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The final ZeroF event introduced PFAS-free coatings for food packaging and upholstery textiles, exploring technical feasibility, regulatory alignment, consumer acceptance, and future market potential. The European research project ZeroF marked an important milestone at its last stakeholder event “PFAS FREE FUTURE – Safe and Sustainable Alternatives for Packaging and Textiles” held in Barcelona last November. After three years of EU- and Swiss-funded research, the project presents a PFAS-free coating solution for food packaging and upholstery textiles, showing promising progress in performance, safety and sustainability assessments, alignment with new EU regulations by 2030, and increased consumer awareness. Why PFAS-free matters now:…
January 14, 2026Ravi LakshmananApplication security/vulnerabilities Node.js has released an update that fixes an issue described as a critical security issue that affects “virtually all production Node.js apps.” Exploitation of this issue could lead to a denial of service (DoS) condition. “Node.js/V8 makes a best-effort attempt to recover from stack space exhaustion due to catchable errors, which frameworks rely on to ensure service availability,” Node.js’ Matteo Collina and Joyee Cheung said in a Tuesday update. “This attempt fails due to a bug that only reproduces when async_hooks are used, causing Node.js to exit directly at 7 without throwing a catchable error…
January 14, 2026Ravi LakshmananCyber espionage/threat intelligence The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has revealed details of a new cyberattack targeting the Armed Forces between October and December 2025 with malware known as PLUGGYAPE. This activity is believed with medium confidence to be the work of a Russian hacker group tracked as Void Blizzard (also known as Laundry Bear or UAC-0190). This threat actor is believed to have been active since at least April 2024. Attack chains distributing malware use instant messaging Signal and WhatsApp as vectors, with attackers posing as charity organizations persuading targets to click on seemingly…
With the help of more than 2 million citizen scientists and the legendary Arecibo Observatory, one of the largest searches for alien information in history is nearing completion.Launched in 1999, the SETI@Home project enlisted the help of millions of volunteers around the world to identify anomalous radio signals in data from the Arecibo Observatory, a giant radio telescope in Puerto Rico that collapsed in 2020 due to a cable failure. Although the project ended prematurely due to the disappearance of the telescope, citizen scientists still identified over 12 billion interesting signals from 21 years of data.Now, the researchers behind the…
Despite the intense public backlash against data centers over the past 12 months, all of the tech industry’s biggest companies have committed to building out additional AI infrastructure over the next year. This includes OpenAI partner Microsoft, which on Tuesday announced a so-called “community-first” approach to AI infrastructure. Microsoft’s announcement, coming just one day after Mark Zuckerberg said Meta would launch its own AI infrastructure program, is not unexpected. Last year, the company announced plans to spend billions of dollars to expand its AI capabilities. What’s a little unusual is the commitment the company is making now about how it…
Shortly after Google announced a new universal commerce protocol for its AI-powered shopping agents, consumer economic watchdog groups sounded the alarm. “Big news and bad news for consumers: Google today announced how it plans to integrate shopping into its AI services, including search and Gemini. Those plans include ‘personalized upsells,'” Lindsay Owens wrote in a viral post on X that has been viewed nearly 400,000 times on Sunday. That means analyzing your chat data and using it to overcharge you. ” Owens is executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a consumer economics think tank. Her concerns stem from looking at…
What does it take to bring a burnt-out founder back to the company he sold to Amazon? For Jamie Siminoff of video doorbell maker Ring, that’s the potential of AI. and the Palisades fire that destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring. Siminoff’s vision is to transform Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “intelligent assistant” that can be used throughout the home and beyond. Several new features that advance that goal, including fire alarms, “unusual event” alerts, conversational AI, and facial recognition capabilities, shipped just before this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Some of…
Dr. Sina Bali, a practicing surgeon and AI healthcare leader at data company iMerit, has seen firsthand how ChatGPT can mislead patients with incorrect medical advice. “I recently had a patient come in and recommend a medication, and a dialog printed from ChatGPT said that this medication had a 45% chance of pulmonary embolism,” Dr. Bari told TechCrunch. Upon further investigation, Dr. Bari discovered that the statistics were from a paper about the drug’s effects in a niche subgroup of tuberculosis patients and did not apply to his patients. Still, when OpenAI announced its purpose-built ChatGPT Health chatbot last week,…
New satellite images show that once the world’s largest iceberg, A23a, has turned into a beautiful mass of striped “blue mush”, signaling its imminent demise. This moribund ice mass, until recently three times the size of New York City, is one of the oldest ice masses on record and is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary.A23a is unique among icebergs. Dubbed the “Queen of the Icebergs,” the megaberg broke away from Antarctica’s Filchner-Ronne Ice Sheet in the summer of 1986, but quickly became stuck in place when its submerged bottom caught on the ocean floor. For most of the past 40…
January 13, 2026Ravi Lakshmanan Web security/data theft Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a large-scale web skimming campaign that has been active since January 2022, targeting several major payment networks, including American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB Co., Ltd., Mastercard, and UnionPay. “Enterprise organizations that are customers of these payment providers are likely to be most affected,” Silent Push said in a report released today. Digital skimming attacks refer to a category of client-side attacks in which a malicious party compromises a legitimate e-commerce site or payment portal and injects malicious JavaScript code that can covertly collect credit card information and other…