This hacker conference installed a literal antivirus monitoring system

This hacker conference installed a literal antivirus monitoring system

fivenewscrypto    novembre 25, 2025   

Hacker conferences—like all conventions—are notorious for giving attendees a parting gift of mystery illness. To combat “con crud,” New Zealand’s premier hacker conference, Kawaiicon, quietly launched a real-time, room-by-room carbon dioxide monitoring system for attendees.

To get the system up and running, event organizers installed DIY CO₂ monitors throughout the Michael Fowler Centre venue before conference doors opened on November 6. Attendees were able to check a public online dashboard for clean air readings for session rooms, kids’ areas, the front desk, and more, all before even showing up. “It’s ALMOST like we are all nerds in a risk-based industry,” the organizers wrote on the convention’s website.

“What they did is fantastic,” Jeff Moss, founder of the Defcon and Black Hat security conferences, told WIRED. “CO₂ is being used as an approximation for so many things, but there are no easy, inexpensive network monitoring solutions available. Kawaiicon building something to do this is the true spirit of hacking.”

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Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

fivenewscrypto    novembre 25, 2025   

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly.

An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”

Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.

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Why you don’t want to get tuberculosis on your penis

Why you don’t want to get tuberculosis on your penis

fivenewscrypto    novembre 24, 2025   

A man in Ireland earned the unpleasant distinction of developing an exceedingly rare infection on his penis—one that has a puzzling origin, but may be connected to his work with dead animals.

According to an article published in ASM Case Reports on Thursday, the 57-year-old man went to a hospital in Dublin after his penis became red, swollen, and painful over the course of a week. He also had a fever. Doctors promptly admitted him to the hospital and noted that he had received a kidney transplant 15 years prior. As such, he was on immunosuppressive drugs, which keep his body from rejecting the organ, but could also allow infections to run amok.

Initial blood work found hints of an infection, and the doctors initially suspected a bacterial skin infection (cellulitis) had taken hold in his nether region. So, they put him on some standard antibiotics for that. But his penis only got worse, redder, and more swollen. This prompted consultation with infectious disease doctors.

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Science-centric streaming service Curiosity Stream is an AI-licensing firm now

Science-centric streaming service Curiosity Stream is an AI-licensing firm now

fivenewscrypto    novembre 24, 2025   

We all know streaming services’ usual tricks for making more money: get more subscribers, charge those subscribers more money, and sell ads. But science streaming service Curiosity Stream is taking a new route that could reshape how streaming companies, especially niche options, try to survive.

Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks launched Curiosity Stream in 2015. The streaming service costs $40 per year, and it doesn’t have commercials.

The streaming business has grown to also include the Curiosity Channel TV channel. CuriosityStream Inc. also makes money through original programming and its Curiosity University educational programming. The firm turned its first positive net income in its fiscal Q1 2025, after about a decade of business.

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Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser

Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser

fivenewscrypto    novembre 24, 2025   

Over the past couple of weeks, friends and colleagues have made me aware of multiple ingeniously implemented, browser-based ways to play classic MS-DOS and Windows games with other people on basically any hardware.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were the peak of multiplayer gaming for me. It was the era of real-time strategy games and boomer shooters, and not only did I attend many LAN parties, but I also played online with friends.

That’s still possible today with several old-school games; there are Discord servers that arrange scheduled matches of Starsiege Tribes, for example. But oftentimes, it’s not exactly trivial to get those games running in modern Windows, and as in the old days, you might have some annoying network configuration work ahead of you—to say nothing of the fact that many folks who were on Windows back in those days are now on macOS or Linux instead.

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How to know if your Asus router is one of thousands hacked by China-state hackers

How to know if your Asus router is one of thousands hacked by China-state hackers

fivenewscrypto    novembre 24, 2025   

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said.

The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said. So far, it’s unclear what the attackers do after gaining control of the devices. SecurityScorecard has named the operation WrtHug.

Staying off the radar

SecurityScorecard said it suspects the compromised devices are being used similarly to those found in ORB (operational relay box) networks, which hackers primarily use to conduct espionage to conceal their identity.

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Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand

Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand

fivenewscrypto    novembre 24, 2025   

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. The comments show a rare look at what Google executives are telling its own employees internally. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides to its employees showing the company needs to scale “the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking “for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” he told employees during the meeting. “It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there.”

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