Sick! The Federal Aviation Administration is targeting gamers in its most recent job advertisement for air traffic controllers. The administration’s annual hiring window opens at 12AM ET on April 17, and considering the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers, it’s calling this a period of “supercharged hiring.” Rad! The FAA’s YouTube video draws parallels between gaming and directing air traffic, and notes that the average salary for the role after three years is $155,000. Hella!

The FAA is clearly seeking players who are at least old enough to remember the Xbox One and Bjergsen in the LCS, which puts would-be candidates around their early 20s at least. It’s either that, or the ad editors really just picked videos at random from the pile of stock footage marked gamerz. But I won’t lie, it made me smile to see that Xbox One logo appear out of nowhere. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing.

“To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” US Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said. “This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller.”

The FAA has been losing more air traffic controllers than it can hire and retain since the 2010s, and this trend only worsened during the pandemic in the 2020s, according to a report released in December by the US Government Accountability Office. The administration increased hiring every year since 2021, but at the end of 2025 it employed 13,164 air traffic controllers, 6 percent fewer than in 2015, the report said. At the same time, the number of flights in the air traffic control system increased by about 10 percent, to 30.8 million.

Or, as the FAA put it on the ATC hiring page: “Join the BEST AND BRIGHTEST, the elite squad of 14,000 controllers protecting 2.9 million daily passengers.” Applicants must be a US citizen, under 31 (maybe those video editors do know what they’re doing), and be able to speak fluent English. An aptitude test, medical screening and academy training follows, among other steps.

Hackers gained access to an API for the CPUID project and changed the download links on the official website to serve malicious executables for the popular CPU-Z and HWMonitor tools.

The two utilities have millions of users who rely on them for tracking the physical health of internal computer hardware and for comprehensive specifications of a system.

Users who downloaded either tool reported on Reddit recently that the official download portal points to the Cloudflare R2 storage service and fetches a trojanized version of HWiNFO, another diagnostic and monitoring tool from a different developer.

The name of the malicious file is HWiNFO_Monitor_Setup, and running it launches a Russian installer with an Inno Setup wrapper, which is atypical and highly suspicious.

Users reported that downloading the clean hwmonitor_1.63.exe from the direct URL was still possible, indicating that the original binaries were intact, but the distribution links appear to have been poisoned.

The externalized download chain was also confirmed by Igor’s Labs and @vxunderground, who reported that a fairly advanced loader using known techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) is involved.

“As I began poking this with a stick, I discovered this is not your typical run-of-the-mill malware,” stated vxunderground.

“This malware is deeply trojanized, distributes from a compromised domain (cpuid-dot-com), performs file masquerading, is multi-staged, operates (almost) entirely in-memory, and uses some interesting methods to evade EDRs and/or AVs such as proxying NTDLL functionality from a .NET assembly.”

The researcher claims that the same threat group targeted users of the FileZilla FTP solution last month, suggesting that the attacker is focusing on widely used utilities.

The downloaded ZIP is flagged by 20 antivirus engines on VirusTotal, although not clearly identified. Some classify it as Tedy Trojan, and others as Artemis Trojan.

Some researchers on Virustotal say that the fake HWiNFO variant is an infostealer malware.

BleepingComputer has contacted CPUID to learn more about what happened, the date of the compromise, the affected versions, and what impacted users should do. A spokesperson has provided the following statement.

The same person told us that the hackers hit them at a time when the main developer was away on holiday.

Currently, it appears that CPUID has fixed the problem and now serves clean versions for both CPU-Z and HWMonitor.

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The Orion capsule carrying the Artemis II astronauts has successfully splashed down off the coast of San Diego at 8:07PM Eastern time on April 10. It signals the conclusion of Artemis II’s 10-day journey around the moon, which is meant to be a test flight for a future mission that would bring humanity back to the lunar surface. The Orion crew module carrying the mission’s astronauts separated from the service module at 7:33 PM. While the service module was designed to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the crew capsule was built to bring the astronauts back home safely.

By 7:53 PM, Orion reached our planet’s upper atmosphere, where a six-minute communication blackout occurred due to the capsule heating up as it started its guided descent. The capsule has 11 parachutes, with its drogue parachutes being deployed at 23,400 feet to stabilize and slow it down. When Orion reached 5,400 feet above the ground, the drogue parachutes were cut off so that the three main parachutes could be deployed. That decreased the capsule’s velocity to 200 feet per second, enabling a safe splashdown.

NASA’s engineers conducted several tests while the capsule was in the water before the recovery team headed to the capsule on inflatable boats to extract the crew from Orion. By 9:34 PM, all four crew members were out of the capsule. They were then hoisted into helicopters and flown to the USS John P. Murtha dock ship, where doctors will assess their health.

Artemis II launched on April 1 with four astronauts on board: NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen. They traveled around the moon for almost 10 days, reaching distances no other crewed mission has before it. The astronauts took photos of the far side of the moon, the side we don’t see from our planet, including amazing closeups of the lunar surface using their smartphones. That makes them the first humans to directly and personally view the lunar far side.

During NASA’s post-splashdown news conference, the agency said it will announce the Artemis III crew soon. Artemis III will rendezvous with one or both commercial landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin in low Earth orbit, which will take humans to the lunar surface. It will test the lander’s ability to dock with Orion before NASA lands humans on the moon again.

Astronaut eats: they’re not just Tang and Space Food Sticks these days. NASA shared a look at the menu for the Artemis II astronauts, and it doesn’t sound half bad.

The Artemis II crew will enjoy more than 10 types of beverages, including coffee, mango-peach smoothies, green tea, apple cider, lemonade, a pineapple drink, cocoa and breakfast drinks flavored in their choice of chocolate, vanilla or strawberry. 

The most common food items they’ll eat include tortillas, wheat flat bread, vegetable quiche, barbecued beef brisket, mango salad, granola with blueberries, macaroni and cheese, tropical fruit salad, couscous with nuts, broccoli au gratin, spicy green beans, almonds, cashews, and butternut squash cauliflower.

NASA also reports that the astronauts can choose to spice up their meals — there are five different hot sauces available to the crew. And culinary flavorings available include maple syrup, chocolate spread, peanut butter, spicy mustard, strawberry jam, honey, cinnamon and almond butter. Sweet treats include cookies, chocolate, pudding, cake, candy-coated almonds and cobbler.

And, no, they’re not popping a flavor pill or sucking a sandwich out of a tube, like old sci-fi shows told us.

“Food aboard Orion is ready-to-eat, rehydratable, thermostabilized or irradiated,” NASA says. “The crew uses Orion’s potable water dispenser to rehydrate foods and beverages and a compact, briefcase-style food warmer to heat meals as needed.”

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It’s the longest of the week, the Saturday edition. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: N.B.A. team that plays at M.S.G.
Answer: KNICKS

7A clue: Guy with a nerdy, passionate interest
Answer: FANBOY

8A clue: Rudely merges
Answer: CUTSIN

9A clue: Standard number of bowling pins
Answer: TEN

10A clue: Inflated sense of one’s own importance
Answer: BIGEGO

13A clue: Arrived via airplane
Answer: FLEWIN

14A clue: History-making achievements, perhaps
Answer: FIRSTS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Colonel Sanders’s fast-food chain
Answer: KFC

2D clue: Spiral-shelled mollusks
Answer: NAUTILI

3D clue: 1, 2 or 3, but not 1.23
Answer: INTEGER

4D clue: “60 Minutes” producer
Answer: CBSNEWS

5D clue: Colorful pond fish
Answer: KOI

6D clue: Thesaurus listing: Abbr.
Answer: SYN

10D clue: Closest pal, for short
Answer: BFF

11D clue: “Go on, ___!” (“Scram!”)
Answer: GIT

12D clue: Opposite of offs
Answer: ONS

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

After 10 days, the four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft have returned to Earth, their mission around the Moon a success.

Integrity, the name of the crew’s spacecraft as part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, at 5:07 p.m. Pacific Time, according to NASA. The four crew members aboard — three Americans and one Canadian — were all in “green” (or safe and healthy) condition after the Orion craft’s “perfect” landing.

The crew was composed of Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. From liftoff to splashdown, the quartet was in space for just over nine days (with NASA rounding up and calling it a 10-day mission).

Artemis II was NASA’s first mission to the Moon’s orbit in more than 50 years. The crew traveled farther from Earth than humans ever have before — reaching an estimated 252,760 miles from our planet. During their journey, the crew orbited the Moon, taking photos from their flyby of never-before-seen parts of the surface, and even witnessing a total solar eclipse. They identified new craters, naming one after Wiseman’s wife Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

“These were the ambassadors to the stars that we sent out there,” Jared Isaacman, NASA’s administrator, said after the landing. “I can’t imagine a better crew. It was a perfect mission.”

Isaacman, a commercial astronaut who has been on two private orbital missions, also took to X to celebrate the mission and signaled there would be more to come, noting that America is back in the business.

“America is back in the business of sending astronauts to the Moon and bringing them home safely,” he wrote on X, later giving credit to the entire NASA workforce. “This was a test mission, the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion, pushing farther into the unforgiving environment of space than ever before, and it carried real risk. They accepted that risk for all we stood to learn and for the exciting missions that follow, as we return to the lunar surface, build a Moon base, and prepare for what comes next.”