ASBURY, N.J. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Asbury Carbons Inc. announced on Friday that it will be introducing price increases for its graphite products (natural and synthetic) as well as cokes and non-carbon materials.
Price increases will range up to 10 percent, depending on the product and grade, and will go into effect for shipments beginning Jan. 1, 2024.
These price increases are necessary to help offset the increased cost of raw materials, energy, transportation, and manufacturing.
About Asbury Carbon, Inc.
Founded in 1895 by Harry M. Riddle and based in Asbury, NJ, Asbury Carbons Inc. is the world’s most reliable source for high-quality graphite, cokes, carbon materials, and graphene-engineered solutions.
The company provides more than 2,000 grades of materials, which it processes to customers’ exacting requirements for various applications, including polymers and rubbers, paints and coatings, lubricants, specialty ceramics, friction products, insulation, and other materials.
For nearly 130 years, Asbury has set an industry standard for meeting customers’ needs, providing flexible and innovative solutions, and investing in employees. The company operates 12 manufacturing locations across the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Netherlands and has sales offices across North America, Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit https://www.asbury.com/.
H.E.R. has shared a cover of ‘The Glass’, a track from Foo Fighters’ latest album But Here We Are.
Last month, she performed the song with the band on Saturday Night Live, and her new rendition arrives as part of a double A-side vinyl release that features the original on the B-side.
— SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Thursday rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s social media company to overturn a May 2022 order by the Federal Trade Commission that imposed requirements for safeguarding the personal data of its users.
A pile of characters removed from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building are seen in San Francisco, Monday, July 24, 2023, after Musk changed the name of the company to X. (Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP)
The company, then known as Twitter, had agreed to the order and a fine of $150 million after the FTC found that it asked for user phone numbers as a security mechanism but used them for marketing.
Musk bought the company later that year and renamed it X. By then, the FTC had launched a new investigation based on an explosive whistleblower complaint by former Twitter head of security Peiter Zatko, who said the company’s engineers had wide access to data with ineffective tracking.
Musk’s legal team asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson to throw out the FTC order on the grounds that the agency had improperly increased its scrutiny after Musk took over and also pressured an outside assessor of the company’s security practices to find fault with them.
Hixson denied that motion after a hearing in San Francisco, ruling that the court was only involved in the underlying case for limited procedural reasons, such as the transfer of case documents to the Justice Department. He wrote that he lacked authority to set aside a consent order approved by an FTC administrative judge.
Hixson also declined to interfere in the FTC investigation by letting Musk avoid a deposition.
In his 11-page ruling, Hixson noted other problems with X’s argument. For example, the company had cited an Ernst & Young employee who said in his deposition that he felt the FTC expected him to find issues with X’s privacy program. But Hixson noted that the same employee said his work was delayed by the constant turnover in the executive ranks after Musk took charge and the lack of designated parties in charge of multiple aspects of the privacy program.
And while it is true the FTC increased its activity post-takeover, it had provided reasons for that, Hixson wrote.
“The government says this increase in investigative activity should not be surprising because Musk directed at least five rounds of terminations, layoffs or other reductions in X Corp.’s workforce, which affected the security, governance, risk and compliance team. The government argues that the FTC was concerned about X Corp.’s ability to comply with the Administrative Order given these significant changes to the company,” he ruled.
“As for deposing Musk, the government argues that the major changes to the company appear to have been initiated by Musk himself,” the judge said in declining to stop the deposition.
In its second showing on the Nielsen Streaming Top 10, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is already setting a strong show as it becomes the only title to consistently outperform “Suits” on the overall chart in back-to-back weeks since its Netflix debut.
During the viewing window, the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired series raked in an additional 1.5 billion minutes viewed during its first full week of availability, pushing it to No. 1 again with a 19% jump from its opening figure of 1.2 billion minutes.
“Suits” continued to remain in the No. 2 spot, but still maintained another week above the 1 billion minutes threshold with 1.06 billion minutes viewed across Netflix and Peacock — an impressive performance in its 18th consecutive week on the chart. To date, the series has accrued 45.445 billion minutes viewed. Landing just beneath is “Grey’s Anatomy,” which recorded 860 million minutes viewed.
Other newcomers this week include Bill Burr’s “Old Dads” which ranked sixth on the list with 728 million minutes viewed in its opening weekend. Also, “Bodies,” another Netflix title, managed 633 million minutes viewed leading it to No. 9 on the chart.
“Goosebumps” has been reclassified as an original title during this interval after having been previously listed on the acquired titles chart. With the updated classification, the title would have been the No. 5 Original last week when it recorded 553 million viewing minutes. But this week, it lands at No. 10 on the overall chart and No. 3 on the originals chart with 594 million minutes viewed.
Elsewhere on the list is “Bluey” (840 million), “NCIS” (811 million), “Gilmore Girls” (698 million), and “Cocomelon” (667 million).
See Nielsen’s list of overall streaming rankings for Oct. 16-22 first, followed by original streaming titles, acquired titles and then films.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — $KSCP#SecurityRobot—Knightscope, Inc. [Nasdaq: KSCP] “(Knightscope” or the “Company),” a leading developer of autonomous security robots and blue light emergency communication systems, on Friday announces an expansion of services in New York and a new sale of 15 machines to a police department in California.
Port Authority New York New Jersey added the Knightscope Emergency Management System (KEMS) Professional service to monitor its 11 K1 Call Boxes on the George Washington Bridge. The KEMS platform allows clients and technicians to better understand the real-time health and status of deployed emergency communication devices. The cloud-based application monitors the system wide state-of-health, alerts users concerning operational issues, provides technicians real-time error detection/diagnostics, and collects/reports system performance statistics.
A police department in Southern California is purchasing 5 K1 Blue Light Towers to be installed in a new public park and 10 K1 Blue Light E-Phones in a new parking structure.
Knightscope’s Blue Light Towers, E-Phones and Call Boxes expand access to emergency communications for motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians utilizing the bridge as well as the park visitors by providing direct access to emergency services for people who may be experiencing danger, a crisis or some form of distress.
Learn More
Knightscope’s ASR services and industry leading emergency communications products help better protect the places people live, work, study and visit. To learn more about Knightscope’s Blue Light Emergency Communication Systems or Autonomous Security Robots – now with the option of Private LTE – book a discovery call or demonstration now at www.knightscope.com/discover.
About Knightscope
Knightscope is an advanced public safety technology company that builds fully autonomous security robots and blue light emergency communications systems that help protect the places people live, work, study and visit. Knightscope’s long-term ambition is to make the United States of America the safest country in the world. Learn more about us at www.knightscope.com. Follow Knightscope on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and Instagram.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release may contain “forward-looking statements” about Knightscope’s future expectations, plans, outlook, projections and prospects. Such forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as “should,” “may,” “intends,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “projects,” “forecasts,” “expects,” “plans,” “proposes” and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release and other communications include, but are not limited to, statements about the Company’s profitability and growth. Although Knightscope believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, there are a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, among other things, the risk that the restructuring costs and charges may be greater than anticipated; the risk that the Company’s restructuring efforts may adversely affect the Company’s internal programs and the Company’s ability to recruit and retain skilled and motivated personnel, and may be distracting to employees and management; the risk that the Company’s restructuring efforts may negatively impact the Company’s business operations and reputation with or ability to serve customers; the risk that the Company’s restructuring efforts may not generate their intended benefits to the extent or as quickly as anticipated. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider any cautionary statements and other disclosures, including the statements made under the heading “Risk Factors” in Knightscope’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of the document in which they are contained, and Knightscope does not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements, except as may be required by law.
TRENTON, N.J. — The New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency (NJHMFA) approved the Residential Foreclosure Intervention Program (FIP) at its Oct. 19 board meeting.
The FIP will enable qualified non-profits to rehabilitate vacant or abandoned residential properties and sell them to low-, moderate-, or middle-income households.
“Vacant and abandoned homes are often purchased by institutional investors to rent back to the community or left to depreciate, adversely impacting neighboring properties,” said Executive Director Melanie R. Walter.
“This program is a testament to the state’s commitment to finding innovative solutions to difficult problems. Instead of allowing those to be the only two potential outcomes, we are going to rehabilitate these properties and get them back into the hands of residents as ownership opportunities.”
In conjunction with the Emergency Rescue Mortgage Assistance Program (ERMA), which has already delivered more than $110 million in relief to prevent foreclosures, the FIP is part of NJHMFA’s efforts to offer communities a wide range of solutions to combat foreclosure contagion and increase the stock of available homes for purchase by low-to-moderate income families.
The FIP is financed by fees collected during sheriff sales and supplemented with $25 million from the state’s allocation of the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund. From these funds, nonprofit community development organizations are eligible for up to $400,000 per property in grants to use for the acquisition and rehabilitation of single-family homes, townhomes, or condominiums.
After these properties are rehabilitated by nonprofit community development organizations, they will be sold to low-, moderate-, or middle-income households. To help these eligible families complete home purchases, NJHMFA offers up to $22,000 in down payment and closing cost assistance through its successful Down Payment Assistance (DPA) Program.
NJHMFA’s share of the proceeds will be deposited back into the Foreclosure Intervention Fund to ensure that the program grows with its successes. Grantee applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, with the program’s initial round of financing expected to benefit 60 properties.
About Us: The New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency (NJHMFA) advances the quality of life for residents of and communities throughout New Jersey by investing in, financing, and facilitating access to affordable rental housing and homeownership opportunities for low and moderate-income families, older adults, and individuals with specialized housing needs. To learn more about NJHMFA, visit: https://NJHousing.gov/
Despite more than a decade of reminding, prodding, and downright nagging, a surprising number of developers still can’t bring themselves to keep their code free of credentials that provide the keys to their kingdoms, to anyone who takes the time to look for them.
The lapse stems from immature coding practices in which developers embed cryptographic keys, security tokens, passwords, and other forms of credentials directly into the source code they write. The credentials make it easy for the underlying program to access databases or cloud services necessary for it to work as intended. I published one such PSA in 2013 after discovering simple searches that turned up dozens of accounts that appeared to expose credentials securing computer-to-server SSH accounts. One of the credentials appeared to grant access to an account on Chromium.org, the repository that stores the source code for Google’s open source browser.
In 2015, Uber learned the hard way just how damaging the practice can be. One or more developers for the ride service had embedded a unique security key into code and then shared that code on a public GitHub page. Hackers then copied the key and used it to access an internal Uber database and, from there, steal sensitive data belonging to 50,000 Uber drivers.
Uber lawyers argued at the time that “the contents of these internal database files are closely guarded by Uber,” but that contention is undermined by means the company took in safeguarding the data, which was no better than stashing a house key under a door mat.
The number of studies published since following the revelations underscored just how common the practice had been and remained in the years immediately following Uber’s cautionary tale. Sadly, the negligence continues even now.
Researchers from security firm GitGuardian this week reported finding almost 4,000 unique secrets stashed inside a total of 450,000 projects submitted to PyPI, the official code repository for the Python programming language. Nearly 3,000 projects contained at least one unique secret. Many secrets were leaked more than once, bringing the total number of exposed secrets to almost 57,000.
“Exposing secrets in open-source packages carries significant risks for developers and users alike,” GitGuardian researchers wrote. “Attackers can exploit this information to gain unauthorized access, impersonate package maintainers, or manipulate users through social engineering tactics.”
The credentials exposed provided access to a range of resources, including Microsoft Active Directory servers that provision and manage accounts in enterprise networks, OAuth servers allowing single sign-on, SSH servers, and third-party services for customer communications and cryptocurrencies. Examples included:
Azure Active Directory API Keys
GitHub OAuth App Keys
Database credentials for providers such as MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
Dropbox Key
Auth0 Keys
SSH Credentials
Coinbase Credentials
Twilio Master Credentials.
Also included in the haul were API keys for interacting with various Google Cloud services, database credentials, and tokens controlling Telegram bots, which automate processes on the messenger service. This week’s report said that exposures in all three categories have steadily increased in the past year or two.
The secrets were exposed in various types of files published to PyPI. They included primary .py files, README files, and test folders.
Enlarge / Most common types of files other than .py containing a hardcoded secret in PyPI packages.
GitGuardian tested the exposed credentials and found that 768 remained active. The risk, however, can extend well beyond that smaller number. GitGuardian explained:
It is important to note that just because a credential can not be validated does not mean it should be considered invalid. Only once a secret has been properly rotated can you know if it is invalid. Some types of secrets GitGuardian is still working toward automatically validating include Hashicorp Vault Tokens, Splunk Authentication Tokens, Kubernetes Cluster Credentials, and Okta Tokens.
There are no good reasons to expose credentials in code. The report said the most common cause is by accident.
“In the course of outreach for this project, we discovered at least 15 incidents where the publisher was unaware they had made their project public,” the authors wrote. “Without naming any names, we did want to mention some of these were from very large companies that have robust security teams. Accidents can happen to anyone.”
Over the past decade, various mechanisms have become available for allowing code to securely access databases and cloud resources. One is .env files that are stored in private environments outside of the publicly available code repository. Others are tools such as the AWS Secrets Manager, Google Cloud’s Secret Manager, or the Azure Key Vault. Developers can also employ scanners that check code for credentials inadvertently included.
The study examined PyPI, which is just one of many open source repositories. In years past, code hosted in other repositories such as NPM and RubyGems has also been rife with credential exposure, and there’s no reason to suspect the practice doesn’t continue in them now.
Like most kids his age, 15-year-old Hassan spent a lot of time online. Before the pandemic, he liked playing football with local kids in his hometown of Burewala in the Punjab region of Pakistan. But Covid lockdowns made him something of a recluse, attached to his mobile phone.
“I just got out of my room when I had to eat something,” says Hassan, now 18, who asked to be identified under a pseudonym because he was afraid of legal action.
But unlike most teenagers, he wasn’t scrolling TikTok or gaming. From his childhood bedroom, the high schooler was working in the global artificial intelligence supply chain, uploading and labeling data to train algorithms for some of the world’s largest AI companies.
The raw data used to train machine-learning algorithms is first labeled by humans, and human verification is also needed to evaluate their accuracy. This data-labeling ranges from the simple—identifying images of street lamps, say, or comparing similar ecommerce products—to the deeply complex, such as content moderation, where workers classify harmful content within data scraped from all corners of the internet. These tasks are often outsourced to gig workers, via online crowdsourcing platforms such as Toloka, which was where Hassan started his career.
A friend put him on to the site, which promised work anytime, from anywhere. He found that an hour’s labor would earn him around $1 to $2, he says, more than the national minimum wage, which was about $0.26 at the time. His mother is a homemaker, and his dad is a mechanical laborer.
“You can say I belong to a poor family,” he says.
When the pandemic hit, he needed work more than ever. Confined to his home, online and restless, he did some digging, and found that Toloka was just the tip of the iceberg.
“AI is presented as a magical box that can do everything,” says Saiph Savage, director of Northeastern University’s Civic AI Lab.
“People just simply don’t know that there are human workers behind the scenes.”
At least some of those human workers are children. Platforms require that workers be over 18, but Hassan simply entered a relative’s details and used a corresponding payment method to bypass the checks—and he wasn’t alone in doing so. WIRED spoke to three other workers in Pakistan and Kenya who said they had also joined platforms as minors, and found evidence that the practice is widespread.
“When I was still in secondary school, so many teens discussed online jobs and how they joined using their parents’ ID,” says one worker who joined Appen at 16 in Kenya, who asked to remain anonymous.
After school, he and his friends would log on to complete annotation tasks late into the night, often for eight hours or more.
— China’s Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com reported sales increases for Singles’ Day, after the e-commerce giants offered steep discounts
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc. reported sales increases during China’s most important shopping festival, yet likely lagged newer entrants from social media platforms like ByteDance Ltd.’s Douyin during a muted year for consumer spending.
Analysts scrambled for clues after China’s two e-commerce leaders again failed to disclose overall revenue numbers during Singles’ Day, the annual bargains extravaganza built around a Nov. 11 event that Alibaba popularized over a decade ago. Historically a barometer for Chinese consumer sentiment, it’s become much harder to parse since companies stopped providing precise figures during the turmoil of the Covid era.
Online transactions across the three largest platforms — Alibaba’s Tmall, JD.com’s main portal and PDD Holdings Inc.’s China-only Pinduoduo service — likely slipped about 1% to 923.5 billion yuan ($127 billion) during the festival, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ada Li estimated, calculating based on retail channel data tracked by Syntun. While a smaller piece of the pie, streaming platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou Technology grew transactions by 19%, according to Li’s analysis.
Others painted a slightly rosier picture. Alibaba and JD likely managed 1% to 3% growth in gross merchandise value over the three- to four-week period leading up to Nov. 11, when merchants embarked on their discounting spree, Goldman Sachs estimated. PDD, which targets lower-income and rural markets, racked up growth of 20%, analyst Ronald Keung estimated.
Alibaba and JD.com report earnings this week and should offer more insight into whether domestic consumption has recovered.
“The slowing growth shows we need to roll out large-scale economic stimulus measures that are strong enough to lift market confidence and drive up the economy,” Ren Zeping, a well-known economist who was formerly a researcher at the State Council’s Development Research Center, wrote Monday.
“Consumers are becoming more mature and rational as they go after high value for money. Their perception of brands is also changing, and domestic brands with high value for money are rising.”
As their yacht bobbed on the Mediterranean in July 2021, Marc Rocchi snapped a picture of the slightly doughy Russian man in baggy swimming trunks, dozing with his head propped against the helm. The French businessman would later say that he only knew the Russian by his first name, Maxim.
But he knew the purchases Maxim had been making for years had been essential to the survival of Ommic, a French microchip manufacturer of which Rocchi was then director-general. Desperate to keep the flow of chips moving, just a few months earlier Rocchi had flown to Greece to hand-deliver Maxim a shipment of 230 microchips — €45,000 worth. Maxim had, at one point, offered Rocchi “cash and women.” But Rocchi said he declined — he needed Maxim’s business to keep Ommic afloat.
Rocchi always knew his business partner was buying microchips on behalf of a Russian state enterprise, and that Maxim used a network of intermediaries to get them out of France and into Russia. And he also knew Maxim was working on behalf of Istok, which Rocchi described as a state research body. Istok is in fact a state-owned technology company that makes electronic warfare systems for the Russian military.
Today, Ommic has closed and Rocchi is awaiting trial in France, having been indicted in March. He denies charges of sending secrets to a foreign power that could harm the national interest, exporting dual-use goods to Russia, and submitting false documents. According to sources familiar with the investigation, Rocchi has previously argued to police that the goods and information sent by Ommic were not subject to controls, disputed that sensitive information was ever sent abroad and said that other people were responsible for any false documents. He has declined to comment to the Financial Times.
The photograph was a rare slip in what appears to be a decades-long Russian intelligence operation. The man pictured, Maxim Ermakov, has been sanctioned by the US and UK governments in the past fortnight as part of a major crackdown on the networks that Moscow’s intelligence services use to procure advanced western technology for President Vladimir Putin’s war machine. He did not respond to a request to comment. This rare account of the activities of such a network illustrates how difficult it is for western governments to tackle Russian state smuggling operations, and prevent western technology from being used by Russian industry and the military.
Specialist microchips, such as the high-performance gallium nitride and gallium arsenide-integrated circuit boards that Ommic made, are vital to Russian defence manufacturers such as Istok. According to Le Parisien, a senior French defence official told investigators that the chips were a “sensitive, strategic technology”
