Microsoft is warning of an active scam that diverts employees' paycheck payments to attacker-controlled accounts after first taking over their profiles on Workday or other cloud-based HR services.

Payroll Pirate, as Microsoft says the campaign has been dubbed, gains access to victims’ HR portals by sending them phishing emails that trick the recipients into providing their credentials for logging in to the cloud account. The scammers are able to recover multi-factor authentication codes by using adversary-in-the-middle tactics, which work by sitting between the victims and the site they think they’re logging in to, which is, in fact, a fake site operated by the attackers.

Not all MFA is created equal

The attackers then enter the intercepted credentials, including the MFA code, into the real site. This tactic, which has grown increasingly common in recent years, underscores the importance of adopting FIDO-compliant forms of MFA, which are immune to such attacks.

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Odontotermes obesus is one of the termite species that grows fungi, called Termitomyces, in their mounds. Workers collect dead leaves, wood, and grass to stack them in underground fungus gardens called combs. There, the fungi break down the tough plant fibers, making them accessible for the termites in an elaborate form of symbiotic agriculture.

Like any other agriculturalist, however, the termites face a challenge: weeds. “There have been numerous studies suggesting the termites must have some kind of fixed response—that they always do the same exact thing when they detect weed infestation,” says Rhitoban Raychoudhury, a professor of biological sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education, “but that was not the case.” In a new Science study, Raychoudhury’s team discovered that termites have pretty advanced, surprisingly human-like gardening practices.

Going blind

Termites do not look like particularly good gardeners at first glance. They are effectively blind, which is not that surprising considering they spend most of their life in complete darkness working in endless corridors of their mounds. But termites make up for their lack of sight with other senses. "They can detect the environment based on advanced olfactory reception and touch, and I think this is what they use to identify the weeds in their gardens," Raychoudhury says. To learn how termites react once they detect a weed infestation, his team collected some Odontotermes obesus and challenged them with different gardening problems.

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Google is facing multiple antitrust actions in the US, and European regulators have been similarly tightening the screws. You can now add the UK to the list of Google's governmental worries. The country's antitrust regulator, known as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has confirmed that Google has "strategic market status," paving the way to more limits on how Google does business in the UK. Naturally, Google objects to this course of action.

The designation is connected to the UK's new digital markets competition regime, which was enacted at the beginning of the year. Shortly after, the CMA announced it was conducting an investigation into whether Google should be designated with strategic market status. The outcome of that process is a resounding "yes."

This label does not mean Google has done anything illegal or that it is subject to immediate regulation. It simply means the company has "substantial and entrenched market power" in one or more areas under the purview of the CMA. Specifically, the agency has found that Google is dominant in search and search advertising, holding a greater than 90 percent share of Internet searches in the UK.

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It feels like it was just yesterday that Sony hardware architect Mark Cerny was first teasing Sony's "PS4 successor" and its "enhanced ray-tracing capabilities" powered by new AMD chips. Now that we're nearly five full years into the PS5 era , it's time for Sony and AMD to start teasing the new chips that will power what Cerny calls "a future console in a few years' time."

In a quick nine-minute video posted Thursday , Cerny sat down with Jack Huynh, the senior VP and general manager of AMD's Computing and Graphics Group, to talk about "Project Amethyst," a co-engineering effort between both companies that was also teased back in July . And while that Project Amethyst hardware currently only exists in the form of a simulation, Cerny said that the "results are quite promising" for a project that's still in the "early days."

Mo’ ML, fewer problems?

Project Amethyst is focused on going beyond traditional rasterization techniques that don't scale well when you try to "brute force that with raw power alone," Huynh said in the video. Instead, the new architecture is focused on more efficient running of the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks behind AMD's FSR upscaling technology and Sony's similar PSSR system .

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OpenAI will finally stop saving most ChatGPT users' deleted and temporary chats after a court fight compelled the AI firm to retain the logs "indefinitely."

The preservation order came in a lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other news plaintiffs, who alleged that user attempts to skirt paywalls with ChatGPT would most likely set their chats as temporary or delete the logs.

OpenAI vowed to fight the order , defending its policies and users' privacy, but it lost . By July, news plaintiffs started digging through the logs —which only preserved ChatGPT's outputs—while a few ChatGPT users' efforts to intervene were consistently denied, as they were deemed non-parties to the lawsuit.

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Nevada state regulators have accused Elon Musk’s Boring Co. of violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times in the last two years as it digs a sprawling tunnel network beneath Las Vegas for its Tesla-powered “people mover.” The company’s alleged violations include starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water onto city streets and spilling muck from its trucks, according to a new document obtained by City Cast Las Vegas and ProPublica.

The September 22 cease-and-desist letter from the state Bureau of Water Pollution Control alleged repeated violations of a settlement agreement that the company had entered into after being fined five years ago for discharging groundwater into storm drains without a permit. That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws.

Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.

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The Chevrolet Bolt was one of the earliest electric vehicles to offer well over 200 miles (321 km) of range at a competitive price. For Ars, it was love at first drive , and that remained true from model year 2017 through MY2023. On the right tires, it could show a VW Golf GTI a thing or two , and while it might have been slow-charging, it could still be a decent road-tripper .

All of this helped the Bolt become General Motors' best-selling EV, at least until its used-to-be-called Ultium platform got up and running. And that's despite a costly recall that required replacing batteries in tens of thousands of Bolts because of some badly folded cells . But GM had other plans for the Bolt's factory, and in 2023, it announced its impending death .

The reaction from EV enthusiasts, and Bolt owners in particular, was so overwhelmingly negative that just a few months later, GM CEO Mary Barra backtracked, promising to bring the Bolt back , this time with a don't-call-it-Ultium-anymore battery.

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Welcome to Edition 8.14 of the Rocket Report! We're now more than a week into a federal government shutdown, but there's been little effect on the space industry. Military space operations are continuing unabated, and NASA continues preparations at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for the launch of the Artemis II mission around the Moon early next year. The International Space Station is still flying with a crew of seven in low-Earth orbit, and NASA's fleet of spacecraft exploring the cosmos remain active. What's more, so much of what the nation does in space is now done by commercial companies largely (but not completely) immune from the pitfalls of politics. But the effect of the shutdown on troops and federal employees shouldn't be overlooked. They will soon miss their first paychecks unless political leaders reach an agreement to end the stalemate.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Danger from dead rockets. A new listing of the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit is dominated by relics more than a quarter-century old, primarily dead rockets left to hurtle through space at the end of their missions, Ars reports . "The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," said Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented October 3 at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. "Seventy-six percent of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century, and 88 percent of the objects are rocket bodies. That's important to note, especially with some disturbing trends right now."

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On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 AM in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven’t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn’t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the same amount of shaking as a truck passing by. Still, this earthquake is notable, not because it was large but because it was small—and yet we know about it.

Over the past seven years, AI tools based on computer imaging have almost completely automated one of the fundamental tasks of seismology: detecting earthquakes. What used to be the task of human analysts—and later, simpler computer programs—can now be done automatically and quickly by machine learning tools.

These machine learning tools can detect smaller earthquakes than human analysts, especially in noisy environments like cities. Earthquakes give valuable information about the composition of the Earth and what hazards might occur in the future.

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