Rent a Cyber Friend pays to talk to strangers online and shows off its platform at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025
Francesco Vitali will be the first to admit that he didn’t fully understand the idea of Rent a Cyber Friend when his co-founder Chris Siametis first pitched it to him. “Who would pay to talk to someone?” Vitali told TechCrunch. “But Chris was stubborn. Chris is a Millennial and I’m a Gen Xer, so it […]
Era of reionization: Astronomers look for signals from ‘one of the most unexplored epochs in the universe’
The young universe may have been boiling over long before starlight first filled the universe, according to a new study. The discovery suggests that some 800 million years after the Big Bang, energy from newborn black holes and the dying embers of the first stars was already warming vast clouds of intergalactic hydrogen gas, offering […]
Iran’s volcano appears to have woken up – 700,000 years after its last eruption
A volcano in southern Iran that was thought to have disappeared about 710,000 years ago is trembling. A new study published Oct. 7 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the ground near the summit of Taftan Volcano rose 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) over a 10-month period from July 2023 to May 2024. The […]
A new wave of social media apps brings hope to a world of doomscrolling
Zehra Naqvi remembers the magical days of the early social internet. She grew up in One Direction and Marvel fandom in the early 2010s. This was back when people were posting photos of their lattes on Instagram with Valencia filters, and Twitter was still Twitter, a place where people came together to exchange jokes and […]
Deal reaches valuation of $17.3 billion after raising $300 million from major venture capital
While it was interesting for the tech industry to watch payroll giants Deal and Rippling sue each other over corporate espionage scandals, top venture capital firms apparently aren’t too scared. Deel announced Thursday that it has raised $300 million in a Series E round co-led by A-list fintech venture capital firms Ribbit Capital and Andreessen […]
Apple loses another AI executive to meta
Apple executive Ke Yang, who is leading the iPhone maker’s efforts to build AI-driven web search, is going meta, Bloomberg reports. Yang’s departure is the latest in a series of departures from Apple’s AI division, putting the company in jeopardy ahead of a long-awaited Siri overhaul scheduled for March. Ruoming Pang, Apple’s former head of […]
Black eyes, orbital fractures, and retinal detachments: Pickleball-related eye injuries are on the rise in the U.S.
As pickleball’s popularity explodes in the United States, new research has found that pickleball-related eye injuries are increasing at an “alarming rate.” More people in the United States are taking up pickleball as a leisure activity, with recent estimates showing that 19.8 million people will participate in the sport in 2024, an increase of about […]
A record-breaking ‘dark object’ hidden inside the distorted ‘Einstein ring’ 10 billion light years away is discovered
Astronomers have discovered a surprisingly small “dark object” lurking in a distant, distorted ring of light. This record-breaking discovery could help unravel the mysterious nature of dark matter, which will have a major impact on the field of cosmology. The hidden object, possibly an invisible mass of dark matter, was discovered inside B1938+666, an “Einstein […]
North Korean hackers use EtherHiding to hide malware inside blockchain smart contracts
October 16, 2025Ravi LakshmananMalware/Blockchain Threat actors associated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (also known as North Korea) have been observed leveraging the EtherHiding technique to distribute malware and enable the theft of cryptocurrencies, marking the first time a state-sponsored hacker group has employed this technique. This activity has been attributed to the threat […]
Hackers exploit blockchain smart contracts to spread malware via infected WordPress sites
A financially motivated attacker, codenamed UNC5142, has been observed exploiting blockchain smart contracts as a way to facilitate the distribution of information stealers such as Atomic (AMOS), Lumma, Rhadamanthys (aka RADTHIEF), and Vidar, targeting both Windows and Apple macOS systems. “UNC5142 is characterized by the use of ‘EtherHiding,’ a technique used to place and hide […]