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The Signal Foundation, maker of the Signal Protocol that encrypts messages sent by more than a billion people, has rolled out an update designed to prepare for a very real prospect that’s never far from the thoughts of just about every security engineer on the planet: the catastrophic fall of cryptographic protocols that secure some of the most sensitive secrets today.

The Signal Protocol is a key ingredient in the Signal, Google RCS, and WhatsApp messengers, which collectively have more than 1 billion users. It’s the engine that provides end-to-end encryption, meaning messages encrypted with the apps can be decrypted only by the recipients and no one else, including the platforms enabling the service. Until now, the Signal Protocol encrypted messages and voice calls with X3DH, a specification based on a form of cryptography known as Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman.

A brief detour: WTF is ECDH?

Often abbreviated as ECDH, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman is a protocol unto its own. It combines two main building blocks. The first involves the use of elliptic curves to form asymmetric key pairs, each of which is unique to each user. One key in the pair is public and available to anyone to use for encrypting messages sent to the person who owns it. The corresponding private key is closely guarded by the user. It allows the user to decrypt the messages. Cryptography relying on a public-private key pair is often known as asymmetric encryption.

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Enlarge / HANGZHOU, CHINA - SEPTEMBER 14, 2023 - Photo taken on September 14, 2023 shows the Mate 60 Pro phone at the Hangzhou store in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China. (credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Huawei is emulating Apple in developing the processors that power its latest smartphone, a breakthrough that will help the Chinese company to reduce its reliance on foreign technology as it confronts US sanctions.

Analysis of the main chip inside the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which launched at the end of last month and immediately sold out, reveals that Huawei has joined the elite group of Big Tech companies capable of designing their own semiconductors.

Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro’s “system on a chip” (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones.

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Part of network of crims who used 'trickery and threats' to target elderly, says US Attorney

Two Indian nationals each received 41-month prison sentences for their involvement in $1.2 million worth of robocall scams targeting the elderly, according to the district of New Jersey’s attorney's office on Tuesday.…

Ketamine-assisted therapy is now available as a health benefit across the U.S.

Enthea, a benefits company focused on providing insurance coverage for psychedelic treatments, announced it is offering ketamine-assisted therapy to its benefit plans nationwide. The company already has ketamine-assisted therapy on benefit plans in California, New York, and Texas. 

But the number of Americans receiving this type of treatment as a benefit is limited. Currently only 1,500 people are offered it while the company hopes that number will reach 200,000 by the end of 2024. 

Ketamine is the only psychedelic that can legally be used to treat mental health conditions, and there’s been an influx of clinics offering the drug, sometimes in conjunction with psychotherapy, in the last few years. Sessions range from $300 to $1,500 a session without insurance—usually several sessions are recommended. 

Enthea’s ability to offer ketamine as a benefit nationwide is due to new partnerships with two companies—Skylight Psychedelics and Innerwell—that facilitate psychedelic experiences at clinics around the country, remotely, and in people’s homes, according to a news release. 

Employers looking to offer the benefit to its workers can add it on to existing plans, similarly to dental and vision plans, Enthea said. 

“Nationwide availability represents a pivotal moment in accomplishing Enthea’s mission of helping employers with workplace mental health challenges,” said Sherry Rais, chief executive officer and co-founder of Enthea. 

While ketamine is currently the most widely available legal psychedelic, other drugs are also becoming more mainstream. Oregon recently opened its first legal psilocybin centers, where people can trip on mushrooms while being supervised, which can cost up to $3,500 for “high dose” trips. 

Meanwhile, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) recently published the results of a second confirmatory Phase 3 clinical trial on using MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. MAPS will apply to the Food and Drug Administration to allow for the use of MDMA as a PTSD treatment, with the hopes that it will be approved next year.

YouTube announced Tuesday it had demonetized Russell Brand after the comedian and pundit was accused of sexual assault in a blockbuster investigation. Brand has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube and he’ll no longer be able to make money from videos posted there. He has more than 11 million followers on Twitter, where a video of Brand denying the allegations against him went viral and has racked up more than 67 million views, according to the platform’s metrics.

Over the weekend, Channel 4 aired a documentary alongside a Times and Sunday Times newspaper investigation in which four women came forward to accuse Brand of crimes including rape. One of the accusers was 16 at the time of the incident. Brand published a video on Twitter before the allegations went public. He said that all his sexual interactions had been consensual and denied what he called “serious criminal allegations.” 

Twitter owner Elon Musk publicly lent his unequivocal support to Brand after the video, which claimed that upcoming allegations were part of a media conspiracy, was published. “Of course,” Musk said in reply to Brand’s video. “They don’t like competition.”

“I support Russell Brand,” Musk said in another tweet two days later. “That man is not evil.”

At the time of writing, Motherboard viewed numerous ads displayed alongside Brand’s posts on his Twitter timeline from multiple companies ranging from A24 to the World Gold Council. Ads are displayed directly under Brand’s denial video.

Twitter allows its creators to receive a share of the ad revenue that’s played in the feed next to their posts. How the system works is a bit of a mystery, but according to Twitter, a user needs to have a blue checkmark, opt into the program, and sign up for Stripe to process the transactions. If Brand is a content partner with Twitter and has monetized his account—he is subscribed to Twitter Blue but has not tweeted about receiving payments from the platform—he could have made money from the nearly three-minute video, even if he will be demonetized going forward. 

Motherboard reached out to Twitter to ask if Brand’s account is monetized and received a boilerplate response. Since Musk’s takeover of the site last year, it has stonewalled journalists and until recently automatically replied to requests with a poop emoji. 

In the days after Twitter premiered the service, Twitter personalities like the Krassenstein brothers, Ian Miles Cheong, and Tim Pool posted screenshots of the checks they’d received from the program. Andrew Tate, who is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in Romania, claimed he was paid $20,379 by Twitter. 

Right-wing pundits Catturd and Laura Loomer have also received payouts from Twitter, although they complained that they were low despite their millions of impressions.

According to Musk and Twitter, this is because the platform gives advertisers a measure of control over where their ads are placed. “Find advertisers who support you. We cannot force them to,” Musk told Loomer on Twitter.

Last month, Twitter launched what it called “a new level of control for X advertisers…more than 1,900 global advertisers now leverage this solution to avoid adjacency to undesired keywords and handles with more than a 99% efficacy rate.”

The blog post about the service explained that advertisers can adjust sensitivity settings so that their ads don’t appear alongside content with certain keywords. “Avoidance example: targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, drugs,” the post said. “In collaboration with industry partners, we’ve also created an automated, industry-standard blocklist that aims to protect advertisers from appearing adjacent to unsafe keywords in the Home Timeline (i.e. For You and Following).” How, exactly, these blocklists work and which accounts are sanctioned is unknown. 

Twitter has also published a list of “creator monetization standards.” According to Twitter, “these rules mitigate risk of harm to Twitter and its customers, while ensuring that creators derive the utmost value from monetization features.”

The rules include broad proscriptions against depicting or describing “criminal behaviors”, “graphic content”, and the promotion of illicit drugs and restricted services like gambling. The guidelines state that Twitter makes determinations on a case by case basis and there may be exceptions. 

In its statement to the press, YouTube cited its own terms of service as the reason it demonetized Brand. “We have suspended monetization on Russell Brand’s channel for violating our Creator Responsibility policy,” a YouTube spokesperson said Tuesday. “If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community.”

Brand’s response is a flatout denial boosted with conspiracy theories. In his telling, a cabal of journalists are making him out to be a sex criminal because he’s getting too close to “the truth.” That’s nonsense, but conspiracy theorists have rushed to his defense.

Will spend 20 years in prison after selling $88M in ADI software keys

A sysadmin and his partner pleaded guilty this week to being part of a "massive" international ring that sold software licenses worth $88 million for "significantly below the wholesale price."…

Plus: DeepMind trained model to predict genetically mutated DNA strings

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, is to build one of the world's largest GPU clusters, so that it can throw AI at biomedical research. …

Not leaving home for work cuts an individual's carbon footprint by 54%, says research

As TikTok becomes the latest tech biz to demand employees return to the office, deploying an app to monitor this, research indicates that working from home is good for the planet, in addition to staff morale.…

When Romana Didulo, Canada’s so-called QAnon Queen, rolled through a small town in Saskatchewan, she didn’t exactly receive a royal welcome. 

Riding in a large RV with her face plastered on the side, and about seven other vehicles traveling behind her, the cult leader and her crew pulled into Kamsack, a town of about 2,000 souls in southeast Saskatchewan, last Tuesday night. News travels fast in the Prairies, so by morning a sizable amount of people knew the cult leader was in town. 

They decided to come out and say hi. 

Locals not just from the town, but also from a nearby Indigenous community, were waiting for the QAnon convoy in downtown Kamsack and told Didulo to, as it was put by one protestor, "get the fuck out of town.” 

According to reports from local media, Didulo was in the town for about six hours. Tensions grew as the day went on. The Qanon group parked in front of an Indigenous Centre where they got into it with locals who they told they were going to “educate.” Soon after a group began to form to protest, local police were called in to keep the situation calm. As is often the case, Didulo sat on her bus while her followers got off and milled about. At one point, Didulo’s followers ran into Kamsack’s mayor and informed her that Didulo was now in charge—they quickly found out the hard way that wasn’t true. 

"You can't come into a town and tell the mayor, the community safety officer and the RCMP—and people of town—that you're in charge," Mayor Nancy Brunt told CBC News afterward. 

"They were told, 'No, you're not in charge.' I am the mayor. This is my town, I'm in charge. First Nations people said, 'You are not our chief. You are not the chief of Canada. We do not recognize you in any way, shape or form.'"

A video of the protest shows a group of people with signs yelling at Didulo to “get out of Kamsack” and “go home to wherever you come from.” Other precautions were taken by the locals as well, including the hospital locking their doors and bringing in extra security. 

Eventually, Didulo and her crew were escorted out of town by the RCMP and hit the road. 

"They're pretty secretive about where they go,” said Christine Sarteschi, a criminology professor at Chatham University who follows Didulo closely. “They kind of just show up in places where they have some type of person that allows them to stay on their private property. Every couple of weeks they hold a meet and greet and the sovereignty ceremony, which usually attracts anywhere from 25 to 50 people”

Do you have information or tips about “QAnon Queen” Romana Didulo or her followers? You can contact Mack Lamoureux by email at mack.lamoureux@vice.com, or DM him on Twitter at @MackLamourex for a Signal number.

It seems that Didulo’s travels are starting to raise some eyebrows as she moves about the Great White North. Just this week, a concerned citizen of Richmound, Saskatchewan, reached out to local media to report that Didulo limped into their community following their time in Kamsack. CTV Regina wrote that the conspiracy leader has set up on the property of a follower who owns a former school. The Richmound resident said locals are “very disturbed” by their new neighbors. 

One of Didulo's followers hosts the group's livestream from the abandoned school. Photo via Telegram.

The school can be seen in the group's latest livestreams as they’re now being filmed in front of a chalkboard. In a video filmed on September 15, one of the higher-ranking members of Didulo’s followers called their new home their “new command center.” A livestream by an independent journalist shows the group has parked numerous vehicles, RVs, and trailers around an old elementary school and put up an orange wire around the perimeter of the property. The journalist filmed for a short while before being asked to leave by a man who stated he owned the land. 

Following the man’s time near the school, Didulo took to her social media pages to tell her followers that Canada is under martial law and “ remains in DEFCON1.” It is unknown exactly what “DEFCON1” means.

Didulo leads a group of people that she has convinced she’s the real Queen of Canada—among many, many other eccentric beliefs including she’s the National Indigenous Chief of Canada—who is waging a war against a pedophilic deep state alongside Donald Trump. 

She grew out of the QAnon movement on Telegram, but unlike many other QAnon leaders, Didulo took her online following into the real world in early 2022 in the form of essentially a never-ending convoy across Canada. Accompanied by an extremely dedicated group of followers who have left their previous lives to do her bidding she now travels from town to town. Several former followers told VICE News Didulo is abusive towards the people who travel with her. To pay for her seemingly never-ending road trip, Didulo constantly pleads for her followers to send her money. 

Didulo has yet to hold a “sovereignty ceremony” in Richmound, nor indicate if she is planning on doing so. The ceremony, which doesn’t happen in public, is a bizarre affair. It sees the group inviting the local followers, Didulo giving a speech, her followers swearing fealty to her, and at times receiving her fake currency. She’s held it in numerous towns across the country. 

It was initially rare for Didulo to experience the level of pushback she got in Kamsack—typically, she’s largely ignored by most in the town she rolls through—but it wasn’t the first time. Last fall, Didulo and her convoy pulled into Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and attempted to fundraise off the devastation that a recent hurricane wrought on the town. She was not treated with a light touch and just like in Kamsack, she was chased out. 

"She's seen as somebody they don't want around who's not a good figure, not somebody who's helpful or positive,” said Sarteschi. “Somebody they see in a very negative way.”

Typically, Didulo ignores these sorts of incidents but the stories about what happened in Kamsack must have gotten to her. Over the weekend, Didulo declared that the CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, was to be shut down (it wasn’t) and then she asked her followers what kind of “criminal charges be for individuals and entities creating preposterous narratives” about her. Her followers enthusiastically came up with multiple ideas such as imprisonment, caging all journalists in the public square, making them all wear a T-shirt declaring Didulo is queen, and, of course, public executions.   

“Public hanging! We need rule of law,” one wrote. “These criminals have created such horror for humanity!!!!”

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“If you like gravy, give me a wavy!” This is bellowed by a competitor going by the name of Pyrexeler (like the, um, cooking dish), dressed up as a red tub of Bisto gravy granules. He’s wearing a headpiece which opens up to reveal actual granules which he proceeds to sprinkle over the audience, like a flower girl walking down the aisle. 

I’m here – up north in a Lancashire village – for the World Gravy Wrestling Championships, which was nothing short of a miracle as I'm a Londoner who doesn’t drive, but still managed to find a way to travel the five hour journey during a bank holiday and national rail trike. No one can doubt my dedication to reporting a ridiculous event and no one can dispute the fact that this event was, indeed, ridiculous. 

Photo: Bekky Calver​

You might be used to slathering your roast dinner in the juicy brown goodness, but there’s no time for that here. In the back garden of The Rose N’ Bowl pub in Stacksteads, 1,500 litres of warm gravy is poured into a wrestling ring where 16 men and eight women compete in two minutes of wrestling mayhem. (It can only be assumed that the reason for this uneven split is because silliness might be a hard sell.) Competitors must wear fancy dress and all proceeds go to East Lancashire Hospice charity – apart from the £50 prize pot money for first place male and female.  

The pub itself is crammed fuller than the six barrels of gravy waiting by the side of the inflatable pool-like ring, but I battle my way to the back garden in time for the fancy dress parade. Wrestlers prance round the ring reacting to raucous applause from the audience and chaotic commentary from a man with a microphone. “Boobs, bollocks, bums, and they will be seen,” he booms into his handheld mic. One man parades around in wrestling Y-fronts with Bisto written on them. “It looks like a TicTac!” screams the commentator at this supposedly family event. There’s no warm up, but for a chillingly awkward rendition of “YMCA”.

Organiser Andrew Holt. Photo: Bekky Calver​

About 15 years ago, this annual event started in a car park as a “publicity stunt for a food festival that fell by the wayside”, explains event organiser Andrew Holt. Wearing tiny glasses covered in gravy and a beret, he pops out his false teeth to chat properly. My heart dropped at first, thinking it was an accidental denture emergency, but I was relieved to find out they were just a fun prop. Back to the championship history, and after a successful first gravy wrestle, it was brought back year after year and moved to the back garden of the pub, deemed a fun way to make money for charity. 

The gravy itself is made in Holt’s black pudding factory and transported in six drums of 55 gallons. “You can’t take this job seriously, you have to take it with a pinch of salt,” he laughs. I finished with the world's most boring cleanliness question: “How on earth do you clean all this up?” The local fire department has that covered, it turns out. 

The wrestling itself was more chaotic than a day out in Oxford Street during a Black Friday sale. Or as the commentator put it: “There’s more skin on show than Conservative MPs resigning.” It was a mixture of total slapstick and something you might see on WWE. Two names were called out and the wrestlers would hype up the audience before the fight began. Most of them seemed to have almost choreographed routines, but were adamant none of this was practised before. Music ranged from “Yakety Sax” (you know, the classic chase scene song) to “Eye of the Tiger”. The true hero was the referee who was often the butt of everyone's jokes and was flung into a lot of fights. Thankfully, he managed to survive all three and a half hours of wrestling in that slippery ring. 

Photo: Bekky Calver​

“I’m doing 40 crazy things this year because I'm turning 40,”  explains finalist Lauren Bricknall. “I promise that if I win, I’ll do an official cage fight. I won't go back on a deal.” Her wrestling name is Ocean Fury and in the week, she works with people with special needs. Today she’s fighting to support a charity for autism. “I’m not a fighting person, but once I got in the ring I was like let's go,” she adds.

The rules of how the competitors are deemed winners were more unclear than why the wildly inappropriate host was picked. I’m surprised someone didn’t try to knock him out after making comments such as “You haven’t done this before have you? ‘Cos I'd remember you” to one of the women, before saying he’d fight her husband for her. A good old spot of body shaming was up next for a woman who used to be Angelina Jolie’s body double (“believe it or not”), but that’s enough airtime for him. 

Photo: Bekky Calver​

Some of the rules seemed to be made up on the spot, like when competitor Moody Cow got disqualified for dragging the ref in with her. Strangely, others went through to the next round despite doing the same thing. As the day went on, it became clear you were awarded higher points if you provided more entertainment factor. One wrestler was introduced as The Cranberry King. “He once found the world’s longest nipple hair," the host added as the king himself ran round the ring beaming with pride. The flexibility of some of the competitors was impressive, too – backward flips, forward flips and quite a few front dives from above, straight onto their cowering opponent. Chaos really ensued when the wrestlers failed to contain their fight within the ring. They’d be found sliding around like slugs trying to slip back in to finish the battle. 

Photo: Bekky Calver​

Gravy got in places I didn’t want gravy to get in. It’s still not out of my jeans. As I tried to interview the contestants, I was repeatedly drenched in drips of sweaty gravy, as they all tried to rush off as fast as possible in order to get hosed down by the local fire brigade. Most could be described as almost delirious when trying to speak. 

“We signed up for a joke, but now I've got 52 weeks to bulk up for the next one,” said one competitor, just as his mate dressed in a Mexican flag bounded over. “I'm a very happy man, I ran away from Tijuana!” he screamed in a strange, presumably Mexican-meaning accent. As if in reply, the original interviewee started repeatedly chanting “USA” until his mate bolted from the interview saying he couldn’t breathe. He ended up having to get cut out of the flag, which was wound too tightly around his neck, by a medic. In the chaos of the moment, I wasn’t able to grab either of their names. 

The chaotic duo El Bisto and Gravy Seal. Photo: Bekky Calver​

All good days must come to an end, though – even ones filled with more laughter than a street of kids in Shoreditch doing NOS. By the end, Ravin Gravy (Nathan Kendall) and The Bacup Bavarian (Patina Bury) were declared the rightful winners and an incredible £5,444 was raised for East Lancashire Hospice. Sadly, so much gravy and chips were consumed on site that there was nothing left for my dinner – luckily, I had enough on my jeans.

@ElizabethMcCaf

Photo: Bekky Calver​ Photo: Bekky Calver​ Photo: Bekky Calver​

Andy Jassy's rent-a-Macs have no love for the vanilla M2, and the Max and Ultra aren't used in the Mini

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Open wide!

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Won't someone please think of the banks, asks minister

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Or so says US Commerce Secretary

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Talkin' about my ML generation

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger used his keynote at the chip giant's Innovation conference in San Jose on Tuesday to repeatedly hammer home the idea of running large language models and other machine-learning workloads, like Llama 2 or Stable Diffusion, locally, privately, and securely on users' own PCs.…

Enlarge / A pharmacist administers an updated COVID-19 vaccine at a CVS Pharmacy in Eagle Rock, California. (credit: Getty | Irfan Khan)

With fall approaching, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is gearing up efforts to promote three respiratory virus vaccines this year—annual flu shots, new RSV vaccines, and updated COVID-19 shots—and the agency's plans include confronting vaccine skepticism and hesitancy head-on.

In a presentation to clinicians on Tuesday, the CDC laid out its general recommendations for the use of those vaccines and ended with its four-step strategy to persuade patients swayed by anti-vaccine talking points to come back over to the side of science and public health.

The strategy, developed by the CDC in partnership with experts at the American Psychological Association, isn't new, but it has become increasingly needed as anti-vaccine misinformation and disinformation gained further ground during the pandemic. Even now, conservative politicians and officials continue to spread misinformation and skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines, leading to a sharp partisan divide in vaccination uptake and intentions.

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