and other intrusion tools to target organizations worldwide and steal sensitive data, including from US critical infrastructure networks. “These actors exploit vulnerabilities by using scanning tools, cross-site scripting attacks, and password spraying on Microsoft Exchange servers, while establishing persistence through VPN software and exfiltrating emails and credentials using scripts,” according to the security alert. Based on this activity, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five CVEs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog: CVE-2015-3306 CVE-2015-5477 CVE-2016-3081 CVE-2021-3199 CVE-2023-22894 The court-authorized seizures are the latest in a long series of US law-enforcement attempts to disrupt a Beijing-backed cybercrew called Flax Typhoon and shut down its botnet. From 2021 until its disruption, Flax Typhoon allegedly used a version of this Mirai-based botnet to infect internet-connected devices with malware, scan networks for vulnerabilities, and launch additional cyberattacks, all while hiding the PRC government hackers’ true IP addresses and physical location. The feds allege Integrity Tech developed the botnet and a vulnerability scanner called Microscan, and operated a post-compromise tool called FishHub. The latter allegedly downloaded additional malware to the phishing victims’ networks and stole sensitive data. Court documents, unsealed on Thursday, allege Integrity Tech has contracts with the PRC government, and the feds have long linked Flax Typhoon to the private firm. “Flax Typhoon actors conducted successful computer intrusions against multiple victim entities which had been scanned using the Microscan tool,” according to the court documents. Victims include a university in Hsinchu, Taiwan, that Flax Typhoon compromised in March 2023, and a second university in Puli Township, Taiwan breached in August 2022. “On or about April 26, 2022, and on or about December 29, 2022, Flax Typhoon actors also used the Microscan tool to scan for vulnerabilities on the networks of a U.S. power company based in South Carolina, a multi-national Non-Governmental Organization, Japanese and Polish airports, and at least two Taiwanese critical infrastructure companies in the natural gas and power sectors,” the documents allege. Integrity Tech accessed Microscan through one of the seized domains, c0cc[.]cc. Meanwhile, five of the seized domains, 98aicai[.]com, 98aicode[.]com, outlook3650[.]com, youtubecard[.]com, and linkedinns[.]net, delivered the FishHub malware as recently as March, and infected about 20 Taiwanese universities. “Based on my training and experience I believe the tool was named FishHub because it facilitated phishing activity,” FBI special agent Adam James said in a seizure warrant affidavit. After FishHub downloaded a file onto victims' computers, that file used the five domains to retrieve additional malicious programs and code. The malware created a file listing, searched for specific files, compressed documents, and then exfiltrated the selected files to an attacker-controlled server. This gave Flax Typhoon remote access to compromised networks. In September 2024, the FBI said Integrity Tech and Flax Typhoon tore down their 260,000-device botnet after the FBI and its international pals went after them. As recently as this year, however, both private sector security researchers and Western governments warned that Chinese hackers continue to turn compromised routers and IoT devices into botnets and break into critical networks. In February, operational technology (OT) security provider Dragos said China’s state-sponsored spies haven't let up on their attempts to compromise America's critical infrastructure, and this includes a group whose activity overlaps with Flax Typhoon. This group focuses on gaining long-term access to OT engineering workstations and exfiltrating operational files, and it targets manufacturing, defense, automotive, electric power, oil and gas, and government organizations across the US, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. In April, a 10-country joint advisory warned that basically every Chinese “Typhoon” group is using botnets “strategically, and at scale.” Some of these covert networks are built and maintained by Chinese infosec companies including Integrity Tech, which also controlled and managed the so-called Raptor Train network, the alert said. In late August, the FBI said that it had disrupted a different botnet and seized domains associated with two platforms that Chinese government-backed operatives allegedly used to target NASA, the US Senate, the Department of Energy, and several other government agencies and critical networks. The DOJ subsequently clarified that not all the named organizations had been compromised.®

Nvidia on Thursday scraped together some spare change to commit $1 billion — about 1/60th of its quarterly profits — to funding US scientific discovery over the next five years. The commitment, announced during an event in Washington, DC, aims to support the research and development of AI — or is it "super intelligence" now? — in fields including quantum computing, healthcare, and energy security. Nvidia's choice of technologies is not surprising as it has long aspired to fuse AI and high-performance computing. And while LLM training and inference pay Nvidia's bills, the GPU giant has continued to introduce new CUDA libraries specifically for AI-assisted quantum computing, healthcare, drug discovery, and physics simulation. The initiative is part of the US government's broader Genesis Mission, announced late last year by the Trump administration, which aims to use AI to drive the scientific discoveries necessary to ensure the country's continued technological leadership. The program marks Nvidia's return to US supercomputing in a big way. The Department of Energy's (DoE) last flagship supercomputers powered by Nvidia, Summitand Sierra, were commissioned all the way back in 2018. The A100-based Perlmutter system launched in 2021 is also notable, but fell far short of the older systems. And while Nvidia never stopped building supers for the US government, they tended to be significantly smaller than the massive AMD-based platforms like Frontier and El Capitan. That changed last year when Nvidia revealed it would supply the US government with no fewer than seven new supercomputers across the Argonne, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Argonne will house the 100,000 Blackwell-GPU-based Solstice system. Built in collaboration with Oracle, the machine is largely aimed at emerging AI workloads, which don't depend on ultra-high precision computation and instead can get by with 16, eight or even four bits of precision. That puts Nvidia in a strong position to meet the US government's goals under the Genesis Mission. Over the past few generations of GPUs, Nvidia has traded much of its accelerators' double-precision FP64 grunt in favor of higher throughput at precisions used by more lucrative AI workloads. In the case of its upcoming Vera Rubin platform, Nvidia relies heavily on an FP64 emulation capability based on the Ozaki scheme we looked at in more detail earlier this year. Los Alamos' upcoming Mission and Vision systems will be powered by these same chips and take advantage of Nvidia's Quantum-X800 InfiniBand. FP64 emulation comes with compromises, but for workloads that are predominantly AI-optimized and only occasionally need higher precision, it can be worthwhile for the additional matrix FLOPS. While Nvidia is playing a much bigger role in US scientific computing efforts, it's worth noting that the DoE's biggest super — at least for pure FP64 — will still be powered by AMD. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Discovery system, which is expected to come online 2029 will be built by HPE's Cray division and feature The House of Zen's FP64-optimized MI430X GPUs and Venice CPUs. Discovery is expected to offer peak theoretical performance somewhere between 3.3 and 8.5 exaFLOPS depending on whether or not Oak Ridge gets a facility power upgrade. Meanwhile, China's LineShine leads the Top500 ranking of Earth's mightiest computers. That system made its debut this northern spring with 2.2 exaFLOPS measured out of a 2.7 exaFLOPS of theoretical performance. With Uncle Sam's nose bloodied by China's return to the ranking, Oak Ridge may not have to fight hard for the extra power. ®

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Bassian Thrush (Zoothera lunulata). At the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden in Mount Tomah, NSW Australia.

Amazon Prime Video will become the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards under a six-year deal beginning in 2027, the Television Academy announced on Tuesday. The Emmys will stream live for free to viewers in more than 240 countries and territories without requiring a Prime subscription. From the report: In the release, Prime Video was named as the "permanent home" for the Emmys, in contrast to the rotating agreement in place years prior. The switch ends the traditional "wheel-deal" setup to broadcast the awards, where ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox took turns hosting the Emmys each year. The system has been in place since at least 1994, with the most recent eight-year contract expiring this year. "Television has never been more global, and the Emmys should be a celebration that the world can share," Television Academy chair Cris Abrego said in a statement. "Having a dedicated home with Prime Video allows us to build on that legacy with unprecedented global reach and a broader commitment to the Television Academy and our mission throughout the year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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