fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: A Florida man who was the subject of a 2019 investigation by ProPublica was indicted last month on federal charges that he defrauded clients of his ransomware data recovery firm. According to the Justice Department, the man, Zohar Pinhasi, told customers he could recover their encrypted files without having to pay hackers, when, in reality, he paid the ransom and charged victims a hefty fee on top. The indictment mirrors the findings from ProPublica's 2019 article "The Trade Secret," which centered on Pinhasi and his scheme. The outlet found that the ransomware victims were being harmed twice: once by the hackers, who locked their targets' files and demanded ransom, and a second time by MonsterCloud, Pinhasi's Florida-based data recovery firm, which misled its clients about not paying ransoms. "By falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself," U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said in an Oct. 7 press release. "Our Office will vigorously prosecute ransomware attackers who prey on Americans from across the world and those who cynically profit from their criminal activity." [...] Pinhasi, who went by the alias Zack Green, told ProPublica in 2019 that MonsterCloud never promised clients that their data will be recovered by any particular method. "How we do it, it's our problem," he told ProPublica. "You will get your data back. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride." He called MonsterCloud's data recovery methods a "trade secret." [...] Federal investigators found that, over the course of the scheme, Pinhasi allegedly charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments. In one example, Pinhasi made a ransom payment of about $8,200 but charged the client about $150,000. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. [...] In 2019, Pinhasi touted MonsterCloud's ties to law enforcement as evidence of its integrity. Pistole, who also headed the Transportation Security Administration under President Barack Obama, was listed on MonsterCloud's website as the only member of its "Cyber Security Advisory Council."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 5:00pm GMT

Genie 4 will roll out to developers and Google AI Ultra subscribers soon.

27 Oct 2026 4:00pm GMT

Ahead of the touchscreen MacBook Pro expected to debut tomorrow, Apple has refreshed its standard 14-inch MacBook Pro with the new M6 processor, promising up to 20% faster multithreaded performance, improved power efficiency, and more powerful on-device AI capabilities. The Verge reports: Announced this morning through a press release, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro features three Thunder 4 USB-C ports that all support charging and DisplayPort connectivity, a MagSafe 3 charging port, full-size HDMI, and an SDXC memory card slot accommodating photographers. Pricing for the new M6 version of the 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 with 16GB of memory, the same as last year's M5 model. Preorders start on October 28th and shipping is expected to begin on November 6th. The new M6 processor is Apple's first 2nm chip with a bump to a 12-core CPU, up from 10 cores in the M5, and the company says it offers up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance when compared to its predecessor. The M6 also features a Dual 16-core Neural Engine to handle heavy on-device AI tasks, plus an upgraded 12-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core. In addition to performance improvements, Apple says its M6 processor is more power efficient.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 4:00pm GMT

Huge software price hikes force loyal users to reconsider their favorite apps.

27 Oct 2026 3:50pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: While global tech stocks teeter, in China they have already crashed as lofty valuations collapse under worries about AI demand and curbs on Chinese exports. The meltdown, tanking the mainland STAR50 index of AI and semiconductor leaders by 40% in less than four months and vaporizing some $480 billion in market value, is an ill omen for wobbly world markets and a dampener on China's efforts at encouraging its savers into stocks to fund the AI boom. It has also slammed the brakes on a rally running two years, since economic stimulus promises sent shares soaring, and has stalled Beijing's push to break with a long boom-bust pattern and drive a "slow bull" market that delivers reliable performance. China's broad blue-chip index has dropped about 20% from highs made in June. "The stock market later evolved into a speculative crazy bull," said Beijing-based fund manager Dong Baozhen. "And now we see the bubble bursting." There was no clear trigger for the selloff in China, though traders pointed to high valuations, tax bills, and the threat of foreign bans on Chinese data center equipment. According to Goldman Sachs, AI stocks account for 42% of China's market capitalization and 57% of trading turnover, leaving investors widely exposed to the downturn. "What's happening is now going to put a stop for many of the companies trying to get themselves listed," said Hong Hao, managing partner and chief investment officer at Lotus Asset Management in Hong Kong. "Overemphasising the 'technology content' -- that is, the weighting of tech companies by market value in major indexes -- leads to a deviation, even a distortion, in capital behavior," said Leo Wang, partner at Beijing-based Qianchuang Capital. "This created a severe bubble in certain sectors and a serious drain on others." "Just like all other Chinese manufacturers, (chipmakers and AI suppliers) will eventually end up in a price war," said fund manager Wang Zhuo, partner at Shanghai Zhuozhu Investment Management. "There's no exception," he said. "All bubbles inevitably burst."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 3:00pm GMT

I respect Apple's first crack at a foldable phone, but I'm not sure I like it.

27 Oct 2026 2:20pm GMT

What's the oldest Windows GUI application you can still run on Windows 11 today, without any modifications? For now, the best answer Boris Popik can come up with is an innocuous application from build 347 of Windows NT 3.1, an early prerelease: CDPLAYER.EXE. You can't go any older than that, because earlier prerelease builds had not yet finalised its PE format and calling convention. Neat find. Popik also mentions a few other contenders, but I won't spoil those here.

27 Oct 2026 12:14am GMT

Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it's time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox' build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3's HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there's the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well. Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it's definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.

27 Oct 2026 12:06am GMT

Thew day ends in a Y, so Microsoft is launching a new way to build Windows applications. Get excited, Windows application developers! If you caught our session at Microsoft Build 2026 or you've been watching the repo, you've seen this one taking shape in public for a while now, and a lot has changed since Build. Here's the longer tour: Microsoft.UI.Reactor, an experimental C# framework that brings the MVU (Model-View-Update) pattern to WinUI desktop apps. No XAML files, no code-behind, no ViewModels. Two things before the fun part. Reactor is experimental: no support policy, no API guarantees, published this early on purpose because we'd rather hear we got the design wrong now than once people have shipped on it. And it is not a replacement for XAML or MVVM, which we'll come back to. ↫ Alexandre Zollinger Chohfi at Microsoft's Dev Blogs At multiple points in the linked blog post, Microsoft underlines that no, Reactor is not going to replace XAML. I'm sure Windows developers who learned Win32, Silverlight, WinRT XAML, WPF, UWP, WinUI 2 and 3, and all the others, over the past two decades will feel deeply comforted by Microsoft's insistence that Reactor will not replace XAML. Microsoft repeats: this won't replace XAML. They swear.

26 Oct 2026 11:57pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT