The unexpected death of Kevin Mitnick, the first big-name computer hacker, has put his accomplishments back in the spotlight. CC-licensed photo by Campus Party Mexico on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. So it goes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Famed social engineer and hacker Kevin Mitnick dies at 59 • The Register
Liam Proven:
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Kevin Mitnick, probably the world’s most-famous computer hacker – and subsequently writer, public speaker, and security consultant – has succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He was 59.
Tributes have poured in from around the world following the announcement of his death this week.
“We’ve lost a true pioneer of the digital world, Kevin Mitnick,” said Chris Wysopal, a former member of the L0pht team and today an infosec CTO. “His ingenuity challenged systems, incited dialogues, and pushed boundaries in cybersecurity. He will remain a testament to the uncharted power of curiosity.”
Kevin’s wife Kimberley, who is pregnant with their son, said: “Till we see each other again, I know you are here with me. I hear your voice. Our son will know you and I am convinced he will be a mini you. I am grateful we have so many friends all over the world who will teach our son how to hack and more importantly who the real Kevin Mitnick was.”
Mitnick was sometimes known as the Ghost in the Wires after his book of the same name, and was an early celebrity in the area of computer security, as well as a sometime Register contributor. We could hardly introduce him better than he could himself: twenty years ago, we recommended his book the Art of Deception and he generously permitted us to publish its unused autobiographical first chapter.
As a teenager, Mitnick worked out how to obtain free travel on the bus system of the greater Los Angeles area in his native California, and later progressed to breaking into the computer systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Pacific Bell. He served a number of jail sentences even before he made it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He was apprehended in 1998, and served about three years in prison, which he later referred to as a “vacation.” On his release, he was banned from using any form of computer for three years, and even lost his ham radio license, although after a legal battle he won that back.
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Mitnick was the first properly famous hacker; the fact he was indicated how we had moved properly into the computer age in the mid-90s, when the machines were both pervasive, and controlled so much of what we did, but were also accessible to and controllable by the ordinary person – even a teenager. Every hacker whose name ever appeared in a paper owes a minor debt to Mitnick.
I found him charming (as I suppose was his aim) when I spoke to him about his first book, The Art Of Deception – about hacking. He’s a great loss.
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The European heatwave of July 2023 in a longer-term context • Copernicus
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Temperatures for Europe as a whole show long-term warming trends for both annual and seasonal averages. The annual temperature for 2022 was the second warmest on record for Europe, and was 0.3°C cooler than 2020, the warmest year on record. The ten warmest years on record for Europe have all occurred since 2000, and the five warmest years have all occurred since 2014. Summer 2022 was the warmest on record, by a large margin, at 1.4°C above average.
The average temperature over European land was only a little warmer in the early 1980s than it had been a hundred years earlier but has risen sharply over the past forty or so years. The average value for the last five years is around 2.2°C higher than typical values for the latter half of the 19th century. This temperature increase for Europe is about 1°C larger than the corresponding increase for the globe as a whole. Europe has also warmed faster overall than any other continent in recent decades.
European air temperature over land – anomalies for summer (JJA) 1950–2022, relative to the average for the 1991–2020 reference period. Data source: ERA5, E-OBS. Credit: C3S/ECMWF/KNMI.While the current heatwave is expected to last until around 26 July, another period of extreme temperatures may follow if the heat dome persists. C3S seasonal forecasts also predict that well-above-average temperatures are likely to continue across Europe until the end of summer, with the exception of southeastern parts of the continent where large uncertainty leaves the probability for extreme conditions close to average.
“C3S is monitoring the evolution of the season. June was the warmest on record for the globe as a whole, and the first 15 days of July have been the warmest 15 days on record. This means that the chance of having a record-breaking summer for the globe is not remote,” said Carlo Buontempo. “Without a dedicated study we can’t say how much more likely the current heatwave has become as a consequence of climate change, but it could be seen as part of a global pattern.”
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Crypto investors are being robbed in their own homes, Canadian police say • The Block
Yogita Khatri:
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Canadian police have issued a public warning following what appears to be an emerging trend of home invasion-style robberies in the country targeting large crypto investors.
“The suspects appear to know the victims are heavily invested in cryptocurrency, know where they live and are robbing them in their own homes,” Jill Long, staff sergeant of Delta Police Investigative Services, said in a release published Wednesday by Delta Police and Richmond Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Over the past year, several incidents have been reported in Delta and Richmond, where victims were holding “large amounts” of crypto, the police agencies said, without disclosing specific details.
In one case, an arrest has been made, and charges are being recommended. As for suspects’ modus operandi, in each case, they gain entry into victims’ homes by posing as delivery persons or people of authority. Once inside the homes, they seize crucial information that grants access to the victims’ crypto accounts, the police said.
They have asked crypto investors to remain vigilant and take necessary precautions to safeguard themselves and their assets.
Canada is one of the popular nations for growing crypto adoption. The country ranked 22nd in the Global Crypto Adoption Index by Chainalysis in 2022, up from 26th position in 2021 and 24th in 2020.
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Of course, this is the sort of thing that could happen if you owned a large amount of any sort of currency – except that if you were forced to make a bank transfer, you could afterwards call and get the bank to reverse it. (Assuming you’re still alive afterwards.) With crypto, when it’s transferred, it never comes back in any normal circumstance. Maybe being rich isn’t so attractive after all?
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Costly invite? Scientists hit with massive bills after speaking at COVID-19 ‘webinars’ • Science
Michele Catanzaro:
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When Björn Johansson received an email in July 2020 inviting him to speak at an online debate on COVID-19 modeling, he didn’t think twice. “I was interested in the topic and I agreed to participate,” says Johansson, a medical doctor and researcher at the Karolinska Institute. “I thought it was going to be an ordinary academic seminar. It was an easy decision for me.”
Three years later, Johansson has come to regret that decision. The Polish company behind the conference, Villa Europa, claims he still owes them fees for taking part, and is seeking payment through a Swedish court. After adding legal costs and interest to the bill, the company is demanding a whopping €80,000.
Johansson isn’t alone. Dozens of researchers participated in the same series of online conferences on COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 and many have received demands for payment from Villa Europa. At least five are being pursued through courts in their own countries for fees of tens of thousands of euros, although several researchers are fighting back.
But the case is peppered with puzzling circumstances. In court filings and interviews, the researchers say the demands are illegitimate and based on deceptive license agreements. Little is known about the individuals who organized the conferences. And many of the demands hinge on the ruling of a Polish arbitration court whose very existence has been questioned by experts in the country.
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Faked names, unpublished videos, scammy contracts: all the signs of opportunistic grifting are there.
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Revealed: media blitz against heat pumps funded by gas lobby group • DeSmog
Phoebe Cooke:
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Over the past two years, the Energy and Utilities Association (EUA) has paid a public affairs firm to generate hundreds of articles and interviews to lobby the UK government on energy policy.
The PR campaign subjects heat pumps to intense criticism. Powered by electricity, heat pumps are currently set to play a key role in decarbonising heating and replacing gas boilers, which heat around 85% of Britain’s homes and account for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.
Negative stories about electric heat pumps have featured in outlets such as The Sun, Telegraph and The Express, in which damning headlines dub the technology “Soviet-style”, “financially irrational” as well as “costly and noisy”. Broadcast media has amplified similar messages on BBC 2’s Newsnight, LBC, TalkTV and GB News.
The company driving this coverage is the Birmingham-based WPR Agency, which was hired by the EUA to deliver an “integrated PR and social media campaign” to “help change the direction of government policy”.
On its website WPR said it aimed to “spark outrage” around heat pumps. This wording, along with other phrases, has since been altered to read “spark conversations” following a request for comment on this article from DeSmog.
The group has since lobbied to delay government plans to ramp up heat pump installation targets in a consultation that closed in June.
WPR’s campaign also explicitly promotes hydrogen as a viable fuel for domestic heating. While favoured by the gas and installers industry as it can flow along existing infrastructure, neither the UN’s leading climate body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or 32 recently reviewed independent studies see a major role for hydrogen in decarbonizing homes.
Much of the media coverage about heat pumps features Mike Foster, a former Labour MP and the chief executive of the Energy and Utilities Association trade body. According to the group, its members carry out around 98% of the UK’s heating installations. The vast majority of these are for gas boilers, though some of its members have also branched out into heat pumps.
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Great journalism. A hydrogen trial was abandoned earlier this week: it just doesn’t work.
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‘Major wake up call’: Vattenfall halts 1.4GW offshore wind farm project over cost fears • BusinessGreen News
Stuart Stone:
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Swedish energy giant Vattenfall has today announced it is halting the development of its 1.4GW Norfolk Boreas offshore wind project and reviewing further projects planned for its Norfolk Zone that were expected to power up to four million homes.
In its interim report for January to June 2023, Vattenfall revealed that project costs have risen by up to 40% on the back of soaring materials and labour costs. As such, it stated that it would “not take an investment decision now” on the project and confirmed its decision will trigger an impairment cost of 5.5 billion Swedish crowns, or roughly £415m.
The Norfolk Boreas project is expected to provide power for up to 1.5 million homes and would be the first of three east coast wind farms planned by the company. The project was last year awarded a Contract for Difference (CfD) guaranteeing a £37.35/MWh fixed price for its electricity over its first 15 years – equating to around £45/MWh today.
However, subsequent inflation and rising interest rates have led to concerns across the industry that a number of planned offshore wind projects may no longer prove profitable at the contract prices that were previously agreed through the CfD auction process.
Anna Borg, chief executive at Vattenfall, this morning confirmed that current “market conditions” left the company with little choice but to pause the project.
“Offshore wind is essential for affordable, secure and clean electricity, and it is a key element of Vattenfall’s strategy for fossil-free living,” she said. “But conditions are extremely challenging across the whole industry right now, with a supply chain squeeze, increasing prices and cost of capital, and fiscal frameworks not reflecting current market realities.”
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This comes just as the government is giving an estimated £500m in various subsidies to (foreign-owned, a subsidiary of India’s Tata Motors) Jaguar Landrover to build a battery factory in the UK rather than Spain. Very much about priorities, isn’t it.
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Of Course Apple Has an LLM AI Chatbot in the Works, and of Course the Bloomberg Report Revealing Its Code Name Mentions How the Story Moved the Company’s Stock Price • Daring Fireball
John Gruber, on the Bloomberg story about the Apple chatbot:
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Next paragraph [in the Bloomberg story]:
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Apple shares gained as much as 2.3% to a record high of $198.23 after Bloomberg reported on the AI effort Wednesday, rebounding from earlier losses. Microsoft Corp., OpenAI’s partner and main backer, slipped about 1% on the news.
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If you ever notice, Bloomberg news stories always contain updates like this. It’s an obsession unique to Bloomberg. My understanding is that this decade-old Business Insider story remains true: Bloomberg reporters are evaluated and receive bonuses tied to reporting market-moving news. They’re incentivized financially to make mountains out of molehills, and craters out of divots, to maximize the immediate effect of their reporting on stock prices. And Bloomberg appends these stock price movements right there in their reports, to drive home the notion that Bloomberg publishes market-moving news, so maybe you too should spend over $2,000 per month on a Bloomberg Terminal so that you can receive news reports from Bloomberg minutes before the general public, and buy, sell, and short stocks based on that news. No other news organization I’m aware of has an incentive system like this for reporters — but no other news organization has a business like the Bloomberg Terminal.
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That’s absolutely astonishing. I hadn’t heard about this incentive scheme, but as the linked BI story points out, it worries traders because it creates an obvious incentive for reporters to stretch a story in order to move the stock. Talk about misaligned incentives. Incredible that American journalists, normally the most po-faced of all, would tolerate it.
By the way, my hurried calculation yesterday about the effect of the announcement on Apple’s value was wrong by a factor of 100: as Jonathan B pointed out, “If Apple is worth $3trn and jumps 2%, that’s $60bn, not $600m. A billion here, a billion there etc…” Imagine if the reporters got a bonus proportionate to the unsigned value change..
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Google tests AI tool that can write news articles • New York Times
Benjamin Mullin and Nico Grant:
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Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.
One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.
Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.
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What a strange phrase – “it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories”. I take it that refers to Google, rather than the tool itself, but I’m not even sure what is meant. If you’re offering a tool that writes news stories, surely you’re implying that the effort by human of writing news stories is in fact largely wasted.
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Something in space has been lighting up every 20 minutes since 1988. But we have no idea what • Ars Technica
John Timmer:
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GPM J1839–10 was discovered in a search of the galactic plane for transient objects—something that’s not there when you first look, but appears the next time you check. The typical explanation for a transient object is something like a supernova, where a major event gives something an immense boost in brightness. They’re found at the radio end of the spectrum—fast radio bursts—but are also very brief, and so fairly difficult to spot.
In any case, GPM J1839–10 showed up in the search in a rather unusual way: it appeared as a transient item twice in the same night of observation. Rather than delivering a short burst of immense energy, such as a fast radio burst, GPM J1839–10 was much lower energy and spread out over a 30-second-long burst.
Follow-on observations showed that the object repeated pretty regularly, with a periodicity of about 1,320 seconds (more commonly known as 22 minutes). There’s a window of about 400 seconds centered on that periodicity, and a burst can appear anywhere within the window and will last anywhere from 30 to 300 seconds. While active, the intensity of GPM J1839–10 can vary, with lots of sub-bursts within the main signal. Occasionally, a window will also go by without any bursts.
A search through archival data showed that signals had been detected at the site as far back as 1988. So, whatever is producing this signal is not really a transient, in the sense that the phenomenon that’s producing these bursts isn’t a one-time-only event.
The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior is short and consists of precisely zero items.
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Pulsar? Nah. Neutron star? Nah. Something else? Clearly, but nobody knows quite what. Though there may be many more of these mystery things out there, as Timmer explains.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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