The U.S. government is warning of "possible threats" to satellite communication networks amid fears that recent attacks on satellite networks in Europe, sparked by the war in Ukraine, could soon spread to the United States. From a reportL: A joint CISA-FBI advisory published this week urges satellite communication (SATCOM) network providers and critical infrastructure organizations that rely on satellite networks to bolster their cybersecurity defenses due to an increased likelihood of cyberattack, warning that a successful intrusion could create risk in their customer environments.

While the advisory did not name specific sectors under threat, the use of satellite communications is widespread across the United States. It's estimated that about eight million Americans rely on SATCOM networks for internet access. Ruben Santamarta, a cybersecurity expert who specializes in analyzing satellite communications systems, told TechCrunch that networks are used in a wide number of industries, including aviation, government, the media and the military, as well as gas facilities and electricity service stations that are located in remote places.

Spotify is drawing up plans to add blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens to its streaming service, fuelling excitement in the crypto and music industries about the potential of NFTs to boost artists' earnings. Financial Times: Two recent job ads show Spotify is recruiting people to work on early stage projects related to "Web3," a tech buzzword for a blockchain-powered network that some crypto enthusiasts hope will wrestle control back from the Big Tech platforms that dominate today's internet. Spotify is the latest tech giant to venture into NFTs and head off potential competition from crypto start-ups. This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg confirmed a Financial Times report earlier this year that Instagram would soon start to support NFTs. Other social media companies, including Twitter and Reddit, are also working to build new features for displaying or trading NFTs. NFTs use blockchain technology to certify ownership of digital assets. The vast majority of the $17.7bn worth of NFTs traded last year were for visual artworks, games and collectibles, according to market tracker Nonfungible.com.

Australia's competition watchdog filed a lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta Platforms on Friday, alleging the social media giant failed to prevent scammers using its platform to promote fake ads featuring well-known people. From a report: The advertisements, which endorsed investment in cryptocurrency or money-making schemes, could have misled Facebook users into believing they were promoted by famous Australians, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) said. The lawsuit filed in the Federal Court also alleges Facebook "aided and abetted or was knowingly concerned in false or misleading conduct and representations by the advertisers," the ACCC said in a statement.

Maserati announced on Thursday that it will offer electric versions of its entire vehicle lineup by 2025 and is starting its efforts off with the GranTurismo EV, a 1,200 HP roadster slated for release next year. Engadget reports: The GranTurismo "Folgore" will be the first entry into Maserati's new line of electric vehicles. Its thousand-plus horses will translate into a limitered top speed of 190 MPH and a sub-3-second 0-60. It will be joined by an electrified version of the new Grecale SUV and Grancabrio GT in 2023 followed by EV variants of the MC20, the Quattroporte and the Levante SUV by 2025. The company also announced its intention to halt production of internal combustion vehicles and go fully electric by 2030. The company, a subsidiary of the Stellantis Group, did not elaborate on the expected MSRPs for the upcoming vehicles, but given Maserati's current offerings, interested buyers will likely be looking to pay anywhere from the high five-figures to the mid-sixes.

Internet security analysts have spotted a spike in backdoor infections on WordPress websites hosted on GoDaddy's Managed WordPress service, all featuring an identical backdoor payload. The case affects internet service resellers such as MediaTemple, tsoHost, 123Reg, Domain Factory, Heart Internet, and Host Europe Managed WordPress. BleepingComputer reports: The discovery comes from Wordfence, whose team first observed the malicious activity on March 11, 2022, with 298 websites infected by the backdoor within 24 hours, 281 of which were hosted on GoDaddy. The backdoor infecting all sites is a 2015 Google search SEO-poisoning tool implanted on the wp-config.php to fetch spam link templates from the C2 that are used to inject malicious pages into search results. The campaign uses predominately pharmaceutical spam templates, served to visitors of the compromised websites instead of the actual content.

The goal of these templates is likely to entice the victims to make purchases of fake products, losing money and payment details to the threat actors. Additionally, the actors can harm a website's reputation by altering its content and making the breach evident, but this doesn't seem to be the actors' aim at this time. The intrusion vector hasn't been determined, so while this looks suspiciously close to a supply chain attack, it hasn't been confirmed. [...] In any case, if your website is hosted on GoDaddy's Managed WordPress platform, make sure to scan your wp-config.php file to locate potential backdoor injections. Wordfence also reminds admins that while removing the backdoor should be the first step, removing spam search engine results should also be a priority.

The New York Times, which acquired Wordle in January, is putting an end to unofficial takes of the game. The latest casualty is Wordle Archive, a website that let users play through hundreds of previous daily five-letter Wordle puzzles. According to Ars Technica, the site "has been taken down at the request of Wordle owner The New York Times." From the report: The archival site, which offered a backward-looking play feature that's not available in the NYT's official version of Wordle, had been up since early January. But it was taken down last week and replaced with a message saying, "Sadly, the New York Times has requested that the Wordle Archive be taken down." A Twitter search shows dozens of daily Wordle Archive players who were willing to share their results on social media up through March 7. "The usage was unauthorized, and we were in touch with them," a New York Times representative said in response to an Ars Technica comment request. "We don't plan to comment beyond that."

The Wordle Archive is still fully playable in its own archived form (as of March 5) at the Internet Archive, appropriately enough. Other sites that allow you to play archived Wordle puzzles are not hard to find, as are sites that let you play unlimited Wordle puzzles beyond the usual one-a-day limit. But some of those sites may be under threat, if the Times' treatment of Wordle Archive is any indication.

The Chinese Weiqi Association has issued a statement suspending a Chinese player from attending competitions of weiqi, more commonly known as Go overseas, for a year after he violated the "no use of AI" rules when participating in a national chess competition earlier that day. From a report: According to the statement, Go player Liu Ruizhi used an AI program during the first round of the Chinese professional Go Championship preliminaries, and his supervisors did not fulfill their supervisory responsibilities. The authority pronounced Liu's opponent Yin Qu the winner of the match and decided to suspend Liu from participating in professional competitions until March 15, 2023. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, competitions have been held online and the organizing committee requires each player to have a supervisor during matches. According to the rules of the competition, the use of AI is strictly prohibited during competitions. Players who break this rule will be banned for one year. If the player is a member of the national training team, they will be expelled from the team immediately.

Alongside their spring driver update, AMD this morning is also unveiling the first nugget of information about the next generation of their FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology. From a report: Dubbed FSR 2.0, the next generation of AMD's upscaling technology will be taking the logical leap into adding temporal data, giving FSR more data to work with, and thus improving its ability to generate details. And, while AMD is being coy with details for today's early teaser, at a high level this technology should put AMD much closer to competing with NVIDIA's temporal-based DLSS 2.0 upscaling technology, as well as Intel's forthcoming XeSS upscaling tech.

AMD's current version of FSR, which is now being referred to as FSR 1.0, was released last summer by the company. Implemented as a compute shader, FSR 1.0 was a (relatively) simple spatial upscaler, which could only use data from the current frame for generating a higher resolution frame. Spatial upscaling's simplicity is great for compatibility but it's limited by the data it has access to, allowing for more advanced multi-frame techniques to generate more detailed images. For that reason, AMD has been very careful with their image quality claims for FSR 1.0, treating it more like a supplement to other upscaling methods than a rival to NVIDIA's class-leading DLSS 2.0.

HSBC is buying a plot of virtual real estate in an online gaming space called The Sandbox for an undisclosed sum, the bank's first major foray into the metaverse as it shrinks its UK branch network. From a report:The digital push will enable HSBC to engage with sports, e-sports and gaming fans via its slice of turf in The Sandbox, a virtual space majority-owned by Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands. Its venture into the virtual world comes as the British-based lender slashes its footprint in the real world, announcing on Tuesday it would cut a further 69 branches in Britain as its customers move online.

Executives at companies like Meta, Google, Twitter and TikTok could face jail time sooner than anticipated if they fail to cooperate with the U.K. internet regulator, Ofcom. From a report: The U.K. government announced Wednesday that executives may face prosecution or jail time within two months of the new Online Safety Bill becoming law, instead of two years as it was previously drafted. The Online Safety Bill will be presented to lawmakers in Parliament on Thursday and could become law later this year. It aims to make it mandatory for social media services, search engines and other platforms that allow people to share their own content to protect children, tackle illegal activity and uphold their stated terms and conditions. The government said Wednesday that a range of new offenses had been added to the bill that makes the senior managers at tech firms criminally liable for destroying evidence, failing to attend or providing false information in interviews with Ofcom, and for obstructing the watchdog when it enters company offices.

For two decades, researchers have used brain-imaging technology to try to identify how the structure and function of a person's brain connects to a range of mental-health ailments, from anxiety and depression to suicidal tendencies. But a new paper, published Wednesday in Nature, calls into question whether much of this research is actually yielding valid findings. The New York Times reports: Many such studies, the paper's authors found, tend to include fewer than two dozen participants, far shy of the number needed to generate reliable results. "You need thousands of individuals," said Scott Marek, a psychiatric researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and an author of the paper. He described the finding as a "gut punch" for the typical studies that use imaging to try to better understand mental health.

Studies that use magnetic-resonance imaging technology commonly temper their conclusions with a cautionary statement noting the small sample size. But enlisting participants can be time-consuming and expensive, ranging from $600 to $2,000 an hour, said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine and another author on the paper. The median number of subjects in mental-health-related studies that use brain imaging is around 23, he added. But the Nature paper demonstrates that the data drawn from just two dozen subjects is generally insufficient to be reliable and can in fact yield 'massively inflated' findings," Dr. Dosenbach said. The findings from the Nature paper can "absolutely" be applied to other fields beyond mental health, said Marek. "My hunch this is much more about population science than it is about any one of those fields," he said.

Several outlets -- including Slashdot -- reported last week that LimeWire is making a comeback as an NFT marketplace. But as it turns out, the new LimeWire project has absolutely nothing to do with the team that originally developed the file-sharing software. They just happen to share the same name. TorrentFreak, a news website that tracks piracy and copyright, interviewed Mark Gorton, founder and chief executive of the original LimeWire company, called Lime Group LLC. An excerpt from the story: Gorton says that he had never even heard of this NFT project before it hit the news. "I was not approached about this NFT project, and I didn't hear about it until the public announcement," Gorton tells TorrentFreak. There was probably no legal obligation to inform the former LimeWire chief. The original trademarks have expired and the NFT website uses a new logo, so they can use the brand. However, Gorton is not happy to see the name used in a way that deviates from its original purpose. "I am not thrilled about an unrelated group of people using the LimeWire name. Using the LimeWire name in this way creates confusion and falsely uses that brand that we created for purposes for which it was never intended," Gorton says. The new LimeWire does have at least one asset that previously belonged to the original LimeWire team; the Limewire.com domain name.

Google is rolling out a Google Docs update that lets Workspace and legacy G Suite users collaborate on Gmail drafts. Engadget reports: Open the email draft template (Insert > Building Blocks > Email draft) and your colleagues can comment or make suggestions. You won't always need to know recipients' email addresses, either, as you can mention people by name. When you're ready to send the email, you just need to click a button to open a Gmail compose window and finalize the message. Docs will automatically populate all the relevant fields.

The feature will take up to 15 days to reach companies on Rapid Release domains, and will start reaching more cautious Scheduled Release customers on March 22nd. There's no mention of availability for personal use.

Worldcoin -- the billion-dollar startup that wants to give cryptocurrency to every living human by imaging their eyes -- has recently halted operations in at least seven countries due to a host of logistical hurdles that have prompted it to redraw its launch plans. From a report: Co-founded in 2020 by former Y Combinator chief Sam Altman, Worldcoin aims to photograph the irises of everyone on earth in order to identify them so it can distribute its new digital money fairly. So far, the company has collected images of the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people in about 20 countries. But the process has been bedeviled by problems such as uneven smartphone access, confused users and fraud attempts.

Worldcoin has suspended its work in multiple countries after local contractors departed or regulations made doing business impossible. After technical challenges, it also instituted a new requirement that anyone signing up must have a smartphone -- limiting its reach in developing nations, which have been key to the company's vision. Worldcoin has also repeatedly delayed its target launch date, which is now set for later this year. Worldcoin co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Alex Blania said in an interview last week that these setbacks are the natural result of "very aggressive testing" for a young startup. The company has grown from 10 employees to 100 in the last year, Blania said, and it's still experimenting as it hones its operations. "You're still talking to a Series A company, not an Uber," he said. "Things are not perfect."

Love them or hate them, NFTs will soon be coming to Instagram. From a report: Speaking at SXSW, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that digital collectibles would be arriving on Instagram "in the near term."

"We're working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term," he said. He didn't detail exactly how that would take shape, but suggested people would be able to show off their existing NFTs and potentially mint new ones. "I'm not ready to kind of announce exactly what that's going to be today. But over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment."

At the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit where its Stadia B2B cloud gaming platform was unveiled, Google announced the long-awaited availability of Steam on Chromebooks. 9to5Google reports: Google specifically said that the "Steam Alpha just launched, making this longtime PC game store available on select Chromebooks for users to try." That said, no other details appear to be live this morning, but we did reveal the device list last month. As we noted at the time: "At a minimum, your Chromebook needs to have an (11th gen) Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and a minimum of 7 GB of RAM. This eliminates almost all Chromebooks but those in the upper-mid range and high end."

Google today said "you can check that out on the Chromebook community forum." The post in question is now live, but without any actual availability timeline beyond "coming soon." However, we did learn that the "early, alpha-quality version of Steam" will first come to the Chrome OS Dev channel for a "small set" of devices.

Meanwhile, Google also said Chrome OS is getting a new "games overlay" on "select" Android titles to make them "playable with user-driven keyboard and mouse configurations on Chromebooks without developer changes." It will launch later this year in a public beta. Further reading: The part of the keynote where this announcement was made can be viewed here.

Google's Domain Name Registrar is Out of Beta After Seven Years

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Google had plenty of news about Stadia, the consumer-facing aspect of its cloud gaming products, at its Google for Games Developer Summit. On the flip side of that is the white-label platform Google's been working on: a way for other companies to license the game streaming tech that powers Stadia. Previously, that B2B offering was believed to be known as Google Stream. Google has now confirmed more details about the offering, including its name.

It's now called Immersive Stream for Games (which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue as smoothly as Google Stream). The Stadia team built it with the help of the folks at Google Cloud. The company says the service will allow companies to run their own game trials, let users play full games, offer subscription bundles or have full storefronts. In other words, publishers might be able to run their own versions of Stadia with their own libraries of games, branding and custom user interface.

We've seen a version of Immersive Stream for Games in action. Last year, Google teamed up with AT&T to offer people a way to play Batman: Arkham Knight for free via the cloud. Thousands of folks took advantage of the offer. AT&T plans to offer its customers access to another game soon with the help of Immersive Stream for Games. While that version of Batman: Arkham Knight was only available on desktop and laptop web browsers, the next game will run on mobile devices too. If all goes well, it could be a decent way for AT&T to show off what its 5G network can do. Immersive Stream for Games will include other features Google revealed for Stadia today, including a way to offer free trials of full games and a project aimed at making it easier to port games so they run on Stadia tech, as well as analytics. Developers and publishers can send Google an inquiry for more details.

Seven long, long years ago, Google started offering users a way to buy a domain without having to deal with a host provider. Now, Google Domains is at last out of beta as a full-fledged product. Engadget: Google says, to date, millions of people have used the service to manage a domain. It has added more features and tools to Domains over the years. Folks in 26 countries can now use the full version of the service. [...] To mark the occasion of Domains becoming a fully formed entity, Google's offering new and returning users a discount until April 15th.

DigitalOcean, in a blog post: I am excited to announce that DigitalOcean has acquired the CSS-Tricks website, a learning site with 6,500 articles, videos, guides and other content focused on frontend development. CSS-Tricks will broaden and complement our existing library of content, furthering DigitalOcean's reach with both frontend and full-stack developers, and supports our community strategy, a key differentiator for DigitalOcean in the cloud computing space. CSS-Tricks will continue operating as a standalone site supported by DigitalOcean, and CSS-Tricks founder Chris Coyier will support CSS-Tricks in an advisory capacity.

At DigitalOcean we take great pride in our commitment to the developer and startup communities. We truly believe that our community is bigger than just us, and we have demonstrated this through our creation of more than 6,000 high-quality developer tutorials and approximately 30,000 community-generated questions & answers, hosting of community-focused events such as deploy, and support of the open source community through Hacktoberfest and other initiatives.

South Africa's Competition Commission says it had referred Facebook and WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms to a tribunal for allegedly abusing its dominant position in the market. From a report: But a spokesperson for WhatsApp said the regulator was objecting to actions meant to protect the platform's users from abuses of WhatsApp's terms. In a statement, the regulator accused Meta of "abusing its dominance by engaging in exclusionary conduct geared at preventing competitors or potential competitors from entering into, participating, and expanding in a market". The commission said Meta had decided to "offboard" GovChat (a start-up that connects government and citizens) and its subsidiary #LetsTalk from its WhatsApp Business Application Programming Interface. It also said the company had "imposed and/or selectively enforced exclusionary terms and conditions regulating access to the WhatsApp Business API, mainly restrictions on the use of data".