Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Amazon Hit with $2.5 Billion Penalty for Deceptive Prime Subscriptions

2025-09-25

The FTC has ordered Amazon to pay a record-breaking $2.5 billion – $1 billion civil penalty and $1.5 billion in refunds – for deceptively enrolling millions in Amazon Prime without consent and making cancellations difficult. The FTC alleged Amazon used manipulative user interfaces and deliberately complicated the cancellation process. This settlement marks a significant win for consumer protection and sets a precedent for combating deceptive subscription practices.

(www.ftc.gov)

Tech

Cheap Batteries: X-ray CT Scan Reveals Shocking Defects

2025-09-25

Lumafield used X-ray CT scanning to analyze over 1,000 lithium-ion batteries, revealing dangerous manufacturing defects in low-cost and counterfeit batteries sold on platforms like Amazon and Temu. A defect called 'negative anode overhang' significantly increases the risk of fire and short circuits. While name-brand batteries from Samsung and Panasonic showed no issues, low-cost batteries had an 8% defect rate, with some counterfeit brands exceeding 15%. This highlights the risks of prioritizing price over safety when purchasing batteries for devices.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech CT scan

Musk's Federal Workforce Purge: The Valentine's Day Massacre and the Absurd Email

2025-09-25

Elon Musk's mass layoff of federal workers has caused a major uproar, with tens of thousands losing their jobs in what became known as the "Valentine's Day Massacre." The process was chaotic and unprofessional, with many employees facing unfair treatment and public humiliation. Following the layoffs, Musk demanded weekly progress reports from all remaining employees, prompting widespread resentment. Employees responded in various creative and defiant ways, including using different languages, citing the Constitution, and even detailing childcare responsibilities. The incident highlights the absurdity of the decision-making process and the disregard for employee dignity, sparking a broader conversation about government efficiency and employee rights, and exposing the controversial nature of Musk's management style.

(www.wired.com)

Tech

Critical: 2 Million Cisco Devices Vulnerable to Actively Exploited Zero-Day

2025-09-25

A critical zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-20352) affecting up to 2 million Cisco devices is actively being exploited. The vulnerability, present in all supported versions of Cisco IOS and IOS XE, allows remote attackers to crash devices or execute arbitrary code. Exploitation leverages a stack overflow in the SNMP component, requiring a read-only community string and system privileges. Cisco urges immediate upgrades to patched software releases.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech Cisco

Facebook's Misinformation Problem: A Race Against Time

2025-09-25

An analysis of Facebook posts from Australia's top 25 news outlets reveals the persistent spread of misinformation, including false claims about hydroxychloroquine and election fraud conspiracies. The study shows significant real-world consequences, including health damage and declining public trust. Despite fact-checking efforts, misinformation proves 'sticky,' resurfacing regularly during elections. High-profile figures amplify the problem. The research highlights the need for a multi-pronged approach to combat misinformation, encompassing counter-messaging from trusted leaders, media engagement, and digital literacy campaigns.

(theconversation.com)

Tech

California Bill Aims to Simplify CCPA Compliance: A.B. 566 Seeks Governor's Approval

2025-09-25

California's CCPA grants consumers data privacy rights, but exercising them is difficult. A.B. 566 simplifies this by requiring browsers to offer users an easy way to tell companies not to sell or share their data. This makes CCPA more user-friendly, empowering consumers and balancing the power dynamic. Despite industry opposition, the bill is seen as pro-consumer and non-restrictive to innovation.

(www.eff.org)

Tech A.B. 566

Random Mosaic: Securing Hardware with Beans, Lentils, and Rice

2025-09-25

This paper introduces Random Mosaic, a novel physical security method. Traditional tamper-evident techniques are easily bypassed. The authors explore threats like supply chain attacks and Evil Maid attacks, analyzing existing methods (tamper-evident seals, glitter nail polish). They propose a new approach using colored beans, rice, etc., to create a unique, easily-verifiable mosaic pattern that detects unauthorized access. This simple, inexpensive method, combined with vacuum sealing, is suitable for short-term and long-term storage and shipping. The paper also introduces the Blink Comparison app for image comparison.

(dys2p.com)

Tech physical security tamper evidence

Strange Traffic on IXPs: An Admin's Observations

2025-09-25

The author, operating one of the largest IXP networks on the internet, uses bgp.tools to monitor and reveal a surprising amount of unexpected traffic on IXPs. This includes various routing protocols (OSPF, IS-IS, RIP), auto-addressing protocols (DHCP, IPv6 RA), and vendor-specific protocols (LLDP, CDP, MNDP), all posing security risks like information disclosure and traffic hijacking, even causing outages. The author also highlights bizarre traffic like home networking protocols (UPnP), printer discovery protocols (MDNS), and erroneous broadcast DNS queries stemming from misconfigurations. The author calls for increased traffic monitoring and access controls on IXPs to enhance network security.

(blog.benjojo.co.uk)

Tech traffic monitoring

GoAnywhere MFT Vulnerability CVE-2025-10035: A CVSS 10.0 Mystery

2025-09-25

watchTowr Labs dissected CVE-2025-10035, a critical vulnerability in Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT with a perfect CVSS score of 10.0. This deserialization vulnerability allows an attacker with a forged license response signature to deserialize arbitrary objects, potentially leading to command injection. While exploitation requires internet exposure, watchTowr Labs discovered an unauthenticated method to obtain a license request token, bypassing authentication. However, a signature verification hurdle remains. The analysis details the exploitation process, raising questions about potential undiscovered signature bypasses or leaked private keys. A detection tool is provided to help users identify vulnerable instances.

(labs.watchtowr.com)

Tech deserialization

Microsoft's Mandatory RTO: A Management Fail?

2025-09-25

Microsoft's announcement of a mandatory return-to-office (RTO) policy for employees within 50 miles of its Redmond headquarters, starting February 2026, has sparked controversy. While the company denies it's a cost-cutting measure, many see it as a symptom of poor management, ignoring the success of remote work and employee well-being. The article criticizes the motivations behind the decision, suggesting it stems from distrust, misconceptions about remote work efficiency, and a desire for control. Mandatory RTO imposes additional burdens on employees (commute, childcare, etc.), negatively impacts mental health, and could lead to the loss of valuable employees.

(wordsrightman.beehiiv.com)

Tech

Pocket Casts' Ad Bug Angers Lifetime Subscribers

2025-09-25

Podcast app Pocket Casts is facing backlash after showing ads to legacy users who paid for ad-free lifetime access. Originally a one-time purchase app (2010), it switched to a subscription model in 2019. While Automattic, the parent company, promised ad-free access to early payers under the 'Pocket Casts Champion' program, some users are now seeing ads. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg attributed this to a bug and stated that all paid users shouldn't see ads. The incident highlights challenges in maintaining 'lifetime' promises during business model shifts. Only a few thousand users are affected.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech advertising controversy lifetime subscriptions

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite: A Legendary Leap for Windows on Arm?

2025-09-25

Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, its second-generation Windows on Arm chips, boasting significant performance gains. Built on a 3nm process, they promise up to a 31% CPU performance boost and a 2.3x GPU performance-per-watt improvement over the previous generation. The X2 Elite Extreme even claims a 75% faster CPU performance than competitors at the same power level. Featuring an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, these chips target improved AI capabilities. While promising multi-day battery life, laptops using these chips aren't expected until the first half of 2026. The announcement also hinted at potential implications for Google's Android on PC project.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech

Microsoft Extends Windows 10 Security Updates: Free and Paid Options Available

2025-09-25

Facing criticism and user concerns, Microsoft announced new options for US and European users to extend Windows 10 security updates for free, just days before ending support on October 14th. US users can choose a free option involving profile backup for a year of updates, or pay $30 or redeem 1000 Microsoft Rewards points. European users can get a free year of updates by logging in with a Microsoft account. This follows pressure from European advocacy groups and widespread worries about upgrading to Windows 11.

(www.straitstimes.com)

Tech

Tech Giants Embrace AI, Leading to Job Cuts: Efficiency Gains or Unemployment Crisis?

2025-09-25

Tech giants like SAP, Amazon, and Salesforce are aggressively adopting AI to boost efficiency and reduce costs. However, this trend is resulting in significant job cuts. SAP's CFO anticipates fewer engineers will be needed due to automation; the CEO estimates that 60-70% of jobs could be digitized. Amazon's CEO also stated that AI will lead to a reduction in the company's overall workforce. While some new roles are emerging, low-wage workers are expected to be disproportionately affected. Is this AI-driven efficiency gain paving the way for a larger unemployment crisis?

(fortune.com)

Tech

EU Eyes Cookie Consent Overhaul: The End of Annoying Pop-ups?

2025-09-25

The 2009 e-Privacy Directive requiring websites to obtain user consent for cookies has led to a deluge of consent banners, prompting user fatigue. The EU Commission plans a December “omnibus” regulation simplifying digital company oversight, potentially easing cookie rules. This might include allowing one-time cookie preference settings or exempting cookies for technically necessary functions and simple statistics. Denmark has proposed similar changes. However, the upcoming Digital Fairness Act focusing on advertising suggests further battles over cookie regulation are on the horizon.

(www.politico.eu)

Tech

VMware Lock-in: School Districts Face IT Nightmare

2025-09-25

An Indiana school district's migration away from VMware has resulted in severe compatibility issues. Their Dell hardware, purchased in 2019 with a purported 10-year lifespan, is now unsupported without VMware. This $250,000 investment is now forcing the district to use unsupported hardware, causing project delays and necessitating a complete IT infrastructure re-planning for the next three to four years. An Idaho school district, using VMware since 2008, faces similar challenges with high upgrade costs. This highlights the problematic aspects of large tech companies' bundling software and hardware, impacting organizations like educational institutions with limited budgets.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech

Jupiter's Gravitational Dance: Unveiling the Kirkwood Gaps

2025-09-25

The asteroid belt, a vast ring of rocks and dust between Mars and Jupiter, harbors curious empty spaces known as Kirkwood gaps. These aren't completely devoid of asteroids, but their populations are significantly sparser than surrounding regions. The culprit? Jupiter's immense gravity. Jupiter's gravitational pull creates orbital resonances with asteroids, leading to periodic disturbances that gradually alter their orbits. Over time, these asteroids are essentially 'kicked out' of specific resonant orbits, creating the gaps. The discovery of Kirkwood gaps provides valuable insight into how planetary gravity shapes the structure of the asteroid belt.

(kids.kiddle.co)

Tech Kirkwood Gaps Asteroid Belt Jupiter's Gravity

The H-1B Lottery Reform: A Wage Level Mirage

2025-09-25

The Department of Homeland Security proposed replacing the H-1B lottery with a weighted system based on Department of Labor (DOL) Wage Levels. However, research reveals this system doesn't prioritize high-skill or high-pay workers. Instead, it favors large outsourcing firms, reduces visas for US-educated graduates, and only marginally increases H-1B holder salaries. Analysis of FOIA data shows a compensation-based system would be far more effective at attracting high-skilled talent and significantly raising average H-1B salaries.

(ifp.org)

Tech

Tech's Shifting Sands: AI Hype, RTO Mandates, and Layoff Anxiety

2025-09-25

The tech industry is undergoing a significant shift. The optimism of previous years has given way to anxiety fueled by AI hype, return-to-office mandates, and widespread layoffs. Managers are quicker to let people go, and the once-reliable job security for developers has vanished. The author points to AI tools creating both efficiency gains and job insecurity, return-to-office mandates eroding trust and imposing rigid schedules, and mass layoffs shattering the previously stable job market. The advice offered is for managers to publicly support company policies while privately acknowledging and addressing employee concerns, finding small ways to improve the work environment, and maintaining team morale amidst the uncertainty.

(chaoticgood.management)

Tech

Unlocking Microbial Dark Matter: New Antibiotics Discovered in Soil

2025-09-25

Researchers at Rockefeller University have developed a novel method to access the genetic potential of unculturable bacteria residing in soil. By extracting large DNA fragments directly from soil, they bypassed the need for lab cultivation and sequenced hundreds of previously unseen bacterial genomes. This yielded two promising new antibiotic leads, one of which, erutacidin, effectively targets drug-resistant bacteria. This scalable approach opens a new era of drug discovery and provides insights into the vast, unexplored microbial world shaping our environment.

(www.rockefeller.edu)

Tech metagenomics

Apache SedonaDB: A Single-Node Spatial Database Engine Launches

2025-09-25

The Apache Sedona community announces SedonaDB, a new open-source, single-node analytical database engine built in Rust that treats spatial data as first-class citizens. Blazing fast and easy to install, SedonaDB offers Python and SQL interfaces and seamlessly integrates with tools like GeoArrow, GeoParquet, and GeoPandas. Leveraging Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion, it provides a modern, vectorized query engine and optimizes spatial operations with spatial indexing and data pruning. Ideal for small-to-medium spatial data analytics, SedonaDB complements the existing Sedona ecosystem by offering a simple, high-performance alternative to distributed systems for local processing.

(sedona.apache.org)

Tech Spatial Database

T-Carrier: The Forgotten Backbone of Early Internet

2025-09-25

This article delves into the history of T-carrier technology, a digital carrier system that played a crucial role in the evolution of telecommunications and the early internet. Known for its reliability and low latency, T1 lines, a common type of T-carrier, were a prevalent choice for commercial internet access, particularly in online gaming, despite their relatively low bandwidth compared to later technologies like DSL. The article explains the technical details of T-carrier, its relationship to ISDN and SONET, and its eventual decline, highlighting its lasting impact on modern networking.

(computer.rip)

Tech T-carrier

LeoLabs: Your Gateway to Low Earth Orbit Data

2025-09-25

LeoLabs provides a comprehensive platform for accessing and analyzing data on low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Their services range from real-time tracking and monitoring to collision avoidance predictions and advanced orbit analytics. Users can access a vast catalog of satellite data, conduct conjunction assessments, and leverage APIs and tools for in-depth analysis. This platform is invaluable for spacecraft operators, research institutions, and government agencies.

(platform.leolabs.space)

Tech orbit analysis collision avoidance

Smartphone Turns into Pocket Spectrometer with a Simple Card

2025-09-24

Purdue University researchers have devised a clever method to transform a regular smartphone into a high-precision spectrometer using a simple card with a special color reference chart. The technique uses an algorithm to analyze smartphone photos, extracting hidden spectral information with an accuracy of 1.6 nanometers. This breakthrough promises wide applications in defense, medicine, food safety, and more, making spectroscopy more affordable and accessible.

(spectrum.ieee.org)

Tech spectral analysis

Microsoft's Copilot: Integrating AI into Edge, Leading the AI Browser Wars

2025-09-24

Microsoft is aggressively integrating its AI assistant, Copilot, into its Edge browser, enabling it to directly control browser tabs and automate tasks like restaurant reservations and price comparisons. Instead of building a new AI browser, Microsoft is enhancing its existing browser with AI capabilities for a more seamless experience. Copilot will perform tasks in real-time with transparency, ensuring user control. This move aims to compete with rivals like Google's Gemini and Perplexity's Comet, with Microsoft claiming a leading position in the AI browser race.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech Edge browser

Arm's Neural Super Sampling (NSS): Real-time AI Upscaling for Mobile

2025-09-24

Arm introduces Neural Super Sampling (NSS), a next-generation AI-powered upscaling solution replacing traditional heuristic-based Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA). NSS leverages a trained neural network to learn from image data, adapting to various scenes and content, effectively addressing ghosting and instability issues common in older methods. Trained using recurrent learning and a spatiotemporal loss function, optimized with PyTorch and Slang, NSS boasts a four-level UNet architecture. Its output parameters drive post-processing for efficient real-time upscaling. Performance tests show NSS outperforming existing technologies in image quality and speed, promising real-time performance on mobile hardware.

(semiengineering.com)

Tech Mobile

US Airlines Push for Deregulation, Threatening Passenger Rights

2025-09-24

Major US airlines, including American, Delta, Southwest, and United, are pushing for deregulation, claiming it will lower costs and boost competition. However, this move risks significantly eroding passenger rights and increasing hidden fees. Key protections at stake include automatic refunds for cancellations, transparent pricing, and guaranteed family seating. While airlines argue deregulation will lower fares, the likely outcome is more fees, less accountability for service failures, and a diminished sense of consumer protection. This could lead to a more expensive and opaque air travel experience for passengers.

(www.travelandtourworld.com)

Tech airline deregulation passenger rights hidden fees

AWS S3: How Cheap Hard Drives Power a Massively Scalable Storage System

2025-09-24

This article unveils the astounding scale and underlying technology of Amazon S3. S3 leverages inexpensive HDDs, overcoming the limitations of slow random I/O through massive parallelization, erasure coding, and clever load balancing techniques (like the 'power of two choices'). This enables millions of requests per second, ultra-high throughput, and exceptional availability. S3's data storage strategy incorporates random data placement, continuous rebalancing, and the smoothing effect of scale to avoid hot spots. Parallelization at the user, client, and server levels further boosts performance. Ultimately, S3 has evolved from a backup and image storage service to a foundational component of big data analytics and machine learning infrastructures.

(bigdata.2minutestreaming.com)

Tech

Secret Service's National Security Threat Hoax: A Tale of Lies and Propaganda

2025-09-24

The Secret Service announced they thwarted a major national security threat, a claim echoed by major news outlets without critical examination. However, the reality is far less dramatic. The alleged threat was a typical criminal enterprise: a SIM farm using thousands of SIM cards to send spam and international calls. The Secret Service, investigating threats sent to politicians via SMS, traced the messages back to this farm. They then dramatically exaggerated the situation, portraying it as an unprecedented national security threat capable of crippling cell towers. An anonymous hacker exposes this as a common criminal activity, achievable by anyone with technical skills. The New York Times, citing so-called experts, further propagated this narrative, revealing government propaganda at play. The article exposes the false narrative crafted by media and government agencies, explaining the functioning of SIM farms and their negligible actual threat to national security.

(cybersect.substack.com)

Tech government propaganda

Secret DHS DNA Collection Program Exposed: A Surveillance State in the Making?

2025-09-24

A secret DNA collection program run by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) since 2020 has been exposed, raising serious privacy concerns. Leveraging legal loopholes and technological advancements, CBP has amassed a vast database of DNA from immigrants, travelers, and even US citizens, feeding the data into the national CODIS system. This program lacks transparency and legal safeguards, with even children's DNA being collected and potentially used in future criminal investigations. Oversight bodies and lawmakers have voiced strong opposition, highlighting the program's transformation into a sweeping genetic surveillance regime. Lawsuits are underway to compel CBP to release more information.

(www.wired.com)

Tech genetic surveillance

Category: Tech