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It’s not every day that a security researcher acquires the ability to generate counterfeit HTTPS certificates, track email activity, and execute code of his choice on thousands of servers—all in a single blow that cost only $20 and a few minutes to land. But that’s exactly what happened recently to Benjamin Harris.

Harris, the CEO and founder of security firm watchTowr, did all of this by registering the domain dotmobilregistry.net. The domain was once the official home of the authoritative WHOIS server for .mobi, a top-level domain used to indicate that a website is optimized for mobile devices. At some point—it’s not clear precisely when—this WHOIS server, which acts as the official directory for every domain ending in .mobi, was relocated, from whois.dotmobiregistry.net to whois.nic.mobi. While retreating to his Las Vegas hotel room during last month’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Harris noticed that the previous dotmobiregistry.net owners had allowed the domain to expire. He then scooped it up and set up his own .mobi WHOIS server there.

Misplaced trust

To Harris’s surprise, his server received queries from slightly more than 76,000 unique IP addresses within a few hours of setting it up. Over five days, it received roughly 2.5 million queries from about 135,000 unique systems. The entities behind the systems querying his deprecated domain included a who’s who of Internet heavyweights comprising domain registrars, providers of online security tools, governments from the US and around the world, universities, and certificate authorities, the entities that issue browser-trusted TLS certificates that make HTTPS work.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of catch arms ensnaring SpaceX's Super Heavy booster. (credit: SpaceX )

The Federal Aviation Administration has signaled to SpaceX that it won't approve a launch license for the next test flight of the Starship rocket until at least late November, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

This is more than two months later than the mid-September timeframe the FAA previously targeted for determining whether to approve a launch license for the next Starship flight. SpaceX says the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the next launch—the fifth full-scale test flight of the Starship program—have been ready to launch since the first week of August.

"The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air," SpaceX said in a statement .

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Westend61 )

Nevada will soon become the first state to use AI to help speed up the decision-making process when ruling on appeals that impact people's unemployment benefits.

The state's Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation (DETR) agreed to pay Google $1,383,838 for the AI technology, a 2024 budget document shows, and it will be launched within the "next several months," Nevada officials told Gizmodo .

Nevada's first-of-its-kind AI will rely on a Google cloud service called Vertex AI Studio. Connecting to Google's servers, the state will fine-tune the AI system to only reference information from DETR's database, which officials think will ensure its decisions are "more tailored" and the system provides "more accurate results," Gizmodo reported.

The US government recently announced multiple charges against the alleged leaders of the "Terrorgram Collective," which does just what it sounds like—it promotes terrorism on the Telegram messaging platform. In this case, the terrorism was white racial terror, complete with a "hit list" of US officials and activists, a homemade "White Terror" video glorifying "saints" who had killed others, and instructions for taking down US infrastructure such as electrical substation transformers. (Read the indictment .)

The group's criteria for "sainthood."

Chaos was the point. Terrorgram promoted "white supremacist accelerationism," which believes that society must be incited into a civil war or apocalyptic confrontation in order to bring down the existing system of government and establish a white nationalist state.

The group's manifestos and chat rooms sometimes felt suffused with the habits of the extremely online: hand-clap emojis between every important word, instructional videos on how to make bombs, the language of trolling, catchphrases so over the top they sound ironic ("HAIL HOLY TERROR" in all caps).

Enlarge (credit: Getty | MICHAEL KAPPELER )

The human body is full of marvels, some even bordering on miraculous. That includes the limited ability for nerves to regenerate after injuries, allowing people to regain some function and feeling. But that wonder can turn, well, unnerving when those regenerated wires end up in a jumble.

Such is the case for a rare neurological condition called gustatory hyperhidrosis, also known as Frey's syndrome. In this disorder, nerves regenerate after damage to either of the large saliva glands that sit on either side of the face, just in front of the ears, called the parotid glands. But that nerve regrowth goes awry due to a quirk of anatomy that allows the nerves that control saliva production for eating to get tangled with those that control sweating for temperature control.

In this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors in Taiwan report an unusual presentation of the disorder in a 76-year-old woman. She told doctors that, for two years, every time she ate, her face would begin profusely sweating. In the clinic, the doctors observed the phenomenon themselves. They watched as she took a bite of pork jerky and began chewing.

Enlarge / In the U.S., a folding phone has you carrying around nearly $2,000 of fragile, folding OLED phone. In China and export-friendly countries, the Mate XT adds $1,000 and yet another hinge. (credit: Huawei)

Huawei's Mate XT Ultimate is a phone that does not flip or fold, at least in the way of its Samsung or Google contemporaries. You could say it collapses, really, across two hinges, from a full 10.2-inch diagonal rectangle (about a half-inch short of a standard iPad) down to a traditional 6.4-inch rectangle phone slab. There's also an in-between single-fold configuration at 7.9 inches. And there's an optional folding keyboard.

This phone, which Huawei calls a "trifold," would cost you the USD equivalent of $2,800 (19,999 yuan) if you could buy it in the US. Most notably, the phone launched just hours after Apple's iPhone 16 event . As noted by The New York Times, Huawei's product launches are often timed for maximum pushback against the US, which has sanctioned and attempted to stymie Huawei's chip tech .

“It’s a piece of work that everyone has thought of but never managed to create,” Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer group chairman, said during the Mate XT livestream unveiling. “I have always had a dream to put our tablet in my pocket, and we did it.”

Enlarge / "The only species of fish confirmed to be able to escape from the digestive tract of the predatory fish after being captured.” (credit: Hasegawa et al./Current Biology)

Imagine you're a Japanese eel, swimming around just minding your own business when—bam! A predatory fish swallows you whole and you only have a few minutes to make your escape before certain death. What's an eel to do? According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, Japanese eels opt to back their way out of the digestive tract, tail first, through the esophagus, emerging from the predatory fish's gills.

Per the authors, this is the first such study to observe the behavioral patterns and escape processes of prey within the digestive tract of predators. “At this point, the Japanese eel is the only species of fish confirmed to be able to escape from the digestive tract of the predatory fish after being captured,” co-author Yuha Hasegawa at Nagasaki University in Japan told New Scientist .

There are various strategies in nature for escaping predators after being swallowed. For instance, a parasitic worm called Paragordius tricuspidatus can force its way out of a predator’s system when its host organism is eaten. There was also a fascinating study in 2020 by Japanese scientists on the unusual survival strategy of the aquatic beetle Regimbartia attenuata . They fed a bunch of the beetles to a pond frog ( Pelophylax nigromaculatus ) under laboratory conditions, expecting the frog to spit the beetle out. That's what happened with prior experiments on bombardier beetles ( Pheropsophus jessoensis ), which spray toxic chemicals (described as an audible "chemical explosion") when they find themselves inside a toad's gut, inducing the toad to invert its own stomach and vomit them back out.

Enlarge / More streamlined (but still user-replaceable) battery packs are responsible for some of the Reform Next's space savings. (credit: MNT Research)

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  The current booting prototype of the MNT Reform Next. [credit: MNT Research ]

The original MNT Reform laptop was an interesting experiment, an earnest stab at the idea of a laptop that used entirely open source, moddable hardware as well as open source software. But as a modern Internet-connected laptop, its chunky design and (especially) its super-slow processor let it down.

MNT Research has been upgrading the Reform laptop and its smaller counterpart, the Pocket Reform , continuously since we took a look at it two-and-a-half years ago. The most significant upgrade is probably the Rockchip RK3588 processor upgrade , which offers four ARM Cortex-A76 CPU cores (the same ones used in the Raspberry Pi 5's Broadcom SoC) and four ARM Cortex-A55 cores, plus either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. While still not a high-end speed demon, these specs are enough to make it a competent workhorse laptop for browsing and productivity apps.

Now, MNT is revisiting the Reform with a more significant design update. The MNT Reform Next is smaller and thinner, defaults to a more traditional glass trackpad instead of a trackball, and is starting with the Rockchip RK3588 instead of the poky NXP/Freescale processor that the original laptop was saddled with.

Enlarge / The cool racing stripe means it's faster. (credit: Sony )

Sony today announced the PlayStation 5 Pro, a mid-generation hardware upgrade that will play the same game library as 2020's PlayStation 5 , but with higher frame rates and better resolution than on the original system. The new units will be available on November 7 for $700, Sony said.

The updated hardware will come complete with 2TB of solid-state storage (up from 1TB on the original PS5), but without an Ultra HD Blu-Ray disc drive, which users can purchase as an add-on accessory for $80 .

In a video presentation Tuesday , Sony's Mark Cerny said PS5 developers "desire more graphics performance" in order to deliver the visuals they want at a frame rate of 60 fps. The lack of enough graphical power on the PS5 leads to a difficult decision for players between the higher resolution of "fidelity" mode and the smoother frame rates of "performance" mode (with three-quarters of players choosing the latter, according to Cerny).