An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Former president Donald Trump'sTruth Social, a shameless Twitter clone, is set to become a publicly traded company as soon as next week. Shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. voted on Friday to merge with Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. The vote is a culmination of a years-long saga attempting to merge Trump Media with a publicly traded company in what's known as a SPAC deal. The company will trade under the ticker DJT once it goes public. [...] Truth Social looks nearly identical to Twitter, with some key distinctions. Instead of "tweeting," users post a "truth." A "retweet" is called a "retruth." Unlike many right-wing Twitter clones, the site functions well, has remained mostly online, and actually appears to have a somewhat active user base. But since launching in February 2022, after Trump was kicked off of mainstream platforms for inciting violence during the January 6 riot at the Capitol, the company has been mired in controversy.

Instagram has been limiting recommended political content by default without notifying users. Ars Technica reports: Instead, Instagram rolled out the change in February, announcing in a blog that the platform doesn't "want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don't follow." That post confirmed that Meta "won't proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads," so that those platforms can remain "a great experience for everyone." "This change does not impact posts from accounts people choose to follow; it impacts what the system recommends, and people can control if they want more," Meta's spokesperson Dani Lever told Ars. "We have been working for years to show people less political content based on what they told us they want, and what posts they told us are political."

To change the setting, users can navigate to Instagram's menu for "settings and activity" in their profiles, where they can update their "content preferences." On this menu, "political content" is the last item under a list of "suggested content" controls that allow users to set preferences for what content is recommended in their feeds. There are currently two options for controlling what political content users see. Choosing "don't limit" means "you might see more political or social topics in your suggested content," the app says. By default, all users are set to "limit," which means "you might see less political or social topics." "This affects suggestions in Explore, Reels, Feed, Recommendations, and Suggested Users," Instagram's settings menu explains. "It does not affect content from accounts you follow. This setting also applies to Threads." "Did [y'all] know Instagram was actively limiting the reach of political content like this?!" an X user named Olayemi Olurin wrote in an X post. "I had no idea 'til I saw this comment and I checked my settings and sho nuff political content was limited."

"This is actually kinda wild that Instagram defaults everyone to this," another user wrote. "Obviously political content is toxic but during an election season it's a little weird to just hide it from everyone?"

In a Threads post today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. With the feature enabled, Threads users will be able to cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon. The Verge reports: Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum. As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to "search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server."

There are still a few limitations, though. The beta currently doesn't let users view replies and follows from the fediverse, for example. Meta also can't promise that when you delete a federated post on Threads, it will also get deleted on the other platforms it was shared on.

Neuralink, the brain-chip startup founded by Elon Musk, showed its first patient using his mind to play online chess. Reuters reports: Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments. I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues." "I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday appeared skeptical of a challenge on free speech grounds to how President Joe Biden's administration encouraged social media platforms to remove posts that federal officials deemed misinformation, including about elections and COVID-19. From a report: The justices heard oral arguments in the administration's appeal of a lower court's preliminary injunction constraining how White House and certain other federal officials communicate with social media platforms. The Republican-led states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with five individual social media users, sued the administration.

They argued that the government's actions violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment free speech rights of users whose posts were removed from platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, now called X. The case tests whether the administration crossed the line from mere communication and persuasion to strong arming or coercing platforms - sometimes called "jawboning" - to unlawfully censor disfavored speech, as lower courts found.

Soon you might be able to compete in games against friends and colleagues and even the office next door on LinkedIn. From a report: The Microsoft-owned company is reportedly planning to add a new game experience to the platform. According to TechCrunch, the experience is designed to tap into the same popularity of games like Wordle. Players' scores will be sorted by their workplace and ranked, allowing you to take on another office or even across the country. App researcher Nima Owji posted photos of the gaming experience on Twitter/X on Saturday. A representative from LinkedIn confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is working on adding puzzle-based games to the LinkedIn experience as a way to "unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Apex Legends Global Series is currently in regional finals mode, but the North America finals have been delayed after two players were hacked mid-match. First, Noyan "Genburten" Ozkose of DarkZero suddenly found himself able to see other players through walls, then Phillip "ImperialHal" Dosen of TSM was given an aimbot. Genburten's hack happened part of the way through the day's third match. A Twitch clip of the moment shows the words "Apex hacking global series by Destroyer2009 & R4ndom" repeating over chat as he realizes he's been given a cheat and takes his hands off the controls. "I can see everyone!" he says, before leaving the match.

ImperialHal was hacked in the game immediately after that. "I have aimbot right now!" he shouts in a clip of the moment, before declaring "I can't shoot." Though he continued attempting to play out the round, the match was later abandoned. The volunteers at the Anti-Cheat Police Department have since issued a PSA announcing, "There is currently an RCE exploit being abused in [Apex Legends]" and that it could be delivered via from the game itself, or its anti-cheat protection. "I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles", they went on to say.

As for players of the tournament, they strongly recommended taking protective measures. "It is advisable that you change your Discord passwords and ensure that your emails are secure. also enable MFA for all your accounts if you have not done it yet", they said, "perform a clean OS reinstall as soon as possible. Do not take any chances with your personal information, your PC may have been exposed to a rootkit or other malicious software that could cause further damage." The rest of the series has now been postponed, "Due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised," as the official Twitter account announced. They finished by saying, "We will share more information soon."

Published scientific papers include language that appears to have been generated by AI-tools like ChatGPT, showing how pervasive the technology has become, and highlighting longstanding issues with some peer-reviewed journals. From a report: Searching for the phrase "As of my last knowledge update" on Google Scholar, a free search tool that indexes articles published in academic journals, returns 115 results. The phrase is often used by OpenAI's ChatGPT to indicate when the data the answer it is giving users is coming from, and the specific months and years found in these academic papers correspond to previous ChatGPT "knowledge updates."

"As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, there is no widely accepted scientific correlation between quantum entanglement and longitudinal scalar waves," reads a paper titled "Quantum Entanglement: Examining its Nature and Implications" published in the "Journal of Material Sciences & Manfacturing [sic] Research," a publication that claims it's peer-reviewed. Over the weekend, a tweet showing the same AI-generated phrase appearing in several scientific papers went viral.

Most of the scientific papers I looked at that included this phrase are small, not well known, and appear to be "paper mills," journals with low editorial standards that will publish almost anything quickly. One publication where I found the AI-generated phrase, the Open Access Research Journal of Engineering and Technology, advertises "low publication charges," an "e-certificate" of publication, and is currently advertising a call for papers, promising acceptance within 48 hours and publication within four days.

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.")

Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world."

From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...."

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

"The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs."
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.
Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution.

"If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

sixoh1 writes: On the third attempt, SpaceX's Super Heavy booster lofted the Starship vehicle to space on a sub-orbital parabolic trajectory. The test was successful for nearly all of the objectives, including payload delivery functions on Starship that will be used for Starlink deployment and in-space fuel transfers. Unfortunately the booster did not soft-land, and the Starship vehicle was destroyed during re-entry, likely due to unspecified issues with re-starting the Raptor engine and then maintaining attitude control during re-entry. You can watch Starship's third flight test here.

New emails from before the launch of the Epic Games Store in 2018 show just how angry Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was with the "assholes" at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing "the little guy" with what he saw as inflated fees. "The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire's price-fixing case against Valve (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are 'no longer justifiable,'" writes Ars Technica's Kyle Orland. "They also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fury Sweeney and Epic would unleash against Apple in court proceedings starting years later. From the report: The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017 (PDF), starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is "anything we [are] doing to annoy you?" That query was likely prompted by Sweeney's public tweets at the time questioning "why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB." Later in the same thread, he laments that "the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here's Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc." Expanding on these public thoughts in a private response to Newell, Sweeney allows that there was "a good case" for Steam's 30 percent platform fee "in the early days." But he also argues that the fee is too high now that Steam's sheer scale has driven down operating costs and made it harder for individual games to get as much marketing or user acquisition value from simply being available on the storefront.

Sweeney goes on to spitball some numbers showing how Valve's fees are contributing to the squeeze all but the biggest PC game developers were feeling on their revenues: "If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1,000 than the developer themselves made. These guys are our engine customers and we talk to them all the time. Valve takes 30% for distribution; they have to spend 30% on Facebook/Google/Twitter [user acquisition] or traditional marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. So, the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990's." Based on experience with Fortnite and Paragon, Sweeney estimates that the true cost of distribution for PC games that sell for $25 or more in Western markets "is under 7% of gross." That's only slightly lower than the 12 percent take Epic would establish for its own Epic Games Store the next year.

The second email chain (PDF) revealed in the lawsuit started in November 2018, with Sweeney offering Valve a heads-up on the impending launch of the Epic Games Store that would come just weeks later. While that move was focused on PC and Mac games, Sweeney quickly pivots to a discussion of Apple's total control over iOS, the subject at the time of a lawsuit whose technicalities were being considered by the Supreme Court. Years before Epic would bring its own case against Apple, Sweeney was somewhat prescient, noting that "Apple also has the resources to litigate and delay any change [to its total App Store control] for years... What we need right now is enough developer, press, and platform momentum to steer Apple towards fully opening up iOS sooner rather than later." To that end, Sweeney attempted to convince Valve that lowering its own platform fees would hurt Apple's position and thereby contribute to the greater good: "A timely move by Valve to improve Steam economics for all developers would make a great difference in all of this, clearly demonstrating that store competition leads to better rates for all developers. Epic would gladly speak in support of such a move anytime!"

In a follow-up email on December 3, just days before the Epic Games Store launch, Sweeney took Valve to task more directly for its policy of offering lower platform fees for the largest developers on Steam. He offered some harsh words for Valve while once again begging the company to serve as a positive example in the developing case against Apple: "Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people. We're all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?" After being forwarded the message by Valve's Erik Johnson, Valve COO Scott Lynch simply offered up a sardonic "You mad bro?"

At this year's SXSW festival, discussions on artificial intelligence's future sparked controversy during screenings of premiers like "The Fall Guy" and "Immaculate." Variety reports: The quick-turnaround video editors at SXSW cut a daily sizzle reel highlighting previous panels, premieres and other events, which then runs before festival screenings. On Tuesday, the fourth edition of that daily video focused on the wide variety of keynotes and panelists in town to discuss AI. Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount -- many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI -- decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.

Those boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI's VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human." That is not a popular opinion. Deng participated in the session "AI and Humanity's Co-evolution with Open AI's Head of Chat GPT" on Monday, moderated by Signal Fire's consumer VC and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. Constine is at the start of the video with another soundbite that drew jeers: "SXSW has always been the digital culture makers, and I think if you look out into this room, you can see that AI is a culture." [...] The groans also grew loud for Magic Leap's founder Rony Abovitz, who gave this advice during the "Storyworlds, Hour Blue & Amplifying Humanity Ethically with AI" panel: "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it." You can hear some of the reactions from festival attendees here, here, and here.

The FAA today awarded a launch license to SpaceX for Starship's third-ever test flight on March 14. "The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency wrote in a post on X this afternoon. Space.com reports: The megarocket has two test flights under its belt so far, which took place in April and November of last year. Starship's two stages failed to separate as planned on the April flight, however, which ended after just four minutes. Things went better in November -- stage separation occurred as planned, for example -- but both stages ended up exploding high in the sky on that mission as well. The FAA wrapped up its investigation into what happened on the November flight late last month. But the agency took some additional time before awarding a license for launch number three today.

Thursday's flight will be different, and bolder, than its predecessors. "The third flight test aims to build on what we've learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship's payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage's coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship," SpaceX wrote in a mission description. In addition, Thursday's test launch will aim to bring Starship's upper stage down in the Indian Ocean. The target splashdown zone for the first two test missions, by contrast, was the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. [...]

In a blog post today on Cognition's website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin's chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. [...]

According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end -- without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here.

"The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."

A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user's prompt into a website or video game. From a report: A new installment of Silicon Valley's most exciting game, Are We in a Bubble?!, has begun. This time around the game's premise hinges on whether AI technology is poised to change the world as the consumer internet did -- or even more dramatically -- or peter out and leave us with some advances but not a new global economy. This game isn't easy to play, and the available data points often prove more confusing than enlightening. Take the case of Cognition AI Inc.

You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it's been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn't even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They're betting on Cognition AI's team and its main invention, which is called Devin.

Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job -- "Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney," say -- and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written. The founders of Cognition AI are Scott Wu, its chief executive officer; Steven Hao, the chief technology officer; and Walden Yan, the chief product officer. Hao was most recently one of the top engineers at Scale AI, a richly valued startup that helps train AI systems. Yan, until recently at Harvard University, requested that his status at the school be left ambiguous because he hasn't yet had the talk with his parents.

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Midjourney says it has banned Stability AI staffers from using its service, accusing employees at the rival generative AI company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney's data. Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2nd that acknowledged an extended server outage was preventing generated images from appearing in user galleries. In a summary of a business update call on March 6th, Midjourney claimed that "botnet-like activity from paid accounts" -- which the company specifically links to Stability AI employees -- was behind the outage.

According to Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre on X, who listened to the call, Midjourney said that the service was brought down because "someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday." St. Pierre said that Midjourney had linked multiple paid accounts to an individual on the Stability AI data team. In its summary of the business update call on March 6th (which Midjourney refers to as "office hours"), the company says it's banning all Stability AI employees from using its service "indefinitely" in response to the outage. Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that will similarly ban employees of any company that exercises "aggressive automation" or causes outages to the service.

St. Pierre flagged the accusations to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, who replied on X, saying he was investigating the situation and that Stability hadn't ordered the actions in question. "Very confusing how 2 accounts would do this team also hasn't been scraping as we have been using synthetic & other data given SD3 outperforms all other models," said Mostaque, referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 AI model currently in preview. He claimed that if the outage was caused by a Stability employee, then it was unintentional and "obviously not a DDoS attack." Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming to have sent him "some information" to help with his internal investigation.

" A federal agency in charge of cybersecurity discovered it was hacked last month..." reports CNN.

Last month the U.S. Department of Homeland Security experienced a breach at its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reports the Record, "through vulnerabilities in Ivanti products, officials said..."

"The impact was limited to two systems, which we immediately took offline," the spokesperson said. We continue to upgrade and modernize our systems, and there is no operational impact at this time."

"This is a reminder that any organization can be affected by a cyber vulnerability and having an incident response plan in place is a necessary component of resilience." CISA declined to answer a range of questions about who was behind the incident, whether data had been accessed or stolen and what systems were taken offline.

Ivanti makes software that organizations use to manage IT, including security and system access. A source with knowledge of the situation told Recorded Future News that the two systems compromised were the Infrastructure Protection (IP) Gateway, which houses critical information about the interdependency of U.S. infrastructure, and the Chemical Security Assessment Tool (CSAT), which houses private sector chemical security plans. CISA declined to confirm or deny whether these are the systems that were taken offline. CSAT houses some of the country's most sensitive industrial information, including the Top Screen tool for high-risk chemical facilities, Site Security Plans and the Security Vulnerability Assessments.

CISA said organizations should review an advisory the agency released on February 29 warning that threat actors are exploiting previously identified vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure gateways including CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887 and CVE-2024-21893.
"Last week, several of the world's leading cybersecurity agencies revealed that hackers had discovered a way around a tool Ivanti released to help organizations check if they had been compromised," the article points out.

The statement last week from CISA said the agency "has conducted independent research in a lab environment validating that the Ivanti Integrity Checker Tool is not sufficient to detect compromise and that a cyber threat actor may be able to gain root-level persistence despite issuing factory resets."

UPDATE: The two systems run on older technology that was already set to be replaced, sources told CNN..." While there is some irony in it, even cybersecurity agencies or officials can be victims of hacking. After all, they rely on the same technology that others do. The US' top cybersecurity diplomat Nate Fick said last year that his personal account on social media platform X was hacked, calling it part of the "perils of the job."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: The Earth just observed its warmest February, setting a monthly record for the ninth time in a row, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday.

The unrelenting and exceptional global warmth — fueled by a combination of human-caused warming and the El Niño climate pattern — has spanned both land and ocean areas since June. It has scientists worried about the planet crossing a critical climate threshold and prospects for an active Atlantic hurricane season. The month's average global air temperature of 13.5 degrees Celsius (56.3 degrees Fahrenheit) was 0.12 degrees (0.22 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the previous warmest February in 2016.

The warmth of the last 12-month period is unprecedented in modern records, coming in at 1.56 degrees (2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial levels... Scientists fear that tipping points, such as those that could lead to catastrophic sea level rises or the collapse of critical ocean circulations, will become more likely to be reached if the Earth's temperature remains near or above that threshold for multiple years.
Axios adds: This is significant, since these 12 months exceeded the Paris Agreement's 1.5-degree target for a full year. However, the pact is aimed at averting multiple decades above that level, meaning the target hasn't yet been officially breached. Europe was especially warm compared to average during February, along with central and northwest North America, much of South America, Africa and western Australia, Copernicus found.
The Washington Post notes that in the United States, "more than 200 locations in the Midwest and Northeast set records for winter warmth."

They also quote a weather historian who posted on social media that "We are witnessing something extraordinary and unprecedented. Several thousands of records pulverized all over the world in a matter of hours, with margins never seen before."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police: Seven years ago, Google announced that it would phase out all Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux by 2018 (it would actually take until 2023). In its place would be what the company called Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), web apps that can be installed on a user's desktop that act as if they are practically natural apps and programs. The idea grew quickly, with Chrome users having installed PWAs in record numbers by the beginning of 2022. Soon, every website will be installable on desktops through PWAs.

In Chrome Canary (the daily build version of Google Chrome and typically a couple of versions ahead of the stable build), websites can now be installed on desktops. As part of the latest daily build, Google has added an "Install page as app" option to the "Save and share" submenu on the desktop version (via @Leopeva64 on X). This makes clicking the app -- which is just the website made to look and feel like a native app -- always open in its own window. Sites that already have their own PWAs, like YouTube or Reddit, have been prompting users to install them for a while now and will have their "Install page as app" function actually showing the name of the site. For example, YouTube's entry will show as "Install YouTube." In February, it became possible to enable the flags necessary to make any website into a PWA, but it seems to have just now become fully implemented.

Space.com describes it as "a nearly 3-ton leftover tossed overboard from the International Space Station" — which crashed back to earth today. One satellite tracker claims to have filmed it passing over the Netherlands...

"A couple minutes later reentry and it would have reached Fort Meyers" in Florida, posted astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But instead it re-entered the earth's atmosphere "over the Gulf of Mexico between Cancun and Cuba," Friday afternoon. "This was within the previous prediction window but a little to the northeast of the 'most likely' part of the path."

From Space.com: The multi-ton Exposed Pallet 9 (EP9) was jettisoned from the space station back in March 2021. At the time, it was reported to be the most massive object ever tossed overboard from the International Space Station. Disposing of used or unnecessary equipment in such a way is common practice aboard the space station, as the objects typically burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere.

Ahead of EP9's reentry, the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, National Warning Center 1 in Bonn, Germany issued this information... "The object is battery packs from the International Space Station. Luminous phenomena or the perception of a sonic boom are possible...." EP9 is loaded with old Nickel-Hydrogen batteries, NASA explained at the time it was jettisoned, also explaining that EP9 has the approximate mass of a large SUV and predicting it would re-enter Earth's atmosphere in two-to-four years.
"A large space object reenters the atmosphere in a natural way approximately once per week," the European Space Agency points out, "with the majority of the associated fragments burning up before reaching the ground.

"Most spacecraft, launch vehicles and operational hardware are designed to limit the risks associated with a reentry."