The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have urged the US Copyright Office to broaden exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Section 1201. Specifically, the two agencies are advocating for the extension of the right to repair to include "commercial and industrial equipment," which includes McDonald's ice cream machines that are notorious for breaking down. The Verge reports: Exemptions to DMCA Section 1201 are issued every three years, as per the Register of Copyrights' recommendation. Prior exemptions have been issued for jailbreaking cellphones and repairing certain parts of video game consoles. The FTC and DOJ are asking the Copyright Office to go a step further, extending the right to repair to "commercial and industrial equipment." The comment (PDF) singles out four distinct categories that would benefit from DMCA exemptions: commercial soft serve machines; proprietary diagnostic kits; programmable logic controllers; and enterprise IT. 'In the Agencies' view, renewing and expanding repair-related exemptions would promote competition in markets for replacement parts, repair, and maintenance services, as well as facilitate competition in markets for repairable products," the comment reads.

The inability to do third-party repairs on these products not only limits competition, the agencies say, but also makes repairs more costly and can lead to hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost sales. Certain logic controllers have to be discarded and replaced if they break or if the passwords for them get lost. The average estimated cost of "unplanned manufacturing downtime" was $260,000 per hour, the comment notes, citing research from Public Knowledge and iFixit. As for soft serve machines, breakdowns can lead to $625 in lost sales each day. Business owners can't legally fix them on their own or hire an independent technician to do so, meaning they have to wait around for an authorized technician -- which, the comment says, usually takes around 90 days.

Two of the biggest manufacturers of locks used in commercial safes have been accused of essentially putting backdoors in at least some of their products in a new letter by Senator Ron Wyden. 404 Media: Wyden is urging the U.S. government to explicitly warn the public about the vulnerabilities, which Wyden says could be exploited by foreign adversaries to steal what U.S. businesses store in safes, such as trade secrets. The little known "manufacturer" or "manager" reset codes could let third parties -- such as spies or criminals -- bypass locks without the owner's consent and are sometimes not disclosed to customers. Wyden's office also found that while the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) bans such locks for sensitive and classified U.S. government use in part due to the security vulnerability reset codes pose, the government has deliberately not warned the public about the existence of these backdoors.

The specific companies named in Wyden's letter are China-based SECURAM and U.S.-based Sargent and Greenleaf (S&G). Each produces keypad locks which are then implemented into safes by other manufacturers. The full list of locks that contain backdoor codes is unknown, but documentation available online points to multiple SECURAM products which do include them, and S&G confirmed to Wyden's office that some of its own locks also have similar codes.

France Travail, the government agency responsible for assisting the unemployed, has fallen victim to a massive data breach exposing the personal information of up to 43 million French citizens dating back two decades, the department announced on Wednesday. The incident, which has been reported to the country's data protection watchdog (CNIL), is the latest in a series of high-profile cyber attacks targeting French government institutions and underscores the growing threat to citizens' private data. From a report: The department's statement reveals that names, dates of birth, social security numbers, France Travail identifiers, email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers were exposed. Passwords and banking details aren't affected, at least. That said, CNIL warned that the data stolen during this incident could be linked to stolen data in other breaches and used to build larger banks of information on any given individual. It's not clear whether the database's entire contents were stolen by attackers, but the announcement suggests that at least some of the data was extracted.

Roman Sterlingov, the founder of a $400 million crypto-mixing service called Bitcoin Fog, has been convicted of money laundering in a United State District Court on Tuesday. Other charges include money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and violations of the D.C. Money Transmitters Act. CoinTelegraph reports: Sterlingov, however, had argued throughout the trial that he was only a user of the service, and not its operator. His attorney, Tok Ekeland said in a March 12 X post that his team will appeal the verdict. According to evidence presented at the trial, Sterlingov operated Bitcoin Fog from October 2011 to April 2021, which acted as a money laundering service for "criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement."

The service moved over 1.2 million Bitcoin over the decade-long operation -- worth $400 million at the time of the transactions -- with the bulk of cryptocurrency coming from darknet marketplaces tied to narcotics, computer fraud abuse and identity theft, the government said. Bitcoin Fog also served distributors of child sexual abuse material. Evidence used to convict Sterlingov found that the "vast majority" of crypto deposited to his crypto exchange accounts came from "Bitcoin clusters" associated with Bitcoin Fog. "Evidence presented at trial clearly showed that the defendant laundered hundreds of millions of illicit funds from the dark web through Bitcoin Fog in an attempt to conceal the origin of those funds," said Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Investigation Chief Jim Lee.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Wednesday that would give TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to divest the U.S. assets of the short-video app used by about 170 million Americans or face a ban. From a report: The bill passed 352-65, with bipartisan support, but it faces a more uncertain path in the Senate where some favor a different approach to regulating foreign-owned apps that could pose security concerns. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not indicated how he plans to proceed.

TikTok's fate has become a major issue in Washington. Democratic and Republican lawmakers said their offices had received large volumes of calls from teenaged TikTok users who oppose the legislation, with the volume of complaints at times exceeding the number of calls seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

The measure is also the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to U.S. national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to advanced artificial intelligence chips to cranes at U.S. ports. The vote comes just over a week since the bill was proposed following one public hearing with little debate, and after action in Congress had stalled for more than a year. Last month, President Joe Biden's re-election campaign joined TikTok, raising hopes among TikTok officials that legislation was unlikely this year.

Two top executives from the crypto exchange Binance have been arrested in Nigeria for allegedly destabilizing the national currency. Quartz reports: According to a Wall Street Journal report, Tigran Gambaryan, head of financial-crime compliance at Binance who previously worked at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan national and Binance's regional manager for Africa, have been held against their will for the past two weeks in the country. As per reports, Nigerian government officials invited Binance executives to discuss an ongoing dispute about the world's largest crypto exchange allegedly driving down the value of their national currency. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla arrived in Nigeria on February 25th; after their meeting with government officials, both were taken to their hotels. Later, they were instructed to pack their belongings and move to a guesthouse run by Nigeria's National Security Agency, as stated by their families, per reports.

The Nigerian government has accused Binance of exacerbating the country's foreign exchange challenges through rate manipulation for profit. The authorities have also accused the crypto exchange of illegal operations and have restricted access to the company's website. There are also reports that Nigeria sought a $10 billion penalty from Binance for processing around $26 billion in untraceable funds in the country. [...] The reason why and how Nigeria's economic crisis is linked with Binance is yet to be found out. Binance is hoping to resolve the matter soon, according to CoinDesk. The report notes that Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in recent years due to inflation and the devaluation of their currency, the naira.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Arkady Volozh, the billionaire cofounder of Russia's biggest internet company, was removed from the EU sanctions list today, clearing the way for his return to the world of international tech. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the European Council confirmed to WIRED that the Yandex cofounder was among three people whose sanctions were lifted this week. Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation," the blocsaidlast year to justify its decision. "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation." In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions "misguided." [...]

The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech's most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. "These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation," Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. "They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land." Yandex is widely known as "Russia's Google" because it monopolizes the Russian search market and offers many other services, including Yandex Music for streaming, Yandex Navigator for maps, and Yandex Go for hailing a ride. "Over the past 18 months, [Dutch-based Yandex NV] has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech," reports Wired.

Last month, Yandex NV reached a "binding agreement" to sell its operations in the country for $5.2 billion -- a price that reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia.

The U.S. government must move "quickly and decisively" to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an "extinction-level threat to the human species," says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday. Time: "Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security," the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. "The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons." AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.

The three authors of the report worked on it for more than a year, speaking with more than 200 government employees, experts, and workers at frontier AI companies -- like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta -- as part of their research. Accounts from some of those conversations paint a disturbing picture, suggesting that many AI safety workers inside cutting-edge labs are concerned about perverse incentives driving decisionmaking by the executives who control their companies. The finished document, titled "An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI," recommends a set of sweeping and unprecedented policy actions that, if enacted, would radically disrupt the AI industry. Congress should make it illegal, the report recommends, to train AI models using more than a certain level of computing power.

The threshold, the report recommends, should be set by a new federal AI agency, although the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini. The new AI agency should require AI companies on the "frontier" of the industry to obtain government permission to train and deploy new models above a certain lower threshold, the report adds. Authorities should also "urgently" consider outlawing the publication of the "weights," or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says. And the government should further tighten controls on the manufacture and export of AI chips, and channel federal funding toward "alignment" research that seeks to make advanced AI safer, it recommends.

Several French government agencies were hit by "intense" cyberattacks beginning Sunday night. From a report: The attacks' impact on most services has been reduced and access to agencies' websites restored, the prime minister's office said in a statement Monday.

CNN's national security analyst interviewed a U.S. intelligence officer who worked on the newly-released Defense report debunking UFO sightings — physicist Sean Kirkpatrick. He tells CNN "about two to five percent" of UFO reports are "truly anomalous."

But CNN adds that "he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth..." This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That's because, in 1947, a U.S. military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico. A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the U.S. government had covered up the evidence.

Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret. At the same time, the U.S. military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.

Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft...

Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the U.S. military. Kirkpatrick says that's the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the U.S. government's policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.
The pattern keeps repeating. "Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the U.S. government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the U.S. or of benign civilian drones and balloons." ("What's more likely?" asked Kirkpatrick. "The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that's being commercialized down in Florida that you didn't know about, or we have extraterrestrials?")

But the greatest irony may be that "stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who'd heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft. And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people... [F]or decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there's a U.S. government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government."

A Toronto Sun columnist writes that two Canadian civil liberties groups are "sounding alarms" about the proposed new Online Harms Act (C-63): The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) say while the proposed legislation contains legitimate measures to protect children from online sexual abuse, cyber-bulling and self-harm, and to combat the spread of so-called "revenge porn," its provisions to prevent the expression of hate are draconian, vaguely worded and an attack on free speech... "[D]on't be fooled," said CCF executive director Joanna Baron. "Most of the bill is aimed at restricting freedom of expression. This heavy-handed bill needs to be severely pared down to comply with the constitution."

Both the CCLA and CCF warn the bill could lead to life imprisonment for someone convicted of "incitement to genocide" — a vague term only broadly defined in the bill — and up to five years in prison for other vaguely defined hate speech crimes. The legislation, for example, defines illegal hate speech as expressing "detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals," while legally protected speech, "expresses dislike or disdain, or ... discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends." The problem, critics warn, will be determining in advance which is which, with the inevitable result that people and organizations will self-censor themselves because of fear of being prosecuted criminally, or fined civilly, for what is actually legal speech.
"Both the CCLA and the CCF say the proposed legislation, known as Bill C-63, will require major amendments before becoming law to pass constitutional muster," according to the columnist.

Some specific complains:

• The CCF argues that the Bill "would allow judges to put prior restraints on people who they believe on reasonable grounds may commit speech crimes in the future."

• The CCLA adds that the proposed bill also grants authorities "sweeping new search powers of electronic data, with no warrant requirement," according to the Toronto Sun, and also warns about the creation of a government-appointed "digital safety commission" given "vast authority" and "sweeping powers" to "interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury, and executioner."

And in addition, the CCF points out under the proposed rules the Canadian Human Rights Commission "could order fines of up to $50,000, and awards of up to $20,000 paid to complainants, who in some cases would be anonymous."

"Findings would be based on a mere 'balance of probabilities' standard rather than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt... The mere threat of human rights complaints will chill large amounts of protected speech."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shared this story from the New York Times: Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.

While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November...

The Miami Chronicle's website first appeared on Feb. 26. Its tagline falsely claims to have delivered "the Florida News since 1937."

Amid some true reports, the site published a story last week about a "leaked audio recording" of Victoria Nuland, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in American support for Russia's beleaguered opposition after the death of the Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.
From the Raw Story: The network was discovered by Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub by researchers Patrick Warren and Darren Linvill, who tell the Times that its websites are designed to lend journalistic credibility to slickly produced propaganda. "The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they're reading a genuine, U.S.-branded article," Linvill told the Times.

America's Department of Justice "has launched a criminal investigation into the Boeing jetliner blowout that left a gaping hole on an Alaska Airlines plane," reports the Associated Press, citing a report from the Wall Street Journal.

"As part of the new investigation, the Justice Department has interviewed pilots and flight attendants on the flight..." the Journal reports. "Investigators have taken steps to begin notifying Alaska passengers on board during the Jan. 5 accident that they are potential crime victims in the case, according to a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal." The probe would inform the Justice Department's review of whether Boeing complied with an earlier settlement that resolved a federal investigation following two fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. Investigations don't always result in formal charges of wrongdoing.

Separately, investigators with the Transportation Department's Inspector General's office in recent weeks have been seeking to interview Federal Aviation Administration officials in the Seattle area who oversee Boeing's manufacturing...

If the Justice Department finds that Boeing violated the terms of the 2021 settlement, the company could face prosecution on the original count of defrauding the U.S. Alternatively, the government could seek to extend the probationary, three-year agreement that requires Boeing to update the Justice Department on its compliance improvements.
In a related development, Boeing "has acknowledged in a letter to Congress that it cannot find records for work done on the door panel of the Alaska Airlines plane," reports the Associated Press: "We have looked extensively and have not found any such documentation," Ziad Ojakli, Boeing executive vice president and chief government lobbyist, wrote to Sen. Maria Cantwell on Friday. The company said its "working hypothesis" was that the records about the panel's removal and reinstallation on the 737 MAX final assembly line in Renton, Washington, were never created, even though Boeing's systems required it.
Not having the documents "raises concerns about quality assurance, quality management safety management systems within Boeing," said the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board earlier this week.

"This is a serious, potentially illegal, lapse in standard aviation manufacturing quality processes," reports the Seattle Times.

Meanwhile, America's National Transportation Safety Board is also investigating a United Airlines Boeing 737-8 flight "that last month experienced 'stuck' rudder pedals," reports Axios, "after touching down in Newark, per a preliminary report released Thursday." The captain reported that during the landing rollout, which is after touchdown but before the plane slows to taxi speed, the pedals did not respond to foot pressure and remained stuck. "The captain used the nosewheel steering tiller to keep the airplane near the runway centerline while slowing to a safe taxi speed before exiting the runway onto a high-speed turn-off," the report states.

Shortly after, the rudder pedals began to operate normally, the captain said. There were no injures and the airplane was removed from service for maintenance and troubleshooting. An inspection found no obvious malfunctions, said the National Transportation Safety Board. After removing the rudder system components, United conducted a second flight test and found the rudder controls operated normally, per the report. "With coordination with United, the issue was successfully resolved with the replacement of three parts and the airplane returned to service last month," Boeing said in a statement, adding that this is the only report of such an issue that they've received for the 737 MAX fleet.

The investigation is ongoing.

Legislation proposed in California "aims to repeal Daylight saving time and put California permanently on Standard time," reports a San Diego news station:

In November 2018, California voters passed Prop 7, a measure that would allow the state legislature to change Daylight saving time by either keeping it year-round or getting rid of it altogether. However, this measure also requires approval by the U.S. Congress if California were to opt for year-round Daylight Saving Time. So far, nothing has materialized.

"I am really, really passionate about this bill," said State Assembly Member Tri Ta, who added it is finally time to listen to the will of the voters. He has drafted new legislation that to do away with twice-yearly time changes. However, his bill would put the Golden State onto year-round Standard time: a move that would not require federal action. Oregon and Washington state are also considering similar moves [though Oregon's bill appears stalled]. "If my bill is passed, we do not need congressional approval," Ta told CBS 8, "so that's a win-win for everyone...."

Ta said that his bill has the support of the California Medical Association, as well as sleep experts who say Standard time syncs better with our natural clocks. "So why don't we go along with science?" Ta added. "That's what I believe." One things most people seem to agree on: it's time to stop changing our clocks, which research has shown leads to higher rates of accidents as well as increased health risks.
"While this new bill continues to work its way through Sacramento, Daylight saving time is still a go here in California," the article points out, "starting 2 a.m. Sunday, when we set our clocks forward one hour."

But USA Today adds that across the rest of the country, "Most Americans — 62% — are in favor of ending the time change, according to an Economist/YouGov poll from last year."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian: The U.S. is not secretly hiding alien technology or extraterrestrial beings from the public, according to a defense department report.

On Friday, the Pentagon 'published the findings of an investigation conducted by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a government office established in 2022 to detect and, as necessary, mitigate threats including "anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects"....

AARO investigators, which were "granted full access to all pertinent sensitive [U.S. government] programs", reviewed all official government investigatory efforts since 1945. Investigators also researched classified and unclassified archives, conducted approximately 30 interviews, and collaborated with intelligence community and defense department officials responsible for controlled and special access program oversight, the report revealed.
NPR writes that "Many of the sightings turned out to be drones, weather balloons, spy planes, satellites, rockets and planets, according to the report..." "AARO has found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology," Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement Friday. All investigative efforts concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and the result of misidentification, Ryder said... The office plans to publish a second volume of the report later this year that covers findings from interviews and research done between November 2023 and April 2024."
The report finds no evidence of any confirmed alien technology, the Guardian notes: It added that sensors and visual observations are imperfect, the vast majority of cases lack actionable data and such available data is limited or of poor quality. The report also said resources and staffing for such programs have largely been irregular and sporadic and that the vast majority of reports "almost certainly" are the result of misidentification. In addition, the report found "no empirical evidence for claims that the [U.S. government] and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology"...

The report's public release comes as AARO's acting director, Timothy Phillips, told reporters on Wednesday that the US military is developing a UFO sensor and detection system called Gremlin. "If we have a national security site and there are objects being reported that [are] within restricted airspace or within a maritime range or within the proximity of one of our spaceships, we need to understand what that is ... and so that's why we're developing sensor capability that we can deploy in reaction to reports," Phillips said, CNN reports.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this article from Live Science: Manufacturers will no longer use harmful "forever chemicals" in food packaging products in the U.S., according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In a statement released February 28, the agency declared that grease-proofing materials that contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) will not be used in new food packaging sold in the U.S. These include PFAS used in fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, takeout boxes and pet food bags. The FDA's announcement marks the completion of a voluntary phase-out of the materials by U.S. food packaging manufacturers.

This action will eliminate the "major source of dietary exposure to PFAS," Jim Jones, deputy commissioner for human foods at the FDA, said in an associated statement. Companies told the FDA that it could take up to 18 months to completely exhaust the market supply of these products following their final date of sale. However, most of the affected manufacturers phased out the products faster than they initially predicted, the agency noted...

The FDA's new announcement marks a "huge win for the public," Graham Peaslee, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame who studies PFAS, told The Washington Post.

" A federal agency in charge of cybersecurity discovered it was hacked last month..." reports CNN.

Last month the U.S. Department of Homeland Security experienced a breach at its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reports the Record, "through vulnerabilities in Ivanti products, officials said..."

"The impact was limited to two systems, which we immediately took offline," the spokesperson said. We continue to upgrade and modernize our systems, and there is no operational impact at this time."

"This is a reminder that any organization can be affected by a cyber vulnerability and having an incident response plan in place is a necessary component of resilience." CISA declined to answer a range of questions about who was behind the incident, whether data had been accessed or stolen and what systems were taken offline.

Ivanti makes software that organizations use to manage IT, including security and system access. A source with knowledge of the situation told Recorded Future News that the two systems compromised were the Infrastructure Protection (IP) Gateway, which houses critical information about the interdependency of U.S. infrastructure, and the Chemical Security Assessment Tool (CSAT), which houses private sector chemical security plans. CISA declined to confirm or deny whether these are the systems that were taken offline. CSAT houses some of the country's most sensitive industrial information, including the Top Screen tool for high-risk chemical facilities, Site Security Plans and the Security Vulnerability Assessments.

CISA said organizations should review an advisory the agency released on February 29 warning that threat actors are exploiting previously identified vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure gateways including CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887 and CVE-2024-21893.
"Last week, several of the world's leading cybersecurity agencies revealed that hackers had discovered a way around a tool Ivanti released to help organizations check if they had been compromised," the article points out.

The statement last week from CISA said the agency "has conducted independent research in a lab environment validating that the Ivanti Integrity Checker Tool is not sufficient to detect compromise and that a cyber threat actor may be able to gain root-level persistence despite issuing factory resets."

UPDATE: The two systems run on older technology that was already set to be replaced, sources told CNN..." While there is some irony in it, even cybersecurity agencies or officials can be victims of hacking. After all, they rely on the same technology that others do. The US' top cybersecurity diplomat Nate Fick said last year that his personal account on social media platform X was hacked, calling it part of the "perils of the job."

Roughly $138 billion in U.S. student loan debt has now been cancelled, reports CNN. "That's about one-third of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year."

It's 9% of all outstanding federal student loan debt, according to the article, "wiping out debts for about 3.9 million borrowers — by using a number of existing programs that aim to offer debt relief for certain groups of struggling borrowers..." What President Biden has been doing — before and after the Supreme Court ruling — is using existing student loan forgiveness programs to deliver relief to certain groups of borrowers, like public-sector workers (through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program) and borrowers who were defrauded by their college (through the borrower defense to repayment program). His administration also made discharges for borrowers who are totally and permanently disabled. None of these programs expire, meaning they will help qualifying borrowers now and in the future. In some cases, Biden's administration has expanded the reach of these programs, making more borrowers eligible.

And in other cases, it has made an effort to correct past administrative errors made to borrowers' student loan accounts by conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments. This effort helps make sure people receive the loan forgiveness they may already qualify for by having made at least 20 years of payments in an income-driven plan, which calculates monthly payment amounts based on a borrower's income and family size, rather than the amount owed. The recount is expected to be completed by July...

Last year, the administration created a new income-driven repayment plan. Known as SAVE, the new plan offers the most generous terms for low-income borrowers. Those who originally borrowed $12,000 or less will see their remaining debt canceled after making payments for at least 10 years... [The administration] is working on implementing another path toward a broad student loan forgiveness program, this time relying on a different legal authority in hopes that this attempt holds up in court. This proposal is currently making its way through a lengthy rulemaking process and has yet to be finalized.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the 1960s, secret test flights of advanced government spy planes generated U.F.O. sightings. More recently, government and commercial drones, new kinds of satellites and errant weather balloons have led to a renaissance in unusual observations. But, according to a new report, none of these sightings were of alien spacecraft. The new congressionally mandated Pentagon report found no evidence that the government was covering up knowledge of extraterrestrial technology and said there was no evidence that any U.F.O. sightings represented alien visitation to Earth.

The 63-page document is the most sweeping rebuttal the Pentagon has issued in recent years to counter claims that it has information on extraterrestrial visits or technology. But amid widespread distrust of the government, the report is unlikely to calm a growing obsession with aliens. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Defense Department spokesman, said the Pentagon approached the report with an open mind and no preconceived notions, but simply found no evidence to back up claims of secret programs, hidden alien technology or anything else extraterrestrial. The new report suggests that the public's belief that the government is hiding what it knows will probably continue. The report adds: Nevertheless the public is unlikely to be swayed. Many people dismiss the government's claims that nothing interesting is going on in Pentagon videos that appear to show strange objects, citing accounts by Navy pilots that they observed objects whose movements cannot be easily explained. The new report notes that in the past, particularly in the 1950s, there was interest in U.F.O.s, but today the attention on unexplained sightings is greater than ever before. Politico adds: The Pentagon has disclosed that the government once considered a program to recover and reverse-engineer any captured alien spacecraft, an effort that never came to fruition but fueled conspiracy theories about a cover-up.

A directive known as Document 79 ramps up Beijing's effort to replace U.S. tech with homegrown alternatives. From a report: For American tech companies in China, the writing is on the wall. It's also on paper, in Document 79. The 2022 Chinese government directive expands a drive that is muscling U.S. technology out of the country -- an effort some refer to as "Delete A," for Delete America. Document 79 was so sensitive that high-ranking officials and executives were only shown the order and weren't allowed to make copies, people familiar with the matter said. It requires state-owned companies in finance, energy and other sectors to replace foreign software in their IT systems by 2027.

American tech giants had long thrived in China as they hot-wired the country's meteoric industrial rise with computers, operating systems and software. Chinese leaders want to sever that relationship, driven by a push for self-sufficiency and concerns over the country's long-term security. The first targets were hardware makers. Dell, International Business Machines and Cisco Systems have gradually seen much of their equipment replaced by products from Chinese competitors.

Document 79, named for the numbering on the paper, targets companies that provide the software -- enabling daily business operations from basic office tools to supply-chain management. The likes of Microsoft and Oracle are losing ground in the field, one of the last bastions of foreign tech profitability in the country. The effort is just one salvo in a yearslong push by Chinese leader Xi Jinping for self-sufficiency in everything from critical technology such as semiconductors and fighter jets to the production of grain and oilseeds. The broader strategy is to make China less dependent on the West for food, raw materials and energy, and instead focus on domestic supply chains.