Palantir abandons any attempt at curating nice
The mysterious miscreant who exploited a software vulnerability in Poly Network to drain $600m in crypto-assets, claims the Chinese blockchain company offered them $500,000 as a reward for discovering the weakness.
Most of the digital funds have been returned over several transactions. “We appreciate you sharing your experience and believe your action constitutes white hat behaviour ... Since, we believe your action is white hat behaviour, we plan to offer you a $500,000 bug bounty after you complete the refund fully,” the thief wrote in their transaction metadata, seemingly quoting or paraphrasing a message received from Poly Network.
The miscreant claims Poly Networks offered the money as part of a 'completely legal bounty reward,' and the biz told him it believed the massive heist 'is white hat behavior.' However, it appears the thief won't accept the bounty, and may instead send back the rest of the digital dosh.
NSFW Some internet clown has satirised current UK controversy over mapping app What3words by making a version that uses four swearwords to name each 3x3 metre block of Great Britain.
FourKingMaps, which appears to have been put together using the same basic principles as What3Words, copies the same basic approach as W3W but uses four words – and very sweary words at that.
Both sites work by breaking the UK up into 3x3m squares and assigning a unique combination of words to each one. For example, the tourist entrance to the Houses of Parliament is located at 'fiddlesticks.busty.suckmyass.barfface' or, in the W3W version, 'lions.banana.using'.
This week ended with two separate patent-related blows against Apple and Google in the United States.
On Friday, a jury in Texas awarded $300m in damages to Optis Wireless and its constellation of companies, to be paid by Apple because the 4G/LTE tech in its iPhones, iPads, and Watches were deemed to have infringed Optis' communications patents.
Optis last year scored $506m in damages from the Cupertino giant. Apple later persuaded District Judge Rodney Gilstrap to order a retrial. Specifically, a retrial to come up with a damages figure that properly took FRAND into account – the notion that standards-essential patents are licensed on a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory basis.
AlgorithmWatch, a non-profit group based in Germany, said it has been forced to end its efforts to monitor Instagram's newsfeed after parent company Facebook intervened.
In July, the advocacy organization shuttered its Instagram transparency project, launched in March, 2020, because of alleged veiled legal threats after Facebook claimed the group's data-collecting browser extension violated its Terms of Service and Europe's GDPR.
'On 13 July, we took the decision to terminate the project and delete any collected data (media partners still have fully anonymized versions of the data),' said Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a data journalist with AlgorithmWatch, in a blog post published on Friday. 'Ultimately, an organization the size of AlgorithmWatch cannot risk going to court against a company valued at one trillion dollars.'
Analysis Amazon Game Studios has reportedly dropped terms in its employment contract that gave the internet giant a license to the intellectual property created by employees, even to games they develop on their own time.
The expansive contractual terms received some attention last month when James Liu, a software engineer at Google, recounted via Twitter how in 2018 he turned down a job offer at Amazon 'due to absolutely draconian rules regarding hobbyist game dev.'
His Twitter post from July 6, 2021, since deleted, included a screenshot of a contractual agreement that laid out specific terms by which employees were allowed to develop or release 'Personal Games.'
Boeing's troubled CST-100 Starliner capsule, once expected to ferry astronauts to and from space, is heading back to the workshop after suffering mechanical failures.
The spacecraft's second unmanned flight test was supposed to take place this month though that launch was delayed, and now scrapped, after 13 of the valves controlling the propulsion system used for maneuvering failed a pre-flight check. Although attempts were made to fix the issue on-site, in a press conference on Friday Boeing said it was decoupling the capsule from its Atlas V booster and will be going back to the shop for a rethink.
“Mission success in human spaceflight depends on thousands of factors coming together at the right time,” said John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program. “We’ll continue to work the issue from the Starliner factory and have decided to stand down for this launch window to make way for other national priority missions.”
Opinion NASA's relationship with its Russian International Space Station (ISS) partner is under a similar strain to, say, an orbiting outpost that has been given a surprise spin by a malfunctioning module.
The module in question is, of course, the long-delayed Nauka, which made an automatic docking to the ISS on 29 July before sending the complex on a wilder-than-desired ride a few hours later.
Despite reassuring noises from NASA, the incident was a near-disaster for the ISS as Nauka's thrusters began firing, slowly rotating the station.
Britain's tax collection agency has handed £150m in contracts to integrator and consultant Cognizant, including work to assist with the implementation of Pega low-code and automation systems.
Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) split that deal in two, awarding a £90m portion for building and supporting the Case Management Delivery Group's (CMDG) Pega Technology Stack.
'The majority of the projected outcome-based work will be 'build' related activities funded through relevant business projects,' the tender notice states.
A job ad blunder by the UK's Ministry of Defence has accidentally revealed the existence of a secret SAS mobile hacker squad.
The secretive Computer Network Operations (CNO) Exploitation Unit had its cover blown on the MoD's external job ad website, as spotted by the ever eagle-eyed Alan Turnbull of Secret Bases.
Based in Hereford, the £33k-per-year post was to be filled by an 'extraordinary talented electronics engineer' [sic] to 'work alongside some of the best scientists and engineers within defence and will be tasked with delivering prototype solutions directly to the soldiers and officers of a unique and specialised military unit.'
Microsoft has released a number of Windows 11 updates even as it acknowledges yet more holes found in its flagship operating systems by researchers.
Build 22000.132 hit the Windows Insider Dev Channel overnight. The usual raft of tweaks and improvements included a fix for an explorer.exe crash in the Windows Sandbox and Chat from Microsoft Teams was made available to customers in the Beta Channel.
The emission was accompanied by updates for some of the apps that remain in the Windows 11 box (for Dev Channel Insiders only at present). The old Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch apps have been replaced by a new Snipping Tool app 'that represents the best experiences of both apps in the next evolution of screen capture for Windows,' according to Microsoft. The Mail and Calendar apps have been given the Windows theme and rounded corner treatment. Finally, the open-sourced Calculator app has been warmed over.
UK water company United Utilities is in the market for control, monitoring and analytics platforms in a deals that could be worth up to £270m.
In a tender document, the £1.8bn-revenue company said its ambition was 'to drive digital transformation, systems thinking and improved service for our stakeholders, customers and community by development of our advanced analytics and information management capabilities, using data tools and skills to deliver ethical insight and competitive advantage.'
The utility firm, which supplies around 1.8 billion litres of water every day, said that with increasing complexity and variety of data available and rapid technological development of sensor and data technology, it needed 'to facilitate the processing and analysis of more data in more complex forms.'