Morbius, the long-delayed next film in Sony’s Spider-Man universe, is like a roller coaster without a pulse. There are highs, there are lows, there’s plenty of disorientation, and by the end, you aren’t upset with the ride, but largely underwhelmed because you have the sense it should have been better.
President Vladimir “Putin has massively misjudged the situation… [and] over-estimated the abilities of his military,” according to GCHQ leader Jeremy Fleming.
VinFast Automotive— the Vietnamese car startup — is set to build its first North American assembly plant in North Carolina’s Triangle Innovation Point, right outside of Raleigh. The company will invest a total of $5 billion in the facility which will eventually employ 13,000 workers, according to the Raleigh News and Observer. The Vinfast plant won’t just be North Carolina’s first EV facility, it’ll also be the state’s first car manufacturing plant. Toyota also announced plans last year to build a $1.29 billion battery manufacturing plant in Randolph County, further cementing North Carolina’s status as the next potential EV hub.
We’ve already heard about VinFast’s two new electric crossover cars — the VF32 and the VF33 — that it plans to debut in the US this summer. But the North Carolina plant will focus on building two other cars: the VinFast VF 9, a 7-passenger all-electric SUV and the VinFast VF 8, a 5-passenger, all-electric mid-size SUV. The company is aiming to make both lines available for delivery in the US later this year.
As far as SUVs go, both VinFast models will be reasonably priced. The smaller car, the two-row VF 8, will retail for $39,400. The three-row VF 9 will retail for $53,700. Drivers have the option of selecting different battery sizes for each model. The VF 8 with a smaller battery has a range of 285 miles, with a bigger battery the range increases to 313 miles. Meanwhile, the VF 9 is likely to come with a larger battery pack that could give it a range of up to 423 miles, InsideEVs reported. If this actually happens, this would put the VF 9 at a higher maximum range than many of its competitors in the electric SUV space. For the sake of comparison, the 2021 Tesla Model X has a range of 360 miles and the Kia EV9 SUV has a range of 300 miles.
Even as far as EV startups go, VinFast is relatively new to the game. The company is a subsidiary of a Vietnamese conglomerate called VinGroup, and only started making cars in 2017. Both its cars and scooters are popular in Vietnam, but it has yet to sell any cars abroad, reported the Raleigh News and Observer. But with its first US manufacturing facility in the works, the Vietnamese startup is likely to gain more credibility stateside.
One of the major Apple Watch Series 7 features is fast charging support, but it looks like a recently issued software update has left it broken.
Astronaut Mark Vande Hei recently returned to Earth from the ISS, and while such events are typically routine, that certainly wasn’t the case this time around.
The Oscars co-host also said it was “gross” that Will Smith was allowed to remain for the rest of the ceremony.
Apple, Facebook and Discord turned over user data to hackers posing as law enforcement officials, according to a new report in Bloomberg. The demands, which were forged to look like authentic legal requests, reportedly came from legitimate email accounts that had been “compromised.”
According to Bloomberg, both Facebook and Apple turned over “basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address.” Discord provided “the Internet address history of Discord accounts tied to a specific phone number,” according to Krebs on Security. The hackers also targeted Snap, though it’s not clear if the company actually turned over the requested data.
As Bloomberg points out, it’s not uncommon for companies like Apple and Facebook to turn over data to law enforcement, and these companies have dedicated teams to respond to such requests. Typically, these requests are accompanied by a court order, but there are “emergency” cases when law enforcement asks for data without one, like when someone’s life is believed to be in danger.
In this case, the hackers exploited this tactic in order to access personal information about specific targets in order to “facilitate financial fraud schemes.” Using hacked emails tied to legitimate law enforcement personnel, they were able to successfully fool the companies into handing over the data.
In a statement to Bloomberg, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that the company has safeguards in place to verify legal requests and detect abuse. “We block known compromised accounts from making requests and work with law enforcement to respond to incidents involving suspected fraudulent requests, as we have done in this case,” Stone said.
Apple and Snap also pointed to company guidelines, saying they have policies to verify the legitimacy of requests for user data. But these safeguards can fall short if the requests appear to be from emails associated with legitimate law enforcement agencies. As Discord told Krebson Security:
“We can confirm that Discord received requests from a legitimate law enforcement domain and complied with the requests in accordance with our policies. We verify these requests by checking that they come from a genuine source, and did so in this instance. While our verification process confirmed that the law enforcement account itself was legitimate, we later learned that it had been compromised by a malicious actor. We have since conducted an investigation into this illegal activity and notified law enforcement about the compromised email account.”
Interestingly, security researchers have reportedly tied some of the people involved in this scheme to another high-profile hacking group: Lapsus$, whose members allegedly hacked Microsoft and Okta. According to Bloomberg, one person involved with forging the requests is also “believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$.”
Astronomers have had success finding some of the most distant galaxies in the universe, but now they might have pinpointed the most distant star to date. As SyFy Wirenotes, researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted Earendel (“morning star” in Old English), a star currently reckoned to be 12.9 billion light-years away — the light we see from it comes from when the universe was roughly 900 million years old. Until now, the smallest objects seen at that distance were star clusters.
If confirmed, the star will easily smash the previous record. The most distant star before now was MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1, which shone when the universe was about 4 billion years old. Scientists found that star using Hubble in 2018.
The feat was accomplished using gravitational lensing, or relying on the gravity of galaxy clusters to distort light and magnify objects that would otherwise remain difficult or impossible to detect. The star’s host galaxy had its light warped into a long arc thanks to the massive WHL0137-08 galaxy cluster. As Earendel sits on the edge of a space “caustic,” or a ripple in the fabric of space, its brightness was magnified a thousand times and helped it stand out.
Earendel is a large beast, too. The scientists estimate it’s “at least” 50 times the mass of the Sun, and millions of times brighter. It’s also expected to have relatively little metal, as it would have formed when it didn’t have access to heavier elements that came with successive star generations. If it’s made of only hydrogen and helium, it would be the first evidence of very early “Population III” stars.
The object hasn’t been confirmed as a star yet, but that might come relatively soon. Observers plan to use the James Webb Space Telescope’s high infrared sensitivity to both verify Earendel’s star status and study it in more detail. With that said, Webb might also help pinpoint stars that are even more distant. To put it another way, he technology needed to acknowledge the star’s existence might relegate it to a footnote.
Last year, cybercriminals used phony law enforcement subpoenas to steal an unknown amount of user data from Apple and Meta. The data requests were submitted to the tech companies using hacked police email accounts, and thus appeared to be legitimate government requests.
The FDA has authorized a second COVID-19 booster shot for certain people despite the controversy surrounding it. Here’s why the agency says it’s important.
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