Wired

Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated tool sets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.

One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different tool set created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.

A trove of leaked internal messages and documents from the militia American Patriots Three Percent—also known as AP3—reveals how the group coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022.

This information was leaked to Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a nonprofit that says it publishes hacked and leaked documents in the public interest. The person behind these AP3 leaks is an individual who, according to their statement uploaded by DDoSecrets, infiltrated the militia and grew so alarmed by what they were seeing that they felt compelled to go public with the information ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

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Gaming is starting to look more and more like Netflix: Instead of buying a disc at the store and popping it in at home, you have a bevy of services from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nvidia, and even Netflix itself. Services provide access to tons of games for a monthly price, or allow you to stream them without the need for a long download. Between Xbox Game Pass Core, Game Pass Ultimate, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PS Plus Essential, PS Plus Extra, PS Plus Premium, Nintendo Switch Online, and everything else, it’s hard to know what’s worth paying for. Let’s break it all down.

On October 10, 2018, Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf of Mexico—a pillar of American air superiority—found itself under aerial attack. Hurricane Michael, first spotted as a Category 2 storm off the Florida coast, unexpectedly hulked up to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 miles per hour whipped into the base, flinging power poles, flipping F-22s, and totaling more than 200 buildings. The sole saving grace: Despite sitting on a peninsula, Tyndall avoided flood damage. Michael’s 9-to-14-foot storm surge swamped other parts of Florida. Tyndall’s main defense was luck.

If we’re going to find life on another world, Europa might just be our best bet. We think this icy moon of Jupiter has an ocean of water beneath its frozen surface, and it seems like this ocean might have the right ingredients for life. If we can find out for certain, it could be a game changer in our quest to determine if we are alone.

“Europa is the first ocean world, besides Earth, that we discovered in our solar system,” says Jonathan Lunine, the chief scientist of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “We need to determine whether the ocean could support life.”

@stephantradez thought he was going to be fine. In his first TikTok about Hurricane Milton, he vowed to stay at his Tampa apartment. In a follow-up video, he said the media was “rage-baiting” everyone into thinking the storm “was going to be some catastrophic thing” but that it wouldn’t be that bad “as long as you can swim.” Late Wednesday night, he posted another video saying that he thought he’d survived but then lost his power. “This is so much worse than I expected,” he said while pointing the camera out the window of his home, showing the destruction from several floors up. Thursday morning, he posted a video saying he’d survived, adding “They have to ban hurricanes at night, that was the most stressful thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I’d signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and I was suddenly flooded with suggestions for more of the same. Which was all well and fine until—whoops—I canceled the wedding and it seemed Pinterest pins would haunt me until the end of days. Pinterest wasn’t the only offender. All of social media wanted to recommend stuff that was no longer relevant, and the stench of this stale buffet of content lingered long after the non-event had ended.

Just before Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday, many people reported that the sky above them turned a sinister purple hue. A sign of the apocalypse? Well, yes, actually—the climate catastrophe we’ve made for ourselves. But it’s still a natural phenomenon with a scientific explanation.

Visible light is a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths from 700 to 380 nm. (Nanometers are billionths of a meter.) Within this range, our eyes interpret different wavelengths as different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, in order from longest to shortest. (AKA: the rainbow.)

Such is the world of luxury products, that customers for McLaren Automotive’s newly announced $2.6 million W1 hypercar can now order a watch to match.

The fourth watch produced as a result of the long-term partnership between McLaren and luxury watchmaker Richard Mille, the RM 65-01 “McLaren W1 Edition” was announced this week in a press conference at the carmaker’s Woking headquarters.

Billed as something approaching a hypercar for the wrist, the watch, which will cost 320,000 Swiss francs plus taxes ($373,300) is a tribute to the design language of the car, which was revealed to the world last Sunday. With a split-second chronograph movement and a couple of other tricks up its sleeve, it houses what Richard Mille says is the most complicated automatic movement it has ever produced.

When OpenAI launched its platform for custom GPTs, Josh Brent Villocido was stoked to learn that one of his creations would be featured.

The ascendant AI company announced at its November 2023 developer day that it would launch a store that would host GPTs, custom skins that run on top of its proprietary ChatGPT technology. People can create GPTs for specific tasks, like analyzing spreadsheets, drumming up tattoo designs, or providing customer support. And when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke at the dev day, he touched on potential earning opportunities for developers.