Author: Vidya Saras

Global economic uncertainty remains a concern, but it may be too early to revise Philippine growth targets, National Economic and Development Authority Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan said. “We’ll see. There are many things are happening especially with all this uncertainty in the global economy. We need to revisit. We just revised the figures,” Mr. Balisacan told reporters on March 7. The Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) in December widened the gross domestic product (GDP) growth target to 6-8% for 2025 until 2028, due to “evolving domestic and global uncertainties.” “It’s too early to change at this point but we need…

Former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, sentenced to 25 years in 2024 for his role in misusing customer funds, gave another interview from prison before his 33rd birthday.Speaking to right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson on March 5, Bankman-Fried talked about prison life since his sentencing and his thoughts on crypto regulation in the United States. Though Carlson did not directly ask the former FTX CEO whether he expected to receive a pardon from US President Donald Trump, SBF seemed to warm to some Republican ideas during the interview.Sam Bankman-Fried interview, released on March 6. Source: Tucker CarlsonAccording to SBF, he…

At 7:29 UTC today, on epoch 222464, the Pectra network upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet. Unfortunately, an issue with Sepolia’s permissioned deposit contract prevented many execution layer clients from including transactions in blocks. The root cause was identified within minutes, and client teams immediately began working on a fix. This issue is due to Sepolia’s configuration and could not occur on the Ethereum mainnet. Around 14:00 UTC today, validators deployed a fix that restored the network to normal throughput. All Sepolia node operators must now upgrade their execution layer clients to the versions listed below to maintain network…

Global video game commerce company Xsolla has launched the Xsolla Offerwall, a new solution aimed at improving revenue opportunities for developers whilst enhancing player engagement.The Offerwall seeks to allow players to earn virtual rewards through tasks and advertiser-sponsored actions, offering an alternative revenue stream that benefits both players and developers.By incorporating quests, tasks, and in-game incentives, the Offerwall encourages deeper interaction within gaming ecosystems. With a competitive revenue-sharing model and a focus on secure transactions, Xsolla aims to provide a more sustainable financial model for game developers globally. Source: XsollaWhat is Xsolla?Founded in 2005, Xsolla is a prominent company specialising…

In recent years, the cryptocurrency market has seen roller coaster-like price fluctuations, which have frightened countless investors. The price of Bitcoin was once expected to fall to $50,000, and the sharp decline of other highly-watched altcoins such as XRP and DOGE has put investors under tremendous wealth pressure. In such an unstable market environment, it is particularly important to find new investment opportunities. As an emerging investment method, AI cloud mining has gradually emerged and become a new favorite of investors. 🔖The rise of cloud mining Compared with traditional mining, cloud mining has significant advantages. Traditional mining requires not only…

While the improvements feel as incremental as its name suggests, GPT-4.5 is still OpenAI’s most ambitious drop to date. Released in late February as a research preview—which essentially means OpenAI sees this as a beta version—GPT-4.5 uses more computing power than its previous models and was trained on more data.So, just how big is the GPT-4.5 research preview? Who knows—since the developers won’t say. And where did this additional training data come from? Their lips are zipped on that as well. To borrow a line from Apple TV’s hit show Severance, right now OpenAI is positioning the alleged improvements in…

Oakland’s Lateefah Simon, following in Barbara Lee’s footsteps, “prebutted” Trump’s creepy Tuesday address. Ad Policy (Working Families Party via YouTube) Rising progressive star Representative Lateefah Simon, who succeeded icon Barbara Lee to represent Oakland this year, wrestled with whether to attend Donald Trump’s Tuesday address to Congress even after I talked to her on Monday. The first member of Congress who was born legally blind, and the first Muslim representative from California, Simon had been tapped by the Working Families Party to do a “prebuttal” before Trump’s speech. “I think it’s my duty to be in this building,” Simon…

Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery was drawn to the Institute’s commitment to “computing for the planet,” and set out to bring her methods to global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring.In the Pacific Northwest, salmon have a disproportionate impact on the health of their ecosystems, and their complex reproductive needs have attracted…

“Satori identified more than 1 million devices that were infected in Badbox 2.0, up from the 74,000 in the original Badbox scheme,“ Human added. Badbox 2.0 operates multiple frauds Badbox 2.0 infiltrates low-cost consumer devices with backdoors, allowing threat actors to remotely deploy fraud modules.These devices connect to actor-controlled C2 servers to, on activation, potentially carry out multiple attacks, including programmatic ad fraud, click fraud, and residential proxy servers — which in turn facilitate attacks like account takeover, fake account creation, DDoS, malware distribution, and one-time-password (OTP) theft. “Badbox 2.0 threat actors also operated over 200 re-bundled and infected versions…

Days of our Lives spoilers reveal that Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall) and Steve Johnson (Stephen Nichols) are demanding answers, and Rafe Hernandez (Galen Gering) is really struggling. As we always do on early edition day, we start with what is coming the rest of this week to get you ready. On Wednesday, March 5th, if you haven’t seen it yet, we have Kayla Brady (Mary Beth Evans) making a deal with Stephanie Johnson (Abigail Klein). Now, she has gone over to see her mom, Kayla, at the hospital about some of that PR stuff for fundraising. There, Stephanie overheard Sarah…