For decades, satellites, drones , and human spotters have all been part of war’s surveillance and reconnaissance tool kit. In an age of cheap, insecure, Internet-connected consumer devices, however, militaries have gained another powerful set of eyes on the ground: every hackable security camera installed outside a home or on a city street, pointed at potential bombing targets.

On Wednesday, Tel Aviv–based security firm Check Point released new research describing hundreds of hacking attempts that targeted consumer-grade security cameras around the Middle East —with many apparently timed to Iran's recent missile and drone strikes on targets that included Israel, Qatar, and Cyprus. Those camera-hijacking efforts, some of which Check Point has attributed to a hacker group that's been previously linked to Iranian intelligence, suggest that Iran's military has tried to use civilian surveillance cameras as a means to spot targets, plan strikes, or assess damage from its attacks as it retaliates for the US and Israeli bombings that have sparked a widening war in the region.

Iran wouldn't be the first to adopt that camera-hacking surveillance tactic. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Israeli military had accessed “nearly all” the traffic cameras in Iran's capital of Tehran and, in partnership with the CIA, used them to target the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In Ukraine, the country's officials have warned for years that Russia has hacked consumer surveillance cameras to target strikes and spy on troop movements—while Ukrainian hackers have hijacked Russian cameras to surveil Russian troops and perhaps even to monitor its own attacks .

Read full article

Comments

In his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck wrote of loss, "It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."

The death of NASA's Exploration Upper Stage today represents the inverse of that sentiment. The world of spaceflight is so much brighter now that its light has gone out.

The rocket's death came via a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: "NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA)."

Read full article

Comments

Planet Labs, one of the world's leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.

The company, which brands itself as Planet, operates a fleet of several hundred Earth-imaging satellites designed to record views of every landmass on Earth at least once per day. Its customers include think tanks, NGOs, academic institutions, news media, and commercial users in the agriculture, forestry, and energy industries, among others.

Planet also holds lucrative contracts selling overhead imagery to the US military and US government intelligence agencies.

Read full article

Comments

Until 1970, the US dumped an estimated 17,000 tons of unspent chemical weapons from World War I and II off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean—and that disposal decision continues to haunt commercial fishing operations.

In an article published this week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, health officials from New Jersey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that there were at least three incidents of commercial fishing crews dredging up dangerous chemical warfare munitions (CWMs) off the coast of New Jersey between 2016 and 2023.

The three incidents exposed at least six crew members to mustard agent, which causes blistering chemical burns on skin and mucous membranes. (An example of these types of burns can be seen here , but be warned, the image is graphic.) One crew member required overnight treatment in an emergency department for respiratory distress and second-degree blistering burns. Another was burned so badly that they were hospitalized in a burn center and required skin grafting and physical therapy.

Read full article

Comments

The command line is hot again. For some people, command lines were never not hot, of course, but it's becoming more common now in the age of AI. Google launched a Gemini command line tool last year, and now it has a new AI-centric command line option for cloud products. The new Google Workspace CLI bundles the company's existing cloud APIs into a package that makes it easy to integrate with a variety of AI tools, including OpenClaw. How do you know this setup won't blow up and delete all your data? That's the fun part—you don't.

There are some important caveats with the Workspace tool. While this new GitHub project is from Google, it's "not an officially supported Google product." So you're on your own if you choose to use it. The company notes that functionality may change dramatically as Google Workspace CLI continues to evolve, and that could break workflows you've created in the meantime.

For people who are interested in tinkering with AI automations and don't mind the inherent risks, Google Workspace CLI has a lot to offer even at this early stage. It includes the APIs for every Workspace product, including Gmail, Drive, and Calendar. It's designed for use by humans and AI agents, but like everything else Google does now, there's a clear emphasis on AI.

Read full article

Comments

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered federal agencies to patch three critical iOS vulnerabilities that were exploited over a 10-month span in hacking campaigns conducted by three distinct groups.

The hacking campaigns came to light on Thursday in a report published by Google. All three campaigns used Coruna, the name of an advanced hacking kit that amassed 23 separate iOS exploits into five potent exploit chains. While some of the vulnerabilities had been exploited as zero-days in earlier, unrelated campaigns, all had been patched by the time Google observed them being exploited by Coruna. When used against older iOS versions, the kit nonetheless posed a formidable threat given the high caliber of the exploit code and the wide range of capabilities.

The case of the promiscuous 2nd-hand zero-days

“The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits,” Google researchers wrote. “The exploits feature extensive documentation, including docstrings and comments authored in native English. The most advanced ones are using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.”

Read full article

Comments

On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a binary asteroid system . By intentionally ramming a probe into the 160-meter-wide moonlet named Dimorphos, the smaller of the two asteroids, humanity demonstrated that the kinetic impact method of planetary defense actually works. The immediate result was that Dimorphos’ orbital period around Didymos, its larger parent body, was slashed by 33 minutes .

Of course, altering a moonlet’s local orbit doesn’t seem like enough to safeguard Earth from civilization-ending impacts. But now, as long-term observational data has come in, it seems we accomplished more than that. DART actually changed the trajectory of the entire Didymos binary system, altering its orbit around the Sun.

Tracking space rocks

Measuring the orbital shift of a 780-meter-wide primary asteroid and its moonlet from millions of miles away isn’t trivial. When DART slammed into Dimorphos, it didn't knock the binary system wildly off its trajectory around the Sun. The change in the system's heliocentric trajectory was expected to be small, a minuscule nudge that would become apparent only after months or years of continuous observation. By analyzing enough painstakingly gathered data, a global team of researchers led by Rahil Makadia at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has now determined the consequences of the DART impact.

Read full article

Comments

Back in 2009, residents were scandalized when employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Alsip were accused of exhuming old graves in order to resell the burial plots, unceremoniously dumping older remains in another area on the grounds. The perpetrators were tried and convicted in 2015 , but the forensic evidence of the moss that helped convict them has now been detailed in a new paper published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research. It's a follow-up to a 2025 paper concluding that mosses and other bryophyte plants have been used as evidence in forensic cases only a dozen or so times over the last century.

"The focus was an attempt to elevate the profile of these small, often overlooked plants," co-author Matt von Konrat, who heads the botany collections at Chicago's Field Museum, told Ars. "Mosses are ubiquitous, resilient, and capable of preserving timeline and habitat information in ways that complement other forensic tools. Our recent publications help consolidate these cases into the scientific record and, we hope, encourage investigators to recognize and preserve botanical evidence more routinely. [We also wanted to] highlight the use of natural history collections and their stories and how they can be applied to questions and applied in ways we have yet to imagine."

Burr Oak Cemetery dates back to 1927, when it was founded to serve as the final resting place for Chicago's African American population, which had grown significantly since the turn of the century due to migration from the South. Among the luminaries buried there are Emmett Till, heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles, and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington.

Read full article

Comments

Elon Musk's xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

xAI had tried to argue that California's Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.

The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.

Read full article

Comments