Hackers Exploit Websites To Give Them Excellent SEO Before Deploying Malware

schwit1 shares a report from ZDNet: Cyberattackers have turned to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to deploy malware payloads to as many victims as possible. According to Sophos, the so-called search engine “deoptimization” method includes both SEO tricks and the abuse of human psychology to push websites that have been compromised up Google’s rankings. SEO optimization is used by webmasters to…

Popular LA Restaurant Closes After High-Tech ‘Dine and Dash’ Scheme

quonset writes: “The Korean Fusion Cafe ‘Spoon by H’ had the ingredients to become an L.A. success story but is the epitome of a small business, with owner and chef Yoonjin Hwang working 15-hour days to run the restaurant with her mother and brother,” reports CBS News. “‘We have no staff. We have no cooks. I have to do everything by…

Linux Mint Developers Will Force Updates on Users Like Microsoft Does with Windows 10

AmiMoJo shares a report: Last month, the Linux Mint team published a post on the organization’s official blog about the importance of installing security updates on machines running the Linux distribution. The essence of the post was that a sizeable number of Linux Mint devices was running outdated applications, packages or even an outdated version of the operating system itself. A…

Through the looking glass: Artificial molecules open door to ultrafast polaritonic devices

Researchers from Skoltech and the University of Cambridge have shown that polaritons, the quirky particles that may end up running the quantum supercomputers of the future, can form structures behaving like molecules—and these “artificial molecules” can potentially be engineered on demand. The paper outlining these results was published in the journal Physical Review B. …

Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin’s total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK’s electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the…

The Perseverance Rover CPU Has Similar Specs To a Clamshell Ibook From 2001

An anonymous reader writes: NASA’s Perseverence rover, which is currently exploring Mars, has as it’s CPU a BAE Systems RAD 750 running at a 200 Mhz and featuring 256 Megabytes of RAM with 2 Gigabytes of storage. This is a radiation hardened version of the PowerPC G3, with specs roughly equivalent to the Clamshell Ibook that Reese Witherspoon used in Legally…

Smart TVs Running Google TV Will Have a ‘Basic’ Option

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you go out and purchase a new TV today, it’s going to have smart TV features allowing access to streaming services and the internet. However, if that new TV is running on the Google TV platform, it’s possible to easily disable all the smart features during setup. The option to make your TV dumb…

Amazon Prime Video Direct and the Dystopian Decision To Stop Accepting Documentaries

When Amazon made a unilateral decision in early February to stop accepting documentaries and short films via Prime Video Direct (a policy that also covers “slide shows, vlogs, podcasts, tutorials, filmed conferences, monologues, toy play, music videos, and voiceover gameplay”), the announcement also served as a quiet purge. Amazon also has been dropping long-running documentary titles from the service, with stakeholders…

Apple M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

Over the past week, some M1 Mac users have been reporting alarming SSD health readings, suggesting that these devices are writing extraordinary amounts of data to their drives. From a report: Across Twitter and the MacRumors forums, users are reporting that M1 Macs are experiencing extremely high drive writes over a short space of time. In what appear to be the…

Flash Version Distributed in China After EOL is Installing Adware

Although the Flash Player app formally reached its end of life on December 31, 2020, Adobe has allowed a local Chinese company to continue distributing Flash inside China, where the application still remains a large part of the local IT ecosystem and is broadly used across both the public and private sectors. From a report: Currently, this Chinese version of the…