It took more than an hour to mine a block of bitcoin (BTC) on Monday, leaving thousands of transactions stuck in an unconfirmed state. CoinDesk reports: According to on-chain data from several block explorers, the interval between the two latest blocks mined by Foundry USA and Luxor was 85 minutes. According to Mempool, over 13,000 transactions were pending before the latest block was mined.

Last week Bitcoin underwent a difficulty adjustment to ensure block confirmations kept taking place every 10 minutes. With mining difficulty surging to 35.6 trillion it becomes more expensive to mine bitcoin, which heaps pressure on a mining industry that is dealing with soaring energy prices and a crypto bear market. Tadge Dryja, founder of the Lightning Network, tweeted that an 85-minute interval between blocks can be expected to happen once every 34 days, not taking into account difficulty changes.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Visa and Mastercard's security tokens restrict debit-card routing competition on online payments, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The FTC for the past few years has already been probing whether Visa and Mastercard block merchants from routing payments over other debit-card networks. The networks acknowledged an FTC probe in regulatory filings in recent years. In recent months, the FTC expanded its focus to routing challenges that stem from the networks' security tokens, the people familiar with the matter said. It isn't clear if the investigation is a new probe or part of the previous one.

Visa and Mastercard are by far the two biggest card networks in the U.S., building and maintaining the plumbing that allows Americans to use credit and debit cards at stores and online. Their lion's share of that market has drawn increasing scrutiny from regulators and fueled tension with merchants, which pay fees set by the networks when a customer pays via card. A Justice Department investigation on whether Visa has unlawfully maintained a dominant market share in debit cards is ongoing, according to people familiar with the matter. Federal law requires that merchants have the ability to choose from at least two unaffiliated debit-card networks to route transactions. That is supposed to give merchants the option to send debit-card payments over the network that sets lower fees. In most cases, when a person stores a card in a digital wallet such as Apple Pay, the 16-digit card number gets replaced by a "security token" -- essentially a line of random numbers. The token is typically provided by the network listed on the card -- often Visa or Mastercard.

Kanye West, the rapper who also also goes by the name Ye, has reached an agreement to buy "uncancelable free speech platform" Parler, the two said in a statement Monday, in a move they said will help individuals express their conservative opinions freely. From a report: As part of the deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed, Parler has agreed to sell fully to West but the social network will continue to receive technical support from Parlement Technologies, including access to its private cloud services and its data center infrastructure. The deal is expected to close in the ongoing quarter. West, who has accused Meta and Twitter of censoring him in recent weeks, said in a statement: "In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves."

"Europe is aiming to launch a technology demonstration satellite for secure, quantum-encrypted communications in 2024," reports Space.com, "with a view to developing a larger constellation." The satellite, Eagle-1, will be the first space-based quantum key distribution (QKD) system for the European Union and could lead to an ultrasecure communications network for Europe, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

Eagle-1 will spend three years in orbit testing the technologies needed for a new generation of secure communications. The satellite will demonstrate the "feasibility of quantum key distribution technology — which uses the principles of quantum mechanics to distribute encryption keys in such a way that any attempt to eavesdrop is immediately detected — within the EU using a satellite-based system," according to ESA...

"European security and sovereignty in a future world of quantum computing is critical to the success of Europe and its Member States," Steve Collar, CEO of SES, said in the statement. He added that the goal is "to advance quantum communications and develop the Eagle-1 system to support secure and sovereign European networks of the future."
SES will be leading a consortium of more than 20 European countries, according to the ESA's statement: Eagle-1 will demonstrate the feasibility of quantum key distribution technology — which uses the principles of quantum mechanics to distribute encryption keys in such a way that any attempt to eavesdrop is immediately detected — within the EU using a satellite-based system. To do so, the system will build on key technologies developed under ESA's Scylight programme, with the aim of validating vital components supplied within the EU....

It will allow the EU to prepare for a sovereign, autonomous cross-border quantum secure communications network.

The system will initially use an upgraded optical ground terminal from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) alongside a new optical ground terminal to be developed by a team from the Netherlands. The Eagle-1 platform satellite from Italian company Sitael will carry a quantum-key payload built by Tesat Spacecom of Germany and will be operated by Luxembourg-headquartered SES.

"You know you're a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge," says Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research tells the BBC — holding up a tiny vial with a light film at the bottom: But this DNA is special. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. "That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds," says Zielinski.

Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies. Scientists have already encoded films, books and computer operating systems into DNA. Netflix has even used it to store an episode of its 2020 thriller series Biohackers.

The information stored in DNA defines what it is to be human (or any other species for that matter). But many experts argue it offers an incredibly compact, durable and long-lasting form of storage that could replace the many forms of unreliable digital media available, which regularly become defunct and require huge amounts of energy to store. Meanwhile, some researchers are exploring other ways we could store data effectively forever, such as etching information onto incredibly durable glass beads, a modern take on cave drawings.
Even before the issue of the energy required to power (and cool) data centers, Zielinski points out that data stored on hard drives "lasts on average maybe 10 to 20 years, maybe 50 if you're lucky and the conditions are perfect." And yet we've already been able to recover DNA from million-year-old wooly mammoths...

Olgica Milenkovic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, acknowledges that DNA can be damaged by things like humidity, acids, and radiation — "But if it's kept cold and dry, it's good for hundreds of years." And if it's stored in an ice vault, "it can last forever, pretty much." (And unlike floppy disks — DNA-formatted data will never become obsolete.)

It's not the only option. Peter Kazansky, a professor in optoelectronics at the University of Southampton, has created an optical storage technology that etches nano-structures onto glass disks. But Latchesar Ionkov, a computer scientist working on DNA storage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, believes we're just decades away from being able to store the estimated 33 zettabytes of data that humans will have produced by 2025 in a space the size of a ping-pong ball.

In a press release on Wednesday, Amazon said it will launch two prototype satellites for its Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation in early 2023. They will be riding into orbit on a Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United Launch Alliance (ULA). The Verge reports: The company says the launch will let it perform tests on its satellite network technology with data from space and that the data will "help finalize design, deployment, and operational plans for our commercial satellite system." The timeframe marks a slight delay from Amazon's original plan; last year, the company announced it would launch the prototypes in Q4 of 2022, using a completely different rocket from a company called ABL Space Systems.

Early 2023 isn't too far away, but there are still a lot of things that have to go right for the launch to happen on schedule. For one, Amazon needs to actually finish building the satellites, which its press release says will be completed later this year. The rocket also isn't done yet -- ULA said in a press release on Wednesday that it expects to have Vulcan fully assembled by November and tested by December -- for now, though, it still has to install the engines. It's not exactly a proven launch platform, either; this will be the rocket's first flight.

Both companies have deadlines to meet. As The Washington Post points out, ULA has to launch Vulcan twice before Q4 2023 to prove that it's reliable enough to carry out missions for the US Space Force. Meanwhile, Amazon has to launch half of its satellites by 2026 to keep its FCC license. That's further away than the end of next year, but given that Amazon's constellation is set to be made up of 3,236 satellites, that's going to require quite a few launches in the next few years. Thirty-eight of them are set to use the Vulcan, while several others will be with rockets from Arianespace and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. (Fun fact: the BE-4 engines that Vulcan uses are also from Blue Origin.) Notably absent from its list of partners is SpaceX, which other satellite providers like Lynk and AST SpaceMobile have used to launch equipment into space.

Last week, DeepMind announced it discovered a more efficient way to perform matrix multiplication, conquering a 50-year-old record. This week, two Austrian researchers at Johannes Kepler University Linz claim they have bested that new record by one step. Ars Technica reports: In 1969, a German mathematician named Volker Strassen discovered the previous-best algorithm for multiplying 4x4 matrices, which reduces the number of steps necessary to perform a matrix calculation. For example, multiplying two 4x4 matrices together using a traditional schoolroom method would take 64 multiplications, while Strassen's algorithm can perform the same feat in 49 multiplications. Using a neural network called AlphaTensor, DeepMind discovered a way to reduce that count to 47 multiplications, and its researchers published a paper about the achievement in Nature last week.

To discover more efficient matrix math algorithms, DeepMind set up the problem like a single-player game. The company wrote about the process in more detail in a blog post last week. DeepMind then trained AlphaTensor using reinforcement learning to play this fictional math game -- similar to how AlphaGo learned to play Go -- and it gradually improved over time. Eventually, it rediscovered Strassen's work and those of other human mathematicians, then it surpassed them, according to DeepMind. In a more complicated example, AlphaTensor discovered a new way to perform 5x5 matrix multiplication in 96 steps (versus 98 for the older method).

This week, Manuel Kauers and Jakob Moosbauer of Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, published a paper claiming they have reduced that count by one, down to 95 multiplications. It's no coincidence that this apparently record-breaking new algorithm came so quickly because it built off of DeepMind's work. In their paper, Kauers and Moosbauer write, "This solution was obtained from the scheme of [DeepMind's researchers] by applying a sequence of transformations leading to a scheme from which one multiplication could be eliminated."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Modified off-the-shelf drones have been found carrying wireless network-intrusion kit in a very unlikely place. Greg Linares, a security researcher, recently recounted an incident that he said occurred over the summer at a US East Coast financial firm focused on private investment. He told The Register that he was not involved directly with the investigation but interacted with those involved as part of his work in the finance sector. In a Twitter thread, Linares said the hacking incident was discovered when the financial firm spotted unusual activity on its internal Atlassian Confluence page that originated from within the company's network.

The company's security team responded and found that the user whose MAC address was used to gain partial access to the company Wi-Fi network was also logged in at home several miles away. That is to say, the user was active off-site but someone within Wi-Fi range of the building was trying to wirelessly use that user's MAC address, which is a red flag. The team then took steps to trace the Wi-Fi signal and used a Fluke system to identify the Wi-Fi device. "This led the team to the roof, where a 'modified DJI Matrice 600' and a 'modified DJI Phantom' series were discovered," Linares explained. The Phantom drone was in fine condition and had a modified Wi-Fi Pineapple device, used for network penetration testing, according to Linares. The Matrice drone was carrying a case that contained a Raspberry Pi, several batteries, a GPD mini laptop, a 4G modem, and another Wi-Fi device. It had landed near the building's heating and ventilation system and appeared to be damaged but still operable. "During their investigation, they determined that the DJI Phantom drone had originally been used a few days prior to intercept a worker's credentials and Wi-Fi," Linares said. "This data was later hard coded into the tools that were deployed with the Matrice."

According to Linares, the tools on the drones were used to target the company's internal Confluence page in order to reach other internal devices using the credentials stored there. The attack, he said, had limited success and is the third cyberattack involving a drone he's seen over the past two years. "The attackers specifically targeted a limited access network, used by both a third-party and internally, that was not secure due to recent changes at the company (e.g. restructuring/rebranding, new building, new building lease, new network setup or a combination of any of these scenarios)," Linares told The Register. "This is the reason why this temporary network unfortunately had limited access in order to login (credentials + MAC security). The attackers were using the attack in order to access an internal IT confluence server that contained other credentials for accessing other resources and storing IT procedures." [...] While the identity of the attacker has not been disclosed, Linares believes those responsible did their homework. "This was definitely a threat actor who likely did internal reconnaissance for several weeks, had physical proximity to the target environment, had a proper budget and knew their physical security limitations," he said.

tedlistens shares a report from Fast Company: Two corners of Brooklyn's historic Navy Yard will be connected by a small test bed for quantum networking, a first step toward a future "quantum internet" that promises to transform computing and make communications untappable. The effort, by a startup company called Qunnect, will join dozens of experiments around the U.S., Europe, and China, but would be the first commercial quantum network in the country, and the first to use only small, room-temperature devices. Such tools could make it easier to link quantum computers across the planet, opening the door to more practical uses of the technology in research, defense, finance, and other yet-to-be-determined applications.

"We can have these networks go all the way from here, coast to coast, and eventually global," says Dr. Noel Goddard, the CEO of Qunnect. In addition to testing a protocol for sharing quantum information across conventional fiber-optic lines, the 12-person startup will use the network to test a group of quantum networking hardware that can fit into the server racks of existing telecom buildings. Its flagship product, spun out of research at SUNY Stony Brook, is a type of device thought to be crucial to establishing the "magic" of quantum entanglement across a fiber line, called a quantum memory. The machines use rubidium vapor to briefly store photons' quantum information, with all of its weird uncertainty, so that the information can be repeated across a long-distance fiber network without disturbing it along the way. But unlike many quantum machines -- often sprawling tabletop contraptions that rely on cryogenic cooling, vacuums, and other delicate equipment -- Qunnect's memory machine operates at room temperature and fits inside a box the size of a large desk drawer.

Qunnect's sold just three of its memory machines so far, to Brookhaven National Lab and Stony Brook University, at a reported price of around $100,000 apiece. But a number of government and defense labs, along with big telecom and tech companies, from Amazon to Verizon, are paying close attention. The device has already received millions in backing from the Department of Energy and other federal and state agencies. And last week, Qunnect announced its largest endorsement yet: $8 million in funding, in a series A round led by Airbus Ventures and including The New York Ventures Fund, Impact Science Ventures, Motus Ventures, and SandboxAQ, a post-quantum security company Google spun off earlier this year. The new money will help build the test bed, which Qunnect plans to start operating by the middle of next year, when it will open it up to researchers and customers in government, finance, and telecom. These experiments will help the company learn more about a variety of proposals for building quantum networks, and, it hopes, position it as a device supplier for the whole quantum internet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: TikTok is planning to build its own product fulfillment centers in the U.S., creating an e-commerce supply chain system that could directly challenge Amazon, as indicated by more than a dozen new job openings posted in the past two weeks to LinkedIn. The move signifies TikTok's commitment to e-commerce as its next major revenue stream, following the explosive growth of its ads business. "By providing warehousing, delivery, and customer service returns, our mission is to help sellers improve their operational capability and efficiency, provide buyers a satisfying shopping experience and ensure fast and sustainable growth of TikTok Shop," the company wrote in one job listing.

According to the job postings, TikTok is looking to build an "international e-commerce fulfillment system" that will include international warehousing, customs clearings and supply chain systems that support domestic e-commerce efforts in the U.S. and cross-border e-commerce efforts. The systems will eventually perform parcel consolidation, along with transporting goods from one stage to the next and managing free returns. One position, a logistics solutions manager for a global fulfillment center, is looking for a Seattle-based employee to plan and design fulfillment centers and e-commerce logistics solutions that include the transportation of goods, order prediction and inventory management.

Another Seattle-based role calls for the creation of a new fulfillment service center "from scratch." The center, the posting says, "is a global team responsible for developing and growing our logistics solution" and will include product fulfillment by TikTok Shop to its sellers by "providing warehousing, delivery, and customer service returns." While that role explicitly calls for the development of fulfillment services for TikTok's e-commerce logistics in the U.S., other roles reference a team that is responsible for a global logistics and warehousing network. For now, it does not appear that TikTok plans to build out its own transportation unit like Amazon. The job postings imply that TikTok would work with vendors to handle shipping, parcel consolidation and transportation. One job description for a fulfillment logistics manager implies that, like Amazon, TikTok is looking to develop a free return program.

General Motors is creating a new energy business to sell batteries, charging equipment, solar panels, and software to residential and commercial customers in a broad-based effort to create a range of accessories that can help sell its lineup of electric vehicles. The Verge reports: The new division, GM Energy, is also a direct shot at Tesla as a major player in renewable energy generation and storage. GM has said it intends to eventually overtake Elon Musk's company in vehicles sales -- and now it wants to challenge it on the energy front as well. Travis Hester, GM's chief EV officer, said the company is making a serious grab for a piece of what is potentially a $120-150 billion market for energy generation and storage products. The aim is to make GM's brand synonymous with not just electric vehicles, but a whole host of products and services in orbit around EVs and their rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

GM Energy will be comprised of three units: Ultium Home, Ultium Commercial, and Ultium Charge 360, which is the company's EV charging program. The division will sell a range of products to residential and commercial customers, including bi-directional charging equipment, vehicle-to- home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) equipment, stationary storage, solar products, software applications, cloud management tools, microgrid solutions, and hydrogen fuel cells. GM Energy will also be in the virtual power plant business. Many EVs with high-capacity batteries are being marketed for their ability to serve as backup power in the event of a blackout. (Hester notes that the Chevy Silverado EV, with its 200kWh battery pack, can power an average sized home for 21 days.) EVs can also feed power back into the grid during times of peak demand. GM Energy will be the entity that sells that power back to the utilities during times of high-energy consumption.

For solar energy, GM is teaming up with San Jose-based SunPower to sell solar panels and home energy storage products to residential customers. SunPower and other partners will supply the solar panels and perform the installations, with GM developing the complimentary software. Over time, as GM's battery factories come online and production of its Ultium-branded battery systems ramps up, the company intends on swapping in its own battery cells and storage units, Hester said. The automaker is also planning on manufacturing its own line of backup power generators using its Hydrotec-branded hydrogen fuel cells. (Ultium is the name of GM's electric vehicle battery and powertrain technology. Last year, the company said the Ultium Charge 360 network would be the name given to GM's own vehicle apps and software with a variety of third-party charging services, such as Blink, ChargePoint, EVgo, Flo, Greenlots, and SemaConnect.) "But much like its approach to EVs, the dates for the launch of these new products are still a ways off in the future," adds The Verge. "GM is still testing its V2H service in partnership with PG&E with a small sample of residential customers in California, and plans on expanding it to more homes in early 2023. And its solar products won't be available until 2024."

Google has approved Donald Trump's Truth Social app for release in its Play Store, opening up a key distribution channel for the social network ahead of US midterm elections. Bloomberg reports: Google had previously declined to distribute the app, saying it needed to address the fact that it hosted violent threats and other content that goes against Google's standards. Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., confirmed on Wednesday that Truth Social was now available. Truth Social has agreed to take down content that violates Google's policies, Google said.

Devin Nunes, chief executive officer of Trump Media & Technology Group, said in a statement that the development represented "a significant milestone in our mission to restore free speech online." "It's been a pleasure to work with Google, and we're glad they helped us to finally bring Truth Social to all Americans, regardless of what device they use," Nunes said.

Mullvad VPN has discovered that Android leaks traffic every time the device connects to a WiFi network, even if the "Block connections without VPN," or "Always-on VPN," features is enabled. BleepingComputer reports: The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic. This behavior is built into the Android operating system and is a design choice. However, Android users likely didn't know this until now due to the inaccurate description of the "VPN Lockdown" features in Android's documentation. Mullvad discovered the issue during a security audit that hasn't been published yet, issuing a warning yesterday to raise awareness on the matter and apply additional pressure on Google.

Android offers a setting under "Network & Internet" to block network connections unless you're using a VPN. This feature is designed to prevent accidental leaks of the user's actual IP address if the VPN connection is interrupted or drops suddenly. Unfortunately, this feature is undercut by the need to accommodate special cases like identifying captive portals (like hotel WiFi) that must be checked before the user can log in or when using split-tunnel features. This is why Android is configured to leak some data upon connecting to a new WiFi network, regardless of whether you enabled the "Block connections without VPN" setting.

Mullvad reported the issue to Google, requesting the addition of an option to disable connectivity checks. "This is a feature request for adding the option to disable connectivity checks while "Block connections without VPN" (from now on lockdown) is enabled for a VPN app," explains Mullvad in a feature request on Google's Issue Tracker. "This option should be added as the current VPN lockdown behavior is to leaks connectivity check traffic (see this issue for incorrect documentation) which is not expected and might impact user privacy." In response to Mullvad's request, a Google engineer said this is the intended functionality and that it would not be fixed for the following reasons:

- Many VPNs actually rely on the results of these connectivity checks to function,
- The checks are neither the only nor the riskiest exemptions from VPN connections,
- The privacy impact is minimal, if not insignificant, because the leaked information is already available from the L2 connection.

Mullvad countered these points and the case remains open.

"Your boss probably has enough data about your digital activities to get a snapshot of your workday — without using any special monitoring software...." reports the Washington Post.

"Workers should be aware that many online work apps offer data about their daily activities...." Commonly used network-connected apps such as Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Office give managers the ability to find everything from the number of video meetings in which you've actively participated, to how much you chatted online with co-workers and the number of documents you saved to the cloud....

At the beginning of 2022, global demand for employee monitoring software increased 65 percent from 2019, according to internet security and digital rights firm Top10VPN. But popular work apps also offer data. On Microsoft 365, an account administrator can pull data — though it may not be easy and would be tracked in compliance logs — on how many emails workers sent, how many files they saved on a shared drive and how many messages they sent as well as video meetings they participated in on the messaging and video tool Microsoft Teams. Google Workspace, Google's suite of work tools, allows administrators, for security and audit purposes, to see how many emails a user sent and received, how many files they saved and accessed on Google Drive, and when a user started a video meeting, from where they joined meetings, and who was in a meeting. Select administrators on both services can also access the content of emails and calendar items.

On paid Slack accounts, managers can see how many days users have been active and how many messages they've sent over a set period of time. Zoom allows account administrators to see how many meetings users participated in, the length of the meetings, and whether users enabled their camera and microphone during them. And if employees have company-issued phones or use office badges or tech that requires them to sign in at the office, managers can track phone usage and office attendance.

To be sure, several software companies say their reports are not for employee evaluation and surveillance. Microsoft has stated that using technology to monitor employees is counterproductive and suggested that some managers may have "productivity paranoia." In the help section of its website, Slack states that the analytics data it offers should be "used for understanding your whole team's use of Slack, not evaluating an individual's performance."
"Several workplace experts agree on one thing: The data doesn't properly represent a worker's productivity," the article concludes.

"Activities such as in-person mentoring, taking time to brainstorm, sketching out a plan or using offline software won't appear in the data. And measuring quantity might discount the quality of one's work or interactions."

"Russian-speaking hackers on Wednesday claimed responsibility for knocking offline state government websites in Colorado, Kentucky and Mississippi, among other states," reports CNN, calling it "the latest example of apparent politically motivated hacking following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.... The websites in Colorado, Kentucky and Mississippi were sporadically available Wednesday morning and afternoon as administrators appeared to try to bring them online." The Kentucky Board of Elections' website, which posts information on how to register to vote, was also temporarily offline on Wednesday, but it was not immediately clear what caused that outage. The board of elections' website is also managed by the Kentucky government, though the hackers did not specifically list the board as a target.... Websites like that of the Kentucky Board of Elections are not directly involved in the casting or counting of votes, but they can provide useful information for voters....

The hacking group claiming responsibility for Wednesday's website outage is known as Killnet and stepped up their activity after Russia's February invasion of Ukraine to target organizations in NATO countries. They are a loose band of so-called "hacktivists" — politically motivated hackers who support the Kremlin but whose ties to that government are unknown. The group also claimed responsibility for briefly downing a US Congress website in July, and for cyberattacks on organizations in Lithuania after the Baltic country blocked the shipment of some goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in June....

Officials at the FBI and CISA reiterated this week that any efforts by hackers to breach election infrastructure are "unlikely to result in largescale disruptions or prevent voting."
Government Technology supplies some context: Amsterdam-based threat intelligence technology and services provider EclecticIQ's Threat Research team said in a blog post that Killnet appears to only have the capacity to launch DDoS attacks with short-term impact, and falls short of dealing lasting damage to victims' network infrastructure. "Analysts believe that Killnet supporters are novice users with zero or limited experience with DDoS attacks, based on an analysis of Telegram messaging data and open-source reporting," EclecticIQ wrote.
CNN described Killnet's typical attacks as "crude hacks that temporarily knock websites offline but don't do further damage to infrastructure.

"Killnet thrives off of public attention and bravado, and cybersecurity experts have to strike a balance between being mindful of Killnet's online antics and not hyping a low-level threat."

Iran's government is trying to limit internet access, reports CNBC — while Iranians are trying a variety of technologies to bypass the blocks: Outages first started hitting Iran's telecommunications networks on September 19, according to data from internet monitoring companies Cloudflare and NetBlocks, and have been ongoing for the last two and a half weeks. Internet monitoring groups and digital rights activists say they're seeing "curfew-style" network disruptions every day, with access being throttled from around 4 p.m. local time until well into the night. Tehran blocked access to WhatsApp and Instagram, two of the last remaining uncensored social media services in Iran. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and several other platforms have been banned for years.

As a result, Iranians have flocked to VPNs, services that encrypt and reroute their traffic to a remote server elsewhere in the world to conceal their online activity. This has allowed them to restore connections to restricted websites and apps. On September 22, a day after WhatsApp and Instagram were banned, demand for VPN services skyrocketed 2,164% compared to the 28 days prior, according to figures from Top10VPN, a VPN reviews and research site. By September 26, demand peaked at 3,082% above average, and it has continued to remain high since, at 1,991% above normal levels, Top10VPN said....

Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher at free speech campaign group Article 19, said a contact she's been communicating with in Iran showed his network failing to connect to Google, despite having installed a VPN. "This is new refined deep packet inspection technology that they've developed to make the network extremely unreliable," she said. Such technology allows internet service providers and governments to monitor and block data on a network. Authorities are being much more aggressive in seeking to thwart new VPN connections, she added....

VPNs aren't the only techniques citizens can use to circumvent internet censorship. Volunteers are setting up so-called Snowflake proxy servers, or "proxies," on their browsers to allow Iranians access to Tor — software that routes traffic through a "relay" network around the world to obfuscate their activity.

"Mastercard has launched software that allows banks to identify and potentially block customer purchases from cryptocurrency exchanges that have been linked to fraud..." reports Barron's: "Crypto Secure" allows card issuers to assess the regulatory risk of dealing with crypto exchanges and other digital asset platforms, as well as decide which purchases to approve, Mastercard said. The solution, which taps blockchain data, allows banks to see where cardholders are buying crypto and assess their overall exposure to the digital asset space, which is rife with fraud and under continuing scrutiny from regulators.
A report on Yahoo Finance says the solutions will "infuse added security and reliability into crypto purchases made across a worldwide network of 2,400 exchanges," noting that the initiative "reinforces Mastercard's efforts to bolster its presence in the growing crypto ecosystem." Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence business told CNBC that "The idea is that the kind of trust we provide for digital commerce transactions, we want to be able to provide the same kind of trust to digital asset transactions for consumers, banks and merchants." The Mastercard executive "declined to disclose the overall dollar value of fiat-to-crypto volumes from its network of 2,400 crypto exchanges," but did say the number of transactions per minute now runs into the "thousands."

And when CNBC asked if Mastercard was changing its strategy after a recent drop in crypto prices, he retorted that market cycles always come and go. "I think you've got to take the longer view that this is a big marketplace now and evolving and is probably going to be much, much bigger in the future."

Meta is warning Facebook users about hundreds of apps on Apple and Google's app stores that were specifically designed to steal login credentials to the social network app. From a report: The company says it's identified over 400 malicious apps disguised as games, photo editors, and other utilities and that it's notifying users who "may have unknowingly self-compromised their accounts by downloading these apps and sharing their credentials." According to Bloomberg, a million users were potentially affected. In its post, Meta says that the apps tricked people into downloading them with fake reviews and promises of useful functionality (both common tactics for other scam apps that are trying to take your money rather than your login info). But upon opening some of the apps, users were prompted to log in with Facebook before they could actually do anything -- if they did, the developers were able to steal their credentials.

A token created by Helium, a much-hyped crypto project hailed as one of the best use cases of Web3 technology, will be partially delisted from major cryptocurrency exchange Binance amid reports of poor revenue and misleading marketing at its parent company, as well as the network's abandonment of its native blockchain last month. From a report: In a blog post Thursday, Binance said that it would cease trading Helium Network Tokens, or HNT, with multiple trading pairs over the next week, effectively preventing token holders from exchanging HNT for Bitcoin or other tokens. Binance "strongly advised" people to close out their positions, or else it would "conduct an automatic settlement and cancel all pending orders" relating to HNT and its trading pairs on October 12. Users may continue to spot trade with the HNT/Binance USD (Binance's stablecoin, BUSD) pair.

In a statement to Forbes, Binance spokesperson Jessica Jung said the exchange periodically reviews "each digital asset we list to ensure that it continues to meet a high level of standard. When a coin or token no longer meets this standard or there are changes in the industry, we conduct a more in-depth review and potentially delist it in order to protect our users." In response, Scott Sigel, COO at the Helium Foundation, which manages the community, said in a statement to Forbes that "there is no basis for Binance to delist several HNT pairs. There has been no change to the integrity of HNT and it continues to meet all of the standards the exchange sets."

To reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5C, investment in renewable energy sources needs to surpass finance flows to fossil fuels by a factor of four over the next decade, according to research from BloombergNEF. From the report: Currently, about 90 cents goes to low-carbon energy sources for every $1 put toward fossil fuels. That ratio needs to change dramatically by 2030, with an average $4 invested in renewables for every $1 allocated to high-polluting energy supplies, analysts at BNEF said. For context, that ratio has never before crossed the 1:1 mark. The numbers show that the decarbonization of the global economy is an undertaking with few parallels in modern history. Investment in the global energy system may climb to as much as $114.4 trillion by 2050, as dollars pour into renewable energy sources including wind and solar, according to BNEF.

This decade "is a vital time to kick-start investing in the energy transition and prevent back-loading emission reductions," the BNEF analysts wrote in a report published Thursday. Scientists have said global greenhouse-gas emissions need to halve by 2030 to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change. BNEF's research was commissioned by the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a coalition of banks, asset managers and insurers overseeing a combined $135 trillion of assets. The analysis was aimed at determining the level of investment required to reach net zero and limit global temperature increases to no more 1.5C under seven scenarios from the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Network for Greening the Financial System. Comparing investment in low-carbon energy supplies with fossil fuels "offers a new view on how corporations, state and non-state organizations and financial institutions can align their financing activity to climate scenarios," BNEF said.