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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

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  • How Tech Scammers Conned Four People Out of $673,000 in Three Days
    by EditorDavid on 06/07/2026 at 4:49 am

    USA Today reports on a Facebook post from a Washington state sheriff's office: Four residents of Clallam County, a coastal region west of Seattle along northern Washington's peninsula, lost more than $673,000 in just three days, according to the Clallam County Sheriff's Office... The smallest amount lost was $3,500, which someone purchased in Apple gift cards for a scammer posing as an employee with Microsoft technical support, the sheriff's office wrote. Another person lost $50,000 after they clicked on a malicious email and unwittingly granted the scammers access to their financial accounts. The local Peninsula Daily News reports another scam involved a 64-year-old resident who attempted to contact Coinbase after seeing their account displayed shown as closed: "Believing they were speaking with a legitimate Coinbase representative, the victim was told there was fraudulent activity on the account and was instructed to download a 'rescue' application," the [sheriff's] release states. "The application allowed the scammer to remotely access the victim's phone." They then convinced the victim to transfer approximately $200,000 worth of cryptocurrency to what was described as a secure wallet. The funds were instead transferred to the scammer and could not be recovered... In one scam, reported Monday, an 84-year-old Clallam County resident believed they had received an email from their daughter with a photo. After opening the email, a fake Microsoft security alert appeared on the computer directing the victim to call a support number, according to the release. "The victim was transferred to someone claiming to represent the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and was falsely told they were under investigation in a child pornography and money laundering case," the release states. "The scammers instructed the victim not to contact local law enforcement and claimed local banks were also under investigation. The victim was told their bank accounts were in danger of being seized and was instructed to purchase gold to protect their assets." In three separate transactions, the victim purchased approximately $420,000 worth of gold and gave it to an unknown man waiting at the end of their driveway. "Only after speaking with bank officials did the victim realize they had been defrauded," the release states. USA Today offers this advice from the sheriff's press release. "These criminals are professional manipulators who prey on fear, trust and urgency. We encourage everyone to pause before sending money, purchasing gold or gift cards, or transferring cryptocurrency. A simple phone call to a trusted family member, your bank or local law enforcement can prevent a life-changing financial loss." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Hundreds Support Legal Defense for Engineer Charged with Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
    by EditorDavid on 06/07/2026 at 1:34 am

    "Hundreds of freedom lovers are rallying behind a US Air Force engineer" who's been accused of damaging over a dozen AI-integrated surveillance cameras last year and even knocking down their poles. Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this article from Futurism: According to local channel WAVY, Virginia-based Air Force engineer and mechanic Jeffrey Sovern is facing 13 counts of destruction of property, as well as six counts of both petit larceny and possession of burglary tools related to the destruction of Flock license plate cameras... [Wavy reports the cameras were sometimes pointed in the wrong direction or thrown to the street.] Armed with garbage bags, spray paint, and even chainsaws, a not insignificant number of privacy vigilantes have taken the fight to Flock, using any means to free their neighborhoods of the ominous surveillance poles. On a GoFundMe page to raise money for his legal defense, the 41-year-old Sovern explained that this kind of privacy-minded vandalism has far more support than would outwardly appear... Sovern kicked off the campaign late in December of 2025, where he encouraged his supporters to "reach out to the local governments and demand that these systems are taken down." The Virginia resident initially set his funding goal to $8,500. As news of his case has spread across the web, the amount of support has far outpaced those already-hopeful aspirations. [Two hours ago the legal fund stood at $23,326 from over 680 donors]. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Go-based TypeScript 7.0 Finally Reaches Release Candidate Stage
    by EditorDavid on 06/07/2026 at 12:34 am

    It was more than two years ago that TypeScript's creator Anders Hejlsberg announced plans to rewrite its compiler in Go. This week Microsoft announced its first Go-based release candidate for TypeScript 7.0, reports InfoWorld: TypeScript 7.0 is often about 10 times faster than TypeScript 6.0, Microsoft said, thanks to native code speed and shared memory parallelism... Unlike TypeScript 6.0, TypeScript 7.0 performs many steps in parallel, including parsing, type checking, and emitting, Microsoft said. Some of these steps, such as parsing and emitting, can mostly be done independently across files. For that reason, parallelization automatically scales well with larger codebases with relatively little overhead. However, not every step in a TypeScript build is easily parallelizable, Microsoft said. Microsoft plans to release TypeScript 7.0 within the next month, the article points out, but developers can try the new compiler by installing it from the typescript package on npm: npm install -D typescript@rc Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Meta is Quietly Launching Pocket, an App for Vibe-coding and Scrolling Small 'Gizmos'
    by EditorDavid on 05/07/2026 at 11:08 pm

    "Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch," writes The Verge. While it's not available for downloads in most locations, Meta's Pocket will allow people "to generate small, interactive apps and games using AI prompts," writes TechCrunch. They're called "gizmos", and Pocket "also offers a scrollable feed where you can play with gizmos others have made." Some context from The Verge: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media, and he's previously described a vision of how users could use AI to make interactive experiences and share them with people. The launch of Pocket appears to be one manifestation of that idea... It follows Meta hiring engineers from a company called Atma Sciences Inc., which made an app called Gizmo, as Business Insider reported in March. On a help center page, Meta also describes a gizmo as a "playable AI-generated experience," and when you post one, Meta says you can choose to let other people remix them. "Based on the app's screenshots in Google Play, there are many similarities to Gizmo's original app, which is still listed," notes TechCrunch. "Pocket is another example of Meta's push to make AI creation tools more mainstream, extending its earlier efforts, which included AI-generated images created via its Meta AI app and AI videos created with its app called Vibes. It has also added AI features across its social platforms... " Given that Meta has not officially announced Pocket's debut, it's likely that Pocket is still in its initial experimentation phase. Its counterpart Gizmo, however, had generated 635,000 lifetime installs across both iOS and Google Play, according to Appfigures, which noted it had a 98% positive sentiment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Big Companies That Invest Heavily in AI Also Hire More People, Report Suggests
    by EditorDavid on 05/07/2026 at 9:55 pm

    "Companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in the entry-level roles that many fear are doomed," writes TechCrunch. That's the conclusion of new report tracking AI spending from Ramp's corporate card/bill pay data as well as Revelio Labs' workforce records from 21,599 U.S. firms: According to the report, "high-intensity adopters" — firms that spend on average $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months — saw headcount increase 10.2%. Headcount also rose across functions, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing, and scientist roles. The strongest job growth among high-intensity adopters was in the information sector, which includes software, internet, media, and tech-adjacent firms. Despite these positive signals, the data isn't as rosy as it seems. It skews heavily toward tech-forward, knowledge-work firms — ones that might have VC-backing and are growing fast anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is contributing to the hiring or just showing up at companies that are expanding anyway. "This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs," the paper's authors admit, "but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses." It also counters claims that AI is killing all junior jobs. Recent research from Goldman Sachs found that AI has already erased about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Gen Z and entry-level workers taking the brunt of the burden. But in tech-forward firms, the report finds that entry-level headcount actually rose by 12%... "For software and technology firms, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development," the report reads. "Lower production costs in these workflows can raise the return to expanding the whole firm, not just the engineering team." But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, yet did not go on to make sustained investments, don't tend to see any gains in headcount, per the report. That sets up the potential for a widening gap between firms that have the resources — like capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth — to turn AI adoption into actual business gains and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that firms that already have the resources are the ones that will see the largest gains. CNBC argues another AI "narrative" was challenged this week: that open source can't make money. "The assumption was that giving your model away for free meant no business. That's breaking too, as open-model companies start posting real revenue and enterprises move from renting AI to running their own." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Microsoft and Amazon Commit Billions to New AI Implementation Units for Businesses
    by EditorDavid on 05/07/2026 at 8:54 pm

    Microsoft is investing $2.5 billion in a new group "assisting clients with AI implementations," reports CNBC: [Microsoft] said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that's become known as forward deployed engineering [or FDE]... The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was putting $1 billion behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced AI engagements. Leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI both established FDE groups in May, partnering with private equity firms, banks and consulting firms. Alongside its technology peers, Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into building data centers that run generative AI models. Microsoft has also released a variety of AI services, with mixed results. The Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant has yet to gain anything approaching ubiquity in the business world, and the GitHub Copilot coding agent has ceded market share to newer players. Microsoft's stock has slumped 21% this year, by far the worst performance among the mega-cap tech companies. One concern on Wall Street is that AI models that quickly compose code might threaten mature software companies... Microsoft has for years provided support and implementation services to customers. The company generated about $2.1 billion in revenue from enterprise and partner services in the March quarter, up 2.5% from a year earlier. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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