Jennifer Ouellette reports via Ars Technica: Famed naturalist Charles Darwin amassed an impressive personal library over the course of his life, much of which was preserved and cataloged upon his death in 1882. But many other items were lost, including more ephemeral items like unbound volumes, pamphlets, journals, clippings, and so forth, often only vaguely referenced in Darwin's own records. For the last 18 years, the Darwin Online project has painstakingly scoured all manner of archival records to reassemble a complete catalog of Darwin's personal library virtually. The project released its complete 300-page online catalog -- consisting of 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes, with links to electronic copies of the works -- to mark Darwin's 215th birthday on February 12.

"This unprecedentedly detailed view of Darwin's complete library allows one to appreciate more than ever that he was not an isolated figure working alone but an expert of his time building on the sophisticated science and studies and other knowledge of thousands of people," project leader John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore said. "Indeed, the size and range of works in the library makes manifest the extraordinary extent of Darwin's research into the work of others."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Lawyers for Julian Assange have launched what could be his final bid to avoid extradition to the US to face trial over leaking military secrets. The two-day hearing at the High Court in London is hearing his team argue he should be allowed a full appeal. Edward Fitzgerald KC told the court his client was being prosecuted "for engaging in ordinary journalistic practice." If an appeal is turned down, Mr Assange could be handed over within weeks.

Supporters of the Wikileaks founder say he exposed wrongdoing, but the US says Mr Assange put lives at risk. The case is being heard by two judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Johnson. As the hearing got under way, Mr Fitzgerald told them his client was "being prosecuted for engaging in ordinary journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information, information that is both true and of obvious and important public interest." He also confirmed that Mr Assange would not be attending court as he is unwell. Some supporters of Assange started gathering outside court hours ahead of Tuesday's hearing, waving placards featuring the words "Drop the charges."

A coalition of global law enforcement agencies including the FBI and UK National Crime Agency have taken control of the LockBit ransomware gang's dark web site, replacing it with a notice saying their services had been disrupted by joint international action. The "Operation Cronos" task force includes Europol and enforcement agencies from a dozen countries across Europe, Asia and North America. LockBit is a prolific ransomware group that hacks corporate networks then threatens to leak stolen data unless ransom demands are paid. The notice said the operation against them was "ongoing and developing."

The FBI is "laser focused" on Chinese efforts to insert malicious software code into computer networks in ways that could disrupt critical US infrastructure, according to the agency's director Christopher Wray. From a report: Wray said he was acutely concerned about "pre-positioning" of malware. He said the US recently disrupted a Chinese hacking network known as Volt Typhoon that targeted American infrastructure including the electricity grid and water supply, and other targets around the world. "We're laser focused on this as a real threat and we're working with a lot of partners to try to identify it, anticipate it and disrupt it," Wray said on Sunday after attending the Munich Security Conference.

"I'm sober and clear minded about what we're up against...We're always going to have to be kind of on the balls of our feet." Wray said Volt Typhoon was just the tip of the iceberg and was one of many such efforts by the Chinese government. The US has been tracking Chinese pre-positioning operations for well over a decade, but Wray told the security conference that they had reached "fever pitch." He said China was increasingly inserting "offensive weapons within our critical infrastructure poised to attack whenever Beijing decides the time is right."

His comments are the latest FBI effort to raise awareness about Chinese espionage that ranges from traditional spying and intellectual property theft to hacking designed to prepare for possible future conflict. Last October, Wray and his counterparts from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand held their first public meeting in an effort to focus the spotlight on Chinese espionage. Wray said the US campaign was having an impact and that people were increasingly attuned to the threat, particularly compared with several years ago when he sometimes met scepticism.

"I feel things fraying," says Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour.

But he's one of the more optimistic tech skeptics interviewed by the Guardian: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience — taking things slowly for a novice like me — that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines.... Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California... "If you put me to a wall," he continues, "and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10." By "remaining timeline", Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things...

Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences — AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of "Ooh, look at that!" smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don't imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture "an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us", in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to...

[Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist, believes] "a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that's introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it's shaped by power, and it's generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they're dumb? That was concocted by bosses." Where a techno-pessimist like Yudkowsky would have us address the biggest-picture threats conceivable (to the point at which our fingers are fumbling for the nuclear codes) neo-luddites tend to focus on ground-level concerns. Employment, especially, because this is where technology enriched by AIs seems to be causing the most pain....

Watch out, says [writer/podcaster Riley] Quinn at one point, for anyone who presents tech as "synonymous with being forward-thinking and agile and efficient. It's typically code for 'We're gonna find a way around labour regulations'...." One of his TrashFuture colleagues Nate Bethea agrees. "Opposition to tech will always be painted as irrational by people who have a direct financial interest in continuing things as they are," he says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

In the high-stakes world of AI, "The fundamental agreement behind robots.txt [files], and the web as a whole — which for so long amounted to 'everybody just be cool' — may not be able to keep up..." argues the Verge: For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. "What we found pretty quickly with the AI companies," says Medium CEO Tony Stubblebin, "is not only was it not an exchange of value, we're getting nothing in return. Literally zero." When Stubblebine announced last fall that Medium would be blocking AI crawlers, he wrote that "AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers."

Over the last year, a large chunk of the media industry has echoed Stubblebine's sentiment. "We do not believe the current 'scraping' of BBC data without our permission in order to train Gen AI models is in the public interest," BBC director of nations Rhodri Talfan Davies wrote last fall, announcing that the BBC would also be blocking OpenAI's crawler. The New York Times blocked GPTBot as well, months before launching a suit against OpenAI alleging that OpenAI's models "were built by copying and using millions of The Times's copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more." A study by Ben Welsh, the news applications editor at Reuters, found that 606 of 1,156 surveyed publishers had blocked GPTBot in their robots.txt file.

It's not just publishers, either. Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, WikiHow, WebMD, and many other platforms explicitly block GPTBot from accessing some or all of their websites.

On most of these robots.txt pages, OpenAI's GPTBot is the only crawler explicitly and completely disallowed. But there are plenty of other AI-specific bots beginning to crawl the web, like Anthropic's anthropic-ai and Google's new Google-Extended. According to a study from last fall by Originality.AI, 306 of the top 1,000 sites on the web blocked GPTBot, but only 85 blocked Google-Extended and 28 blocked anthropic-ai. There are also crawlers used for both web search and AI. CCBot, which is run by the organization Common Crawl, scours the web for search engine purposes, but its data is also used by OpenAI, Google, and others to train their models. Microsoft's Bingbot is both a search crawler and an AI crawler. And those are just the crawlers that identify themselves — many others attempt to operate in relative secrecy, making it hard to stop or even find them in a sea of other web traffic.

For any sufficiently popular website, finding a sneaky crawler is needle-in-haystack stuff.
In addition, the article points out, a robots.txt file "is not a legal document — and 30 years after its creation, it still relies on the good will of all parties involved.

"Disallowing a bot on your robots.txt page is like putting up a 'No Girls Allowed' sign on your treehouse — it sends a message, but it's not going to stand up in court."

A paper (PDF) from researchers at the University of Cambridge, supported by voices from numerous academic institutions including OpenAI, proposes remote kill switches and lockouts as methods to mitigate risks associated with advanced AI technologies. It also recommends tracking AI chip sales globally. The Register reports: The paper highlights numerous ways policymakers might approach AI hardware regulation. Many of the suggestions -- including those designed to improve visibility and limit the sale of AI accelerators -- are already playing out at a national level. Last year US president Joe Biden put forward an executive order aimed at identifying companies developing large dual-use AI models as well as the infrastructure vendors capable of training them. If you're not familiar, "dual-use" refers to technologies that can serve double duty in civilian and military applications. More recently, the US Commerce Department proposed regulation that would require American cloud providers to implement more stringent "know-your-customer" policies to prevent persons or countries of concern from getting around export restrictions. This kind of visibility is valuable, researchers note, as it could help to avoid another arms race, like the one triggered by the missile gap controversy, where erroneous reports led to massive build up of ballistic missiles. While valuable, they warn that executing on these reporting requirements risks invading customer privacy and even lead to sensitive data being leaked.

Meanwhile, on the trade front, the Commerce Department has continued to step up restrictions, limiting the performance of accelerators sold to China. But, as we've previously reported, while these efforts have made it harder for countries like China to get their hands on American chips, they are far from perfect. To address these limitations, the researchers have proposed implementing a global registry for AI chip sales that would track them over the course of their lifecycle, even after they've left their country of origin. Such a registry, they suggest, could incorporate a unique identifier into each chip, which could help to combat smuggling of components.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum, researchers have suggested that kill switches could be baked into the silicon to prevent their use in malicious applications. [...] The academics are clearer elsewhere in their study, proposing that processor functionality could be switched off or dialed down by regulators remotely using digital licensing: "Specialized co-processors that sit on the chip could hold a cryptographically signed digital "certificate," and updates to the use-case policy could be delivered remotely via firmware updates. The authorization for the on-chip license could be periodically renewed by the regulator, while the chip producer could administer it. An expired or illegitimate license would cause the chip to not work, or reduce its performance." In theory, this could allow watchdogs to respond faster to abuses of sensitive technologies by cutting off access to chips remotely, but the authors warn that doing so isn't without risk. The implication being, if implemented incorrectly, that such a kill switch could become a target for cybercriminals to exploit.

Another proposal would require multiple parties to sign off on potentially risky AI training tasks before they can be deployed at scale. "Nuclear weapons use similar mechanisms called permissive action links," they wrote. For nuclear weapons, these security locks are designed to prevent one person from going rogue and launching a first strike. For AI however, the idea is that if an individual or company wanted to train a model over a certain threshold in the cloud, they'd first need to get authorization to do so. Though a potent tool, the researchers observe that this could backfire by preventing the development of desirable AI. The argument seems to be that while the use of nuclear weapons has a pretty clear-cut outcome, AI isn't always so black and white. But if this feels a little too dystopian for your tastes, the paper dedicates an entire section to reallocating AI resources for the betterment of society as a whole. The idea being that policymakers could come together to make AI compute more accessible to groups unlikely to use it for evil, a concept described as "allocation."

The UK has entered a recession after GDP contracted 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2023, the Office for National Statistics said Thursday. This follows a 0.1% GDP decline in Q3. The data shows meager 0.1% growth for the full year, the worst performance since 2009 barring 2020. All main sectors declined in Q4, with manufacturing, construction and wholesale facing the biggest drops, only partially offset by upticks in rentals and hotels. The recession deals a blow to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's economic pledges ahead of local elections Thursday and the national vote expected this year, potentially widening the lead held by the opposition Labour Party in polls.

Estate agents are increasingly using AI tools to digitally furnish empty rental flats, a practice known as "virtual staging," to make them look occupied in listings. While virtual staging has existed for years, AI advancements have made the process faster and cheaper. One major UK estate agency already offers AI staging services to customers, Vice reported this week. Industry insiders cited by Vice said AI virtual staging is likely to become more widespread as costs fall. The unrealistic furniture from AI staging can be noticeable, such as bunk beds with overlapping ladders. But the technology continues advancing in quality. The story adds: Although some agents have experimented with using popular AI image generators like Dall-e and Midjourney to "fix" property pictures, the results are usually pretty bizarre, like in this example, where the AI has envisioned bookcases in every corner of the living room and put a hob at perfect height for a toddler. Companies like Virtual Staging AI, ModelProp and Gepetto, which describes itself as like "Pinterest on steroids," are now taking this technology and tailoring it specifically to virtual furnishing.

Researchers have made significant progress toward developing a blood test that can predict the risk of dementia up to 15 years before clinical diagnosis. The Guardian reports: Hopes for the test were raised after scientists discovered biological markers for the condition in blood samples collected from more than 50,000 healthy volunteers enrolled in the UK Biobank project. Analysis of the blood identified patterns of four proteins that predicted the onset of dementia in general, and Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia specifically, in older age. When combined with more conventional risk factors such as age, sex, education and genetic susceptibility, the protein profiles allowed researchers to predict dementia with an estimated 90% accuracy nearly 15 years before people received clinical confirmation of the disease.

For the latest study, blood samples from 52,645 UK adults without dementia were collected and frozen between 2006 and 2010 and analyzed 10 to 15 years later. More than 1,400 participants went on to develop dementia. Using artificial intelligence, the researchers looked for connections between nearly 1,500 blood proteins and developing dementia years later. Writing in Nature Aging, they describe how four proteins, Gfap, Nefl, Gdf15 and Ltbp2, were present in unusual levels among those who developed all-cause dementia, Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia. Higher levels of the proteins were warning signs of disease. Inflammation in the brain can trigger cells called astrocytes to over-produce Gfap, a known biomarker for Alzheimer's. People with raised Gfap were more than twice as likely to develop dementia than those with lower levels.

Another blood protein, Nefl, is linked to nerve fibre damage, while higher than normal Gdf15 can occur after damage to the brain's blood vessels. Rising levels of Gfap and Ltbp2 was highly specific for dementia rather than other brain diseases, the scientists found, with changes occurring at least 10 years before people received a dementia diagnosis. The researchers are speaking to companies to develop the test but said the cost, currently at several hundred pounds, would need to come down to make it viable.

A registered sex offender has become the first person in England and Wales to be convicted of cyber-flashing. The BBC reports: Nicholas Hawkes, 39, of Basildon, Essex, sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and a woman on Friday. The woman took screenshots of the image on WhatsApp and reported Hawkes to Essex Police the same day. Hawkes admitted two charges when he appeared before magistrates in Southend earlier. He is the first person to be convicted of the new offense of cyber-flashing, which was brought in under the Online Safety Act and came into effect on January 31.

After pleading guilty to two counts of sending a photograph or film of genitals to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation, he was remanded in custody until March 11, when he will be sentenced at Basildon Crown Court. Hawkes is a registered sex offender until November 2033 after he was convicted and given a community order for sexual activity with a child under 16 and exposure last year at Basildon Crown Court, the CPS said. He will also be sentenced for breaching the order when he is sentenced in March.

HP is seeking as much as $4 billion from Autonomy's former bosses following a London judge's finding that they fraudulently boosted the value of the company before its sale. From a report: Founder Mike Lynch was found to have inflated Autonomy's revenue alongside his chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain and induced HP to buy the firm for $11 billion, according to a London civil judgment in 2022. The British tech tycoon is currently waiting to face a criminal trial in the US over the sale after being extradited last year. He was previously investigated by the UK's Serious Fraud Office but the agency dropped its case. Hussain was convicted in the US for his role in the saga. Lawyers for HP calculated the total losses that Lynch and Hussain must pay back as over $4 billion, according to court documents prepared for a hearing Monday. This was revised from a previous calculation of $5 billion at trial due to further evidence.

Last week Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor suddenly stopped supporting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

But now Microsoft "has announced a temporary reprieve for developers who use VS Code to connect to servers, clouds, container, and other devices running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu: Microsoft [had] pushed out an update to VS Code that bumps its glibc requirement, dropping support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (which uses an older version of glibc) in the process. Innocuous though it sounds, that move had a huge impact, leaving thousands of developers who use VS Code unable to connect to/work with devices running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or other Linux distros using glibc 2.27, including RHEL 7, CentOS 7, and Amazon Linux 2.

— "Screwed" was the term many of those affected used!

Well, good news: Microsoft says it plans to release a 'recovery' update for VS Code soon. This will restore the ability for developers to use the text editor's remote dev tools to connect to/work with machines running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and other, older Linux distros.

But only for the next 12 months.
"We hope this will provide the needed time for you and your companies to migrate to newer Linux distributions," Microsoft's senior product manager for VS Code posted on GitHub. He added that the software will "show the appropriate dialog and banner that you are connecting to an OS that is not supported by VS Code." (The updated was released on Thursday.)

He also thanked developers for their feedback and "for sharing your passion for VS Code and sharing how it is being used to enable various scenarios."

Thanks to Slashdot reader motang for sharing the article.

Gen Z is reviving the trend of reading physical books over digital ones, with a notable increase in library visits and book purchases, as evidenced by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner promoting literature and book clubs. The Guardian reports: This week the 22-year-old model Kaia Gerber launched her own book club, Library Science. Gerber, who this month appears on the cover of British Vogue alongside her supermodel mum, Cindy Crawford, describes it as "a platform for sharing books, featuring new writers, hosting conversations with artists we admire -- and continuing to build a community of people who are as excited about literature as I am." "Books have always been the great love of my life," she added. "Reading is so sexy."

Gerber isn't alone. Last year in the UK 669m physical books were sold, the highest overall level ever recorded. Research from Nielsen BookData highlights that it is print books that gen Z favour, accounting for 80% of purchases from November 2021 to 2022. Libraries are also reporting an uptick in gen Z users who favour their quiet over noisy coffee shops. In the UK in-person visits are up 71%. While the BookTok charts -- a subsection of TikTok where avid readers post recommendations -- are regularly topped by fantasy and romance titles from authors such as Colleen Hoover, gen Z are reading a diverse range of genres. [...]

"Overall we are seeing a move towards escapism through the rise in speculative fiction, romance and fantasy, but I think it would be a mistake to homogenise gen Z and say they're reading lighter," says the author and literary agent Abigail Bergstrom. "With the oversaturation and noise of the wild west digital landscape, they are also demanding higher standards, especially when it comes to the authority and expertise of a writer on a particular subject."

Longtime Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: Users of Ring video doorbells have reacted angrily to a huge price hike being introduced in March. After buying the devices, customers can pay a subscription to store footage on the cloud, download clips and get discounted products. That subscription is going up 43%, from $44 to $63 per device, per year, for basic plan customers. The firm, which is owned by Amazon, insisted it still provided "some of the best value in the industry." Its customers appear not to to agree.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU's climate service. World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts. This first year-long breach doesn't break that landmark Paris agreement, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.

Urgent action to cut carbon emissions can still slow warming, scientists say. "This far exceeds anything that is acceptable," Prof Sir Bob Watson, a former chair of the UN's climate body, told the BBC Radio 4's Today Program. "Look what's happened this year with only 1.5C -- we've seen floods, we've seen droughts, we've seen heatwaves and wildfires all over the world." The period from February 2023 to January 2024 reached 1.52C of warming, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The following graph [here] shows how that compares with previous years.

The world's sea surface is also at its highest ever recorded average temperature -- yet another sign of the widespread nature of climate records. As the chart [here] shows, it's particularly notable given that ocean temperatures don't normally peak for another month or so. Science groups differ slightly on precisely how much temperatures have increased, but all agree that the world is in by far its warmest period since modern records began -- and likely for much longer.

On Tuesday, The Independent, Tom's Hardware, and many other tech outlets reported on a story about how three million smart toothbrushes were used in a DDoS attack. The only problem? It "didn't actually happen," writes Jason Koebler via 404 Media. "There are no additional details about this apparent attack, and most of the article cites general research by a publicly traded cybersecurity company called Fortinet which has detected malicious, hijacked internet of things devices over the years. A search on Fortinet's website shows no recent published research about hacked smart toothbrushes." From the report: The original article, called "The toothbrushes are attacking," starts with the following passage: "She's at home in the bathroom, but she's part of a large-scale cyber attack. The electric toothbrush is programmed with Java, and criminals have unnoticed installed malware on it - like on 3 million other toothbrushes. One command is enough and the remote-controlled toothbrushes simultaneously access the website of a Swiss company. The site collapses and is paralyzed for four hours. Millions of dollars in damage is caused. This example, which seems like a Hollywood scenario, actually happened. It shows how versatile digital attacks have become." [...]

The "3 million hacked smart toothbrushes" story has now been viral for more than 24 hours and literally no new information about it has emerged despite widespread skepticism from people in the security industry and its virality. The two Fortinet executives cited in the original report did not respond to an email and LinkedIn message seeking clarification, and neither did Fortinet's PR team. The author of the Aargauer Zeitung story also did not respond to a request for more information. I called Fortinet's headquarters, asked to speak to the PR contact listed on the press release about its earnings, which was published after the toothbrush news began to go viral, and was promptly disconnected. The company has continued to tweet about other, unrelated things. They have not responded to BleepingComputer either, nor the many security researchers who are asking for further proof that this actually happened. While we don't know how this happened, Fortinet has been talking specifically about the dangers of internet-connected toothbrushes for years, and has been using it as an example in researcher talks. In a statement to 404 Media, Fortinet said "To clarify, the topic of toothbrushes being used for DDoS attacks was presented during an interview as an illustration of a given type of attack, and it is not based on research from Fortinet or FortiGuard Labs. It appears that due to translations the narrative on this topic has been stretched to the point where hypothetical and actual scenarios are blurred."

James Felton reports via IFL Science: One of the deepest metal mines in Europe -- the Pyhasalmi Mine in central Finland -- is to be turned into an enormous gravity battery capable of storing 2 megawatts of energy. [...] Despite the cool name, the idea behind gravity batteries is really simple. During times when energy sources are producing more energy than the demand, the excess energy is used to move weights (in the form of water or sometimes sand) upwards, turning it into potential energy. When the power supply is low, these objects can then be released, powering turbines as our good friend (and deadly enemy) gravity sends them towards the Earth.

Though generally gravity batteries take the form of reservoirs, abandoned mines moving sand or other weights up when excess power is being produced have also been suggested. Scottish company Gravitricity created a system of winches and hoists that can be installed in such disused mineshafts. The company will install the system in the 1,400-meter-deep (4,600 feet) zinc and copper mine in Pyhajarvi, Finland. "A study last year by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) estimated that gravity batteries in abandoned underground mines could store up to 70TWh of energy -- enough to meet global electricity demands," reports The Independent. "The repurposed mines could also provide economic benefits to the communities that previously relied on the mine for their livelihoods."

The Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Volt Typhoon has been living in the networks of some critical industries for "at least five years," (non-paywalled link) according to a joint cybersecurity advisory issued by the US and its allies on Wednesday. From a report: The compromised environments are in the continental US and elsewhere, including Guam, the advisory said. It was published by US agencies and their security counterparts in Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. The report comes a week after US officials announced an operation to disrupt Volt Typhoon by deleting malware from thousands of internet-connected devices the group had hijacked to gain access to the networks in critical parts of the economy. Among the sectors targeted were communications, energy, transportation and water systems.

The United Kingdom, France and allied countries on Tuesday called for international guidelines for the responsible use of spyware, in an effort to stop the hacking tools from running rampant. From a report: At a conference at London's Lancaster House co-hosted by the British and French government, more than a dozen countries and technology companies signed a declaration saying that "uncontrolled dissemination" of cyber intrusive tools could lead to "unintentional escalation in cyberspace."

A 2021 investigation called the Pegasus Project highlighted how spyware tools like the Israeli-made Pegasus software had spread across the world and are being abused in political and corporate hacking campaigns. Despite widespread condemnation, governments' efforts to crack down on malicious hacking software have largely failed -- in part because the tools are popular with many intelligence and security services, including in democratic countries.

Among the countries that have signed up to the pledge for international rules guidelines EU members Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Italy and Poland, as well as the United States, United Kingdom and the African Union. On the industry side, Apple, defense firm BAE Systems, Google, Meta and Microsoft signed up. The group of countries and firms hopes to curb the proliferation and unabated use of intrusive cybertools. They called for principles and policy options to balance human rights and security interests, including policies to use spyware in a âoelegal and responsible manner," in line with international law and under strict oversight by authorities.