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Submission + - Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' fraud convictions upheld (msnbc.com)

Submitted by ClickOnThis
ClickOnThis writes: Elizabeth Holmes' fraud conviction has been upheld by a federal appellate panel. From the article:

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday affirmed the convictions, sentences and nine-figure restitution ordered against both Holmes and Theranos president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.

[...] Theranos was supposedly going to revolutionize medical laboratory testing with the ability to run fast, accurate and affordable tests with just a drop of blood from a finger prick. “But the vision sold by Holmes and Balwani was nothing more than a mirage,” 9th Circuit Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen wrote for the panel, adding that the “grandiose achievements touted by Holmes and Balwani were half-truths and outright lies.”

Submission + - Idle power lines can cause fires (mercurynews.com)

Submitted by larryjoe
larryjoe writes: In a story about how wildfires in California can be caused, a "line idle for decades has been accused of starting the LA area’s deadly Eaton Fire.

"Sometimes the utilities that own idled lines disconnect them from the power grid, cutting off the flow of electricity through the cables. Other times, they don’t, keeping them energized. California regulations require the companies to remove power lines they don’t anticipate using again, but there’s no set deadline. The companies can keep idled lines in place if they foresee needing them in the future, so long as they’re regularly inspected and maintained.

"Even those that have been unplugged from the grid can potentially pose a danger.

"The line under scrutiny due to the Eaton Fire is owned by Edison International’s Southern California utility and was retired in 1971. Under normal circumstances, it carries no electricity, according to the company. Lawyers suing Edison allege that a Jan. 7 power surge on a nearby, active line created a magnetic field that briefly re-energized the dormant cable, setting off the sparks that ignited the blaze. Edison said in a state filing that it is investigating that theory. State investigators have yet to announce a cause for the fire."

Separately, "[in 2021], the utilities commission fined owner PG&E Corp. $40 million for not removing the line [that caused the Kincade Fire that scorched 77,700 acres], among other violations. PG&E, the state’s largest utility, agreed to remove 72 permanently abandoned transmission lines — representing about 260 miles (418 kilometers) of dormant cables. The work could cost as much as $268 million spread over 10 years, the company estimated at the time. PG&E had removed 64 of the idled lines by the end of 2024, according to a spokesman."

At a cost of about $1 million to remove one mile of idle line, the cost is significant and challenging.

Submission + - Blue Ghost instrument proves Earth-orbiting GPS works on the moon (behindtheblack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Having now reached lunar orbit in preparation for its landing on March 2, 2025, an engineering test instrument on Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander has now proven that even from that distance spacecraft can use the multiple GPS-type satellites in Earth orbit to track their position.

The Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) acquired and tracked Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals for the first time in lunar orbit – a new record! This achievement, peaking at 246,000 miles, suggests that Earth-based GNSS constellations can be used for navigation in transit to, around, and potentially on the Moon. It also demonstrates the power of using multiple GNSS constellations together, such as GPS and Galileo, to perform navigation. After lunar landing, LuGRE will operate for 14 days and attempt to break another record – first reception of GNSS signals on the lunar surface.

This test is a very big deal. It tells us that operations on the Moon, at least those on the near side, will likely not require a GPS-type infrastructure in lunar orbit, thus allowing a lot of difficult missions to proceed sooner while saving a lot of money and time.

Submission + - Kimbal Musk Nonprofit Took $1.6M in PPP Money, Then Fired Unionizing Employees

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With reports of "millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits turning out to be more of a Know-Thy-Data problem, one wonders if Elon Musk's DOGE team might turn its attention to the fraught-with-fraud $800 billion Federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). If so, he may be getting some of that nonstop scrutiny he says he expects, here in connection with $1.6+ million in since-forgiven PPP loans made to his brother Kimbal Musk's Big Green nonprofit during COVID in 2020-2021, a period that saw Elon ascend to the title of World's Richest Person. SBA records show and Big Green's audited financial statements confirm the nonprofit had one loan approved on 4/9/2020 for $783,500 (apparently with its CFO's home address given for 'Borrower Address') and a second on 2/24/2021 for $852,334; the loans were respectively forgiven on 5/4/2021 and 11/20/2021.

A 2019 Musk Foundation IRS 990 filing that reported $207M in year-end assets and listed Elon Musk as President also disclosed a $250,000 grant to brother Kimbal's Big Green nonprofit. An earlier 2017 Musk Foundation 990 filing reported Kimbal was its Secretary & Treasurer during a year that also saw the Musk Foundation transfer $37+ million to a donation-anonymizing donor-advised fund and give $10 million to YC.org — a nonprofit led by then-Y Combinator President and now-OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — which The Guardian suggested acted as a holding area for OpenAI while it got its tax-free nonprofit status ducks in a row. YC.org later sent $10M to OpenAI in 2016 and another $16M in 2019, years in which Musk and Altman were OpenAI Directors.

The 'Paycheck Protection' provided by the forgiven loans proved to be short-lived for some Big Green employees. Last September, The Colorado Sun and others reported that Big Green agreed to pay $449,999 in back pay, benefits and wages as part of an unfair-termination settlement to 10 workers who were fired on Sept. 13, 2021 — prior to the 2nd PPP loan being forgiven — after demanding recognition for their union (which is coincidentally a pet peeve of Elon's).

Submission + - Elon Musk claims of SSN fraud shows his ignorance of data (usatoday.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed top Path of Exile player, has tweeted his claims of fraud with the Social Security Administration records. Among his claims "cursory examination of Social Security showed people in there that are about 150 years old" and "just learned that the social security database is not de-duplicated, meaning you can have the same SSN many times over". His first claim is regarding the fact that there are 18.9M individuals in the database who were born before 1920 but not marked as dead. These are "vampires" according to Musk who are receiving benefits. The actual explanation is that the SSA has never received proof of death to flag these individual as dead. Especially who died before the digital age, these individuals' death records may not exist. Being marked as alive in the database; however, does not mean that these individuals are receiving benefits.

An audit in 2015 found that exactly 266 individuals over the age of 112 were receiving benefits. Of those 253 were found to be not actually over 112 with only 13 individuals recorded with the correct age. Social Security benefits however terminate at age 115.

As for his second claim of duplicate SSNs, without further context, it is difficult to assert that duplicate SSNs in a database is even a problem. For some types of data like contribution and payment records, duplicate SSNs is normal as one should expect multiple records can exist for one unique SSN.

Submission + - How China Pinned University Cyberattacks on NSA Hackers (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Chinese government agencies and cybersecurity experts have attributed a series of cyberattacks on Northwestern Polytechnical University to the NSA. Evidence such as purchased IP addresses, incident timelines, American English keyboard inputs, and even specific operational mistakes led Chinese authorities, including the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, to link these breaches to the NSA, accusing it of orchestrating tens of thousands of attacks.

Detailed reports reveal that the operation involved over 40 malware strains—many similar to those exposed by the Shadow Brokers leak—and tactics like zero-day exploits, numerous jump servers, and manual “hands-on-keyboard” actions. Despite these claims and the technical evidence provided, independent verification of the attribution remains pending.

Submission + - Musk to "fix" Community Notes for contradicting Trump (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: The man who espouses "free speech" has announced he will be "fixing" Community Notes on Twitter because they repeatedly contradict what Trump says. He claims a cabal of governments and media are using Notes to game the system.

Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."

Yaccarino invited audience members to "think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time," but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.

Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a "neon sore thumb."

Submission + - Meta Claims Torrenting Pirated Books Isn't Illegal Without Proof of Seeding (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Just because Meta admitted to torrenting a dataset of pirated books for AI training purposes, that doesn't necessarily mean that Meta seeded the file after downloading it, the social media company claimed in a court filing this week. Evidence instead shows that Meta "took precautions not to 'seed' any downloaded files," Meta's filing said. Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there's allegedly no proof of such "seeding," Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process.

[...] Meta ... is hoping to convince the court that torrenting is not in and of itself illegal, but is, rather, a "widely-used protocol to download large files." According to Meta, the decision to download the pirated books dataset from pirate libraries like LibGen and Z-Library was simply a move to access "data from a 'well-known online repository' that was publicly available via torrents." To defend its torrenting, Meta has basically scrubbed the word "pirate" from the characterization of its activity. The company alleges that authors can't claim that Meta gained unauthorized access to their data under CDAFA. Instead, all they can claim is that "Meta allegedly accessed and downloaded datasets that Plaintiffs did not create, containing the text of published books that anyone can read in a public library, from public websites Plaintiffs do not operate or own."

While Meta may claim there's no evidence of seeding, there is some testimony that might be compelling to the court. Previously, a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, had testified (PDF) that Meta allegedly modified torrenting settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," which seems to support authors' claims that some seeding occurred. And an internal message (PDF) from Meta researcher Frank Zhang appeared to show that Meta allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers. Once this information came to light, authors asked the court for a chance to depose Meta executives again, alleging that new facts "contradict prior deposition testimony."

Submission + - Spectral menace infects critical infrastructure (theregister.com)

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: “The operators of Ghost ransomware continue to claim victims and score payments, but keeping the crooks at bay is possible by patching known vulnerabilities and some basic infosec actions, according to a joint advisory issued Wednesday by the FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”

“The Feds warned orgs to beware of this spectral menace, which is known to have infected critical infrastructure and entities in every sector of a typical economy, and which has been observed scoring ransoms as recently as January. It is said to have racked up victims in more than 70 countries, including some in its China homeland.”

Submission + - Multiple credential coercion vulnerabilities in Ivanti Endpoint Manager

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ivanti Endpoint Manager – Multiple Credential Coercion Vulnerabilities

Back in October of 2024, we were investigating one of the many Ivanti vulnerabilities and found ourselves without a patch to “patch diff” with – leading us to audit the code base at mach speed. This led to the discovery of four critical vulnerabilities in Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM). These vulnerabilities were patched last month in Ivanti’s January patch rollup.

The vulnerabilities discovered allow an unauthenticated attacker to coerce the Ivanti EPM machine account credential to be used in relay attacks, potentially allowing for server compromise.

Submission + - Vulnerabilities in every single LTE/5G implementation tested (cellularsecurity.org)

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: We discover 119 vulnerabilities in LTE/5G core infrastructure, each of which can result in persistent denial of cell service to an entire metropolitan area or city and some of which can be used to remotely compromise and access the cellular core.

Our research covers seven LTE implementations (Open5GS, Magma, OpenAirInterface, Athonet, SD-Core, NextEPC, srsRAN) and three 5G implementations (Open5GS, Magma, OpenAirInterface); we find vulnerabilities in every single LTE/5G implementation tested.

Submission + - Russia targets Signal Messenger (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russia-backed hacking groups have developed techniques to compromise encrypted messaging services, including Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram, placing journalists, politicians and activists of interest to the Russian intelligence service at potential risk ..

.. Google threat analysts report that Russia-linked threat actors have developed malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will give the threat actor real-time access to the victim’s messages without having to compromise the victim’s phone or computer ...

Submission + - Scented Products Cause Indoor Air Pollution On Par With Car Exhaust (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New research by Purdue University, the latest in a series of Purdue-led studies, examined how scented products – in this case, flame-free candles – are a significant source of nanosized particles small enough to get deep into your lungs, posing a potential risk to respiratory health [...] Scented wax melts are marketed as a flameless, smoke-free, non-toxic alternative to traditional candles, a safer way of making your home or office smell nice. To assess the truth of these claims, the researchers comprehensively measured the nanoparticles formed when they warmed wax melts in their mechanically ventilated test house. The tiny house is actually an architectural engineering laboratory called the Purdue Zero Energy Design Guidance for Engineers (zEDGE) lab. Designed and engineered to test the energy efficiency of a larger building, it’s full of sensors that monitor the impact of everyday activities on indoor air quality.

The researchers knew from their previous research that new nanoparticle formation was initiated by terpenes – aromatic compounds that determine the smell of things like plants and herbs – released from the melts and reacting with indoor atmospheric ozone (O3). They’d found that activities such as mopping the floor with a terpene-rich cleaning agent, using a citrus-scented air freshener, or applying scented personal care products like deodorant inside the zEDGE house resulted in pulsed terpene emissions to the indoor air within five minutes. Conversely, using essential oil diffusers or peeling citrus fruits caused a more gradual increase in terpenes.

In the present study, heating the scented wax contributed significantly to the number of new particles formed in the indoor air, particularly those smaller than 100 nanometers (nm). The resulting atmospheric concentrations were over one million nanoparticles per cubic centimeter (106 cm-3), which is comparable to concentrations emitted by traditional lighted candles (106 cm-3), gas stoves (105 – 107 cm-3), diesel engines (103 – 106 cm-3), and natural gas engines (106 – 107 cm-3). By comparison, there were no significant terpene emissions when unscented wax melts were heated. The researchers also examined respiratory tract deposited dose rates (RD), a useful way of studying air pollution that measures the number of particles deposited in the respiratory tract over time. They found that the new particle formation triggered by using scented wax melts indoors produced a median RD for 1.18 to 100 nm particles of 29 billion per minute (2.9 x 1010 min-1). That’s about 483 million particles per second. The majority of scented-wax-melt-formed particles were deposited in the upper airways. Their small size means they can migrate between cells and enter the bloodstream, potentially reaching organs such as the brain.

Submission + - Musk's Reports of Social Security Payments to the Dead Are Greatly Exaggerated 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: While Doge.gov still vows to get to the bottom of an Elon Musk tweet claiming that "there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," the AP and others are reporting that Musk's reports of social security payments being made to dead people are greatly exaggerated.

"The Trump administration is falsely claiming that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments," reports the AP. "It is true that improper payments have been made, including some to dead people. But the numbers thrown out by Musk and the White House are overstated and misrepresent Social Security data. [...] A series of reports from the Social Security Administration’s inspector general in March 2023 and July 2024 state that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits. The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9 million."

"Know Thy Data," AnnMaria De Mars wrote in a 2016 blog post, "[is] the most important commandment in statistics. [...] It is crucial to understand how your data are coded before you go making stupid statements like the average mother is 3 months old." While it was offered for the likes of her epidemiology students, De Mars' advice would also be well-heeded by the richest person in the world as plays data scientist with the nation's data.

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