CISA and allied governments are warning users to secure their routers as Russian state-backed hackers continue compromising the devices and turning them into proxy nodes to disguise attacks against critical infrastructure. The advisory urges users to disable outdated SNMP versions, use strong passwords, update firmware, and turn off unnecessary router services to reduce the risk of being swept into these botnets. Ars Technica reports: "Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Center 16 cyber actors continue to exploit poorly configured and vulnerable networking devices worldwide, opportunistically compromising multiple critical infrastructure sector networks," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Monday. The hacking groups are tracked under various names, including Berserk Bear, Energetic Bear, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard, and Static Tundra. The advisory was co-issued by governments from around the world, including Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and the UK.

The primary means of compromise the agency warned about was hackers scanning IP ranges with active Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents that accept common or default authentication credentials. These scans are run by the very sorts of router botnets the actors are trying to enroll the targeted device in. By sending malicious traffic from spoofed addresses, the hackers can use the SNMP agent on poorly configured routers to run malware. SNMP allows users to collect and organize information about managed networking devices or to modify that information to change device behavior.

With control of a device, the hackers then use it as an exit node when probing or attacking targets in the communications, defense, energy, financial services, and government sectors. By funneling the malicious traffic through a benign-appearing device on a trustworthy IP address, the attackers are able to lower the chances of getting blocked by firewalls and other security defenses. Monday's advisory made no mention of identical operations carried out in recent years by China. So-called residential proxies are also a go-to tool used by financially motivated criminal hackers to obscure their true IP address. In many cases, these sorts of proxies are made up of millions of streaming devices that are sold with preloaded malware.

Microsoft has released a public preview of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) containers, adding a built-in command-line tool and API for running Linux containers directly inside Windows applications without third-party software. The update also introduces faster file access, improved networking and memory management, plus integration with Defender, Intune, and VS Code. The Register reports: WSL has always been a handy way to run Linux workloads from Windows, and is particularly convenient for Linux developers who must comply with corporate edicts to use a Windows device. The CLI for end-to-end container workflows furthers this. Microsoft stated, "WSL containers make it easier for developers and organizations to build, test, and run containerized workloads while benefiting from the security, manageability, and integration of the Windows platform."

Alternatively, you could run your preferred Linux distribution natively, but that might not be an option, particularly if an organization is keen on the "security, manageability, and integration of the Windows platform." And this is an important point. WSL's existing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) has been updated (in private preview) to be aware of Linux container events, and there are settings in Intune for managing WSL containers. Support is also in a pre-release version of VS Code, where the Docker path in the dev container settings can be changed to wslc.

There is also a new default file system for WSL container that Microsoft claims makes Windows file access twice the speed. So, going from terribly slow to just slow? We'll wait until general availability is reached before passing judgment. There's a new default networking mode to improve compatibility and better memory reclaim techniques. However, none of these tweaks will be enabled by default in WSL. Microsoft wrote, "Since these changes touch mission critical paths like file system access and network, for now they are enabled just in WSL container."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, recently dispatched a small team at his company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, two employees with knowledge of the matter said. Users would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video game-like points system instead, one person said, though the company had not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting. The app is internally referred to as "Arena" and would function independently from Meta's social networking apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, said the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans. Meta aims to grow the app by leveraging its large social networking audiences and directing them toward using it, they said.

The effort, which insiders characterized as experimental but a top priority, is part of a broader push by Mr. Zuckerberg to create new types of apps based on emerging social behavior online. More than 3.56 billion people visit one or more of Meta's apps every day, an amount that has raised questions about whether those platforms have reached a saturation point. Arena is one of a handful of apps that Meta is trying out. Others include one called Meta Photos, another stand-alone app which would create new types of media using artificial intelligence, the employees said. [...] Meta insiders have cautioned that Arena remains in development and may not be released. But as executives search for ways to keep the world's largest social media sites thriving, Mr. Zuckerberg appears to be relying on his well-worn product development strategy: Follow the users.

UC San Diego researchers are working with Google to build a private cloud from 2,000 retired Pixel Fold motherboards, demonstrating how discarded smartphones could provide useful, low-cost computing capacity. "The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall," reports The Register. "Depending on how well the initial phase goes, we're told the cluster could grow even larger." From the report Once the phone's motherboards have been extracted from their shells, the researchers say that the chips hiding within remain more than potent enough to be useful for a variety of tasks. In many cases, the single-threaded performance of these chips is as good as, if not better than, what you'd find from a many-cored datacenter chip. The Pixel Fold smartphones, which will form the basis of the cluster, are powered by a Google Tensor G2 processor with two 2.85 GHz Cortex-X1, two 2.35 GHz Cortex-A78 and four 1.80 GHz Cortex-A55 Arm cores, a Mali-G710 MP7 GPU, and 12 GB of system memory. Early benchmarking using the SPEC suite suggests that 25-50 phones should deliver performance similar to that of a conventional server.

The major challenge, instead, is distributing workloads across multiple devices, each of which has a handful of cores of one or more varieties, and most have 8-12 GB of memory. UCSD researchers are approaching this challenge from a couple of different angles. The first is by targeting applications that can easily fit within a single device. The second is using Kubernetes to orchestrate container deployments across clusters of 25-50 phones. For this to work, the devices first need to be flashed with a Linux operating system suitable for the job. While Android makes for a great handheld experience, it is not intended for server duty. In the blog post, researchers note that Android includes functionality intended to stop rogue applications from chewing up excessive amounts of memory and draining your battery. In server context, these safety mechanisms are no longer necessary.

[Ryan Kastner, an associate professor of computer science at UCSD] told us this was by no means an easy task, but the team has made steady progress toward getting Linux running smoothly on these devices, including support for the phone's onboard GPUs. Access to some functionality, like the chip's integrated tensor processing unit, remains elusive. Clustering these devices will require networking the phones together. Normally these devices would connect over cellular or Wi-Fi, but at this scale, this not only isn't practical, but also has implications for security, he explained. Instead, the team will employ PCBs that both supply power and break out wired Ethernet networking.

The researchers suggest that many EdTech, grading, and research workloads commonly run by universities in the cloud are small enough to run on the cluster without issue. "The vast majority of these applications are within the capabilities of a single smartphone to host, with the standard grading backend running on small cloud instances," a blog post detailing the planned deployment reads. "Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class."

Electrek reports: Tesla wants to sell modular AI data center hardware, according to a new trademark application for a product called "Megapod." The filing describes a complete, self-contained computing system for AI workloads...

Tesla filed the "Megapod" trademark (serial number 99893717) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month, through its longtime IP counsel. It's an intent-to-use application, meaning Tesla is claiming the name for a product it hasn't launched yet. The goods-and-services description is unusually specific for a trademark. Megapod covers "modular data center hardware systems for artificial intelligence computing, comprised of computer servers, computer hardware for artificial intelligence data processing, networking equipment, power distribution units, and cooling systems." It also covers "self-contained modular computing hardware systems for artificial intelligence workloads," integrated platforms sold as a single unit — an enclosure bundling compute, power distribution, and cooling — and downloadable software to monitor, manage, and optimize those systems.

In plain terms: Tesla wants to sell a turnkey AI data center building block. Not a battery, not a chip on its own, but the full rack-and-room of servers, networking, power, and cooling that AI training and inference run on.
Tesla's offering would have to compete with Nvidia's liquid-cooled, rack-scale systems that simulates a giant GPU, the article points out. But "The bigger issue is that Tesla has no merchant compute-hardware business to build on." Tesla's own AI training cluster, Cortex at Gigafactory Texas, runs on roughly 67,000 Nvidia H100-equivalent GPUs. In other words, Tesla is one of Nvidia's customers, not a competitor selling alternative hardware... Where Tesla does have a real AI-data-center business is power, not compute. Its Megapack and new Megablock energy storage products are selling into AI data centers as grid buffers — Musk's own xAI has bought roughly $1 billion of Megapacks to keep its training runs powered. That energy-storage strength is the one credible thread here. A Megapod that bundles Tesla's power electronics, thermal management, and the enclosure — the "shell" around the chips rather than the chips themselves — would at least sit adjacent to a business Tesla actually runs.

The U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence partners issued a joint warning (PDF) that Chinese military intelligence services are using LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to recruit people with access to government, military, foreign policy, or sensitive economic information. "These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defense analysts," the agencies said Wednesday. "China's military intelligence services ultimately seek to acquire privileged military, political and economic intelligence that can provide China with a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes." Bloomberg reports: China was targeting Five Eyes nationals with security clearance, particularly those working in foreign affairs, security and intelligence, and military personnel including people stationed in the Asia-Pacific region, it said. People with more peripheral access to government information, such as academics, journalists and think tank employees, were also being approached.

The Chinese embassy in the UK strongly condemned the accusations, calling the allegation of Chinese espionage threats "entirely fabricated" and "malicious slander." The "Five Eyes" members have "engaged in unscrupulous espionage and intelligence-gathering activities around the globe. Their activities are the real threat to peace-loving countries," the embassy said in a statement Thursday.

[...] According to the agencies, Chinese spies have commissioned reports to be written by those they've approached, paying them anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, with payments sometimes made in cryptocurrency. "Military members may be asked about their roles and unit activities, home base or naval vessel," the notice said. "Five Eyes agencies have identified individuals who have undertaken these activities, leading to criminal prosecutions, job losses, and security-clearance revocation," it warned.

Dell has introduced a redesigned $699 XPS 13 aimed squarely at Apple's budget MacBook Neo, offering a premium aluminum design, touch display, backlit keyboard, Wi-Fi 7, 512GB of base storage, and various other configuration options. Dell's machine costs more than Apple's entry model but tries to justify the difference with lighter weight, better display specs, and upgrade paths Apple doesn't offer. "The XPS 13 begins at $699 -- students can purchase it for $599 -- while the MacBook Neo costs $599 and drops to $499 for education buyers," notes Bloomberg. From the report: Dell's product allows for more configuration, with up to 32GB of memory compared with the Neo's nonupgradeable 8GB of unified memory. Its display can also produce a wider spectrum of colors and supports refresh rates up to 120 hertz, while Apple reserves its best screens for the pricier MacBook Pro line.

The inclusion of a backlit keyboard should allow for easier typing in dark conditions. Dell has also tossed in other nice-to-have upgrades over the Neo like more robust Wi-Fi 7 wireless networking. As for battery life, Dell is touting "up to 17 hours of streaming" versus a comparable 16 hours on the Neo.

Still, the XPS comes with compromises of its own: Unlike the Neo, there's no built-in headphone jack, which means owners will need to rely on its quad-speaker audio system, use Bluetooth earbuds or plug a headphone adapter into one of the two USB-C ports. You can learn more via Dell.com.

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Threat actors are exploiting a vulnerability in shared content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure to hide connections to malicious domains. Researchers say the vulnerability could impact roughly 88 million domains and can bypass DNS filtering and protective DNS controls, potentially enabling stealthy command-and-control communications and other evasive attacks.
Dubbed "Underminr," the exploit "presents the SNI and HTTP Host of a domain," writes SecurityWeek, "while forcing a request to the IP address of another tenant on the same shared edge." The mismatch, ADAMnetworks reports, has been exploited in attacks targeting large-scale hosting providers, including those that have implemented mitigations against domain fronting...

Threat actors' increased reliance on AI is expected to lead to a surge in attacks. "Once Underminr becomes parametric information for AI-generated malware, we could expect to see it in every attack that needs to evade protective DNS as part of the attack chain," ADAMnetworks CEO David Redekop says.

BrianFagioli writes: Flipper Devices has finally revealed Flipper One, a Linux-powered cyberdeck that sounds less like a gadget and more like an attempt to rebuild portable ARM computing from the ground up. Unlike Flipper Zero, which focuses on offline protocols like RFID and Sub-1 GHz radio, Flipper One is all about networking, modular hardware, SDR experimentation, local AI, and upstream Linux kernel support. The company says it wants to build "the most open and best-documented ARM computer in the world," complete with zero vendor BSP dependency and as few binary blobs as possible. That alone is enough to get Linux folks paying attention.

The hardware itself is loaded with nerd bait: dual Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, M.2 expansion for SSDs and 5G modems, GPIO add-ons, HDMI 2.1, and a dual-processor architecture pairing a Rockchip RK3576 with a Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller. Flipper Devices is even developing its own small-screen Linux UI framework because squeezing KDE onto tiny touchscreens is miserable. The company openly admits the project is financially and technically terrifying, which honestly makes this announcement feel more believable than most startup hardware pitches. Whether Flipper One succeeds or not, it is one of the most ambitious Linux hardware projects in years.

"Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core networking developers," reads the pull request.

And so Thursday Linus Torvald merged the pull request "to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem," reports Phoronix, "and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters." This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining... [W]ith the large language models and increased code fuzzing finding potential issues with these drivers for obsolete hardware, it's easier to just get rid of these drivers if no one is actively using the hardware from decades ago... This merge lightens the kernel by 138,161 lines of code with ISDN gone and numerous old network adapters and also getting rid of legacy ATM device drivers as well as the amateur ham radio support. The main networking drivers removed affect the 3com 3c509 / 3c515 / 3c574 / 3c589, AMD Lance, AMD NMCLAN, SMSC SMC9194 / SMC91C92, Fujitsu FMVJ18X, and 8390 AX88190 / Ultra / WD80X3.

Linux 7.1 also has removed the long-obsolete bus mouse support as well as beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support and removing support for Russia's Baikal CPUs.

NIST is narrowing how it handles CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), saying it will only automatically enrich higher-priority vulnerabilities. "CVEs that do not meet those criteria will still be listed in the NVD but will not automatically be enriched by NIST," it said. "This change is driven by a surge in CVE submissions, which increased 263% between 2020 and 2025. We don't expect this trend to let up anytime soon." The Hacker News reports: The prioritization criteria outlined by NIST, which went into effect on April 15, 2026, are as follows:
- CVEs appearing in the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.
- CVEs for software used within the federal government.
- CVEs for critical software as defined by Executive Order 14028: this includes software that's designed to run with elevated privilege or managed privileges, has privileged access to networking or computing resources, controls access to data or operational technology, and operates outside of normal trust boundaries with elevated access.

Any CVE submission that doesn't meet these thresholds will be marked as "Not Scheduled." The idea, NIST said, is to focus on CVEs that have the maximum potential for widespread impact. "While CVEs that do not meet these criteria may have a significant impact on affected systems, they generally do not present the same level of systemic risk as those in the prioritized categories," it added. [...]

Changes have also been instituted for various other aspects of the NVD operations. These include:
- NIST will no longer routinely provide a separate severity score for a CVE where the CVE Numbering Authority has already provided a severity score.
- A modified CVE will be reanalyzed only if it "materially impacts" the enrichment data. Users can request specific CVEs to be reanalyzed by sending an email to the same address listed above.
- All unenriched CVEs currently in backlog with an NVD publish date earlier than March 1, 2026, will be moved into the "Not Scheduled" category. This does not apply to CVEs that are already in the KEV catalog.
- NIST has updated the CVE status labels and descriptions, as well as the NVD Dashboard, to accurately reflect the status of all CVEs and other statistics in real time.

IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4's address shortage. Tom's Hardware reports: [...] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction -- despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop. That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses.

The tried-and-true IPv4 and its well-known 123.456.789.123 format from 1980 offers ~4.3 billion addresses in theory, and around 3.7 billion in practice. That always sounded like a lot, but nobody could have predicted just how rapid the explosion of the Internet would be. IANA, the entity controlling the North-American IPv4 space, ran out of IPv4 addresses around 2011, while its European equivalent RIPE NCC could spare no more four-octet addresses nearly seven years ago in 2019. Asian, African, and Latin-American IP registries equally ran out during that timeframe.

Anthropic says its annualized revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion and disclosed plans to secure roughly 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU compute starting in 2027. Broadcom will supply the key chips and networking gear for the effort, the company announced. The Register reports: News of the two deals emerged today in a Broadcom regulatory filing that opens with two items of news. One is a "Long Term Agreement for Broadcom to develop and supply custom Tensor Processing Units ("TPUs") for Google's future generations of TPUs." Google and Broadcom have collaborated to produce custom TPUs. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan recently shared his opinion that hyperscalers don't have the skill to create custom accelerators and predicted Broadcom's chip business will therefore win over $100 billion of revenue from AI chips in 2027 alone.

Working on next-gen TPUs for Google will presumably help to make that prediction a reality. So will the second part of Broadcom's announcement: a "Supply Assurance Agreement for Broadcom to supply networking and other components to be used in Google's next-generation AI racks through up to 2031." Broadcom's filing also revealed one user of Google's next-gen TPU will be Anthropic, which starting in 2027, "will access through Broadcom approximately 3.5 gigawatts as part of the multiple gigawatts of next generation TPU-based AI compute capacity committed by Anthropic."

Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet's new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.

The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.

An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.
"While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer," Clarke wrote in 2023, "allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others... designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user."

"Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web,"

Meta plans to remove end-to-end encryption (E2EE) from Instagram direct messages by May 8, 2026. "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months," says Meta. "Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp." The Hacker News reports: The American company first began testing E2EE for Instagram direct messages in 2021 as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "privacy-focused vision for social networking." The feature is currently "only available in some areas" and is not enabled by default. Weeks into the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, the company made encrypted direct messaging available to all adult users in both countries. Last week, TikTok said it would not introduce E2EE, arguing it makes users less safe by preventing police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if needed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today's X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor's algorithm. Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site.

To bypass the bottleneck, companies are turning to Merkle Trees, a data structure that uses cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of material used in more traditional verification processes in public key infrastructure. Merkle Tree Certificates, "replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs," members of Google's Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. "In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certificates, and the 'certificate' sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree."

[...] Google is [also] adding cryptographic material from quantum-resistant algorithms such as ML-DSA (PDF). This addition would allow forgeries only if an attacker were to break both classical and post-quantum encryption. The new regime is part of what Google is calling the quantum-resistant root store, which will complement the Chrome Root Store the company formed in 2022. The [Merkle Tree Certificates] MTCs use Merkle Trees to provide quantum-resistant assurances that a certificate has been published without having to add most of the lengthy keys and hashes. Using other techniques to reduce the data sizes, the MTCs will be roughly the same 64-byte length they are now [...]. The new system has already been implemented in Chrome.

TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors. The Register: The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

It is understood that this is just the first of several lawsuits that the Office of the Attorney General intends to file this week against "China-aligned companies," as part of a coordinated effort to hold China accountable under Texas law. The lawsuit claims that TP-Link is the dominant player in the US networking and smart home market, controlling 65 percent of the American market for network devices.

It also alleges that TP-Link represents to American consumers that the devices it markets and sells within the US are manufactured in Vietnam, and that consistent with this, the devices it sells in the American market carry a "Made in Vietnam" sticker.

Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat.

Solar panels in orbit generate roughly five times the power they do on the ground because there is no day-night cycle, no cloud cover, no atmospheric loss, and no atmosphere-related energy reduction. The system economics are even more favorable because space-based operations eliminate the need for batteries entirely, making the effective cost roughly 10 times cheaper than terrestrial solar, Musk said. The terrestrial bottleneck is already real.

Musk said powering 330,000 Nvidia GB300 chips -- once you account for networking hardware, storage, peak cooling on the hottest day of the year, and reserve margin for generator servicing -- requires roughly a gigawatt at the generation level. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030, and the limiting factor is the casting of turbine vanes and blades, a process handled by just three companies worldwide.

Five years from now, Musk predicted, SpaceX will launch and operate more AI compute annually than the cumulative total on Earth, expecting at least a few hundred gigawatts per year in space. Patel estimated that 100 gigawatts alone would require on the order of 10,000 Starship launches per year, a figure Musk affirmed. SpaceX is gearing up for 10,000 launches a year, Musk said, and possibly 20,000 to 30,000.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Acer has filed three separate patent infringement lawsuits against AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, taking the unusual step of hauling the nation's largest wireless carriers into federal court. The suits, filed in the Eastern District of Texas, claim the companies are using Acer-developed cellular networking technology without paying for the privilege. Acer says it tried to negotiate licenses for years but reached a dead end, arguing it was left with no option except litigation. The case centers on six U.S. patents Acer asserts are core to modern wireless networks, rather than anything tied to PCs or laptops.

The company describes itself as reluctant to pursue courtroom battles, but it has been quietly building a large global patent portfolio after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D. Acer also notes that some of its patents count as standard-essential, hinting the carriers may be required to license them. All three companies are expected to push back, and the dispute could become another long-running telecom patent saga. Consumers will not notice any immediate changes, but if Acer wins or settles, it may find a new revenue stream far beyond its traditional hardware business.
Further coverage from Hot Hardware

Ars Technica reports: Security firm Mandiant [part of Google Cloud] has released a database that allows any administrative password protected by Microsoft's NTLM.v1 hash algorithm to be hacked in an attempt to nudge users who continue using the deprecated function despite known weaknesses.... a precomputed table of hash values linked to their corresponding plaintext. These generic tables, which work against multiple hashing schemes, allow hackers to take over accounts by quickly mapping a stolen hash to its password counterpart... Mandiant said it had released an NTLMv1 rainbow table that will allow defenders and researchers (and, of course, malicious hackers, too) to recover passwords in under 12 hours using consumer hardware costing less than $600 USD. The table is hosted in Google Cloud. The database works against Net-NTLMv1 passwords, which are used in network authentication for accessing resources such as SMB network sharing.

Despite its long- and well-known susceptibility to easy cracking, NTLMv1 remains in use in some of the world's more sensitive networks. One reason for the lack of action is that utilities and organizations in industries, including health care and industrial control, often rely on legacy apps that are incompatible with more recently released hashing algorithms. Another reason is that organizations relying on mission-critical systems can't afford the downtime required to migrate. Of course, inertia and penny-pinching are also causes.

"By releasing these tables, Mandiant aims to lower the barrier for security professionals to demonstrate the insecurity of Net-NTLMv1," Mandiant said. "While tools to exploit this protocol have existed for years, they often required uploading sensitive data to third-party services or expensive hardware to brute-force keys."
"Organizations that rely on Windows networking aren't the only laggards," the article points out. "Microsoft only announced plans to deprecate NTLMv1 last August."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.