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T-Mobile yesterday announced a phone plan called "Go5G Next" that costs $100 a month for a single line, more expensive than the highest-tier wireless plans offered by AT&T and Verizon.

In a notable development for a carrier that spent years blasting its rivals' prices, T-Mobile issued a press release with a chart showing that its new plan costs more than the top-tier unlimited plans sold by AT&T and Verizon. AT&T's Unlimited Premium is $85 for a single line while Verizon's Unlimited Plus is $80 unless you add optional perks like the Disney Bundle.

T-Mobile's Go5G Next will be available on August 24 and come with unlimited phone data, 50GB of high-speed mobile hotspot data, and the ability to upgrade to a new phone once a year. It will also come with Apple TV+ and a Netflix subscription. T-Mobile points out that the similar AT&T and Verizon plans don't have streaming services included.

Enlarge / If this kind of thing raises your eyebrows, there's a whole lot more inside a ribbon bar for you. (credit: Anaconda)

If you’re decent in Python (or aspire to be) but don’t have the chops for advanced data work in Excel, Microsoft now offers the kind of peanut butter-and-chocolate combination that you may consider a gift. At least until it goes behind the paywall.

Microsoft's Stefan Kinnestrand, writing about “the best of both worlds for data analysis and visualization,” writes that this public preview of Python in Excel will allow spreadsheet tinkerers to “manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries and then use Excel's formulas, charts, and PivotTables to further refine your insights.”

Microsoft partnered with Python analytics repository Anaconda to bring libraries like Pandas, Statsmodels, and Matplotlib into Excel. Python in Excel runs on Microsoft’s cloud servers, and the company is touting the security that should offer . Python runs in isolated containers, with no access to devices, your network, or user tokens, Microsoft states. Python and Excel can only really talk to each other through limited functions—xl() and =PY()—that can only return code results, not macros, VBA code, or other data, Microsoft claims.

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ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search , streamline office chores , and remake education , but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster.

Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year.

The botnet, which the researchers dub Fox8 because of its connection to cryptocurrency websites bearing some variation of the same name, consisted of 1,140 accounts. Many of them seemed to use ChatGPT to craft social media posts and to reply to each other’s posts. The auto-generated content was apparently designed to lure unsuspecting humans into clicking links through to the crypto-hyping sites.

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It's not Halloween yet, but some users of Snapchat feel like it is. On Tuesday evening, Snapchat's My AI chatbot posted a mysterious one-second video of what looks like a wall and a ceiling, despite never having added a video to its messages before. When users asked the chatbot about it, the machine stayed eerily silent.

"My AI" is a chatbot built into the Snapchat app that people can talk to as if it were a real person. It's powered by OpenAI's large language model (LLM) technology, similar to ChatGPT . It shares clever quips and recommends Snapchat features in a way that makes it feel like a corporate imitation of a trendy young person chillin' with its online homies.

Late yesterday, many people discovered that My AI had left a short video of a two-toned scene as a "story" (what Snapchat calls a shared photo or video), shocking users because it was unknown that the bot had this capability. And the bot's faux personality makes it easy to assume there is some intentional action behind the video, even though it's probably just a weird technical glitch.

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Thousands of websites belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt to trick them into downloading apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards in Fortnite and Roblox .

For more than three years, security researcher Zach Edwards has been tracking these website hijackings and scams. He says the activity can be linked back to the activities of affiliate users of one advertising company. The US-registered company acts as a service that sends web traffic to a range of online advertisers, allowing individuals to sign up and use its systems. However, on any given day, Edwards, a senior manager of threat insights at Human Security , uncovers scores of .gov, .org, and .edu domains being compromised.

“This group is what I would consider to be the number one group at bulk compromising infrastructure across the Internet and hosting scams on it and other types of exploits,” Edwards says. The scale of the website compromises—which are ongoing—and the public nature of the scams makes them stand out, the researcher says.

Enlarge / MLS (Multiple Listing Service). (credit: Getty Images)

Home buyers, sellers, real estate agents, and listing websites throughout the US have been stymied for five days by a cyberattack on a California company that provides a crucial online service used to track home listings.

The attack, which commenced last Wednesday, hit Rapottoni , a software and services provider that supplies Multiple Listing Services to regional real estate groups nationwide. Better known as MLS, it provides instant access to data on which homes are coming to the market, purchase offers, and sales of listed homes. MLS has become essential for connecting buyers to sellers and to the agents and listing websites serving them.

“If you're an avid online refresher on any real estate website, you may have noticed a real nosedive in activity the last couple of days,” Peg King, a realty agent in California’s Sonoma County, wrote in an email newsletter she sent clients on Friday. “Real estate MLS systems across the country have been unusable since Wednesday after a massive cyberattack against major MLS provider, Rapattoni Corporation. This means that real estate markets (like ours!) can't list new homes, change prices, mark homes as pending/contingent/sold, or list open houses.”

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One of your Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings on Saturday about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism, which could be exploited to bypass and, therefore, defeat the company's recently added monitoring tool.

There's no foolproof method for catching malware on computers with perfect accuracy because, at their core, malicious programs are just software, like your web browser or chat app. It can be difficult to tell the legitimate programs from the transgressors. So operating system makers like Microsoft and Apple, as well as third-party security companies, are always working to develop new detection mechanisms and tools that can spot potentially malicious software behavior in new ways.

Apple's Background Task Management tool focuses on watching for software “persistence.” Malware can be designed to be ephemeral and operate only briefly on a device or until the computer restarts. But it can also be built to establish itself more deeply and “persist” on a target even when the computer is shut down and rebooted. Lots of legitimate software needs persistence so all of your apps and data and preferences will show up as you left them every time you turn on your device. But if software establishes persistence unexpectedly or out of the blue, it could be a sign of something malicious.

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CNET, one of the great-granddaddies of tech news on the web, has been having a rough year. First, its AI-written articles sparked drama, then layoffs rocked the publication. And now, Gizmodo reports that the 28-year-old site has been deleting thousands of its old articles in a quest to achieve better rankings in Google searches.

The deletion process began with small batches of articles and dramatically increased in the second half of July, leading to the removal of thousands of articles in recent weeks. Although CNET confirmed the culling of stories to Gizmodo, the exact number of deleted articles has not been disclosed.

"Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic. In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern Internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site," Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications, told Gizmodo.

Enlarge / Researchers use CyBio FeliX workstations to extract and purify DNA samples for testing (credit: LabGenius)

At an old biscuit factory in South London, giant mixers and industrial ovens have been replaced by robotic arms, incubators, and DNA sequencing machines. James Field and his company LabGenius aren’t making sweet treats; they’re cooking up a revolutionary, AI-powered approach to engineering new medical antibodies.

In nature, antibodies are the body’s response to disease and serve as the immune system’s front-line troops. They’re strands of protein that are specially shaped to stick to foreign invaders so that they can be flushed from the system. Since the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies have been making synthetic antibodies to treat diseases like cancer, and to reduce the chance of transplanted organs being rejected.