The FBI director nominee Kash Patel was hit with what is believed to be a cyberattack emanating from Iran on Tuesday, according to two sources familiar with the situation.President-elect Donald Trump nominated his longtime ally Patel on Saturday after announcing he planned on firing FBI director Christopher Wray.Patel has been a staunch supporter of Trump for years and served in his first administration in a number of roles.Former Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Defense Kash Patel speaks during a campaign rally for former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Las Vegas, Nevada, Oct. 24, 2024.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images"Kash Patel was a key part of the first Trump administration's efforts against the terrorist Iranian regime and will implement President Trumps policies to protect America from adversaries as the FBI Director," said Trump transition spokesman Alex Pfeiffer.This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such asAT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the countrys telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the call Tuesday, two officials a senior FBI official who asked not to be named and Jeff Greene,executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency both recommended using encrypted messaging apps to Americans who want to minimize the chances of Chinas intercepting their communications.Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, whether its on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible, Greene said.The FBI official said, People looking to further protect their mobile device communications would benefit from considering using a cellphone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption and phishing resistant multi-factor authentication for email, social media and collaboration tool accounts.The scope of the telecom compromise is so significant, Greene said, that it was impossible for the agencies to predict a time frame on when well have full eviction.The hackers generally accessed three types of information, the FBI official said.One type has been call records, or metadata, showing the numbers that phones called and when. The hackers focused on records around the Washington, D.C., area, and the FBI does not plan to alert people whose phone metadata was accessed.The second type has been live phone calls of some specific targets. The FBI official declined to say how many alerts it had sent out to targets of that campaign; the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told NBC News in October that the FBI had informed that they had been targeted.The third has been systems that telecommunications companies use in compliance with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track peoples communications. CALEA systems can include classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which processes some U.S. intelligence court orders. The FBI official declined to say whether any classified material was accessed.Privacy advocates have long advocated using end-to-end encrypted apps. Signal and WhatsApp automatically implement end-to-end encryption in both calls and messages. Google Messages and iMessage also can encrypt calls and texts end to end.The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have a complicated relationship with encryption technology, historically advocating against full end-to-end encryption that does not allow law enforcement access to digital material even with warrants. But the FBI has also supported forms of encryption that do allow some law enforcement access in certain circumstances.Even though the hacking campaign was first publicly disclosed in the lead-up to the election, the U.S. believes it was not an attempt to sway results, the FBI official said, but instead a massive but traditional espionage operation by China to gather intelligence on American politics and government.We see this as a cyberespionage campaign, not dissimilar to any other approaches. Certainly the way they went about it was very, very specific about the telcos and the ISPs, but it fits into the cyberespionage bucket, the FBI official said.In a statement to NBC News, Ron Wyden, D-Ore, one of the Senates fiercest privacy advocates, criticized Americas reliance on CALEA as it leaves such sensitive information unencrypted.Whether its AT&T, Verizon, or Microsoft and Google, when those companies are inevitably hacked, China and other adversaries can steal those communications, he said.

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Filming for Fallout season 2 has finally started, and The Ghoul himself Walton Goggins has shared a little look at himself in the makeup once more. Read more

Consolation PrizeAs HBO prepares to crackdown on Max password sharing, it at least offers up some release windows for the next Game of Thrones spin-off, The White Lotus season 3, and moreYou'll be spending more, but there's more to come, I suppose.Image credit: HBO News by Oisin Kuhnke Contributor Published on Dec. 4, 2024 You might want to start preparing yourself to get kicked off your friend's HBO Max account, as the password sharing crackdown is coming.There's only so much each streaming service can grow because there's only so many people in the world, so in recent years these services came up with an annoying little idea: make it so that you can only be logged into one household at a time so that you can't share your account with your friend. It stinks! Netflix does it, Disney Plus has started doing it, and now, while speaking at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit (via Deadline), Warner Bros. Discovery's CEO and president of global streaming and games JB Perrette (bit of a mouthful of a title, there) has shared that HBO will soon send out reminders to Max subscribers about password sharing with some "very early, gentle messaging."To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Perrette went on to explain, "this is an art and a science to try and tighten the filter of whos in there. Well start some early messaging with some people who we think are in the higher tier of usage. We will offer a way to essentially add a member, starting in the first quarter. We will then start gradually as we get the data and start figuring out, with some explicit and implicit signals, how good we are at detecting. And then as we go through 25, youre going to see the filters get tighter and tighter."That's obviously quite annoying, but I suppose the brightside is that HBO has also shared some release windows for some of its biggest shows (via Deadline). The long-awaited third season of Euphoria is apparently currently targeting a 2026 return, with filming set to begin early next year, so you've still got quite a wait for that one. The White Lotus' third season is coming a lot sooner though, luckily, as that's set to arrive in February. Perrette said that Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is due for a summer premiere, but HBO and Max Content CEO and chairman Casey Bloys said it was due for a late 2025 release earlier this year, and sources that spoke with Deadline said this still seems to be the case. And as previously mentioned, The Last of Us season 2 is on track for Q2. So, you might end up having to pay more, but there's lots of bits coming, at least! Bit of a consolation prize, though.

A completely new way to achieve more accurate light distribution - fasterFind out more about a completely new method for rendering complex light fixtures in V-Ray 7 for Max, SketchUp or Rhino with V-Ray Luminaires in this article by Vlado Koylazov.You can choose between over 190 Cosmos assets, working perfectly with V-Ray Luminaires - 3D models by vendors like Evermotion and CGAxis as well as the digital twins of real physical products like Lumina and Two Parts.Over 6000 render-ready assets at your fingertipsYou now have access to a vast content library of more than 6000 high-quality assets ready for your projects. In Update 12, we focused on enriching our vegetation and people categories, offering even more diverse possibilities for creating dynamic, realistic environments.Vegetation: 250+ new assets, selected models - with seasonal variantsCosmos Update 12 expands the vegetation category with over 250 new high-quality models, featuring trees, plants, and shrubs in different sizes, shapes, and seasonal variations with multiple levels of detail. Whether you're designing an urban park or a sprawling natural landscape, these render-ready assets will help you add depth and realism to your scenes while saving time on manual adjustments.

Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube787kChristmas is upon us once again, which means that No Gravity Games is back with another generous offer of free Switch games; eleven of them, to be precise.Yes, the company's 'Switchmas Giveaway' is back and will commence on 9th December 2024 at 12am PT, after which it will be giving away one free game on each of the following eleven days. New releases are included in the line-up alongside one game that will be provided for free from day one of its launch.Of course, there are a few rules to follow, as per the previous giveaway events. In short, you'll need to already own one game from No Gravity Games' back catalogue on Switch. In addition, the giveaway will work as a 'chain' of sorts, so in order to redeem 'game 2', you'll need to have redeemed 'game 1', and so on. If you miss out on any of the titles on offer, you can purchase them for a discounted price and rejoin the chain.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube787kWatch on YouTube The giveaway will be available from 9th December to 19th December, and while we don't have a view of what the free games will be at this time, we'll be sure to update this post as soon as we know more. Are they going to be good games..? Well, that'll certainly up for debate, but we just can't say no to free stuff.If you don't already own one of the title's from No Gravity Games' back catalogue, you can grab Pirates: All Aboard! for free by signing up to the company's newsletter. This will then qualify you for the additional 11 games over the aforementioned period. It's basically a repeat of last year's event, then, but hopefully the line-up of games will be given a nice refresh.If you want more information on how to sign up for the newsletter, then simply visit the official No Gravity Games website.What do you make of this offer from No Gravity Games? Will you be grabbing yourself a few free games, or do you plan on skipping this one? Let us know with a comment down below.

PauseStation.Those with an appetite for Nintendo history likely will have heard of the 'SNES PlayStation' a collaboration between Nintendo and Sony which was intended to bring CD-ROM gaming to the former's latest console.The partnership never materialised, naturally, with Nintendo announcing that it was pivoting to work with Phillips at the very same event that Sony would unveil the console. Yikes. It's one of the most notorious double crosses in gaming history, and now, in celebration of the PlayStation's 30th birthday, former Sony executive Shawn Layden has shared what the jilting felt like from the other side.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

A new company is emerging from stealth today with backing from Googles AI-focused venture fund to help businesses compile their open-source AI infrastructure and reduce their engineering overheads.Cake integrates and secures more than 100 components for enterprises, including data source adapters (e.g. Apache Hadoop), data ingestion (e.g. Apache Kafka), data labelling (e.g. Label Studio), vector and graph databases (e.g. Milvus or Neo4j), generative AI APIs and related tools (e.g. Anthropic), among many other categories.This hints at why Cake is called what it is it takes the various layers that constitute the AI stack, and integrates them into a more digestible, production-ready format suitable for business.Big picture problemFounded out of New York in 2022 by Misha Herscu (CEO) and Skyler Thomas (CTO) pictured above Cake launched last year and is already working with customers like AI bioscience startup Altis Labs and data intelligence insurtech Ping. However, the company hasnt been making much noise in public until now.On top of its formal unveiling today, Cake said it has raised $13 million since its inception. This includes $3 million in pre-seed funding through its formative couple of years, and a recent $10 million seed round led by Googles Gradient Ventures.We havent been super secretive; weve just been building, and working with customers, Herscu explained to TechCrunch in an interview last week.Previously, Herscu founded an AI company called McCoy Medical Technologies that was focused on machine learning infrastructure for radiology, and sold it in 2017 to IT vendor TeraRecon. He later joined New York VC firm Primary Venture Partners as operator in residence, where he pursued his next venture by chatting with hundreds of data science and AI executives.I did over 200 customer discovery calls, asking what their biggest pain points and bottlenecks are, Herscu said. The biggest problem wasnt a single part of the stack, such as setting up a vector database or data pipeline. It was that there are a ton of different components across a very rich ecosystem. How do you go about integrating everything reliably, and making it production ready?This is what Herscu refers to as the big picture problem, and is where his new business enters the fray.Cake is all about making sense of the myriad open-source components that constitute the modern AI stack, and providing bundled, managed, open-source AI infrastructure for small teams. This isnt about building a business around a single open-source project as countless companies have done; instead, its about assembling and serving a curated selection of open-source projects across an entire stack and making it run smoothly.Lets say a large financial services company has millions of documents containing complex financial data, and it wants to do RAG (retrieval augmented generation) against these files to improve the quality of the responses to natural-language queries. If an off-the-shelf product isnt up to the task, or is unsuitable for compliance reasons, the company would have to build its own system by installing and stitching multiple different components. Thats a time-consuming endeavor that Cake can take care of.Elsewhere, a hospital might need to construct a secure system for analyzing images from CT scans, or an e-commerce company might want to upgrade its recommendation engine. These are all potential use-cases for Cake.We do run the gamut, but Id say our sweet spot is definitely when companies are going beyond what you can do with a simple, off-the-shelf product, Herscu said.Parallel developmentCakes CTO Thomas previously worked at IBM as a chief architect, and more recently he was a distinguished engineer and director of strategy at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which acquired a previous company he worked at called MapR.Thomas says he has worked across hundreds of projects through the years, with large and smaller customers, and he noticed a trend permeating pretty much all of them every one was using open-source tools in some way, much of it fresh out of research labs. Still, using them in the enterprise wasnt easy.It takes a huge amount of time for even the largest enterprises to take whats coming out of the labs and integrate it into what they do, Thomas told TechCrunch. A lot of that is because most of it isnt ready for the enterprise it might not have authentication and authorization, and enterprises have to do that themselves.There are parallels to what Cake is striving for here. In Europe, we have the likes of Finnish Aiven, a $2 billion unicorn, which is doing something similar but with a focus on data infrastructure. Perhaps the most obvious comparison would be Red Hat, which IBM acquired for $34 billion and is best known for its enterprise-grade Linux operating system (RHEL).In the early days of Linux, there were thousands of open-source packages that everyone wanted to use, but werent integrated and werent secure, Thomas said. There just wasnt a support model for it, and so the Red Hats of the world made Linux safe for the enterprise. We want to do a similar thing for AI today.While there are plans to eventually introduce a hosted version of Cake, for now companies have to run it in their own environments. For many, this wont be an issue because data privacy stipulations mean they cant send data outside their own systems anyway. But a hosted version might be appealing to organizations with lower compliance obligations.It is actually easier for us if we can control the cloud, Herscu added.Aside from lead investor Gradient, Cakes seed round saw participation from its pre-seed investor Primary Venture Partners, as well as Alumni Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, Correlation Ventures, and Firestreak Ventures.The hitherto unannounced $10 million seed round, which closed back in April, is indicative not only of the founders backgrounds but also the companys traction. Herscu said that the company is already looking toward its next financing round, with tentative plans to raise again around the middle of 2025.From a traction standpoint, we look more like a Series A company already. We were able to get there pretty quickly, Herscu said. When we go to the Series A, itll probably look more like a Series B.

Theres a new connected fitness device in town and its called Growl. Inspired by hardware companies like Peloton and Tonal, Growl is building a boxing bag that you can attach to your wall at home. Users can then start immersive, gamified boxing classes from the comfort of their home. It also looks like the team draw some inspiration from boxing classes like Brooklyn Fitboxing just spying an opportunity to offer a similarly intense fitness experience but without the user having to trek to a studio and sweat it out in a group setting.The aim of the product is really to transform the traditional punching bag, which is an object that is over 3,000 years old and hasnt evolved since. We want to transform it in several ways to turn it into a full-scale, at-home boxing and fitness coach for the whole family for $150 a month, co-founder and CEO Lo Desrumaux told TechCrunch.Theres still a long road ahead, as Growl plans to start accepting pre-orders in April 2025. Then it will be another year before it delivers the first units to customers.On the hardware front, Growl is divided into two main parts. Theres a frame thats designed to be screwed to your wall. You then attach a boxing bag component onto the frame. Most of the sensing intelligence is located in the frame. The boxing bag itself is mostly made of foam and artificial leather, with five or six accelerometers inside to detect punching power etc.The frame includes a key component of the device: a 4K projector. It can project a human-sized coach onto the boxing bag and various metrics on the wall. Growl has also been using the projector for a gaming experience (think Tap Tap Revenge on a boxing bag).Using a projector is a smart approach, as you arent punching a display, which means that you cant break it.Thats the beauty of our technology. We mostly use light, and youll never break light, Desrumaux said.On each side of the frame, theres one speaker and two cameras with infrared sensors. Theres also an additional camera near the top of the frame, along with some time-of-flight sensors.The cameras and sensors are used to calculate the impact zone of your punch and your posture. The accelerometers behind the boxing bag are used to calculate the intensity of the punch.The core feature of our product is that we reproduce the physical presence of a one-on-one coach, as if they were physically there with you, Desrumaux said.The company is working with a handful of coaches with the aim of creating a content library for launch day. But note it wont be limited to boxing as there will be some yoga, Pilates, and strength training classes, too.Image Credits:GrowlGrowl plans to price its device in the same range as Tonal devices. The full price is slated at around $4,500, but most customers will likely opt for a financing option with monthly payments. There will be a subscription plan to access new content as well. The idea is that it shouldnt cost more than a premium gym membership in total, the startup said.The Growl team is well aware that the connected fitness industry is crowded these days. But most of these companies have focused on cycling, strength and rowing. And those companies have faced some growing pains.The worst thing that ever happened to Peloton was the Covid pandemic, Desrumaux suggested. When you look at Peloton, at the time of their IPO, that is a few months before Covid, in September 2019, they have 800,000 households in the U.S., theyre growing 100% a year, theyre making a 50% margin on hardware, a 60% margin on software, and they have 0% in EBITDA. So theyre practically break-even.During the lockdown periods, Peloton launched several new products and spent a lot of money. And then, in the end, Covid was just a brief interlude. The market returned to its original growth trajectory, he added.Now, Peloton seems to be out of the woods after a difficult reality check. Thats why Desrumaux believes connected fitness is still an interesting industry as long as you maintain financial discipline which is his aim with Growl.Based in Austin, Texas and Paris, France, the company counts Sam Bowen, the former VP of hardware engineering at Amazon, Peloton and Tonal, as an advisor. The startup has raised $4.75 million in seed funding from Skip Capital, Kima Ventures, Teampact Ventures and various business angels, such as former UFC Heavyweight Champion Ciryl Gane.