Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics
The current fallout with Reform UK's leader – Nigel Farage, a well-known figure on the British populist right – stems from Farage's refusal to consider far-right activist Tommy Robinson among Reform's ranks. For Musk, it seems Farage and his allies were not quite right-wing enough, and he let his 210 million X followers know about it. Farage may have reason for being wary of Robinson, who was jailed for contempt of court in the UK after repeating false claims about a Syrian refugee.German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: "Germany is a strong and stable democracy – Musk can say what he wants. In Germany, the will of the citizens prevails, not the erratic statements of a billionaire from the USA."
Yesterday, UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer stepped in after Musk launched a vitriolic attack on one of his ministers. "Those who are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims [of crime], they're interested in themselves," he said.
Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia
The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information. “Stop donating to Wokepedia,” Elon Musk urged. His complaint is that Wikipedia spends 17.6% of its budget on "Equity", which he misrepresents as DEI. It's actually used for reliability. The funding goes to programs to expand coverage of underrepresented topics, recruit editors with expertise in neglected subject areas, develop tools to identify and counter coordinated disinformation campaigns, improve article and source reliability, and protect the project and its editors from attempts to censor or restrict access to Wikipedia content. Far from detracting from Wikipedia’s mission, these programs work to directly address the types of concerns Musk and others raise.5Here’s a New Year’s resolution for Trump’s America: no snitching
Government persecution requires a lot of informers. It is hard to deport immigrants, infiltrate protest groups and attack civil society without a lot of people telling the powers-that-be where all their enemies are and what they’re doing. Fascism needs snitches everywhere in order to work. By vowing not to snitch, you can therefore strike a blow for justice, without doing anything at all.America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal
For decades, academics warned anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and broadcast consolidation was creating local “news deserts,” where residents have no access to reliable, accurate local news. Millions voted for Trump with a distorted understanding of who he is, what he supports, what his policies will actually accomplish, and how severely his second term will hurt them and those they love.Arizona Regulators Closed a Failing Charter School. It Reopened as a Private Religious School Funded by Taxpayers.
Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.Is ‘Bypassing’ a Better Way to Battle Misinformation?
Corrections can work, but countering misinformation this way is an uphill battle: people don’t like to be contradicted, and a belief, once accepted, can be difficult to dislodge.Bypassing works differently. Rather than directly addressing the misinformation, this strategy involves offering accurate information that has an implication opposite to that of the misinformation. For example, faced with the factually incorrect statement “genetically modified foods have health risks,” a bypassing approach might highlight the fact that genetically modified foods help the bee population. This counters the negative implication of the misinformation with positive implications, without taking the difficult path of confrontation.
After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now
We know how deeply rotten things are because Salt Typhoon used the same techniques used in a break-in into another national telco 40 years ago, when the UK's British Telecom's Prestel text message service was attacked. An industry unable to learn something in 40 years has no legitimacy. And there’s no sign it is learning now.AI spending spree continues as Microsoft commits $80B for 2025
And Microsoft is not alone in this respect. Last year, Amazon reported that it was on track to spend $75 billion in capital expenditure during 2024, and even more in 2025.Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster
The satellite broadband service fell over on December 31, 2024, for 48 hours. "We can confirm that the issue was caused by a leap year problem, related to day 366 in 2024, which impacted the manual calculation for the GPS-to-UTC offset."Covid jab scientists develop bubonic plague vaccine amid fears of next pandemic
Scientists behind the Oxford Covid jab are developing a bubonic plague vaccine amid fears a superbug strain of the Black Death could emerge. There is no vaccine in the UK for the plague, which has killed around 200 million people worldwide throughout history.How Chinese Hackers Graduated From Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons
Massive ‘Typhoon’ cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure and telecoms sought to lay groundwork for potential conflict with Beijing, as intruders gathered data and got in position to impede response and sow chaos. In late December, in response to the Salt Typhoon campaign, federal cybersecurity officials published new guidance recommending the public use end-to-end encryption for communications, and said text-based multifactor authentication for account logins should be avoided in favor of app-based methods.It looks like the Raspberry Pi RP2350 Hacking Challenge may have been beaten — Hacker gains access to the OTP secret by glitching the RISC-V cores to enable debugging
The RP2350 comes with a quartet of new security features, that Raspberry Pi was keen to highlight. These are Secure Boot, TrustZone, Redundancy Coprocessor (RCP), and Glitch Detectors. Raspberry Pi and Hextree hid a secret in the RP2350's OTP (One Time Programmable) memory on the chip, said to be a once-set but never-forget binary code.Cullen tested injecting power glitches to Pin 53 at certain points in the boot process. The 'permanently disabled' RISC-V cores were woken by the glitch to enable access.
Scam FasTrak Texts Target CA Drivers
Transportation agencies across the state are warning about scammers using an online ruse to steal money using fake toll bills.Tufts University Students Help Nonprofits With Cybersecurity
A new pilot program at Tufts University offers free student-driven support to help nonprofits fortify their cyber defenses and train the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. One student team found and updated an old WordPress blog that contained cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and another group enrolled their client in a free, secure email platform.