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The data was stolen from the Swiss armed forces during the hacker attack on the IT service provider Xplain. Criminal charges have been filed against unknown persons.

Excerpts of military police reports as well as personal data of about 720 users of the platform have surfaced on the darknet. The data was stolen from the Swiss armed forces during the hacker attack on the IT service provider Xplain. Criminal charges have been filed against unknown persons.

According to a statement by the Defence Group and the General Secretariat of the Defence Department on Thursday, the IT infrastructure of the Swiss armed forces was not affected by the hacker attack. The information on the Darknet had no influence on the operational missions of the Armed Forces and did not pose a potential threat to the Armed Forces and its partner organisations. However, security monitoring has been additionally strengthened.

According to the Swiss armed forces, there are no risks for the persons concerned on the stolen list of the military police's journal and report management system "Jorasys". Comparable information was available in public directories such as the federal government calendar or other public sources. In addition, the Swiss armed forces had sensitised the people.

Microsoft is adding the Python programming language to Microsoft Excel, allowing users to create powerful functions for analyzing and manipulating data.

The public preview of the feature is now available to Microsoft 365 Insiders in the Beta channel, with the goal to ultimately roll out the feature to Excel for Windows in 16.0.16818.2000.

However, even if you join the Microsoft 365 Insiders Beta channel to test the new feature, there is no guarantee that Python in Excel will be available, as Microsoft is rolling it out slowly to test the feature.

Python in Excel

The new Python in Excel feature brings a new 'PY' function that allows users to embed Python code directly in a cell to be executed like any macro or regular Excel function.

However, instead of running the Python scripts locally, Excel will execute the code in the cloud using a hypervisor-isolated container on Azure Container Instances. Microsoft says this container environment will include Python and a curated set of Anaconda libraries to prevent security issues.

These libraries include the data visualization and analysis tool 'pandas' and the visualization tool 'Matplotlib.'

As the Python scripts will run in an isolated container, they will not have access to any local resources, including the local network, computer, files, and a Microsoft 365 authentication token.

To embed a Python script in Excel, users will use the =PY() function to open a text area where they can enter the Python code they wish to execute.

The code is then executed in the cloud container, and the results are sent back and displayed in the worksheet. Microsoft says this is all done anonymously so that your Python code is not linked back to a particular user.

"Python in Excel makes it possible to natively combine Python and Excel analytics within the same workbook - with no setup required," Microsoft explains in an announcement.

"With Python in Excel, you can type Python directly into a cell, the Python calculations run in the Microsoft Cloud, and your results are returned to the worksheet, including plots and visualizations."

In contrast to the House of Representatives, the responsible committee of the Senate says ‘no’ to a fixed price cap for roaming charges. Switzerland must coordinate internationally, it argues.

The Commission for Transport and Telecommunications of the Senate proposes to reject a corresponding motion by parliamentarian Elisabeth Schneider-Schneiter, as announced on Tuesday. In May, the motion had been adopted by 116 votes to 68 with 4 abstentions.

The motion demands that the Federal Council introduce an upper limit for roaming charges. According to the press release, the Senate committee agrees with the Federal Council that according to the current Telecommunications Act, price ceilings can be set based on international agreements. However, a unilateral decision by the Federal Council is not desirable.

Difficult fight against charges

Similar proposals to abolish excessive roaming charges had already failed several times in parliament. Earlier this year, communications minister, Albert Rösti, said that the Federal Council could not simply set a unilateral cap by decree. This was confirmed by an expert opinion. Moreover, without an international agreement, foreign providers would not have to comply with Swiss rules.

The Foundation for Consumer Protection repeatedly warns against high roaming charges. It is true that new customers of telecom providers have had to set their own limits for data roaming since summer 2021 according to a new regulation. Nevertheless, customers still run the risk of returning from their holidays with high bills.

The situation is different in the European Union (EU), where customers benefited from the removal of roaming charges. Negotiators of the EU states and the European Parliament agreed at the end of 2021 to extend the popular rules until summer 2032. This means that people can continue to make phone calls, surf the internet or write text messages with their mobile phones while travelling at the same cost as at home.

Swiss start-up AlpineAI announced on Monday the launch of SwissGPT.

This Swiss version of the ChatGPT text generator aims to counter the American and Chinese presence in this field and serve local companies more effectively.

The aim is to process company data securely using LLM (Large Language Model) and develop new solutions using algorithms, the start-up explained at a press conference.

Jointly created by several artificial intelligence research laboratories, including the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and its Lausanne counterpart (EPFL), SwissGPT is aiming to assert itself against the technological supremacy of the USA and China, the main suppliers of such software.

Full names and phone numbers of all 2,800 employees of the Bernese cantonal police have been leaked to hackers.

The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) informed the Bern cantonal police on July 21 about a previously unknown security vulnerability in the MobileIron app installed on smartphones of police employees. The app, which is provided by the IT software company Ivanti, is used worldwide to ensure a connection between a smartphone or laptop and servers at company headquarters.

The security gap was quickly closed, but the data had already been leaked, confirmed Flurina Schenk, media spokeswoman for the Bern cantonal police in an interview with Swiss public television, SRF.

The stolen information, including names and phone numbers of police officers, is considered sensitive because it could be used to target police officers. According to the Bern cantonal police, it is not known who stole the data. There’s no evidence thus far that the data has been published online. An investigation has been opened.

Authorities abroad, most recently in Norway, have also fallen victim to the MobileIron security vulnerability.

Switzerland has faced a surge in cyber attacks recently. In June, hackers published data from the Federal Office of Police (Fedpol) and the Federal Office for Customs and Border Security on the Darknet, after exploiting a vulnerability on the servers of the company that hosted it.

Swiss federal railways, Swiss media groups, defence contractor RUAG, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and several websites of the federal administration also faced attacks.

A group of hackers have exposed an exploit that can unlock Tesla’s software-locked features worth up to $15,000.

Free heated seats and Full Self-Driving package, anyone?

Software-locked features that need to be activated by the owner paying or subscribing to a service are becoming increasingly popular in the auto industry.

Tesla has been on board that trend very early since it produced virtually all its vehicles with the same hardware and owners can unlock features later through software updates.

This includes features like heated seats, acceleration boost, and even Tesla’s Full Self-Driving package, which costs $15,000.

It creates a market for people trying to get around the software lock.

A group of security researchers (aka hackers) at TU Berlin announced that they managed to exploit a weakness in the onboard computer to unlock these features:

Tesla has been known for their advanced and well-integrated car computers, from serving mundane entertainment purposes to fully autonomous driving capabilities. More recently, Tesla has started using this well-established platform to enable in-car purchases, not only for additional connectivity features but even for analog features like faster acceleration or rear heated seats. As a result, hacking the embedded car computer could allow users to unlock these features without paying.

They plan to unveil the result of their exploit in a presentation called “Jailbreaking an Electric Vehicle in 2023 or What It Means to Hotwire Tesla’s x86-Based Seat Heater” next week.

The hack requires physical access to the car, and it involves a “voltage fault injection attack” on the AMD-based infotainment system:

For this, we are using a known voltage fault injection attack against the AMD Secure Processor (ASP), serving as the root of trust for the system. First, we present how we used low-cost, off-the-self hardware to mount the glitching attack to subvert the ASP’s early boot code. We then show how we reverse-engineered the boot flow to gain a root shell on their recovery and production Linux distribution.

The group of hackers claims that their “Tesla Jailbreak” is “unpatchable” and allows to run “arbitrary software on the infotainment.”

Brave Software, maker of the Brave web browser, has tuned its search engine to run on a homegrown index of images and videos in an effort to end its dependency on "Big Tech" rivals.

On Thursday, the biz said image and video results from Brave Search – available on the web at search.brave.com and via its browser – will be served from Brave's own index.

Search indexes are made by visiting online resources – typically web pages, images, videos, or other files – with a crawler bot and recording the locations of these resources in a database. And when an internet user submits a query to a search engine, the search engine checks its index (and possible other sources) to find the addresses of resources that correspond to the query keywords. There's actually a lot more to it but that's the basic idea.

Ranking matches from the list in such a way that the search user sees results ordered by predicted relevance is an ongoing computer science challenge, one that Google handled effectively for years with the help of its PageRank algorithm and other machinations. And it continues to dominate the US search market, with more than 90 percent market share in June, according to Similarweb.

But in recent years, there has been growing sentiment that Google Search is getting worse. Part of the problem is AI content generation, which is being used to create web spam, to the detriment of web users.

Yet AI is also part of the supposed solution, at least for rival Microsoft, which sees OpenAI's chatbot tech as a way to rewrite the expectations for web search at Google's expense.

The big subreddit protest of 2023 has Reddit right at the end of its rope. The company is reportedly handing out notices of a Thursday deadline to the biggest subs that still remain private, telling them they need to offer a reopening plan, or else they’ll do… something.