Il Dipartimento di Giustizia degli Stati Uniti ha accusato i fratelli gemelli Muneeb e Sohaib Akhter di aver cancellato 96 database contenenti informazioni sensibili, tra cui verbali di indagini e documenti richiesti ai sensi del Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), dopo aver lasciato il loro lavoro presso un appaltatore del governo federale e di aver utilizzato strumenti basati sull’intelligenza artificiale per coprire le loro tracce .

Secondo gli inquirenti, gli Akhter avrebbero deliberatamente attaccato l’infrastruttura IT del loro ex datore di lavoro, che forniva servizi a diverse agenzie governative statunitensi. I fratelli avrebbero continuato ad accedere ai sistemi anche dopo aver lasciato il lavoro , bloccato l’accesso ad altri utenti, distrutto dati e tentato di coprire le proprie tracce. L’atto d’accusa è stato emesso il 13 novembre.

L’episodio più grave, secondo i pubblici ministeri, si è verificato il 18 febbraio.

Quel giorno, avrebbero cancellato circa 96 database, inclusi file FOIA e materiali relativi a indagini sensibili. Appena un minuto dopo aver cancellato uno dei database, appartenente al Dipartimento per la Sicurezza Interna (DHS), secondo gli investigatori, avrebbe avuto accesso a uno strumento basato sull’intelligenza artificiale chiedendo come cancellare i log di sistema. Gli investigatori ritengono che questo sia un chiaro segno di un tentativo di occultamento delle prove.

Nella corrispondenza inclusa nel fascicolo, i fratelli hanno anche discusso di come “ripulire” la loro casa in caso di una visita delle forze dell’ordine. I computer portatili aziendali, che erano ancora in loro possesso dopo il licenziamento, sono stati completamente cancellati prima di essere restituiti al datore di lavoro.

Un’altra accusa contro i Muneeb è quella di aver avuto accesso illegalmente ai dati dell’Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Secondo il Dipartimento di Giustizia, avrebbero avuto accesso ai registri fiscali federali di almeno 450 persone. Sohaib, a sua volta, è accusato di aver condiviso una password per un sistema governativo, il che costituisce di per sé un reato federale.

Sono quindi accusati di cospirazione per commettere frode informatica, distruzione di documenti, furto di dati governativi e furto d’identità aggravato. Complessivamente, rischiano fino a 45 anni di carcere. Sohaib è accusato di cospirazione, distruzione di documenti e trasmissione di una password che potrebbe essere utilizzata per hackerare un computer governativo; le sue accuse prevedono una pena massima fino a sei anni.

Il Ministero della Giustizia ha dichiarato che i fratelli hanno abusato della loro fiducia trovandosi dalla parte sbagliata della barricata, da appaltatori incaricati della gestione di dati governativi sensibili a persone accusate di aver minato processi governativi critici. Tuttavia, gli Akhter rimangono tecnicamente innocenti fino a prova contraria in tribunale.

L'articolo Agenzie USA colpite da impiegati infedeli muniti di AI. 96 database governativi cancellati proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

People enjoy retrocomputing for a wide variety of reasons – sometimes it’s about having a computer you could fully learn, or nostalgia for chips that played a part in your childhood. There’s definitely some credit to give for the fuzzy feeling you get booting up a computer you built out of chips. Old technology does deteriorate fast, however, and RAM chip failures are especially frustrating. What if you got a few hundred DRAM chips to go through? Here’s a DRAM chip tester by [Andreas]/[tops4u] – optimized for scanning speed, useful for computers like the ZX Spectrum or Oric, and built around an ATMega328P, which you surely still have in one of your drawers.

The tester is aimed at DIP16/18/20 and ZIP style DRAM chips – [Andreas] claims support for 4164, 41256, 6416, 6464, 514256, and 44100 series RAM chips. The tester is extremely easy to operate, cheap to build, ruthlessly optimized for testing speed, sports a low footprint, and is fully open-source. If you’re ever stuck with a heap of RAM chips you want to quickly test one by one, putting together one of these testers is definitely the path to take, instead of trying to boot up your well-aged machine with a bunch of chips that’d take a while to test or, at worst, could even fry it.

[Andreas] includes KiCad PCB and Arduino source files, all under GPL. They also provide adapter PCBs for chips like the 4116. What’s more, there are PCB files to build this tester in full DIP, in case that’s more your style! It’s far from the first chip tester in the scene, of course, there are quite a few to go around, including some seriously featureful units that even work in-circuit. Not only will they save you from chips that failed, but they’ll also alert you to fake chips that are oh so easy to accidentally buy online!

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hackaday.com/2025/12/08/cheap-…

Today, it is hard to imagine a world without recorded audio, and for the most part that started with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. However, for most of its history, the phonograph was a one-way medium. Although early phonographs could record with a separate needle cutting into foil or wax, most record players play only records made somewhere else. The problem is, this cuts down on what you can do with them. When offices were full of typists and secretaries, there was the constant problem of telling the typist what to type. Whole industries developed around that problem, including the Dictaphone company.

The issue is that most people can talk faster than others can write or type. As a result, taking dictation is frustrating as you have to stop, slow down, repeat yourself, or clarify dubious words. Shorthand was one way to equip a secretary to write as fast as the boss can talk. Steno machines were another way. But the dream was always a way to just speak naturally, at your convenience, and somehow have it show up on a typewritten page. That’s where the Dictaphone company started.

History of the Dictaphone

Unsurprisingly, Dictaphone’s founder was the famous Alexander Graham Bell. Although Edison invented the phonograph, Bell made many early improvements to the machine, including the use of wax instead of foil as a recording medium. He actually started the Volta Graphophone Company, which merged with the American Graphophone Company that would eventually become Columbia Records.

In 1907, the Columbia Phonograph Company trademarked the term Dictaphone. While drum-based machines were out of style in other realms, having been replaced by platters, the company wanted to sell drum-based machines that let executives record audio that would be played back by typists. By 1923, the company spun off on its own.

Edison, of course, also created dictation machines. There were many other companies that made some kind of dictation machine, but Dictaphone became the standard term for any such device, sort of like Xerox became a familiar term for any copier.

Dictaphones were an everyday item in early twentieth-century offices for dictation, phone recording, and other audio applications. Not to mention a few other novel uses. In 1932, a vigilante organization used a Dictaphone to bug a lawyer’s office suspected of being part of a kidnapping.

Some machines could record and playback. Others, usually reserved for typists, were playback-only. In addition, some machines could “shave” wax cylinders to erase a cylinder for future use. Of course, eventually you’d shave it down to the core, and then it was done.

The Computer History Archives has some period commercials and films from Dictaphone, and you can see them in the videos below.

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As mentioned, Dictaphone wasn’t the only game in town. Edison was an obvious early competitor. We were amused that the Edison devices had a switch that allowed them to operate on AC or DC current.

Later, other companies like IBM would join in. Some, like the Gray Audograph and the SoundScriber used record-like disks instead of belts or drums. Of course, eventually, magnetic tape cassettes were feasible, too, and many people made recorders that could be used for dictation and many other recording duties.

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The Dictabelt

For the first half of the twentieth century, Dictaphones used wax cylinders. However, in 1947, they began making machines that pressed a groove into a Lexan belt — a “Dictabelt,” at first called a “Memobelt.” These were semi-permanent and, since you couldn’t easily melt over some of the wax, difficult to tamper with, which helped make them admissible in court. Apparently, you could play a Dictabelt back about 20 times before it would be too beat up to play.

These belts found many uses. For one, Dictaphone was a major provider to police departments and other similar services, recording radio traffic and telephone calls. In the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations used Dictaphone belts from the Dallas police department recording in 1963 to do audio analysis on the Kennedy assassination. Many Dictaphones found homes in courtrooms, too.

As you can see in the commercials in the video, Dictabelts would fit in an envelope: they are about 3.5 in x 12 in or 89 mm x 300 mm. The “portable” machine promised to let you dictate from anywhere, keep meeting minutes, and more. A single belt held 15 minutes of audio, and the color gives you an idea of when the belt was made.

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Magnetic Personality

Of course, Dictaphone wasn’t the only game in town for machines like this. IBM released one that used a magnetic belt called a “Magnabelt’ that you could edit. Dictaphone followed suit. These, of course, were erasable.

Even as late as 1977, you could find Dictaphones in “word processing operations” like the one in the video with the catchy tune, below. Of course, computers butted into both word processing and dictation with products like Via Voice or DragonDictate. Oddly, DragonDictate is from Nuance, which bought what was left of Dictaphone.

Insides

Since this is Hackaday, of course, you want to see the insides of some of these machines. A video from [databits] gives us a peek below.

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Offices have certainly changed. Most people do their own typing now. Your phone can record many hours of crystal-clear audio. Computers can even take your dictation now, if you insist.

Should you ever find a Dictabelt and want to digitize it for posterity, you might find the video below from [archeophone] useful. They make a modern playback unit for old cylinders and belts.

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We’d love to see a homebrew Dictabelt recorder player using more modern tech. If you make one, be sure to let us know. People recorded on the darndest things. Tape caught on primarily because of World War II Germany and Bing Crosby.

hackaday.com/2025/12/08/beltin…

The European Commission took aim at X for breaking the DSA, proof that Europe’s landmark law can bite. Despite political pressure and corporate pushback, the EU is showing that online platforms can and will be held accountable for practices that mislead users, cause harm, or undermine democracy.

The post Press Release: EU stands up to Big Tech with €120 million fine to X appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

[Alexwlchan] noticed something funny. He knew that not putting a size for a video embedded in a web page would cause his page to jump around after the video loaded. So he put the right numbers in. But with some videos, the page would still refresh its layout. He learned that not all video sizes are equal and not all pixels are square.

For a variety of reasons, some videos have pixels that are rectangular, and it is up to your software to take this into account. For example, when he put one of the suspect videos into QuickTime Player, it showed the resolution was 1920×1080 (1350×1080). That’s the non-square pixel.

So just pulling the size out of a video isn’t always sufficient to get a real idea of how it looks. [Alex] shows his old Python code that returns the incorrect number and how he managed to make it right. The mediainfo library seems promising, but suffers from some rounding issues. Instead, he calls out to ffprobe, an external program that ships with ffmpeg. So even if you don’t use Python, you can do the same trick, or you could go read the ffprobe source code.

[Alex] admits that there are not many videos that have rectangular pixels, but they do show up.

If you like playing with ffmpeg and videos, try this in your browser. Think rectangular pixels are radical? There has been work for variable-shaped pixels.

hackaday.com/2025/12/08/how-bi…

IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and you find me this week splitting my time between Berlin and Brussels. As we hurtle toward the end of 2025, this is my current permanent state of mind. Almost there, folks.

— What are Europeans' views on digital policymaking? I teamed up with YouGov, the polling firm, to find out.

— The United States latest National Security Strategy reaffirms a step change in how Washington approaches tech.

— A litany of recent trade deals highlights how US officials are linking digital policymaking with access to the American market.

Let's get started:

digitalpolitics.co/newsletter0…

Pensavo di avercela fatta installando Nextcloud ma oggi ho aggiornato alla versione 32 e mi sono trovato tra i piedi un errore legato ad AppAI che non riesco a risolvere senza accesso alla shell (ho un hosting condiviso e ho solo cPanel come strumento di amministrazione). Ho disabilitato quell'app tanto non mi serve e amen.

Fino alla versione 31 di Nextcloud c'era l'app "OCC web" che permetteva di fare qualcosina ma è "deprecated" e non ne esiste una versione per Nextcloud 32

Considerato che tutto quello che mi serve è un repository per i file che vorrei avere sempre con me, dal telefono o da qualunque PC sul pianeta, tipo i codici fiscali miei e di mio figlio, la polizza dell'assicurazione auto, le ultime analisi del sangue, ecc. avete qualche app alternativa a Nextcloud e che possa essere installata e usata senza SSH, così come si usa Wordpress, Mediawiki, ecc.?

In subordine, avete qualche suggerimento per servizi del genere in linea con le policy di chi vuole ridurre la sua dipendenza dalle Big Tech?

Mi serve 1 GB di spazio alla fine, non chissà quanto.