Owner of spyware used in alleged WhatsApp breach ends contract with Italy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/06/owner-of-spyware-used-in-alleged-whatsapp-breach-ends-contract-with-italy

Spyware maker Paragon terminates contract with Italian government: media reports | TechCrunch

"Paragon Solutions, a startup that sells access to surveillance technologies including phone spyware, has cut ties with the Italian government, according to reports in The Guardian and Haaretz.

On Thursday, citing an anonymous source, The Guardian reported Paragon had first suspended its contract with Italy on Friday after WhatsApp said it had disrupted a hacking campaign leveraging the Israeli startup’s spyware targeting around 90 people. On Wednesday, Paragon terminated the contract once the company determined that the Italian government had broken “the terms of service and ethical framework it had agreed under its Paragon contract,” according to the British newspaper."

#Paragon #ParagonGraphite #Italy

Nitter.net is coming back.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212

■■□□□ ”Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/

Nepenthes
This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it's targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM's - but really, like the plants it is named after, it'll eat just about anything that finds it's way inside.

It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse.
You can take a look at what this looks like, here. (Note: VERY slow page loads!)

WARNING
THIS IS DELIBERATELY MALICIOUS SOFTWARE INTENDED TO CAUSE HARMFUL ACTIVITY. DO NOT DEPLOY IF YOU AREN'T FULLY COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

ANOTHER WARNING
LLM scrapers are relentless and brutual. You may be able to keep them at bay with this software - but it works by providing them with a neverending stream of exactly what they are looking for. YOU ARE LIKELY TO EXPERIENCE SIGNIFICANT CONTINUOUS CPU LOAD, ESPECIALLY WITH THE MARKOV MODULE ENABLED.

YET ANOTHER WARNING
There is not currently a way to differentiate between web crawlers that are indexing sites for search purposes, vs crawlers that are training AI models. ANY SITE THIS SOFTWARE IS APPLIED TO WILL LIKELY DISAPPEAR FROM ALL SEARCH RESULTS.

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

■□□□□ Researcher Outsmarts, Jailbreaks OpenAI's New o3-mini.

https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/researcher-jailbreaks-openai-o3-mini

■■□□□ Cloudflare outage caused by botched blocking of phishing URL.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cloudflare-outage-caused-by-botched-blocking-of-phishing-url/

VX Linux - systemd-free Plasma desktop distro - LinuxLinks
https://www.linuxlinks.com/vx-linux-systemd-free-plasma-desktop-distro/

Proof that the GNU project depends on corporations, the FSF must be piling money up its ass, doing nothing to maintain the software, abandoning its own software, not investing in its own developers, spending money promoting internal events!

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Gold-Linker-Deprecated

Rust Is Taking Over The World Of NVIDIA GPUs
—> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPbMOj53F_g

T-Mobile dropped $8 million on a Super Bowl ad to reveal that Starlink beta is now open to everyone—on any carrier—free until July.

6G-oyim