fidzu : computers

A coalition of security firms working with Japan's National Police Agency has disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices across 200+ countries. "We assess with high confidence that the backdoor and botnet were intentionally developed, deployed, and operated for financial gain by Videostrong Technology," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a blog post. The Register reports: Videostrong Technology is a hardware manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China. It builds Android devices, including home TV boxes and projectors. According to Google, Videostrong deliberately embedded the XCPE backdoor in device firmware and sold access to criminal affiliates, allowing them to install additional malware modules on devices shipped to unsuspecting customers. When buyers connected these devices to their home networks, the preinstalled backdoor allowed operators to create proxy networks and hide malicious traffic using the customers' internet connections without their knowledge. The firmware's pre-installed management agent purported to be a standard remote-management client, according to TrendAI. It pulled updates from a GitHub page, and connected to a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) server that gave the operator full remote control of each box, allowing them to install and remove apps, change settings, and push updates to the infected devices. Between June 3 and October 1, TrendAI documented more than 3.8 million distinct home and mobile IP addresses connected to the operation. The coalition also disrupted the command-and-control domains used to manage the affiliate modules. "Because these affiliates each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE, we assess that taking down their C2 domains will sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices," according to GTIG. Google said it had since cut ties with Videostrong, and banned the OEM from making devices with preloaded Google apps.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Nov 2026 11:00am GMT

At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, Chinese space officials publicly outlined the most detailed roadmap yet for landing astronauts on the Moon "before 2030." Ars Technica reports: China's lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon. According to slides shared on social media, the current plan involves: - An uncrewed test of the Long March 10A rocket (a single-stick variant, with no boosters) and the Mengzhou spacecraft to low-Earth orbit. Target: early 2027 - An uncrewed test of the larger Long March 10 rocket (a core stage with two boosters) and the Lanyue lunar lander, including descent/ascent from Moon's surface. Target: 2028 - A concurrent launch of two Long March 10 rockets, one carrying uncrewed Mengzhou and the other the Lanyue vehicle; they will dock in lunar orbit. Target: 2029 - Dual launch of Long March 10 rockets, this time with crew on the Mengzhou spacecraft, leading to crewed landing mission. Target: "Before 2030" The public release of this new information provides a timeline for gauging China's technical progress in its efforts to land humans on the Moon before 2030 and beat NASA and the United States back to the lunar surface. Notably, the plan (for now, at least) omits a mission similar to Apollo 8 or Artemis II, which involved a crew flying out to the Moon and either entering orbit or passing close by before returning to Earth. The Mengzhou vehicle should still get a workout closer to Earth with humans on board as part of missions carrying astronauts to Tiangong, China's space station in low-Earth orbit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Nov 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The world's leading EV maker is showing no signs of slowing down. BYD sold 490,168 new energy vehicles (NEVs) in October, up 11% from the prior year and the company's highest monthly total in 2026. BYD's battery electric vehicles drove the growth, with a record 305,743 units sold, up 37% year over year and marking the first time its EV sales have crossed the 300,000 mark. To put that into perspective, just over 262,500 EVs were sold in the US in the entire third quarter combined, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. By the end of the year, BYD expects overseas shipments to reach about 2 million vehicles. "In 2027, that number is expected to rise to more than 2.5 million vehicles," adds Electrek.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Nov 2026 3:30am GMT

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has all of its "space" back open.

02 Nov 2026 11:30pm GMT

Plus invisible tattoos, medieval skeleton gets an ID, trapping a single antimatter particle, and more.

02 Nov 2026 10:54pm GMT

The threat is still considered to be low, but the virus continues to spread.

02 Nov 2026 9:21pm GMT

Enlightenment, the long-running desktop environment and associated libraries and frameworks, just released version 0.28.0. It brings initial support for NetBSD, support for Network Manager and a whole slew of related changes and fixes to make that possible, as well as native PipeWire support. There's also a brand new clipboard manager, which brings with it modernisations and bug fixes for related UI elements. This release also reworks a ton code related to battery management, AC polling, and more, adding features like setting battery thresholds, ACPI power profile support, and so on. Of course, there's also the long list of smaller fixes and changes. You can download the release and build it yourself, or wait for your distribution of BSD variant to package it.

02 Nov 2026 8:31pm GMT

A little while ago, we talked about 9front's Good Enough File System being ported to OpenBSD. A lot of progress has been made on this front lately. Aside from fixing bugs and porting over fixes from the 9front side, there's also been a ton more substantial changes. Some userspace tools have been done (you can now mkfs on openbsd!), but snapshot control hasn't. I'm thinking we have a userspace 'gefs' program that lets you handle this, trying to keep the interface similar to the 9front ctl file. ↫ Ori Bernstein There's still some major hurdles to overcome, some of which have already been addressed on the 9front side, but the progress is clear. Considering OpenBSD desperately needs a more modern file system, this is great news. A fun sidenote is that I'm actually posting this news item from OpenBSD.

02 Nov 2026 8:23pm GMT

"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time," Altman said. "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that." ↫ Andrew E. Freedman at Tom's Hardware I'm installing a 32bit operating system without support for physical address extension on my laptop with 64GB of RAM, just because I can.

02 Nov 2026 4:35pm 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