Mois : janvier 2025

FUSD planning to announce finalized school schedule changes in upcoming meeting  Arizona Daily Sun
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1. Bitcoin needs trading volume boost to rally above $105K in January  Cointelegraph
2. Beware of Bitcoin’s ‘Shooting Star’ at Record Highs: Godbole  CoinDesk
3. Leak Reveals Serious China 2025 Warning—Predicted To Blow Up The Bitcoin Price  Forbes

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Cory’s Corner: The Packers Need Jordan Love Magic  Cheesehead TV
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New York eliminates Regents exams: The coming change in education.
A big surprise has come to New York with a possible change that seems to be good news for many, and to generate serious anger for others. It is the possible elimination of the Regents exams, a key requirement for high school graduates who want to earn a diploma to qualify for the right course of study. With a series of four exams, students currently have to justify their years of studies by putting their work in English, science, history and mathematics. According to a source close to the Regents Board, the possibility of making these evaluations optional again is on the minds of the presidents and, for that, they would no longer be an obligation at the end of the studies. Opinions are mixed, but it is important to know what they are about.
One of the bells and whistles of the education sector in New York has postulated that a reform is necessary in the area of high school, where young people can demonstrate that they have studied enough in these years without the need to take these theoretical exams and opt for practical tasks, with jobs that develop their skills in a better way. However, many see that this is not a reliable alternative, since it will bring out other knowledge and not the ones justly instilled during the years of secondary education. Likewise, others also think that the method used for students since 1997 needs to adapt to the new times and to their requests required to go out in the best way to the working world.
Therefore, the inclusion of a financial education course or exam can be added as another request for those who have dedicated time to this. With this, graduates would need to complement various knowledge to put it into practice in everyday life and justify so many hours of coursework. Although the intention is to change this by 2027, many already stipulate that the decision will be prolonged and the real change will be made by 2029. And this 2029 is the date when Regents exams must be changed due to the stipulations of the format, which requires a renewal in New York.
Along with teachers and unions, there are several groups that have given the go-ahead to the modification or reform of these Regents exams, which aims to renew the theoretical content and get alternative options to demonstrate knowledge. But, on the other hand, several educators have shown dissatisfaction thinking that fundamental knowledge such as concepts related to the three branches of the federal government will be de-emphasized.
No exact voting date has yet been given for whether or not to renew the Regents exam system. What is clear is that there will be reform, but many fear that this filter for graduation will be eliminated. At the same time, New York will continue to discuss how to continue its education sector to adapt to the new times.

© 2024 Employment and labor news in the United States
© 2024 Employment and labor news in the United States

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Elon Musk goes global with his playbook for political influence  The Washington Post
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Racing was tight on the first day of the U.S. National Championships at Anchorage’s Kincaid Park, with winners in both the men’s and women’s events decided by less than 15 seconds.
The real drama, however, was in a quintessential Anchorage wildlife standoff — one that may have even altered the women’s podium.
Along a willowy downhill stretch toward the end of the five-kilometer race loop, volunteers and coaches engaged in a tense showdown with a moose and calf — trying, and ultimately failing, to keep them from crossing the trail as lycra-clad athletes zoomed by.
“If it had been a high school race, I think we probably would have said, ‘You know what? We need to send no more new people out on course for a bit — we’ll figure it out later,’” said Jeremy Littell, a volunteer who brandished a blaring megaphone in an unsuccessful effort to ward off the large ungulates. “But it is senior national championships, and that’s a little bit of a different story. People have a lot on the line.”

In the end, no moose, nor athletes, were harmed. But at least two women in the 10-kilometer race had hair-raisingly close shaves — one of which was captured on video, alongside Littell’s hazing efforts.
Coaches and athletes were all in agreement, however: Don’t blame the moose.
“They live there. And we get to race in their habitat,” said Tilde Bångman, a Swedish athlete competing for the University of Colorado Boulder’s ski team who narrowly dodged the moose — costing her precious seconds in a tightly fought competition. She added: “You can’t control a wild animal.”
Moose encounters are a long, venerable tradition of Anchorage athletics, and especially of cross-country ski races. The willows and alders that line many of the city’s trails double as moose feed, and almost any resident who trains in the woods can tell a story of a workout being disrupted or diverted.
“Every week, and sometimes more than once, we have to change our interval plan because of a moose,” said Trond Flagstad, the coach of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s cross-country ski team. He recounted an incident earlier this winter in which a moose charged one of his athletes in the middle of a ski workout.
“He goes down on the ground, covering his head, and the moose is just standing over him — and then it just moves off,” he said. (Flagstad’s team spotted the moose in the area for a couple of weeks afterward, and named it after the shaken but unharmed athlete.)
Numerous editions of the Tour of Anchorage — a 30-mile race from the city’s hillside to the coast — have seen top athletes delayed by moose in the middle of the trail. A police officer once shot an aggressive moose during a cross-country running race at Kincaid Park.
“I was standing between the moose and the girls,” the shotgun-toting officer — the father to one of the competitors — later told the Anchorage Daily News. “I was standing there the whole race. I planned on him not getting to the girls.”
Matt Pauli, the chief of competition for this week’s national championship ski races at Kincaid, said he included a slide of an “amorous cow and bull” moose in his pre-race presentation, to warn team captains about what to expect.
“I show that and say, ‘Hey, we’ll do what we can do mitigate,’” he said. “But we’re not stopping the race.”
Volunteers and coaches made a textbook execution of the Pauli method during the women’s race Thursday — throwing an array of deterrents at the cow and calf to allow athletes to pass by.
Littell, the megaphone-wielding volunteer, said the moose were also present during the men’s race earlier in the day, though peacefully bedded down. After lunch, he said, the animals got up and started moving.
Unfortunately for organizers, the race format did not lend itself to easy moose management: Rather than one big pack of athletes racing around the course together, the event was a time-trial style individual-start race, where skiers left the gate one at a time every 30 seconds.
For a while, Littell said, the moose seemed content to browse on the side of the trail, and with a little help from Flagstad, who was passing by, they kept the animals clear of the athletes.
But then, Littell said, the moose “got it in their heads that they wanted to cross the course, and it got more and more difficult to keep them in place.”
“A couple other course people came along, and we kind of got in close with them — used the megaphone, used a lot of voice, used a lot of raised arms, sort of general moose intimidation tactics. And for a while, that worked,” he said. “And then they weren’t having it any more. And we lost.”
The first time the moose crossed the trail, they moved quickly and didn’t cause problems. But then, they returned, pushed back down toward the course by other volunteers who were trying to keep them off of a different segment of trail.
“That’s when they got in the trail and didn’t want to leave,” Littell said.
Enter Bångman, the Swedish skier.
“You know, when you’re in a race, I was pretty locked in — I don’t see a lot of things going on outside the course,” she said. “I just come down this fast downhill and I see a volunteer in the middle of the course. And I get so confused. And then I see this huge moose starting to walk towards me.”
Bångman pumped the brakes, sliding her skis a bit.
“But then I realized, if I stop-slide, I will come to a stop right by the moose, which would probably be worse,” she said. “So, I was like, ‘Well, I’ll try to just send it and hope it doesn’t chase me.’”
Bångman said she saw a volunteer jump out in front of the moose; she was worried he was about to get stomped. But she snuck past, with no harm done — except, perhaps, to Bångman’s finish time.
She ended up in sixth place, less than five seconds from the podium, and guessed she’d lost perhaps a few seconds when she slowed for the moose.
“But, you know, that’s a part of racing at Kincaid, isn’t it?” she said. “Some extra excitement.”
Littell, reached by phone a day later, said he was a little nervous about publicizing his moose intimidation efforts, stressing that he’s typically “pretty cautious about the animals.”
The volunteers, he said, were “trying to balance skier safety first, volunteer safety second, and moose safety as a close third.”
Littell works for a federal agency, he said, and he’s frequently instructed that “no altercation is worth the effort.” But, he added: “I wasn’t on the clock.”
Nat Herz is an Alaska-based journalist who moonlights for FasterSkier as an occasional reporter and podcast host. He was FasterSkier’s full-time reporter in 2010 and 2011.
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Two separate campaigns have been stealing credentials and browsing history for months.
As many of us celebrated the year-end holidays, a small group of researchers worked overtime tracking a startling discovery: At least 33 browser extensions hosted in Google’s Chrome Web Store, some for as long as 18 months, were surreptitiously siphoning sensitive data from roughly 2.6 million devices.
The compromises came to light with the discovery by data loss prevention service Cyberhaven that a Chrome extension used by 400,000 of its customers had been updated with code that stole their sensitive data.
The malicious extension, available as version 24.10.4, was available for 31 hours, from December 25 at 1:32 AM UTC to Dec 26 at 2:50 AM UTC. Chrome browsers actively running Cyberhaven during that window would automatically download and install the malicious code. Cyberhaven responded by issuing version 24.10.5, and 24.10.6 a few days later.
The Cyberhaven extension is designed to prevent users from inadvertently entering sensitive data into emails or websites they visit. Analyses of version 24.10.4 showed that it was configured to work with different payloads that were downloaded from cyberhavenext[.]pro, a malicious site the threat actor registered to give the appearance it was affiliated with the company. One recovered payload, Cyberhaven said, scoured user devices for browser cookies and authentication credentials for the facebook.com domain. A separate payload recovered by security firm Secure Annex stole cookies and credentials for chatgpt.com; Cyberhaven said the payload didn’t appear functional.
The malicious version came through a spear phishing email sent to the developers Google listed for the Cyberhaven extension on Christmas Eve. It warned that the extension wasn’t in compliance with Google terms and would be revoked unless the developer took immediate action.
A link in the email led to a Google consent screen requesting access permission for an OAuth application named Privacy Policy Extension. A Cyberhaven developer granted the permission and, in the process, unknowingly gave the attacker the ability to upload new versions of Cyberhaven’s Chrome extension to the Chrome Web Store. The attacker then used the permission to push out the malicious version 24.10.4.
As word of the attack spread in the early hours of December 25, developers and researchers discovered that other extensions were targeted, in many cases successfully, by the same spear phishing campaign. John Tuckner, founder of Secure Annex, a browser extension analysis and management firm, said that as of Thursday afternoon, he knew of 19 other Chrome extensions that were similarly compromised. In every case, the attacker used spear phishing to push a new malicious version and custom, look-alike domains to issue payloads and receive authentication credentials. Collectively, the 20 extensions had 1.46 million downloads.
“For many I talk to, managing browser extensions can be a lower priority item in their security program,” Tuckner wrote in an email. “Folks know they can present a threat, but rarely are teams taking action on them. We’ve often seen in security [that] one or two incidents can cause a reevaluation of an organization’s security posture. Incidents like this often result in teams scrambling to find a way to gain visibility and understanding of impact to their organizations.”
The earliest compromise occurred in May 2024. Tuckner provided the following spreadsheet:
One of the compromised extensions is called Reader Mode. Further analysis showed it had been compromised not just in the campaign targeting the other 19 extensions but in a separate campaign that started no later than April 2023. Tuckner said the source of the compromise appears to be a code library developers can use to monetize their extensions. The code library collects details about each web visit a browser makes. In exchange for incorporating the library into the extensions, developers receive a commission from the library creator.
Tuckner said that Reader Mode is one of 13 Chrome extensions known to have used the library to collect potentially sensitive data. Collectively, these extensions had 1.14 million installations. The full list is:
As Tuckner indicated, browser extensions have long remained a weak link in the security chain. In 2019, for example, extensions for both Chrome and Firefox were caught stealing sensitive data from 4 million devices. Many of the infected devices ran inside the networks of dozens of companies, including Tesla, Blue Origin, FireEye, Symantec, TMobile, and Reddit. In many cases, curbing the threat of malicious extensions is easy since so many extensions provide no useful benefit.
In the case of other abused extensions, such as the one used by Cyberhaven customers, it’s not as easy to address the threat. After all, the extension provides a service that many organizations find valuable. Tuckner said one potential part of the solution is for organizations to compile a browser asset management list that allows only selected extensions to run and blocks all others. Even then, Cyberhaven customers would have installed the malicious extension version unless the asset management list specifies a specific version to trust and to distrust all others.
Anyone who ran one of these compromised extensions should carefully consider changing passwords and other authentication credentials. The Secure Annex post provides additional indicators of compromise, as do posts here, here, here, and here.
Ars Technica has been separating the signal from the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts and sciences, Ars is the trusted source in a sea of information. After all, you don’t need to know everything, only what’s important.

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Fleet Feet and Yellow Jacket Racing host Winter Warrior races at Monroe Community College  13WHAM-TV
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There were some major lottery wins in Michigan in 2024, but one absolutely dominated the rest.
Michigan’s biggest lottery prize won or claimed in 2024 came on the first day of the year, according to the Michigan Lottery.
A Powerball ticket purchased at Food Castle of Grand Blanc in Grand Blanc matched the five white balls and Powerball drawn Jan. 1, 2024, to win a jackpot worth $842.2 million.
It was the largest Powerball prize ever won in Michigan.
The Michigan Lottery announced in June that a three-person lottery club from mid-Michigan, called The Breakfast Club, had claimed the prize.
The club chose to receive the winnings as a one-time lump sum payment of about $425 million instead of annuity payments for the full amount. After required income tax withholdings of 24% federal tax (about $102 million) and 4.25% state tax (about $18 million), the club received about $305 million, according to the Michigan Lottery.
The club members told the Michigan Lottery they planned to retire earlier than expected, travel and share the money with their immediate family and nonprofits close to their hearts.
And there were other big wins in 2024. Fifty tickets won at least $1 million.
Some of the other top wins included a Lotto 47 ticket purchased in Romulus that won $7.19 million and three instant tickets purchased in Farmington, Clinton Township and Holland that won $6 million each.
More:Where the biggest Michigan Lottery prizes in December were sold
There were some hotspots for huge prizes. Commerce Township, Grand Rapids and Westland each had three tickets worth at least $1 million sold in their communities.
When factoring in all prizes worth $100,000 or more, Bay City, Livonia, Mount Pleasant, Taylor and Westland were the hottest spots with six tickets worth $100,000 or more purchased in each of those towns.
Here’s a look at all the Michigan Lottery prizes worth $1 million or more that were won or claimed in 2024, according to the Michigan Lottery.

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The final day of the non-College Football Playoff bowl game season has arrived.
And it is taking place in The Bahamas.
In the lone college football bowl game on Saturday, Buffalo (8-4) and Liberty (8-3) will clash against each other in Nassau at Thomas A. Robinson National Stadium in the Bahamas Bowl at 10 a.m. CT.
Saturday’s meeting between the Bulls and Flames is the second in the last year, as both teams faced each other in the 2023 college football season where Liberty came out with the 55-27 victory. Liberty leads the all-time series against Buffalo 3-0.
Two players to look out for on Buffalo are linebackers Shaun Dolac and Red Murdock, who rank first and second in the country in tackles at 159 and 143 respectively, per Buffaloes’ game notes. A win against Liberty on Saturday would give the Bulls their third ever season with at least ninth wins and the second since becoming an FBS program in 1999.
Liberty will be without starting quarterback Kaidon Salter, who entered the transfer portal and since announced his commitment to Deion Sanders and Colorado. In Salter’s spot will likely be sophomore Ryan Burger, who has completed 4 of 7 passes for 48 yards while running for 13 yards and a score on six carries thus this season.
Here’s how to watch the day’s college football action, including time, TV schedule, streaming information and more:
Saturday, Jan. 4
All times Central
ESPN2 will broadcast nationally Buffalo vs. Liberty in the Bahamas Bowl on Saturday. Streaming options for the game include the ESPN app (with a cable login) and Fubo, which carries the ESPN family of networks and offers a free trial to new subscribers.
Saturday, Jan. 4
This section will be updated as scores conclude
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