Lifeboat Foundation

Five malicious dropper Android apps with over 130,000 cumulative installations have been discovered on the Google Play Store distributing banking trojans like SharkBot and Vultur, which are capable of stealing financial data and performing on-device fraud.

“These droppers continue the unstopping evolution of malicious apps sneaking to the official store,” Dutch mobile security firm ThreatFabric told The Hacker News in a statement.

“This evolution includes following newly introduced policies and masquerading as file managers and overcoming limitations by side-loading the malicious payload through the web browser.”

A recently discovered hacking group known for targeting employees dealing with corporate transactions has been linked to a new backdoor called Danfuan.

This hitherto undocumented malware is delivered via another dropper called Geppei, researchers from Symantec, by Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

The dropper “is being used to install a new backdoor and other tools using the novel technique of reading commands from seemingly innocuous Internet Information Services (IIS) logs,” the researchers said.

The mission team continues to complete testing of the spacecraft’s flight software in preparation for the 2023 launch date.

On Friday, October 29, NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.” Its core values are “safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion.”

John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School and has served as president of both the Society of Biblical Literature and Catholic Biblical Association. His many other books include “Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Pseudepigraphy; Beyond the Qumran Community; and The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism.

Apocalyptic literature evokes an imaginative world that is set in deliberate counterpoint to the experiential world of the present. Apocalypticism thrives especially in times of crisis, and it functions by offering a resolution of the relevant crisis, not in practical terms but in terms of imagination and faith.

Continue reading “The Invention of The Exodus Story — Dr. John J. Collins” »

“We are very pleased that we can now start with the first activities to stimulate and consolidate cellular agriculture in the Netherlands,” said Ira van Eelen, CEO of KindEart. Tech and a board member of Cellular Agriculture Netherlands. “With this we can guarantee that the Netherlands remains the ideal place for cellular agriculture to thrive. We have a rich history in cellular agriculture and are a global leader in biotechnology, alternative proteins and food innovation. Supported by this visionary leadership that the Dutch government is showing again today, we will expand our team in the coming months and roll out the first activities around public research, scaling up, and education.”

Indeed, the Netherlands has been demonstrating considerable progress in developing cultured meat. In July, for example, Dutch company Meatable revealed its first lab-grown sausages, which are expected to go on sale to consumers by 2025. The addition of €60 million in government funding will make the Netherlands an even more attractive location for companies in the sector.

Currently a niche and miniscule part of the overall food market, cultured meat has potential to become another “exponential” technology – much like the semiconductor industry, solar energy, genome sequencing, and so on. The benefits in terms of animal welfare, climate change, food safety, antibiotic resistance, land and water usage could be substantial.

Picking your nose might seem harmless albeit gross, but new research is showing it may have some devastating consequences, according to a press release published by Griffith University Friday.

A direct path to the brain

The new research demonstrates that a bacteria can travel through the olfactory nerve in the nose and into the brain in mice, where it creates markers that are a tell-tale sign of Alzheimer’s disease.

Semiconductors are small, ubiquitous, and underappreciated. They are the brains of every modern device.

When Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan in August, it made front-page news around the world and raised the specter of an all-out war between the U.S. and China.

Early in October, the Biden administration made a far more decisive move against China — but it barely made the news in Australia.

Continue reading “Tech war: How the US chip embargo is eroding China’s research base” »

If you’ve been closely following the progress of Open AI, the company run by Sam Altman whose neural nets can now write original text and create original pictures with astonishing ease and speed, you might just skip this piece.

If, on the other hand, you’ve only been vaguely paying attention to the company’s progress and the increasing traction that other so-called “generative” AI companies are suddenly gaining and want to better understand why, you might benefit from this interview with James Currier, a five-time founder and now venture investor who cofounded the firm NFX five years ago with several of his serial founder friends.

Currier falls into the camp of people following the progress closely — so closely that NFX has made numerous related investments in “generative tech” as he describes it, and it’s garnering more of the team’s attention every month. In fact, Currier doesn’t think the buzz about this new wrinkle on AI isn’t hype so much as a realization that the broader startup world is suddenly facing a very big opportunity for the first time in a long time. “Every 14 years,” says Currier, “we get one of these Cambrian explosions. We had one around the internet in ’94. We had one around mobile phones in 2008. Now we’re having another one in 2022.”

New U.K. law indicates sperm can be used from as far back as 55 years.

When a boy was born this week in the U.K. using sperm frozen in 1996, the issue arose of how long sperm can be stored for before it is actually put to use.

A timeframe extended by 45 years.

Continue reading “‘Science fiction worries’: Baby born from 1996 frozen sperm sparks debate” »