Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg abruptly left a key WordPress community platform after a federal court ordered his company to restore rival WP Engine's access to WordPress.org and remove a controversial login requirement. The preliminary injunction mandates Automattic eliminate a checkbox that forced users to declare they had no connection to WP Engine before accessing the platform.

Mullenweg departed the Post Status Slack forum following the ruling, writing he was "sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor" to WP Engine, according to 404 Media. "It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this," he added. The order gives Automattic 72 hours to comply, including reinstating WP Engine's employee credentials and plugin access. The ruling marks a significant development in an escalating dispute between the WordPress parent company and the web hosting provider.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The news came by Slack message. Cruise CEO Marc Whitten, who took the top post in June, posted a message Tuesday afternoon in the company's announcements channel along with a link to a press release entitled "GM to refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles."

GM, which acquired the self-driving car startup in 2016, would no longer fund the company, ending a mission that hundreds of Cruise engineers had worked on for years. Minutes later, during an all-hands meeting, Cruise employees learned a few more details. The self-driving car company would be absorbed into parent company GM and combined with the automaker's own efforts to develop driver assistance features -- and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Whether their jobs would be safe or cut was, and still is, unclear.

That meeting was short and unsatisfactory, according to one source, who noted that the senior leadership team was also surprised by this turn of events. Whitten, president and chief technology officer Mo Elshenawy, and chief administrative officer Craig Glidden, led the all-hands. Several Cruise employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity said they were "surprised" and "blindsided" by the decision. One source told TechCrunch that employees learned about GM's plans the same time the media did.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fans post about him on social media. Swag bearing his name sells out on the regular. College professors dedicate class sessions and textbook sections to him. Foreign government officials have been known to express jealousy over his skills, and one prominent economist refers to him as a "national treasure." Meet FRED, a 33-year-old data tool from St. Louis, Mo., and the economics world's most unlikely celebrity.

Even if you have not interacted with FRED yourself, there is a good chance you've encountered him without knowing it. The tool's signature baby blue graphs dot social media and crop up on many of the world's most popular news websites. Many people feel that way about FRED. The website had nearly 15 million users last year, and it is on track for even more in 2024, up from fewer than 400,000 as recently as 2009. Their reasons for clicking are diverse: FRED users are coming for freshly released unemployment data, to check in on egg inflation or to find out whether business is booming in Memphis.

That appeal crosses political lines. Larry Kudlow, who directed the National Economic Council during the first Trump administration, has tweeted and retweeted FRED charts. Groups as disparate as the spending-focused Alaskans for a Sustainable Budget and the pro-worker advocacy organization Employ America have used its charts to back up their arguments. It is even occasionally used by professional and White House economists, who tend to have access to sophisticated data tools, for quick charts. "It is unfathomable for me now, to think of the days before FRED," said Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale and a former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

When he speaks to foreign government economists, he noted, they are often "jealous" of the data tool, which is more comprehensive and easier to use than what other countries offer. "It's a compliment to FRED," he said. FRED -- whose name stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data -- was born in 1991. But he was a sparkle in the eye of the St. Louis Fed long before that. The story started in the 1960s, with an economist named Homer Jones (now sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of FRED"). Mr. Jones was the director of research at the Fed's branch in St. Louis, and he wanted to make central bank decisions more data-based, so he started to mail typed data reports to Fed officials around the country.

"Mercedes-Benz is researching a new type of solar modules that could be seamlessly applied to the bodywork of electric vehicles," according to a recent Mercedes-Benz press release.

They describe the 5-micrometer coating as "similar to a wafer-thin layer of paste... significantly thinner than a human hair" — but creating an active photovoltaic surface with an efficiency of 20%. An area of 118.4 square feet (equivalent to the surface of a mid-size SUV) could produce energy for up to 7,456 miles per year under ideal conditions [based on daylight conditions from their testing in Stuttgart]. The energy generated by the solar cells is used for driving or fed directly into the high-voltage battery...

Solar paint has a high level of efficiency and contains no rare earths or silicon — only non-toxic, readily available raw materials. It is easy to recycle and considerably cheaper to produce than conventional solar modules. The Mercedes-Benz research department is currently working to enable use of the new solar paint on all exterior vehicle surfaces — regardless of shape or angle.
Solar paint could power 62% of the travel for a typical Stuttgart driver, their announcement notes. But in a sunnier city like Los Angeles, "It could be used for 100% of their driving, on average." (And "the surplus of energy could be fed directly into the home network via bidirectional charging.")

Mercedes-Benz researchers "initially thought the tech had limited scope for mass production," reports EV Central, "until experiments were carried out with prototypes coated with the paint in real-world scenarios. Instead of just coating the roof and bonnet to form a 1.8-square-metre surface area, one scientist suggested covering an entire car with the new solar paint, ramping up the surface area to more than 11m2. Another difference to the [Mercedes-Benz 2022 Vision EQXX concept] is instead of wiring the body panels to the 12-volt system, scientists hardwired the body panels to the Benz's high-voltage battery and the performance of the paint was well beyond expectations... Available in all colours, engineers admit the solar paint work best in darker shades. When it's launched, the tech should be as durable as regular paint. The photovoltaic surface is protected by at least two protective lacquer finishes to ensure it isn't damaged in daily use.
Mercedes-Benz says the solar paint could mean "increased electric range and fewer charging stops." And this is significant, because "Electric vehicle charging and infrastructure are two major obstacles to EV adoption on a mass scale," writes Autoblog — arguing that Mercedes-Benz "may have a solution... " Alternative methods of energy harnessing could help alleviate range anxiety, increase an EV's driving distance, and reduce charging costs across the board. Not only that but considering the cost of producing Mercedes' solar coating and the lack of rare earth metals, it could be the leading solution to charging concerns... While the German automaker says the solar paint isn't ready for production on a mass scale, research, and development are progressing at a steady rate. If all goes well, we'll hopefully see solar coating as an accessory EV charging solution within the next decade.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

60-year-old Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli led the Wuhan Institute of Virology's group studying bat coronaviruses (prompting Science magazine to call her "Bat Woman"). In June of 2020 Scientific American described Zhengli as "distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab — despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied."

More than four years later, Nature writes Friday that Zhengli "reported that none of the viruses stored in her freezers are the most recent ancestors of the virus SARS-CoV-2," presenting data at a conference in Japan "on dozens of new coronaviruses collected from bats in southern China." Shi has consistently said that SARS-CoV-2 was never seen or studied in her lab. But some commentators have continued to ask whether one of the many bat coronaviruses her team collected in southern China over decades was closely related to it. Shi promised to sequence the genomes of the coronaviruses and release the data. The latest analysis, which has not been peer reviewed, includes data from the whole genomes of 56 new betacoronaviruses, the broad group to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs, as well as some partial sequences. All the viruses were collected between 2004 and 2021.

"We didn't find any new sequences which are more closely related to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2," said Shi, in a pre-recorded presentation at the conference... The results support her assertion that the WIV lab did not have any bat-derived sequences from viruses that were more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than were any already described in scientific papers, says Jonathan Pekar, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. "This just validates what she was saying: that she did not have anything extremely closely related, as we've seen in the years since," he says.
"Earlier this year, Shi moved from the WIV to the Guangzhou Laboratory, a newly established national research institute for infectious diseases."

"TikTok has lost its bid to strike down a law that could result in the platform being banned in the United States," reports CNN.

A U.S. federal appeals court just unanimously ruled in favor of the new U.S. law requiring TikTok's China-based owners to either sell the app next month or face an effective ban in the United States. Denying TikTok's argument that the law was unconstitutional, the judges found that the law does not "contravene the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," nor does it "violate the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws"... After the [January 25] deadline, U.S. app stores and internet services could face hefty fines for hosting TikTok if it is not sold. (Under the legislation, President Biden may issue a one-time extension of the deadline.)

In a statement, TikTok indicated it would appeal the decision. "The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans' right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue," said company spokesperson Michael Hughes. "Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people. The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025"....

"People in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing," the judges said. "What the Act targets is the PRC's ability to manipulate the content covertly. Understood in that way, the Government's justification is wholly consonant with the First Amendment."
The judges also wrote that "in part precisely because of the platform's expansive reach, Congress and multiple Presidents determined that divesting it from the PRC's control is essential to protect our national security... Congress judged it necessary to assume that risk given the grave national-security threats it perceived."

CNN notes that ByteDance "has previously indicated it will not sell TikTok."

"Okay, we're doing this," begins a new announcement at The Verge: Today we're launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It'll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we'll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design... A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we're happy to deliver. If you don't want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we're thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else...

If you're a Verge reader, you know we've been covering massive, fundamental changes to how the internet works for years now. Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do.

A few years ago, we decided the only real way to survive all this was to stand apart and bet on our own website so that we could remain independent of these platforms and their algorithms. We didn't want to write stories to chase Google Search trends or because we thought they'd do well on social media. And we definitely didn't want to compromise our famously strict ethics policy to accept brand endorsement deals from the companies we cover, which almost all of our competitors in the creator economy are forced to do in order to run sustainable businesses...

[W]e intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time. So many of you like The Verge that we've actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It's no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it's clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet. At the same time, we didn't want to simply paywall the entire site — it's a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free.
The print premium for subscribers is described as a "beautiful / deranged print product" that's drawn from a series of articles "about what Google had done to the web, capped off by a feature about search engine optimization titled 'The People Who Ruined the Internet.'" But it ships with a satirical cover that instead proclaims it as "The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization". A tongue-in-check announcement explains: [A] year has passed, and we've had a change of heart. Maybe search engine optimization is actually a good thing. Maybe appeasing the search algorithm is not only a sustainable strategy for building a loyal audience, but also a strategic way to plan and produce content. What are journalists, if not content creators? Anyway, SEO community, consider this our apology. And what better way to say "our bad, your industry is not a cesspool of AI slop but a brilliant vision of what a useful internet could look like" than collecting all the things we've learned in one handy print magazine? Which is why I'm proud to introduce The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization: All the Tips, Tricks, Hints, Schemes, and Techniques for Promoting High-Quality Content!
Whoops — slip off the cover and the real title appears: "CONTENT GOBLINS" (written in green slime). Again, it's "an anthology of stories about 'content' and the people who 'make' it." In very Verge fashion, we are meeting the moment where the internet has been overrun by AI garbage by publishing a beautifully designed, limited edition print product. (Also, the last time we printed a magazine, it won a very prestigious design award.) Content Goblins collects some of our best stories over the past couple years, capturing the cynical push for the world's great art and journalism to be reduced into units that can be packaged, distributed, and consumed on the internet. Consider Content Goblins as our resistance to that movement. With terrific new art and photography, we're making the case that great reporting is vital and enduring — and worth paying for.

This gorgeous, grotesque magazine can be yours if you commit to an annual subscription to The Verge — while supplies last.

The Solana JavaScript SDK "was temporarily compromised yesterday in a supply chain attack," reports BleepingComputer, "with the library backdoored with malicious code to steal cryptocurrency private keys and drain wallets." Solana offers an SDK called "@solana/web3.js" used by decentralized applications (dApps) to connect and interact with the Solana blockchain. Supply chain security firm Socket reports that Solana's Web3.js library was hijacked to push out two malicious versions to steal private and secret cryptography keys to secure wallets and sign transactions... Solana confirmed the breach, stating that one of their publish-access accounts was compromised, allowing the attackers to publish two malicious versions of the library... Solana is warning developers who suspect they were compromised to immediately upgrade to the latest v1.95.8 release and to rotate any keys, including multisigs, program authorities, and server keypairs...

Once the threat actors gain access to these keys, they can load them into their own wallets and remotely drain all stored cryptocurrency and NFTs... Socket says the attack has been traced to the FnvLGtucz4E1ppJHRTev6Qv4X7g8Pw6WPStHCcbAKbfx Solana address, which currently contains 674.86 Solana and varying amounts of the Irish Pepe , Star Atlas, Jupiter, USD Coin, Santa Hat, Pepe on Fire, Bonk, catwifhat, and Genopets Ki tokens. Solscan shows that the estimated value of the stolen cryptocurrency is $184,000 at the time of this writing.

For anyone whose wallets were compromised in this supply chain attack, you should immediately transfer any remaining funds to a new wallet and discontinue the use of the old one as the private keys are now compromised.
Ars Technica adds that "In social media posts, one person claimed to have lost $20,000 in the hack."

The compromised library "receives more than ~350,000 weekly downloads on npm," Socket posted. (Although Solana's statement says the compromised versions "were caught within hours and have since been unpublished."

"$15.8 million every 60 seconds. That's how much US consumers spent in two hours on Monday night," reports CNN, "capping off a five-day spending spree that smashed previous records." U.S. consumers spent a total of $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday, up 7.3% from the previous year, according to Adobe Analytics... Consumers spent a record $41.1 billion across the five days beginning Thanksgiving Day, according to Adobe. "While Cyber Monday remained the season's and year's biggest online shopping day, year-over-year growth was stronger on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday," Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement... The company's data projects that holiday spending from November 1 to December 31 will surpass $240 billion, up 8.4% from the previous year.

The record sales on Cyber Monday were boosted by US consumers shopping on their mobile devices, which accounted for $7.6 billion in spending. This year, 57% of online sales came through a mobile device, compared to 33% in 2019, as shopping on mobile phones has surged in popularity... Buy now, pay later" programs also contributed nearly $1 billion in spending on Cyber Monday, a record high. About 75% of these types of transactions occurred through a mobile device.

Cyber Monday shopping wasn't just confined to the US, either. Global sales reached $49.7 billion, up 3% from the previous year, according to data from Salesforce.
The top-selling items included consumer electronics like the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch OLED, the article points out (adding that "About 78% of all consumer smartphones and 87% of consoles were imported from China in 2023, according to a report from the Consumer Technology Association.")

More interesting statistics from CNN:

• "Discounts on apparel peaked at just over 23% off, while TVs and computers peaked at almost 22% off, according to Adobe. And the discounts might last: Adobe projects discounts of up to 18% off computers through the end of the year... "

• "For US retail sites, the share of revenue from affiliates and partners like social media influencers was 20.3% on Cyber Monday, up almost 7% from the previous year. "

• "Additionally, companies employed AI chatbots to assist consumers, like Amazon's Rufus. Traffic to retail sites from chatbots increased by nearly 2,000% on Cyber Monday, according to Adobe."

Have you been to Enron.com lately?

"It's the comeback story no one asked for," reports CNN, "the resurrection of a brand so toxic it remains synonymous with corporate fraud more than two decades after it collapsed in bankruptcy.

"That's right, folks: Enron is back. But only kind of." TL;DR: A company that makes T-shirts bought the Enron trademark and appears to be trying to sell some merch on behalf of the guy behind the satirical conspiracy theory "Birds Aren't Real...."

On Monday, the 23rd anniversary of Enron's filing for bankruptcy, rumors began to spread that the former Texas energy giant had come back from the dead. A sleek new website, enron.com, appeared to show that the company had done some serious soul-searching and, inexplicably, reincorporated under its original brand. As a modern energy company, it would be dedicated to "solving the global energy crisis," its press statement reads. The site is packed with the kind of stock art and benign corporate platitudes that lend it credibility. There's a link to job openings, employee testimonials and even a minute-long video titled "I am Enron," a movie-trailer-style mashup of cityscape time lapses, rockets launching into space, a ballerina twirling on a beach — a mess of imagery and baritone voiceover so trite it's almost believable.

But the site and its associated social media accounts are, like Enron's balance sheets, mostly fiction. Unlike the Enron scandal, however, this one appears to be little more than performance art designed to sell branded hoodies. Publicly available documents show that an Akansas-based LLC called The College Company bought the Enron trademark for $275 in 2020... You can tab over to the site's "Company Store" page to browse a selection of Enron-branded hoodies ($118 before tax and shipping), puffer vests ($89), tees ($40) baseball hats ($40), beanies ($30) and water bottles emblazoned with the slogan "you've got great energy."
Somewhere on the site CNN spotted a list of "key pillars" which included a commitment to "permissionless innovation," which CNN took to be "a nod that prompted some speculation online that the new 'Enron' would launch some kind of digital token." That phrase has apparently been changed now to "continuous innovation." An Enron-branded X account posted and later deleted a message teasing at a crypto offering, saying "we do not have any token or coin (yet). Stay tuned, we are excited to show you more soon."
But sharp-eyed X.com users also found the key context to add: that the Terms of Use at Enron.com declare the site's information "is First Amendment-protected parody, represents performance art, and is for entertainment purposes only."

Still, the site includes this testimonial from someone it says is a current employee. "Like many of my peers in the Enron family, I was skeptical at first.

"Now, not only do I have complete confidence in the integrity of the company, I also genuinely believe that we are leading the way for a new chapter of American business."

A ransomware attack on the multinational Stoli Group in August helped push two of the vodka-maker's U.S. subsidiaries into bankruptcy, according to the company's CEO. From a report: In a Texas bankruptcy court filing on November 29, CEO Chris Caldwell attributed a range of external factors to the financial woes of Stoli Group USA and Kentucky Owl (KO) -- which are facing $84 million in debt. But one of the most prominent was a ransomware attack this year that damaged the parent company's IT system.

"In August 2024, the Stoli Group's IT infrastructure suffered severe disruption in the wake of a data breach and ransomware attack," Caldwell said in the filing. "The attack caused substantial operational issues throughout all companies within the Stoli Group, including Stoli USA and KO, due to the Stoli Group's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system being disabled and most of the Stoli Group's internal processes (including accounting functions) being forced into a manual entry mode." Caldwell said the systems will be restored âoeno earlier than in the first quarter of 2025.â

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers...

In the call Tuesday, two officials — a senior FBI official who asked not to be named and Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — both recommended using encrypted messaging apps to Americans who want to minimize the chances of China's intercepting their communications. "Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, whether it's on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible," Greene said. The FBI official said, "People looking to further protect their mobile device communications would benefit from considering using a cellphone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption and phishing resistant" multi-factor authentication for email, social media and collaboration tool accounts...

The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have a complicated relationship with encryption technology, historically advocating against full end-to-end encryption that does not allow law enforcement access to digital material even with warrants. But the FBI has also supported forms of encryption that do allow some law enforcement access in certain circumstances.
Officials said the breach seems to include some live calls of specfic targets and also call records (showing numbers called and when). "The hackers focused on records around the Washington, D.C., area, and the FBI does not plan to alert people whose phone metadata was accessed."

"The scope of the telecom compromise is so significant, Greene said, that it was 'impossible" for the agencies "to predict a time frame on when we'll have full eviction.'"

The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, appears to be signaling its intention to tackle daylight saving time. Musk has indicated support for ending semiannual clock changes in recent days on his social media platform X, sharing a poll showing majority opposition to the practice.

DOGE co-head Ramaswamy also backed the stance, calling time changes "inefficient and easy to change."

The initiative follows a failed 2022 legislative attempt, the Sunshine Protection Act, which passed the Senate but stalled in the House. The Department of Transportation, which oversees time changes, cannot alter the system without congressional action.

Public sentiment appears to favor reform, with a 2022 YouGov poll showing two-thirds of Americans support ending time changes. Studies have linked the switches to increased rates of heart attacks and traffic accidents, while JPMorgan Chase research found the return to standard time reduces consumer spending by up to 4.9%. Several countries including Mexico, Russia, and Turkey have already discontinued daylight saving time, which originated during World War I as an energy conservation measure.

Walmart said Tuesday it had completed its $2.3 billion all-cash acquisition of TV maker Vizio, a move by the retailing giant to expand its advertising business. From a report: The closing of the deal follows the expiration of the waiting period under federal regulations. Walmart announced the deal to buy Vizio in February 2024. Walmart said the acquisition of Vizio will let it "bring to market new and differentiated ways for advertisers to meaningfully connect with customers at scale and boost product discovery" through Walmart Connect, the company's U.S. retail media business.

Walmart and Vizio will continue to operate separately "for the foreseeable future," according to the announcement. William Wang will continue to lead Vizio as CEO, reporting to Seth Dallaire, executive VP and chief growth officer of Walmart U.S. Vizio, founded in 2002, is a leading vendor of value-priced HDTVs. Its device ecosystem and its smart TV operating system, SmartCast, provide free, ad-supported access to streaming content.

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced sweeping action against some of the most important companies in the location data industry, including those that power surveillance tools used by a wide spread of U.S. law enforcement agencies and demanding they delete data related to certain sensitive areas like health clinics and places of worship. From a report: Venntel, through its parent company Gravy Analytics, takes location data from smartphones, either through ordinary apps installed on them or through the advertising ecosystem, and then provides that data feed to other companies who sell location tracking technology to the government or sells the data directly itself.

Venntel is the company that provides the underlying data for a variety of other government contractors and surveillance tools, including Locate X. 404 Media and a group of other journalists recently revealed Locate X could be used to pinpoint phones that visited abortion clinics. The FTC says in a proposed order that Gravy and Venntel will be banned from selling, disclosing, or using sensitive location data, except in "limited circumstances" involving national security or law enforcement.

The cyber risks facing the United Kingdom are being "widely underestimated," the country's new cyber chief will warn on Tuesday as he launches the National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) annual review. From a report: In his first major speech since joining the NCSC -- part of the signals and cyber intelligence agency GCHQ -- Richard Horne will drive a shift in tone in how the cybersecurity agency communicates these risks. Despite some evidence showing cyberattacks growing year-on-year for half a decade, the NCSC has not previously confirmed the trend nor expressed alarm about it.

"What has struck me more forcefully than anything else since taking the helm at the NCSC is the clearly widening gap between the exposure and threat we face, and the defences that are in place to protect us," Horne will say, according to an advance preview of his speech on Tuesday. Citing the intelligence that NCSC has access to as an agency within GCHQ, Horne will warn that "hostile activity in UK cyberspace has increased in frequency, sophistication and intensity," adding that despite growing activity from Russian and Chinese threat actors, the agency believes British society as a whole is failing to appreciate the severity of the risk. The annual review reveals that the agency's incident management team handled a record number of cyber incidents over the past 12 months -- 430 compared to 371 last year -- 89 of which were considered nationally significant incidents.

Oxford University Press: Following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say, we're pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is 'brain rot.'

Our language experts created a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape the past year. After two weeks of public voting and widespread conversation, our experts came together to consider the public's input, voting results, and our language data, before declaring 'brain rot' as the definitive Word of the Year for 2024.

'Brain rot' is defined as "the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration."

Our experts noticed that 'brain rot' gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.

Bluesky says it will never train generative AI on its users' data. But despite that, "one million public Bluesky posts — complete with identifying user information — were crawled and then uploaded to AI company Hugging Face," reports Mashable (citing an article by 404 Media).

"Shortly after the article's publication, the dataset was removed from Hugging Face," the article notes, with the scraper at Hugging Face posting an apology. "While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake." But TechCrunch noted the incident's real lesson. "Bluesky's open API means anyone can scrape your data for AI training," calling it a timely reminder that everything you post on Bluesky is public. Bluesky might not be training AI systems on user content as other social networks are doing, but there's little stopping third parties from doing so...

Bluesky said that it's looking at ways to enable users to communicate their consent preferences externally, [but] the company posted: "Bluesky won't be able to enforce this consent outside of our systems. It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings. We're having ongoing conversations with engineers & lawyers and we hope to have more updates to share on this shortly!"
Mashable notes Bluesky's response to 404Media — that Bluesky is like a website, and "Just as robots.txt files don't always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here."

So "While many commentators said that data collection should be opt in, others argued that Bluesky data is publicly available anyway and so the dataset is fair use," according to SiliconRepublic.com.

America's FBI "has been investigating a longtime Exxon Mobil consultant," reports Reuters, "over the contractor's alleged role in a hack-and-leak operation that targeted hundreds of the oil company's biggest critics, according to three people familiar with the matter." The operation involved mercenary hackers who successfully breached the email accounts of environmental activists and others, the sources told Reuters. The scheme allegedly began in late 2015, when U.S. authorities contend that the names of the hacking targets were compiled by the DCI Group, a public affairs and lobbying company working for Exxon at the time, one of the sources said. DCI provided the names to an Israeli private detective, who then outsourced the hacking, according to the source.

In an effort to push a narrative that Exxon was the target of a political vendetta aimed at destroying its business, some of the stolen material was subsequently leaked to the media by DCI, Reuters determined. The Federal Bureau of Investigation found that DCI shared the information with Exxon before leaking it, the source said. Some environmental activists interviewed by Reuters say the hacking operation disrupted preparations for lawsuits by cities and state attorneys general against Exxon and other energy companies... The stolen material continues to be used today to counter litigation claiming the oil giant misled the public and its investors about the risks of climate change...

The investigation into the hack-and-leak operation comes amid growing concern among law enforcement agencies worldwide about how such cyberespionage schemes threaten to taint judicial proceedings. The FBI has been investigating the broader use of mercenary hackers to tamper with lawsuits since early 2018, Reuters has previously reported. The Israeli private detective hired by DCI, Amit Forlit, was arrested this year at London's Heathrow Airport and is fighting extradition to the United States on charges of hacking and wire fraud... Federal prosecutors have secured a related conviction: that of Forlit's former business associate, private investigator Aviram Azari. Azari pleaded guilty in 2022 to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit hacking and aggravated identity theft, which included targeting the environmental activists.

"Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok?" asks the BBC. "If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year." It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word's usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024. Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a "symptom of the time we're living in". Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing... [And "slop".]

The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet — it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society's tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. It leads him to ask: "While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot — which prevails so much more widely and fatally?" The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it's now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Prof Przybylski says "there's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it's a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media."
The New York Times points out that Oxford's past "word of the year" selections included "podcast" and "selfie" [Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of "bell-bottoms coming back into fashion...."

"Slop" has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to "art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate," according to Oxford. Like "brain rot," it "represents the underbelly of today's linguistic churn," Grathwohl said. "There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged."