That, though, turned out to be the least of my problems.

Using my home Wi-Fi connection, I checked my email and discovered a notification that $20,000 was being transferred from my credit card to an unfamiliar Discover Bank account.

I thwarted that transfer and reported the cell phone issues, but my nightmare was just starting. Days later, someone managed to transfer $19,000 from my credit card to the same strange bank account.

I was the victim of a type of fraud known as port-out hijacking, also called SIM-swapping. It’s a less-common form of identity theft. New federal regulations aimed at preventing port-out hijacking are under review, but it’s not clear how far they will go in stopping the crime.

Port-out hijacking goes a step beyond hacking into a store, bank or credit card account. In this case, the thieves take over your phone number. Any calls or texts go to them, not to you.

When your own phone access is lost to a criminal, the very steps you once took to protect your accounts, such as two-factor authentication, can be used against you. It doesn’t help to have a bank send a text to verify a transaction when the phone receiving the text is in the hands of the very person trying to break into your account.

Even if you’re a relatively tech-savvy individual who follows every recommendation on how to protect your tech and identity, it can still happen to you.

Experts say these scams will only increase and become more sophisticated, and the data show they are on the rise.

I am not the most tech savvy person, but I am a law-school educated journalist who specializes in finance reporting. Due to the very online nature of my job, I was taught all the methods of staying safe online: constantly changing my passwords with multi-factor authentication, signing out of apps that I don’t use regularly and keeping my personal information off the internet.

Still, despite being safe, I was vulnerable to criminals. And it took a lot of time and legwork before I got my money and phone number back.

The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center reports SIM-swapping complaints have increased more than 400% from 2018 to 2021, having received 1,611 SIM swapping complaints with personal losses of more than $68 million.

Complaints to the FCC about the crime have doubled, from 275 complaints in 2020 to 550 reports in 2023.

Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, an online security company, says the rate of the crime is likely much higher since most identity thefts are not reported.

She also says two-factor authentication is an outdated way of keeping consumers safe, since it’s possible to find anyone’s phone number, birthday and social security number through any number of public or private databases on the web.

The ability of thieves to obtain your personal information was again made clear Friday when AT&T said the data of nearly all of its customers was downloaded to a third-party platform in a security breach two years ago. Although AT&T claims no personal information was leaked, cybersecurity experts have warned breaches involving telephone companies leave customers vulnerable to SIM swapping.

As of now, switching numbers from one phone to another is easy and can be done online or over the phone. The process takes less than a few hours so long as a criminal has your personal information on hand.

While consumers need to be smart about having a variety of different passwords and protections, consumers need to “put pressure on companies where its their job to protect our data,” Tobac said.

“We need them to update consumer protection protocols,” she said, since two-factor authentication is not enough.

FCC rules have recently changed to force companies to do more to protect consumers from this type of scam.

In 2023, the FCC introduced rulemaking that require wireless providers to “adopt secure methods of authenticating a customer before redirecting a customer’s phone number to a new device or provider” among other new rules. Companies could require more information when a customer tries to port over a phone number to another phone — from requiring government identification, voice verification or additional security questions.

The rules were scheduled to take effect on July 8, but the FCC on July 5 granted phone companies a waiver that delays implementation until the White House Office of Management conducts a further review.

The wireless industry had sought the delay, stating among other reasons that companies need more time to comply. CTIA, which lobbies on behalf of the companies, said the new rules will require major changes in technology and procedures both within the wireless companies and in their interactions with phone manufacturers.

But if the FCC rules had been in place, my phone number might have been harder to steal, experts say.

Ohio State University Professor Amy Schmitz says the new FCC rules make it easier for consumers to protect themselves, but it is still reliant on action and awareness of the consumers.

“I still question whether consumers will be aware of this, and will take action to protect themselves,” she said.

It took ten days to get my number back from Cricket Wireless — and that wasn’t until I told company representatives that I was writing a story about my experience.

In that period of time the scammer was able to access my bank account three times and eventually successfully transferred $19,000 from my credit card— even though I removed my number from the bank account, froze my credit, changed all my passwords, among other measures.

Bank of America worked to reverse the $19,000 wire after I visited a branch near the AP bureau in Washington.

Cricket apologized for the error and said in an email that its “expectation is to deliver a much better customer experience.”

“Fraudulent port-outs are a form of theft committed by sophisticated criminals,” reads a company statement that was emailed to me. “We have measures in place to help defeat them, and we work closely with law enforcement, our industry and consumers to help prevent this type of crime.”

An AT&T representative told me in an email that “all providers are working to implement the FCC’s new rules on port-outs and SIM swaps.”

I’m still unsure of how this person got access to my accounts, whether through my social security number, phone number or date of birth, or possibly a recording of my voice.

It was a hard lesson in how vulnerable we are when you lose control of our personal information that is so publicly available.

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The changes have made it so anyone following you on the platform formerly known as Twitter can call and see your Internet Protocol address by default.

An IP address lists where your phone or computer lives on the internet — it’s how you get messages and load websites. An exposed IP address can make you more vulnerable to dangers from spam to ID theft to revealing your location.

It poses perhaps the most serious risk to people like human-rights activists who create online accounts under pseudonyms to avoid persecution.

If you want to avoid random calls from people you may not know or want to hide your IP address from the X community, here are the mobile app settings you need to change:

Head to your direct message settings
Navigate to the X app on your phone. Click on your profile picture in the upper-left corner, navigate to “Settings and Support,” then hit “Settings and privacy.”

Touch the “Privacy and safety” menu and then scroll to the “Direct messages” subcategory.

How to limit who can see your IP address
If you want to use X’s new audio and video call functions but limit the exposure of your IP address, scroll down and toggle on the “Enhanced call privacy” option. It’s toggled off by default.

X says this setting will help you avoid revealing your IP address to your contact during a call.

In this same menu, you also have a number of choices to limit who can call you, including an option that allows only people in your address book to reach out.

How to turn off audio and video calls entirely
In the “Direct messages” menu, toggle off the “Enable audio and video calling” option. This will collapse the previous options and prevent anyone on X from calling you.

Limiting IP address visibility and turning off the calls entirely is only available in the settings if you are using the mobile app version of the former Twitter. For now, at least, there does not appear to be an option to turn off the feature using the web version of X. A representative for X did not immediately return a message for comment on Monday.

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While the latest artificial intelligence craze has sparked another wave of investments in the quest to build a humanoid, most of the current prototypes are clumsy and impractical, looking better in staged performances than in real life. That hasn’t stopped a handful of startups from keeping at it.

“The intention is not to start from the beginning and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,’” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. “We’re trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.”

Do we even need humanoids? Hurst makes a point of describing Agility’s warehouse robot Digit as human-centric, not humanoid, a distinction meant to emphasize what it does over what it’s trying to be.

What it does, for now, is pick up tote bins and move them. Amazon announced in October it will begin testing Digits for use in its warehouses, and Agility opened an Oregon factory in September to mass produce them.

Digit has a head containing cameras, other sensors and animated eyes, and a torso that essentially works as its engine. It has two arms and two legs, but its legs are more bird-like than human, with an inverted knees appearance that resembles so-called digitigrade animals such as birds, cats and dogs that walk on their toes rather than on flat feet.

Rival robot-makers, like Figure AI, are taking a more purist approach on the idea that only true humanoids can effectively navigate workplaces, homes and a society built for humans. Figure also plans to start with a relatively simple use case, such as in a retail warehouse, but aims for a commercial robot that can be “iterated on like an iPhone” to perform multiple tasks to take up the work of humans as birth rates decline around the world.

“There’s not enough people doing these jobs, so the market’s massive,” said Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock. “If we can just get humanoids to do work that humans are not wanting to do because there’s a shortfall of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids, billions maybe.”

At the moment, however, Adcock’s firm doesn’t have a prototype that’s ready for market. Founded just over a year ago and after having raised tens of millions of dollars, it recently revealed a 38-second video of Figure walking through its test facility in Sunnyvale, California.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also trying to build a humanoid, called Optimus, through the electric car-maker’s robotics division, but a hyped-up live demonstration last year of the robot’s awkwardly halting steps didn’t impress experts in the robotics field. Seemingly farther along is Tesla’s Austin, Texas-based neighbor Apptronik, which unveiled its Apollo humanoid in an August video demonstration.

All the attention — and money — poured into making ungainly humanoid machines might make the whole enterprise seem like a futile hobby for wealthy technologists, but for some pioneers of legged robots it’s all about what you learn along the way.

“Not only about their design and operation, but also about how people respond to them, and about the critical underlying technologies for mobility, dexterity, perception and intelligence,” said Marc Raibert, the co-founder of Boston Dynamics, best known for its dog-like robots named Spot.

Raibert said sometimes the path of development is not along a straight line. Boston Dynamics, now a subsidiary of carmaker Hyundai, experimented with building a humanoid that could handle boxes.

“That led to development of a new robot that was not really a humanoid, but had several characteristics of a humanoid,” he said via an emailed message. “But the changes resulted in a new robot that could handle boxes faster, could work longer hours, and could operate in tight spaces, such as a truck. So humanoid research led to a useful non-humanoid robot.”

Some startups aiming for human-like machines focused on improving the dexterity of robotic fingers before trying to get their robots to walk.

Walking is “not the hardest problem to solve in humanoid robotics,” said Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO of British Columbia, Canada-based startup Sanctuary AI. “The hardest problem is the problem of understanding the world and being able to manipulate it with your hands.”

Sanctuary’s newest and first bipedal robot, Phoenix, can stock shelves, unload delivery vehicles and operate a checkout, early steps toward what Rose sees as a much longer-term goal of getting robots to perceive the physical world to be able to reason about it in a way that resembles intelligence. Like other humanoids, it’s meant to look endearing, because how it interacts with real people is a big part of its function.

“We want to be able to provide labor to the world, not just for one thing, but for everybody who needs it,” Rose said. “The systems have to be able to think like people. So we could call that artificial general intelligence if you’d like. But what I mean more specifically is the systems have to be able to understand speech and they need to be able to convert the understanding of speech into action, which will satisfy job roles across the entire economy.”

Agility’s Digit robot caught Amazon’s attention because it can walk and also move around in a way that could complement the e-commerce giant’s existing fleet of vehicle-like robots that move large carts around its vast warehouses.

“The mobility aspect is more interesting than the actual form,” said Tye Brady, Amazon’s chief technologist for robotics, after the company showed it off at a media event in Seattle.

Right now, Digit is being tested to help with the repetitive task of picking up and moving empty totes. But just having it there is bound to resurrect some fears about robots taking people’s jobs, a narrative Amazon is trying to prevent from taking hold.

Agility Robotics co-founder and CEO Damion Shelton said the warehouse robot is “just the first use case” of a new generation of robots he hopes will be embraced rather than feared as they prepare to enter businesses and homes.

“So in 10, 20 years, you’re going to see these robots everywhere,” Shelton said. “Forever more, human- centric robots like that are going to be part of human life. So that’s pretty exciting.”

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AP writer Haleluya Hadero contributed to this report.

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Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved the result, which is called net energy gain, the Energy Department said. Net energy gain has been an elusive goal because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.

The breakthrough will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other officials said.

“Ignition allows us to replicate for the first time certain conditions that are found only in the stars and the sun,″ Granholm told a news conference in Washington. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society.″

Fusion ignition is “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,″ Granholm said, adding that the breakthrough “will go down in the history books.″

Appearing with Granholm, White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar called the fusion ignition “a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve” and “an engineering marvel beyond belief.″

Proponents of fusion hope that it could one day offer nearly limitless, carbon-free energy and displace fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said the announcement marked a significant advance nonetheless.

“It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.”

Kim Budil, director of the Livermore Lab, said there are “very significant hurdles” to the commercial use of fusion technology, but advances in recent years mean the technology is likely to be widely used in “a few decades” rather than 50 or 60 years as previously expected.

Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.

President Joe Biden called the breakthrough a good example of the need to continue to invest in research and development. “Look what’s going on from the Department of Energy on the nuclear front. There’s a lot of good news on the horizon,” he said at the White House.

Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.

The lasers focus an enormous amount of heat on a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment where fusion may occur.

Riccardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and expert in laser fusion, said there’s a long road ahead before the net energy gain leads to sustainable electricity.

He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion.

“You still don’t have the engine, and you still don’t have the tires,” Betti said. “You can’t say that you have a car.”

The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer.

It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot — it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is a challenge, he said.

The achievement of net energy gain isn’t a huge surprise from the California lab because of the progress it had already made, according to Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics.

But, he said, “that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a significant milestone.”

One approach to fusion turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company.

Last year the teams working on those projects on two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work.

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Fusion breakthrough is a milestone for climate, clean energy

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The Menlo Park, California-based Facebook is also planning to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis so that parents or guardians can supervise what their teens are doing online. These initiatives come after Facebook announced late last month that it was pausing work on its Instagram for Kids project. But critics say the plan lacks details and they are skeptical that the new features would be effective.

The new controls were outlined on Sunday by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, who made the rounds on various Sunday news shows including CNN’s “State of the Union” and ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” where he was grilled about Facebook’s use of algorithms as well as its role in spreading harmful misinformation ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

“We are constantly iterating in order to improve our products,” Clegg told Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday. “We cannot, with a wave of the wand, make everyone’s life perfect. What we can do is improve our products, so that our products are as safe and as enjoyable to use.”

Clegg said that Facebook has invested $13 billion over the past few years in making sure to keep the platform safe and that the company has 40,000 people working on these issues. And while Clegg said that Facebook has done its best to keep harmful content out of its platforms, he says he was open for more regulation and oversight.

“We need greater transparency,” he told CNN’s Bash. He noted that the systems that Facebook has in place should be held to account, if necessary, by regulation so that “people can match what our systems say they’re supposed to do from what actually happens.”

The flurry of interviews came after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former data scientist with Facebook, went before Congress last week to accuse the social media platform of failing to make changes to Instagram after internal research showed apparent harm to some teens and of being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation. Haugen’s accusations were supported by tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company’s civic integrity unit.

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a watchdog for the children and media marketing industry, said that he doesn’t think introducing controls to help parents supervise teens would be effective since many teens set up secret accounts anyway. He was also dubious about how effective nudging teens to take a break or move away from harmful content would be. He noted Facebook needs to show exactly how they would implement it and offer research that shows these tools are effective.

“There is tremendous reason to be skeptical,” he said. He added that regulators need to restrict what Facebook does with its algorithms.

He said he also believes that Facebook should cancel its Instagram project for kids.

When Clegg was grilled by both Bash and Stephanopoulos in separate interviews about the use of algorithms in amplifying misinformation ahead of Jan. 6 riots, he responded that if Facebook removed the algorithms people would see more, not less hate speech, and more, not less, misinformation.

Clegg told both hosts that the algorithms serve as “giant spam filters.”

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, told Bash in a separate interview Sunday that it’s time to update children’s privacy laws and offer more transparency in the use of algorithms.

“I appreciate that he is willing to talk about things, but I believe the time for conversation is done,” said Klobuchar, referring to Clegg’s plan. “The time for action is now.”

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Facebook unveils new controls for kids using its platforms

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Branded the F-150 Lightning, the pickup will be able to travel up to 300 miles per battery charge, thanks to a frame designed to safely hold a huge lithium-ion battery that can power your house should the electricity go out. Going from zero to 60 mph (97 kilometers per hour) will take just 4.5 seconds.

With a starting price near $40,000 (before options), Ford has calculated that an electric version of America’s top-selling vehicle will appeal to the sorts of buyers who favor rugged pickup trucks prized for strength and durability. If it succeeds, it could speed the nation’s transition away from petroleum burners — a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s broad effort to fight climate change.

“It’s a watershed moment to me,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said of the electric truck, which was formally unveiled Wednesday night. “It’s a very important transition for our industry.”

For the Biden administration to prevail in its push for green energy-driven manufacturing, it will need to overcome resistance as well as skepticism. Critics fear the loss of auto industry jobs in a shift away from gasoline-fueled vehicles. Because EVs are much simpler, it takes fewer workers to build them. And bottlenecked supply chains could leave automakers short of computer chips and vehicle batteries, along with other parts, for months and perhaps years.

That said, a vehicle like the Lightning is so critical to Biden’s policies that even before its formal unveiling, he visited the Ford plant in Michigan where it will be built beginning next year. The president even drove the truck on a test track.

“This sucker’s quick,” he declared.

For its part, Ford is taking a significant risk by sinking so much capital into an electric version of a pickup that commands a huge and loyal following. In a typical year, Ford sells about 900,000 F-series trucks nationally. It has been America’s top-selling vehicle for nearly four decades.

Gas-powered F-150s are staples on job sites across the nation, where workers haul equipment and materials and often don’t see a need for change. So it could be years before Ford realizes a return on its investment in an electric F-150. This year, through April, the company has sold only 10,000 of its new gas-electric hybrid F-150s — just over 6% of the F-150′s total sales.

Ford said 20,000 people had put down $100 deposits to order the new trucks as of Thursday morning.

Still, introducing a capable electric truck at a fairly reasonable price could potentially produce the breakthrough that draws many more people to battery-powered vehicles of all sizes, said Ivan Drury, a senior manager at Edmunds.com.

“If you’re going to choose one vehicle in the industry that’s going to do it, this is going to be the one,” Drury said. “I expect this to be a home run, and I expect it to really convert a lot of consumers’ minds.”

At the same time, the electric truck, due in showrooms by the middle of next year, comes at a time when American drivers remain reluctant to jettison gas vehicles. Through April, automakers sold about 108,000 fully electric vehicles in the U.S. Though that’s nearly twice the number from the same period last year, EVs still account for only 2% of U.S. vehicle sales, according to Edmunds.

In addition to the Lightning, though, the growing number of fully electric offerings will help raise sales numbers. Automakers now sell 18 electric models in the U.S.; Drury expects 30 by year’s end.

To be sure, Ford won’t stop building gas-powered trucks for years. They remain an enormous cash cow. A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that the F-Series generates $42 billion in annual U.S. revenue for the automaker — more than such entire companies as McDonald’s, Nike or Netflix do.

Initially, Ford expects Lightning customers to be mainly higher-income urban and suburban residents who seldom go off road or use truck beds to haul anything heavy. But the company plans a commercial version designed to make work more efficient. Ultimately, Farley expects sales to be evenly balanced between work and personal buyers.

But Ford may have a hard time selling it to people who build houses, maintain lawns or plow snow.

“It sounds good, but it’s not good for the type of business I’m in,” said Jimmie Williams, owner of a landscaping firm on Chicago’s South Side. He doesn’t think the battery will have enough range to last the 12-14-hour days his crews sometimes work maintaining about 700 properties.

He’ll stick with his three gas-powered pickups, in part because he plows snow in the winter, when cold weather can limit an EV’s range.

Others aren’t ready now but might be convinced to switch in the future.

“Maybe when I’m retired,” quipped Steven Realy, a foreman for a subcontractor at a housing development in Pittsfield Township, Michigan.

Realy, 28, whose company uses diesel trucks to carry equipment and building materials, doesn’t think an electric truck will do the job now but maybe in the future.

“When electric takes off more than what it is right now,” he said, “I could see myself owning one, definitely.”

Yet it may be difficult to persuade some people to give up the big gas engines they’re used to.

“I like my V-8,” Anthony Lane, a 26-year-old plumber in the same development, said from the driver’s seat of his gleaming Chevrolet Silverado.

Aside from a charging port and a Lightning decal, Ford’s new truck resembles a standard F-150. That was intentional. Ford wants the Lightning to be perceived as just as capable as gasoline versions, if not more so.

Even the base version of the electric F-150, with two rows of seats and a 230-mile estimated range per battery charge, can haul up to a ton in its bed. A high-end Lightning equipped with a longer-range battery can tow an estimated 10,000 pounds, matching many gas-powered trucks, though falling about 3,000 pounds shy of Ford’s V-8 engines.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the truck is its price, which Ford said is about equal to a comparably equipped gasoline F-150. With a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 still available on Ford electric vehicles, the base price falls to around $32,500. That’s below the lowest-priced gas F-150 with a crew cab, which starts at roughly $37,000.

The Lightning has a front trunk with plugs for power tools and lights at job or camp sites. And if the electricity goes, out, it can run your house for up to three days, which Farley expects to be a big selling point.

Competition for the Lightning is looming. General Motors says it’s working on an electric Silverado. Stellantis is developing an electric Ram. Tesla’s angular Cybertruck is due out this year. And startups Bollinger Motors, Nikola, Rivian and Lordstown Motors have trucks in the works.

All will face an inevitable obstacle in seeking buyers: brand loyalty. Pickup drivers often stick with one company for life. Sometimes, they choose a brand because it’s been in the family for years, if not generations.

“I’m not a Ford guy,” said Lane, the plumber. “I drive Chevys my whole life.”

Once General Motors comes out with an electric Silverado, though, Lane might consider a change.

“I’ll probably stick with the gas,” he said. “But if they ever fully switch over to electric, I’ll probably get the Chevy one.”

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Ford’s big bet: Fans of F-150 pickup will embrace electric

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That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.

”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for what it’s doing. But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust the management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.

The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. It also hopes to “identify potential vulnerabilities” as part of efforts to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries, who are consistently infiltrating U.S. networks, sometimes operating from unused internet address blocks.

The statement did not specify whether the “pilot project” would involve outside contractors.

The Pentagon periodically contends with unauthorized squatting on its space, in part because there has been a shortage of first-generation internet addresses since 2011; they now sell at auction for upwards of $25 each.

Madory said advertising the address space will make it easier to chase off squatters and allow the U.S. military to “collect a massive amount of background internet traffic for threat intelligence.”

Some cybersecurity experts have speculated that the Pentagon may be using the newly advertised space to create “honeypots,” machines set up with vulnerabilities to draw hackers. Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity.

“This greatly increases the space they could monitor,” said Madory, who published a blog post on the matter Saturday.

What a Pentagon spokesman could not explain Saturday is why the Defense Department chose Global Resource Systems LLC, a company with no record of government contracts, to manage the address space.

“As to why the DoD would have done that I’m a little mystified, same as you,” said Paul Vixie, an internet pioneer credited with designing its naming system and the CEO of Farsight Security.

The company did not return phone calls or emails from The Associated Press. It has no web presence, though it has the domain grscorp.com. Its name doesn’t appear on the directory of its Plantation, Florida, domicile, and a receptionist drew a blank when an AP reporter asked for a company representative at the office earlier this month. She found its name on a tenant list and suggested trying email. Records show the company has not obtained a business license in Plantation.

Incorporated in Delaware and registered by a Beverly Hills lawyer, Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T, or Comcast.

The only name associated with it on the Florida business registry coincides with that of a man listed as recently as 2018 in Nevada corporate records as a managing member of a cybersecurity/internet surveillance equipment company called Packet Forensics. The company had nearly $40 million in publicly disclosed federal contracts over the past decade, with the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among its customers.

That man, Raymond Saulino, is also listed as a principal in a company called Tidewater Laskin Associates, which was incorporated in 2018 and obtained an FCC license in April 2020. It shares the same Virginia Beach, Virginia, address — a UPS store — in corporate records as Packet Forensics. The two have different mailbox numbers. Calls to the number listed on the Tidewater Laskin FCC filing are answered by an automated service that offers four different options but doesn’t connect callers with a single one, recycling all calls to the initial voice recording.

Saulino did not return phone calls seeking comment, and a longtime colleague at Packet Forensics, Rodney Joffe, said he believed Saulino was retired. Joffe, a cybersecurity luminary, declined further comment. Joffe is chief technical officer at Neustar Inc., which provides internet intelligence and services for major industries, including telecommunications and defense.

In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates.

The company continues to sell “lawful intercept” equipment, according to its website. One of its current contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is for “harnessing autonomy for countering cyber-adversary systems.” A contract description says it is investigating “technologies for conducting safe, non-disruptive, and effective active defense operations in cyberspace.” Contract language from 2019 says the program would “investigate the feasibility of creating safe and reliable autonomous software agencies that can effectively counter malicious botnet implants and similar large-scale malware.”

Deepening the mystery is Global Resource Systems’ name. It is identical to that of a firm that independent internet fraud researcher Ron Guilmette says was sending out email spam using the very same internet routing identifier. It shut down more than a decade ago. All that differs is the type of company. This one’s a limited liability corporation. The other was a corporation. Both used the same street address in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

“It’s deeply suspicious,” said Guilmette, who unsuccessfully sued the previous incarnation of Global Resource Systems in 2006 for unfair business practices. Guilmette considers such masquerading, known as slip-streaming, a ham-handed tactic in this situation. “If they wanted to be more serious about hiding this they could have not used Ray Saulino and this suspicious name.”

Guilmette and Madory were alerted to the mystery when network operators began inquiring about it on an email list in mid-March. But almost everyone involved didn’t want to talk about it. Mike Leber, who owns Hurricane Electric, the internet backbone company handing the address blocks’ traffic, didn’t return emails or phone messages.

Despite an internet address crunch, the Pentagon — which created the internet — has shown no interest in selling any of its address space, and a Defense Department spokesman, Russell Goemaere, told the AP on Saturday that none of the newly announced space has been sold.

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The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved

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Congressional districts that attract highly educated workers around areas like Denver and Charlotte, North Carolina, were among the communities that saw mean household income rise the most from 2013 to 2018, according to new figures released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Other congressional districts that had the highest household income growth were in or around Houston; Pittsburgh; Provo, Utah; parts of South Florida and the wealthy retirement haven of Sarasota

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Most of the income growth in these areas came from wages, said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities.

“Metro areas tied to technology have tended to perform best, although global gateways and energy markets had their moment in the sun earlier in the decade,” Vitner said.

Household income grew more in Democratic-leaning districts than Republican ones, according to an Associated Press analysis of the data by congressional districts. Household income grew by an average of more than $12,000 in Democratic-leaning congressional districts, compared to more than $9,000 in Republican-leaning districts.

What impact that has going into the 2020 elections remains to be seen, experts said.

“Surely new evidence of income level rises in coastal and more highly educated districts relative to others plays to the Democrats’ strength,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. “But it also makes clear they need to redouble their efforts to court non-college voters in less prosperous districts in the run-up to the 2020 election.”

The greater income growth in Democratic-leaning districts likely had to do with the fact that they’re in cities where incomes tend to be higher, Vitner said.

“Republican districts tend to be more rural and have lower wages,” he said.

In some areas, the growth in household income was enormous. In House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district, located in San Francisco, the epicenter of the last decade’s tech boom, household income jumped by a third from almost $110,500 to more than $150,000.

In other areas, income growth was significantly more modest.

In the district that covers Huntington, West Virginia, average household income only went up 5% to about $52,500. The area represented by Republican Rep. Carol Miller has been gripped by the struggles of the coal industry and is losing population.

Some industrial areas also have struggled to adjust to changing circumstances.

“The difficulty that some manufacturing areas have been facing is that they have not been able to re-position their economies quick enough to stem the outflow of younger workers,” Vitner said.

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Income Growth Greatest in Tech Hubs over the Past 5 years

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Blue Origin used the same rocket for the sixth time in West Texas. The suborbital flight exposed the capsule and its contents — including NASA experiments, artwork and a commercial grapevine study — to more than three minutes of weightlessness.

“Welcome back, New Shepard. A beautiful launch to space and back,” said launch commentator Ariane Cornell, director of astronaut and orbital sales. “We can’t wait to do it again.”

Cornell said the company plans another couple of spaceflights before putting people on board. The craft has the biggest windows ever built into a spacecraft.

Earlier this year, Blue Origin said it aimed to fly passengers by the end of 2019. This was the company’s 12th test flight and the third this year.

“We are going to take our time, step by step, and as we’ve said before, this is not a race. We need to understand the entire system,” Cornell said.

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NASA had trash-recycling and plant experiments on board. Space Cargo Unlimited, a Luxembourg start-up that flew 12 bottles of red Bordeaux wine to the International Space Station last month for a year of aging, had vine calluses, or cells, from three types of French Cabernet grapes on board, each in its own petri dish.

The flight also included stacks of postcards from youngsters who drew their vision of the future of space. The postcards will be returned to their creators with a flown-in-space postmark.

New Shepard is named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space. The company is working in Cape Canaveral on a larger orbital-class rocket, named New Glenn after the first American to orbit the world, John Glenn.

Bezos is the founder of Amazon.

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Blue Origin Launches, Lands Same Rocket Record 6 Times

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The failed stunt, which ranks high on the list of embarrassing auto industry rollouts, came just after CEO Elon Musk bragged about the strength of “Tesla Armor Glass” on the wedge-shaped “Cybertruck.”

On a Los Angeles-area stage with Musk, Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen hurled a softball-sized metal ball at the driver’s side window to demonstrate the strength of the glass, which Musk called “Transparent Metal Glass.” It shattered.

“Oh my … God,” Musk said, uttering an expletive. “Maybe that was a little too hard.”

They tried it a second time on the left passenger window, which spider-cracked again.

Musk recovered with a one-liner: “At least it didn’t go through. That’s a plus side.”

The failure overshadowed the truck’s slick unveiling, with some analysts panning its looks. The truck, a stainless-steel covered triangle, resembles the much-derided Pontiac Aztek SUV sold by General Motors in the early 2000s.

Investors apparently didn’t like the stunts or the truck’s futuristic design, which is aimed at getting a foothold in the most profitable part of the U.S. auto market. Tesla shares fell more than 6% Friday.

“Tesla’s Cybertruck reveal will likely disappoint current pickup truck owners, and we see the vehicle remaining a niche and not a mainstream product,” Cowen Investment Research analyst Jeffrey Osborne wrote in a note to investors. “While we are pleased to see Tesla enter the most profitable segment of the North American passenger car market, we do not see this vehicle in its current form being a success.”

Over the years, such stunts have been common at highly rehearsed auto industry unveils. In a tweet Friday, Musk indicated Tesla had rehearsed its stunt as well, saying the same ball was thrown at the same window of the truck before the event and it “didn’t even scratch the glass.”

But like Tesla, others have seen some embarrassing mishaps. At Detroit’s auto show earlier this year, an Infiniti concept electric SUV missed its introduction when it wouldn’t start and the company couldn’t move it onto the stage.

Perhaps the most famous miscue came in Detroit in 2008 when Chrysler showed off the new Ram pickup truck with a cattle drive outside the convention center. But some of the cattle started mating, drawing attention away from the vehicle.

“You can rehearse it 100 times, and the 101st is the time you do it before the public and it fails,” said Bud Liebler, who was head of marketing and communications at Chrysler from 1980 through 2001.

He was in charge when Chrysler became famous for auto-show stunts, including driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee up the entry steps and through the front windows of Detroit’s convention center in the 1990s.

Liebler said he considers the Tesla event a “fiasco,” but said Musk did the only thing he could when the glass broke. He joked about it and continued on with the show. “It’s got to be an embarrassment,” Liebler said.

With the Cybertruck, Tesla was aiming for Detroit’s profit machine, the full-sized pickup.

The truck came on stage with lasers and flames, and a demonstration of its stainless steel skin developed by Musk’s SpaceX rocket company went well. Von Holzhausen swung a sledgehammer at the driver’s side door, and it bounced away harmlessly without any damage.

Musk said the Cybertruck will start at $39,900 but a tri-motor, long-range version will have a base price of $69,900. It will have a battery range of between 250 miles (400 kilometers) and more than 500 miles and will be able to tow up to 14,000 pounds (6,350 kilograms). Tesla says the truck can go from zero to 60 mph (97 kph) in 2.9 seconds.

The electric pickup truck will be in production in 2021, Musk said.

With the truck, Tesla is gunning for buyers with fierce brand loyalty.

Many pickup truck buyers stick with the same brand for life, choosing a truck based on what their mom or dad drove or what they decided was the toughest model, said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

“They’re very much creatures of habit,” Gordon said. Getting a loyal Ford F-150 buyer to consider switching to another brand such as a Chevy Silverado, “it’s like asking him to leave his family,” he said.

Tesla’s pickup is more likely to appeal to weekend warriors who want an electric vehicle that can handle some outdoor adventure. And it could end up cutting into Tesla’s electric vehicle sedan sales instead of winning over traditional pickup truck drivers.

“The needs-based truck buyer, the haulers, the towers at the worksites of the world, that’s going to be a much tougher sell,” said Akshay Anand, executive analyst at Kelley Blue Book.

The truck will help Musk enter a new market, but it’s not likely to make a bunch of money for the company. Instead, Tesla will rely on its mainstream Model 3 sedan and the upcoming Model Y small SUV due to go on sale in early 2021.

Musk stands to face competition when his truck hits the market. Ford, which has long dominated the pickup truck landscape, plans to launch an all-electric F-150 pickup. General Motors CEO Mary Barra said its battery-electric pickup will come out by the fall of 2021.

Rivian, a startup based near Detroit, plans to begin production in the second half of 2020 on an electric pickup that starts at $69,000 and has a battery range of 400-plus miles (640 kilometers).

Tesla has struggled to meet delivery targets for its sedans, and some fear the new vehicle will shift the company’s attention away from the goal of more consistently meeting its targets.

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Tesla Cybertruck: Stainless Steel, Broken Glass, and Buzz

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