AI swarms could hijack democracy—without anyone noticing - The University of British Columbia

Chip giant knew about the flaw in 2018, researcher claims, but millions of devices may still be vulnerable A 16-year-old security flaw in Broadcom's Wi-Fi software could let attackers hijack millions of routers without knowing the network password, even though the chipmaker reportedly knew about the problem since 2018. Security researcher Quentin Kaiser disclosed the vulnerability, dubbed "WPSplinter," revealing two bugs in Broadcom's proprietary Wi-Fi implementation that date back to at least 2010. An attempted fix arrived eight years later, but Kaiser claims it didn't fully resolve the problem. The bugs lie in Broadcom's handling of Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), the feature that lets users connect devices to a wireless network without manually entering a password. Kaiser found that specially crafted WPS messages could corrupt the router's memory, allowing someone within Wi-Fi range to run their own code on the device. They wouldn't need the Wi-Fi password, and the router's owner wouldn't have to do a thing.

Aging is the price paid for the ability of experiencing existence, one might philosophize. Natural cellular aging begins with differentiation. Once a stem cell becomes a specific cell type, it's locked in forever: fat cells can never become muscle cells, no matter how hard one wishes, or pokes and prods at them in front of the mirror. Or so it goes in nature, but scientists can definitely transform cells, as if biologically compensating for all the failed alchemical attempts of the past. Now, scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older. The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell. Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type. The second method involves a "direct conversion," which skips the middle stage and directly transforms a cell into a different type.