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Article URL: http://www.overpricedsoftware.com/h87letterbug/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132109

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Article URL: https://www.redfin.com/news/sellers-vs-buyers-price-impact/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132103

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://thehill.com/opinion/5322428-trump-grants-harvard-columbia/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132093

Points: 10

# Comments: 5

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP91WmrgpBE

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132083

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://www.cat-coloring-pages.org

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132076

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Article URL: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/u-s-sanctions-cloud-provider-funnull-as-top-source-of-pig-butchering-scams/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132075

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Article URL: https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-shallow-state

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132073

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I’ve founded and now building this

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It’s still in build. I’ll keep you updated if you like. Click through early access to get on the list

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132065

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Image: Shutterstock, ArtHead.

The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as “pig butchering.” In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers.

“Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024,” reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. “Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses.”

The Treasury Department said Funnull’s operations are linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans.

Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find their money is gone when they wish to cash out.

The scammers often insist that investors pay additional “taxes” on their crypto “earnings” before they can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering scams.

KrebsOnSecurity’s January story on Funnull was based on research from the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus.

Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October 2023 and April 2025.

A graphic from the FBI explaining how Funnull generated a slew of new domains on a regular basis and mapped them to Internet addresses on U.S. cloud providers.

Silent Push revisited Funnull’s infrastructure in January 2025 and found Funnull was still using many of the same Amazon and Microsoft cloud Internet addresses identified as malicious in its October report. Both Amazon and Microsoft pledged to rid their networks of Funnull’s presence following that story, but according to Silent Push’s Zach Edwards only one of those companies has followed through.

Edwards said Silent Push no longer sees Microsoft Internet addresses showing up in Funnull’s infrastructure, while Amazon continues to struggle with removing Funnull servers, including one that appears to have first materialized in 2023.

“Amazon is doing a terrible job — every day since they made those claims to you and us in our public blog they have had IPs still mapped to Funnull, including some that have stayed mapped for inexplicable periods of time,” Edwards said.

Amazon said its Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform actively counters abuse attempts.

“We have stopped hundreds of attempts this year related to this group and we are looking into the information you shared earlier today,” reads a statement shared by Amazon. “If anyone suspects that AWS resources are being used for abusive activity, they can report it to AWS Trust & Safety using the report abuse form here.”

U.S. based cloud providers remain an attractive home base for cybercriminal organizations because many organizations will not be overly aggressive in blocking traffic from U.S.-based cloud networks, as doing so can result in blocking access to many legitimate web destinations that are also on that same shared network segment or host.

What’s more, funneling their bad traffic so that it appears to be coming out of U.S. cloud Internet providers allows cybercriminals to connect to websites from web addresses that are geographically close(r) to their targets and victims (to sidestep location-based security controls by your bank, for example).

Funnull is not the only cybercriminal infrastructure-as-a-service provider that was sanctioned this month: On May 20, 2025, the European Union imposed sanctions on Stark Industries Solutions, an ISP that materialized at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has been used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.

In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark Industries Solutions that found much of the malicious traffic traversing Stark’s network (e.g. vulnerability scanning and password brute force attacks) was being bounced through U.S.-based cloud providers. My reporting showed how deeply Stark had penetrated U.S. ISPs, and that Ivan Neculiti for many years sold “bulletproof” hosting services that told Russian cybercrime forum customers they would proudly ignore any abuse complaints or police inquiries.

The homepage of Stark Industries Solutions.

That story examined the history of Stark’s co-founders, Moldovan brothers Ivan and Yuri Neculiti, who each denied past involvement in cybercrime or any current involvement in assisting Russian disinformation efforts or cyberattacks. Nevertheless, the EU sanctioned both brothers as well.

The EU said Stark and the Neculti brothers “enabled various Russian state-sponsored and state-affiliated actors to conduct destabilising activities including coordinated information manipulation and interference and cyber-attacks against the Union and third countries by providing services intended to hide these activities from European law enforcement and security agencies.”

Article URL: https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Article URL: https://www.propublica.org/article/newtok-alaska-climate-relocation

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131889

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://obsoletesony.substack.com/p/how-sony-shaped-steve-jobs-vision

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131886

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

We’ve inherited a lot of data, now neatly organized in a Dremio Data Lake. Most team members use Excel or Power BI to access it. With all the excitement around AI, management (especially non-technical business units) are now asking for a chat-based interface to interact with this data and generate charts on demand—similar to the AI demos you see everywhere.

I’ve pointed out that Excel Copilot offers some of this, but they’re looking for a more conversational, dedicated chat experience.

Requirements/constraints: - Needs access control and auditability - Preferably integrates with OpenAI-like API - We’re an Azure shop with existing Microsoft contracts

Has anyone dealt with similar requests? What kind of approaches, tools, or architectures did you consider? Any pros/cons you’d highlight, especially in an enterprise context?

PS. English is not my first language, the question was made with deepseek. I hope it didn't butcher it too much.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131885

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://justincartwright.com/2025/03/13/iops-and-fsync.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131882

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://shareofmodel.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131877

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-criticism

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131872

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

FLUX.1 Kontext is a new image editing model from Black Forest Labs. It is the best in class model for editing images using text prompts, and the latest addition to the FLUX.1 family.

In our tests we’ve found Kontext to give accurate and brilliant results. It’s better and cheaper than OpenAI’s 4o/gpt-image-1 model (and there’s no yellow tint).

There are three models, two are available now, and a third open-weight version is coming soon:

FLUX.1 Kontext [pro]: State-of-the-art performance for image editing. High-quality outputs, great prompt following, and consistent results. FLUX.1 Kontext [max]: A premium model that brings maximum performance, improved prompt adherence, and high-quality typography generation without compromise on speed. Coming soon: FLUX.1 Kontext [dev]: An open-weight, guidance-distilled version of Kontext.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131871

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://natsnui.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131836

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A web where most posts, images and videos are AI-generated with only SEO optimization, advertisement and manipulation in mind

A web controlled by scraping and crawling agents with advanced browser control designed to deceive paywalls, steal content and send spam

A web were creators that make genuinely interesting content are not rewarded for their work because of the things mentioned above

A web where digital identities are easily faked and weaponized with a simple prompt

I'm afraid that we are trading short term economic gains for a horrible web experience in the long term.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131833

Points: 2

# Comments: 0