Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from CBC News: Prime Minister Mark Carney is delaying a plan to force automakers to hit minimum sales levels for electric vehicles. The move is part of a series of measures the government announced Friday to help the sectors most affected by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs. The EV mandate will be paused as the government conducts a 60-day review of the policy, and will be waived for 2026 models. Sources told CBC News that the review will look at the entire mandate and next steps.

"We have an auto sector which, because of the massive change in U.S. policy, is under extreme pressure. We recognize that," Carney said at a news conference in Mississauga, Ont. "They've got enough on their plate right now. So we're taking that off." The government is using the review as part of broader look at all the government's climate measures, he added. [...]

Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association, called it "an important first step." "The EV mandate imposes unsustainable costs on auto manufacturers, putting at risk Canadian jobs and investment in this critical sector of the economy," he said in a statement. "A full repeal of the regulation is the most effective way to provide immediate relief to the industry and keep it competitive."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the tech behemoth was entering the "most ambitious decade yet" in its climate action. "Today, I'm proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year," he said, in a video announcement at the time.

Pichai added that he knew the "road ahead would not be easy," but Google "aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change." Five years on, just how hard Google's "energy journey" would become is clear. In June, Google's Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed. An investigation by Canada's National Observer has found that Google's net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company's sustainability report.

Streameast -- the world's largest illegal sports streaming platform -- has been shut down after a year long investigation, according to a leading United States-based anti-piracy organisation. From a report: The network of 80 unauthorised domains generated 1.6billion combined visits over the past year, providing free access to global sports fixtures, including Europe's top football leagues and competitions, such as the Premier League and Champions League, as well as the NFL, NBA and MLB.

The Athletic has been informed by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) -- a coalition of 50 media and entertainment organisations including Amazon, Apple TV+, Netflix and Paramount -- that an operation alongside Egyptian law enforcement officials took place on Sunday August 24 to disrupt Streameast's dominant position in the illegal streaming market.

Traffic to the site reached 136million average monthly visits, with domains primarily originating from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and Germany.

Canada's tech job market has collapsed from its pandemic-era boom, with postings down 19% from 2020 levels. Analysts say the decline was sharper than the overall job market and worsened after ChatGPT's debut in 2022 fueled AI-driven shifts in workforce demand. The Canadian Press reports: "The Canadian tech world remains stuck in a hiring freeze," said Brendon Bernard, Indeed's senior economist. "While both the tech job market and the overall job market have definitely cooled off from their 2022 peaks, the cool off has been much sharper in tech." He thinks the fall was likely caused by the market adjusting after a pandemic boom in hiring along with recent artificial intelligence advances that have reduced tech firms' interest in expanding their workforces.

"We went from this really hot job market with job postings through the roof to one where job postings really crashed, falling well below their pre-pandemic levels," Bernard said. However, he sees AI's recent boom as a "watershed moment." While much of the decline in tech job postings has been in software engineer roles, Indeed found hiring for AI-related jobs was still up compared to early 2020. In fact, machine learning engineers and roles that support AI infrastructure, such as data engineers and data centre technicians, were among the job titles with postings still above early-2020 levels.

At the same time, Indeed saw postings for senior and manager-level tech jobs drop sharply from their 2022 peak, but as of early 2025, they were still up five per cent from their pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, basic and junior tech titles were down 25 per cent. When it compared Canada's overall decline in tech job postings, Indeed found the country's decrease from pre-pandemic levels was somewhat milder than the retrenchment it has observed in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. The U.S. fall amounted to 34 per cent, while in the U.K. it was 41 per cent. France saw a 38 per cent drop and Germany experienced a 29 per cent decrease. "All this just highlights is that this tech hiring freeze is a global tech hiring freeze," Bernard said.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: All the critical minerals the U.S. needs annually for energy, defense and technology applications are already being mined at existing U.S. facilities, according to a new analysis published in the journal Science. The catch? These minerals, such as cobalt, lithium, gallium and rare earth elements like neodymium and yttrium, are currently being discarded as tailings of other mineral streams like gold and zinc, said Elizabeth Holley, associate professor of mining engineering at Colorado School of Mines and lead author of the new paper.

To conduct the analysis, Holley and her team built a database of annual production from federally permitted metal mines in the U.S. They used a statistical resampling technique to pair these data with the geochemical concentrations of critical minerals in ores, recently compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey, Geoscience Australia and the Geologic Survey of Canada. Using this approach, Holley's team was able to estimate the quantities of critical minerals being mined and processed every year at U.S. metal mines but not being recovered. Instead, these valuable minerals are ending up as discarded tailings that must be stored and monitored to prevent environmental contamination.

The analysis looks at a total of 70 elements used in applications ranging from consumer electronics like cell phones to medical devices to satellites to renewable energy to fighter jets and shows that unrecovered byproducts from other U.S. mines could meet the demand for all but two -- platinum and palladium. Among the elements included in the analysis are:
- Cobalt (Co): The lustrous bluish-gray metal, a key component in electric car batteries, is a byproduct of nickel and copper mining. Recovering less than 10% of the cobalt currently being mined and processed but not recovered would be more than enough to fuel the entire U.S. battery market.
- Germanium (Ge): The brittle silvery-white semi-metal used for electronics and infrared optics, including sensors on missiles and defense satellites, is present in zinc and molybdenum mines. If the U.S. recovered less than 1% of the germanium currently mined and processed but not recovered from U.S. mines, it would not have to import any germanium to meet industry needs.

This week workers on Blizzard's "Story and Franchise Development" team "strongly voted" to join America's largest communications and media labor union, the Communications Workers of America.

From the union's announcement: The Story and Franchise Development team is Blizzard's in-house cinematics, animation, and narrative team, producing the trailers, promotional videos, in-game cutscenes, and other narrative content for Blizzard franchises — as well as franchise archival workers and historians. These workers will be the first in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative studio to form a union in the North American game industry, joining nearly 3,000 workers at Microsoft-owned studios who have organized with CWA to build better standards across the video game industry after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023...

The announcement is the latest update in organizing the tech and video game industry, as over 6,000 workers in the United States and Canada have organized with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA) since launching over five years ago. Last week, workers at Raven Software secured a historic contract with Microsoft, joining ZeniMax QA developers at CWA, who also secured a contract with the company in June.
"CWA says that Blizzard owner Microsoft has recognized the union," reports the gaming news site Aftermath, in accordance with the labor neutrality policy Microsoft agreed to in 2022, leading to several other union game studios at Microsoft: In July 2024, 500 workers on Blizzard-owned World of Warcraft formed a union that they called "the largest wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft-owned studio," alongside Blizzard QA workers in Austin. Other studios across Microsoft have also unionized in recent years, including at Bethesda, ZeniMax Online Studios, and ZeniMax QA, the latter of which finally reached a contract in May after nearly two years of bargaining. Unionized workers at Raven Studios reached a contract with Microsoft earlier this month.
The CWA's announcement this week included this quote from one organizing committee member (and a cinematic producer). "I'm excited that we have joined together in forming a union to protect my colleagues from things like misguided policies and instability as a result of layoffs."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: In a sharp rebuke to the anti-electrification agenda in the US, global EV sales are up 27% over last year, with some legacy automakers -- but not all -- indicating the potential for a successful transition to electric mobility. CleanTechnica has spilled much ink on the pace of plug-in hybrid and full EV adoption, and the latest report from the UK firm Rho Motion (a branch of the price reporting agency Benchmark Mineral Intelligence) adds some fresh insights.

Covering the first seven months of 2025, earlier today Rho Motion totaled up more than 10.7 million EVs sold for a "robust" 27% increase over the same period last year, with China leading the pack by a wide margin. Europe also contributed to the overall robustness. Germany and the UK racked up impressive gains and Italy also turning in a mentionable performance. "The European EV market has grown by 30% year-to-date, with strong momentum in both battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), up 30% and 32% respectively," Rho Motion summarized.

"In contrast, North America's growth has been muted so far in 2025, with the US facing policy headwinds and Canada seeing a slowdown," Rho Motion Data Manager Charles Lester observed. "We expect a short-term lift in US demand ahead of the IRA consumer tax credit deadline in September, followed by a likely dip," Lester added. That short-term lift won't help North America catch up to Europe [...] Rho Motion's EV sales snapshot shows the recent gains:

Global: 10.7 million, +27%
China: 6.5 million, +29%
Europe: 2.3 million, +30%
North America: 1.0 million, +2%
Rest of World: 0.9 million, +42%

The Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections (OCCE) has revealed in its annual report that it will "explore the use" AI and emerging technologies to see how they will shape the government body's approach for the next year. From a report: Commissioner Caroline Simard's office didn't outline ways it might adopt AI. In its outlook, the OCCE expected to use funding announced in January 2025 to secure the tools needed for addressing the "challenges of today's electoral environment." This included staffing roles dictated by its new structure and reflected "ongoing modernization efforts," but no further details.

The Commissioner is an independent officer who ensures the government, political parties, and others honour both the Canada Elections Act and Referendum Act. This includes core aspects like financing, nominations, campaigning, and advertising. More recently, the OCCE has been addressing rising issues with AI, including election disinformation facilitated by bots, AI-generated images, and deepfakes (AI-generated videos that resemble real people in false scenarios).

Extreme heat is breaking temperature records across Europe, early measurements suggest, and driving bigger and stronger wildfires. From a report: In south-west France, records were broken on Monday in Angouleme, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Saint-Emilion and Saint-Girons. Meteo France said the "often remarkable, even unprecedented, maximum temperatures" in the region were 12C above the norm for the last few decades.

In Croatia, air temperature records were set in Sibenik, at 39.5C, and Dubrovnik, at 38.9C, while large forest fires raged along its coasts and ripped through neighbouring countries in the Balkans. The day before, Hungary broke its daily maximum temperature record when a weather station in Korosladany hit 39.9C. The capital, Budapest, also broke its daily maximum record as it sweltered through 38.7C heat.

Beyond Europe, dozens of temperature records were broken across Canada, and record-breaking heat above 50C in Iraq was blamed for a nationwide blackout. The heatwave in southern Europe comes as Nordic countries recover from unprecedentedtemperatures above 30C in the Arctic Circle this month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Patrick Schlott often finds himself in a cellular dead zone during his drive to work. "You go down the road, you turn the corner and you're behind a mountain and you'll lose cell coverage pretty fast," he says. The 31-year-old electrical engineer says poor reception is a common frustration for residents of Vermont's Orange County. To address this issue, he's providing his community with a new way to stay connected.

Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop. With just an internet connection, these phones can make calls anywhere in the U.S. or Canada -- no coins required. And Schlott covers all the operating costs himself. "It's cheap enough where I'm happy just footing the bill," he says. "You know, if I'm spending $20 a month on, say, Netflix, I could do that and provide phone service for the community. And to me, that's way more fun." Hundreds of calls have been made since the first phone was installed back in March last year. "I knew there would be some fringe cases where it would be really helpful," says Schlott. "But I never expected it to get daily use and for people to be this excited about it."

"One of the cornerstones that I want to stick to is, no matter what happens on the backend, the calls will always be free," he says. "And I will figure out a way to make that happen."

The women-only app Tea now "faces two class action lawsuits filed in California" in response to a recent breach," reports NPR — even as the company is now boasting it has more than 6.2 million users.

A spokesperson for Tea told the CBC it's "working to identify any users whose personal information was involved" in a breach of 72,000 images (including 13,000 verification photos and images of government IDs) and a later breach of 1.1 million private messages. Tea said they will be offering those users "free identity protection services." The company said it removed the ID requirement in 2023, but data that was stored before February 2024, when Tea migrated to a more secure system, was accessed in the breach... [Several sites have pointed out Tea's current privacy policy is telling users selfies are "deleted immediately."]

Tea was reportedly intended to launch in Canada on Friday, according to information previously posted on the App Store, but as of this week the launch date is now in February 2026. Tea didn't respond to CBC's questions about the apparent delay. Yet even amid the current turmoil, Tea's waitlist has ballooned to 1.5 million women, all eager to join, the company posted on Wednesday. A day later, Tea posted in its Instagram stories that it had approved "well over" 800,000 women into the app that day alone.

So, why is it so popular, despite the drama and risks?
Tea tapped into a perceived weakness of ther dating apps, according to an associate health studies professor at Ontario's Western University interviewed by the CBC, who thinks users should avoid Tea, at least until its security is restored.

Tech blogger John Gruber called the incident "yet another data point for the argument that any 'private messaging' feature that doesn't use E2EE isn't actually private at all." (And later Gruber notes Tea's apparent absence at the top of the charts in Google's Play Store. "I strongly suspect that, although Google hasn't removed Tea from the Play Store, they've delisted it from discovery other than by searching for it by name or following a direct link to its listing.")

Besides anonymous discussions about specific men, Tea also allows its users to perform background and criminal record checks, according to NPR, as well as reverse image searches. But the recent breach, besides threatening the safety of its users, also "laid bare the anonymous, one-sided accusations against the men in their dating pools." The CBC points out there's a men's rights group on Reddit now urging civil lawsuits against tea as part of a plan to get the app shut down. And "Cleveland lawyer Aaron Minc, who specializes in cases involving online defamation and harassment, told The Associated Press that his firm has received hundreds of calls from people upset about what's been posted about them on Tea."

Yet in response to Tea's latest Instagram post, "The comments were almost entirely from people asking Tea to approve them, so they could join the app."

"So far, all lifeforms on Earth have a phosphorous-based chemistry, particularly as the backbone of DNA," writes longtime Slashdot reader bshell. "In 2010, a paper was published in Science claiming that arsenic-based bacteria were living in a California lake (in place of phosphorous). That paper was finally retracted by the journal Science the other day." From a report: : Some scientists are celebrating the move, but the paper's authors disagree with it -- saying that they stand by their data and that a retraction is not merited. In Science's retraction statement, editor-in-chief Holden Thorp says that the journal did not retract the paper when critics published take-downs of the work because, back then, it mostly reserved retractions for cases of misconduct, and "there was no deliberate fraud or misconduct on the part of the authors" of the arsenic-life paper. But since then, Science's criteria for retracting papers have expanded, he writes, and "if the editors determine that a paper's reported experiments do not support its key conclusions," as is the case for this paper, a retraction is now appropriate.

"It's good that it's done," says microbiologist Rosie Redfield, who was a prominent critic of the study after its publication in 2010 and who is now retired from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "Pretty much everybody knows that the work was mistaken, but it's still important to prevent newcomers to the literature from being confused." By contrast, one of the paper's authors, Ariel Anbar, a geochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, says that there are no mistakes in the paper's data. He says that the data could be interpreted in a number of ways, but "you don't retract because of a dispute about data interpretation." If that's the standard you were to apply, he says, "you'd have to retract half the literature."

A six-month international study found that a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay significantly improved employee well-being, job satisfaction, and sleep quality, with burnout dropping most among those who reduced their hours by eight or more. "The results indicate that income-preserving four-day workweeks are an effective organizational intervention for enhancing workers' well-being," the researchers said. The Register reports: The study, reported in Nature Human Behaviour, was designed to test the effects of the four-day workweek with no reduction in pay. It relied on a six-month trial involving 2,896 employees in 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, and the US. The researchers compared work and health-related indicators -- including burnout, job satisfaction, and mental and physical health -- before and after the intervention using survey data. A further 285 employees at 12 companies did not participate in the trial and acted as a control.

The researchers noted that the study was limited in that companies volunteered to participate, and the sample consisted of smaller companies from English-speaking countries. More extensive government-sponsored trials might help provide a clearer picture, they said. While several factors may explain the effect, one possibility is "increased intrinsic motivation at work," the study said. "Unfortunately, [we] cannot assess [this] due to data limitations." "Despite its limitations, this study has important implications for understanding the future of work, with 4-day workweeks probably being a key component. Scientific advances from this work will inform the development of interventions promoting better organization of paid work and worker well-being. This task has become increasingly important with the rapid expansion of new digital, automation, and artificial general intelligence technologies."

Microsoft has released emergency security updates for two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in SharePoint, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 and CVE-2025-53771, that have compromised servers worldwide in what researchers call "ToolShell" attacks. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned over the weekend that hackers were exploiting the vulnerabilities to gain remote code execution on on-premises SharePoint installations, while Microsoft has not yet provided patches for all affected versions.

The vulnerabilities allow hackers to steal private digital keys from SharePoint servers without requiring credentials, enabling them to plant malware and access stored files and data. Eye Security, which first identified the attacks on Saturday, found dozens of actively exploited servers and warned that SharePoint's integration with Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive could enable further network compromise. Researcher Silas Cutler at cybersecurity firm Censys estimated more than 10,000 companies with SharePoint servers were at risk, with the largest concentrations in the United States, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Canada.

Microsoft released patches for SharePoint 2019 and Subscription Edition but is still working on fixes for SharePoint Server 2016. Administrators must install available updates immediately and rotate machine keys to prevent re-compromise, according to Microsoft's security guidance.

Science Daily reports: Wild orcas across four continents have repeatedly floated fish and other prey to astonished swimmers and boaters, hinting that the ocean's top predator likes to make friends. Researchers cataloged 34 such gifts over 20 years, noting the whales often lingered expectantly — and sometimes tried again — after humans declined their offerings, suggesting a curious, relationship-building motive...

"Orcas often share food with each other — it's a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other," said study lead author Jared Towers, of Bay Cetology in British Columbia, Canada. "That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well."
The complete research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Its title? "Testing the Waters: Attempts by Wild Killer Whales (Orcinus orca) to Provision People (Homo sapiens)."

"Canada and the United States have resumed trade negotiations," reports Newsweek, "after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to rescind the country's digital services tax on U.S. technology companies." The development follows President Donald Trump's announcement on Friday that he was suspending all trade talks with Canada "effective immediately" over the tax policy... Canada's quick reversal signals the high stakes involved in maintaining trade relationships with the United States, particularly given the countries' deeply integrated economies.

Carney's office confirmed on Sunday that both leaders have agreed to restart negotiations after Canada committed to abandoning the 3 percent levy targeting major U.S. tech giants including Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber, and Airbnb. The tax was scheduled to take effect Monday and would have applied retroactively, creating an estimated $2 billion bill for American companies. The conflict escalated rapidly after Canada's Finance Department confirmed Friday that companies would still be required to make their first digital tax payments Monday, despite ongoing negotiations. The tax targeted revenue generated from Canadian users rather than corporate profits, making it particularly burdensome for technology companies operating internationally...

Canada's decision to rescind the tax came "in anticipation" of reaching a broader trade agreement, according to government officials. With negotiations resuming, both countries will likely focus on addressing broader trade issues beyond the digital services tax.

Bloomberg reports: By the time Jessica Lindsey's customers accuse her of being an AI, they are often already shouting. For the past two years, her work as a call center agent for outsourcing company Concentrix has been punctuated by people at the other end of the phone demanding to speak to a real human. Sometimes they ask her straight, 'Are you an AI?' Other times they just start yelling commands: 'Speak to a representative! Speak to a representative...!' Skeptical customers are already frustrated from dealing with the automated system that triages calls before they reach a person. So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine. "They just end up yelling at me and hanging up," she said, leaving Lindsey sitting in her home office in Oklahoma, shocked and sometimes in tears. "Like, I can't believe I just got cut down at 9:30 in the morning because they had to deal with the AI before they got to me...."

In Australia, Canada, Greece and the US, call center agents say they've been repeatedly mistaken for AI. These people, who spend hours talking to strangers, are experiencing surreal conversations, where customers ask them to prove they are not machines... [Seth, a US-based Concentrix worker] said he is asked if he's AI roughly once a week. In April, one customer quizzed him for around 20 minutes about whether he was a machine. The caller asked about his hobbies, about how he liked to go fishing when not at work, and what kind of fishing rod he used. "[It was as if she wanted] to see if I glitched," he said. "At one point, I felt like she was an AI trying to learn how to be human...."

Sarah, who works in benefits fraud-prevention for the US government — and asked to use a pseudonym for fear of being reprimanded for talking to the media — said she is mistaken for AI between three or four times every month... Sarah tries to change her inflections and tone of voice to sound more human. But she's also discovered another point of differentiation with the machines. "Whenever I run into the AI, it just lets you talk, it doesn't cut you off," said Sarah, who is based in Texas. So when customers start to shout, she now tries to interrupt them. "I say: 'Ma'am (or Sir). I am a real person. I'm sitting in an office in the southern US. I was born.'"

The Canadian government has ordered Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer Hikvision to cease operations in Canada over national security concerns, Industry Minister Melanie Joly said late on Friday. From a report: Hikvision, also known as Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co, has faced numerous sanctions and restrictions by Canada's neighbor, the United States, over the past five and a half years for the firm's dealings and the use of its equipment in China's Xinjiang region, where rights groups have documented abuses against the Uyghur population and other Muslim communities.

"The government has determined that Hikvision Canada's continued operations in Canada would be injurious to Canada's national security," Joly said on X, adding that the decision was taken after a multi-step review of information provided by Canada's security and intelligence community."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Canada is proceeding with its digital services tax on technology companies such as Meta despite a Group of Seven agreement that resulted in removing the Section 899 "revenge tax" proposal from U.S. President Donald Trump's tax bill. The first payment for Canada's digital tax is still due Monday, the country's Finance Department confirmed, and covers revenue retroactively to 2022. The tax is three percent of the digital services revenue a firm makes from Canadian users above $20 million in a calendar year.

Keeping the digital tax will not affect the G7 agreement, which focuses on global minimum taxes, the Finance Department said. The Section 899 provision would have targeted companies and investors from countries that the U.S. determines are unfairly taxing American companies. [...] Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne suggested to reporters last week that the digital tax may be negotiated as part of broader, ongoing U.S.-Canada trade discussions. "Obviously all of that is something that we're considering as part of broader discussions that you may have," he said.

Business groups in the country have opposed the tax since it was announced, arguing it would increase the cost of digital services and invite retaliation from the U.S. It also raised the ire of U.S. businesses and lawmakers. A group of 21 members of U.S. Congress wrote to Trump earlier this month asking him to push for the tax's removal, estimating the June 30 payment will cost U.S. companies $2 billion. Before scrapping its digital services tax, Canada wants to see an OECD deal on policies that expand a country's authority to tax profits earned within that country even if a company doesn't have a physical location there -- which is different from a global minimum tax. Earlier today, President Trump said the U.S. is immediately ending trade talks with Canada in response to the tax, calling it a "direct and blatant attack on our country."

"Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. "We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period."

Hackers suspected of working on behalf of the Chinese government exploited a maximum-severity vulnerability, which had received a patch 16 months earlier, to compromise a telecommunications provider in Canada, officials from that country and the US said Monday. ArsTechnica: "The Cyber Centre is aware of malicious cyber activities currently targeting Canadian telecommunications companies," officials for the center, the Canadian government's primary cyber security agency, said in a statement. "The responsible actors are almost certainly PRC state-sponsored actors, specifically Salt Typhoon." The FBI issued its own nearly identical statement.

Salt Typhoon is the name researchers and government officials use to track one of several discreet groups known to hack nations all over the world on behalf of the People's Republic of China. In October 2023, researchers disclosed that hackers had backdoored more than 10,000 Cisco devices by exploiting CVE-2023-20198, a vulnerability with a maximum severity rating of 10. Any switch, router, or wireless LAN controller running Cisco's iOS XE that had the HTTP or HTTPS server feature enabled and exposed to the Internet was vulnerable. Cisco released a security patch about a week after security firm VulnCheck published its report.