Spanish police have uncovered a major clue in the year-long investigation of a missing Cuban man, JLPO, after Google Street View images showed a man loading a body-shaped package into a car and pushing a wheelbarrow with a large white package. These images led to the discovery of the victim's dismembered remains in a cemetery and the arrest of two suspects, including the victim's wife and a bar worker. The Independent reports: Spanish police have said the pictures are a "decisive" clue in case, with detectives reportedly launching a murder investigation and arresting two people in connection with the man's death. According to El Pais, police are still investigating the case -- and it appears neither have yet appeared charged before a court.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Wired with the caption: "This story will be an on-going payday for traffic ticket lawyers. I am ordering one now." From the report: Digital license plates, already legal to buy in a growing number of states and to drive with nationwide, offer a few perks over their sheet metal predecessors. You can change their display on the fly to frame your plate number with novelty messages, for instance, or to flag that your car has been stolen. Now one security researcher has shown how they can also be hacked to enable a less benign feature: changing a car's license plate number at will to avoid traffic tickets and tolls -- or even pin them on someone else.

Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to "jailbreak" digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he's able to rewrite a Reviver plate's firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its display to show any characters or image. That susceptibility to jailbreaking, Rodriguez points out, could let drivers with the license plates evade any system that depends on license plate numbers for enforcement or surveillance, from tolls to speeding and parking tickets to automatic license plate readers that police use to track criminal suspects. "You can put whatever you want on the screen, which users are not supposed to be able to do," says Rodriguez. "Imagine you are going through a speed camera or if you are a criminal and you don't want to get caught."

Worse still, Rodriguez points out that a jailbroken license plate can be changed not just to an arbitrary number but also to the number of another vehicle -- whose driver would then receive the malicious user's tickets and toll bills. "If you can change the license plate number whenever you want, you can cause some real problems," Rodriguez says. All traffic-related mischief aside, Rodriguez also notes that jailbreaking the plates could also allow drivers to use the plates' features without paying Reviver's $29.99 monthly subscription fee. Because the vulnerability that allowed him to rewrite the plates' firmware exists at the hardware level -- in Reviver's chips themselves -- Rodriguez says there's no way for Reviver to patch the issue with a mere software update. Instead, it would have to replace those chips in each display. That means the company's license plates are very likely to remain vulnerable despite Rodriguez's warning -- a fact, Rodriguez says, that transport policymakers and law enforcement should be aware of as digital license plates roll out across the country. "It's a big problem because now you have thousands of licensed plates with this issue, and you would need to change the hardware to fix it," he says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Smart home devices compatible with the Matter standard have garnered most of our attention lately, but the compelling features in the latest generation of Z-Wave chips convinced the IoT developer Shelly Group to build no fewer than 11 new products powered by Z-Wave technology. The new collection includes a smart plug, in-wall dimmers, relays, and various sensors aimed at DIYers, installers, and commercial builders. Citing the ability of Z-Wave 800 (aka Z-Wave Long Range or LR) chips to operate IoT devices over extremely long range -- up to 1 mile, line of sight -- while running on battery power for up to 10 years, Shelly Group CTO Leon Kralj said "Shelly is helping break down smart home connectivity barriers, empowering homeowners, security installers, and commercial property owners and managers with unmatched range, scalability, and energy efficiency to redefine their automation experience."

[...] While most homeowners won't need to worry about the number of IoT devices their networks can support, commercial builders will appreciate the scalability of Z-Wave 800-powered devices -- namely, you can deploy as many as 4,000 nodes on a single mesh network. That's a 20x increase over what was possible with previous generations of the chip. And since Z-Wave LR is backward compatible with those previous generations, there should be no worries about integrating the new devices into existing networks. Shelly says all 11 of its new Z-Wave 800-powered IoT devices will be available in the first half of 2025. The new Shelly devices will be available in the U.S. in the first half of 2025.

Here's a list of the devices enhanced with the new long-range capabilities:
- Shelly Wave Plug US
- Shelly Wave Door/Window
- Shelly Wave H&T
- Shelly Wave Motion
- Shelly Wave Dimmer
- Shelly Wave Pro Dimmer 1 PM
- Shelly Wave Pro Dimmer 2 PM
- Shelly Wave 1
- Shelly Wave 1 PM
- Shelly Wave 2 PM
- Shelly Wave Shutter

The CDC has confirmed the first case of severe bird flu in the United States. NPR reports: Louisiana health officials initially reported the infection last week, saying a person was hospitalized after being exposed to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shared their findings that indicate the H5N1 virus responsible for the illness belongs to a genetic lineage that's circulating in wild birds and poultry -- different from what's spreading in dairy cattle and driving the majority of infections in agricultural workers.

In the U.S., more than 60 people have been infected so far, although some research suggests the official tally may be an undercount. The illnesses linked to dairy cattle have largely led to mild illnesses in humans.

The version of the virus in the Louisiana case is the so-called "D1.1 genotype." It has previously popped up in poultry workers in Washington state, who developed mild symptoms after testing positive in October. More recently, however, a teenager in British Columbia was hospitalized after contracting this D1.1 strain of the virus. Canadian health officials were unable to figure out how that person was infected. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis with the CDC, told reporters on Wednesday that bird blu has a well-established history of leading to severe illness and death. He added: "Infections without a clear source of exposure do occur, neither these cases nor the cases with known animal or animal products exposure have resulted in human to human transmission." California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency as the H5N1 bird flu virus moves from the Central valley to Southern California herds. The declaration will allow for a more streamlined approach among state and local agencies to tackle the virus, providing "flexibility around staffing, contracting, and other rules to support California's evolving response,'" reports the Los Angeles Times, citing a statement from Newsom's office.

"Building on California's testing and monitoring system -- the largest in the nation -- we are committed to further protecting public health, supporting our agriculture industry, and ensuring that Californians have access to accurate, up-to-date information," said Newsom in a statement. "While the risk to the public remains low, we will continue to take all necessary steps to prevent the spread of this virus."

Further reading:
US Government Orders Nationwide Testing of Milk for Bird Flu to Stop the Virus's Spread
Bird Flu Fears Stoke the Race for an mRNA Flu Vaccine

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is no longer developing a hardware subscription service for iPhones that would let subscribers upgrade devices every year. Gurman first reported Apple's work on the service in 2022, noting it was delayed due to "software bugs and regulatory concerns." The Verge reports: While the hardware subscription service apparently won't see the light of day, Apple offers installment plans you can use to pay for an iPhone over time. The iPhone Upgrade Program spreads the payments of a loan for a new iPhone (and AppleCare Plus) over 24 months, and you can upgrade to a new phone after you pay the equivalent of 12 months. If you have an Apple Card, you can also pay for a new iPhone (and other Apple products) using Apple Card Monthly Installments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: GPS tracking firm Hapn is exposing the names of thousands of its customers due to a website bug, TechCrunch has learned. A security researcher alerted TechCrunch in late November to customer names and affiliations -- such as the name of their workplace -- spilling from one of Hapn's servers, which TechCrunch has seen.

Hapn, formerly known as Spytec, is a tracking company that allows users to remotely monitor the real-time location of internet-enabled tracking devices, which can be attached to vehicles or other equipment. The company also sells GPS trackers to consumers under its Spytec brand, which rely on the Hapn app for tracking. Spytec touts its GPS devices for tracking the locations of valuable possessions and "loved ones." According to its website, Hapn claims to track more than 460,000 devices and counts customers within the Fortune 500.

The bug allows anyone to log in with a Hapn account to view the exposed data using the developer tools in their web browser. The exposed data contains information on more than 8,600 GPS trackers, including the IMEI numbers for the SIM cards in each tracker, which uniquely identify each device. The exposed data does not include location data, but thousands of records contain the names and business affiliations of customers who own, or are tracked by, the GPS trackers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In preparation for the summer Olympics in 2008, the authorities in Beijing, the host city and China's capital, launched a campaign to teach English to residents likely to come in contact with foreign visitors. Police, transit workers and hotel staff were among those targeted. One aim was to have 80% of taxi drivers achieve a basic level of competency. Today, though, any foreigner visiting Beijing will notice that rather few people are able to speak English well.

The 80% target proved a fantasy: most drivers still speak nothing but Chinese. Even the public-facing staff at the city's main international airport struggle to communicate with foreigners. Immigration officers often resort to computer-translation systems. For much of the 40 years since China began opening up to the world, "English fever" was a common catchphrase. People were eager to learn foreign languages, English most of all. Many hoped the skill would lead to jobs with international firms. Others wanted to do business with foreign companies. Some dreamed of moving abroad. But enthusiasm for learning English has waned in recent years. According to one ranking, by EF Education First, an international language-training firm, China ranks 91st among 116 countries and regions in terms of English proficiency. Just four years ago it ranked 38th out of 100.

The world's coal use is expected to reach a fresh high of 8.7bn tonnes this year, and remain at near-record levels for years as a result of a global gas crisis triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: There has been record production and trade of coal and power generation from coal since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine inflated global gas market prices, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA said the coal rebound, after a slump during the global Covid pandemic, means consumption of the fossil fuel is now on track to rise to a new peak of 8.77bn tonnes by the end of the year -- and could remain at near-record levels until 2027.

The Paris-based agency blamed power plants for the growing use of coal over the last year, particularly in China which consumes 30% more of the polluting fuel than the rest of the world put together. In developed economies such as the US and the European Union coal power generation has already passed its peak, the IEA said, and is forecast to fall by 5% and 12% respectively this year.

The U.S. government is urging senior government officials and politicians to ditch phone calls and text messages following intrusions at major American telecommunications companies blamed on Chinese hackers. From a report: In written guidance, opens new tab released on Wednesday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said "individuals who are in senior government or senior political positions" should "immediately review and apply" a series of best practices around the use of mobile devices.

The first recommendation: "Use only end-to-end encrypted communications." End-to-end encryption -- a data protection technique which aims to make data unreadable by anyone except its sender and its recipient -- is baked into various chat apps, including Meta's WhatsApp, Apple's iMessage, and the privacy-focused app Signal. Neither regular phone calls nor text messages are end-to-end encrypted, which means they can be monitored, either by the telephone companies, law enforcement, or - potentially - hackers who've broken into the phone companies' infrastructure.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has granted a pair of waivers to California, allowing the Golden State to continue regulating vehicle-caused air pollution within its borders. From a report: The first is for the California Air Resources Board's Advanced Clean Cars II regulations, which apply to light- and medium-duty vehicles like passenger cars, SUVs, and smaller trucks. The second waiver is for regulations that control the amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx) that can be emitted by heavy-duty vehicles as well as off-road vehicles.

The Clean Air Act allows states to apply for a waiver from the EPA to set their own emissions standards in cases where the federal regulations are insufficient to prevent deleterious pollution. The state applied for the latest waivers late in 2023, and after a public comment period and then a review by the agency, the EPA decided to approve them.

"California has longstanding authority to request waivers from EPA to protect its residents from dangerous air pollution coming from mobile sources like cars and trucks," said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. "Today's actions follow through on EPA's commitment to partner with states to reduce emissions and act on the threat of climate change."

An anonymous reader shares a report: ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones -- landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI's AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon.

The experience is more or less identical to Advanced Voice Mode, OpenAI's real-time conversational feature for ChatGPT -- minus the multimodality. ChatGPT responds to the questions users ask over the phone, and can handle tasks such as translating a sentence into a different language. OpenAI is offering 15 minutes of free calling for U.S. users. Beginning Wednesday, ChatGPT is also available on WhatsApp for those who prefer to text the AI assistant.

Nebraska's attorney general has sued Change Healthcare over a massive data breach that exposed sensitive medical information of more than 100 million Americans following a February ransomware attack. The lawsuit alleges the UnitedHealth-owned company failed to implement basic security measures, including multi-factor authentication, allowing hackers to breach its systems using credentials from a customer support employee that were posted on Telegram.

The Russian-speaking ALPHV ransomware group accessed personal health records, financial data and treatment information across Change Healthcare's poorly segmented network, according to the complaint filed by Attorney General Mike Hilgers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Australia's chief cyber security agency has decided local orgs should stop using the tech that forms the current cryptographic foundation of the internet by the year 2030 -- years before other nations plan to do so -- over fears that advances in quantum computing could render it insecure.

The Land Down Under's plans emerged last week when the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) published guidance for High Assurance Cryptographic Equipment (HACE) -- devices that send and/or receive sensitive information -- that calls for disallowing the cryptographic algorithms SHA-256, RSA, ECDSA and ECDH, among others, by the end of this decade.

Bill Buchanan, professor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University, wrote a blog post in which he expressed shock that the ASD aims to move so quickly. "Basically, these four methods are used for virtually every web connection that we create, and where ECDH is used for the key exchange, ECDSA or RSA is used to authenticate the remote server, and SHA-256 is used for the integrity of the data sent," he wrote. "The removal of SHA-256 definitely goes against current recommendations."

A cybersquatting scheme targeting prominent writers and entrepreneurs has exposed flaws in Bluesky's domain-based verification system, newsletter Tedium reports, citing users.

Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen reported receiving an extortion attempt this week when an anonymous user who had purchased his namesake domain demanded payment to transfer ownership. The episode has unraveled wider revelations of similar attacks targeting at least five other well-known users, including political blogger Matt Yglesias and The Hustle founder Sam Parr.

The platform's moderation team initially banned Parr's legitimate account while leaving the impersonator active, Sen told Tedium. The fake account was only removed after users escalated the issue to senior Bluesky staff.

A new MIT study reveals why legal documents are so hard to read: Both lawyers and non-lawyers instinctively use complex language to signal authority, similar to how magic spells use archaic terms. The research, published in PNAS, found that even laypeople default to convoluted "center-embedded" clauses when writing laws, but switch to plain language for other tasks. From a report: [Edward] Gibson's [an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences] research group has been studying the unique characteristics of legalese since 2020, when Martinez came to MIT after earning a law degree from Harvard Law School. In a 2022 study, Gibson, Martinez, and Mollica analyzed legal contracts totaling about 3.5 million words, comparing them with other types of writing, including movie scripts, newspaper articles, and academic papers.

That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences -- a feature known as "center-embedding." Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand. "Legalese somehow has developed this tendency to put structures inside other structures, in a way which is not typical of human languages," Gibson says.

In a follow-up study published in 2023, the researchers found that legalese also makes documents more difficult for lawyers to understand. Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents. "Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated," Gibson says. "Lawyers don't like it, laypeople don't like it, so the point of this current paper was to try and figure out why they write documents this way."

Microsoft is significantly shifting its Xbox strategy, moving away from console exclusives in a bid to reach gamers across all platforms, Windows Central reports. The company's "Project Latitude" initiative will make previously Xbox-exclusive titles available on PlayStation and other platforms, with even flagship franchises like Halo no longer guaranteed exclusivity.

This strategic pivot comes as Microsoft faces both opportunities and challenges in the gaming industry. While Xbox is seeing record users, according to company statements, the broader gaming market faces stagnant growth and rising development costs. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella frames this as "redefining what it means to be an Xbox fan," emphasizing accessibility across devices rather than hardware loyalty.

Microsoft bought twice as many of Nvidia's flagship chips as any of its largest rivals in the US and China this year, as OpenAI's biggest investor accelerated its investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure. From a report: Analysts at Omdia, a technology consultancy, estimate that Microsoft bought 485,000 of Nvidia's "Hopper" chips this year. That put Microsoft far ahead of Nvidia's next biggest US customer Meta, which bought 224,000 Hopper chips, as well as its cloud computing rivals Amazon and Google.

With demand outstripping supply of Nvidia's most advanced graphics processing units for much of the past two years, Microsoft's chip hoard has given it an edge in the race to build the next generation of AI systems. This year, Big Tech companies have spent tens of billions of dollars on data centres running Nvidia's latest chips, which have become the hottest commodity in Silicon Valley since the debut of ChatGPT two years ago kick-started an unprecedented surge of investment in AI.

U.S. authorities are investigating Chinese router manufacturer TP-Link over national security risks and considering banning its devices, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The Commerce, Defense and Justice departments have launched separate probes into the company, which controls approximately 65% of the U.S. home and small business router market.

Microsoft reported in October that Chinese hackers had compromised thousands of TP-Link routers to launch cyberattacks against Western targets, including government organizations and Defense Department suppliers. The company's routers are widely used across federal agencies, including the Defense Department and NASA. The Justice Department is also examining whether TP-Link's significantly lower pricing violates federal anti-monopoly laws, the report said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Salesforce will hire 2,000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to clients, CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday, double the number the company indicated it was planning to add a month ago. The cloud software company, which targets sales reps, marketers and customer service agents, is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features. "We're adding another couple of thousand salespeople to help sell these products," Benioff said at a company event in San Francisco. "We already had 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions that we've opened up. It's amazing."

Last month, Benioff told Bloomberg that it planned to hire 1,000 salespeople focusing on AI. On Tuesday, Salesforce said the second generation of its Agentforce technology creating and operating AI agents will become available to customers in February 2025. Agentforce will be able to tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce's Slack communications app, based on all available data. [...] Benioff said Salesforce's homepage now features an experimental AI agent that can respond to user queries about the company's products. Salesforce customers in need of assistance can visit a chat-based help page that conducts 32,000 conversations a week. About 5,000 are getting escalated to humans as a result of current AI capabilities, down from 10,000 before, Benioff said.

Scripps Research scientists sent stem-cell-derived brain organoids to the ISS to study the effects of microgravity on brain cells, finding that the organoids matured faster and showed signs of specialization compared to Earth-grown controls. The findings have been published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine. Phys.Org reports: To examine how the space environment impacts cellular functions, the team compared the cells' RNA expression patterns -- a measure of gene activity -- to identical "ground control" organoids that had remained on Earth. Surprisingly, they found that the organoids grown in microgravity had higher levels of genes associated with maturity and lower levels of genes associated with proliferation compared to the ground controls, meaning that the cells exposed to microgravity developed faster and replicated less than those on Earth. "We discovered that in both types of organoids, the gene expression profile was characteristic of an older stage of development than the ones that were on the ground," [says co-senior author Jeanne Loring, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the Department of Molecular Medicine and founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps Research]. "In microgravity, they developed faster, but it's really important to know these were not adult neurons, so this doesn't tell us anything about aging."

The team also noted that contrary to their hypothesis, there was less inflammation and lower expression of stress-related genes in organoids grown in microgravity, but more research is needed to determine why. Loring speculates that microgravity conditions may more closely mirror the conditions experienced by cells within the brain compared to organoids grown under conventional lab conditions and in the presence of gravity. "The characteristics of microgravity are probably also at work in people's brains, because there's no convection in microgravity -- in other words, things don't move," says Loring. "I think that in space, these organoids are more like the brain because they're not getting flushed with a whole bunch of culture medium or oxygen. They're very independent; they form something like a brainlet, a microcosm of the brain." "The next thing we plan to do is to study the part of the brain that's most affected by Alzheimer's disease," says Loring. "We also want to know whether there are differences in the way neurons connect with each other in space. With these kinds of studies, you can't rely on earlier work to predict what the result would be because there is no earlier work. We're on the ground floor, so to speak; in the sky, but on the ground floor."