An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: New intelligence has led two US intelligence agencies to conclude that it's possible a small number of mysterious health ailments colloquially termed as Havana Syndrome impacting spies, soldiers and diplomats around the world may have been caused by a "novel weapon" wielded by a foreign actor, according to intelligence officials and a new unclassified summary report released on Friday. However, the two agencies are in the minority and the broader intelligence community assessment remains that it is very unlikely that the symptoms were caused by a foreign actor, according to the unclassified report summary issued Friday — even as an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] emphasized that analysts cannot "rule out" the possibility in some small number of cases. The subtle, technocratic shift in the assessment over the cause of Havana Syndrome has reignited a bitter debate that has split US officials, Capitol Hill and victims over the likelihood that the bizarre injuries were caused by a weapon or a host of disparate, natural causes. Sometime in the last two years, the US received new intelligence that indicated a foreign nation's directed energy research programs had been "making progress," according to the official. That led one unnamed intelligence agency to assess that there was a "roughly even chance" that a foreign country has used some kind of novel weapon against a small group of victims, causing the symptoms that the government officially calls "anomalous health incidents" — headaches, vertigo and even, in some cases, signs of traumatic brain injury. A second intelligence agency assessed a "roughly even" chance that a foreign actor possessed such a weapon but is unlikely to have deployed it against US personnel... But both judgments were made with low confidence, according to the ODNI official. And critically, possessing a capability is not the same as proof that it has been used. The article notes that U.S. intelligence and administration officials "do not doubt that the injuries are real and deserving of government compensation." But one official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told CNN "The intelligence does not link a foreign actor to these events. Indeed, it points away from their involvement." And they added that all U.S. Intelligence Community components "agree that years of Intelligence Community collection, targeting and analytic efforts have not surfaced compelling intelligence reporting that ties a foreign actor to any specific event reported" as a possible anomalous health incident. CNN adds that "the official said some evidence directly contradicts the notion that a foreign government was involved." The White House emphasized that research to determine the causes of the incidents is ongoing... On Friday, officials emphasized that the intelligence community is now supporting lab work on whether radio frequencies can cause "bioeffects" in line with what victims have reported. The latest findings from limited studies have shown mixed results, while previously most results had shown no effects, officials said. A panel of experts assembled by the intelligence community that studied a smaller set of incidents previously found that the symptoms might be explained by "pulsed electromagnetic or acoustic energy," as opposed to environmental or medical conditions. "There was unanimous judgment by the panel that the most plausible explanation for a subset of cases was exposure to directed energy," a second senior administration official said. But complicating matters for victims and analysts is the fact that not all of those reporting Anomalous Health Incidents have the same set of symptoms — and the vast majority of cases have been explained by other causes, officials have previously said...

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"Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit is taking legal action to ensure the safety and integrity of our AI services," according to a Friday blog post by the unit's assistant general counsel. Microsoft blames "a foreign-based threat-actor group" for "tools specifically designed to bypass the safety guardrails of generative AI services, including Microsoft's, to create offensive and harmful content. Microsoft "is accusing three individuals of running a 'hacking-as-a-service' scheme," reports Ars Technica, "that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company's platform for AI-generated content" after bypassing Microsoft's AI guardrails: They then compromised the legitimate accounts of paying customers. They combined those two things to create a fee-based platform people could use. Microsoft is also suing seven individuals it says were customers of the service. All 10 defendants were named John Doe because Microsoft doesn't know their identity.... The three people who ran the service allegedly compromised the accounts of legitimate Microsoft customers and sold access to the accounts through a now-shuttered site... The service, which ran from last July to September when Microsoft took action to shut it down, included "detailed instructions on how to use these custom tools to generate harmful and illicit content." The service contained a proxy server that relayed traffic between its customers and the servers providing Microsoft's AI services, the suit alleged. Among other things, the proxy service used undocumented Microsoft network application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate with the company's Azure computers. The resulting requests were designed to mimic legitimate Azure OpenAPI Service API requests and used compromised API keys to authenticate them. Microsoft didn't say how the legitimate customer accounts were compromised but said hackers have been known to create tools to search code repositories for API keys developers inadvertently included in the apps they create. Microsoft and others have long counseled developers to remove credentials and other sensitive data from code they publish, but the practice is regularly ignored. The company also raised the possibility that the credentials were stolen by people who gained unauthorized access to the networks where they were stored... The lawsuit alleges the defendants' service violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Lanham Act, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and constitutes wire fraud, access device fraud, common law trespass, and tortious interference.

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"What if they ban TikTok and people keep using it anyway?" asks the New York Times, saying a pending ban in America "is vague on how it would be enforced" Some experts say that even if TikTok is actually banned this month or soon, there may be so many legal and technical loopholes that millions of Americans could find ways to keep TikTok'ing. The law is "Swiss cheese with lots of holes in it," said Glenn Gerstell, a former top lawyer at the National Security Agency and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research organization. "There are obviously ways around it...." When other countries ban apps, the government typically orders internet providers and mobile carriers to block web traffic to and from the blocked website or app. That's probably not how a ban on TikTok in the United States would work. Two lawyers who reviewed the law said the text as written doesn't appear to order internet and mobile carriers to stop people from using TikTok. There may not be unanimity on this point. Some lawyers who spoke to Bloomberg News said internet providers would be in legal hot water if they let their customers continue to use a banned TikTok. Alan Rozenshtein, a University of Minnesota associate law professor, said he suspected internet providers aren't obligated to stop TikTok use "because Congress wanted to allow the most dedicated TikTok users to be able to access the app, so as to limit the First Amendment infringement." The law also doesn't order Americans to stop using TikTok if it's banned or to delete the app from our phones.... Odds are that if the Supreme Court declares the TikTok law constitutional and if a ban goes into effect, blacklisting the app from the Apple and Google app stores will be enough to stop most people from using TikTok... If a ban goes into effect and Apple and Google block TikTok from pushing updates to the app on your phone, it may become buggy or broken over time. But no one is quite sure how long it would take for the TikTok app to become unusable or compromised in this situation. Users could just sideload the app after downloading it outside a phone's official app store, the article points out. (More than 10 million people sideloaded Fortnite within six weeks of its removal from Apple and Google's app stores.) And there's also the option of just using a VPN — or watching TikTok's web site. (I've never understood why all apps haven't already been replaced with phone-optimized web sites...)

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President-elect Donald Trump wants to buy the territory from Denmark, which says it’s not for sale. DealBook asked experts how they’d approach the deal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company's e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack. He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site. "We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page," Tomchuk told TechCrunch. "Each page has at least three photos." OpenAI was sending "tens of thousands" of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions. "OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it's way more," he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site. "Their crawlers were crushing our site," he said "It was basically a DDoS attack." Triplegangers' website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of "human digital doubles" on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models. It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos -- everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies -- to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics. [...] To add insult to injury, not only was Triplegangers knocked offline by OpenAI's bot during U.S. business hours, but Tomchuk expects a jacked-up AWS bill thanks to all of the CPU and downloading activity from the bot. Triplegangers initially lacked a properly configured robots.txt file, which allowed the bot to freely scrape its site since the system interprets the absence of such a file as permission. It's not an opt-in system. Once the file was updated with specific tags to block OpenAI's bot, along with additional defenses like Cloudflare, the scraping stopped. However, robots.txt is not foolproof since compliance by AI companies is voluntary, leaving the burden on website owners to monitor and block unauthorized access proactively. "[Tomchuk] wants other small online business to know that the only way to discover if an AI bot is taking a website's copyrighted belongings is to actively look," reports TechCrunch.

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The Justice Department’s conclusion follows an investigation of the 1921 atrocity in Oklahoma in which up to 300 Black residents were killed.

An image depicting a famous 19th-century painting of Cossacks, with current Ukrainian soldiers standing in for the warriors, has struck a chord as Kyiv battles to assert its identity.

Wikipedia's massive dataset helped researchers identify three styles of curiosity -- "busybody," "hunter," and "dancer" -- based on how users navigate its pages (see: wiki rabbit hole). These curiosity styles reflect broader social trends and highlight curiosity's role in connecting information rather than merely acquiring it. Scientific American reports: In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. "Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them," says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, cosenior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. "It's not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know." The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia's mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these users' paths using "knowledge networks" of connected information, which depict how closely one search topic (a node in the network) is related to another. Beyond just mapping the connections, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures. In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that "in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus." The researchers also analyzed topics of interest, ranging from physics to visual arts, for busybodies compared with hunters (graphic). Dancer patterns, more recently confirmed, were excluded. Editor note: This article was published on December 24, 2024, based on a study published in October, 2024.

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SysEngineer shares a report from the Associated Press: A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole. The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped as close as 183 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of of our solar system's smallest, innermost planet. Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers).

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A son of the country’s founding father says he has been persecuted by the government because of a feud with his older brother, who until May was prime minister.