RFF20: “La vita va così”: il coraggio di dire “No”
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/10/rff20-l…
Un inno al tempo lento che salva la terra Il cinema italiano, quello che sa toccare corde civili e al tempo stesso far vibrare l’anima, ha trovato la sua voce in ‘La vita va così’ di Riccardo Milani. Scelto non a caso come film
KW 42: Die Woche, in der dem Innenministerium die Schwungumkehr misslingt
netzpolitik.org/2025/kw-42-die…
Channel Surfing Nostalgia Machine
As any generation of people get older, they tend to look back fondly on their formative years when there was less responsibility and more wonder. Even if things have objectively improved, we often have a fondness for the past. Such is the case for cable television, where even though ads were everywhere and nothing was on-demand, we can see that something was lost from this era in the modern streaming ecosystem. [Ricardo] brought back the good parts of this golden era of cable TV with this small channel surfing television.
The project attempts to keep the good parts of this era while discarding things we certainly don’t miss. The ability to channel surf is still here, with a rotary encoder standing in for an antique television channel selector knob, but dealing with any telecommunications company is out, including those of the Internet variety. Instead it is a fully offline machine with the user able to curate their own channels and programming with a Flask application, and [Ricardo]’s includes his own collection of commercials from Argentina.
The hardware itself is fairly straightforward as well, with a Raspberry Pi doing the heavy lifting, paired with a small screen and enclosed in a retro-themed television case. It’s a clever throwback to a time where we might not know what we wanted to see but there was always something on. Builds like this are gaining popularity right now as well, and we’ve even seen them recreate the cable company’s preview channel as well.
youtube.com/embed/5saGNbtMNfM?…
Verhaltensscanner im Mannheim: Hier wird die Überwachung getestet, die so viele Städte wollen
netzpolitik.org/2025/verhalten…
Free-to-play, non chiamateli giochini gratis: fanno guadagnare miliardi
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
Nata e confinata su smartphone, la formula dei free-to-play se ben implementata nei videogiochi permette agli editori incassi record anche quando i titoli non hanno particolare diffusione. Sarà questo il futuro dell'industria
RFanciola reshared this.
A New Way to Make (Almost) Holograms with Lasers
The spectrum of laser technologies available to hackers has gradually widened from basic gas lasers through CO2 tubes, diode lasers, and now fiber lasers. One of the newer entries is the MOPA laser, which combines a laser diode with a fiber-based light amplifier. The diode’s pulse length and repetition rate are easy to control, while the fiber amplifier gives it enough power to do interesting things – including, as [Ben Krasnow] found, etch hologram-like diffraction gratings onto stainless steel.
Stainless steel works because it forms a thin oxide layer when heated, with a thickness determined by the temperature it reaches. The oxide layer creates thin-film interference with incoming light, letting the laser mark parts of a steel sheet with different colors by varying the intensity of heating. [Ben] wrote a script to etch color images onto steel using this method, and noticed in one experiment that one area seemed to produce diffraction patterns. More experimentation revealed that the laser could consistently make diffraction gratings out of parallel patterns of oxide lines. Surprisingly, the oxide layer seemed to grow mostly down into the metal, instead of up from the surface.
The pitch of the grating is perpendicular to the direction of the etched lines, and varying the line spacing changes the angle of diffraction, which should in theory be enough control to print a hologram with the laser. [Ben]’s first experiment in this general direction was to create a script that turned black-and-white photographs into shimmering matrices of diffraction-grating pixels, in which each pixel’s grating orientation was determined by its brightness. To add a parallax depth effect, [Ben] spread out images into a gradient in a diffraction grating, so that it produced different images at different angles. The images were somewhat limited by the minimum size required for the grating pixels, but the effect was quite noticeable.
Unfortunately, since the oxide layers grow down into the metal, [Ben] doubts whether the laser can etch molds for diffraction-grating chocolate. If you’re interested in more diffraction optics, check out these custom diffraction lenses or the workings of normal holograms.
youtube.com/embed/RsGHr7dXLuI?…
DIY Telescope Uses Maker Tools
You’ve got a laser cutter. You’ve got a 3D printer. What do you make? [Ayushmaan45] suggests a telescope. The modest instrument isn’t going to do serious astronomy with only 8X worth of optics, but it would make a fine spyglass for a youngster.
The body is cut from MDF, and there are only a few 3D printed parts. The only other things you need are rubber bands and a pair of lenses. You don’t even need glue. We might have spray painted the inside of the scope black or used some black contact paper to cut down on reflections, although it probably wouldn’t make much difference.
Of course, depending on your lenses, you may have to make some changes. Or find new lenses, for that matter. We like that it doesn’t take any exotic parts. We also appreciate that it is easy for kids to take apart and put back together. It would be interesting to see how a motivated kid might alter the design, as well.
If a kid gets interested, you could move on to a more sophisticated telescope. Or maybe you’d prefer a nice microscope.
Radio Astronomy in the Palm of Your Hand
When you think of a radio telescope, you usually think of a giant dish antenna pointing skyward. But [vhuvanmakes] built Wavy-Scope, a handheld radio telescope that can find the Sun and the Moon, among other things.
The build is relatively straightforward, using a commercial LNB to detect signals in the 10-12 GHz range. The detector is a simple satellite finder, although you could also connect it to a software-defined radio, if you wanted something more sophisticated.
The sci-fi style unit is 3D printed, of course, and made us think of a 1950s-era ray gun. There are several videos of the device in action, including one of it detecting the sun that you can see below.
One of the videos shows the instrument detecting otherwise invisible satellites. Of course, it will also detect anything that emits sufficient RF energy for the LNA to detect. When you aren’t using it to snoop on the sky, it would make a fair addition to your Halloween costume.
We’ve seen small radio telescopes before, but not this small. You probably won’t be tracking down hydrogen lines with this, but it could still be a lot of fun.
youtube.com/embed/IbHRXGjD830?…
This week, we discuss crowdsourced resistance and a big government data dump.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: Engaging the Public
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss crowdsourced resistance and a big government data dump.SAM: I don’t want to say it’s rare that we publish positive stories. We post more of those than people probably even realize, because the gnarly stories are the ones that go viral, or are talked about by your friends or aggregated by other news outlets. A “scoop” is almost never a happy story because often they’re predicated on information someone in a position of power didn’t want the world to know. But it’s definitely less common for us to report on things that makes you feel good or hopeful than things that make you go “oh shit” or “Jesus fucking Christ,” I will admit.
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"What if I could create Théâtre D’opéra Spatial as if it were physically created by hand? Not actually, of course."#News #AI
Creator of Infamous AI Painting Tells Court He's a Real Artist
In 2022, Jason Allen outraged artists around the world when he won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition with a piece of AI-generated art. A month later, he tried to copyright the pictures, got denied, and started a fight with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) that dragged on for three years. In August, he filed a new brief he hopes will finally give him a copyright over the image Midjourney made for him, called Théâtre D’opéra Spatial. He’s also set to start selling oil-print reproductions of the image.A press release announcing both the filing and the sale claims these prints “[evoke] the unmistakable gravitas of a hand-painted masterwork one might find in a 19th-century oil painting.” The court filing is also defensive of Allen’s work. “It would be impossible to describe the Work as ‘garden variety’—the Work literally won a state art competition,” it said.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“So many have said I’m not an artist and this isn’t art,” Allen said in a press release announcing both the oil-print sales and the court filing. “Being called an artist or not doesn’t concern me, but the work and my expression of it do. I asked myself, what could make this undeniably art? What if I could create Théâtre D’opéra Spatial as if it were physically created by hand? Not actually, of course, but what if I could achieve that using technology? Surely that would be the answer.”Allen’s 2022 win at the Colorado State Fair was an inflection point. The beta version for the image generation software Midjourney had launched a few months before the competition and AI-generated images were still a novelty. We were years away from the nightmarish tide of slop we all live with today, but the piece was highly controversial and represented one of the first major incursions of AI-generated work into human spaces.
Théâtre D’opéra Spatial was big news at the time. It shook artistic communities and people began to speak out against AI-generated art. Many learned that their works had been fed into the training data for these massive data hungry art generators like Midjourney. About a month after he won the competition and courted controversy, Allen applied for a copyright of the image. The USCO rejected it. He’s been filing appeals ever since and has thus far lost every one.
The oil-prints represent an attempt to will the AI-generated image into a physical form called an “elegraph.” These won’t be hand painted versions of the picture Midjourney made. Instead, they’ll employ a 3D printing technique that uses oil paints to create a reproduction of the image as if a human being made it, complete—Allen claimed—with brushstrokes.
“People said anyone could copy my work online, sell it, and I would have no recourse. They’re not technically wrong,” Allen said in the press release. “If we win my case, copyright will apply retroactively. Regardless, they’ll never reproduce the elegraph. This artifact is singular. It’s real. It’s the answer to the petulant idea that this isn’t art. Long live Art 2.0.”
The elegraph is the work of a company called Arius which is most famous for working with museums to conduct high quality scans of real paintings that capture the individual brushstrokes of masterworks. According to Allen’s press release, Arius’ elegraphs of Théâtre D’opéra Spatial will make the image appear as if it is a hand painted piece of art through “a proprietary technique that translates digital creation into a physical artifact indistinguishable in presence and depth from the great oil paintings of history…its textures, lighting, brushwork, and composition, all recalling the timeless mastery of the European salons.”
Allen and his lawyers filed a request for a summary judgement with the U.S. District Court of Colorado on August 8, 2025. The 44 page legal argument rehashes many of the appeals and arguments Allen and his lawyers have made about the AI-generated image over the past few years.
“He created his image, in part, by providing hundreds of iterative text prompts to an artificial intelligence (“AI”)-based system called Midjourney to help express his intellectual vision,” it said. “Allen produced this artwork using ‘hundreds of iterations’ of prompts, and after he ‘experimented with over 600 prompts,’ he cropped and completed the final Work, touching it up manually and upscaling using additional software.”
Allen’s argument is that prompt engineering is an artistic process and even though a machine made the final image, he says he should be considered the artist because he told the machine what to do. “In the Board’s view, Mr. Allen’s actions as described do not make him the author of the Midjourney Image because his sole contribution to the Midjourney Image was inputting the text prompt that produced it,” a 2023 review of previous rejections by the USCO said.
During its various investigations into the case, the USCO did a lot of research into how Midjourney and other AI-image generators work. “It is the Office’s understanding that, because Midjourney does not treat text prompts as direct instructions, users may need to attempt hundreds of iterations before landing upon an image they find satisfactory. This appears to be the case for Mr. Allen, who experimented with over 600 prompts,” its 2023 review said.
This new filing is an attempt by Allen and his lawyers to get around these previous judgements and appeal to higher courts by accusing the USCO of usurping congressional authority. “The filing argues that by attempting to redefine the term “author” (a power reserved to Congress) the Copyright Office has acted beyond its lawful authority, effectively placing itself above judicial and legislative oversight.”
We’ll see how well that plays in court. In the meantime, Allen is selling oil-prints of the image Midjourney made for him.
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
Ministero dell'Istruzione
#NoiSiamoLeScuole questa settimana è dedicato all’ITS Academy Campania Moda. Grazie ai fondi del #PNRR destinati alla realizzazione di laboratori professionalizzanti e all’ampliamento delle attività didattiche degli ITS, l’Istituto ha potuto migliora…Telegram
Post-exploitation framework now also delivered via npm
Incident description
The first version of the AdaptixC2 post-exploitation framework, which can be considered an alternative to the well-known Cobalt Strike, was made publicly available in early 2025. In spring of 2025, the framework was first observed being used for malicious means.
In October 2025, Kaspersky experts found that the npm ecosystem contained a malicious package with a fairly convincing name: https-proxy-utils. It was posing as a utility for using proxies within projects. At the time of this post, the package had already been taken down.
The name of the package closely resembles popular legitimate packages: http-proxy-agent, which has approximately 70 million weekly downloads, and https-proxy-agent with 90 million downloads respectively. Furthermore, the advertised proxy-related functionality was cloned from another popular legitimate package proxy-from-env, which boasts 50 million weekly downloads. However, the threat actor injected a post-install script into https-proxy-utils, which downloads and executes a payload containing the AdaptixC2 agent.
Metadata for the malicious (left) and legitimate (right) packages
OS-specific adaptation
The script includes various payload delivery methods for different operating systems. The package includes loading mechanisms for Windows, Linux, and macOS. In each OS, it uses specific techniques involving system or user directories to load and launch the implant.
In Windows, the AdaptixC2 agent is dropped as a DLL file into the system directory C:\Windows\Tasks. It is then executed via DLL sideloading. The JS script copies the legitimate msdtc.exe file to the same directory and executes it, thus loading the malicious DLL.
Deobfuscated Windows-specific code for loading AdaptixC2
In macOS, the script downloads the payload as an executable file into the user’s autorun directory: Library/LaunchAgents. The postinstall.js script also drops a plist autorun configuration file into this directory. Before downloading AdaptixC2, the script checks the target architecture (x64 or ARM) and fetches the appropriate payload variant.
Deobfuscated macOS-specific code for loading AdaptixC2
In Linux, the framework’s agent is downloaded into the temporary directory /tmp/.fonts-unix. The script delivers a binary file tailored to the specific architecture (x64 or ARM) and then assigns it execute permissions.
Deobfuscated Linux-specific code for loading AdaptixC2
Once the AdaptixC2 framework agent is deployed on the victim’s device, the attacker gains capabilities for remote access, command execution, file and process management, and various methods for achieving persistence. This both allows the attacker to maintain consistent access and enables them to conduct network reconnaissance and deploy subsequent stages of the attack.
Conclusion
This is not the first attack targeting the npm registry in recent memory. A month ago, similar infection methods utilizing a post-install script were employed in the high-profile incident involving the Shai-Hulud worm, which infected more than 500 packages. The AdaptixC2 incident clearly demonstrates the growing trend of abusing open-source software ecosystems, like npm, as an attack vector. Threat actors are increasingly exploiting the trusted open-source supply chain to distribute post-exploitation framework agents and other forms of malware. Users and organizations involved in development or using open-source software from ecosystems like npm in their products are susceptible to this threat type.
To stay safe, be vigilant when installing open-source modules: verify the exact name of the package you are downloading, and more thoroughly vet unpopular and new repositories. When using popular modules, it is critical to monitor frequently updated feeds on compromised packages and libraries.
Indicators of compromise
Package name
https-proxy-utils
Hashes
DFBC0606E16A89D980C9B674385B448E – package hash
B8E27A88730B124868C1390F3BC42709
669BDBEF9E92C3526302CA37DC48D21F
EDAC632C9B9FF2A2DA0EACAAB63627F4
764C9E6B6F38DF11DC752CB071AE26F9
04931B7DFD123E6026B460D87D842897
Network indicators
cloudcenter[.]top/sys/update
cloudcenter[.]top/macos_update_arm
cloudcenter[.]top/macos_update_x64
cloudcenter[.]top/macosUpdate[.]plist
cloudcenter[.]top/linux_update_x64
cloudcenter[.]top/linux_update_arm
F/0.38 Camera Lens Made With Oil Immersion Microscope Objective
Over on YouTube [Applied Science] shows us how to make an f/0.38 camera lens using an oil immersion microscope objective.
The f-number of a lens indicates how well it will perform in low-light. To calculate the f-number you divide the focal length by the diameter of the aperture. A common f-number is f/1.4 which is generally considered “fast”.
We are told the fastest commercial lens ever used had f/0.7 and was used by Stanley Kubrick to shoot the film Barry Lyndon which was recorded only with candle light.
A microscope objective is a crucial lens that gathers and magnifies light to form an image. It plays a key role in determining the quality and clarity of the final magnified image produced by a microscope.
In this case the microscope objective is optically coupled to the CMOS image sensor using a drop of oil. The oil has better refractive properties than an air-gap. In order to get the closest coupling possible the protective glass sheet on the top of the image sensor was removed. This process resulted in a lot of broken image sensors! Apparently the yield was only two working image sensors from eight attempts at removing the glass.
Of course we’ve seen f-number hacking here at Hackaday before, such as with the A Low F Number Lens, From Scratch which achieved f/0.5.
youtube.com/embed/DQv0nlGsW-s?…
2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Boosting Voltage With Just a Wire
Switching power supplies are familiar to Hackaday readers, whether they have a fairly conventional transformer, are a buck, a boost, or a flyback design. There’s nearly always an inductor involved, whose rapid change in magnetic flux is harnessed to do voltage magic. [Craig D] has made a switching voltage booster that doesn’t use an inductor, instead it’s using a length of conductor, and no, it’s not using the inductance of that conductor as a store of magnetic flux.
Instead it’s making clever use of reflected short pulses in a transmission line for its operation. Electronics students learn all about this in an experiment in which they fire pulses down a length of coax cable and observe their reflections on an oscilloscope, and his circuit is very similar but with careful selection of pulse timing. The idea is that instead of reflected pulses canceling out, they arrive back at the start of the conductor just in time to meet a pulse transition. This causes them to add rather than subtract, and the resulting higher voltage pulse sets off down the conductor again to repeat the process. We can understand the description, but this is evidently one to sit down at the bench and experiment with to fully get to grips with.
[Craig]’s conductor is an alternative to a long coil of coax, a home made delay line of the type once found in the luminance circuit of some color TVs. It’s a coaxial cable in which the outer is formed of a tightly wound coil rather than a solid tube. With it and a high-speed gate driver he can light a couple of neon bulbs, a significant step-up, we think. We’re trying to work out which component is being abused here (other than the gate driver chip he blows) as the conductor is simply performing its natural function. Either way it’s a clever and unexpected circuit, and if it works, we like it.
This project is part of the Hackaday Component Abuse Challenge, in which competitors take humble parts and push them into applications they were never intended for. You still have time to submit your own work, so give it a go!
Hackaday Podcast Episode 342: Poopless Prints, Radio in Your Fillings, and One Hyperspectral Pixel at a Time
It was Elliot and Dan on the podcast today, taking a look at the best the week had to offer in terms of your hacks. We started with surprising news about the rapidly approaching Supercon keynote; no spoilers, but Star Trek fans such as we who don’t have tickets will be greatly disappointed.
Elliot waxed on about taking the poop out of your prints (not pants), Dan got into a camera that adds a dimension to its images, and we both delighted in the inner workings of an air-powered squishy robot.
Questions? We’ve got plenty. Is it possible to take an X-ray without an X-ray tube? Or X-rays, for that matter? Did Lucille Ball crack a spy ring with her fillings? Is Algol set to take over the world? What’s inside a germanium transistor? How does a flipping fish say Happy Birthday? And how far down the Meshtastic rabbit hole did our own Tom Nardi fall? Tune in to find out the answers.
html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/…
Download this free-range, cruelty-free MP3.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Episode 342 Show Notes:
News:
What’s that Sound?
- Congrats to [James Barker] for picking the sound of a rake!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- SLM Co-extruding Hotend Makes Poopless Prints
- I built a rotating mixing nozzle to print with different colors
- 3D Printer with “rotating nozzle”
- GitHub – Heinz-Loepmeier/nozzleboss
- Waterjet-Cut Precision Pastry
- Waverider: Scanning Spectra One Pixel At A Time
- More Than 100 Sub-Circuit Designs From Texas Instruments
- The Singing Dentures Of Manchester And Other Places
- Printing An Air-Powered Integrated Circuit For Squishy Robots
- Tubeless X-Ray Runs On Patience
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks
- Could This Be The Year Of Algol?
- How Bad Can A Cheap Knockoff ADS1115 ADC Be?
- RFIDisk: When Floppy Drives Go Contactless
- Attack Turns Mouse Into Microphone
- Dan’s Picks:
- Toasty Subwoofer Limps Back To Life
- Inside A Germanium Transistor
- Billy Bass Gets New Job As A Voice Assistant
Can’t-Miss Articles:
hackaday.com/2025/10/17/hackad…
This Week in Security: F5, SonicWall, and the End of Windows 10
F5 is unintentionally dabbling in releasing the source code behind their BIG-IP networking gear, announcing this week that an unknown threat actor had access to their internal vulnerability and code tracking systems. This security breach was discovered on August 9th, and in the time since, F5 has engaged with CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and NCC Group to review what happened.
So far it appears that the worst result is access to unreleased vulnerabilities in the F5 knowledge management system. This means that any unpatched vulnerabilities were effectively 0-days, though the latest set of patches for the BIG-IP system has fixed those flaws. There aren’t any reports of those vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, and F5 has stated that none of the leaked vulnerabilities were critical or allowed for remote exploitation.
Slightly more worrying is that this access included the product development environment. The problem there isn’t particularly the leak of the source code — one of the covered projects is NGINX, which is already open source software. The real danger is that changes could have been surreptitiously added to those codebases. The fact that NGINX is Open Source goes a long way to alleviate that danger, and when combined with the security built into tools like git, it seems very unlikely that malicious code could be sneaked into the NGINX public code base. A thorough review of the rest of the F5 codebases has similarly come up negative, and so far it looks like the supply-chain bullet has been dodged.
WatchGuard Out of Bounds
WatchGuard’s Fireware OS has a stack buffer overflow. There’s a few interesting details about this story. The first, as WatchTowr researchers gleefully point out, is that it’s 2025 and a security vendor has a stack overflow bug straight out of the ’90s. But second, this is one of the first vulnerabilities we’ve covered that has a CVSS 4.0 score. In CVSS 3 terms, this would be a severity 10 vulnerability. As the the 4th iteration of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System also measures the impact on the rest of the network, it scores a bit lower 9.3 there, though one could probably make an argument that it should be higher.
The actual vulnerability is in the VPN service, and it’s as simple as it gets. An attacker controlled buffer is copied into a fixed length memory region without any bounds checking. That VPN service uses an IKEv2 handshake protocol to establish connections, and the server responds with an odd Base64 encoded string. Decode the string, and it turns out the vulnerable service announces VN=12.11.3 BN=719894, the version number and build string, allowing for super easy identification of vulnerable targets.
The final step in turning this into a true vulnerability is to corrupt the stack, take control of the program counter, and Return-Oriented-Program your way through a couple gadgets to be able to call system(). Right? This platform doesn’t turn on every mitigation — stack canaries and position independent execution are noticeably missing. But there are some good hardening steps that were done, like leaving out /bin/sh altogether. How do you run shellcode when the machine doesn’t have a shell at all? The answer the WatchTowr crew turned to was to run the system code in the Python3 shell. Thinking outside the box!
Sonicwall and Unintentional Distributed Backups
About a month ago, we shared the news that Sonicwall had a breach of their own, with limited customers backups being exposed. At the time, the word was that fewer than 5% of customers would be affected. That estimate seems to have been a bit optimistic, as SonicWall is now recommending that all customers step through their new remediation playbook, which calls for a complete cycling of all credentials stored on Sonicwall devices.
It’s unclear if this is because more configuration data was accessible than was previously believed, or because attackers are actively using the pilfered data in attacks against SonicWall customers. The unintentional distribution of system backups turns out not to have been a good strategy.
UEFI Backdoor
UEFI and Secure Boot have been viewed with skepticism, particularly by Linux enthusiasts over the years. There is, however, something to be said for the idea that your computer won’t boot a manipulated OS without your permission, and especially since major Linux distros have access to signed Secure Boot keys, it hasn’t been the dystopian disaster that many of us feared. The security question of the UEFI root of trust has had its own problems, and one of those problems has recently bitten Framework laptops. The issue is the mm (Memory Modify) command that can optionally be built into UEFI shells. This is strictly for debugging purposes, and it’s been discovered that allowing arbitrary access to system memory is not great for system security.
Eclypsium researchers are calling this one BombShell, and it boils down to overwriting the security handler pointer in the UEFI firmware, so all Secure Boot checks are disabled. It seems that this level of tampering is invisible to the system and booted OS. And with just a bit of cleverness, it can be injected as a permanent boot payload. While it’s specifically Framework laptops that are in question with this specific disclosure, it’s not strictly a Framework issue, but can affect any UEFI machine that ships a signed UEFI shell, that includes dangerous commands like mm.
Hack a Car Company, and All the Cars
We have a delightful hack from Def Con 33, where an as-of-yet-unnamed car brand had a couple security problems with their admin web portal, and those problems are pretty serious when put together. First, the invite-only dealer portal didn’t actually verify the invite tokens. And second, when creating an account, the back-end didn’t actually check the account creation details. Meaning that anyone that knew where to look could create an admin account.
The result was that a VIN number could be used to look up a car, and the owner’s details could be accessed. Or the system could be searched via owner’s information, to find vehicle information. It allowed transferring authentication of one of the vehicles to a new mobile app account, and the mobile app could be used to unlock the vehicle.
youtube.com/embed/U1VKazuvGrc?…
Windows 10
It’s time to turn out the lights, the party is over. The sun has set and Windows 10 has entered its twilight. The advice from every other legacy OS applies: upgrade if you can. Yes, there are some frustrating problems with upgrading to Windows 11, particularly if your machine is just too old to have a TPM or Secure Boot.
If you’re stuck on Windows 10, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Microsoft is making security updates available for free, for many computers, if you use a Microsoft account on the machine. The bad news is that those updates are a monthly trickle of fresh vulnerabilities that some machines just won’t ever get patched for.
Bits and Bytes
What do you do when you’re flying, and you’re too cheap frugal to pay for in-flight wifi? Naturally, find some way to tunnel out for free. The key is usually DNS. It’s probably the inverse of the meme, that the problem is always DNS, as that’s the last thing a security hardening team wants to break. And if that won’t work, there’s always MAC address cloning.
Many a pen test has hit a brick wall when faced with a gRPC endpoint. Google’s Remote Procedure Call framework is binary, and without reflection turned on, extremely difficult to map what calls are available. There’s a new tool, grpc-scan, that just might shed some light on the subject. It’s a combination of common design patterns, and carefully parsing the returned errors to learn about the system.
And finally, where’s the most bulletproof place you can host some malicious code? A server in Russia? Apparently it’s now on the blockchain. This isn’t a theoretical attack from a security thinktank, but a real-world malware campaign believed to originate from North Korean hackers. Yet another red flag to watch out for in smart contracts!
Site of Secret 1950s Cold War Iceworm Project Rediscovered
The overall theme of the early part of the Cold War was that of subterfuge — with scientific missions often providing excellent cover for placing missiles right on the USSR’s doorstep. Recently NASA rediscovered Camp Century, while testing a airplane-based synthetic aperture radar instrument (UAVSAR) over Greenland. Although established on the surface in 1959 as a polar research site, and actually producing good science from e.g. ice core samples, beneath this benign surface was the secretive Project Iceworm.
By 1967 the base was forced to be abandoned due to shifting ice caps, which would eventually bury the site under over 30 meters of ice. Before that, the scientists would test out the PM-2A small modular reactor. It not only provided 2 MW of electrical power and heat to the base, but was itself subjected to various experiments. Alongside this public face, Project Iceworm sought to set up a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites for Minuteman missiles. These would be located below the ice sheet, capable of surviving a first strike scenario by the USSR. A lack of Danish permission, among other complications, led to the project eventually being abandoned.
It was this base that popped up during the NASA scan of the ice bed. Although it was thought that the crushed remains would be safely entombed, it’s estimated that by the year 2100 global warming will have led to the site being exposed again, including the thousands of liters of diesel and tons of hazardous waste that were left behind back in 1967. The positive news here is probably that with this SAR instrument we can keep much better tabs on the condition of the site as the ice cap continues to grind it into a fine paste.
Top image: Camp Century in happier times. (Source: US Army, Wikimedia)
Hai una foto? Ora possono trovarti pure su Tinder (anche se non ci sei)
Sui social media, una particolare attenzione è stata rivolta verso quei siti web che consentono di individuare il profilo Tinder di un individuo partendo da una semplice foto.
Piattaforme come Cheaterbuster e CheatEye affermano di utilizzare algoritmi di riconoscimento facciale, consentendo a chiunque di identificare un utente specifico in base a una foto e di ottenere informazioni sulla sua posizione e attività.
404 Media ha testato questi servizi e ha confermato che sono effettivamente in grado di trovare un account di incontri specifico, anche se la persona non ha lasciato alcuna traccia accessibile tramite l’interfaccia ufficiale di Tinder.
Tali strumenti vengono pubblicizzati come un modo per “controllare un partner” o “smascherare un traditore”, ma in realtà diventano strumenti di sorveglianza. Aprono le porte ad abusi, dallo stalking di ex partner al tracciamento dei movimenti di qualcuno a sua insaputa. L’Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ha osservato che tali progetti sono uno strumento ideale per gli stalker che si nascondono dietro motivazioni banali.
Cheaterbuster, precedentemente noto come Swipe Buster, esiste da diversi anni, ma di recente ha aggiunto un modulo di riconoscimento facciale. Durante i test, 404 Media ha caricato le foto di due volontari e, in entrambi i casi, il sistema ha restituito risultati accurati, inclusi i luoghi in cui gli individui si erano effettivamente recati. Le posizioni erano leggermente obsolete, ma abbastanza accurate, fino a quartieri specifici di Los Angeles e Brooklyn. Per effettuare una ricerca, è sufficiente inserire un nome sospetto, l’età e la città. Se i dati non sono accurati, è possibile abilitare le funzioni “volti simili” o “mostra tutto” per una fascia d’età specifica. Il servizio costa circa 20 dollari al mese e non richiede altro che una connessione Internet e un indirizzo email.
Secondo gli stessi sviluppatori, i risultati si basano sui dati pubblicati dagli utenti di Tinder, ma queste informazioni non sono accessibili tramite gli strumenti standard dell’app. Un rappresentante di Tinder ha dichiarato che l’azienda non ha alcuna affiliazione con Cheaterbuster o CheatEye e vieta severamente tale utilizzo delle informazioni. Tinder ha sottolineato che la sicurezza e la privacy degli utenti sono una priorità e che qualsiasi tentativo di raccolta dati esterna viola i termini e le condizioni della piattaforma. I creatori del sito web non hanno risposto alle richieste di informazioni di 404 Media.
Cheaterbuster si promuove attivamente attraverso il marketing virale. I video stanno guadagnando popolarità su TikTok e Instagram, dove i blogger presumibilmente trovano il profilo di qualcuno durante un’intervista.
L’emergere di tali strumenti riflette un cambiamento nell’uso della tecnologia di riconoscimento facciale: dalle agenzie di intelligence e polizia alle applicazioni commerciali di massa.
Mentre in precedenza tali database venivano creati da aziende come Clearview AI, che vendevano i loro servizi ad agenzie governative, le funzionalità di sorveglianza sono ora a portata di mano di qualsiasi utente.
Servizi come Pimeyes consentivano già alle persone di cercare foto su Internet, e ora meccanismi simili vengono utilizzati per tracciare le attività sulle app di incontri. Per le vittime di stalking o violenza, questo potrebbe avere conseguenze estremamente pericolose, poiché ora possono essere identificate da una singola foto.
L'articolo Hai una foto? Ora possono trovarti pure su Tinder (anche se non ci sei) proviene da Red Hot Cyber.
Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles
A number of easy to access websites use facial recognition to let partners, stalkers, or anyone else uncover specific peoples’ Tinder profiles, reveal their approximate physical location at points in time, and track changes to their profile including their photos, according to 404 Media’s tests.Ordinarily it is not possible to search Tinder for a specific person. Instead, Tinder provides users potential matches based on the user’s own physical location. The tools on the sites 404 Media has found allow anyone to search for someone’s profile by uploading a photo of their face. The tools are invasive of anyone’s privacy, but present a significant risk to those who may need to avoid an abusive ex-partner or stalker. The sites mostly market these tools as a way to find out if their partner is cheating on them, or at minimum using dating apps like Tinder.
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Subscribe nowViral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles
Videos demoing one of the sites have repeatedly gone viral on TikTok and other platforms recently. 404 Media verified they can locate specific peoples' Tinder profiles using their photo, and found that the viral videos are produced by paid creat…Joseph Cox (404 Media)
“Yuheng”, il microchip che cattura lo spettro di 10.000 stelle al secondo
Il team guidato dal professor Fang Lu del Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica dell’Università di Tsinghua ha annunciato lo sviluppo del primo chip al mondo per l’imaging spettrale con risoluzione sub-angstrom, denominato “Yuheng“.
La ricerca, pubblicata sulla rivista Nature con il titolo “Integrated lithium niobate photonics sub-angstrom snapshot spectral imaging”, rappresenta un significativo avanzamento nella tecnologia fotonica intelligente.
Nonostante le dimensioni compatte di appena 2 cm × 2 cm × 0,5 cm, il chip offre una risoluzione spettrale di R = 12.000, consentendo di acquisire uno spettro completo per ciascun pixel. Questa capacità elimina i limiti tradizionali che fino ad oggi hanno impedito di combinare elevata risoluzione spettrale e flusso di imaging.
Secondo il professor Fang Lu, il chip supera sfide chiave legate a risoluzione, efficienza e integrazione dei sistemi di imaging spettrale, aprendo la strada a numerose applicazioni.
Tra i possibili utilizzi, “Yuheng” si distingue per il telerilevamento aereo, l’intelligenza artificiale e l’osservazione astronomica. In quest’ultimo ambito, il chip è in grado di catturare lo spettro completo di circa 10.000 stelle al secondo.
Ciò potrebbe ridurre drasticamente il tempo necessario per osservare centinaia di miliardi di stelle nella Via Lattea, passando da migliaia di anni a meno di dieci. Inoltre, grazie al suo design miniaturizzato, il chip può essere montato sui satelliti, consentendo di mappare lo spettro cosmico con una precisione senza precedenti.
L'articolo “Yuheng”, il microchip che cattura lo spettro di 10.000 stelle al secondo proviene da Red Hot Cyber.
Phishing contro PagoPA: nuova campagna abusa di open redirect Google
Il CERT-AGID ha rilevato una nuova variante del phishing ai danni di PagoPA.
La campagna, ancora a tema multe come le precedenti, sfrutta questa volta un meccanismo di open redirect su domini legittimi di Google per rendere i messaggi più credibili e aggirare i controlli automatici.
Come funziona il meccanismo
Ad un primo sguardo il link malevolo
hxxps://adservice.google.be/clk/408533097;208818505;l;?//sitomalevolo.tld/pagina
sembrerebbe portare a un servizio Google, ma in realtà il parametro finale permette di effettuare un open redirect, consente cioè di reindirizzare verso un qualunque URL di un dominio terzo.
La catena di compromissione procede con i seguenti passaggi
L’URL inizia con un sottodominio Google (adservice.google.be) che viene usato come esca, approfittando della reputazione del marchio per far apparire il link sicuro.
Il sottodominio Google adservice reindirizza verso una pagina intermedia ospitata su bio.site, una piattaforma legittima che consente di creare pagine di presentazione con link personalizzati simile a Linktree, anch’esso sfruttato per diverse campagne di phishing.
In questo caso i criminali hanno realizzato una pagina che riproduce il logo di PagoPA e fa riferimento a presunte infrazioni stradali non pagate, invitando l’utente a cliccare su un pulsante con la dicitura “Accedi al servizio di regolamento“.
Il pulsante a sua volta reindirizza l’utente verso la pagina di phishing vera e propria che imita graficamente il portale ufficiale e provvede a raccogliere i dati personali e delle carte elettroniche di pagamento. La risorsa è ospitata su privatedns.org, un servizio legittimo che offre registrazioni gratuite di sottodomini a terzi, spesso usato per progetti temporanei o test, ma frequentemente abusato da attori malevoli poiché consente di creare indirizzi difficili da tracciare o bloccare in modo centralizzato.
Questo tipo di approccio non è nuovo
Un caso analogo era già stato documentato nel 2023 sul sito web-inspection.de, dove veniva segnalato lo stesso abuso dei domini Google, in particolare adservice.google.de, ma il comportamento è presente anche sui domini equivalenti .it e .com.
Nell’analisi, intitolata “INSPECTION finds Open Redirect Fraud on Google Pages”, viene descritto lo stesso schema oggi osservato: reindirizzamenti aperti, indicizzazione di link manipolati e impiego del cloaking per celare i contenuti fraudolenti.
Tuttavia, nel caso attuale, non si tratta di cloaking in senso stretto: la pagina ospitata su bio.site non varia i contenuti in base al visitatore, ma rappresenta piuttosto un uso ingannevole di un servizio legittimo come passaggio intermedio, sfruttato per carpire la fiducia dell’utente e aggirare i controlli di sicurezza automatizzati.
Dati sul phishing PagoPA
Da marzo 2025, quando è stata individuata la prima campagna a tema, il CERT-AGID ha rilevato 220 campagne di phishing riconducibili ad abusi verso PagoPA, grazie anche alle segnalazioni quotidiane inviate dagli utenti colpiti.
Nel complesso, sono stati prodotti e condivisi 2.574 Indicatori di Compromissione (IoC) con le amministrazioni e i soggetti accreditati, per supportare le attività di blocco tempestivo dei siti fraudolenti.
L'articolo Phishing contro PagoPA: nuova campagna abusa di open redirect Google proviene da Red Hot Cyber.
Vulnerabilità da 9.8 su Apache ActiveMQ NMS AMQP: aggiornamento urgente necessario
È stata individuata una vulnerabilità di deserializzazione di dati non affidabili nel client Apache ActiveMQ NMS AMQP, che espone i sistemi a potenziali attacchi da parte di server malevoli.
Il difetto monitorato con il codice CVE-2025-54539, ha uno score pari a 9.8 su 10, e interessa tutte le versioni fino alla 2.3.0 inclusa, quando vengono stabilite connessioni con server AMQP non attendibili.
Secondo gli esperti di sicurezza di Endor Labs, che hanno segnalato la falla, un server remoto opportunamente modificato può sfruttare la logica di deserializzazione non vincolata del client per inviare risposte manipolate, potenzialmente in grado di consentire l’esecuzione arbitraria di codice sul sistema della vittima.
Già nella versione 2.1.0 era stato introdotto un meccanismo di sicurezza basato su liste di permesso e blocco (allow/deny lists) per limitare la deserializzazione. Tuttavia, successive analisi hanno dimostrato che questa protezione poteva essere aggirata in determinate circostanze, mantenendo così il rischio di compromissione.
In parallelo alla vulnerabilità, il team di sviluppo di Apache ActiveMQ ha annunciato che, in linea con la decisione di Microsoft di deprecare la serializzazione binaria in .NET 9, è in corso una valutazione per rimuovere completamente il supporto alla serializzazione binaria .NET nelle future versioni dell’API NMS.
Gli utenti sono fortemente invitati ad aggiornare il client alla versione 2.4.0 o successive, che risolve il problema.
Inoltre, tutti i progetti che si basano su NMS-AMQP dovrebbero pianificare una migrazione dalla serializzazione binaria .NET come parte di una più ampia strategia di rafforzamento della sicurezza a lungo termine.
L'articolo Vulnerabilità da 9.8 su Apache ActiveMQ NMS AMQP: aggiornamento urgente necessario proviene da Red Hot Cyber.
Microsoft blocca Vanilla Tempest: Falsi installer di Teams diffondevano ransomware Rhysida
All’inizio di ottobre 2025, Microsoft ha interrotto un’ampia operazione malevola attribuita al gruppo Vanilla Tempest, revocando più di 200 certificati digitali utilizzati per firmare in modo fraudolento file di installazione di Microsoft Teams.
Questi pacchetti falsi servivano come vettore per diffondere la backdoor Oyster e, successivamente, il ransomware Rhysida.
La scoperta e le contromisure
La campagna è stata individuata a fine settembre 2025, dopo mesi di attività in cui l’attore della minaccia aveva sfruttato file binari apparentemente legittimi.
In risposta, Microsoft Defender Antivirus ha aggiornato le proprie firme per riconoscere e bloccare sia i falsi installer di Teams sia i malware coinvolti, mentre Microsoft Defender for Endpoint è stato potenziato per individuare i tattiche, tecniche e procedure (TTP) tipiche di Vanilla Tempest.
Il profilo del gruppo
Vanilla Tempest, noto anche con gli alias VICE SPIDER o Vice Society in altri report di sicurezza, è un gruppo di cybercriminali motivato da fini economici. Le sue operazioni si concentrano su attacchi ransomware e furto di dati sensibili con finalità di estorsione. Nel tempo, ha distribuito diversi payload, tra cui BlackCat, Quantum Locker e Zeppelin, ma negli ultimi mesi si è orientato principalmente verso Rhysida.
La tecnica d’attacco
Nel corso della campagna, i criminali hanno diffuso alcuni falsi file denominati MSTeamsSetup.exe, ospitati su domini malevoli che simulavano siti ufficiali di Microsoft Teams, come teams-download[.]buzz, teams-install[.]run e teams-download[.]top.
Gli utenti, venivano presumibilmente indirizzati a questi siti attraverso attacchi di avvelenamento SEO, una tecnica che manipola i risultati dei motori di ricerca per far apparire i domini infetti tra i primi risultati.
Una volta eseguito, il falso installer generava un loader che a sua volta installava Oyster, una backdoor già impiegata da Vanilla Tempest a partire da giugno 2025, ma che il gruppo ha iniziato a firmare digitalmente in modo fraudolento da settembre 2025.
Per conferire un’apparente legittimità ai file distribuiti, Vanilla Tempest ha abusato dei servizi di Trusted Signing e delle autorità di certificazione SSL[.]com, DigiCert e GlobalSign, riuscendo così a eludere inizialmente i controlli di sicurezza.
La risposta di Microsoft
Microsoft ha dichiarato che Defender Antivirus, se completamente attivo, è in grado di bloccare l’intera catena d’attacco. Inoltre, Defender for Endpoint fornisce strumenti di analisi e mitigazione per aiutare le organizzazioni a indagare su eventuali compromissioni.
L’azienda ha condiviso pubblicamente i dettagli tecnici dell’operazione per rafforzare la cooperazione nella comunità di cybersecurity e migliorare la capacità di risposta collettiva a questo tipo di minacce.
L'articolo Microsoft blocca Vanilla Tempest: Falsi installer di Teams diffondevano ransomware Rhysida proviene da Red Hot Cyber.
Nvidia perde il 95% dal mercato AI Cinese! Le restrizioni all’export fanno crollare la quota
Jen-Hsun Huang, fondatore e CEO di Nvidia, ha rivelato che le recenti restrizioni all’esportazione hanno drasticamente ridotto la presenza dei chip AI dell’azienda in Cina, passando dal 95% a una quota praticamente nulla.
“Quattro anni fa, Nvidia aveva una quota di mercato del 95% in Cina. Oggi è solo del 50%”, disse Huang a maggio del 2025, stigmatizzando le restrizioni crescenti imposte a partire dall’era di Joe Biden.
Ma oggi tutto è cambiato e la Cina ha iniziato a produrre chip AI per se stessa.
Quello che ha detto Huang il 17 ottobre, mette in luce le attuali conseguenze di queste limitazioni sulle dinamiche globali dell’intelligenza artificiale. Nonostante le restrizioni sull’acquisto di chip avanzati, la Cina continua a contare su una quota significativa di sviluppatori di intelligenza artificiale.
Secondo Huang, circa il 50% degli sviluppatori AI mondiali risiede in Cina, consentendo comunque lo sviluppo di tecnologie sofisticate come DeepSeek.
Huang ha sottolineato l’importanza degli sviluppatori nello sviluppo delle piattaforme future: “La chiave nell’intelligenza artificiale, come in qualsiasi altro settore software, sono gli sviluppatori. Sono loro a plasmare il futuro tecnologico.”
Il CEO di Nvidia ha inoltre evidenziato le implicazioni geopolitiche delle restrizioni: se il mondo deve fare affidamento sulla tecnologia americana, è essenziale che questa rimanga accessibile.
Limitare l’export dei chip verso la Cina, ha spiegato Huang, impedisce agli sviluppatori cinesi di utilizzare le soluzioni Nvidia, riducendo drasticamente la quota di mercato dell’azienda in uno dei mercati più rilevanti a livello globale.
“Se fossimo completamente esclusi dal mercato cinese, la nostra quota sarebbe pari a zero. Siamo passati dal 95% al 0%,” ha dichiarato Huang a barrons aggiungendo: “Non riesco a immaginare che un politico voglia vedere la nostra presenza in Cina completamente azzerata.”
In precedenza, la Cina rappresentava una parte significativa del fatturato di Nvidia. Nel secondo trimestre dell’anno fiscale 2026, l’azienda ha registrato ricavi totali di 46,7 miliardi di dollari, con una crescita del 56% rispetto all’anno precedente.
Tuttavia, le vendite di chip H20 destinati ai clienti cinesi sono state sospese, a causa delle direttive del governo cinese che hanno scoraggiato l’acquisto di tali prodotti per motivi di sicurezza. Nonostante ciò, Nvidia ha beneficiato di una vendita di 180 milioni di dollari di H20 a clienti al di fuori della Cina, contribuendo a mitigare l’impatto delle restrizioni sul fatturato complessivo.
Nel corso dell’anno fiscale 2025, la Cina ha rappresentato circa il 13% del fatturato totale di Nvidia, pari a circa 17 miliardi di dollari.
L'articolo Nvidia perde il 95% dal mercato AI Cinese! Le restrizioni all’export fanno crollare la quota proviene da Red Hot Cyber.
Arturo Di Corinto presenta i Security day di Fortinet
È stato bello condurre i security days di Fortinet a Milano.
Bella atmosfera, ottima organizzazione, relatori eccellenti.
C’erano 1500 persone in sala. Un record.
Non è stato difficile gestire tutta la giornata visto che gli speaker erano tutti bravi. A cominciare da Massimo Palermo, vice presidente di Fortinet, economista prestato alla cybersecurity.
Tutto è incominciato con un intervento spettacolare di Roberto Caramia capo del CSIRT Italia (sì siamo amici e lo stimo molto)
Ho apprezzato molto l’analisi che Filippo Cassini e Aldo Di Mattia hanno fatto delle minacce emergenti e in particolare dell’IA, e anche l’intervento stimolante di Stefano Mele che ha parlato della regolazione come fattore di creazione di fiducia. Bello e provocatorio poi è stato il talk di un altro collega e amico come Alessandro Curioni che ha scudisciato l’hype tecnologico che va a discapito della comprensione della tecnologia stessa.
Ma sono stati bell anche i panel, quelli coi partner e con le donne. Sul palco ho potuto intervistare senza rete il Ciso di Juventus, Mirko Rinaldini, il Cio di Bpm, Adolfo Pellegrino il CTO di Prysmian, Alessandro Bottin e Sapio, Riccardo Salierno, (persona squisita). Quattro campioni italiani.
Grazie anche a Greta Nasi Selene Giupponi e alla Andrea Bocelli Foundation che ci hanno parlato di parità di genere, salari e Burn out.
Un sentito ringraziamento a loro e alla Polizia di Stato (Tx Rocco Nardulli) per quanto fanno nel campo dell’educazione cyber.
Cara Valentina Sudano hai fatto un bel lavoro con tutta la tua squadra.
Stampa Romana: attentato a Ranucci colpo a tutta l’informazione, mobilitazione necessaria.
L’attentato a Sigfrido Ranucci è un atto di una gravità inaudita, un attacco diretto al giornalismo d’inchiesta, all’informazione, cardine della dialettica democratica.
Si colpisce e si cerca di intimidire non solo Ranucci e la redazione di Report, che con il loro lavoro incarnano la ragione e la missione della Rai servizio pubblico, ma l’intera comunità dei giornalisti, il diritto di informare e quello dei cittadini a essere informati.
Contro questa violenza indecente è necessaria la mobilitazione unitaria di tutte le forze democratiche a difesa di una libertà di stampa sempre di più a rischio dopo anni di leggi bavaglio, cronisti minacciati e intimiditi, esposti alle pressioni, con un potere politico molto spesso indifferente alla tutela del diritto di cronaca, solerte invece nell’immaginare e concretizzare nuovi limiti al diritto di manifestare, di dissentire, persino di esprimere il proprio pensiero.
Un clima di odio e di attacco all’informazione in cui si sono distinti persino esponenti altissimi di Governo e Parlamento, che hanno usato parole gravemente offensive proprio nei confronti di Ranucci e di Report, parole su cui oggi dovrebbero riflettere.
L’Associazione Stampa Romana esprime piena solidarietà al collega vittima dell’attentato, alla sua famiglia e a tutta la redazione di Report.
L’informazione libera e indipendente non si tocca.
La Segreteria dell”ASR
Gazzetta del Cadavere reshared this.
Costante: “Attentato a Ranucci riporta indietro orologio della democrazia” Oggi alle 16 presidio davanti sede Rai di via Teulada
“L’attentato a Sigfrido Ranucci riporta indietro di decenni l’orologio della democrazia in Italia. È un attentato non solo al collega di Report, ma alla libertà di informazione, all’articolo 21 della Costituzione, ai basilari principi della convivenza civile e di democrazia”. Lo afferma Alessandra Costante, segretaria generale della Fnsi.
“La Federazione nazionale della Stampa – prosegue – chiede che venga fatta chiarezza con rapidità su quanto accaduto. L’attentato a Ranucci mostra un salto di qualità nelle azioni contro il giornalismo”.
Fnsi, Usigrai, Stampa Romana organizzano per oggi alle 16.00 un presidio davanti alla sede Rai di via Teulada. Per essere al fianco di Sigfrido Ranucci e per dimostrare che per i giornalisti italiani la libertà di informazione è inviolabile.
Gazzetta del Cadavere reshared this.
How press can survive interactions with police on the skirmish line
As protesters paint signs for another round of “No Kings” demonstrations this Saturday, journalists are getting ready in their own way: Charging camera batteries, notifying emergency contacts, and rinsing old tear gas off their shatter-resistant goggles.
At similar events since June, well over a hundred journalists have been injured, detained, or arrested by police. Now two cities — Los Angeles, California, and Chicago, Illinois — are expecting their largest protests since federal judges issued multiple rulings exempting the press from general dispersal orders and restricting law enforcement use of “less lethal” munitions.
Those are big wins on paper, but only if you know how to use them.
The law exists in two separate but unequal places: the court and the street. And you’ll never win a philosophical argument on a skirmish line.
Sure, you’re probably right. You’re armed with the First Amendment. But the average police officer is armed with a baton, handcuffs, body armor, tear gas, and at least a couple of guns. They may also be tired, overwhelmed, hungry, and see you standing between them and a bathroom break.
As they’ve been known to say, “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.”
It’s no longer “Listen to me,” it’s ideally “Here’s a signed order from your boss.”
Covering a protest, an immigration raid, or an immigration hearing is no place to give up your rights. Instead, you can learn to invoke them more effectively.
The press is one of two professions (alongside religious practitioners) distinguished by its constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. Policing is the opposite, marked by rigid command structure and a sworn duty to enforce very specific codes and regulations.
But cops are supposed to be trained and held accountable by their department. They shouldn’t need reminding of the law they’re supposed to uphold. And it’s not the job of journalists to train them.
As professional communicators, journalists may find it more productive to translate conversations into the language of law enforcement.
For example, in California, it won’t get you very far to tell an officer you’re exempt from dispersal orders thanks to “Senate Bill 98.” You might be talking to a kid fresh out of the police academy or a detective pulled off desk duty to earn overtime. They have no idea what passed the statehouse four years ago. At best, they’re trained to speak in terms of “penal code.” Mentioning “Penal Code 409.7,” the statute established by that bill, might be your better ticket out of handcuffs. (This state law only applies to local law enforcement, not to federal operations like Immigration or Customs Enforcement or other Department of Homeland Security agencies.)
For journalists in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas, recent court rulings, including one for the LA Press Club in which I’m a plaintiff, have made things much clearer. Ideally you don’t need to print out 80 pages of preliminary injunctions. An officer will likely ignore that anyway, figuring it’s up to department lawyers to interpret. Instead, try to print the version of orders their boss(’s boss’s boss) was required to issue. The following list of PDFs are being updated as those materials are released by each agency, so use your judgment and print what might be applicable to your situation.
- Chicago-area Temporary Restraining Order (Northern District of Illinois)
- As each DHS subsidiary agency provided their own cover sheet to personnel, it may be useful to print each of the following.
- Federal Protective Service Cover Sheet
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cover Sheet
- Customs and Border Patrol Cover Sheet
- Department of Justice Cover Sheet
- Los Angeles Police Department’s “Chief’s Notice” to all personnel
- This is an earlier version based on an initial TRO. It will be updated with a newer version based on a more recent preliminary injunction, which is even more favorable to press.
- LA-area Preliminary Injunction (Central District of California)
- DHS has not shared details on how this order was distributed. As a longer document, you may wish to only print the cover page along with pages 43 to 45, which contain the injunction itself.
This puts things in law enforcement terms — from the top of their command structure. It’s no longer “Listen to me,” it’s ideally “Here’s a signed order from your boss.”
You want a printed copy, since your phone could run out of battery, be lost, or shatter. And it’s never a good idea to hand your unlocked phone to police. Also, if you need to pull out these orders (or a press pass), state clearly what you’re reaching for before placing your hand in a pocket or bag. Officers don’t love those sorts of unannounced movements.
A piece of paper isn’t much of a shield from a raging officer swinging a baton and screaming, “Leave the area.” But if you can engage with them, you want to ensure the precious few words that they hear will resonate. And it bears repeating: Everyone has a boss.
Protests involve a lot of turnover on the front line, so you may never see the same officer twice. If possible, communicate early and often. Ask to meet a supervisor or public information officer during a calm moment, and get their name so you can ask for them if you have trouble later on.
Unfortunately, even a signed order from the chief isn’t always a “get out of jail free” card. After a temporary restraining order was issued against the LAPD this summer, officers still put several journalists in zip ties during a protest. Two lawyers who had won the TRO showed up with a copy of official paperwork instructing officers to leave press alone. After they handed it to the incident commander, police still drove two photojournalists away in the back of a squad car.
The LAPD later suggested those photographers were ”pretending to be media.” The pair’s credits include The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Business Insider, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and even a cover for Time magazine.
A federal judge later wrote of the LAPD, “The Court expresses no approval for this conduct. To the contrary, the evidence presented is disturbing and, at the very least, shows that Defendants violated the spirit if not the letter of the Court’s initial restraining order.”
Of course, the photojournalists beat the rap. But they didn’t beat the ride.
Attending a protest outside of LA or Chicago? You still have First Amendment rights, even if you don’t have a court order. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has been investigating and documenting serious violations in cities from New York to Portland, Oregon. If you experience or witness law enforcement violating press rights anywhere in the country, please send us tips and any available evidence to tips@pressfreedomtracker.us.
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When the law’s on your side but ICE isn’t
Dear Friend of Press Freedom,
It’s been two weeks since Atlanta journalist Mario Guevara was deported and 207 days since Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested for co-writing an op-ed. Read on for more about this weekend’s planned protests, actions you can take to protect journalists, and events you can catch us at this month.
When the law’s on your side but ICE doesn’t care
As protesters paint signs for another round of “No Kings” demonstrations this Saturday, journalists are getting ready in their own way: charging camera batteries, notifying emergency contacts, and rinsing old tear gas residue off their shatter-resistant goggles.
Two cities — Los Angeles, California, and Chicago, Illinois — are expecting their largest protests since federal judges issued multiple rulings exempting the press from general dispersal orders and restricting law enforcement’s use of “less lethal” munitions.
Those are big wins for journalists, but only if they know how to use them. Our new deputy director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), Adam Rose, wrote about how journalists can prepare for the weekend. Read more here.
Administration ignores flotilla abuses
Three U.S. journalists have been abducted from aid flotillas bound for Gaza and detained by Israel. All three reported experiencing or witnessing abuse and even torture.
Photojournalist Noa Avishag Schnall recalled, “I was hung from the metal shackles on my wrists and ankles and beaten in the stomach, back, face, ear and skull by a group of men and women guards, one of whom sat on my neck and face, blocking my airways … Our cell was awoken with threats of rape.”
Jewish Currents reporter Emily Wilder said she “announced … ‘I’m a journalist, I’m press.’ The woman to my left hissed, ‘We don’t give a fuck,’ and the other dug her nails into my scalp and pulled me by my hair across the port.”
In normal times, this would be a major scandal. We joined Defending Rights & Dissent and others in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio explaining what should be obvious — the U.S. shouldn’t sit silently as its ally assaults its journalists. Read it here.
First rule of Qatari jets? Don’t talk about Qatari jets
We sued the Trump administration for refusing to share its legal rationale for approving the president’s acceptance of a $400 million jet from the Qatari government, despite the Constitution saying he can’t do that. Now the administration wants to strike our complaint, claiming the background discussion of the gifted jet is “impertinent” and “scandalous.”
That’s rich, especially weeks after the president’s frivolous defamation lawsuit against The New York Times got dismissed for rambling on about how he was once on WrestleMania and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” (he’s since filed an amended complaint).
Public records expert: ‘We can do better’
If fewer newspapers exist to request public records, does the government become less transparent? That’s the question at the heart of “Dark Deserts,” a new research paper by David Cuillier of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center for Advancement of the First Amendment and law student Brett Posner-Ferdman.
Cuillier told us about what he and Posner-Ferdman found and what it means for the public’s right to know. Read the interview here.
Standing with student journalists
Last week we told you about the lawsuit filed by The Stanford Daily to stop the Trump administration’s unconstitutional and appalling push to deport foreign students who say or write things it doesn’t like.
This week we joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the First Amendment Coalition, and others in a legal brief in support of that important lawsuit.
Congressional secrecy bill advances
The Senate passed Sens. Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar’s bill to protect themselves — but not you — from data broker abuses and otherwise allow federal lawmakers to censor the internet.
FPF’s Caitlin Vogus wrote for The Dallas Morning News about how the bill threatens journalism — for example, by stifling reporting on its co-sponsor vacationing while his constituents endure natural disasters. Read more here.
Tell the House to kill the bill.
What we’re reading
Pentagon reporters have now turned in their badges – but plan to keep reporting (The Guardian). Journalists told The Guardian, “the restrictions won’t stop the work, with some even saying they plan to take a more aggressive tack.” Good. The policy is highly unconstitutional, but it’s an opportunity to omit Pentagon lies and spin from reporting.
LAPD wants judge to lift an order restricting use of force against the press (LAist). Rose, who is also press rights chair for the LA Press Club, said that “Instead of holding the department accountable, the city is spending even more money to hire an outside law firm so they can effectively beg a judge for permission to keep assaulting journalists for just doing their job.”
Facebook suspends popular Chicago ICE-sightings group at Trump administration’s request (Chicago Sun-Times). So much for Facebook’s renewed commitment to free speech. And so much for this administration’s condemnation of social media censorship.
Victory: Federal court halts Texas’ ‘no First Amendment after dark’ campus speech ban (FIRE). A federal court blocked a ridiculous law that banned almost all speech on public college campuses in Texas at night, including student journalism. As we explained in the Houston Chronicle, free speech does not have a curfew.
Upcoming FPF events
Oct. 22: Join FPF’s Adam Rose and others on Oct. 22 at 3 p.m. EDT for an online conversation hosted by the American Constitution Society about the impact of federal law enforcement violence on your First Amendment rights. Register here.
Oct. 24: If you’re in Chicago and fortunate enough to not have to hide from ICE invaders, come to Northwestern for a panel on Oct. 24 at 10 a.m. CT featuring FPF Advocacy Director Seth Stern. We’ll discuss the numerous digital and physical challenges journalists are facing. Register here.
Oct. 29: FPF’s Caitlin Vogus will join an online panel of experts to break down how the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission are targeting journalists and the First Amendment and how to fight back. Register here for the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Future of Speech 2025, “Working the Refs” panel on Oct. 29 at 12:10 p.m. EDT.
That same day, join us for a conversation about making public records-based reporting free, featuring Vogus as well as our Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper, in conversation with leadership at Wired and 404 Media, including Wired global editorial director and FPF board member Katie Drummond. The event starts at 2 p.m. EDT; RSVP on Zoom here.
Oct. 30: Join an online discussion on Oct. 30 at 1 p.m. EDT about digital safety and legal rights for journalists reporting on immigration in the U.S., featuring FPF Director of Digital Security Harlo Holmes and several other experts from the U.S. Journalist Assistance Network. Register here.
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