Ideaforge

 Hyundai Motor envisions an interactive and partially virtual future it calls “metamobility,” in which a variety of robotic devices interact with humans to provide a wide range of mobility services, from automated personal transport to remote control of robots in  factories.

Hyundai executives, led by Chief Executive Euisun Chung, elaborated on the vision during a press conference at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

 Buzzwords aside, Hyundai plans to leverage its growing expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence to build  a future mobility network that connects humans in the real world with objects and tasks in the virtual world. 

The concept is linked to the so-called metaverse, a term coined 30 years ago by author Neal Stephenson, but which recently gained attention  when social media company Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc. 

It refers to shared virtual environments. world that people can access through the Internet and that they can  use  virtual reality or augmented reality. Hyundai offered several examples of how it could connect the metaverse and the real world:

– A vehicle that can be transformed into a work space or an entertainment room that includes a 3D video game platform.

– A “smart” factory where humans outside the plant remotely control robots that interact with machines and products inside the plant.

– Automated personal transportation devices for people with disabilities or individuals who want to maintain social distances while traveling.

To make all this work, the automaker said it was building a Mobility of Things ecosystem that will link modular robotic platforms to perform different mobility services.

One module called Plug & Drive or PnD is a single-wheel robotics platform that combines intelligent steering, braking and suspension with in-wheel electric drive, cameras and lidar sensors for automated operation.

For larger logistics tasks and other mobility services, Hyundai can bundle four PnD modules, including one application that pairs with a robot dog called – what else? – Spot.

Source: Tech Crunch

People wearing protective face masks walk in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in France, January 5, 2022. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

The French parliament on Thursday approved President Emmanuel Macron’s plans for a vaccination card to  curb the spread of the Omicron variant after Macron sparked a tumultuous debate whipped up by Macron’s comments that he wanted to “piss off” the unvaccinated.

Macron told Le Parisien  earlier this week. that he wanted to make life so difficult for those who opposed the COVID-19 vaccine  by leading them away from public places that they would end up being jabbed.
Macron’s coarse language barely three months before a presidential election was widely seen as a politically calculated, tapping into a intensifying public frustration against the unvaccinated.

Source: Tech Crunch

Vehicles are stuck in gridlock in the morning on the Interstate Highway I-95 near Stafford, Virginia, U.S., January 4, 2022 in this still image obtained from a social media video. Susan Phalen/via REUTERS (Susan Phalen/via REUTERS / Reuters Photos)

A viral video from TikTok  shows how a bread truck  driver was able to provide much needed help to  dozens of unsuspecting drivers who were  stranded on I95 in Virginia for more than 24 hours due to snowy weather and freezing temperatures this week they ate nothing for 37 hours stuck on that frozen Virginia freeway, so they called the bread company whose truck was right in front of them, asking if they could have what was in it, ” said the narrator of the video. showing a photo of Casey Holihan and her husband, John Noe, and the Schmidt Baking Company truck.
“To their surprise, the driver of the truck was contacted and  given the green light to start distributing bread to 50 starving motorists,” they added, as the video shows the gloved driver  handing out bags of bread from the  truck. Baltimore-based company truck.
It is not known how many people were fed by the gesture or how long the drivers were stuck in the roadblock before being rescued.
The blocked traffic prompted Virginia state transportation officials to shut down the entire freeway, including the mostly congested areas between exits 152 and 104.

Hundreds — if not thousands — of drivers were affected before their eventual help came from law enforcement vehicles, who were also impeded and delayed by the storm, and the generosity of Schmidt Baking company and its delivery truck driver.
There have been other reports of people helping stranded people, including a family who handed over oranges to the US Senator.
Governor Ralph Northam has declared a state of emergency, after initially choosing not to do so as another winter storm is expected to hit Virginia in the coming days.

Source: Tech Crunch

Image Credit: (Renee Schiavone/Patch)

The winning ticket for the last Powerball was sold at a  convenience store in Sacramento. According to the lottery site, the ticket was sold at 7 Eleven on Wyndham Drive. 

The ticket price is $315 million. 

The other  winning ticket, which hit five out of five numbers, was sold to a Chevron in South Pasadena. This person made about $1.3 million. Powerball’s last big  winning ticket was sold at an Albertsons in Morro Bay in October, for a price of $685 million. 

This winner was able to choose between the 29-year paid annuity option  or the $ 496 million cash option. Both reward options are subject to tax.

Source: Tech Crunch

Image Credit(AP)

It sounds more like science fiction the more you hear it: The first case of Flurona, a new and rare  double infection of coronavirus and influenza, was discovered in an unvaccinated pregnant Israeli young  woman, according to doctors at Beilinson Hospital in the city from Petach Tikva out of the country.
Israel is currently seeing a surge in Omicron, with over 9,000 cases registered yesterday, and while there are no confirmed cases in the UK and the patient is  experiencing mild symptoms, her two positive  results have raised concerns about the possibility of a new double infection. How common is it? Could the falls in the UK? Could two infections cause a more serious illness?
From symptoms to look out for to how likely they are to spread, this is what we knew about Flurona so far.

Source: Tech Crunch

Threat actors used a cloud-based video hosting service to perform a supply chain attack on more than 100 real estate websites operated by Sotheby’s Realty that involved the injection of malicious skimmers to steal sensitive personal information . 

“Others import videos, even their websites are embedded with skimmer codes,” researchers from Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks said in a report released this week.

The skimmer attacks, also called formjacking, relates to a type of cyber attack wherein bad actors insert malicious JavaScript code into the target website, most often to checkout or payment pages on shopping and e-commerce portals, to harvest valuable information such as credit card details entered by users.

In the latest incarnation of the Magecart attacks, the operators behind the campaign hacked Sotheby’s Brightcove account  and deployed malicious code in the cloud video platform player by forging a script that can be loaded to add JavaScript customizations to the video player. 

“The attacker modified the static script in his hosted location by attaching the skimmer code. On the next player update, the video platform reingested the compromised file and served it  with the affected player.” the researchers said, adding that he had worked with the video service and the real estate company to help remove the malware.

The campaign is said to have begun as early as January 2021, according to MalwareBytes, with the harvested information — names, emails, phone numbers, credit card data — exfiltrated to a remote server “cdn-imgcloud[.]com” that also functioned as a collection domain for a Magecart Attack  targeting Amazon CloudFront CDN in June 2019.

To detect and prevent the injection of malicious code into online sites, it is recommended that you perform periodic web content integrity checks, remembering to protect accounts from takeover attempts and pay attention to potential social engineering schemes. 

“The skimmer itself is highly polymorphic, elusive and ever-changing,” the researchers said. “When combined with cloud distribution platforms, the impact of such a skimmer  could be very significant.

Source: Tech Crunch

Image Credit: Agostini/Invision/AP

A competitive chase by representatives to sign the architects of the global streaming hit Squid Game is ending with a surprise. Deadline hears that the law firm of Yorn Levine Barnes Krintzman Rubenstein Kohner Endlich & Gellman has signed and will rep in all areas Squid Game creator, writer-director and EP Hwang Dong-hyuk and EP Kim Ji-yeon and their production company Siren Pictures Inc.

Partners Kevin Yorn, Gregg Gellman and Jared Levine will lead that rep team.T

he phenomenal success of Netflix’s Squid Game came seemingly out of nowhere, catapulting Hwang and the cast to global stardom and making them the hottest commodity in Hollywood. That created a stampede among the major agencies late last yearto sign Hwang and the actors, the vast majority of whom have no Hollywood representation. The courtship got underway when cast and creators came to Hollywood for a big press junket Netflix held. Several of the cast signed with agencies. It looks right now that the Squid Game EP duo will have the attorneys be their sole Hollywood reps, sources said.

Hwang hinted recently at a third season for the show, even before the second season gets the official green light. Season 1 was made on a modest budget, reportedly $2.4 million per episode ($21.4 million in total), while projected to generate $900 million value for the streamer, according to data cited by Bloomberg.

Source: Tech Crunch

Watson’s Instagram post had nearly one million likes and more than 89,000 comments by Tuesday [File: Henry Nicholls/Reuters]

British actress Emma Watson’s official Instagram account  expressed solidarity with the Palestinians in a new post, eliciting widespread support from pro-Palestinian users but also drawing sharp criticism from Israeli officials.

The account of the movie star, known for her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, on Monday shared a photo of a pro-Palestinian rally with the phrase “Solidarity is a verb.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Emma Watson (@emmawatson)

The picture was originally released by the Bad Activism Collective in May last year after Israel launched a deadly 11-day offensive in the besieged Gaza Strip, in which several celebrities interfered with the conflict with figures such as Bella Hadid and Susan Sarandon posting messages of support for the Palestinians.
In the caption, there is a quote from British-Australian activist Sara Ahmed, saying: “Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future.
Solidarity involves commitment and work, as well as recognition that even though we don’t have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we  live on common ground. Watson’s Instagram bio  says her account “has been taken over by an anonymous feminist collective.”
The post, which by Tuesday had nearly one million likes and more than 89,000 comments, was hailed by pro-Palestine social media users. Many thanked Watson for her support, while some added the hashtags #FreePalestine and #PalestineWillBeFree to their comments.

On the other hand, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, criticized the publication:
“Fiction may work in Harry Potter, but in reality it doesn’t work,” he wrote on Twitter. The wizarding world could eradicate the evils of Hamas (which oppresses women and seeks to destroy Israel) and the Palestinian Authority (which supports terrorism). I would be for it! ” he said.

Leah Greenberg, the coexectual director of the indivisible project, a non-profit organization, which was founded in 2016 in response to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, released the allegations of Danons and said that they were “a perfect demonstration of liberation absolutely cynical and bad-faith weaponisation of antisemitism to shut down basic expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

Palestinian journalist and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who played a crucial role in raising international awareness about the forced eviction of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, responded saying that Watson’s “simple statement” had left “Zionists everywhere … in a frenzy”.

Source: Tech Crunch

A record 4.5 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This pushed the layoff rate to 3%, equivalent to the peak in September. Workers were more likely to quit their jobs in the hospitality sector, which had by far the highest exit rate at 6.1% in November, as were those in the health care sector.
Figures in transportation, warehouses and utilities also increased.

Workers have continued to quit work at a historic rate. Low-wage industries directly affected by the pandemic continued to be the source of much of the increase in quits, ”said Nick Bunker, research director  at  Indeed Hiring Lab, in comments by e -mail.
The big question for 2022 is whether this momentum will persist. The high quits rate Data for November  released on Tuesday does not yet take into account the arrival of the Omicron variant on US shores, which has pushed infections on the rise. and put many workers at risk of contracting the virus in the workplace.

Case in point, the UCLA Labor Center said in a report also released on Tuesday that nearly a quarter of fast food workers in the Los Angeles area have contracted Covid in the past 18 months. Less than half of them had been informed by their employers that they had been potentially exposed to the virus.
Including layoffs and discharges, the total number of terminations was 6.3 million in November.
Hotels and restaurants saw the biggest increase in departures, while also seeing the biggest drop in open jobs, the data showed. America had 10.6 million jobs to fill in November, down slightly from just over 11 million jobs opened in October. Available jobs in the United States peaked at 11.1 million last July.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Telegram messaging app Trojan installers are  used to deploy the Windows-based Purple Fox backdoor to compromised systems. That’s according to new research published by Minerva Labs, which describes the attack as different from intruders that typically exploit legitimate software to release malicious payloads. 

“This threat actor was able to keep most  of the attack under the radar by breaking the attack down into several small files, most of which had very low detection rates by the [antivirus] engines,  the last step leading  Purple Fox rootkit infection, said researcher Natalie Zargarov.

First discovered in 2018, Purple Fox comes with rootkit capabilities that allow the malware to be planted beyond the reach of security solutions and evade detection. A March 2021 report from Guardicore  detailed its worm-like propagation feature, enabling the backdoor to spread more rapidly.

Then, in October 2021, Trend Micro researchers discovered a .NET implant dubbed FoxSocket distributed in partnership with Purple Fox that uses WebSockets to contact its command and control (C2) servers for a more secure way to establish communications.

“The capabilities of the Purple Fox rootkit make it more capable of achieving its goals in a more stealthy manner,” the researchers noted. “They allow Purple Fox to persist on affected systems and deliver additional payloads to affected systems.

Last but not least, in December 2021, Trend Micro also  shed light on the later stages of the Purple Fox infection chain, targeting SQL databases by inserting a malicious SQL common language runtime (CLR) module to achieve a persistent and stealthier execution and ultimately abuse the SQL servers for illicit cryptocurrency mining.

The new  chain of attacks observed by Minerva begins with a Telegram installer file, an AutoIt script that publishes a legitimate installer for the chat app, and a malicious downloader called “TextInputh.exe”, the latter being executed to retrieve the next malware from the C2 server.

 Then the downloaded files  block the processes associated with the different antivirus engines, before moving on to the final step of downloading and running the Purple Fox rootkit from a  remote server which is now down. installers providing the same version of the Purple Fox rootkit  using the same attack chain, ”Zargarov said.

“ Some appear to have been delivered by email, while others, we assume, were downloaded from websites phishing. The beauty of this attack is that each step is separate for a different file, which is unnecessary without all of the files.

Source: The Hacker News

Source: Tech Crunch