- An iceberg once bigger than Delaware dumped nearly 1 trillion tons of water in the ocean Yahoo News
- A Gargantuan Iceberg Dumps 152 Billion Tons of Freshwater As it Melts Interesting Engineering
- The drifting giant A68 iceberg released billions of tons of fresh water in South Georgia ecosystem MercoPress
- Huge iceberg 3.5 times larger than London is melting, releasing billions of tonnes of fresh water into ocean Yahoo News UK
- Four tourist hotspots could be SUBMERGED as ‘mega-iceberg’ releases 152 bn tonnes of water Daily Express
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Anti-Vaxxers Spread Lies Online About Betty White’s Death
Anti-vaccine activists have spent the past few days spreading lies about Betty White, the beloved actress who passed away at 99 years old on Dec. 31. But contrary to internet rumors, Betty White didn’t die after getting a covid-19 booster shot.
“Betty died peacefully in her sleep at her home. People are saying her death was related to getting a booster shot three days earlier but that is not true,” White’s agent, Jeff Witjas, told Yahoo Entertainment.
“She died of natural causes. Her death should not be politicized—that is not the life she lived,” Witjas continued.
And while Witjas confirmed White died of natural causes, he did not comment to the Associated Press on whether White had ever gotten a booster shot. Either way, the covid-19 vaccines have been shown to be both safe and effective.
Anti-vaccine scumbags started the conspiracy theories almost immediately after she died, claiming White got a covid-19 booster shot on Dec. 28, just a few days before her death. Screenshots circulating on Facebook include a link to something called “Crow River Media,” where the claim appears, but there’s no evidence the original article included the claim about a booster.
The Facebook claim included a fake quote from White that reads, “Eat healthy and get all your vaccines. I just got boosted today.”
Covid-19 vaccine booster shots do seem to be making a big difference in whether people who contract the disease become seriously ill from the newly emerged omicron variant. People who received a Moderna booster, for example, saw a 37-fold increase in neutralizing antibody levels.
The U.S. reported a record number of new infections on Monday, with over a million cases seen for the first time in history. The U.S. saw 1,045,968 cases to be precise, a number that’s likely artificially high due to a backlog of cases piled up over the New Year holiday.
The seven-day average for new cases, an arguably more accurate way to track infections is currently at 494,660—still an astonishingly high number. The country also reported 1,343 new deaths from the disease on Monday.
LiveJournal, Grooveshark, and 12 More of the Best Internet Relics We Left Behind
Figuring out the age of the Internet is like figuring out the age of the universe: We could date it back to the 1960s and ARPANET, or the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol in 1983, or the launch of America Online in 1985, or the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, or maybe the creation of the Netscape browser in 1994.
However you date the inception of the Internet, two things are inarguably true: The technology has changed modern life in fundamental ways, and the modern Internet is absolutely rotten with abandonware. Not only is it chock-a-block with dead links and missing data, but many of the tools that we once used enthusiastically are either completely dead or exist today as ghostly, barely-functioning time capsules. Heck, Google alone has killed dozens of tools that it launched with great fanfare and then almost immediately abandoned.
Sometimes this is due to changing technologies—there were dozens of search engines prior to Google’s total domination of the space, after all—and sometimes it’s due to good old-fashioned capitalist competition. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of old Internet relics we left behind, and folks of a certain age might be forgiven for having a lingering affection for them. Or a lingering morbid curiosity, because sometimes there’s a definite WTF element to the old tools we used to rely on. Here are some of the Internet relics we left behind as we rocket relentlessly into the future.
Assange lawyer urges British court to review Yahoo News story on CIA plans targeting WikiLeaks founder
Accusing the CIA of having an “obsession for vengeance” against Julian Assange, a lawyer for the WikiLeaks founder urged a British court on Thursday to conduct an independent investigation into the agency’s aggressive measures targeting his client, including an aborted 2017 plot to abduct him from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London that was detailed in a recent report by Yahoo News.
“This is a case of credible evidence of U.S. government plans developed at some length to do serious harm to Mr. Assange,” said Mark Summers, a lawyer for Assange. He spoke on the second day of a two-day hearing before a British appeals court on whether the WikiLeaks founder should be extradited to the United States to face trial for publishing classified documents in violation of the World War I-era Espionage Act.
U.S. government officials have consistently declined to comment on the recent Yahoo News story detailing a CIA plan to abduct Assange — as well as internal discussions within the Trump administration and the agency about the feasibility of assassinating him — after WikiLeaks published documents describing the spy agency’s highly sensitive “Vault 7” documents on how it conducts offensive cyber operations against U.S. adversaries.
But Summers, after reading at length from the Yahoo News story, noted that then-CIA Director and future Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who pushed the agency to develop the plans targeting Assange — has publicly said that “pieces of it are true.” (Pompeo, in a recent podcast interview, also said that more than 30 former U.S. officials who spoke to Yahoo News should be criminally prosecuted for disclosing classified information.)
Summers added that “there is going to have to be some assessment” of the reports about the CIA’s conduct as well as apparently related evidence developed by a Spanish judicial investigation into a security company that allegedly helped the CIA spy on Assange. He argued that the Yahoo News story and the Spanish probe buttress allegations that the CIA “plotted assassination, kidnapping and poisoning” of Assange.
It remains unclear whether the British court will ask Biden administration officials to address the reports of the CIA’s conduct, almost all of which took place during the early years of Donald Trump’s presidency, when Pompeo served as the agency’s director. And James Lewis, the British barrister representing the U.S. government in the case, did not address any of the assertions about the CIA made by Summers.
One of the three British judges said it would not be surprising if, given Assange’s history, the CIA was “intensely interested” in him. But that prompted Summers to respond that the CIA’s conduct went well beyond maintaining an interest in the WikiLeaks founder. Pointing to the Yahoo News account, Summers said: “I invite my lords to read it in due course to get a proper understanding of what lengths the CIA has been prepared to go to in relation to Mr. Assange.”
Technically, the issue before the court is a ruling earlier this year by a lower-court judge, Vanessa Baraitser, denying the U.S. request to extradite Assange on the grounds that sending him to the United States to face trial would put him at serious risk of suicide. Although Assange was indicted by the Justice Department under Trump, the Biden administration — despite criticism from some civil liberties and press freedom groups — has continued the case and appealed Baraitser’s denial to the British High Court.
On Wednesday, during the first day of the High Court hearing, another of Assange’s lawyers argued that the risk of suicide is real given that Assange suffers from an Asperger’s-like mental disorder and would likely be held under harsh prison conditions in the United States that would include solitary confinement.
But Lewis, the lawyer for the U.S. government, argued that that risk has been seriously reduced in light of recent assurances provided by U.S. officials, including an affidavit by the chief U.S. prosecutor in the case, Gordon Kromberg, that Assange will not be subjected to some of those harsh conditions, known as “special administrative measures” (or SAMs), nor will he be sentenced, if convicted, to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons maximum security facility in Florence, Colo. Instead, Kromberg wrote, Assange will be permitted to request a transfer that would allow him to serve out his sentence in a prison in his native Australia.
Lewis contended that these assurances undercut the basis for Baraitser’s denial of the U.S. extradition request, stressing that the U.S. assurances can be relied on by the court. “The United States has never broken a diplomatic assurance — ever,” he said.
But Summers argued that there were plenty of holes in Kromberg’s affidavits to the British court detailing those assurances. For openers, he contended that once Assange is sent to the U.S., he will be held under restrictive conditions in an Alexandria, Va., jail while awaiting trial — a period that Summers contended could drag on for years, given the extensive pretrial motions and discovery that are likely to take place in the case. He also noted that even Kromberg acknowledged that Assange could still be subjected to special administrative measures upon the recommendation of the attorney general if the FBI or members of the U.S. intelligence community determine he is engaging in conduct that endangers national security, such as continuing to disclose classified documents still in possession of WikiLeaks. That makes the disclosures about the CIA’s conduct relevant and deserving of investigation, Summers argued.
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Google Sends 50,000 Warnings to Users Targeted by State Hackers
If the internet is a digital Wild West, it’s time to lock your doors and close your windows. While the amount of cyber attackers and activity alone is alarming, in this episode, the featured villain is a hacker group backed by the Iranian government.
In a blog post published Thursday, Google’s Threat Analysis Group, also known as TAG, revealed that it had sent more than 50,000 warnings to users whose accounts had been targeted by government-backed hacker groups carrying out phishing and malware campaigns so far this year. Receiving a warning does not necessarily mean your Google account has been hacked—Google does manage to stop some of the attacks—but rather that the company has identified you as a target.
Google stated that this amounted to a nearly 33% increase when compared to the same time last year and attributed the activity to a large campaign launched by the Russian-sponsored group Fancy Bear, which U.S. and UK security agencies found had been on a worldwide password guessing spree since at least mid-2019, according to a report published in July.
Russia’s not alone though. More than 50 countries have hacker groups working “on any given day,” Google explained.
“We intentionally send these warnings in batches to all users who may be at risk, rather than at the moment we detect the threat itself, so that attackers cannot track our defense strategies,” Google said. “On any given day, TAG is tracking more than 270 targeted or government-backed attacker groups from more than 50 countries. This means that there is typically more than one threat actor behind the warnings.”
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While that statistic alone is mind-boggling, the company also put a spotlight on APT35, a cyber attacker backed by Iran that has hijacked accounts, deployed malware, and spied on users using “novel techniques” in recent years. In particular, Google highlighted four of the “most notable” APT35 campaigns it’s disrupted in 2021.
One of APT35’s regular activities is phishing for credentials of so-called high-value accounts, or those belonging to people in government, academia, journalism, NGOs, foreign policy, and national security. The group uses a technique in which it compromises a legitimate website and then deploys a phishing kit.
In early 2021, Google said APT35 used this technique to hijack a website affiliated with a UK university. The hackers then wrote emails to users on Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo with an invitation link to a fake webinar and even sent second-factor identification codes to targets’ devices.
As you may be able to infer, legitimacy appears to be important to APT35, so it’s no surprise that another one of its trademarks is impersonating conference officials to carry out phishing attacks.
This year, members of APT35 pretended to be representatives from the Munich Security and the Think-20 Italy conferences, which are actually real events. After sending a non-malicious first contact email, APT35 sent users who responded follow-up emails with phishing links.
APT35 has also carried out its evil deeds via apps. In May 2020, it attempted to upload a fake VPN app to the Google Play Store that was in fact spyware and could steal users’ call logs, text messages, contacts, and location data. Google said it detected the app and removed it from the Play Store before anyone installed it but added that APT35 had tried to distribute this spyware on other platforms as recently as July.
The group even misused Telegram for its phishing attacks, leveraging the messaging app’s API to create a bot that notified it when a user loaded one of its phishing pages. This tactic allowed the group to obtain device-based data in real-time of the users on the phishing site, such as IP, useragent, and locales. Google said it had reported the bot to Telegram and that the messaging app had taken steps to remove it.
Hats off to Google for publishing this valuable information—knowledge is power, especially in cybersecurity—but dang is it nerve-racking. Let’s be clear, nobody is entirely safe online, but there are things you can do to reduce the possibilities of being hacked, such as enacting two-factor authentication and using a security key.
You can check out our full guide of safe online practices here, or just, you know, never use anything with a screen ever again. The guide is probably easier. Your call, though.