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Category: futurism – Page 657

U.S. Authorities Charge 6 Indian Call Centers Scamming Thousands of Americans

A number of India-based call centers and their directors have been indicted for their alleged role in placing tens of millions of scam calls aimed at defrauding thousands of American consumers.

The indictment charged Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki and their respective call centers for conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to U.S. citizens.

“Criminal India-based call centers defraud U.S. residents, including the elderly, by misleading victims over the telephone utilizing scams such as Social Security and IRS impersonation as well as loan fraud,” the U.S. Justice Department said in a release.

Russia is working on 120mm artillery firing guided-jet sliding ammo

Rostec and Russian MoD plan in 2022 to begin state tests of the latest Russian development in artillery defense — self-propelled airborne 120mm Lotus artillery.

MOSCOW, ($1=76.33 Russian Rubles) — The Russian state company Rostec and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation plan in 2022 to begin state tests of the latest Russian development in artillery defense – self-propelled airborne 120mm Lotus artillery. The information was disseminated by the state news agency TASS, based on a press release from Rostec.

Lotus self-propelled artillery is being developed for Russian special forces known as the Blue Berets. This type of weapon system is designed to destroy enemy artillery, tanks, manpower, command posts, and enemy defenses. The lotus is categorized as an air amphibious cannon, ie. can be parachuted from an airplane. In the future, the Russians will transport self-propelled artillery to the battlefield through the heavy military transport aircraft IL-76, which will be able to load and transport two Lotus artillery systems.

Zuckerberg loses $29 billion in net worth, Bezos gains $20 billion

When your net worth depends on the stock value of a company.

Feb 3 (Reuters) — Mark Zuckerberg lost $29 billion in net worth on Thursday as Meta Platforms Inc’s (FB.O) stock marked a record one-day plunge, while fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos was set to add $20 billion to his personal valuation after Amazon’s blockbuster earnings.

Meta’s stock fell 26%, erasing more than $200 billion in the biggest ever single-day market value wipeout for a U.S. company. That pulled down founder and Chief Executive Officer Zuckerberg’s net worth to $85 billion, according to Forbes.

Zuckerberg owns about 12.8% of the tech behemoth formerly known as Facebook.

UEFI firmware vulnerabilities affecting Fujitsu, Intel and more discovered

Researchers have discovered 23 “high-impact vulnerabilities” affecting any vendors that adopted Independent BIOS Developers (IBV) code into their Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware.

Binarly explained the vulnerabilities in a blog post this week, confirming that “all these vulnerabilities are found in several of the major enterprise vendor ecosystems” including Fujitsu, Siemens, Dell, HP, HPE, Lenovo, Microsoft, Intel and Bull Atos. CERT/CC confirmed that Fujitsu, Insyde and Intel were affected but left the others tagged as “unknown,” urging anyone affected to update to the latest stable version of firmware.

According to the blog, the majority of the vulnerabilities disclosed lead to code execution with SMM privileges and had severity ratings of between 7.5 — 8.2.