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You might think it’s pretty strange to hear the founders of VR companies and social media platforms complaining publicly that things were better in the dial-up era. Nevertheless, that’s what happened at CES on Wednesday, when Oculus developer Palmer Lackey and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian gave a joint talk on the joys of “technostalgia.” Luckey and Ohanian, who first made their fortune in VR and now run defense contractor Anduril, both seem to agree that “things were better in the old days.” The problem, however, is that Lucky and Ohanian weren’t actually criticizing the technology itself (Lucky said in his…
NASA announced on Wednesday (January 7) that an extravehicular activity outside the International Space Station (ISS) was postponed and the crew returned early due to a medical issue in an astronaut.The spacewalk was scheduled for 8 a.m. ET on Thursday (January 8) to complete preparations for the power channel where a new solar array will be installed on the ISS. American astronauts Mike Finke and Zena Cardman were scheduled to leave the space station in six-and-a-half hours on what would be Cardman’s first spacewalk. (Finke has already performed nine spacewalks.)NASA did not release the name of the crew member with…
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January 8, 2026Rabi LakshmananMalware/Financial Crime Cybersecurity researchers have revealed details of a new campaign that uses WhatsApp as a distribution vector for a Windows banking Trojan called Astaroth in an attack targeting Brazil. The campaign has been codenamed “Boto Cor-de-Rosa” by Acronis Threat Research Unit. “The malware obtains the victim’s WhatsApp contact list and automatically sends malicious messages to each contact to further spread the infection,” the cybersecurity firm said in a report shared with The Hacker News. “While the core Astaroth payload is still written in Delphi and its installer relies on Visual Basic scripts, the newly added WhatsApp-based…
A shock wave in the far reaches of space could be a precursor to the first known runaway supermassive black hole to escape from its host galaxy at 2.2 million miles per hour (3.6 million kilometers per hour).The possible confirmation from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), published on the preprint server Arxiv on December 3, has not yet been peer-reviewed. However, the paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and the study’s lead author, Peter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, has published several peer-reviewed papers on supermassive black hole candidates in recent…
Snowflake plans to acquire Observe, an observability platform built on Snowflake’s database from its inception. (Observability platforms help businesses monitor performance issues and bugs in their software systems and data.) The cloud data company announced on January 8 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, subject to regulatory approval. Snowflake will integrate Observe’s products into its products to provide customers with a unified location to collect and store telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces from software systems) to better discover potential bugs and issues in their data and software. Founded in 2017 by Jacob Leverich, Jonathan Trevor,…
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI will go to court after a US judge says there is evidence to support the billionaire’s case. Musk sued OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, claiming they breached their original contractual agreement by pursuing profit instead of the nonprofit’s founding mission of developing AI to benefit humanity. Musk, who started his own commercial company xAI, was an early financial backer and co-founder of OpenAI. Altman resigned from the board in 2018 after the company’s other co-founders rejected his nomination to be CEO. Musk has publicly cited Tesla’s own AI development for…
In a worst-case scenario, Earth-orbiting satellites could start colliding with each other within three days, setting off a runaway cascade that could render low Earth orbit (LEO) unusable, a new preprint study warns. According to the researchers’ new CRASH Clock, this is 125 days earlier than it would have been in an emergency just seven years ago.The number of spacecraft orbiting Earth is rapidly increasing thanks to the rise of satellite “megaconsets” such as SpaceX’s Starlink network. As of May 2025, there are at least 11,700 active satellites around Earth, most of them in LEO, or in the atmosphere up…
January 8, 2026Rabi LakshmananMalware/Threat Intelligence A China-affiliated threat actor known as UAT-7290 is believed to be conducting espionage-based infiltrations against organizations in South Asia and Southeast Europe. According to a Cisco Talos report published today, this activity cluster has been active since at least 2022 and primarily focuses on extensive technical reconnaissance of target organizations before launching attacks, ultimately leading to the deployment of malware families such as RushDrop, DriveSwitch, and SilentRaid. Researchers Asheer Malhotra, Vitor Ventura, and Brandon White said, “In addition to UAT-7290 burrowing deep into victim companies’ network infrastructure and conducting espionage-focused attacks, its tactics, techniques, procedures…
Investment in consumer technology startups has been stagnant since 2022 as turbulent macroeconomic conditions and rising inflation have made VCs wary of consumer purchasing power. Over the past few years, most AI investments have focused on acquiring enterprise customers that offer fat checks, multi-year contracts, and rapid scale-up paths. But one venture capital firm believes the consumer sector is gearing up for a comeback in 2026. “This is going to be the year of the consumer,” Vanessa Larco, a partner at venture firm Premise and a former partner at NEA, said on this week’s episode of the Equity podcast. Larco…