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eBay and several former executives have agreed to pay $56 million to Ina and David Steiner, the newsletter writers targeted in a 2019 corporate harassment campaign that involved threats, surveillance attempts, and deliveries of live insects and other disturbing items. The settlement closes the couple's civil case after seven former employees pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to the scheme. TechCrunch reports: Ina and David Steiner, a married couple and the co-authors of EcommerceBytes, inspired the ire of high-level eBay executives after occasionally criticizing the company in their newsletter. In 2019, a plot was concocted to intimidate the couple into halting their negative coverage. Executives used sock puppet social media accounts to harass the couple, while also sending them anonymous threatening letters and bizarre items in the mail -- including live spiders and cockroaches, pornographic magazines, a bloody pig mask, a funereal wreath, and a book about surviving the death of a spouse. According to previously released court documents, a plan that was attempted but never successfully carried out involved affixing a GPS tracking device to the couple's car. Yet another internally broached plan involved sending a "Samoan gang" to the Steiners' home. The settlement this week resolves a 2021 civil case brought by the couple against eBay. The law office representing the Steiners writes that the settlement includes $46.15 million paid to the couple by eBay itself, as well as $2 million from former eBay executive CEO Devin Wenig. Additionally, $500,000 will be paid out to the couple from former eBay executive Wendy Jones, as well as $50,000 from former eBay executive Steve Wymer. Additional funds are being paid to various non-profits. In 2022, seven former eBay employees were criminally charged and pled guilty in relation to the plot, including the company's former security chief, James Baugh -- who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison. Others indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice include David Harville, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Popp, Stephanie Stockwell, Philip Cooke, and former eBay contractor Veronica Zea.

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28 Jul 2026 9:00pm GMT

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28 Jul 2026 8:52pm GMT

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28 Jul 2026 8:45pm GMT

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28 Jul 2026 8:20pm GMT

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview has "found flaws in a weakened version of a digital encryption standard that is in pervasive use throughout the internet," reports The New York Times. Researchers said the model discovered novel attacks against weakened versions of AES and the experimental post-quantum HAWK system, including one that was 200 to 1,000 times faster than previous human-developed methods. From the report: The flaws identified do not concern a cryptographic standard currently in use today, which means that modern banking and communication systems are not subject to immediate potential intrusions from A.I. Instead, Anthropic's technology cracked a watered-down version of an algorithm for Advanced Encryption Standard, or A.E.S., a ubiquitous protocol that safeguards web traffic, wireless networks, data storage and more. It is common to perform tests on weaker versions of encryption algorithms to understand whether more powerful computers could someday crack the actual standards, akin to solving a simpler math problem to identify whether patterns may exist for a more complicated one. In the testing, Mythos was able to break the weaker version of Advanced Encryption Standard in a way that Anthropic said made an assault 200 to 1,000 times faster than what previous human research had managed to do. While the immediate ramifications are minimal, the long-term implications could be significant. In previous tests, large-language models seemingly could not match or best what humans can do in the mathematically dense field of cryptographic research, but their rapid advances could suggest a future in which top models can surmount traditional internet security protections that are foundational to just about everything that takes place on the internet. [...] In addition to the attack on the encryption standard, Mythos also orchestrated another improved attack against a different digital cryptographic system known as HAWK that is designed to be bulletproof against both traditional and quantum computers. HAWK is not currently in use, but under consideration by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to become a new standard. The HAWK attack was validated by its authors, and independent cryptographers reviewed the Advanced Encryption Standard attack, Anthropic said, adding that it had shared its findings with the U.S. government and industry partners ahead of publication. Mythos devised the cryptographic attack on A.E.S. almost entirely autonomously, Anthropic said, but only after first refusing to contemplate the problem because it believed it was impossible to improve on existing methods of analysis. But after some coaxing, the chatbot sat with the puzzle for about a week before engineering its novel attack. Two human researchers then worked for nearly a month to verify that the method appeared correct. "Given that we are constantly underestimating the power and time of availability of future models, are we really comfortable that two years from now strong encryption won't be threatened?" said Glenn S. Gerstell, the former general counsel at the National Security Agency. "Mathematicians would tell you that it shouldn't be possible given current computing powers to break strong encryption in any meaningful time," added Mr. Gerstell, who helped write a report on cryptology in 2022. "But I don't think the capabilities of future models in the medium term -- before quantum computing or quantum-proof cryptography -- should be dismissed as trivial in this context."

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28 Jul 2026 8:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Minnesota, the first US state to prohibit prediction markets, was prevented from enforcing the law by a federal court ruling just days before the ban was scheduled to take effect. But while Minnesota was stopped from enforcing a total ban, the state may ultimately be allowed to prohibit some types of prediction-market wagers. The Trump administration and the two largest prediction markets -- Kalshi and Polymarket -- sued Minnesota after the state enacted the law in May. The cases were consolidated, and a ruling (PDF) issued yesterday imposed a preliminary injunction blocking the law that was scheduled to take effect on August 1. Minnesota lawmakers saw prediction markets as indistinguishable from gambling, but the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) argues it has exclusive authority to regulate the platforms under federal law. One of the primary legal questions is whether event contracts are "swaps," which are regulated by the CFTC. Swaps are defined broadly in US law to include contracts in which payment "is dependent on the occurrence, nonoccurrence, or the extent of the occurrence of an event or contingency associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence." US District Judge Katherine Menendez in the District of Minnesota, a Biden appointee, said Minnesota's total ban on prediction markets is likely to violate US law because many trades on Kalshi and Polymarket are swaps. Menendez wrote: "Specifically, it appears that whether the Minnesota statute is expressly preempted turns on whether the state law attempts to regulate trades in event contracts that qualify as "swaps" within the meaning of the CEA [Commodity Exchange Act]. And there are several examples of event contracts hosted by Kalshi and Polymarket US that fit that definition because they concern the occurrence of events with clear potential economic, financial, or commercial consequences that are neither remote or unattenuated. Kalshi and Polymarket US are designated contract markets, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction to regulate transactions involving those 'swaps.'" Menendez said the CFTC, Kalshi, and Polymarket met their burden of showing they are likely to succeed on the merits, so she issued "a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of Minnesota's prediction market statute until a final decision on the merits is reached." But she said Minnesota may be able to prohibit some types of event contracts offered on Kalshi and Polymarket because not all of them appear to meet the definition of swaps. For example, Menendez doesn't think prediction-market bets on the outcome of Love Island USA meet the legal definition of swaps. Minnesota could continue litigating the case in district court or ask a federal appeals court to overturn the preliminary injunction.

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28 Jul 2026 7:00pm GMT

Wayfire 0.11 introduces sharper fractional scaling, experimental HDR, ICC color profiles, expanded Vulkan effects, and a new external plugin manager.

28 Jul 2026 1:47pm GMT

Hyprland 0.56.1 is a maintenance update addressing monitor regressions, window-rule leaks, input capture, rendering, and more.

28 Jul 2026 12:41pm GMT

Microsoft says tools cost less than competing ones and outperform them, too.

27 Jul 2026 9:56pm GMT

Starlink has a Texas factory but also makes routers in Vietnam.

27 Jul 2026 9:40pm GMT

Kennedy has focused on nutrition but has neglected food safety, critics say.

27 Jul 2026 8:42pm GMT

The Linux firmware update utility fwupd 2.1.7 introduces systemd-pcrlock integration, new security attributes, and multiple reliability fixes.

27 Jul 2026 6:01pm GMT