Tag Archives: press

European Journalists Investigating Paragon Solutions Spyware: A Press Freedom Perspective

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The intrigue surrounding the hacking deepens as researchers unveil new evidence indicating that two additional journalists were targeted by the same military-grade spyware utilized by Italy against activists.

Earlier this month, a parliamentary committee supervising the intelligence reporting agency confirmed that Italy employed mercenary spyware developed by Israel-based Paragon Solutions against two Italian activists.

Nevertheless, the same committee, which initiated an inquiry into the hacking scandal in March, stated that it could not ascertain the identities of those responsible for targeting prominent Italian investigative journalist Francesco Cancellato.

In a recent report from Citizen Lab researchers, Ciro Pellegrino, a close associate of Cancellato and head of the research outlet’s fan page, revealed that the Naples Bureau was also targeted by users of Paragon Solutions’ spyware. The Civic Research Institute reported that a third journalist, described as a “prominent European journalist,” was similarly targeted by the spyware.

This development unfolds as Paragon and the Italian government face mounting public scrutiny. Haaretz reported this week that Paragon offered to assist the Italian government in investigating the Cancellato incident; however, Italy allegedly declined the offer, with the Italian Security Agency expressing national security concerns.

The office of Meloni did not respond to requests for comment. A debate on this matter, which has sparked outrage between the Italian opposition and Brussels MEPs, is slated for June 16th in the European Parliament.

The Guardian sought comments from Paragon regarding the latest updates and referenced communication to Haaretz, where they confirmed that they had terminated their contract with the Italian government following the revelation in February that Cancellato had been targeted. The Guardian initially reported on Paragon’s contract termination with Italy in February.

Like other spyware vendors, Paragon markets cyber weapons to government clients, ostensibly for crime prevention purposes. The company asserts that it sells spyware exclusively to democratic nations and prohibits its use by journalists or members of civil society.

So, who is behind the targeting of the two journalists?

“We’ve noticed considerable efforts to reassure our customers,” stated John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab. “The journalists’ devices displayed a clear digital fingerprint indicating Paragon’s involvement. It became even more intriguing, as we found fingerprints in both instances that corresponded to the same Paragon clients.”

A report from the Copasir Parliamentary Committee disclosed that Italy’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies had contracts with Paragon in 2023 and 2024, with the hacking software being used under prosecutor authorization. The committee noted that the spyware was deployed to investigate fugitives, suspected terrorism, organized crime, fuel smuggling, and anti-smuggling operations.

It also mentioned that pro-immigrant human rights activists like Luca Casarini and Giuseppe Caccia were surveilled not for their human rights work but due to their connections with “irregular immigrants.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

Fresh Off the Press: Latest Release on Supervolcanoes from BBC Science Focus Magazine

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Michael Mosley

This avant-garde science communicator is a colleague BBC Science Focus Contributor, Professor Giles Yeo.

Cosmic String

Cosmic strings would be the Holy Grail of physics: if discovered, they would unify our theories and even make time travel possible. Now, astronomers may have found the first evidence that cosmic strings exist.

Back pain

Most common treatments for back pain don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. Experts dispel myths about back pain, including common causes and treatments. Learn the best ways to reduce strain and relieve back pain.

Hedonic happiness

The everyday actions you take can make or break your happiness. Here are some less-talked-about lifestyle choices you can make to improve your baseline happiness and stop chasing elusive feelings.

plus

  • Creatine: Every supplement claims to have positive effects on the body and brain. But research shows that these claims are false. actually When it comes to creatine, we’ll explore whether these claims are true and cover the potential side effects of the supplement.
  • Question-and-answer session: Answers to all the questions you didn’t know you needed answers to.
  • Doomsday Glacier: Thwaites Glacier is the world’s largest glacier, covering an area larger than Florida, but it may be on the verge of collapse… and that’s a big problem.

Issue 407 will be released on July 9, 2024

Please do not forget BBC Science Focus It is also available on major digital platforms.
Android,
Kindle Fire and Kindle e-Reader,and
iOS App
For iPad and iPhone.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Press the button: The Fallout series is a true gamer’s creation in both appearance and gameplay | Games

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I I've been watching the last few episodes of the Fallout series on Prime Video. It's funny and gory, sometimes sentimental, and sometimes silly. In other words, it's exactly the kind of game that oscillates between quiet, tragic moments in which you explore traces of America and scenes in which you run out of ammunition and are chased down a hill by an irradiated scorpion.

Fallout's ensemble cast – highlighted by Walton Goggins' near-immortal ghoul and Ella Purnell's wide-eyed vault-dweller – deftly compartmentalize the different facets of the game's personality. As director Jonathan Nolan pointed out in an interview last week with Bethesda's Todd Howard, game director, this is a common device in television storytelling, but rare in games. Grand Theft Auto V does it well. Each of the three main characters represents a different part of his DNA in GTA (Trevor of violent chaos, Michael of authoritative crime drama, and Franklin of Compton realism).But in most games we play One Or we shape the character so that it becomes unique to us.

It makes it difficult to adapt the game to the screen. But instead of trying to convey the experience of playing a game, Fallout takes a step back to let the broken yet strangely optimistic world of Fallout take center stage, with each character exploring different aspects of that world. is showing.

“Even if you say you're adapting Fallout 3, whose Fallout 3 are you talking about? Because the way you play that game is very different from the way I play it. Because it could have been different,” Nolan told me. “That's the beauty of this kind of game.” [Bethesda] I'm drawn to the types of games that make the most of the medium and decide who your character will be within that world. Obviously, it doesn't lead directly to the series. ”

I was interested: how did Will Nolan play Fallout 3? “I always play as a Boy Scout first because I think my parents are watching,” he said. “So I'm going to make the smart decision and try again and play as a complete heel. But then I get weird, I get uncomfortable, I end up falling into a morally compromised middle ground.” It's a little pitiful.




Aaron Moten, right, one of the stars of Fallout. Photo: Jojo Wilden/Prime Video

I can relate. chaotic good In most games where it's allowed, I'm willing to cause chaos wherever I go, and happily align myself with characters and factions in power, but I’d never do anything to hurt people. I know it’s a game, but Assumption I want it to be a no-consequences place where I can experiment with morality, but I can’t bring myself to play the villain. This is in contrast to many players I know. They immediately start causing chaos in the game world just to see what happens. The kind of person who shoots horses in Red Dead Redemption.

“Every time I get a game and test it, I immediately think, “What will this game be able to do?” No matter what we do, every time we hand the player a weapon, the first thing they see is I’m going to shoot anyone who does,” Todd Howard said with a laugh. “It could be their mother. They’ll shoot whoever it is. Then they’ll be like, ‘Well, I’ll reload.’ ”

Trying to design a choice-based game based on the random whims of the players must be a nightmare, but Howard and Bethesda have decades of experience with it. When I interviewed him over the years, he talked about how players and systems interact to create new stories, and how games make what they do in-game real and meaningful. He spoke eloquently about the unique mechanism that makes you feel as though you are in the dark. You can’t do that with TV or movies. But as the Fallout show proves, if it’s made by people who really understand it, can We tell unique stories that still capture the essence of the games people love.

Fallout is great because, while this is also true of other successful game-to-movie adaptations in recent years, Appearance Yes, the sets are perfect, and they nail the game’s retro-future, nostalgic aesthetic. That’s because Nolan and screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner actually played Fallout, understood it, and felt the power of its storytelling for themselves. Rather than trying to clumsily adapt the game’s story into a TV script, they wrote an amazing game expansion fan fiction on a very high budget. I’m all for this approach. Now that we have a generation of TV producers and filmmakers who grew up with games and truly understand them, I would like to see more of them.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Press the Button: Exploring the Exciting Gameplay of Dragon’s Dogma 2 | Games

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I love how games keep me so occupied that I think about them all day long while living my real life. This doesn’t happen a lot these days because I’ve played so many games over the past 30 years. It happens when a game does something I’ve never seen before. For example, last year’s The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom of Tears featured a reckless gimmick. Or sometimes it’s because of something I do, like Dragon’s Dogma 2, which I’m still playing after reviewing last week. We’ve seen it before, but not for very long.

In the 12 years between the original Dragon’s Dogma and this sequel, Elden Ring is the only game that has come close to recapturing that brand of fantasy action role-playing with its chaotic, stubborn idiosyncrasies. This is a game where you can ruin a quest by fooling around for too long before pursuing the next objective. On an otherwise empty journey through the countryside, a griffin can appear and run you over to death almost instantly. The multidimensional beings who act as your companions on your journey contract a mysterious disease that unleashes the apocalypse when you save the game. You only have one save slot, so every decision counts. If you make a mistake, you have to accept it.

While some players have had disappointing reactions to the game’s inflexibility, I respect Dragon’s Dogma 2’s willingness to ruin your day at times. It will not bend to your will. You need to work around the rules, even if you don’t necessarily know what they are at first. At first, you might be annoyed that characters often tell you about interesting legends and rumors, but the game also marks them on the map to show you where they are likely to be found. And over time, when you are left out in the wilderness at night, without camping gear, and try to take shelter in a cave which leads to a crumbling mountain shrine, you may find a real Sphinx there. You realized that even if someone had marked the location on your map, you would never have done that. You must have been in awe the first time you saw those glowing eyes in the dark.

Conventional wisdom in open-world games has long held that games are structured like to-do lists. A character with an icon above their head will appear, they will give you something to do, and the game will conveniently mark the location and start checking boxes before receiving the reward. The map is full of small icons that show you where to find things you might need to upgrade your equipment or further your objectives. In recent years, games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring have ditched these conventions, making their worlds feel once again mystical, realistic, and dangerous, but not Dragon’s Dogma 2.

The appeal of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is that it is less susceptible to external influences. Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels like the development team has spent the last decade or more playing only their own games. It’s appealingly free from outside influences and doesn’t adopt any of the ideas that other games have become standard for since 2012. For example, you cannot use menus to fast-traverse the map, except in a few rare cases. If you want to go somewhere, you have to walk. For many years.

You follow that path and if you stray from it, you’re very likely to run into something that will kill you. But you’ll also have adventures like when I found a haunted castle full of skeletons. By the time you and your team reach your next town as the night draws on, exhausted and full of trinkets you picked up along the way, you’ll feel like you’ve actually accomplished something. One way to get around on foot is by riding an oxcart. This takes even more time than incredible walking, unless the character falls asleep and wakes up at the destination. Also, during your journey, you may be attacked by monsters, destroy your entire cart, and end up stranded in a strange land in the middle of the night. It’s like a cruel joke.

What all of this gives the player is what I would describe as a feeling of being fully awake. You can’t switch off your brain when playing games like this. With no minimap or quest markers to tell you where to go, you have to remember what people say, use your eyes to read your way, and find things in the distance. You must be ready to fight when called upon, and be ready to run for your life when cornered. I keep seeing things I’ve never seen before.

Games like this have periodically pulled me out of my funk over the decades, reminding me that they can still be exciting and unpredictable. Regular reader Iain wrote the question last week that was part of the impetus for this issue. “As a gamer in my late 70s, I’ve been playing games since 1985. I think I’ve reached a point where I’ve seen it all before. Are there truly innovative titles, or do they stick to the ongoing series (some of which reach double digits)?” Well, Ian, for me Dragon’s Dogma 2 is one of those games that restores my faith. It may be a sequel, but it hasn’t been this great yet.

Source: www.theguardian.com