Five malicious dropper Android apps with over 130,000 cumulative installations have been discovered on the Google Play Store distributing banking trojans like SharkBot and Vultur, which are capable of stealing financial data and performing on-device fraud.
“These droppers continue the unstopping evolution of malicious apps sneaking to the official store,” Dutch mobile security firm ThreatFabric told The Hacker News in a statement.
“This evolution includes following newly introduced policies and masquerading as file managers and overcoming limitations by side-loading the malicious payload through the web browser.”
There is a mix of excitement and fear and lots of memes.
After much back and forth and a lawsuit, four days ago, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of the social media platform Twitter. Musk had put the deal on hold after his initial offer earlier this year. Later he backed out, citing a high number of fake or spam accounts on the platform, a point that then-CEO Aggarwal had publicly denied.
Musk was then taken to court by Twitter’s lawyers. The court had given the two parties time till the month’s end to work out a deal.
As soon as Musk acquired Twitter, he proceeded to fire CEO Parag Aggarwal, finance executive Ned Segal, and legal and policy executive Vijaya Gadde.
Billionaire CEO Elon Musk has finally bought Twitter after a long saga of back-and-forth negotiations and even a lawsuit. The internet is both excited and afraid, and people are expressing their opinions in all kinds of ways.
Researchers find that a phenomenon called multifractality manifests in the conductance fluctuations of a 2D electron gas as the gas undergoes a topological phase transition.
Fractals are geometric patterns that repeat themselves across different length scales. Such patterns are ubiquitous, appearing in the outlines of snowflakes, in swirls of turbulent fluids, and in graphs tracing the highs and lows of financial markets. Now Aveek Bid and his colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore show that fractals can also emerge in the electrical-conductance fluctuations of a 2D electron gas in graphene as the electron gas transitions between two topological phases [1]. The results confirm predictions made earlier this year [2].
Subject a 2D electron gas to a strong perpendicular magnetic field, and its Hall conductance—the conductance perpendicular to an induced current—takes on certain discrete values. But during a transition from one discrete value to another, this conductance can exhibit fluctuations. Bid and his colleagues measured these fluctuations in the 2D electron gases of two graphene-based devices. Using detailed data analysis, they determined that the conductance fluctuations contained patterns that could be accurately described by a multifractal—a fractal that scales spatially in several different ways.
With his Twitter takeover set to be completed this week, Elon Musk has outlined some of his vision for the social media giant. Speaking on Twitter (where else?) Musk claimed that he didn’t buy Twitter for financial gain, but he do so to “try to help humanity.”
Addressing his message to advertisers on the platform, the multi-billionaire said he believes “the relentless pursuit of clicks” has ultimately resulted in the extreme political polarization we see around the world today. While this is good for profits, Musk argues, it results in meaningful dialogue being lost.
Protecting People, Society & Environment — Lydie Evrard, Deputy Director General; Head, Department of Nuclear Safety & Security, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Ms. Evrard’s department focuses on the protection of people, society and the environment from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation, whether the cause is an unsafe act or a security breach, and her team aims to provide a strong, sustainable and visible global nuclear safety and security framework. Her department was created in 1996 as a response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Prior to joining the IAEA, Ms. Evrard held the role of Commissioner at the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN).
Ms. Evrard started her career in the field of engineering, joining the French Ministry of Energy as an engineer and she has worked extensively in the regulatory field over the last 25 years in positions including as Unit Head at the Industry, Research and the Environment Direction of France’s Ministry of the Environment (Paris Region); Deputy Head of the Paris Region Division of the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) and subsequently Head of the Authority’s waste, decommissioning, fuel cycle facilities, research facilities and contaminated soils remediation Department. At the ASN, Ms. Evrard handled both radiation protection and nuclear safety issues. In particular, she led, together with counterparts at the Ministry of Energy, the 2013–2015 national plan for the management of radioactive materials and waste and coordinated the stress tests performed on research and fuel cycle facilities, following the Fukushima Daiichi accident.
Edward Boyden is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. A professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, Edward Boyden explains how humanity is only at its infancy in merging with machines. His work is leading him towards the development of a “brain co-processor”, a device that interacts intimately with the brain to upload and download information to and from it, augmenting human capabilities in memory storage, decision making, and cognition. The first step, however, is understanding the brain on a much deeper level. With the support of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, Ed Boyden pursued a PhD in neurosciences from Stanford University.
The Hertz Foundation mission is to provide unique financial and fellowship support to the nation’s most remarkable PhD students in the hard sciences. Hertz Fellowships are among the most prestigious in the world, and the foundation has invested over $200 million in Hertz Fellows since 1963 (present value) and supported over 1,100 brilliant and creative young scientists, who have gone on to become Nobel laureates, high-ranking military personnel, astronauts, inventors, Silicon Valley leaders, and tenured university professors. For more information, visit hertzfoundation.org.
TRANSCRIPT
Edward Boyden: Humans and machines have been merging for thousands of years. Right now I’m wearing shoes, I have a microphone on my jacket, we all probably used our phones at least once today… And we communicate with the augmentation of all sorts of amplification and even translation technologies: You can speak into a machine, and it’ll translate the words you’re saying in nearly real time.
So I think what might be different in the years to come is a matter of degree, not a matter of kind. One concept that I think is emerging is what I like to call the brain coprocessor, a device that intimately interacts with the brain. It can upload information to the brain and download information from it. Imagine that you could have a technology that could replace lost memories or augment decision making or boost attention or cognition. To do that though we have to understand how the brain works at a very deep level.
Although over a third of a million patients have had brain implants or neural implants that stimulate the nervous system, so far they’ve operated in an open-loop fashion. That is, they drive activity in the brain, but not in a fully-responsive fashion. What we want to do is to have bi-directional communication to the brain: Can you read and write information continuously, and supply—maybe through coupling these interfaces to silicon computers— exactly the information the brain needs?
The Inaugural Rejuvenation Startup Summit 2022, brought to you by the Forever Healthy Foundation, took place with over 400 participants from over 30 countries in October. It is a vibrant networking event that aims to accelerate the development of the rejuvenation biotech industry. The Summit brings together startups, members of the longevity venture capital / investor ecosystem, and researchers interested in founding or joining a startup – all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan. We started to publish videos with a first set of selected speakers on the 2022 summit:
Elon Musk made a bold prediction during Tesla’s Q3 2022 earnings call stating that Tesla would grow to become an enormous company by the end of this decade.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk dazzled and entertained listeners during the call, which was full of jokes and ambitious goals. That’s when he made the bold statement that Tesla could surpass both Apple and Saudi Aramco’s market cap in the future.
Back in 2017, Elon Musk said Tesla would exceed Apple’s market cap of $700 billion in just a few years. Tesla did just that back in 2020 during its glorious bull run and hit the $1 trillion mark during the height of the 2021 stock market bull run.
Dr. Ben Goertzel, a self-described Cosmist and Singularitarian, is one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial general intelligence (AGI), natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, and virtual worlds and gaming He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles.
Dr. Ben Goertzel, a self-described Cosmist and Singularitarian, is one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial general intelligence (AGI), natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, and virtual worlds and gaming He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles.
