NASA has officially added SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket to its roster despite the vehicle never having completed a single successful test flight, let alone a mission.The space agency announced last week that it had awarded SpaceX a "modification under the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract to add Starship to their existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch service offerings."As the agency explains, these contracts "provide a broad range of commercial launch services for NASAs planetary, Earth-observing, exploration, and scientific satellites."The news shouldn't come as a surprise at this point given SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's growing influence in the White House. His space company has made moves to take over key positions at the agency, highlighting Musk's glaring conflict of interest.Even Jared Isaacman, who's expected to be sworn in as NASA's next administrator soon, has a long history with SpaceX.But the company has struggled as of late to get the upper stage of its mega rocket to launch and safely land, ending in dramatic and strikingly similar explosions during its last two test launches earlier this year.At the same time, the promise of a super heavy launch platform is tantalizing. Starship, as the largest rocket ever built, could give the United States a massive leg up, greatly facilitating its access to space and ability to launch enormous payloads into orbit and beyond.And not just for NASA's science operations the agency can also "provide launch services to other federal government agencies" under its NLS II contracts.While it may sound like it on the surface, the space agency's latest announcement is far from a full-throated endorsement. As SpaceNews explains, NASA categorizes launch vehicles under NLS II into four groups, with Category 1 being the highest risk, including rockets that have yet to make their first flight."Medium risk," or Category 2, vehicles have anywhere between one and six consecutive successful launches under their belt.Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin announced last month that its New Glenn rocket, which is roughly one and a half times as powerful as SpaceX's Falcon 9, was certified as Category 1.In what category SpaceX's Starship falls remains to be seen. According to NASA, NLS II contracts have an "ordering period through June 2030 and an overall period of performance through December 2032."In the meantime, SpaceX has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to get authorization to communicate with its Starship during NASA's upcoming Artemis 3 and 4 missions to the lunar surface, tentatively scheduled for mid-2027 and late 2028, respectively.NASA is still hoping to tap Starship to deliver astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon's surface under its Human Landing System (HLS) program.But whether SpaceX's rocket will be ready in time for the historic missions remains to be seen. During its most recent test flight earlier this month, Starship's upper stage exploded into countless pieces of space junk over the Caribbean in what could be a huge setback for the firm.Users on social media took NASA's latest announcement in strides, taking the opportunity to poke fun at Starship's particularly explosive development period."Great... I'm sure whenever NASA needs a payload spread across 1000 km of ocean they'll pick Starship," one Reddit user joked."It's not so much a delivery system, as it is a distribution system" another user added.More on Starship: Elon Musk Secretly Working to Take Over NASAShare This Article

Prince or PoppersApr 1, 10:02 AM EDT/byNoor Al-SibaiMan Who Believes Poppers Cause AIDS Is Planning to Gut America's HIV Prevention OfficeThis could return America to the dark ages of the 1980s and 90s, when the government let hundreds of thousands of people die of AIDS.Apr 1, 10:02 AM EDT/Noor Al-SibaiImage by Andrew Harnik via Getty / FuturismThe nepo baby in charge of America's healthcare ascribes to homophobic conspiracy theories about the origins of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and he's purportedly planning to close the office that helps prevent its spread.According to federal health officials who spoke toCBS News, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is slated to lay off the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department's entire Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy, as well as its minority health office.This move comes amid a broader "restructuring" that will, per a recent announcement, eliminate 20,000 positions at the agency. It also comes just a few weeks after the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of HHS, raided a manufacturer of amyl nitrate, the scientific name for the popular and legal-ish sex and club inhalant better known as "poppers."In a statement that circulated on social media, poppers company Double Scorpio announced that it was closing following the raid and said that other manufacturers may also have been impacted. Not long after, RFK Jr.'s past claims about poppers resurfaced, which included his insistence that the inhalant causes AIDS and not, as per decades-established medical science, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)."The initial signals of AIDS, Kaposis sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrite 'poppers' a popular drug among promiscuous gays," the political scion wrote in a book he penned about Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Other common 'wasting' symptoms were all associated with heavy drug use and lifestyle stressors."Ironically, president Donald Trump was, during his first administration, seemingly a huge advocate for HIV prevention and research.In 2019, Trump launched the "Ending the HIV Epidemic" initiative, which made pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications free for low-income Americans and made him the first president in American history ever to make HIV and AIDS a federal priority.When announcing the initiative during his state of the union address that year, Trump boasted that "scientific breakthroughs" funded by his program would help "defeat AIDS in America."With Trump 2.0, however, it seems that dream has all but died. A few weeks ago, insider sources told theWall Street Journal that HHS is reducing or eliminating entirely its funding for HIV prevention including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's free PrEP program.As The Guardian reported soon after claims of the forthcoming HIV and infectious disease office cuts, the National Institutes of Health, which is also under HHS, terminated at least 145 grants for HIV research worth a cumulative $450 million.Between these slated HIV prevention rollbacks and the resurgence of AIDS denialism, it's starting to feel a lot like the 1980s and 90s again an era marred by the loss of nearly half a million people in the United States while their government turned away.More on the new HHS: Government Hires Crackpot to "Study" Nonexistent Link Between Vaccines and AutismShare This ArticleImage by Andrew Harnik via Getty / FuturismRead This Next

Apr 01, 2025Ravie LakshmananEncryption / Email SecurityOn the 21st birthday of Gmail, Google has announced a major update that allows enterprise users to send end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) to any user in any email inbox in a few clicks.The feature is rolling out starting today in beta, allowing users to send E2EE emails to Gmail users within an organization, with plans to send E2EE emails to any Gmail inbox in the coming weeks and to any email inbox later this year.What makes the new encryption model an alternative to the Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) protocol stand out is that it eliminates the need for senders or recipients to use custom software or exchange encryption certificates."This capability, requiring minimal efforts for both IT teams and end users, abstracts away the traditional IT complexity and substandard user experiences of existing solutions, while preserving enhanced data sovereignty, privacy, and security controls," Google Workspace's Johney Burke and Julien Duplant said.The technology that powers E2EE emails is client-side encryption (CSE), which Google has already rolled out to Gmail and other services like Calendar, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet.Thus when an E2EE email is sent to another Gmail recipient, the message is automatically decrypted on the other end. In the case of a non-Gmail recipient (e.g., Microsoft Outlook), the Google email platform sends them an invitation to view the E2EE email in a restricted version of Gmail, which can be accessed via a guest Google Workspace account to securely view and respond to the message.The fact that this is driven by CSE means that data gets encrypted on the client before it is transmitted or stored in Google's cloud-based storage, thereby making it indecipherable to other third-party entities, including Google.That said, one crucial difference between CSE and E2EE is that the clients use encryption keys that are generated and stored in a cloud-based key management service, thus allowing an organisation's administrator to control the keys, revoke a user's access to the keys, and even monitor encrypted files."First, at a structural level this approach offers more comprehensive encryption protection," Burke and Deplane said. "It doesn't matter who you send a message to, what email they are using, your message will be encrypted and you are in sole control. There's just one set of keys, and you're the only one who has them.""Second, it's simple and easy to implement and use. It reduces friction for both IT teams and users, as no one has to be an encryption savant to make this work. It'll save teams tons of time and money, and finally give them a path to what everyone craves: email encryption that is painless and just works."Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.SHARE

Apr 01, 2025Ravie LakshmananMobile Security / Financial FraudA new sophisticated phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform called Lucid has targeted 169 entities in 88 countries using smishing messages propagated via Apple iMessage and Rich Communication Services (RCS) for Android.Lucid's unique selling point lies in its weaponizing of legitimate communication platforms to sidestep traditional SMS-based detection mechanisms."Its scalable, subscription-based model enables cybercriminals to conduct large-scale phishing campaigns to harvest credit card details for financial fraud," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News."Lucid leverages Apple iMessage and Android's RCS technology, bypassing traditional SMS spam filters and significantly increasing delivery and success rates."Lucid is assessed to be the work of a Chinese-speaking hacking crew called the XinXin group (aka Black Technology), with the phishing campaigns mainly targeting Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States with an intent to steal credit card data and personally identifiable information (PII).The threat actors behind the service, more importantly, have developed other PhaaS platforms like Lighthouse and Darcula, the latter of which has been updated with capabilities to clone any brand's website to create a phishing version. The developer of Lucid is a threat actor codenamed LARVA-242, who is also a key figure in the XinXin group.All three PhaaS platforms share overlaps in templates, target pools, and tactics, alluding to a flourishing underground economy where Chinese-speaking actors are leveraging Telegram to advertise their warez on a subscription basis for profit-driven motives.Phishing campaigns relying on these services have been found to impersonate postal services, courier companies, toll payment systems, and tax refund agencies, employing convincing phishing templates to deceive victims into providing sensitive information.The large-scale activities are powered on the backend via iPhone device farms and mobile device emulators running on Windows systems to send hundreds of thousands of scam messages containing bogus links in a coordinated fashion. The phone numbers to be targeted are acquired through various methods such as data breaches and cybercrime forums."For iMessage's link-clicking restrictions, they employ 'please reply with Y' techniques to establish two-way communication," PRODAFT explained. "For Google's RCS filtering, they constantly rotate sending domains/numbers to avoid pattern recognition.""For iMessage, this involves creating temporary Apple IDs with impersonated display names, while RCS exploitation leverages carrier implementation inconsistencies in sender verification."Besides offering automation tools that simplify the creation of customizable phishing websites, the pages themselves incorporate advanced anti-detection and evasion techniques like IP blocking, user-agent filtering, and time-limited single-use URLs.Lucid also supports the ability to monitor victim activity and record every single interaction with the phishing links in real-time via a panel, allowing its customers to extract the entered information. Credit card details submitted by victims are subjected to additional verification steps. The panel is built using the open-source Webman PHP framework."The Lucid PhaaS panel has revealed a highly organized and interconnected ecosystem of phishing-as-a-service platforms operated by Chinese-speaking threat actors, primarily under the XinXin group," the company said. "The XinXin group develops and utilizes these tools and profits from selling stolen credit card information while actively monitoring and supporting the development of similar PhaaS services."It's worth noting that the findings from PRODAFT mirror that of Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which recently called out unspecified threat actors for utilizing the domain pattern "com-" to register over 10,000 domains for propagating various SMS phishing scams via Apple iMessage.The development comes as Barracuda warned of a "massive spike" in PhaaS attacks in early 2025 using Tycoon 2FA, EvilProxy, and Sneaky 2FA, with each service accounting for 89%, 8%, and 3% of all the PhaaS incidents, respectively."Phishing emails are the gateway for many attacks, from credential theft to financial fraud, ransomware, and more," Barracuda security researcher Deerendra Prasad said. "The platforms that power phishing-as-a-service are increasingly complex and evasive, making phishing attacks both harder for traditional security tools to detect and more powerful in terms of the damage they can do."Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.SHARE

I'm excited for Den of Wolves after checking out the Payday series' spiritual successor at this year's GDC.

A new playable character in FromSoftware's forthcoming Elden Ring Nightreign has been revealed. Read more

I don't think Severance would necessarily make a good video game, but every episode I watch makes me think about games. More specifically, it makes me realise what games do better than every other medium.Disorientation: it's a major theme in Severance. From the beginning, we, as an audience, long to know what's going on. That's the major compulsion loop in the series, figuring out what the purpose of Lumon Industries is, it's also the major motivation for the characters in it. What is the purpose of their number crunching? What are they working towards?What the series does so well, beyond being so well put together, so surprisingly funny and touching and absurd, is withhold information. The whole premise is that you can split one person into two people. You can put a chip in someone's brain that means they can be one person at work and another outside of it, and that you can keep those two people forever, permanently, apart. One cannot recall details about the other. Separation. Severance.A trailer for Severance, just in case you haven't seen it.Watch on YouTubeWe experience this disorientation separately in each version of the character: the one who drives to work and drives home, and the one who works at the company and exists in the time between. We follow, in particular, the Innies as they're called - the people inside the company - as they come to terms with their existence and start to push at the boundaries of it, start to explore corridors they're forbidden to explore. Start to see, as we do in the game Portal, I suppose, what's behind the set - what we're not supposed to see.But it's always second hand. We are never, as in Portal, the people experiencing it for ourselves. We always read the impact of the revelations through the characters' reactions, or hear them in their words. We can never be, as we can in a game, them. We can never be Mark S and gang exploring those clinical white corridors for ourselves, chased by regulations, pen-pushers and rules. And we can never feel the disorientation of the severance procedure, of being one person one moment, and another the next.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. This thought reminds me sharply of Before I Forget, a game about being a person living with dementia. This does attempt to show us what it's like to experience something ourselves. The house rearranges around us, and objects in our house are strange and incomprehensible. The life we once lived has become increasingly obscured. It's unsettlingly powerful.There's a play and a film that goes for a similarly disorientating experience, based on the same topic, called The Father, for which actor Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar. In it, we the viewer experience the world as the dementia-suffering father does, spun around by sudden jumps in timeline and shifting contexts as scenes flow into each other. It's wonderfully done; you should watch it if you can. But it's still not as immediate as being the character yourself.Severance wouldn't necessarily make a good game, I don't think, because it's designed to be told the way it is, and so much of the set-up depends upon the two versions of a character - the Innie and the Outie - not knowing what the other has done. I don't know how you could obscure that from the player if they played the two roles. But if you could solve that problem and adapt the idea: that's a game I would play. The Stanley Parable. There's a reason why the similarities to Severance in it are so strong. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Galactic CafeIn fact, I think I have played it. The 2013 office-based narrative mystery game The Stanley Parable is probably as close as anything will ever come to being Severance: The Game. In it, you are a character called Stanley who performs an absurdly mundane data entry task day in, day out, without complaint. That is until we, the player, turn up to control him, playing the part of his long dormant free will, I suppose. We start disobeying the Narrator-delivered rules and seeing what happens. It is parodic, mysterious, and unexpectedly funny. It's everything Severance also is.There's a reason for this: Dan Erickson, the creator of Severance, was directly influenced by The Stanley Parable when writing the show, among influences from a dozen other things. So baked into that show's DNA is that video game. Erickson doesn't expand on how, or in what ways the game influenced the show, but I don't know if he really needs to. To me, the blueprint of The Stanley Parable is plain in Severance to see.I love this. I love that we're talking about the creator of a major TV show being influenced by a relatively niche (because it's far from mainstream) game. I love that we live in a world where the people making major TV shows know games well enough that they would play The Stanley Parable at all. And I love that it's games influencing the creation of TV shows rather than only being adapted for them. The incredible success of The Last of Us and Fallout TV shows, and the animated series of Castlevania and soon Devil May Cry, have proved video games' value in financial terms, as intellectual property ripe for adaptation. But with Severance and The Stanley Parable, it feels as though games are also asserting themselves as a cultural force, and that they're justifiably being respected as one.

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games hereWhile GSC Game Worlds Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is a fantastic game, its also far from finished. As the developer ramps up hiring to support the games post-launch updates and work on a roadmap of improvements, the team is already planning major improvements for the future.Speaking to players on Discord, GSC Game World is already exploring a host of major improvements for the survival game. Alongside the expected A-Life improvements, the developer is aiming to overhaul combat with mutant enemies.Stalker 2 mutant combat to be improvedIn a Discord Q&A, the developer revealed that mutant combat overhauls are on the table for future updates in Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. While we loved our time with the game even on launch, battling Bloodsuckers and other mutants is a low point as they lack the interactivity of older games.Players asked whether the developers will introduce flinching, limping or even run[ning] away behaviours for mutant enemies in future updates. While few details were given, the team explained that overhauling mutant comnbat is a key focus for the future.Making mutant react to threats better is something we would want to do in the future, the team explained.Additionally, the team explained that they are planning to add more side quests to the open world. With the developer already planning to bring back cut content that was scrapped during development, the team has ideas for expanding side quests in the game.We have some ideas, it would be cool to have new side quests, but too early to get into details, they said.As for how many patches GSC Game World is planning for the game, theres no plan to stop patching the game. After a host of major improvements for the title, the team is planning to release as many updates as it takes to make it the experience fans deserve.We are not set on the specific number, the studio said. It is more like: we are doing them because we want to improve the game.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of ChornobylPlatform(s):PC, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox Series XGenre(s):Action, Adventure, RPG, Shooter, Survival HorrorRelated TopicsSubscribe to our newsletters!By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime.Share

If youre Beyonc, social [media] is optional. If youre not, you need to be on it, says artist Justina Blakeney. Its the most powerful marketing tool we currently have at our disposaland its free. The straight-shooting, social-media savant is right: Many industry professionalsAD100 designer Young Huh among themcite Instagram as their number one source for acquiring new clients. While it may not be a definitive line item on your marketing budget, creating content, maintaining a regular posting cadence, and keeping up with ever-changing algorithms does have time and energy costs. Efficiency is key: Read up on the best practices design professionals rely on for their social media strategies.On creating a visual identityAssemble a network of collaborators. Have an army of [stylists and photographers] that you regularly use so that you have a visual identity that feels consistent. Were in the business of beautiful: How you curate and put your work together on a feed is just as important as how you put a room together.Athena Calderone [Social Media Strategy: Dial Up Your ROI]Consider use cases for each vertical. Think of the feed as a magazine spread of your work, and stories as more personal and behind the scenesand keep it consistent.Ariel Okin [28 Ways to Get the Word Out About Your Firm]Plan ahead for having to hold whole-home photography, per client or publisher requests. Even if you cant share whole project photography, you can share schemes or elements of the architecture and process.Young Huh [Social Media Strategy: Dial Up Your ROI]Think like a brand partner. If a brands products are often used in your work and consistently have helped bring your vision to light, connect with them and inquire about content creation partnerships or offering your followers a commissionable discount on those products.Reena Goodwin [Ready to Monetize Your Social Media Account? Heres How to Get Started]On defining your voiceNever delegate your POV. As you grow and need support for social media, its important for captions and ideas to still always come from you. Especially as you're building your brand, voice, and community, it should come from that guttural sense of what you want to share.CalderoneAsk yourself: Is this a brand fit? If you have a disconnect and it sounds too corporate or too promotional, then people know its not authentic.Charlotte Moss [Should Your Social Media Be Personal, Professional, or Both?]When writing captions, think of it as something youre trying to share, which has a narrative arc that tells a story. Thats how you engage people, thats how you bring people in, thats how you get people excited about what youre doing.Blakeney [How to Develop a Meaningful Social Media Following]Be ready for criticism. If I get fired up [from a comment], Ill respond: Thank you so much. I value your opinion. The one thing Id recommend is to lead with kindness next time. Have a beautiful day. Just kill them with kindness.CalderoneThe bottom lineDont worry about being all-business all the time. Because we have personal posts, that space between a client calling me and deciding to hire me is really short because they feel like theyve already gotten to know me through my Instagram. HuhDont waste the valuable real estate below your email signature. Direct people to your social pages, website, or particular products. Via 28 Ways to Get the Word Out About Your FirmDont focus solely on getting great stats. Less than 5% of your followers on most channels will be true followers, but that 5% can change everything. Those small but mighty connections are often where the magic happens. Erich Ploog [28 Ways to Get the Word Out About Your Firm]100 AD-Approved Interior Photographers to Book for Your Next ShootCount on one of these vetted talents to capture your design project in its best lightAPPLY NOWGrow your business with the AD PRO DirectoryArrow

Teslas sales in France fell year-on-year for a third consecutive month in March, contributing to the lowest first-quarterly sales figures in the country since 2021 for Elon Musks electric car brand, data showed on Tuesday.The billionaire CEO, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, has stirred controversy by courting far-right parties in Europe, which has added to Teslas sales slump ahead of the much-anticipated launch of its new Model Y mid-size SUV.Tesla registered in March 3,157 car sales in France, a 36.83 per cent drop from last year, for a total of 6,693 car registrations in the first quarter, data from French car body PFA showed.Its market share in the country dropped to 1.63 per cent in the quarter ending March, and lost ground to brands not accounted for by the PFA, including BYD and other Chinese EV makers, whose total share of the market rose to 3.19 per cent.READ MOREOverall new car registrations in France fell 14.54 per cent in March and were down 7.83 per cent in the first quarter.Tesla is set to report its global first-quarter deliveries and production numbers on Wednesday.Analysts expect data from France and other key European markets on Tuesday to provide an important indication of the groups performance in the quarter and consumer sentiment towards the brand.In response to Mr Musks right-wing activism, Tesla cars have also become targets for vandalism across several countries. On Monday, Mr Musk said that an overnight fire at a Tesla dealership in Rome that destroyed 17 cars was an act of terrorism, reiterating earlier comments by Mr Trump. - Reuters