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Elon Musk's X Corp. is reportedly demanding money from at least six Australians who were laid off, saying the company accidentally overpaid them. The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that "X is threatening to take some former Australian employees to court, demanding they return entitlements it claims were overpaid to them after it bungled the currency conversion from US to Australian dollars on the payments."

Emails sent this year by X's Asia Pacific human resources department to the laid-off employees said there was "a significant overpayment in error in January 2023." The alleged overpayments ranged from $1,500 to $70,000 for each employee.

So far, none of the former employees have repaid the money, The Sydney Morning Herald was told. One Australian dollar is currently worth $0.67 in US currency.

Enlarge / A logo on equipment stored near the OceanGate Inc. offices in Everett, Washington, US, on Thursday, June 22, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

Enlarge / Diamond Shruumz's "extremely potent" infused cones in "sprinkles" flavor. (credit: Diamond Shruumz )

More people have reported severe poisonings in an ongoing outbreak marked by people seizing and needing to be intubated after consuming microdose candies made by Diamond Shruumz, the Food and Drug Administration reported Tuesday .

There are now at least 12 reported cases across eight states. All 12 people were ill enough to seek medical care, and 10 needed to be hospitalized. The symptoms reported so far include seizures, central nervous system depression (loss of consciousness, confusion, sleepiness), agitation, abnormal heart rates, hyper/hypotension, nausea, and vomiting, the FDA reported.

In Tuesday's update, the FDA also expanded the products linked to the illnesses. In addition to all flavors of Diamond Shruumz's Microdosing Chocolate Bars, the agency's warning now covers all flavors of the brand's Infused Cones and Micro Dose and Macro Dose Gummies.

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Hackers working for the Chinese government gained access to more than 20,000 VPN appliances sold by Fortinet using a critical vulnerability that the company failed to disclose for two weeks after fixing it, Netherlands government officials said.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-42475, is a heap-based buffer overflow that allows hackers to remotely execute malicious code. It carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. A maker of network security software, Fortinet silently fixed the vulnerability on November 28, 2022, but failed to mention the threat until December 12 of that year, when the company said it became aware of an “instance where this vulnerability was exploited in the wild.” On January 11, 2023—more than six weeks after the vulnerability was fixed—Fortinet warned a threat actor was exploiting it to infect government and government-related organizations with advanced custom-made malware.

Enter CoatHanger

The Netherlands officials first reported in February that Chinese state hackers had exploited CVE-2022-42475 to install an advanced and stealthy backdoor tracked as CoatHanger on Fortigate appliances inside the Dutch Ministry of Defence. Once installed, the never-before-seen malware, specifically designed for the underlying FortiOS operating system, was able to permanently reside on devices even when rebooted or receiving a firmware update. CoatHanger could also escape traditional detection measures, the officials warned. The damage resulting from the breach was limited, however, because infections were contained inside a segment reserved for non-classified uses.

Enlarge / In this pool photo distributed by Sputnik agency, Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur region in 2023. An RD-191 engine is visible in the background. (credit: Vladimir Smirnov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)

Russian President Vladimir Putin will reportedly visit North Korea later this month, and you can bet collaboration on missiles and space programs will be on the agenda.

The bilateral summit in Pyongyang will follow a mysterious North Korean rocket launch on May 27, which ended in a fireball over the Yellow Sea. The fact that this launch fell short of orbit is not unusual—two of the country's three previous satellite launch attempts failed. But North Korea's official state news agency dropped some big news in the last paragraph of its report on the May 27 launch.

The Korean Central News Agency called the launch vehicle a "new-type satellite carrier rocket" and attributed the likely cause of the failure to "the reliability of operation of the newly developed liquid oxygen + petroleum engine" on the first stage booster. A small North Korean military spy satellite was destroyed. The fiery demise of the North Korean rocket was captured in a video recorded by the Japanese news broadcaster NHK .

Enlarge / T-Mobile logo above the Deutsche Telekom pavilion at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

When T-Mobile announced price hikes of up to $5 per line on older smartphone plans last month, many customers were shocked because of T-Mobile's years-old promise that their price would never rise as long as they stuck with the same plan.

"New rule: Only YOU should have the power to change what you pay," T-Mobile said in a January 2017 announcement of its "Un-contract" promise for T-Mobile One plans. "Now, T-Mobile One customers keep their price until THEY decide to change it. T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan."

Unfortunately, the promise wasn't as simple as T-Mobile claimed it to be in that press release. T-Mobile also published an FAQ that answered the question, "What happens if you do raise the price of my T-Mobile One service?" It explained that the only guarantee is T-Mobile will pay your final month's bill if the price goes up and you decide to cancel.

Enlarge (credit: JC Olivera / Stringer | WireImage )

While Musk has spent much of today loudly criticizing the Apple/OpenAI deal , he also sought to drop his lawsuit against OpenAI, a court filing today showed.

In the filing, Musk's lawyer Morgan Chu notified the Superior Court of California in San Francisco of Musk's request for dismissal of his entire complaint without prejudice.

There are currently no further details as to why Musk decided to drop the suit.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu )

Elon Musk is so opposed to Apple's plan to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT with device operating systems that he's seemingly spreading misconceptions while heavily criticizing the partnership.

On X (formerly Twitter), Musk has been criticizing alleged privacy and security risks since the plan was announced Monday at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

"If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies," Musk posted on X. "That is an unacceptable security violation." In another post responding to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Musk wrote , "Don't want it. Either stop this creepy spyware or all Apple devices will be banned from the premises of my companies."

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Lots of animals communicate with each other, from tiny mice to enormous whales . But none of those forms of communication share all but a small fraction of the richness of human language. Still, finding new examples of complex communications can tell us things about the evolution of language and what cognitive capabilities are needed for it.

On Monday, researchers report what may be the first instance of a human-like language ability in another species. They report that elephants refer to each other by individual names, and the elephant being referred to recognizes when it's being mentioned. The work could be replicated with a larger population and number of calls, but the finding is consistent with what we know about the sophisticated social interactions of these creatures.

What’s in a name?

We use names to refer to each other so often that it's possible to forget just how involved their use is. We recognize formal and informal names that refer to the same individual, even though those names often have nothing to do with the features or history of that person. We easily handle hundreds of names, including those of people we haven't interacted with in decades. And we do this in parallel with the names of thousands of places, products, items, and so on.