Rights Alliance and ISPs have agreed to update their code of conduct to block pirate sites more quickly in Denmark. When one ISP receives an instruction to block a domain, a new process will see other ISPs follow in less than seven days. Meanwhile, Denmark's Telecommunications Industry Association is publishing files that reveal precisely which domains are being blocked. TorrentFreak reports: Both Rights Alliance and Teleindustrien (Telecommunications Industry Association in Denmark) have published copies of the new Code of Conduct but neither explain how the new system will work. Indeed, the CoC contains a paragraph that explains that a section detailing the individual steps, procedures and criteria, has been withheld "in order to achieve the purpose of the agreement." Given that Denmark's blocking program is DNS-based, it's trivial for ISPs to modify local DNS entries to redirect pirate site visitors to Share With Care (SWC), a portal designed to encourage pirates back on to the legal path of authorized content services. Somewhat intrigued by the apparent need for secrecy, we took a closer look at Teleindustrien and to our surprise, found the complete opposite.

It appears that when ISPs are ordered to block domains for any reason, Teleindustrien goes public with three things: the laws under which the blocking was ordered, who ordered the blocking, and which domains were blocked in response. For example, the telecoms industry group details recent blocks associated with the Ukraine conflict (including RT.com and sputniknews.com) and publishes the domains to an easily downloadable .csv file -- perfect for ISPs looking to implement DNS blocking. Another .csv file is published for gambling site domains deemed illegal in Denmark, 183 according to the latest batch.

The data relating to Denmark's pirate site blocking program reveals how quickly it has expanded over the years. In 2017, Danish ISPs were blocking around 100 pirate sites, a figure that jumped to 478 in 2020. The latest .csv file containing the list of blocked piracy domains is dated September 27, 2022. It contains 892 URLs -- some of them domains in their own right and others representing sub-domains on various sites dedicated to unblocking. It's unclear how the new streamlining provisions in the revised Code of Conduct can beat pulling a plain text file from a website but Teleindustrian also provides the data in PDF format (PDF) for the Adobe fans out there.

Apple's vice president of procurement, Tony Blevins, has left the company after a TikTok video showed him making a vulgar comment about women at a car show. CNBC reports: An Apple representative confirmed the departure to CNBC, saying, "Tony is leaving Apple." The departure was spurred by a TikTok video posted Sept. 5, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news. In the video, reviewed by CNBC, Blevins is getting out of an expensive Mercedes-Benz sports car and is asked what he does for a living by Daniel Mac, who has a channel centered around asking people in expensive cars questions. In the video, Blevins responds, "I race cars, play golf and fondle big-breasted women. But I take weekends and major holidays off." The remark appears to be a reference to a similar quote in the movie "Arthur." It was viewed 1.3 million times, according to the TikTok page. "Blevins was a VP at Apple," notes CNBC. "His main role was to negotiate with suppliers to keep the price Apple pays for computer parts down, according to a Wall Street Journal profile of Blevins from 2020."

Security researcher Brian Krebs writes: Someone has recently created a large number of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at some of the world's largest corporations. It's not clear who's behind this network of fake CISOs or what their intentions may be. But the fabricated LinkedIn identities are confusing search engine results for CISO roles at major companies, and they are being indexed as gospel by various downstream data-scraping sources. [...] Rich Mason, the former CISO at Fortune 500 firm Honeywell, began warning his colleagues on LinkedIn about the phony profiles earlier this week. "It's interesting the downstream sources that repeat LinkedIn bogus content as truth," Mason said. "This is dangerous, Apollo.io, Signalhire, and Cybersecurity Ventures." [...]

Again, we don't know much about who or what is behind these profiles, but in August the security firm Mandiant (recently acquired by Google) told Bloomberg that hackers working for the North Korean government have been copying resumes and profiles from leading job listing platforms LinkedIn and Indeed, as part of an elaborate scheme to land jobs at cryptocurrency firms. None of the profiles listed here responded to requests for comment (or to become a connection).

LinkedIn could take one simple step that would make it far easier for people to make informed decisions about whether to trust a given profile: Add a "created on" date for every profile. Twitter does this, and it's enormously helpful for filtering out a great deal of noise and unwanted communications. The former CISO Mason said LinkedIn also could experiment with offering something akin to Twitter's verified mark to users who chose to validate that they can respond to email at the domain associated with their stated current employer. Mason said LinkedIn also needs a more streamlined process for allowing employers to remove phony employee accounts. He recently tried to get a phony profile removed from LinkedIn for someone who falsely claimed to have worked for his company. In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, LinkedIn said its teams were actively working to take these fake accounts down. "We do have strong human and automated systems in place, and we're continually improving, as fake account activity becomes more sophisticated," the statement reads. "In our transparency report we share how our teams plus automated systems are stopping the vast majority of fraudulent activity we detect in our community -- around 96% of fake accounts and around 99.1% of spam and scam."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The NYPD says it wants to reimagine its current police communication system and transition to encrypted messages by 2024, according to a recent amNY report confirmed by Gizmodo. While law enforcement has spent years fighting to make encryption less accessible for everyday people, police think they need a little more privacy. Critics worry a turn towards encryption by law enforcement could reduce transparency, hamstring the news media, and potentially jeopardize the safety of protestors looking to stay a step ahead.

According to amNY, the NYPD's new plan would allow law enforcement officers discretion on whether or not to publicly disclose newsworthy incidents. That means the NYPD essentially would get to dictate the truth unchallenged in a number of potentially sensitive local stories. The report suggests police are floating the idea of letting members of the news media monitor certain radio transmissions through an NYPD-controlled mobile app. There's a catch though. According to the report, the app would send radio information with a delay. Users may also have to pay a subscription fee to use the service, the paper said.

The NYPD confirmed its planning a "systems upgrade" in the coming years in an email to Gizmodo. "The NYPD is undergoing a systems upgrade that is underway and that will be complete after 2024," a spokesperson for the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information said. "This infrastructure upgrade allows the NYPD to transmit in either an encrypted or non-encrypted format," the NYPD said. "Some parts of the city have had the necessary equipment installed and the Department will begin testing the technology in these areas later this year. We are currently evaluating encryption best practices and will communicate new policies and procedures as we roll out this upgraded technology." The spokesperson claimed the department intends to listen to and consider the needs of the news media during the transition process. "The entire public safety news coverage system depends on scanners, and if scanners and scanner traffic are no longer available to newsrooms then news reporting about crime, fire -- it's going to be very hit or miss," CaliforniansAware General Counsel Terry Francke told the Reporters Committee in a blog post.

"Cutting off the media from getting emergency transmissions represents the clearest regression of the NYPD policy of transparency in its history," New York Press Photographers Association President Bruce Cotler said in an interview with amNY. "We believe shutting down radio transmissions is a danger to the public and to the right of the public to know about important events."

Gizmodo notes that New York joins a growing list of cities considering encrypting radio communications. "Denver, Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Sioux City, Iowa, and Racine, Wisconsin have all moved to implement the technology in recent years."

After years of lobbying the state to increase regulations on autonomous vehicles, San Francisco officials are taking their case to the feds. San Francisco Examiner reports: The directors of The City's two main transportation agencies outlined their concerns about Cruise's driverless cars in a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding Cruise's application to deploy a custom-built autonomous vehicle. In it, San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority Director Jeffrey Tumlin and San Francisco County Transportation Authority Director Tilly Chang provide a comprehensive overview of disruptive and unsafe incidents that they say Cruise cars precipitated. The letter, sent on Sept. 21, comes as Cruise's driverless cars continue to stop in the middle of San Francisco's streets for extended periods of time, often in groups, blocking traffic until they can be remotely restarted or manually retrieved by Cruise staff. Over the past week, there were at least four such incidents, including one that delayed a couple of KRON4 reporters.

The City's letter to NHTSA provides specific data on these incidents. Between May 29 and Sept. 5 of this year, 28 incidents of stopped Cruise cars blocking traffic were reported to 911. The City identified an additional 20 such incidents reported on social media over that time period, which does not include the events of the past week. The City estimates that these figures represent "a fraction of actual travel lane road failures," since most of these events take place late at night, when Cruise offers its driverless ride-hailing service, and when few other people are on the streets. In light of these concerns, The City requests several new regulations on autonomous vehicles from NHTSA.

San Francisco's letter is in response to a petition by General Motors, Cruise's parent company, to manufacture and commercially deploy a custom-built autonomous vehicle called the Cruise Origin. It would be roughly the size of an SUV, but with no obvious front and back and no driver's seat or steering wheel. In their letter on behalf of the entire city government, Tumlin and Chang stress that they "neither support nor oppose the Petition, but document safety hazards and street capacity issues raised by the operation of the Cruise AV on San Francisco streets." They go on to call for several specific regulations they would like to see imposed on Cruise and Ford's Argo AI, another company seeking to build and deploy a fully autonomous vehicle. Those recommendations include stringent data reporting requirements and incident reports, limiting the geographic area and the number of vehicles that can be deployed in San Francisco, and enabling first responders to manually turn off the vehicles. "Safety is the guiding principle of everything we do," Cruise said in a statement regarding these incidents. "That means if our cars encounter a situation where they aren't able to safely proceed they turn on their hazard lights and we either get them operating again or pick them up as quickly as possible. This could be because of a mechanical issue like a flat tire, a road condition, or a technical problem. We're working to minimize how often this happens, and apologize to any other impacted drivers."

Zecharias Zelalem writes via Reuters: Few have been spared the effects of a nearly two-year internet and phone shutdown in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, which has been cut off since fighting erupted between Tigrayan rebels and government forces in November 2020. The conflict resumed last month after a months-long humanitarian truce, dashing hopes for communications to be restored. Even the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who hails from Tigray, said he had been unable to reach his relatives back home, or send them money. "I don't know even who is dead or who is alive," Tedros told a recent news conference in London.

As fighting continues in Tigray and elsewhere in Ethiopia, the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed says shutdowns are needed to curb violence, but critics accuse authorities of using the internet as a weapon of war. "Access to communications and other basic services, and most importantly humanitarian assistance, is explicitly used as a bargaining chip by the Ethiopian government," said Goitom Gebreluel, a political analyst specialising in Horn of Africa affairs. "It is used as leverage against both Tigray and the international community." In Ethiopia, sporadic internet and phone blackouts have been used as "a weapon to control and censor information," the group said, making it difficult for journalists and activists to document alleged rights crimes, and for aid to be delivered.

In Tigray's regional capital, Mekelle, emergency workarounds such as satellite phones have become a vital tool for aid agency operations. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also maintains a satellite phone service for local residents -- giving them a way to get a message to loved ones. So far this year, the ICRC has facilitated some 116,000 phone calls and oral messages "between family members separated by conflict and violence," said spokesperson Alyona Synenko. With almost half of the region's six million people in severe need of food, the shutdown as well as road blockades have hampered humanitarian aid deliveries, according to the U.N. World Food Program. The lack of mobile phone networks has also "crippled both the emergency and regular health monitoring systems," a WHO spokesperson said in emailed remarks. The only way to communicate is "via paper reports that need to be delivered by hand. All meetings have to be held in person."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a London court this week, coroner Andrew Walker had the difficult task of assessing a question that child safety advocates have been asking for years: How responsible is social media for the content algorithms feed to minors? The case before Walker involved a 14-year-old named Molly Russell, who took her life in 2017 after she viewed thousands of posts on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest promoting self-harm. At one point during the inquest, Walker described the content that Russell liked or saved in the days ahead of her death as so disturbing, the coroner said in court, that he found it "almost impossible to watch." Today, Walker concluded that Russell's death couldn't be ruled a suicide, Bloomberg reports. Instead, he described her cause of death as "an act of self-harm whilst suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content."

Bloomberg reported that Walker came to this decision based on Russell's "prolific" use of Instagram -- liking, sharing, or saving 16,300 posts in six months before her death -- and Pinterest -- 5,793 pins over the same amount of time -- combined with how the platforms catered content to contribute to Russell's depressive state. "The platforms operated in such a way using algorithms as to result, in some circumstances, of binge periods of images, video clips and text," which "romanticized acts of self-harm" and "sought to isolate and discourage discussion with those who may have been able to help," Walker said.

Following Walker's ruling, Russell's family issued a statement provided to Ars, calling it a landmark decision and saying that the court didn't even review the most disturbing content that Molly encountered. "This past fortnight has been particularly painful for our family," the Russell family's statement reads. "We're missing Molly more agonizingly than usual, but we hope that the scrutiny this case has received will help prevent similar deaths encouraged by the disturbing content that is still to this day available on social media platforms including those run by Meta." Bloomberg reports that the family's lawyer, Oliver Sanders, has requested that Walker "send instructions on how to prevent this happening again to Pinterest, Meta, the UK government, and the communications regulator." In their statement, the family pushed UK regulators to quickly pass and enforce the UK Online Safety Bill, which The New York Times reported could institute "new safeguards for younger users worldwide." Meta and Pinterest took different approaches to defend their policies. "Pinterest apologized, saying it didn't have the technology it currently has to more effectively moderate content that Molly was exposed to," reports Ars. "But Meta's head of health and well-being, Elizabeth Lagone, frustrated the family by telling the court that the content Molly viewed was considered 'safe' by Meta's standards."

"We have heard a senior Meta executive describe this deadly stream of content the platform's algorithms pushed to Molly, as 'SAFE' and not contravening the platform's policies," the Russell family wrote in their statement. "If this demented trail of life-sucking content was safe, my daughter Molly would probably still be alive." Russells' statement continued: "For the first time today, tech platforms have been formally held responsible for the death of a child. In the future, we as a family hope that any other social media companies called upon to assist an inquest follow the example of Pinterest, who have taken steps to learn lessons and have engaged sincerely and respectfully with the inquest process."

Pinterest told Ars that it is "committed to making ongoing improvements to help ensure that the platform is safe for everyone" and internally "the Coroner's report will be considered with care." Since Molly's death, Pinterest said it has taken steps to improve content moderation, including blocking more than 25,000 self-harm related search terms and, since 2019, has combined "human moderation with automated machine learning technologies to reduce policy-violating content on the platform."

AI text-to-image generators have been making headlines in recent months, but researchers are already moving on to the next frontier: AI text-to-video generators. From a report: A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook's parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text. The videos are clearly artificial, with blurred subjects and distorted animation, but still represent a significant development in the field of AI content generation.

"Generative AI research is pushing creative expression forward by giving people tools to quickly and easily create new content," said Meta in a blog post announcing the work. "With just a few words or lines of text, Make-A-Video can bring imagination to life and create one-of-a-kind videos full of vivid colors and landscapes." In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the work as "amazing progress," adding: "It's much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they'll change over time."

Bruce Willis has become the first Hollywood star to sell his rights to allow a "digital twin" of himself to be created for use on screen. From a report: Using deepfake technology, the actor appeared in a phone advert without ever being on set, after his face was digitally transplanted onto another performer. Willis allowed US firm Deepcake, which makes "digital twins," to use his face. In a statement on its website, Willis said: "I liked the precision with which my character turned out. It's a mini-movie in my usual action-comedy genre. For me, it is a great opportunity to go back in time. With the advent of modern technology, even when I was on another continent, I was able to communicate, work and participate in the filming. It's a very new and interesting experience, and I thank our entire team." UPDATE 10/3/2022: Bruce Willis Denies Selling Rights To His Face

Small retail payments in Sub-Saharan Africa are powering exceptional crypto adoption and usage, with the region conducting the world's highest proportion (80%) of crypto retail payments of less than $1,000, according to a report by blockchain data firm Chainalysis. From a report: The report also highlights how peer-to-peer transactions are more common in Sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world. At about 6% of all crypto transaction volume, Africa's peer-to-peer transactions dwarf those of Central and Southern Asia and Oceania, the region with the second-highest volumes in that category. Many Africans have integrated crypto into everyday life, the report says. Besides retail transactions, remittances and commercial transactions have also been key drivers for Africa's high adoption and usage rates. "Crypto usage is driven by everyday necessity, as opposed to speculation by the already well-off ... especially in countries where the values of local fiat currencies are dropping, as we've seen in Nigeria and Kenya," the report states.

The SuperSpeed USB branding is no more thanks to a new set of guidelines currently being rolled out by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the body that manages and maintains the USB standard. From a report: It's part of a rebranding initiative that the organization kicked off last year with the introduction of a new series of packaging, port, and cable logos. But with its latest set of branding and logo guidelines it's going even further, simplifying its legacy branding and signaling the end of the decade-old SuperSpeed branding. If the name doesn't ring any bells, then that's probably because you (like most other people) simply referred to it by its USB 3 version number. Alongside it, the USB-IF is also ditching USB4 as a consumer-facing brand name.

AmiMoJo writes: Google announced an extension of the deadline to remove support for Manifest V2 extensions in the company's Chrome browser and the open source Chromium core. The change does not impact the core decision of removing support for Manifest V2 extensions in favor of Manifest V3. Dubbed, the adblocker killer initially, due to limitations imposed on content blocking and other types of browser extensions, Google made concessions that allows content blockers to run on Chrome after the final switch is made. Extensions are still limited in comparison to Manifest V2, especially if multiple that use filtering functionality are run simultaneously, or if lots of filters are activated in a single extension. Google's initial plan was to stop supporting Manifest V2 extensions in Chrome by June 2023. For most users, support would run out in January 2023, but an Enterprise policy would enable users to extend the deadline by six months.

Once unthinkable, mobile phones could go dark around Europe this winter if power cuts or energy rationing knocks out parts of the mobile networks across the region. Reuters reports: Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages. In France, the situation is made worse by several nuclear power plants shutting down for maintenance. Telecoms industry officials say they fear a severe winter will put Europe's telecoms infrastructure to the test, forcing companies and governments to try to mitigate the impact. Currently there are not enough back-up systems in many European countries to handle widespread power cuts, four telecoms executives said, raising the prospect of mobile phone outages.

European Union countries, including France, Sweden and Germany, are trying to ensure communications can continue even if power cuts end up exhausting back-up batteries installed on the thousands of cellular antennas spread across their territory. Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers and most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas. [...] Telecom gear makers Nokia and Ericsson are working with mobile operators to mitigate the impact of a power shortage. The European telecom operators must review their networks to reduce extra power usage and modernize their equipment by using more power efficient radio designs, the four telecom executives said. To save power, telecom companies are using software to optimize traffic flow, make towers "sleep" when not in use and switch off different spectrum bands. The telecom operators are also working with national governments to check if plans are in place to maintain critical services.

In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has 33,000 mobile radio sites (towers) and its mobile emergency power systems can only support a small number of them at the same time, a company spokesperson said. Deutsche Telekom will use mobile emergency power systems which mainly rely on diesel in the event of prolonged power failures, it said. France has about 62,000 mobile towers, and the industry will not be able to equip all antennas with new batteries, the FFT's president Liza Bellulo said. Accustomed to uninterrupted power supply for decades, European countries usually do not have generators backing up power for longer durations.

A group of authors, including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein, and Cory Doctorow, "are lending their names to an open letter protesting publishers' lawsuit against the Internet Archive Library, characterizing it as one of a number of efforts to curb libraries' lending of ebooks." From the report: A group of publishers sued the Internet Archive in 2020, claiming that its open library violates copyright by producing "mirror image copies of millions of unaltered in-copyright works for which it has no rights" and then distributes them "in their entirety for reading purposes to the public for free, including voluminous numbers of books that are commercially available." They also contend that the archive's scanning undercuts the market for e-books. The Internet Archive says that its lending of the scanned books is akin to a traditional library. In its response to the publishers' lawsuit, it warns of the ramifications of the litigation and claims that publishers "would like to force libraries and their patrons into a world in which books can only be accessed, never owned, and in which availability is subject to the rightsholders' whim."

"Libraries are a fundamental collective good. We, the undersigned authors, are disheartened by the recent attacks against libraries being made in our name by trade associations such as the American Association of Publishers and the Publishers Association: undermining the traditional rights of libraries to own and preserve books, intimidating libraries with lawsuits, and smearing librarians," the letter states. The letter also calls for enshrining "the right of libraries to permanently own and preserve books, and to purchase these permanent copies on reasonable terms, regardless of format," and condemns the characterization of library advocates as "mouthpieces" for big tech. "We fear a future where libraries are reduced to a sort of Netflix or Spotify for books, from which publishers demand exorbitant licensing fees in perpetuity while unaccountable vendors force the spread of disinformation and hate for profit," the letter states.

The American Association of Publishers' general counsel Terrence Hart issued a statement responding to the claim that the lawsuit is an attack on libraries. He said, "That authors and publishers support libraries is not in dispute and most certainly not at issue in the infringement case against the Internet Archive, which is not a library. "On the contrary, the Internet Archive operates an unlicensed digital copying and distribution business that copies millions of literary works without permission and gives them away for free. This activity is unprecedented and outside any reasonable interpretation of the copyright law that grants to authors the decision as to whether, when, through whom, and on what terms to distribute their works to the public." He added, "If the rights holder chooses to permit the copying of print books into e-books, that is a choice they are empowered to make as to their own works. The Internet Archive robs authors and publishers of that choice."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A New York City man is suing an Atlantic City casino, its parent company and its online betting partner, alleging he was repeatedly disconnected while gambling online, and was given payments to prevent him from reporting the malfunctions to New Jersey gambling regulators during a nine-month span in which he wagered over $29 million. Sam Antar says he is a compulsive gambler -- a fact he says was well-known to defendants in the case including the Borgata casino, MGM Resorts International, and its online partner Entain. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in state Superior Court in Middlesex County, Antar accuses the defendants of fraud, racketeering and other transgressions. His lawsuit asserts that he experienced thousands of disconnections from the online platforms, often when he had a winning hand that was then wiped out.

His lawyer, Christopher Gramiccioni, said Antar experienced a disconnection rate approaching 50% during the nine months covered by the lawsuit. He added Antar, 46, had lost "easily hundreds of thousands of dollars" during that time. "It's one thing if you have technical issues intermittently," said Gramiccioni, a former Monmouth County prosecutor. "It is quite another when you have them 50% of the time. The casino did not take corrective action as required. They kept doubling down and giving him $30,000 a month, feeding him extra money to try to avoid scrutiny by the regulatory agencies."

In his lawsuit, Antar claims he alerted numerous employees and officials with the gambling companies to the fact that there was a serious, recurring problem with disconnections, but that they knowingly kept malfunctioning games available to the public because they were too profitable to take down. He says his complaints were made to local supervisors and VIP hosts, an online complaint portal, and even to the president of the casino and the CEO of its parent company. He also claims the companies paid him near-daily bonuses totaling $30,000 a month to keep him playing and to entice him not to report problems with the games to the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. [...] Antar said employees acknowledged problems with the system were affecting other customers as well. In a July 17, 2019 text and email conversation, Antar quotes one as telling him "other players are not getting anywhere near what you are getting" in terms of compensation for being kicked offline while gambling. "In 2013, Sam Antar was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for taking $225,000 in a fraudulent investment scheme" to feed his compulsive gambling habit, notes the report.

Developer Asahi Lina with the Asahi Linux project was successfully able to get GNOME running on the Apple M1, including "Firefox with YouTube video playback, the game Neverball, various KDE applications, and more," reports Phoronix. From the report: This is some great progress especially with the driver being written in Rust -- the first within the Direct Rendering Manager subsystem -- and lots of work there with the Rust infrastructure in early form. It won't be until at least Linux 6.2 before this driver could be mainlined while we'll see how quickly it tries to go mainline before it can commit to a stable user-space interface. At the moment there is also a significant driver "hack" involved but will hopefully be sorted out soon. Over in user-space, the AGX Gallium3D driver continues being worked on for OpenGL support with hopes of having OpenGL 2.1 completed by year's end. Obviously it will be longer before seeing the Apple graphics suitable for modern gaming with Vulkan, etc but progress is being made across the board in reverse-engineered, open-source Apple Silicon support under Linux. You can watch a video of the driver working here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Doreen Bogdan-Martin has become the first woman to be elected as secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU is the main technology agency within the UN. Originally founded in 1865 to manage the first international telegraph networks, the ITU now has an important role in facilitating the use of radio, satellite and the internet. Ms Bogdan-Martin beat her Russian rival Rashid Ismailov by 139 votes to 25. The American will succeed Houlin Zhao, who has been in the role since 2014, when her term begins on January 1, 2023. She will be taking the reins of the oldest UN agency, which is responsible for many facets of international communications. These include assigning satellite orbits globally, co-ordinating technical standards, and improving infrastructure in the developing world. There had been concerns ahead of the election because Ms Bogdan-Martin's opponent had previously called for international regulation of the internet.

In her previous role as director of the ITU's Telecommunication Development bureau, Ms Bogdan-Martin's remit included job creation, digital skills development, diversity, and gender equality. Her candidacy for the top job was endorsed by US President Joe Biden, who said she had the "integrity, experience, and vision necessary to transform the digital landscape." "She understands the importance of connecting every school to the internet and making sure every student can access virtual learning, providing women and girls the digital tools they need to succeed, and extending the benefits of online health and educational resources," he said in a statement. "Whether it's today's children or our children's children, we need to provide them with a strong and stable foundation for growth," Ms Bogdan-Martin said following her win. "The world is facing significant challenges -- escalating conflicts, a climate crisis, food security, gender inequalities, and 2.7 billion people with no access to the internet."

As a rapidly advancing climate emergency turns the planet ever hotter, the Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has a vision: "To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again." Founders George Church and Ben Lamm have already racked up an impressive list of high-profile funders and investors, including Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Winklevoss Capital -- and, according to the public portfolio its venture capital arm released this month, the CIA. From a report: Colossal says it hopes to use advanced genetic sequencing to resurrect two extinct mammals -- not just the giant, ice age mammoth, but also a mid-sized marsupial known as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that died out less than a century ago. On its website, the company vows: "Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature's ancestral heartbeat." In-Q-Tel, its new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA. On its surface, the group funds technology startups with the potential to safeguard national security. In addition to its long-standing pursuit of intelligence and weapons technologies, the CIA outfit has lately displayed an increased interest in biotechnology and particularly DNA sequencing.

For decades, security researchers warned about techniques for hijacking virtualization software. Now one group has put them into practice. From a report: For decades, virtualization software has offered a way to vastly multiply computers' efficiency, hosting entire collections of computers as "virtual machines" on just one physical machine. And for almost as long, security researchers have warned about the potential dark side of that technology: theoretical "hyperjacking" and "Blue Pill" attacks, where hackers hijack virtualization to spy on and manipulate virtual machines, with potentially no way for a targeted computer to detect the intrusion. That insidious spying has finally jumped from research papers to reality with warnings that one mysterious team of hackers has carried out a spree of "hyperjacking" attacks in the wild.

Today, Google-owned security firm Mandiant and virtualization firm VMware jointly published warnings that a sophisticated hacker group has been installing backdoors in VMware's virtualization software on multiple targets' networks as part of an apparent espionage campaign. By planting their own code in victims' so-called hypervisors --VMware software that runs on a physical computer to manage all the virtual machines it hosts -- the hackers were able to invisibly watch and run commands on the computers those hypervisors oversee. And because the malicious code targets the hypervisor on the physical machine rather than the victim's virtual machines, the hackers' trick multiplies their access and evades nearly all traditional security measures designed to monitor those target machines for signs of foul play.

"The idea that you can compromise one machine and from there have the ability to control virtual machines en masse is huge," says Mandiant consultant Alex Marvi. And even closely watching the processes of a target virtual machine, he says, an observer would in many cases see only "side effects" of the intrusion, given that the malware carrying out that spying had infected a part of the system entirely outside its operating system. Mandiant discovered the hackers earlier this year and brought their techniques to VMware's attention. Researchers say they've seen the group carry out their virtualization hacking -- a technique historically dubbed hyperjacking in a reference to "hypervisor hijacking" -- in fewer than 10 victims' networks across North America and Asia. Mandiant notes that the hackers, which haven't been identified as any known group, appear to be tied to China.

Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it will freeze hiring and restructure some teams in an effort to cut costs and shift priorities. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the social networking company's freeze during a weekly Q&A session with employees, according to a person in attendance. He added that the company would reduce budgets across most teams, even teams that are growing, and that individual teams will sort out how to handle headcount changes -- whether that means not filling roles that employees depart, shifting people to other teams, or working to "manage out people who aren't succeeding," according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. "I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively," Zuckerberg said.