Daily Tech News 31 December 2024

• The US Treasury was hacked by Chinese spies. (Reuters)
  
  Fortunately it was empty at the time.
  
  
  

• Americans spend five hours a day on their phone, checking it more than 200 times. (PC Magazine)
  
  I rarely look at my phone at all. Every so often it goes off and I have to check my email for a server alert, and sometimes people call me and I ignore them.
  
  Guess I just don't have that kind of personality, I write on the laptop that has never once been turned off since I bought it.
  
  
  
• Scientists have developed VR goggles... For mice. (Phys.org)
  
  The goggles are tiny, but enormous for a mouse. They are held up by a stand while the mouse peers into them. The purpose of the research seems to be simply jump-scaring mice, which is less wasteful than many things they could be doing.
  
  
  
• Frore intends to show off a laptop cooled with its piezoelectric AirJet device at CES. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The AirJet is a solid-state fan; it's small and silent, but can only dissipate about 5W of heat. So for the laptop - based on a Samsung Galaxy Book - they've included four AirJets. That's still half the size of the regular cooling system in that laptop model, allowing them to increase the battery size for the demo.
  
  
  
• What's going on with that Cyberhaven browser extension compromise? Nothing good. (Secure Annex)
  
  The Cyberhaven extension turns out to be designed to monitor and block websites that try to steal your data. It's legitimate.
  
  Or was, until it got hacked, when instead of blocking attempts to steal your data, it simply stole your data.
  
  It was quickly fixed, but it also quickly caught the attention of security researchers, who discovered a long and growing list of other compromised browser extensions.
  
  Some have been fixed. Some have been pulled from the Chrome web store.
  
  Others have been compromised for months.
  
  The root of the problem is a targeted fishing attack aimed at developers of browser extensions. Hack the developers, then hack the extensions, then hack the users of those extensions.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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