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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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  • Breach At South Korea's Equivalent of Amazon Exposed Data of Almost Every Adult
    by BeauHD on 17/12/2025 at 3:30 am

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: The alleged perpetrator had improper access to virtually every South Korean adult's personal information: names, phone numbers and even the keycode to enter residential buildings. It was one of the biggest data breaches of recent years and it has sent the company it targeted -- Coupang, South Korea's equivalent of Amazon -- reeling, generating lawsuits, government investigation and calls to toughen penalties against such leaks. The leak went undetected for nearly five months, hitting Coupang's radar on Nov. 18 only after a customer flagged suspicious activity. At first, Coupang, which was founded by a Korean-American entrepreneur, said it had experienced a data "exposure" affecting roughly 4,500 customer accounts. But within days, the e-commerce firm revised the figure: The leak exposed up to roughly 34 million user accounts in South Korea -- a sum representing more than 90% of the country's working-age population. Coupang started calling the incident a "leak" after Korean regulators took issue with the company's prior word choice. "The Whole Nation Is a Victim," read one local news headline. An investigation has found that the alleged perpetrator had once worked in South Korea as a software developer for authentication systems at Coupang, which is known for its blockbuster U.S. initial public offering a few years ago. The suspected leaker is believed to be a Chinese national who has moved back to China and is now on the lam, South Korean officials say. They haven't named the person. Even after leaving the firm roughly a year ago, the suspect secretly held on to an internal authentication key that granted him unfettered access to the personal information of Coupang users, South Korean authorities and lawmakers say. The infiltration, using overseas servers, started on June 24. By using the login credentials, the suspect was able to appear as if he were still a Coupang employee when accessing the company's systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • EU Moves To Ease 2035 Ban On Internal Combustion Cars
    by BeauHD on 17/12/2025 at 1:30 am

    The EU is moving to soften its planned 2035 ban on internal combustion cars by allowing a small share of low-emission engines. "The less stringent limit would leave room for automakers to continue selling some plug-in hybrids, which have both electric and internal combustion engines and can use the combustion engine to recharge the battery without the need to find a charging station," reports the Associated Press. From the report: The proposal from the EU's executive commission would change provisions of 2023 legislation requiring average emissions in new cars to equal zero, or a 100% reduction from 2021 levels. The new proposal would require a 90% emissions reduction. That means in practical terms that most cars would be battery-only but would leave room for some cars with internal combustion engines. Automakers would have to compensate for the added emissions by using European steel produced by methods that emit less carbon, and through use of climate neutral e-fuels made from renewable electricity and captured carbon dioxide and biofuels made from plants. EU officials say changing the limit will not affect progress toward making the 27-country bloc's economy climate neutral by 2050. That means producing only as much carbon dioxide as can be absorbed by forests and oceans or by abatement methods such as storing it underground. CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas blamed by scientists for climate change. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Meta Tolerates Rampant Ad Fraud From China To Safeguard Billions In Revenue
    by BeauHD on 17/12/2025 at 12:50 am

    A Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in revenue. Reuters reports: Though China's authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta's advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company's global revenue. But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money -- more than $3 billion -- was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters. The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams including Meta's finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta's efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company's reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues. The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta's platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. "We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm," Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations. To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 -- from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China. Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in. "As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck," a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was "asked to pause" its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO's involvement or what the so-called "Integrity Strategy pivot" entailed. But after Zuckerberg's input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective. The document didn't detail the specifics of those measures. Meta took these steps even as an outside consultant it hired produced research that warned "Meta's own behavior and policies" were fostering systemic corruption in the Chinese market for ads targeting users in other countries, additional documents show. The upshot: Within a few months of Meta's brief crackdown, a new crop of Chinese advertising agencies was flooding Facebook and Instagram with prohibited ads. By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to about 16% of Meta's China revenue. Rob Leathern, who was a senior director of product management at Facebook until 2020 and is no longer at the company, said the scale of predatory advertising revealed in the documents represents a major breakdown in consumer protections at the social media giant. "The levels that you're talking about are not defensible," he said of the percentage of abusive ads. "I don't know how anyone could think this is okay." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt
    by BeauHD on 17/12/2025 at 12:10 am

    Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. "Holy crap, it's working," exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom's Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The headlining claims are that Quilter's AI facilitated the design of a new Linux SBC, using 843 parts and dual-PCBs, taking just one week to finish, then successfully booting Debian the first time it was powered up. The Quilter team reckon that the AI-enhanced process it demonstrated could unlock a new generation of computer hardware makers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents
    by BeauHD on 16/12/2025 at 11:30 pm

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mark Carney says that amid a fundamental shift to the nature of globalization, his government will catalyze the growth in both the public and private sector. But Canadian linguists say that's a problem. Language experts have called out the Canadian prime minister's growing "utilization" of British spellings in key documents -- including the recent federal budget and a press release issued following a meeting with Donald Trump. Carney, who served as the governor of the bank of England for seven years, appears to have run afoul of Canadian linguistic norms, returning to his home country with a penchant for using 's' instead of 'z'- a hallmark of British spellings. In an open letter (PDF) chastising the prime minister, six linguists have asked his office, the Canadian government and parliament to stick to Canadian English spelling, "which is the spelling they consistently used from the 1970s to 2025." They warned that if governments start to use other systems for spelling, "this could lead to confusion about which spelling is Canadian." Canadian English is a source of immense pride for the nation's pedants. But the country's distinct and somewhat arbitrary spelling reflects the legacy of how Canada was colonized. "Canadian English evolved through Loyalist settlement after the American Revolutionary War, subsequent waves of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish immigration, and from European and global contexts," the letter says, with the current accepted spellings of words reflecting "global influences and cultures from around the world represented in our population, as well as containing words and phrases from Indigenous languages." The linguists pointed out that Canada's distinct style of spelling was widespread in media and government documents, with this deliberate decision reflecting a desire to preserve a vital element of the country's "national history, identity and pride." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Intel Quietly Discontinues Its Open-Source User-Space Gaudi Driver Code
    by BeauHD on 16/12/2025 at 10:50 pm

    Intel has quietly stopped maintaining its open-source user-space driver stack for Gaudi accelerators. Phoronix reports: It turns out earlier this year Intel archived the SynapseAI Core open-source code and is no longer maintained by Intel. The open-source Synapse AI Core GitHub repository was archived in February and README updated with: "This project will no longer be maintained by Intel. Intel has ceased development and contributions including, but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new releases, or updates, to this project. Intel no longer accepts patches to this project. If you have an ongoing need to use this project, are interested in independently developing it, or would like to maintain patches for the open source software community, please create your own fork of this project." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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