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IMF warns Afghanistan's economic slump will impact neighbours Published

Afghanistan's economic woes could fuel a refugee crisis impacting neighbouring countries, Turkey and Europe, the International Monetary Fund has said.
The economy will contract by up to 30% this year - which could push millions into poverty and cause a humanitarian crisis, the fund warned. The IMF said Afghanistan's neighbours would be further hit because they rely on its funds for trade. Bordering Tajikistan has said it can't afford to take in many more refugees. With foreign assets frozen and most non-humanitarian aid halted, inflows of cash to Afghanistan have all but dried up. In its regional economic outlook, the fund said: "A large influx of refugees could put a burden on public resources in refugee-hosting countries, fuel labour market pressures, and lead to social tensions, underscoring the need for assistance from the international community."

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Google's Pixel 6 processor brings AI photo features

Google has unveiled its latest smartphone, containing the tech giant's first self-designed computer chip.
The Pixel 6 contains Google's "Tensor" processor, which it says enables new phone features powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. It is also the first phone in the series with a "Pro" model, designed to compete at the high end of the market. "The whole goal when we started was to reach this point," said Rick Osterloh, Google's head of devices. "Really, this is our original vision that we're finally able to get to after building a lot of capabilities both in technology and in product development capabilities," he told the BBC.

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Facebook to hire 10,000 in EU to work on metaverse

Facebook is planning to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to develop a so-called metaverse.
A metaverse is an online world where people can game, work and communicate in a virtual environment, often using VR headsets. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a leading voice on the concept. The announcement comes as Facebook deals with the fallout of a damaging scandal and faces increased calls for regulation to curb its influence. "The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities. And Europeans will be shaping it right from the start," Facebook said in a blog post. The new jobs being created over the next five years will include "highly specialised engineers".

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Robert Durst: US millionaire sentenced to life for murder

US real estate heir Robert Durst, subject of HBO crime documentary series The Jinx, has been sentenced to life in prison for killing his best friend.
Durst was found guilty of killing Susan Berman in 2000 to stop her talking to police about his wife's disappearance. Then aged 55, she was found shot in the head in her Beverly Hills home. Police believe he killed two others as well. In a victim impact statement in court, Berman's son told Durst "you murdered the person I was" when he killed her. Prosecutors called Durst, 78 - who appeared in the Los Angeles court for his sentencing - a "narcissistic psychopath". Durst has denied killing his friend. His sentence for first-degree murder excludes any possibility of parole, meaning he will now very likely die in prison. The crime carries special circumstances, the jury decided, including murder while lying in wait, and murder of a witness. Durst's lawyers told the judge on Thursday that he intends to appeal his conviction. Durst himself spoke to the judge only once to say "yes" when asked if he was waiving his right to appear at a future hearing.

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Passengers couldn’t fly after NHS vaccine passport went offline

Outage lasted approximately 4 hours, causing issues with health app.
England's COVID Pass system went offline for hours on Wednesday, causing British travelers to remain stranded at airports. Some passengers couldn't board their flights, while others suffered delays as both the National Health Service (NHS) website and app experienced issues. An NHS system outage lasting approximately four hours left many British travelers unable to access their vaccination records and present their COVID Pass to the airlines. Prior to letting passengers board, most airlines in the UK require proof of vaccination in printed or digital form. But those without a paper copy were left in limbo as the NHS smartphone app kept throwing up errors.

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Walrus counting from space: How many tusked beasts do you see?

A new project aims to get a better idea of the number of walruses on Earth by counting them from space.
Volunteers are being sought to search through thousands of satellite images to see how many of the tusked animals they can spot. Scientists need improved population data as they try to asses how this polar keystone species will be affected by climate change. Walruses are heavily dependent on sea-ice, which has been in sharp retreat. The marine mammals will haul out on to the floes, to use them as a platform on which to rest and raise their young, and as a base from which to launch foraging trips. A walrus will drop to the seabed to hunt in the muds for clams and other invertebrates, such as snails, soft shell crabs and shrimp. All this is being made more difficult as the extent of the seasonal sea-ice declines.

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Firms call for help over surging gas prices

Industries hit by soaring energy costs have made another appeal to the government for action.
Talks with ministers will continue on Monday over a crisis that has sparked warnings about some factories. Sectors such as ceramics, paper and steel manufacturing have called for a price cap, though talks with government on Friday failed to reach a solution. The Treasury has denied being in detailed talks with Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng about the crisis. Dave Dalton, chief executive of the British Glass trade body, called that "very alarming". He was part of Friday's talks with Mr Kwarteng, but told the BBC the meeting "was very much an introductory one. We did not get to specifics".

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US gov’t will slap contractors with civil lawsuits for hiding breaches

Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative mandates data-breach reporting for gov't contractors.
In a groundbreaking initiative announced by the Department of Justice this week, federal contractors will be sued if they fail to report a cyber attack or data breaches. The newly introduced "Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative" will leverage the existing False Claims Act to pursue contractors and grant recipients involved in what the DOJ calls "cybersecurity fraud." Usually, the False Claims Act is used by the government to tackle civil lawsuits over false claims made in relation to federal funds and property connected with government programs. "For too long, companies have chosen silence under the mistaken belief that it is less risky to hide a breach than to bring it forward and to report it,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, who is pioneering the initiative. "Well, that changes today. We are announcing today that we will use our civil enforcement tools to pursue companies, those who are government contractors who receive federal funds, when they fail to follow required cybersecurity standards—because we know that puts all of us at risk. This is a tool that we have to ensure that taxpayer dollars are used appropriately and guard the public fisc and public trust."

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China's Moon mission returned youngest ever lavas

The rock samples brought back from the Moon in December by China's Chang'e-5 mission were really young.
It's all relative, of course, but the analysis shows the basalt material - the solidified remnants of a lava flow - to be just two billion years old. Compare this with the samples returned by the Apollo astronaut missions. They were all over three billion years of age. The findings are reported in the journal Science. China's robotic Chang'e-5 mission was sent to a site on the lunar nearside called Oceanus Procellarum. It was carefully chosen to add to the sum of knowledge gained from previous sample returns - the last of which was conducted by a Soviet probe in 1976.

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Tesla: Elon Musk says company headquarters will move to Texas

Tesla has announced it will move its company headquarters to Texas from California.
Chief executive Elon Musk announced the move at the electric carmaker's annual shareholders' meeting in Austin. Mr Musk had fallen out with local politicians in Alameda county, California, the location of a key Tesla factory, over its Covid response. He gave several reasons for the move, telling shareholders its Californian factory in Fremont was "jammed". California was also a difficult place for his employees to find affordable housing, he told shareholders. "There's a limit to how big you can scale it in the Bay Area. In Austin our factory is like five minutes from the airport, 15 minutes from downtown," he said. The billionaire technology entrepreneur has had an fractious relationship at times with California.

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Stink bug discovery raises fears of threat to crops

A stink bug that can spoil crops and infest homes has been trapped in Surrey as part of a monitoring study.
The brown marmorated stink bug is native to Asia, but has spread to parts of Europe and the US, where it can destroy fruit crops. A lone stink bug was caught at RHS Garden Wisley this summer within weeks of the setting up of a pheromone trap. The adult may be a stowaway brought in on imported goods or part of an undiscovered local population. Dr Glen Powell, head of plant health at RHS Garden Wisley, said the stink bug may become commonplace in gardens and in homes within a decade. "This isn't a sudden invasion but potentially a gradual population build-up and spread, exacerbated by our warming world," he said.

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Twitch source code, creator earnings exposed in 125GB leak

Twitch confirms the data breach but is investigating the full extent.
Live video broadcasting service Twitch has been hit by a massive hack that exposed 125GB of the company's data. In a 4chan thread posted (and removed) Wednesday, an anonymous user posted a torrent file of the data dump. The dump contains the company's source code and details of money earned by Twitch creators. In a 4chan post seen by Ars today, an anonymous user claimed to leak 125GB of data lifted from 6,000 internal Twitch Git repositories. The forum poster mocked Amazon's acquisition of Twitch, writing, "Jeff Bezos paid $970 million for this, we're giving it away FOR FREE."

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'Chief dragon' is UK's oldest meat-eating dinosaur

More than half a century after first being unearthed from a Welsh quarry, four small fossil fragments have finally been assigned to a new species of dinosaur.
Researchers from London's Natural History Museum say Pendraig milnerae is the oldest meat-eating dinosaur ever discovered in the UK. It existed over 200 million years ago, their analysis suggests. The name Pendraig means "chief dragon" in Middle Welsh. The animal was very likely the apex, or top, predator in its environment. That said, it wasn't exactly a giant. Think of something chicken-sized with a very long tail. "It was a typical theropod; so, a meat-eating dinosaur that walked around on two legs, like T. rex or Velociraptor that you'll know from the movies, but much earlier in time," explained the NHM's Dr Stephan Spiekman.

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Company that routes SMS for all major US carriers was hacked for five years

.Syniverse and carriers haven't revealed whether text messages were exposed.
Syniverse, a company that routes hundreds of billions of text messages every year for hundreds of carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, revealed to government regulators that a hacker gained unauthorized access to its databases for five years. Syniverse and carriers have not said whether the hacker had access to customers' text messages. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week said that "in May 2021, Syniverse became aware of unauthorized access to its operational and information technology systems by an unknown individual or organization. Promptly upon Syniverse's detection of the unauthorized access, Syniverse launched an internal investigation, notified law enforcement, commenced remedial actions and engaged the services of specialized legal counsel and other incident response professionals."

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Record number of China planes enter Taiwan air defence zone

Taiwan has urged Beijing to stop "irresponsible provocative actions" after a record number of Chinese warplanes entered its air defence zone.
Monday's incursion marks the fourth straight day of incursions by Chinese aircraft, with almost 150 aircraft sent into Taiwan's defence zone in total. Some analysts say the flights could be seen as a warning to Taiwan's president ahead of the island's national day. Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway province. However, democratic Taiwan sees itself as a sovereign state. Taiwan has been reporting for more than a year that China's air force has been repeatedly flying nearby.

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Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are down. Here’s what we know [Updated]

The root cause of the worldwide outage appears to be a flubbed BGP route update.
DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service that translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn't know how to get to the servers that host the website you're looking for. The problem goes deeper than Facebook's obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook's own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 failures (no server is available for the request) instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services' load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

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Facebook and some of its apps go down simultaneously

Facebook and some of its apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, appeared to go down on Monday for many users, who turned to Twitter and other social media platforms to lament the outage
The social network and its apps began displaying error messages before noon Eastern time, users reported. All of the company’s family of apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — showed outage reports, according to the site downdetector.com, which monitors web traffic and site activity. It was unclear what the cause of the error messages were. Outages are not uncommon for apps, but to have so many interconnected apps at the world’s largest social media company go down at the same time is rare.

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Squid Game subtitles 'change meaning' of Netflix show

Squid Game's "botched" subtitles have changed the show's meaning for English-speaking viewers, some Korean-speaking fans say.
The Korean-language drama is about an alternative world where people in debt compete in deadly games. But fluent Korean speaker Youngmi Mayer claims the closed-caption subtitles in English are "so bad" that the original meaning is often lost. Netflix hasn't yet responded to Newsbeat's request for a comment. The series has proved hugely popular since its release last month and is on track to beat Bridgerton to become Netflix's biggest original series. The plot sees a group of people tempted into a survival game where they have the chance to walk away with 45.6 billion Korean won (£29m) if they win a series of six games.

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Researcher refuses Telegram’s bounty award, discloses auto-delete bug

Telegram took months to fix "self-destruct" message bug. Then requested silence.
Telegram patched another image self-destruction bug in its app earlier this year. This flaw was a different issue from the one reported in 2019. But the researcher who reported the bug isn't pleased with Telegram's months-long turnaround time—and an offered $1,159 (€1,000) bounty award in exchange for his silence. Like other messaging apps, Telegram allows senders to set communications to "self-destruct," such that messages and any media attachments are automatically deleted from the device after a set period of time. Such a feature offers extended privacy to both the senders and the recipients intending to communicate discreetly.

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Russia arrests cybersecurity expert on treason charge

Ilya Sachkov is founder of Group-IB, which specializes in ransomware attack prevention.
The founder of one of Russia’s largest cybersecurity companies has been arrested on suspicion of state treason and will be held in a notorious prison run by the security services for the next two months, a Moscow court said on Wednesday. The charges against Ilya Sachkov, founder of Group-IB, are classified and details of them were not immediately clear. State-run news agency Tass cited an anonymous source who said Sachkov denied passing on secret information to foreign intelligence services. Group-IB, which specializes in preventing cybercrime and ransomware, confirmed that law enforcement raided its officers yesterday but said it did not know the reason for Sachkov’s arrest. “Group-IB’s team is confident in the innocence of the company’s CEO and his business integrity,” the company said in a statement.