Lifeboat Foundation

The endless parade of bad news for Israeli malware merchant NSO Group continues. While it appears someone might be willing to bail out the beleaguered company, it still has to do business as the poster boy for the furtherance of human rights violations around the world. That the Israeli government may have played a significant part in NSO’s sales to known human rights violators may ultimately be mitigating, but for now, NSO is stuck playing defense with each passing news cycle.

Late last month, the New York Times revealed some very interesting things about NSO Group. First, it revealed the company was able to undo its built-in ban on searching US phone numbers… provided it was asked to by a US government agency. The FBI took NSO’s powerful Pegasus malware for a spin in 2019, but under an assumed name: Phantom. With the permission of NSO and the Israeli government, the malware was able to target US numbers, albeit ones linked to dummy phones purchased by the FBI.

The report noted the FBI liked what it saw, but found the zero-click exploit provided by NSO’s bespoke “Phantom” (Pegasus, but able to target US numbers) might pose constitutional problems the agency couldn’t surmount. So, it walked away from NSO. But not before running some attack attempts through US servers — something that was inadvertently exposed by Facebook and WhatsApp in their lawsuit against NSO over the targeting of WhatsApp users. An exhibit declared NSO was using US servers to deliver malware, something that suggested NSO didn’t care about its self-imposed restrictions on US targeting. In reality, it was the FBI and NSO running some tests on local applications of zero-click malware that happened to be caught by Facebook techies.

Disappointed with the lack of US response to the Hermit Kingdom’s attacks against US security researchers, one hacker took matters into his own hands.

Multiple changes in brain cells during the first month of embryonic development may contribute to schizophrenia later in life, according to a new study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

The researchers, whose study was published in Molecular Psychiatry, used stem cells collected from patients with schizophrenia and people without the disease to grow 3-dimensional “mini-brains” or organoids in the laboratory. By comparing the development of both sets of organoids, they discovered that a reduced expression of two genes in the cells stymies early development and causes a shortage of brain cells in organoids grown from patient stem cells.

“This discovery fills an important gap in scientists’ understanding of schizophrenia,” said senior author Dr. Dilek Colak, assistant professor of neuroscience at the Feil Family Brain and Mind Institute and the Center for Neurogenetics at Weill Cornell Medicine. Symptoms of schizophrenia typically develop in adulthood, but postmortem studies of the brains of people with the disease found enlarged cavities called ventricles and differences in the cortical layers that likely occurred early in life.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has taken its first visible light images of the surface of Venus from space.

Smothered in thick clouds, Venus’ surface is usually shrouded from sight. But in two recent flybys of the planet, Parker used its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, to image the entire nightside in wavelengths of the visible spectrum—the type of light that the human eye can see—and extending into the near-infrared.

Continue reading “Parker solar probe captures its first images of Venus’ surface in visible light” »

But with more of everything?

Every day brings us closer to the launch of next generation video cards. The RX 6,000 series and Nvidia RTX 30 series have been with us for well over a year, and we’re looking forward to what’s coming next. Well known leaker Greymon55 loves a good tease and his latest tweet indicates that the fundamental architecture of the upcoming Lovelace, or RTX 40 series GPUs isn’t all that different from those of current Ampere RTX 30 GPUs.

The Lovelace architecture doesn’t change much. February 5, 2022

Continue reading “Nvidia’s next generation Lovelace architecture may not differ all that much from Ampere” »

Proof-of-concept paper shows how data centers could help manage the grid.

A powerful magnetic storm takes out most of a batch of Starlink satellites the day after launch.

SpaceX sets records, Tesla makes a change, Elon Musk prepares for liftoff.

SpaceX sets Falcon 9 records and prepares for Starship, Tesla makes a change in its Full-Self Driving software, Elon Musk prepares for Starship’s eventual liftoff.

Is this the future of hypersonic transportation? Russia’s version of Elon Musk thinks so.