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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America's SEC Announces Tokenized Stock Experiment
    by EditorDavid on 23/09/2026 at 11:34 am

    August 15: $62,991 September 23: $86,456 Bitcoin shot up 37% over the last 39 days, reaching an eight-month high on Monday. "Bitcoin is back," declares Yahoo Finance: The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning multisession rally... [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sean Farrell told Yahoo Finance on Monday] "I think the crypto winter is over, although that does not necessarily mean the path higher will be linear." For now, momentum is on crypto's side, with bitcoin jumping more than 5% on Friday and another 6% on Monday. "We believe crypto is in the early innings of a new bull market and we see few signs of overheating," Compass Point analyst Ed Engel wrote on Tuesday. The move looks "like a combination of renewed ETF demand and a large short squeeze," Nicolai Søndergaard, senior research analyst at Nansen, said as traders betting against bitcoin are forced to buy it back, adding further fuel to the rally. Bitcoin got bad news and then good news last week. After the U.S. Congress failed Thursday to pass a cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act', America's Securities and Exchange Commission instead announced a tokenized-stock experiment. It's a five-year "innovation exemption" that "creates a path for tokenized U.S. stocks to trade through automated market makers on public blockchain," according to CoinDesk. Yahoo Finance notes that Bitcoin and other altcoins surged after the announcement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing-as-a-Service Platform
    by EditorDavid on 23/09/2026 at 7:04 am

    Microsoft's security blog describes the fight against a new "AI-powered cybercrime platform" offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around the world, compromising business accounts "at scale" with automated attacks and prebuilt phishing templates. AI tools could even sift through a victim's mailbox to help engineer better phishing messages. To disrupt EvilTokens Microsoft worked with other organizations, including Cloudflare, Coinbase, OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, Shadowserver Foundation, and TRM Labs to Health-ISAC (a non-profit helping health sector organizations share cyber threat information). "Fifty sites seized and 150 domains disabled in a single action is only possible when the hosting providers, the exchanges, the model providers and the data holders all move at the same time," security company SpyCloud told The Hacker News. From Microsoft's security blog: Microsoft also notified affected customers, helped remediate compromised accounts, and shared intelligence to support further defensive and investigative action... Microsoft worked closely with specialist officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's cybercrime team, sharing intelligence that enabled officers to take operational action in the United Kingdom. On September 11, 2026, officers arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, and seized digital devices and other items for examination... While EvilTokens used AI to identify targets and prioritize fraud opportunities, Microsoft investigators used reverse engineering and AI-powered tools to analyze evidence, accelerate the investigation, and identify the infrastructure supporting the service... Campaigns leveraging EvilTokens have impacted organizations in various industries, including wholesale distribution, construction, financial services, real estate, higher education, and healthcare, with the highest concentrations of observed victim activity in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and France. Working with partners, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) facilitated a coordinated disruption of infrastructure used to operate the EvilTokens service. Sometimes stolen tokens were used to give new devices access to a victim's inbox. (A code authenticating the new device was sent to the targeted user, who unknowingly authorize the threat actor's session and grants access to their account...) But "AI was not simply helping attackers write more convincing messages," says another Microsoft blog post. "It helped them decide who to target, who to impersonate, and how to most effectively exploit the relationship to extract as much money as possible." The significance of EvilTokens extends beyond its rapid growth and global reach. It offers an early warning of what happens when cybercriminals combine stolen access with AI capable of understanding how an organization works... Its AI tools could summarize and translate emails, surface financial conversations, map organizational roles, identify trusted relationships, and recommend potential targets. Preset prompts offered to find wire-transfer discussions, identify the organization's "money movers," locate vendor invoices, and determine the best people to impersonate. Sold through Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring $500 subscription, EvilTokens combined account compromise, mailbox analysis, target selection, and fraud preparation in a single service. Capabilities that once required experience across identity attacks, cloud systems, social engineering, and financial fraud were available through a ready-made interface. Investigators found evidence that large portions of EvilTokens had been "vibe coded," with AI helping its creators build the platform itself. They also determined that EvilTokens drew on capabilities from multiple AI models. The result was more than a collection of attack tools. EvilTokens packaged much of the fraud process into a commercially run service, complete with subscription pricing, customer support, management dashboards, and tools designed to move customers from account access toward financial exploitation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed 'Super Intelligence' in US Documents
    by EditorDavid on 23/09/2026 at 2:34 am

    U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that "The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now." But then he added "hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name, in that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually... amazing. But we have to be careful — in fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world's will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it's super intelligence." TRUMP: In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI. SI. Let's see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it's much more accurate. Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. We're going to find out pretty soon. Super intelligence. Every major new technology brings challenges, and super intelligence is no exception. Yet the very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling not warming, and nobody was dead — these are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all. That robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster — same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia Russia Russia hoax, the Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine hoax. Climate change, open borders. Whoever wins AI — you have to remember this — and now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligent [sic] — wins. That's the group that wins. And we're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way. We're going to keep it very — very straight and very strong. I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Many say, bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself. And we will be very careful, and that's why we have a Department of Justice that we've already used it, having to do with this very subject, and used it very powerfully. Everything worked out very well and very quickly. And other law enforcement bodies that will rein things in if we have to do that. But we will only encourage super intelligence. We're gonna encourage it, not rein it in. We're gonna watch it closely, through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world in Super Intelligence, and will continue to do so, safely and responsibly. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for suggesting the story. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?
    by EditorDavid on 22/09/2026 at 10:04 pm

    On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, "once the dominant choice among students... is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share." It's a small survey, but "The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional 'learn to code' pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2 points. "The category did not decline uniformly. Students moved away fastest from the pathway most associated with entry-level software work, while the more applied and human-facing subfields held their ground better." Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering... [B]roader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like. [Undergraduate enrollment in CS programs at four-year institutions fell 8.1%, to approximately 606,000 students.] Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • 'Coyote vs. Acme' Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit
    by EditorDavid on 22/09/2026 at 5:34 pm

    The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.' $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. "You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!" distributor Ketchup Entertainment posted on social media (adding "Thank you to the fans for making this a massive hit!") With a break-even number of $120 million, the movie "will probably make up any theatrical deficit (should there be any) with its impending releases on video on demand and streaming," writes ScreenRant. Almost three years after the completed film was initially shelved for a $30 million write-off, its cumulative domestic box office has apparently even beat Warner Bros. dinosaur movie The End of Oak Street: In addition to officially joining the chart of the Top 30 movies of the year so far at the domestic box office, by surpassing The End of Oak Street, Coyote vs. Acme has outgrossed five of the eight movies that Warner Bros. has put out in domestic theaters this year.... [It's just $17.6 million behind Supergirl, and within $30 million of Mortal Kombat II and Wuthering Heights.] Their anticipated sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Three also seems guaranteed to land higher than 2026's Coyote vs. Acme on the chart (2021's Dune earned $108.9 million in domestic theaters, while Dune: Part Two earned $282.1 million). With its a small marketing budget of just $10 million, the movie seems to be relying on oddball marketing stunts like their AMA on Reddit's r/movies. And commemorating the spirit of the movie, Crayon-maker Crayola even released a special "Coyote Secret Plan" web page for children to print and color — and partnered with the film's stars for a video on the importance of creativity: Lana Condor: Crayola is all about encouraging kids and grown-ups to turn imagination into action. Will Forte: Which is exactly what Coyote does in Coyote versus Acme. He sees a problem and thinks, "Could this be solved with a rocket, a catapult, or a suspiciously affordable mail order anvil?" Lana Condor: Usually no. Will Forte: Usually very no. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children
    by EditorDavid on 22/09/2026 at 1:04 pm

    Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon review who blame "a cascade of preventable failures that included an overreliance on an AI tool built by Palantir." According to the officials who spoke to Bloomberg, some personnel inside U.S. Central Command leaned too hard on the AI inside the Maven Smart System, an AI-powered data integration and targeting platform developed by Palantir to accelerate intelligence analysis and decision-making. The Defense Department has reportedly made the software tool a cornerstone of military operations over the past year... Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that. The Minab [elementary school] site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes. A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is no evidence its software was at fault. Two people familiar with Palantir's Pentagon contracts said the government keeps primary responsibility for the quality of the information that's fed into Maven. After the strike, Palantir added features that "re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed," a person familiar with the work said. That new functionality is said to have already caught some anomalies... More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit in the first 24 hours, and according to Bloomberg's sources, that pace compressed the time available for additional confirmations. Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. The U.S. Central Command's group shrank from 10 people to one. No member of those teams reviewed the Minab site before the missiles were up in the air. A separate inquiry by the United Nations' Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran this week reached the conclusion that there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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