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Comcast waited 13 days to patch its network against a high-severity vulnerability, a lapse that allowed hackers to make off with password data and other sensitive information belonging to 36 million Xfinity customers.

Exploits disclose session tokens, which the hardware assigns to devices that have already successfully provided login credentials.

The name Citrix Bleed is an allusion to Heartbleed, a different critical information disclosure zero-day that turned the Internet on its head in 2014.

That vulnerability, which resided in the OpenSSL code library, came under mass exploitation and allowed the pilfering of passwords, encryption keys, banking credentials, and all kinds of other sensitive information.

A sweep of the most active ransomware sites didn’t turn up any claims of responsibility for the hack of the Comcast network.

Comcast is requiring Xfinity customers to reset their passwords to protect against the possibility that attackers can crack the stolen hashes.

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But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”.

Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.

The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October.

He said the idea that officials can choose which wills to keep because, in the words of the MoJ, they “belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest”, is “the typical arrogance of bureaucracy”.

He cited the example of Mary Seacole, the Jamiacan nurse who helped British soldiers during the Crimean war in the 1850s, whose story has been revived in recent years.

Digitalisation allows us to move with the times and save the taxpayer valuable money, while preserving paper copies of noteworthy wills which hold historical importance.”

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Republican members of Congress blasted a program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes, accusing the Federal Communications Commission of being “wasteful.”

The lawmakers suggested in a letter to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel that they may try to block funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which is expected to run out of money in April 2024.

The letter questioned Rosenworcel’s testimony at a recent House hearing in which she warned that 25 million households could lose Internet access if Congress doesn’t renew the ACP discounts.

“At a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on November 30, 2023, you asserted—without evidence and contrary to the FCC’s own data—that ‘25 million households’ would be ‘unplug[ged]…from the Internet’ if Congress does not provide new funding for the ACP,” the letter said.

As Congress considers the future of taxpayer broadband subsidies, we ask you to correct the hearing record and make public accurate information about the ACP."

Unfortunately, your testimony pushes “facts” about the ACP that are deeply misleading and have the potential to exacerbate the fiscal crisis without producing meaningful benefits to the American consumer.

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday evening sought and received unanimous consent to confirm the promotions of 11 four-star generals that had been held up for months by Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville ® to protest the Pentagon’s abortion policies.

Schumer broke Tuberville’s blockade of more than 300 lower-ranking military promotions earlier this month, but the Alabama senator insisted at the time on holding up 11 of the highest-ranking officers so as not to capitulate completely to Democrats.

“We’re prepared to stay for as long as it takes to get these officers in position to lead our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen and guardians,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) after the Tuesday lunch.

After negotiations with Schumer, Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan ® and other colleagues Tuesday, Tuberville relented and allowed the Senate to approve the 11 high-ranking officers without a single roll call vote.

Tuberville started holding up the nonpolitical military promotions in February to protest the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing the travel expenses of service members who cross state lines to obtain abortions.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also told colleagues and reporters that while he also opposed the Pentagon’s abortion policies, he did not support Tuberville’s tactic of holding up military promotions.

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Today, Google laid out what’s happening in its Keyword blog, and it’s all in time for the holiday when we can finally slow down and contemplate how much will change about the Android experience due to this ruling.

Noted code sleuth Mishaal Rahman published an easy-to-follow breakdown of how exactly Android’s interface will handle sideloading apps.

You’ll no longer have to dig into the settings panel to toggle on the ability to install apps from other sources, though I also didn’t think it was a big deal to do this in the first place.

If anything, the toggle made me feel like I was engaging in something truly indulgent, and that appealed to my desire to pretend I’m Angelina Jolie’s character in Hackers.

Developers don’t have to hide pricing, either, so they can take up space to tell you how much money you’ll save if you buy in-app coins through their means versus through Google’s.

Though the Play Store has been opened to allow developers to make money in more ways than one, it comes at the expense of what Google presented as pro-consumer practices to keep bad actors from pushing Android users away to Apple’s iOS.

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Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) submitted his official resignation from Congress on Tuesday, effective Dec. 31.

“It has been the honor of a lifetime to represent the great people and communities of Kern, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, Tulare, Fresno, and Kings counties over the past 17 years — and especially my hometown of Bakersfield in the central valley of the great state of California,”  McCarthy said in a communication to the House, read by the House reading clerk.

McCarthy, who made history as the first Speaker to be formally removed from the post, announced his coming resignation earlier this month, just before California’s deadline to file for reelection.

Gavin Newsom (D) has to call for a special election within 14 days of when McCarthy officially departs his seat.

Speaking to reporters last week, McCarthy referenced a quirk in California election law that could have allowed Newsom to keep the seat vacant rather than calling for a special election if he stayed in Congress into January — a scenario that happened when former Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) resigned in 2020.

And he did not rule out using his campaign war chest to boost primary challengers to the eight House Republicans who voted to oust him.

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Greg Abbott for signing a law that allows peace officers to arrest people they think entered the country illegally, accusing him of just wanting to be the Republican nominee for vice president.

López Obrador, often referred to as AMLO, dispensed the harsh criticism of Abbott at a news conference on Tuesday.

In the United States he wants to gain popularity with these measures,” López Obrador said after he was asked about the new Texas law.

DeSantis was once considered Trump’s strongest challenger, but his campaign has faltered and his bid is at risk if he does not have a strong showing in Iowa.

Abbott has been running his own immigration operation in Texas for years, using Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, the state’s highway patrol, to police the border, stop drivers to check for people illegally here and arrest people for criminal trespassing when they cross private land.

Those held are turned over to federal officials for deportation, but authorities have been forced to release many of the migrants after counties failed to charge them within the period of time dictated by law.

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Rite Aid is banned for five years from using artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition to try to curb shoplifting, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Tuesday.

In a press release, the agency said that the drugstore company is being banned from using the technology “for surveillance purposes” for the length of five years to settle charges by the FTC.

The FTC charges “that the retailer failed to implement reasonable procedures and prevent harm to consumers in its use of facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores.”

“Rite Aid’s reckless use of facial surveillance systems left its customers facing humiliation and other harms, and its order violations put consumers’ sensitive information at risk,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement in the release.

The release noted a complaint filed in federal court Tuesday in which the FTC said the drugstore “failed to take reasonable measures to prevent harm to consumers from its use of facial recognition technology.

Back in March, the Department of Justice announced that it was suing Rite Aid, accusing it of filling hundreds of thousands of prescriptions “for controlled substances with obvious red flags” in the midst of the opioid epidemic.

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In a stunning and unprecedented decision, the Colorado Supreme Court removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot, ruling that he isn’t an eligible presidential candidate because of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”

“Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully underway, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President (Mike) Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes.

“President Trump’s direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterized as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary.”

Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says officials who take an oath to support the Constitution are banned from future office if they “engaged in insurrection.” But the wording is vague, it doesn’t explicitly mention the presidency, and has only been applied twice since 1919.

We have full confidence that the U.S. Supreme Court will quickly rule in our favor and finally put an end to these unAmerican lawsuits,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.

Chief Justice Brian Boatright, one of the three dissenters on the seven-member court, wrote that he believes Colorado election law “was not enacted to decide whether a candidate engaged in insurrection,” and said he would have dismissed the challenge to Trump’s eligibility.

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DENVER (AP) — The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War.

It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War.

After a weeklong hearing in November, District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump indeed had “engaged in insurrection” by inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and her ruling that kept him on the ballot was a fairly technical one.

“You’d be saying a rebel who took up arms against the government couldn’t be a county sheriff, but could be the president,” attorney Jason Murray said in arguments before the court in early December.

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In a bombshell decision, Colorado’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that former President Donald Trump’s candidacy in the state is prohibited on constitutional grounds.

"Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”

The first-of-its kind ruling stems from a lawsuit that focused a little-known provision in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Trump, who has called the efforts to keep him off the ballot “nonsense” and “election interference,” is likely to try to appeal Tuesday’s Colorado ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Courts have ruled against similar efforts to get Trump banned from the ballot in Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota.

The plaintiffs challenging Trump’s eligibility in Michigan filed an appeal to that state’s high court on Monday.

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Ben Cardin said the staff member who has been linked to the clip was “no longer a Senate employee”.

The Daily Caller reported on Friday that the video showed a congressional aide having “sex with an unknown man in the Senate hearing room” and that it was posted in a private group for gay men in politics.

The tape appeared to have been filmed in a deserted Hart Senate Office Building room 216, according to Politico.

The room has hosted blockbuster hearings, including the 9/11 Commission and Supreme Court nominations.

On Monday, Mr Cardin was asked by reporters how an aide would have been able to access the Senate hearing room.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, told reporters that the aide in question had been fired.

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The fractured views on the conflict among traditionally Democratic voter groups show the continued difficulty Mr. Biden faces of holding together the coalition he built in 2020 — a challenge that is likely to persist even as economic indicators grow more positive and legal troubles swirl around his expected opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.

“I don’t want to vote for someone who is not aligned with my own personal values, as Biden has shown he is not when it comes to Gaza,” said Colin Lohner, a 27-year-old software engineer in San Francisco.

Given a choice between two courses of action, a narrow plurality of voters, 44 percent, said Israel should stop its military campaign to protect against civilian casualties, already totaling nearly 20,000 people killed, according to Gaza health authorities.

The social media platform, which is owned by a Chinese company, has come under heated criticism from both parties, but especially Republicans, for an inflammatory stream of videos aimed at users who skew very young.

For years, Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, have accused Democrats of undermining Israel’s government and have implored Jewish voters to leave the party that nearly three-quarters of them traditionally have called their political home.

“I think he has been very good at balancing both from the left and the right and coming up with a nuanced response,” Mr. Lebson said, adding, “Biden historically, for his entire political career, has always been supportive of the Jewish community and very against antisemitism.”

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After pardoning a pair of turkeys, an annual White House tradition, Biden delivered some stern words for the small group assembled: His poll numbers were unacceptably low and he wanted to know what his team and his campaign were doing about it.

He complained that his economic message had done little to move the ball, even as the economy was growing and unemployment was falling, according to people familiar with his comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who is running for the state’s open Senate seat, has expressed concern to allies that she may not be able to win her race if Biden is at the top of the ticket, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Adding to the challenging political landscape, Biden’s agenda hangs in the balance on Capitol Hill as his pleas to provide more aid to Ukraine and Israel are mired in partisan battles after the visit from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky failed to secure a breakthrough.

They routinely point to comments made by lawmakers, donors and pundits who declared Biden’s 2020 primary campaign over when he was routed in Iowa and New Hampshire before he went on to win the nomination and the presidency.

Only recently, though, have Biden officials started to scale up the campaign, which they launched in April, after months of warnings from top Democrats in battleground states that they were too slow to build out their operation.

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Comcast has confirmed that hackers exploiting a critical-rated security vulnerability accessed the sensitive information of almost 36 million Xfinity customers.

This vulnerability, known as “CitrixBleed,” is found in Citrix networking devices often used by big corporations and has been under mass-exploitation by hackers since late August.

Hackers have used the CitrixBleed vulnerability to hack into big-name victims, including aerospace giant Boeing, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and international law firm Allen & Overy.

Xfinity, Comcast’s cable television and internet division, became the latest CitrixBleed victim, the company confirmed in a notice to customers on Monday.

The notice doesn’t say how many Xfinity customers have been impacted, and Comcast spokesperson Joel Shadle declined to say when asked by TechCrunch.

In a filing with Maine’s attorney general, Comcast confirmed that almost 35.8 million customers are affected by the breach.

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The site relies heavily on Google search traffic, and with the tech giant periodically updating how it ranks websites, Bruns wondered whether he’d fallen out of the company’s favor.

“The usual signal methods of what’s true are no longer clear, and trusted sources like Google searches don’t turn up the right things anymore,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at Wharton who studies the impact of AI.

SEO professionals help websites improve their ranking in search results, using tactics ranging from official Google trend analysis to more dubious trucks to game the system.

An expat from the north of England now living in Dubai, Ward and his business partner worked to boost business-planning software startup’s Causal’s presence on Google — in part by using generative AI to feed off Exceljet’s existing content.

Even more galling for Bruns: When he reviewed the AI-generated Causal posts, he found factual errors in some articles, with one describing a purported feature that doesn’t exist in Excel.

Sports Illustrated’s publisher recently fired the magazine’s CEO following a brouhaha over its publication of articles that featured fake writers and AI-generated profile pictures.

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Meta’s Oversight Board has criticized the company’s automated moderation tools for being too aggressive after two videos that depicted hostages, injured civilians, and possible casualties in the Israel-Hamas war were — it says — unfairly removed from Facebook and Instagram.

In a report published on Tuesday, the external review panel determined that the posts should have remained live and that removing the content has a high cost to “freedom of expression and access to information” in the war.

One of the removed videos, posted to Facebook, depicts an Israeli woman during the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas, pleading with kidnappers who were taking her hostage not to kill her.

The other video was published on Instagram and shows what appears to be the aftermath of an Israeli strike on or near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

The board says that, in the case of the latter video, both the removal and a rejection of the user’s appeal to restore the footage were conducted by Meta’s automated moderation tools, without any human review.

The board took up a review of the decision on an “accelerated timeline of 12 days,” and after the case was taken up, the videos were restored with a content warning screen.

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It is designed to fix some fundamental problems of the smart home by providing an easy, streamlined setup process for devices, interoperability between platforms so you don’t have to stay in one company’s walled garden, and reliable and secure local connectivity.

Backed by all the big names — Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, Ikea, Comcast, Philips Hue, LG, and more — Matter is meant to make the smart home easier.

I should be able to set up my bathroom light switches and have them controllable by Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa — heck, even Samsung’s Bixby if I want.

This support page from Eve, which attempts to explain to a user which hub they will need to use their Thread devices in Matter, perfectly illustrates the current state of this hub-free standard.

I have a lot of smart home devices, and there are currently a few digital clones of my house set up across the country from Seattle to Cupertino (and possibly even in the Netherlands) to try to replicate some of the issues I’ve had.

Those who are more invested may start pulling back resources from a project that is losing them money and doesn’t have a clear monetization path, and those who have been sitting on the sidelines and “watching closely” will be grinning behind their proprietary protocols.

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But the commissioners, all Democrats, also pointed to what they said was inadequate guidance from Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican.

People waited up to two hours to vote as election officials made frantic trips to office supply stores so they could print ballots and deliver them to polling places.

Derrick Johnson, the national president of the NAACP who attended college in Jackson, said he hoped the episode wouldn’t depress voter turnout in future elections.

In a statement after the meeting, Secretary of State Michael Watson said his office was open to providing more training, but that Hinds County was unique in its election management troubles.

Heading into the 2023 election, all 82 counties received the same training and resources from our office,” Watson told The Associated Press.

The five-member Commission agreed to Monday’s meeting after the civil rights coalition said they had failed to provide enough information about what went wrong on election day.

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Telecoms providers have been forced to pause plans to impose digital phone lines on vulnerable customers after reports of pensioners left unable to call for help during power cuts.

Companies including BT and Virgin Media have been forced by Michelle Donelan, the technology secretary, to sign a charter to safeguard at-risk households during the nationwide switchover from analogue to internet-based landlines.

Last month, the Guardian reported on concerns that the digitalisation of the telecoms network was moving too fast and too soon and could leave vulnerable users cut off.

John Whittingdale, the minister for digital infrastructure, last week informed parliament of “serious incidents” of telecare devices failing in emergencies.

“It seems the whole project is being completely botched,” said Dennis Reed, the director of the campaign group Silver Voices, which accuses BT of reneging on earlier promises not to force over-70s to switch.

A Virgin Media spokesperson said: “In line with the agreed commitments, we have paused switchovers as we review our processes to further support consumers, building on the range of measures that we already have in place.”

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