This morning, WikiLeaks posted the first of what the organization's spokesperson says is a multi-part series of documents and files from the Central Intelligence Agency. "The first full part of the series, 'Year Zero', comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina [sic]," WikiLeaks' spokesperson said in a press release.

When reached for comment, a CIA spokesperson told Ars Technica, "We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents."

The database contains more than 1.37 billion email addresses, and for some records there are additional details such as names, real-world addresses, and IP addresses. It's a situation that's described as "a tangible threat to online privacy and security."

It remains to be seen quite what impact this will have on River City Media's operations, and whether there will be an immediate reduction in the amount of spam flying to inboxes around the world.

The backdoor is in the Telnet admin interface of DblTek-branded devices, and potentially allows an attacker to remotely open a shell with root privileges on the target device.

However, rather than removing the flaw, the vendor simply made it more difficult to access and exploit. And further correspondence with the Chinese company has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

"Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory," tweeted Trump. "Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!, he sniffed.

Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been outright banned.

Greyball and the broader VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents.

Outside experts said they were uncertain about the legality of the program. Greyball could be considered a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or possibly intentional obstruction of justice, depending on local laws and jurisdictions, said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University, who also writes for The New York Times.

The union representing the employees, University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119, says it's the first time a public university has offshored American IT jobs.

Audrey Hatten-Milholin, who earned $127,000 at her job, says other replacements were around for two weeks. "What was shocking is that the system is so complex there’s no way you can learn it in two weeks," she said.

The world's largest and busiest cloud infrastructure provider, Amazon Web Services, was hit by a widespread service interruption Feb. 28 at its northern Virginia data center that took down much of the company's S3 storage and a long list of services with it for several hours.

"Right now they need to wait it out, which is frustrating," Maislos said. "In the future they'd need to replicate the data to multiple regions and multiple cloud providers and it greatly impacts costs and operating complexity.

"Everyone affected should re-evaluate how current their backups are, where they are stored, and how to switch over to alternative locations automatically when an S3 issue is detected in the future."

CloudPets' internet-facing MongoDB installation, on port 2701 at 45.79.147.159, required no authentication to access, and was repeatedly extorted by miscreants, evidence shows. The database contains links to .WAV files of voice messages hosted in the Amazon cloud, again accessible with no authentication, potentially allowing the mass slurping of more than two million highly personal conversations between families and their little ones.

As proof that CloudPets' security was hopeless, Hunt's informant provided him more than 580,000 records from the CloudPets database, along with screenshots of three attempts to alert the toy manufacturer to the gaping hole. Each warning, we're told, fell on deaf ears.

Hunt concluded: “The CloudPets data was accessed many times by unauthorised parties before being deleted and then on multiple occasions, held for ransom.”

“I just can’t emphasize enough how much it’s just beginning,” he repeated. But, pressed Stock, what about ten years out or twenty years out? Hastings said at that point there will be “some serious virtual reality” to contend with.

“Over twenty to fifty years, you get into some serious debate over humans,” mused Hastings. “I don’t know if you can really talk about entertaining at that point. I’m not sure if in twenty to fifty years we are going to be entertaining you, or entertaining A.I.s.”

In a statement, he called on civilians and fighters to "plant one or several fruit or non-fruit trees for the beautification of Earth and the benefit of almighty Allah's creations".

"Tree plantation plays an important role in environmental protection, economic development and beautification of earth," the Taliban leader said, in a report carried by the Afghan Taliban Voice of Jihad website.