Earlier this month, Nintendo received a lot of negative attention for an end-user license agreement (EULA) update granting the company the claimed right to render Switch consoles "permanently unusable in whole or in part" for violations such as suspected hacking or piracy. As it turns out, though, Nintendo isn't the only console manufacturer that threatens to remotely brick systems in response to rule violations. And attorneys tell Ars Technica that they're probably well within their legal rights to do so.
Sony's System Software License Agreement on the PS5, for instance, contains the following paragraph of "remedies" it can take for "violations" such as use of modified hardware or pirated software (emphasis added).
If SIE Inc determines that you have violated this Agreement's terms, SIE Inc may itself or may procure the taking of any action to protect its interests such as disabling access to or use of some or all System Software, disabling use of this PS5 system online or offline, termination of your access to PlayStation Network, denial of any warranty, repair or other services provided for your PS5 system, implementation of automatic or mandatory updates or devices intended to discontinue unauthorized use, or reliance on any other remedial efforts as reasonably necessary to prevent the use of modified or unpermitted use of System Software.
The same exact clause appears in the PlayStation 4 EULA as well. The PlayStation 3 EULA was missing the "disabling use... online or offline" clause, but it does still warn that Sony can take steps to "discontinue unauthorized use" or "prevent the use of a modified PS3 system, or any pirated material or equipment."
A hacker who breached the government messaging platform used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier this month appears to have accessed far more than originally believed. According to an exclusive report from Reuters, the breach impacted a […]
Dr. Darshan Shah, who owns longevity clinics, follows a 40-minute morning routine.
It includes meditation, coffee, and a workout.
He said following routines closely is key to improving our health.
A doctor who owns a longevity clinic shared his morning routine with Business Insider.
"I'm a big believer in routines. Having a good health routine that you follow on a day-to-day basis — with very few skips — is what's going to lead to optimal health," Dr. Darshan Shah, the CEO and director of Next Health, a group of longevity clinics in the US and in Dubai, said.
A decade ago, Shah would often work 12-hour days as a surgeon, starting at 6 a.m., and didn't prioritize his health. He made healthy lifestyle changes in the hope of extending how long he can watch his son grow up, and lost 50 pounds.
He has found that spending 40 to 45 minutes a day on self-care was a "complete game changer."
"I am no longer tired. I want to wake up every morning, jump out of bed, and attack the day," he said.
Here's his morning routine.
Shah lives a healthy lifestyle, which he hopes will help him live longer.
Mushroom coffee,which usually contains reishi, chaga, lion's mane, and cordyceps mushrooms, is said to reduce stress and inflammation, increase energy levels, and support the immune system, but according to the Cleveland Clinic, there isn't much research to support these claims.
2) Journal
Shah journals briefly while waiting for his coffee.
There's some evidence that journaling can improve mental health because it helps people process their thoughts and gain a sense of self-assurance, particularly those with anxiety or PTSD, according to a 2022 meta-review published in the journal Family Medicine and Community Health.
BI's Katie Notopoulos recently reported on an uptick in male fitness and "hustle" influencers taking up journaling as a self-improvement technique.
Shah does regular experimental longevity treatments, such as plasma exchange, pictured here.
Darshan Shah
3) Mediate
Next, Shah meditates for 20 minutes.
According to the American Psychological Association, meditation has been associated with reduced stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as potentially boosting the immune system.
Three times a week, he also does a 40-minute workout at the gym after he's completed his morning routine. There, he does a 12-minute run and 30 minutes of training with free weights.
A 2022 review of 16 studies, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that participants who did 30 to 60 minutes of muscle-strengthening activities, including weight training and calisthenics, were 10 to 20% less like to die of conditions including cancer and cardiovascular disease. The studies were on peopled between 18 and 97.
5) Read for 30 minutes
"At this point, my coffee is ready to go. While I'm drinking my coffee, I read for 30 minutes," Shah said.
He always has two books on the go: one about health and wellness, and one he finds more fun. Currently, he's reading "Forever Strong" by Gabrielle Lyon to keep up with developments in his industry, and "Love, Life, and Elephants, an African Love Story" by Daphne Sheldrick.
A 2020 study, published in the journal International Psychogeriatrics, that followed 1,962 Taiwanese people between 1989 and 2011 found that participants who read at least once a weekat age 60+ were less likely to have cognitive decline 14 years later.
Shah skips breakfast and scrolling
Two glaring omissions from Shah's routine are breakfast and his phone.
"When I wake up, the first thing I don't do is pick up my phone. It charges by my coffee machine, so I put on a cup of coffee, and I don't pick up my phone until that coffee is ready to drink," he said.
He does intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast every morning. The approach, which typically involves only eating within an eight-hour window, is popular among biohackers and those in the longevity space, BI previously reported. It is linked to benefits including improved sleep and cellular health, the maintenance of a healthy weight, and reduced cancer risk.
But the evidence is very mixed, and experts say that it doesn't work for everyone. For example, people wanting to build muscle, those with a history of eating disorders, or pregnant women are among those who should avoid it.
Google is adding a new security setting to Android to provide an extra layer of resistance against attacks that infect devices, tap calls traveling through insecure carrier networks, and deliver scams through messaging services.
On Tuesday, the company unveiled the Advanced Protection mode, most of which will be rolled out in the upcoming release of Android 16. The setting comes as mercenary malware sold by NSO Group and a cottage industry of other exploit sellers continues to thrive. These players provide attacks-as-a-service through end-to-end platforms that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities on targeted devices, infect them with advanced spyware, and then capture contacts, message histories, locations, and other sensitive information. Over the past decade, phones running fully updated versions of Android and iOS have routinely been hacked through these services.
A core suite of enhanced security features
Advanced Protection is Google’s latest answer to this type of attack. By flipping a single button in device settings, users can enable a host of protections that can thwart some of the most common techniques used in sophisticated hacks. In some cases, the protections hamper performance and capabilities of the device, so Google is recommending the new mode mainly for journalists, elected officials, and other groups who are most often targeted or have the most to lose when infected.
U.S. authorities indicted three Russians and one Kazakhstan national for hacking and selling access to a botnet made of vulnerable internet-connected devices.
Kayla Barnes-Lentz uses a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber as part of her biohacking routine to try to live to 150 — but some of her favorite longevity hacks are free.
Magdalena Wosinska
Kayla Barnes-Lentz, 33, says her biological age is 22.
Barnes-Lentz uses experimental longevity treatments available at her clinic.
But some of her favorite longevity hacks are free.
Kayla Barnes-Lentz is a 33-year-old longevity clinic owner who uses experimental treatments to try to live to 150. But some of her favorite biohacks are free.
Barnes-Lentz, who is based in Los Angeles, says she has reversed her biological age to 22. Biological age measures how healthy a person's cells, tissues, and organs appear to be, but there isn't a set definition because it's unclear how bodies "should" look at any given age.
Barnes-Lentz's daily biohacking routine, which she previously shared with BI, involves a home sauna, mats that send electromagnetic waves through the body, and clinical-grade air purifying machines — all of which cost thousands of dollars.
Barnes-Lentz uses a PEMF machine throughout the day to optimize her health.
Magdalena Wosinska
However, she told Business Insider: "The basics are what moves the needle the most. Although I have a ton of tech, it is essential to remember that we can also make massive improvements through lower-cost habits. It's what we do daily that will make the most significant impact on healthspan and longevity."
Barnes-Lentz previously told BI that one of the best biohacks was getting married, because her husband is a source of "security and peace" and helps her relax.
Barnes-Lentz said her husband shares a similar attitude toward health and longevity, and they biohack together, including using saunas and doing cold plunges together and holding fortnightly marriage optimization meetings.
Kayla Barnes-Lentz and Warren Lentz biohack together in an attempt to live until they're 150.
Masha Maltsava
Barnes-Lentz said that while some biohackers seem to be "siloed," she has an active social life.
"Some of the longest-lived people have this really great sense of community," she said. The longevity expert Rose Anne Kenny, a professor of medical gerontology at Trinity College Dublin and the lead researcher for The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, said that having strong social connections is just as important for longevity as a healthy diet and exercising.
Barnes-Lentz goes to events in LA at least once a week. The day before speaking to BI, she had friends over, as she does every Thursday. She and her husband also host friends for dinner once a week.
"We always invite everyone over to our house because then I get to really control the environment, and I know what's in the food, how it's made and what oils are used. But everybody typically loves it because we have all these fun health optimization devices that they get to use," she said. "Yesterday, I was having everyone test their grip strength, for example."
Getting enough sleep
Barnes-Lentz uses a vibration plate every day.
Magdalena Wosinska
Barnes-Lentz goes to bed at 8:30 p.m. most nights and wakes up naturally at around 5:30 a.m.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends adults get between seven and eight hours of sleep every night.
Even if you can't commit to eight hours during the week, research presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2024 suggested that people who "caught up" on sleep during the weekend were 20% less likely to develop heart disease than people who remained sleep deprived.
Exercising daily
"There's never a workout that I regretted," Barnes-Lentz said.
She does zone 2 cardio, which means moving at an intensity where she can just about hold a conversation, every day. She and her husband take a daily 45-minute walk around their neighborhood in the LA hills.
She also does strength training three times a week, lifting weights.
Nathan K. LeBrasseur, a physiologist who researches healthy aging as the director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging at Mayo Clinic, previously told BI the best type of exercise for longevity is a mixture of strength training and cardio, for at least thirty minutes a day.
Hackers have breached TeleMessage, an Israeli company that builds custom versions of messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram for clients including the U.S. government. The stolen data includes the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent through […]
Dr. Darshan Shah owns a longevity clinic, where he does experimental treatments. He also takes supplements.
Darshan Shah
A doctor who owns a longevity clinic does experimental treatments to try to stay healthy for longer.
Dr. Darshan Shah takes supplements as part of this mission.
He shared six that he takes every day, including functional mushrooms and vitamin D.
A doctor who owns a longevity clinic and does experimental treatments to try to live longer shared six of the supplements he takes every day.
In 2016, Dr. Darshan Shah, 52, founded Next Health, which now has locations in the US and Dubai. Shah told Business Insider he improved his own lifestyle 10 years ago when he had his first child and feared he wouldn't live to see him grow up.
As well as focusing oneating healthily, exercising, and sleeping more, he takes multiple daily supplements.
"I'm a believer in supplementation, but you have to be very careful," Shah said. "There are so many supplements out there that people take that don't have a lot of good research behind them."
Shah gets a blood test every four months to check his vitamin levels and whether he needs to take the same supplements, because "deficiencies come and go," he said.
He recommends others get tested before taking supplements, too. "And make sure that you are buying good quality supplements and that you're working with a practitioner who is very familiar with supplements — they can help you sort through what's going to work for you," he said.
Here are six of the daily supplements Shah takes and why.
Shah does regular experimental longevity treatments, such as plasma exchange, pictured here.
Darshan Shah
Vitamin D3
Shah's vitamin D levels are naturally low, he said, so he takes vitamin D3.
D3 is a form of vitamin D that is easy for the body to absorb. It supports the immune system and helps the body absorb calcium, which is important for bone health among other things.
Many doctors, longevity investors, and biohackers take vitamin D because research suggests it can help reduce inflammation and the risk of broken bones and cancer, BI's health correspondent, Hilary Brueck, previously reported.
Vitamin D is also widely recommended for those who live in the Northern hemisphere, who won't always get enough from the sun.
Methylated B vitamins
Shah has a gene called MTHFR, which means his body doesn't easily process B vitamins. So, he takes methylated B vitamins, which are more easily absorbed by the body than other forms.
There are eight B vitamins, most of which help the body turn food into energy. Vitamin B12, for example, helps form red blood cells and supports healthy hair, skin, and nails.
Research has also linked it to better mood and the prevention of dementia, although this isn't confirmed.
Nicotinamide riboside
Nicotinamide riboside is a type of vitamin B3. It helps the body produce an enzyme called NAD, which is necessary for cells to generate energy. It also helps repair DNA, maintain tissue health, and improve immune function.
As we age, our bodies become less efficient at producing NAD. Supplementing with nicotinamide riboside to aid this process has become a buzzy longevity treatment, Brueck previously reported.
It's important to note that the research is still in its early stages and has mostly been done on rodents rather than humans. But it's generally regarded as safe, and one 2022 review of research, published in the journal Nutrients, suggested it had promise for extending health and life span.
Shah takes supplements every day to try to live longer.
Darshan Shah
Omega-3 supplements
Omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish such as salmon, walnuts, and chia seeds, have been linked to better heart and joint health, lower inflammation, and lower blood pressure.
Omega-3 supplements are usually made from fish or algae oil — but it's unclear whether they carry the same benefits as eating foods that are naturally high in the acids.
A study on 777 participants, published in the journal Nature Aging earlier this year, found that adults with an average age of 75 who consumed a gram of omega-3s every day had lower "biological ages" than those who didn't.
Biological age refers to the health of cells, organs, and tissues as opposed to chronological age. Participants were on average three to four months younger than their actual age by the end of the three-year study.
Ashwagandha
Ashwagandha is a herbal supplement used in Ayurvedic medicine. It's an adaptogen, which is a plant substance believed to help reduce stress and improve overall wellbeing, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Multiple studies evaluated by the US Office of Dietary Supplements suggest that ashwagandha could help reduce stress and anxiety levels, sleeplessness, and fatigue.
However, the effects of different types and doses of ashwagandha supplements are unclear. Existing studies have used different parts of the plant (for example, extracts from roots vs leaves), and most looked at its effects when used in traditional medicine, not as a dietary supplement.
Mushroom blend
Every morning, Shah drinks coffee that is blended with "functional" mushroom extracts, specifically lion's mane and chaga mushrooms.
Lion's mane and chaga are adaptogens, like ashwagandha. A 2024 review of research, published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, suggested that lion's mane could help reduce anxiety and sleep disturbance. It's important to note that most of these findings come from studies on older people who took the mushroom for a long time at high doses, the researchers wrote, so the results might not apply to the wider population.
Meanwhile, a 2023 review published in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology found the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of chaga mushrooms could protect against cell damage. But the researchers said more research is needed to confirm the potential effects of chaga and its usefulness as a dietary supplement.
Riot’s “anti-cheat artisan” Phillip Koskinas explains how he and his team go after cheaters and cheat developers to protect the integrity of games, such as Valorant and League of Legends.
Suleyka Bolaños retired in her 30s alongside her partner, Jeff White, thanks to their real estate portfolio.
Courtesy of Suleyka Bolaños and Jeff White
Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños retired early by sticking to a straightforward plan.
They 'house hacked' once a year, meaning they'd buy, move in, and rent a portion to offset their mortgage.
It allowed them to take advantage of owner-occupied financing and put just 5% down instead of 20%.
Retiring in your 30s is far from simple, but Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños did it by simplifying.
They had a clear goal — early retirement in 10 years — and a clear plan: add one rental property a year to their portfolio. And they committed to one strategy: house hacking. By renting out parts of the houses they lived in, they could offset their housing costs and free up extra savings.
"All we wanted was one deal a year — it wasn't like we were looking for 10 — so it was easy," said White. "It was like, OK, we're ready to go again. Here's a handful of deals. Let's go find the one that works best for us."
They executed their first house hack in 2017 and added a property a year, according to plan. By 2023, the rental income from their properties surpassed their salaries, allowing them to quit work ahead of schedule. White had worked in corporate finance and accounting for most of his 17-year career, while Bolaños had worked in sales and started her own notary business. They now spend their days exploring Colorado, planning monthly trips, and building their YouTube channel, "PTO for Life."
"We just did it slow and steady and just looked for the right deal, and we got on the other side in 6.5 years," said White. Without real estate, "we would both still be working probably for another 30, 40 years easily. We made good money, but not crazy money where you can just retire off a stock portfolio."
White and Bolaños take one trip a month in early retirement.
Courtesy of Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños
House hacking comes with its unique challenges, including managing tenants and even sharing space with tenants. The couple has packed up and moved homes once a year since 2017. They've also spent time and energy renovating properties, some of which required more work than others, such as their first house hack: a fixer-upper fourplex that came with mice and mold. The renovation process felt like "a second full-time job," said White.
However, house hacking can provide a path to financial freedom in less than a decade, as in White and Bolaños' case. As of 2025, they are living in their eighth house hack and looking for their ninth. They plan to hit 10 by 2026. BI reviewed settlement statements to verify their property ownership.
Using owner-occupied financing to get in with 5% down payments
One key to the Denver-based couple's strategy was using owner-occupied financing, which typically comes with more favorable terms, such as a lower down payment and interest rate, compared to financing for investment properties. Lenders see investment property loans as riskier than primary home loans and typically want a 20% down payment at a minimum.
While White and Bolaños were renting a portion of the properties they were buying, they were able to avoid putting 20% down because they were also living in the properties and considered owner-occupants.
The main stipulation with owner-occupied financing is that you have to live in the property for at least 12 months. That's exactly what the couple would do: Buy and move into a home, rent the extra space — either bedrooms if it was a single-family home, or units if it was a multi-family — find and buy a new place after the 12 months, and continue repeating the process. When they moved out, they'd fill the unit or room they were living in with a new tenant, further increasing the cash flow and essentially converting the property from a primary residence to an investment property.
White, who worked in finance for years, learned about the concept of house hacking from a book called "Build a Rental Property Empire."
Courtesy of Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños
They've financed each property with a 5% down payment, which lowered the barrier to entry significantly and allowed them to scale consistently.
The difference between putting down 5% and 20%, the typical down payment required for an investment property, can be tens of thousands of dollars: 5% down on a $300,000 home, for example, is $15,000, while 20% down is $60,000.
Getting in with as little as 3.5% with FHA loans
Another strategy real estate investors are using to get started without much upfront cash is using an FHA loan.
This is a government-backed mortgage designed to give low- to moderate-income families and first-time homebuyers the opportunity to buy a home, and the borrowing requirements are less strict than those of a conventional loan: An FHA loan requires a 3.5% down payment and 580 credit score.
There are stipulations — the FHA restricts how much you can borrow, you have to purchase a primary residence and live in it for at least a year before renting it, and borrowers can only have one FHA loan at a time — but it's a low-cost option that new investors can use to get their feet wet.
Boston-based investor Karina Mejia used an FHA loan to buy her first property at age 22. Early in her career, a low down payment was essential, especially in an expensive market.
She told BI that her first property was a $560,000 three-family home in 2019. A 3.5% down payment amounted to about $20,000. Had she been required to put 20% down, she would have needed to come up with about $112,000.
Mejia moved into one unit, filled the other two with tenants, and their rent nearly covered her entire mortgage payment. Thanks to her low monthly housing payment, she saved up enough money to buy her second property the following year.
There are different types of FHA loans, ranging from a traditional mortgage for your primary residence to an FHA 203(k) loan to make home improvements, which is how Seattle-based investor Ludomir Wanot afforded his first property.
Wanot, who partnered with his brother on his first deal, found a single-family fixer-upper for $138,000 and financed the home purchase and renovation with an FHA 203(k) loan.
Without this specific type of loan, they wouldn't have been able to afford renovations, which ended up costing $30,000, Wanot told BI. But since they rolled the remodeling costs into the loan balance and put down 3.5%, "we were in for no more than $10,000," he said.
There's a misconception that you need to put down 20% and save up tens of thousands of dollars to purchase a property, he said. "That's not the case whatsoever."
Suleyka Bolaños and Jeff White retired in their 30s, thanks to their real estate portfolio.
Courtesy of Suleyka Bolaños and Jeff White
Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños retired in their 30s through strategic real-estate investments.
They house hacked properties, living in part and renting the rest, boosting savings.
Their rental strategies include long-term, Section 8, and rent-by-the-room for cash flow.
Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños have been adding one rental property to their portfolio a year since 2017.
The Denver-based couple also hasn't paid for their own housing since 2017. They've "house hacked" each property they've acquired — meaning, they've moved into a portion of the home and rented any additional space. In the case of a single-family home, this means sharing space with roommates. With a multi-family, such as a duplex or triplex, it means sharing walls with neighbors.
"It's very unconventional," White told Business Insider.
But it put them on a fast track to early retirement: Their extra savings and the cash flow from their rentals, which surpassed their day job income in 2023, allowed them to retire in their 30s. White had worked in corporate finance and accounting for most of his 17-year career, while Bolaños had worked in sales and started her own notary business.
As of 2025, they are living in their eighth house hack and looking for their ninth. They plan to hit 10 by 2026. BI reviewed settlement statements to verify their property ownership.
Their first house hack — a fixer-upper fourplex that required months of renovations and an eviction — presented a handful of challenges, said Bolaños If they could go back in time, "we definitely would have never bought that fourplex."
White and Bolaños have moved about once a year since 2017 when they first started house hacking.
Courtesy of Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños
However, over the years, they've homed in on their strategy, figuring out what works best for them, their financial goals, and their market in Denver.
"By the third, we had started to develop our systems," said White. They knew exactly what type of properties they were looking for — move-in ready ones rather than full fixer-uppers — and had experience with four different rental strategies.
1. Short-term rental. White and Bolaños experimented with Airbnb with one of the four units in their first house hack. It was more work than they anticipated, said White: "It was a lot of cleaning. It wasn't necessarily the best fit for us, so we drifted away from that strategy."
2. Long-term 'market tenants.' Renting to long-term tenants — leases that last for 12 months or more — at market rent is a common, straightforward, and typically passive strategy. They've been using it since their first house hack.
3. Section 8. White and Bolaños became Section 8 landlords with their third house hack, a duplex, when they turned one of the units into an affordable housing unit.
"One of the pros is that you have on-time payments every month," said Bolaños. "Sometimes, landlords come into issues where the renter is unable to pay because maybe they've lost their job. This happened, of course, during the pandemic. The great thing about having a Section 8 tenant is that, whether they lose their job or not, you're still getting these guaranteed payments from the government every single month."
4. Rent-by-the-room. Renting individual rooms has proven to be the most lucrative strategy for White and Bolaños.
"We can maximize the rents in a house or a duplex because we're just taking one room," said White — and, often, they'll opt to move into the smallest, least expensive room to further maximize rent. "That's how we were able to cash flow while living at all these places; we were willing to rent out the rooms in our units."
White, who worked in finance for years, learned about the concept of house hacking from a book called "Build a Rental Property Empire."
Courtesy of Jeff White and Suleyka Bolaños
Through experience, they've learned exactly what they can charge in their market for a room with its own bathroom versus a room with a shared bathroom, which makes it easy to calculate how much a property may cash flow.
"If the room shares a bathroom, it's 800 to 900 bucks per room. If the room is a master with its own bathroom, it's 900 to 1,000 bucks," said White.
"More bedrooms equals more cash flow," he added. With that in mind, they look for homes where they could naturally add another bedroom. "If you find a house that you could turn from a 5-bedroom to a 7-bedroom, now you just added an additional $1,600 to $2,000 per month in gross rents."
The key to renting by the room is finding compatible tenants. In a five-bedroom home, you could have five different strangers living under one roof. They prefer to start tenants with a shorter lease to test personality fit, said White: "A two- to four-month lease is the secret ingredient for that. If they pass that initial two-month test, then we offer a six- to 12-month renewal. If you have to make that hard choice and not renew them, it's a lot easier to replace them on the front end versus trying to wait a year."
The strategy is not for everyone — it requires finding and managing more tenants, and, if you're house-hacking, it means sharing space with roommates — but White and Bolaños have found that it can create more cash flow and lower your overall risk. If one tenant moves out, they still have rental income coming from the other bedrooms while searching for a new tenant.
Still, they prefer to use a combination of long-term rentals, Section 8, and rent-by-the-room.
"We didn't want to just rely on one way of doing things to be successful," said White. "It's a good way to diversify."
Certain strategies work better with certain properties. For example, in their experience, a single-family home is typically ideal for rent-by-the-room.
That said, they're willing to pivot strategies when it makes sense, added Bolaños: "Certain houses may have been rent-by-the-room for the last three years, and then maybe Section 8 increases what they pay per bedroom. So we run those numbers. We're like, 'OK if we're renting by the room, we get this much, but if we were to switch it to a Section 8, we're actually making $500 to $1000 more — and now you're only dealing with one lease as opposed to four or five."
The FBI is offering $10 million for information about the China-state hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon and its intrusion last year into sensitive networks belonging to multiple US telecommunications companies.
Salt Typhoon is one of a half-dozen or more hacking groups that work on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. Intelligence agencies and private security companies have concluded the group has been behind a string of espionage attacks designed to collect vital information, in part for use in any military conflicts that may arise in the future.
A broad and significant cyber campaign
The agency on Thursday published a statement offering up to $10 million, relocation assistance, and other compensation for information about Salt Typhoon. The announcement specifically sought information about the specific members of Salt Typhoon and the group's compromise of multiple US telecommunications companies last year.
The lives of most Wii consoles ended sometime in the early 2010s, left to collect dust in dorm rooms and parents’ dens, having run their last Just Dance disc long ago. But at least one Wii is finding another life hosting a website.
Security engineer Alex Haydock found a discarded “sacrificial Wii” at the 2024 Electromagnetic Field festival swap shop, he wrote on his blog (which is now running on that Wii). He took it home intending to use it to emulate and homebrew games, but he’d noticed while browsing the website for the open-source operating system NetBSD—which has options for installing a Unix-like operating system on devices like Dreamcasts, Amiga and Atari machines, and many more—that it had an option for a Wii installation.
“As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it,” he wrote. “That workload is the blog you’re reading now.”
Haydock wrote set-by-step instructions on how he softmodded the Wii on his site, which you can check out for yourself if you have a sad old console lying around and a need for a web host. You’ll need the Wiimotes and sensor bar, he notes, because a lot of this process relies on installing channels (applications on the Wii menu, for the unfamiliar) on the Wii itself.
“Part of it is of course simply the fun of taking a piece of tech people are very familiar with and trying to get it to do something it was never designed to do,” Haydock told me in an email. “But I also find that the fastest way for me to learn new concepts and technologies is when something breaks and I end up having to fix it. If I follow a tutorial and something 'just works', it's almost like losing an opportunity to really appreciate the complexity of what's going on underneath.”
On Wednesday, his Wii blog made it to the top of technology forum Hacker News, meaning potentially hundreds of thousands of people clicked through to the site at the same time—a load that could easily hug any lesser website to death. But the Wiiweb held up. “This is where the Wii really managed to impress. Watching the graphs as the post went live was great fun. I spent a few hours watching as the load spiked, trying to work out where the post had been shared to cause each of the sudden bursts in traffic,” Haydock told me. The page spent about four hours at the number one spot on Hacker News, he said, and was on the front page for 20 hours.
“At its peak a few hours in, the Wii was serving around 40 requests per second, and it was still serving a steady 10 requests per second near the end of the front page run. I was shocked but the Wii kept up amazingly well the entire time. It could easily have handled more,” he said. “Based on the figures I've got, I'm pretty sure the (not great) upload speed on my home connection would become the bottleneck way before the Wii itself would.”
He said he hopes to bring the Wii back to the festival where it started in 2026, and continue to serve the blog from it, in the middle of a field.
“Originally I expected I'd run it like this for a few days or weeks, until I got tired of fixing it when it fell over,” Haydock said. “But it's been so stable that I do now plan to run it like this indefinitely. Especially now that some helpful folk have pointed out how to get it to boot directly into the NetBSD environment. Although I did quite enjoy having a production Wiimote.”
4chan, one of the internet’s most infamous image boards, has been hacked. The site went dark after a major security breach. The attackers exploited outdated systems, leaked the site’s source code, restored a long-deleted board, and allegedly exposed private moderator […]
Apple has won a legal battle against the UK government’s attempt to keep its iPhone backdoor appeal under wraps. On Monday, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal rejected the government’s effort to keep details of a court hearing hidden from the […]
It has never been so important for companies to give customer data top priority. Customers expect their data to be treated carefully, especially given the rise in digital transactions, more cybersecurity threats, and tighter laws. This expectation covers businesses of […]
A SpaceX and X engineer, Christopher Stanley—currently serving as a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General's office at the Department of Justice (DOJ)—was reportedly caught bragging about hacking and distributing pirated e-books, bootleg software, and game cheats.
The boasts appeared on archived versions of websites, of which several, once flagged, were quickly deleted, Reuters reported.
Stanley was assigned to the DOJ by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While Musk claims that DOGE operates transparently, not much is known about who the staffers are or what their government roles entail. It remains unclear what Stanley does at DOJ, but Reuters noted that the Deputy Attorney General’s office is in charge of investigations into various crimes, "including hacking and other malicious cyber activity." Declining to comment further, the DOJ did confirm that as a "special government employee," like Musk, Stanley does not draw a government salary.
