Summary
Overview
This episode covers Tesla's new Roadster with vacuum fans and jet thrusters, a major spyware campaign delivered through online ads targeting journalists, NVIDIA's new RTX Spark laptops, and several quick hits including digital game ownership legislation, surveillance cameras on MapQuest, compromised crypto wallets, Meta's new AI model, and a hack on French supermarket refrigeration systems.
Tesla's New Roadster: Engineering Madness Meets Marketing Spectacle
Tesla unveiled its new Roadster at a live demo event featuring the car driving vertically up walls, hanging upside down, and kickflipping over a semi truck. The vehicle uses vacuum fans on the bottom to stick to surfaces and compressed air jet thrusters that enable 0-60 acceleration in 0.81 seconds. While Elon claims it will be ready in two years, the Rocket Trim version with thrusters will be invite-only and likely illegal on public roads, raising questions about its practical purpose beyond generating buzz.
- The Roadster uses vacuum fans on the bottom to stick to walls and create grip beyond what tires can provide
- Compressed air jet thrusters allow 0-60 acceleration in 0.81 seconds
- The 600 liter compressed air tanks only support short hops, not sustained flight
- Elon estimates two years until release, but the Rocket Trim will be invite-only and likely illegal on public roads
" So Tesla gave the new Roadster vacuum fans on the bottom, which is how it stuck to the wall during the demo. "
" Then, presumably, the car would drive itself to a hospital so the driver could be treated for whiplash. "
" Why force your engineers to make a basically useless, yet admittedly cool thing? To my mind, it's because of the same indomitable human spirit of exploration that drove men like Edmund Hillary to summit Everest. "
Major Spyware Campaign Delivered Through Online Ads
Citizen Lab discovered the first public confirmation of zero-day spyware being delivered through online advertising platforms. Israeli companies DiscoverTech and Kandiru worked together to deliver malicious ads that exploited unknown vulnerabilities to install the Devil's Tongue spyware on Al Jazeera journalists' computers. The campaign has been running since 2024 and reached users at the Pentagon, NATO, and European Commission, though spyware has only been confirmed on journalists' machines so far.
- First public confirmation of zero-day spyware delivered through online ads, making the internet significantly more dangerous
- DiscoverTech's real-time bidding platform delivered malicious ads that exploited unknown vulnerabilities
- Once installed, the spyware exfiltrated files, emails, messages, captured keystrokes and screenshots, and could record microphone and webcam
- The spyware company Kandiru rebranded itself as Integrity Labs to improve optics
" So hot. "
" But what do you expect from a company that named itself after a parasitic Amazonian fish that's most famous for supposedly swimming up people's dickholes and using spikes to lodge itself into the urethra? "
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