In a small country like Israel—the population less than 9 million people—every murder makes national headlines. But the October 2019 killing of Michal Sela, a 32-year old social worker from Jerusalem, stood out. Sela’s husband allegedly stabbed her multiple times in front of their 8-month old baby before stabbing himself in a failed suicide attempt.…
Nintendo has posted extraordinarily high earnings for its normally quiet April-June quarter, as Animal Crossing: New Horizons continues to be a sales juggernaut that drives Switch hardware purchases. Operating profit is up 428 percent year-on-year to 145 billion yen ($1.37 billion) off 357 billion yen ($3.39 billion) in revenue, with Switch sales up 166 percent…
In movies like Die Hard 4 and The Italian Job, hijacking traffic lights over the internet looks easy. But real-world traffic-light hacking, demonstrated by security researchers in years past, has proven tougher, requiring someone to be within radio range of every target light. Now a pair of Dutch researchers has shown how hackers really can…
Singapore scientist develops artificial skin with sense of touch inspired by Star Wars – YouTube
For well over a decade, the relationship between voting machine companies and security researchers has been fraught. The manufacturers have long resisted allowing unfettered access for bug hunters, even as major, long-standing vulnerabilities plagued voting machine models used throughout the 2000s and 2010s. A new collaboration, though, shows that the cold war has meaningfully started…
Millions of young Americans were sent into a panic last weekend when President Donald Trump told reporters that he was “banning” TikTok from the United States. White House officials had already been discussing taking action against the social media platform and other Chinese-owned apps over national security concerns. But as is typical for Trump, it’s…
There are many photos of Tom Hanks, but none like the images of the leading everyman shown at the Black Hat computer security conference Wednesday: They were made by machine-learning algorithms, not a camera.Philip Tully, a data scientist at security company FireEye, generated the hoax Hankses to test how easily open-source software from artificial intelligence…
The classic version of “gamer support hotlines” revolved around a late ’80s and early ’90s period of titans like Nintendo and Sega. You’d either make a long-distance call or call a 1-900 line to get help from a live counselor on how to beat a tough video game. ARS TECHNICAThis story originally appeared on Ars…
Microsoft Office macros have long been a crude but effective tool in the hands of hackers: Trick someone into opening an attachment and clicking “allow” to enable macros, and a simple Word document can run a script of commands that serves as the first step toward taking over their device. While that macro trick has…
In May 2018, as the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect, the main Dutch public broadcaster set in motion a grand experiment. The leadership at Nederlandse Publieke Omroep—essentially the BBC of the Netherlands—interpreted the law strictly, deciding that visitors to any of its websites would now be prompted…
