Parker Higgins, the foundation’s director of special projects, explains that certain news outlets are at risk for what he calls the “billionaire problem.” This is where members of the super rich can use their financial muscle to censor politically or personally inconvenient material. Gawker, famously, earned the ire of one prominent venture capitalist after broadcasting details of their sexuality without consent.

Univision purchased the Gizmodo Media Group, which contained the other sites in Gawker’s stable, but the main site itself is up for auction. Reported buyers include at least one individual who feels they were initially wronged by the outlet, and it’s likely that other rich dudes with a grudge have also made bids.

Similarly, the L.A. Weekly, which was bought by an initially-secret consortium and laid off the bulk of its workforce, removed at least one news story about the purchase. Thankfully, the reports remain publicly available on Archive It’s Threatened Outlets section, part of the new collection. In addition, L.A. Weekly staffers have found older articles being republished with fresh dates, verifiable using the archive.

Other sites have also suffered the “billionaire problem,” like when Joe Ricketts, owner of DNAinfo, shut down Gothamist and its sister publications after its staff voted to unionize. Similarly, the Toast will soon be expunged from the internet for as-yet undisclosed reasons.

The foundation’s preservation of the Gawker archives will, it’s hoped, reduce the temptation for other wealthy folks to suppress online reporting. After all, it’s much harder to scrub inconvenient truths from the internet if they’re being duplicated in a public archive.

The Telegram messaging apps appear to have breached Apple’s App Store guidelines and are currently unavailable for download on iOS. 9to5Mac spotted the absence yesterday, having been alerted via a Reddit thread.

At the time of writing a search for Telegram on the App Store returns Viber, Skype, Messenger and WeChat chat apps, as the top results, but not Telegram.

Both the original Telegram app and a rebuild, called Telegram X, which the messaging company officially announced for Android yesterday — billing it as a coding experiment aimed at speeding up development of the platform — have been taken off the iOS App Store for now.

It’s not entirely clear what the problem is. But, responding to a Twitter user’s question about why both its iOS apps are AWOL, Telegram founder Pavel Durov tweeted that it relates to “inappropriate content”.

“We were alerted by Apple that inappropriate content was made available to our users and both apps were taken off the App Store. Once we have protections in place we expect the apps to be back on the App Store,” he wrote.

We’ve reached out to Apple and Telegram with questions and will update this story with any additional information.

Apple’s developer guidelines for iOS apps include a section on safety that proscribes “upsetting or offensive content”. A sub-section here, regarding user-generated content (which would apply to any messaging app with a public broadcast facility, as Telegram has), notes these types of apps “present particular challenges” — and must therefore contain:

• A method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app
• A mechanism to report offensive content and timely responses to concerns
• The ability to block abusive users from the service
• Published contact information so users can easily reach you

“Apps with user-generated content or services that end up being used primarily for pornographic content, objectification of real people (e.g. “hot-or-not” voting), making physical threats, or bullying do not belong on the App Store and may be removed without notice,” the iOS guidelines add.

Why rebuild it?

In its blog officially announcing Telegram X for Android yesterday, the company describes the rebuilt and redesigned app as “experimental”, saying it “may or may not eventually replace the existing official app”.

“But even if it doesn’t, it will speed up the development of Telegram by allowing us to quickly test new approaches and technologies,” it added.

As well as being billed as faster and more battery efficient, Telegram X features a refreshed UX, with a cleaner look, smoother animations and new swiping actions for shortcutting.

An iOS version of Telegram X apparently appeared on Product Hunt in December. Before vanishing from the App Store at the end of last month — on “inappropriate content” grounds.

The Telegram X blog post doesn’t make mention of payments. But, as we reported last month, the company is gearing up to join the cryptocurrency craze — by launching its own ICO, with a plan to raise $1.2BN to finance a transformation from messaging platform into fully fledged blockchain network for hosting decentralized apps, a la Ethereum.

Given that sizable ambition, twinning Telegram and beginning again from scratch — with “an entirely new code base and without all the legacy components that our older apps have accumulated through the years,” as Telegram tells it — could also be Durov’s way of quietly laying the groundwork for retooling his platform as a blockchain.

According to the technical launch schedule in the white paper we’ve reviewed, Q2 is the slated timeframe for conducting an MVP test of the Telegram Open Network.

Thus far Durov has remained tight-lipped on the plans — though he has broken his silence to warn people away from scam offers to “buy Grams” (the purported name of the incoming Telegram token). But perhaps Telegram X marks the spot.

2017 was the year of high profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, but from the beginning of this year, we are noticing a faster-paced shift in the cyber threat landscape, as cryptocurrency-related malware is becoming a popular and profitable choice of cyber criminals.

Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue—the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry.

Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed “Smominru,” a.k.a Ismo, that is using EternalBlue SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0144) to infect Windows computers to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency, worth millions of dollars, for its master.

Active since at least May 2017, Smominru botnet has already infected more than 526,000 Windows computers, most of which are believed to be servers running unpatched versions of Windows, according to the researchers.

“Based on the hash power associated with the Monero payment address for this operation, it appeared that this botnet was likely twice the size of Adylkuzz,” the researchers said.

The botnet operators have already mined approximately 8,900 Monero, valued at up to $3.6 million, at the rate of roughly 24 Monero per day ($8,500) by stealing computing resources of millions of systems.

The highest number of Smominru infection has been observed in Russia, India, and Taiwan, the researchers said.

The command and control infrastructure of Smominru botnet is hosted on DDoS protection service SharkTech, which was notified of the abuse but the firm reportedly ignored the abuse notifications.

According to the Proofpoint researchers, cybercriminals are using at least 25 machines to scan the internet to find vulnerable Windows computers and also using leaked NSA’s RDP protocol exploit, EsteemAudit (CVE-2017-0176), for infection.

“As Bitcoin has become prohibitively resource-intensive to mine outside of dedicated mining farms, interest in Monero has increased dramatically. While Monero can no longer be mined effectively on desktop computers, a distributed botnet like that described here can prove quite lucrative for its operators,” the researchers concluded. 

“The operators of this botnet are persistent, use all available exploits to expand their botnet, and have found multiple ways to recover after sinkhole operations. Given the significant profits available to the botnet operators and the resilience of the botnet and its infrastructure, we expect these activities to continue, along with their potential impacts on infected nodes.”

Another security firm CrowdStrike recently published a blog post, reporting another widespread cryptocurrency fileless malware, dubbed WannaMine, using EternalBlue exploit to infect computers to mine Monero cryptocurrency.

Since it does not download any application to an infected computer, WannaMine infections are harder to detect by antivirus programs. CrowdStrike researchers observed the malware has rendered “some companies unable to operate for days and weeks at a time.”

Besides infecting systems, cybercriminals are also widely adopting cryptojacking attacks, wherein browser-based JavaScript miners utilise website visitors’ CPUs power to mine cryptocurrencies for monetisation.

Since recently observed cryptocurrency mining malware attacks have been found leveraging EternalBlue, which had already been patched by Microsoft last year, users are advised to keep their systems and software updated to avoid being a victim of such threats.

The new GIF shooting mode appears beside the regular camera shutter button within the app, and joins infltr’s existing support for capturing Live Photos, depth photos, and raw photos.

After selecting GIF shooting mode, users can select the speed and duration of the GIF, and also choose whether it should loop forever or ping-pong back and forth.

Over on the editing front, the developers have added new tools including fade, save highlights, save shadows, highlights tint, and exposure.

The new selections join infltr’s more than 20 editing options, which include the ability to edit Live Photos and images with depth information. And on the same note, it’s now possible to manage, order and hide them, thanks to the new toolkit ordering screen introduced in version 2.13.

Also fresh in this update is a new button in Camera mode that sits next to the undo option and lets users quickly reset all applied adjustments.

Additionally, the app now saves in HEIC format instead of JPEG, and uses the H.265 video codec instead of H.264 whenever possible, bringing a 50 percent reduction in file size without a concomitant reduction in quality.

infltr costs $1.99 and can be downloaded for iPad and iPhone (with Apple Watch support) from the App Store. [Direct Link]

Elon Musk’s flamethrower, branded and sold via The Boring Company, his new tunnel digging venture, is now all sold out. That means 20,000 buyers have secured pre-orders, and at $500 per, that adds up to $10 million in committed funds heading to The Boring Co’s coffers.

Musk started selling these via The Boring Company’s website just a few short days ago, on Saturday, January 27. He noted that 15,000 were sold just yesterday, and now the remaining 5,000 are all claimed, per a tweet from the serial founder.

The sell-out of flamethrower stock follows The Boring Company’s first successful merch venture, which involved selling 50,000 branded hats to fans. Musk must be feeling magnanimous after doing so well with these tangential revenue-generation tactics, because he’s also giving away a “complimentary” Boring Co fire extinguisher with each flamethrower sold.

The Boring Co. had been retailing these separately as $30 add-ons, but maybe some of the criticism levied against Musk and his company for selling something that potentially dangerous got through, or maybe no one bought any of the fire extinguishers and so they had a bunch of stock they needed to be ride of.

This doesn’t mean Musk has raised $10 million free and clear via the sale of the flamethrowers for his young company, but the markup is probably huge so the total sum of funds generated this way isn’t anything to sneeze at, either.