The U.S. released Russian cybercriminal Alexander Vinnik, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering through his cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e, as part of a prisoner swap that freed American schoolteacher Marc Fogel from Russian custody. The Guardian reports: Vinnik, who arrived in Moscow on a flight from Turkey on Tuesday after having been released from custody in California, is accused of owning and operating one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, BTC-e, which prosecutors allege facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars in transactions for criminals worldwide. In May 2024, Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder billions of dollars through BTC-e. He was first arrested in Greece in 2017 at the request of the United States after he was charged by a US jury in a 21-count indictment.

The charges against him included money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, operating an unlicensed money service business and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions, among others. Vinnik was first extradited to France from Greece, where he received a five-year prison sentence for money laundering. He was then sent back to Greece and extradited to the United States in 2022 to face US charges. The justice department described BTC-e, which was active from around 2011 to 2017, as a "significant cybercrime and online money laundering entity that allowed its users to trade in bitcoin with high levels of anonymity and developed a customer base heavily reliant on criminal activity." Prosecutors say that BTC-e processed over $9 bn worth of transactions and served over 1 million users globally, including numerous customers in the US.

US prosecutors said that the exchange was one of the "primary ways by which cyber criminals around the world transferred, laundered, and stored the criminal proceeds of their illegal activities" and accused Vinnik of operating the company with the intent to "promote" unlawful activities. Prosecutors said that he was responsible for more than $120m in losses. Vinnik, who is a nonviolent offender, is forfeiting tens of millions of dollars in assets in the exchange, according to the New York Times.

LibreOffice, the open-source office suite that began as StarOffice in 1985, has marked its 40th anniversary with new features that it says could transform how users interact with the software. At the FOSDEM 2025 conference, developers unveiled LibreOffice 25.2, which introduces browser-based functionality and real-time collaboration capabilities through a technology called conflict-free replicated data types.

A key development is ZetaOffice, a version built for the WebAssembly runtime that enables the full office suite to run inside web browsers across operating systems and CPU architectures. The project, which entered public beta last November, allows websites to embed LibreOffice applications with complete user interfaces for editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

While the browser-based version currently requires about a gigabyte of code and additional memory to run, developers at Allotropia are working to modularize the codebase for faster loading times. The software, released under the MIT license, can be controlled via JavaScript and operates without requiring an internet connection, unlike Google Docs or LibreOffice's existing Collabora Online version.

The world's peatlands are "dangerously underprotected" despite the colossal amount of climate-heating carbon dioxide already being emitted due to their destruction, a study has warned. From a report: Peatlands occupy just 3% of all land, but contain more carbon than all of the world's forests. However, farmers and miners are draining the peatlands, releasing so much CO2 that if they were a country, they would be the fourth biggest polluter in the world after China, the US and India.

The first global assessment found that only 17% of the peatlands were within protected areas. This contrasted starkly with other valuable ecosystems such as tropical forests, where 38% were protected, and mangroves (42%). Protection was even lower than the 17% average in the three nations with the most peatlands: Canada, Russia and Indonesia. The US and Brazil completed the top five nations, which contained almost three-quarters of all peatlands, and had higher proportions in protected areas. But the researchers cautioned that protected status on a map did not always translate to strong protection on the ground.

Several countries are seeing a decline in PhD enrollments as high living costs, stagnant stipends and limited job prospects deter students from pursuing doctoral degrees. Australia recorded an 8% drop in domestic PhD enrollments from 2018 to 2023 despite population growth of 7%, while Japan's numbers fell to 15,014 in 2023 from 18,232 in 2003, data from education authorities showed.

PhD stipends have failed to keep pace with rising costs. In Australia, doctoral students receive about A$32,000 ($20,000) annually, below minimum wage, while Brazil only increased its graduate grants last year after a decade-long freeze.

The trend reflects broader concerns about academic careers becoming increasingly precarious, said Claudia Sarrico, a project lead at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Some countries are taking steps to address the issue. Japan's education ministry plans to provide additional funding for doctoral students, while Brazil's 40% increase in graduate grants in 2023 has led to a slight uptick in enrollments.

Members of key congressional oversight committees wrote to the United States' new top intelligence official Thursday to warn that a British order demanding government access to Apple users' encrypted data imperils Americans. From a report: Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Andy Biggs, a Republican on the House Judiciary committee, wrote to just-sworn-in National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and asked her to demand the United Kingdom retract its order.

If the top U.S. ally does not back off, they said, Gabbard should consider limiting the deep intelligence sharing and cooperation on cybersecurity between the countries. The Post first reported the existence of the confidential British order last week. It directs Apple to create a back door into its Advanced Data Protection offering, which allows users to fully encrypt data from iPhones and Mac computers when putting it in Apple's iCloud storage. Apple cannot retrieve such content even when served with a court order, frustrating authorities looking for evidence of terrorism, child abuse and other serious crimes.

The order was issued under the Investigatory Powers Act, which allows the British Home Office to require technical cooperation from companies and forbids those companies from disclosing anything about the demands. It would apply globally, though the U.K. authorities would have to ask Apple for information stored by specific customers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Jalopnik: Experimental submarine the Titan sank in June 2023 while exploring the wreck of the Titanic. The controversial craft imploded while deep beneath the surface of the ocean killing five people onboard, and now a recording of the Titan's final moments has been shared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [...] In the clip, which is available to hear [here], the static sound of the ocean is shattered by a great rumble, which sounds almost like a wave crashing against the beach.

It's this noise that is thought to be the total failure of the Titan, as LBC adds: "It is believed that the noise is the 'acoustic signature' of the sub imploding on 18th June 2023. It was recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration device about 900 miles from where the sub was last seen on radar, south of Newfoundland, Canada, US Coast Guard officials announced. The five crew members who died onboard the sub were British explorer sub were Hamish Harding, 58, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet (known as 'Mr Titanic'), 77, and and co-founder of the submarines owner's company OceanGate, Stockton Rushton, 61."

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Monday brought chilling news reports of the all-count trial convictions of three individuals for a conspiracy to rob and drug people outside of LGBTQ+ nightclubs in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, which led to the deaths of two of their victims. The defendants were found guilty on all 24 counts, which included murder, robbery, burglary, and conspiracy. "As proven at trial," explained the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in a press release, "the defendants lurked outside of nightclubs to exploit intoxicated individuals. They would give them drugs, laced with fentanyl, to incapacitate their victims so they could take the victims' phones and drain their online financial accounts [including unauthorized charges and transfers using Cash App, Apple Cash, Apple Pay]." District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. added, "My Office will continue to take every measure possible to protect New Yorkers from this type of criminal conduct. That includes ensuring accountability for those who commit this harm, while also working with financial companies to enhance security measures on their phone apps."

In 2024, D.A. Bragg called on financial companies to better protect consumers from fraud, including: adding a second and separate password for accessing the app on a smartphone as a default security option; imposing lower default limits on the monetary amount of total daily transfers; requiring wait times of up to a day and secondary verification for large monetary transactions; better monitoring of accounts for unusual transfer activities; and asking for confirmation when suspicious transactions occur. "No longer is the smartphone itself the most lucrative target for scammers and robbers -- it's the financial apps contained within," said Bragg as he released letters (PDF) sent to the companies that own Venmo, Zelle, and Cash App. "Thousands or even tens of thousands can be drained from financial accounts in a matter of seconds with just a few taps. Without additional protections, customers' financial and physical safety is being put at risk. I hope these companies accept our request to discuss commonsense solutions to deter scammers and protect New Yorkers' hard-earned money."

"Our cellphones aren't safe," warned the EFF's Cooper Quintin in a 2018 New York Times op-ed. "So why aren't we fixing them?" Any thoughts on what can and should be done with software, hardware, and procedures to stop "bank jackings"?

A BBC study published yesterday (PDF) found that AI news summarization tools frequently generate inaccurate or misleading summaries, with 51% of responses containing significant issues. The Register reports: The research focused on OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, and Perplexity assistants, assessing their ability to provide "accurate responses to questions about the news; and if their answers faithfully represented BBC news stories used as sources." The assistants were granted access to the BBC website for the duration of the research and asked 100 questions about the news, being prompted to draw from BBC News articles as sources where possible. Normally, these models are "blocked" from accessing the broadcaster's websites, the BBC said. Responses were reviewed by BBC journalists, "all experts in the question topics," on their accuracy, impartiality, and how well they represented BBC content. Overall:

- 51 percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.
- 19 percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors -- incorrect factual statements, numbers, and dates.
- 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.

But which chatbot performed worst? "34 percent of Gemini, 27 percent of Copilot, 17 percent of Perplexity, and 15 percent of ChatGPT responses were judged to have significant issues with how they represented the BBC content used as a source," the Beeb reported. "The most common problems were factual inaccuracies, sourcing, and missing context." [...] In an accompanying blog post, BBC News and Current Affairs CEO Deborah Turness wrote: "The price of AI's extraordinary benefits must not be a world where people searching for answers are served distorted, defective content that presents itself as fact. In what can feel like a chaotic world, it surely cannot be right that consumers seeking clarity are met with yet more confusion.

"It's not hard to see how quickly AI's distortion could undermine people's already fragile faith in facts and verified information. We live in troubled times, and how long will it be before an AI-distorted headline causes significant real world harm? The companies developing Gen AI tools are playing with fire." Training cutoff dates for various models certainly don't help, yet the research lays bare the weaknesses of generative AI in summarizing content. Even with direct access to the information they are being asked about, these assistants still regularly pull "facts" from thin air.

Children working in India's fruit and vegetable markets can perform complex mental calculations with ease, yet struggle with basic written math tests that determine their academic future, according to new research that raises troubling questions about mathematics education worldwide.

The study, published in Nature, reveals how traditional education systems are failing to tap into the mathematical talents of students who develop practical skills outside the classroom, particularly those from lower-income families. MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, who grew up watching young market vendors deftly handle complicated transactions, led the research. His team found that while these children could rapidly perform mental arithmetic, they performed poorly on standard written assessments like long division problems.

The findings come at a critical moment when mathematics education must evolve to meet modern demands, incorporating data literacy and computational skills alongside traditional mathematics. The research points to systemic issues, including a global shortage of trained mathematics teachers and assessment systems that reward memorization over reasoning. Without addressing these challenges, researchers warn, naturally talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds may never reach their potential in fields like research, entrepreneurship, or teaching.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has fixed two vulnerabilities that, when chained together, could expose the email addresses of YouTube accounts, causing a massive privacy breach for those using the site anonymously.

The flaws were discovered by security researchers Brutecat (brutecat.com) and Nathan (schizo.org), who found that YouTube and Pixel Recorder APIs could be used to obtain user's Google Gaia IDs and convert them into their email addresses. The ability to convert a YouTube channel into an owner's email address is a significant privacy risk to content creators, whistleblowers, and activists relying on being anonymous online.

Alan W. Filion, an 18-year-old from Lancaster, Calif., was sentenced to four years in prison for making nearly 400 false bomb threats and threats of violence (source may be paywalled; alternative source) to religious institutions, schools, universities and homes across the country. The New York Times reports: The threatening calls Mr. Filion made would often cause large deployments of police officers to a targeted location, the Justice Department said in a news release. In some cases, officers would enter people's homes with their weapons drawn and detain those inside. In January 2023, Mr. Filion wrote on social media that his swats had often led the police to "drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies."

Investigators linked Mr. Filion to over 375 swatting calls made in several states, including one that he made to the police in Sanford, Fla., saying that he would commit a mass shooting at the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque. During the call, he played audio of gunfire in the background. Mr. Filion was arrested in California in January 2024, and was then extradited to Florida to face state charges for making that threat. Mr. Filion began swatting for recreation in August 2022 before making it into a business, the Justice Department said. The teenager became a "serial swatter" and would make social media posts about his "swatting-for-a-fee" services, according to prosecutors.

In addition to pleading guilty to the false threat against the mosque in Florida, Mr. Filion pleaded guilty in three other swatting cases: a mass shooting threat to a public school in Washington State in October 2022; a bomb threat call to a historically Black college or university in Florida in May 2023; and a July 2023 call in which he claimed to be a federal law enforcement officer in Texas and told dispatchers that he had killed his mother and would kill any responding officers.

Seven of the 10 world's largest economies missed a deadline on Monday to submit updated emissions-cutting plans to the United Nations -- and only one, the UK, outlined a strategy for the next decade that keeps pace with expectations staked out under the Paris Agreement. From a report: All countries taking part in the UN process had been due to send their national climate plans for the next decade by Feb. 10, but relatively few got theirs in on time. Dozens more nations will likely come forward with updated plans within the next nine months before the UN's annual climate summit, known as COP30, kicks off in Brazil.

The lack of urgency among the more than 170 countries that failed to file what climate diplomats refer to as "nationally determined contributions" (NDCs) adds to concerns about the world's continuing commitment to keeping warming to well below 2C, and ideally 1.5C, relative to pre-industrial levels. Virtually every country adopted those targets a decade ago in the landmark agreement signed in Paris, but a series of lackluster UN summits last year has added to a sense of backsliding. US President Donald Trump has already started the process of pulling the world's second-largest emitter out of the global agreement once again. Political leaders in Argentina, Russia and New Zealand have indicated they would like to follow suit.

The European Union pledged to mobilize 200 billion euros ($206.15 billion) to invest in AI as the bloc seeks to catch up with the U.S. and China in the race to train the most complex models. From a report: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the bloc wants to supercharge its ability to compete with the U.S. and China in AI. The plan -- dubbed InvestAI -- includes a new 20 billion-euro fund for so-called AI gigafactories, facilities that rely on powerful chips to train the most complex AI models. "We want Europe to be one of the leading AI continents, and this means embracing a life where AI is everywhere," von der Leyen said at the AI Action Summit in Paris.

The announcement underscores efforts from the EU to position itself as a key player in the AI race. The bloc has been lagging behind the U.S. and China since OpenAI's 2022 release of ChatGPT ushered in a spending bonanza. [...] The EU is aiming to establish gigafactories to train the most complex and large AI models. Those facilities will be equipped with roughly 100,000 last-generation AI chips, around four times more than the number installed in the AI factories being set up right now.

If there was any doubt before, this seals it: YouTube is in the TV business. According to Neal Mohan, YouTube's CEO, TV screens have officially overtaken mobile as the "primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S." In other words, more people are watching YouTube on TV sets than any other device, at least here in the U.S. From a report: It is, as Mohan writes in his annual letter from the CEO, an indication that "YouTube is the new television."

"But the 'new' television doesn't look like the 'old' television," Mohan writes. "It's interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love."

The United States and Britain have declined to sign an international AI declaration at a Paris summit on Tuesday, after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance warned against over-regulation of the technology. The declaration, backed by France, China and India, calls for an "open, inclusive and ethical" approach to AI development.

Vance told the AI Action Summit that excessive rules could "kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off" and urged prioritizing "pro-growth AI policies" over safety measures. French President Emmanuel Macron defended the need for regulation, saying: "We need these rules for AI to move forward." The summit brought together policymakers and executives to address AI's economic benefits and potential risks amid growing U.S.-European trade tensions.

Scientists have found evidence suggesting that Earth's inner core has changed shape over the past 20 years, possibly deforming at its edges due to interactions with the liquid outer core and gravitational forces. The BBC reports: The inner core is usually thought to be shaped like a ball, but its edges may actually have deformed by 100 million or more in height in places, according to Prof John Vidale who led the research. [...] The new analysis looked at seismic wave patterns from earthquakes that repeated in the same location between 1991 and 2023. That helped to show how the inner core is changing over time. Prof Vidale, an earth scientist at the University of Southern California, found more evidence to back up the theory that during those years the inner core slowed down around 2010. But his team also found the evidence of the inner core's changing shape. It appears to be happening at the boundary of the inner and outer core, where the inner core is close to melting point. The liquid flow of the outer core as well as pull from an uneven gravity field may cause deformation. Prof Hrvoje Tkalcic from Australian National University said the findings could allow scientists "to make more informed estimates of some important material properties, such as the viscosity of the inner core, which is one of the least known quantities in modern science."

The research is published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

AmiMoJo writes: A computer expert who has battled for a decade to recover a $743 million bitcoin fortune he believes is buried in a council dump in south Wales is considering buying the site so he can hunt for the missing fortune. James Howells lost a high court case last month to force Newport city council to allow him to search the tip to retrieve a hard drive he says contains the bitcoins.

The council has since announced plans to close and cap the site, which would almost certainly spell the end of any lingering hopes of reaching the bitcoins. The authority has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land. Howells, 39, said on Monday it had been "quite a surprise" to hear of the closure plan. He said: "It [the council] claimed at the high court that closing the landfill to allow me to search would have a huge detrimental impact on the people of Newport, whilst at the same time they were planning to close the landfill anyway. I expected it would be closed in the coming years because it's 80/90% full -- but didn't expect its closure so soon. If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site -- as is -- and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table."

President Donald Trump has ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to halt penny production to cut government spending, according to a Truth Social post on Sunday. The U.S. Mint spent 3.69 cents to produce and distribute each penny last year, resulting in a $85.3 million loss on over three billion new pennies.

The one-cent coin accounts for more than half of all U.S. coin production despite having about 250 billion pieces already in circulation. Canada, Australia and several other countries have eliminated their lowest-denomination coins citing costs over recent decades.

Further reading: Abolish the Penny?

They publish 77 newspapers in 26 U.S. states, according to Wikipedia. But this week a "cybersecurity event" at the newspapers' parent company "disrupted systems and networks," according to an article at one of their news sites which quotes an email sent to employees by the publishing company's CEO. "We have notified law enforcement of the situation."

And the company "has not released print or e-editions in most markets this week," according to the Augusta Free Press, "originally telling subscribers the outage was due to a server issue," The CEO said the company is also working to identify "additional steps we can take to help prevent something like this from happening again." The computer server appears to have compromised [last] Monday morning. No timeline has been announced for when news operations will return to normal publication schedules. According to a report in The News Virginian and published on the websites of the affected papers nationwide, the company is now producing, printing and delivering back issues, indicating at least some progress on printing and layout front...

Unfortunately, the cybersecurity attack on its server wasn't the only bad news for Lee Enterprises this week... In addition to the estimated $16.7 million the enterprise reported it lost in the last quarter, it has also gutted the staff of its newspapers as it appears to shift its focus toward more successful digital operations.

Fortune remembers that in 2011 Steve Jobs had told author Walter Isaacson that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."

But The Indendepent notes that in his new memoir Gates does write about two acid trip experiences. (Gates mis-timed his first experiment with LSD, ending up still tripping during a previously-scheduled appointment for dental surgery...) "Later in the book, Gates recounts another experience with LSD with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and some friends... Gates says in the book that it was the fear of damaging his memory that finally persuaded him never to take the drug again." He added: "I smoked pot in high school, but not because it did anything interesting. I thought maybe I would look cool and some girl would think that was interesting. It didn't succeed, so I gave it up."

Gates went on to say that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who didn't know about his past drug use, teased him on the subject. "Steve Jobs once said that he wished I'd take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products," recalled Gates. "My response to that was to say, 'Look, I got the wrong batch.' I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him! Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn't overlap much. He wouldn't know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I'm not in his league."

Gates added that he was a fan of Michael Pollan's book about psychedelic drugs, How To Change Your Mind, and is intrigued by the idea that they may have therapeutic uses. "The idea that some of these drugs that affect your mind might help with depression or OCD, I think that's fascinating," said Gates. "Of course, we have to be careful, and that's very different than recreational usage."
Touring the country, 69-year-old Gates shared more glimpses of his life story:

• The Harvard Gazette notes that the university didn't offer computer science degrees when Gates attended in 1973. But since Gates already had years of code-writing experience, he "initially rebuffed any suggestion of taking computer-related coursework... 'It's too easy,' he remembered telling friends."

• "The naiveté I had that free computing would just be this unadulterated good thing wasn't totally correct even before AI," Gates told an audience at the Harvard Book Store. "And now with AI, I can see that we could shape this in the wrong way."

• Gates "expressed regret about how he treated another boyhood friend, Paul Allen, the other cofounder of Microsoft, who died in 2018," reports the Boston Globe. "Gates at first took 60 percent ownership of the new software company and then pressured his friend for another 4 percent. 'I feel bad about it in retrospect,' he said. 'That was always a little complicated, and I wish I hadn't pushed....'"

• Business Insider adds that according to his memoir, Gates "eventually gave his additional 4% stake to [Steve] Ballmer to convince him to quit business school for Microsoft. 'He joined in 1980 and became the 24-hour-a-day partner I needed,' Gates wrote."

• Benzinga writes that Gates has now "donated $100 billion to charitable causes... Had Gates retained the $100 billion he has donated, his total wealth would be around $264 billion, placing him second on the global wealth rankings behind Elon Musk and ahead of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg."

• Gates told the Associated Press "I am stunned that Intel basically lost its way," saying Intel is now "kind of behind" on both chip design and fabrication. "They missed the AI chip revolution, and with their fabrication capabilities, they don't even use standards that people like Nvidia and Qualcomm find easy... I hope Intel recovers, but it looks pretty tough for them at this stage."

• Gates also told the Associated Press that fighting a three-year antitrust case had "distracted" Microsoft. "The area that Google did well in that would not have happened had I not been distracted is Android, where it was a natural thing for me. I was trying, although what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone. That was ours for the taking."

• The Dallas News reports that in an on-stage interview in Texas, Mark Cuban closed by asking Gates one question. "Is the American Dream alive?" Gates answered: "It was for me."