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28 May 2026 3:50am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. The technique, named FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing), allows sites to monitor other sites a visitor is viewing and what apps are open on their devices. The technique, laid out in a research paper (PDF), exploits a side channel, a form of leak resulting from physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task. By measuring the manifestations, attackers can decrypt encrypted traffic and infer other confidential data. The attack that FROST uses is known as a contention side channel, which measures the interaction of various processes all using (or competing for) a given resource. By measuring the timing of certain I/O (input-output) operations of the SSD a visitor is using, the researchers were able to determine the websites open in other tabs -- even on other browsers -- and the apps that were open on the visitor's device. FROST requires no interaction from the visitor other than opening the site hosting the attack. [...] Unlike previous contention side-channel attacks on SSDs, FROST runs exclusively in the browser. It uses JavaScript that interacts with the OPFS (origin private file system), an allocated storage space that's reserved for a specific site to run code needed to complete a given task. Websites can create one with no interaction required by the visitor. While each file system is sandboxed, meaning it's isolated from other websites and from the device system itself, the JavaScript can measure the I/O interactions. Then, by running those interactions through a pretrained convolutional neural network -- a system that uses deep learning to analyze text, audio, and images -- the attacker can deduce various apps and websites open on the device. "The attacker continuously measures SSD contention by performing random reads from a large OPFS file," the researchers explained. "SSD contention caused by user activity causes measurable latency differences for these read operations. By training a convolutional neural network (CNN) on these traces, the attacker can fingerprint user activity on the host system by classifying new traces using the trained model."

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28 May 2026 3:30am GMT

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28 May 2026 2:21am GMT

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28 May 2026 12:49am GMT

Meta will begin testing paid subscriptions for its Meta AI app and website, with a $7.99/month Meta One Plus plan and a more capable $19.99/month Meta One Premium plan offering. The test will start next month in Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia as Meta looks for AI revenue beyond advertising while continuing to offer a free tier. CNBC reports: Naomi Gleit, the head of product at Meta, revealed the subscription testing in an Instagram video, announcing that the plans "give people who use Meta AI more to work with, more capacity, bigger, more complex requests, and more room to create for businesses and creators." Meta One Plus will cost $7.99 a month and the Meta One Premium plan will cost $19.99 a month, the company confirmed. The more expensive version offers users additional computing capacity to produce more comprehensive responses and other advanced features. The company will continue to provide a free version of the app and site. "We're offering premium tools that allow you to enhance presence, supercharge content, automate tasks, and protect your brand," Gleit said in the post. "We're also thinking about how to bring this all together in a way that makes sense."

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27 May 2026 11:00pm GMT

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company plans to spend around $150 billion a year in Taiwan, calling it the "epicenter of the AI revolution." "Four years ago, five years ago, Nvidia was spending about $10, $15 billion dollars a year in Taiwan. Now we're spending $100, going to $150 billion dollars in Taiwan each year," Huang said. Reuters reports: Huang was speaking at a launch celebration in Taipei for the chip company's planned Taiwan headquarters, which he said will break ground this year and aims to become operational in 2030. He did not provide a timeframe for the number of years the company plans to invest $150 billion. The Taiwan headquarters will bring Nvidia closer to TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker which makes many of the advanced semiconductors powering the trend towards AI and is a major supplier to the U.S. tech company. "Taiwan is booming," Huang said on stage at the celebration which was attended by his parents, wife, daughter and son in addition to around 1,000 employees. "Taiwan is the epicentre of the AI revolution. This is where the chips come, packaging comes, this is where the systems are made, this is where AI supercomputers were created. The number of partners we work with here in Taiwan, incredible."

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27 May 2026 10:00pm GMT

California civil rights agency hails win over Tesla, anticipates trial in July.

27 May 2026 9:08pm GMT

Telltale SSD activity can be measured in the browser using simple JavaScript.

27 May 2026 8:56pm GMT

NASA science satellites show dual use in locating sources of GPS interference.

27 May 2026 8:43pm GMT

Canonical's Workshop lets developers define Ubuntu dev environments in YAML and reproduce them across machines with a single command.

27 May 2026 7:52pm GMT

Zen Browser 1.20 introduces Boosts, letting users customize website colors, fonts, styles, page elements, and dark mode.

27 May 2026 4:38pm GMT

Krita 6.0.2 digital painting app arrives with Qt 6 changes, while Krita 5.3.2 remains the recommended build for production work.

27 May 2026 3:48pm GMT