Japanese cybersecurity software firm Trend Micro has patched two critical Apex One vulnerabilities that allow attackers to gain remote code execution (RCE) on vulnerable Windows systems.

Apex One is an endpoint security platform that detects and responds to security threats, including malware, spyware, malicious tools, and vulnerabilities.

The first critical Apex One security flaw patched this week (CVE-2025-71210) is due to a path traversal weakness in the Trend Micro Apex One management console, allowing attackers without privileges to execute malicious code on unpatched systems.

The second, tracked as CVE-2025-71211, is another Apex One management console path traversal vulnerability, similar in scope to CVE-2025-71210 but affecting a different executable.

As Trend Micro explained in a Tuesday security advisory, successful exploitation requires attackers to “have access to the Trend Micro Apex One Management Console, so customers that have their console’s IP address exposed externally should consider mitigating factors such as source restrictions if not already applied.”

“Even though an exploit may require several specific conditions to be met, Trend Micro strongly encourages customers to update to the latest builds as soon as possible,” it warned.

To address these critical security flaws, Trend Micro has patched the vulnerabilities in the SaaS Apex One versions and released Critical Patch Build 14136, which also fixes two high-severity privilege escalation flaws in the Windows agent and four more affecting the macOS agent.

While Trend Micro has not flagged these vulnerabilities as exploited in the wild, threat actors have abused other Apex One in attacks over the last several years.

For instance, Trend Micro warned customers to patch an actively exploited Apex One RCE vulnerability (CVE-2025-54948) in August 2025, and addressed two other Apex One zero-days exploited in the wild in September 2022 (CVE-2022-40139) and in September 2023 (CVE-2023-41179).

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) currently tracks 10 Trend Micro Apex vulnerabilities that have either been or are still being exploited in the wild.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

Get the guide

Apple TV is teaming up with Netflix to stream the new season of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which will debut on both platforms at midnight PT/3 a.m. ET on Feb. 27. The series will be available for Apple TV subscribers in the US only, the tech giant announced Thursday. The move comes as part of Apple’s expansive — and exclusive — F1 programming after the company inked a five-year deal with Formula 1 to broadcast races starting this year.

Drive to Survive has been a top performer in the docuseries category on Netflix, with viewership exceeding 10 million in the first half of 2025. Sticking with its insider, behind-the-scenes style, season 8 will follow the motorsport’s leading contenders in the lead-up to the FIA Formula 1 World Championship. Follow your favorite drivers’ stories while they’re on the track — and off — to see how they weather the competition.

Apple TV subscribers can begin streaming F1’s 2026 season when it kicks off on March 6 with the Australian Grand Prix. As an added perk of the collab, Netflix will also broadcast F1’s Canadian Grand Prix from May 22 to May 24 for its US subscribers.

from the dear-leader dept

Most of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr’s time lately has been split between destroying all consumer protection oversight and threatening media companies with fake investigations if they’re not appropriately deferential to our mad idiot king. The latter has tended to overshadow the former, but it’s all been an ugly combination of authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and rank corruption.

But every so often Carr pauses to do other stuff to show daddy Trump he’s a very good boy. Like his latest announcement that he’s creating a new “Pledge America Campaign” ahead of the country’s 250th birthday this July 4th. The campaign features a demand by Carr that U.S. media outlets make sure they’re airing “pro-America” programming through the summer holiday:

“Consistent with their longstanding public interest obligations, America’s broadcasters play a key role in educating, informing, and entertaining viewers and listeners all across America, and they are particularly well suited to air programming that is responsive to the needs and
interests of their local communities.

The Pledge America Campaign enables broadcasters to lend their voices in support of Task Force 250 and the celebration of America’s 250th birthday by airing patriotic, pro-America content that celebrates the American journey and inspires its citizens by highlighting the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today.”

This would obviously be far less ominous if Carr hadn’t spent much of the last year trampling all over the First Amendment, trying to censor comedians who make fun of Trump, threatening talk shows with fake investigations if they’re not friendly to Republicans, and abusing the FCC merger approval process to try and force large companies to be more racist and sexist.

While this is framed as a “voluntary initiative,” Carr’s recent history of launching costly and pointless investigations into companies that aren’t dutifully obedient lurks quietly in the background. You can clearly infer that Carr defines “programming that is responsive to the needs and interests of their local communities” as programming that kisses Republican ass and ignores criticism of Republican policy.

You’ll notice that Carr specifically singles out broadcasters because he’s trying to abuse the FCC’s public interest standard control over “publicly owned” airwaves:

“If Carr’s pledge is truly voluntary, there would be no reason to limit it to broadcasters, said Harold Feld, a longtime telecom attorney who is senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “If this were genuinely intended as voluntary, and genuinely about celebrating America, there is no reason to limit this to broadcasters,” Feld told Ars. “Cable operators are equally free to celebrate America, as are podcasters for that matter.”

The Trump FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner (the authoritarians refuse to fill the other vacant commission seat), Anna Gomez, had this to say about the campaign over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website:

Carr’s other effort to “empower local communities” has involved destroying popular media consolidation limits so that Trump-friendly broadcasters like Sinclair can merge and become more powerful than ever. It’s really not subtle how badly the MAGA movement wants a North Korea, Hungary, or Russia style media that delivers nothing but 24/7 agitprop blindly praising dear leader.

They’ll keep pushing toward their goal until they run into something other than soft pudding in response.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, agitprop, anna gomez, authortarian, brendan carr, broadcasters, consolidation, donald trump, fcc, media, pledge america campaign, propaganda

Accuracy is one of the most important factors to consider when selecting an AI video generator. You want to pick a program that has strong prompt adherence, meaning it is able to do what you ask it to do in your prompt. Writing a good prompt is essential to this process, but the model should be capable of handling nearly any request.

AI video generators are prone to errors known as hallucinations, especially when it comes to following the laws of physics. For example, a great AI video generator isn’t going to have a person floating through solid objects or have objects appear from out of nowhere (unless instructed to do so). While every AI program messes up sometimes, a capable generator won’t regularly produce these kinds of errors. 

Because hallucinations are unavoidable with AI, the ability to edit your content is also important. More creative AI platforms are introducing tools to edit your output, which is great as it gives you more hands-on controls to perfect AI outputs. If many clarifying prompts are required or if you’re not able to edit your content, those are signs you may want to switch to another program.

Creativity is also important. Creative AI tools are often used for brainstorming, exploration and planning. The best AI video models can bring a wide variety of artistic ideas to life and build off your reference images.

Response speed is another factor. Generating AI videos is a complex task, so most models are able to create them between 2 and 5 minutes. Models that take longer to generate videos may be annoying to use, but if they result in better videos, the trade-off may be worthwhile. On the flip side, a model that produces good results quickly is noteworthy, too.

You’re also going to want to read the fine print, meaning a company’s privacy and usage policies. There are a lot of concerns about how AI models are created and whether copyright-protected content was used. Creators, celebrities and public figures have loudly voiced concerns over the ability of AI video generators to make content that’s too indecipherable from reality. This is especially worrisome as we’ve seen how companies’ guardrails against creating illegal and abusive content aren’t perfect. You ought to understand how the AI company is using your data, moderates content and what ownership or rights you retain over the videos — these vary by service. 

In theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these features now conflict with each other, force us to deal with more complex devices that don’t last nearly as long, and become veritable vampires for your precious attention.

Whereas in the olden days a phone was just used for phone calls, now it’s also a video and photo camera, multimedia computer, pager, and more, but at any point an incoming phone call can interrupt what you are doing. There’s also always the temptation of doom scrolling on one of the infinite ‘social media’ apps. Even appliances like televisions and refrigerators are like that now, adding ‘smarts’ that also vie for your attention, whether it’s with advertisements, notifications, or worse.

Meanwhile trying to simply do some writing work on your PC is a battle against easy distractions, leading people to flee to the digital equivalent of typewriters out of sheer desperation. Similarly, we increasingly see ‘dumb’ phones, and other single-task devices making a comeback, both as commercial options and as DIY projects by the community.

Are we seeing the end of the ‘everything device’ and the return to a more simple time?

Bored Is Good

In the before times, when the iPhones hadn’t yet flooded the planet and Facebooks weren’t even a twinkle yet in some bloke’s eye, your attention wasn’t nearly as much preyed upon as it is today. Spending time on the World Wide Web wasn’t that prevalent, people weren’t yet walking around with displays practically glued to their faces, and if you wanted to do any task it took real effort.

Although I learned to touch-type on an electric typewriter and briefly owned a Brother typewriter, I was already using PCs and word processor software most of the time. Of course, this was initially on MS-DOS with WordPerfect 5.1, running first on the family 286 PC and later the IBM PS/2 386SX system that my father’s work had sold off for a pittance. Back in the single-tasking MS-DOS days it meant that once you were running WordPerfect, or games like Stunts 3D or Doom, that was all you did.

Later I’d run Microsoft Office on Windows, but with only dial-up internet available the temptation from distractions were minimal. Not until the arrival of always-online broadband internet would you have to suffer through notifications from IRC, MSN, ICQ and whatever else you had running in the background, but even then you’d not be on the PC all the time.

When it came to entertainment, such as watching TV, playing a movie or music, it would be just that one thing with zero interruptions on the HiFi set, a Walkman or TV. Along with only landline phones that you were usually not within hearing distance of, it was easy to be ‘bored’ and do some quiet reading, drawing or prod at some small wildlife in a puddle outdoors. Even game consoles were still fully offline, so couch-based gaming – optionally with split-screen – was as multiplayer as things got.

Although even during the 1990s many people had email, you weren’t expected to check your mailbox more than once a week, perhaps a few times a day for serious nerds.

The Online Cacophony

Much of the curse of the ‘everything device’ can be reduced to the fact that everything has to be connected to some remote service or a dozen. Just imagine not having internet on your smartphone, smart TV or PC, and how it almost instantly plummets you into chronic anxiety as only just about everything is connected to some online service, or depends on data stored on remote servers.

Getting away from all this is hard, as signing up for a dozen social media services is part of social pressure, and each of these services make sure to incessantly pull you in with updates and notifications. Then there are advertisements that have become the main financing model for websites and even online services in the 21st century, which ever more intrusively barge into whatever it is that you’re trying to do.

Here the term ‘chronically online‘ along with similar terms has previously been pitched and would seem to be rather apt. Ever more people have to check their smartphone for new notifications and updates, and are constantly occupied with what is happening on social media, rather than in the real world.

Worse, you’re no longer just taking snapshots on your photo camera or recording video on a camcorder, but everything goes straight into the Cloud™, from where you get pushed, harassed, and cajoled into sharing every single bit of content with everyone else, lest someone misses out on your Amazing New Experience.

Out Of Focus

The main problem with all of these chronically online everything devices is that you are never left alone with your thoughts, and thus never get ‘bored’. Everything wants a slice of your attention, with social media platforms being practically engineered to hoover up every last crumb of it, while counting on your inability to control your impulses and relying on your innate fear of missing out (FOMO), courtesy of you being a very social type of monkey.

For example, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology by Christina Koessmeier and Oliver B. Büttner investigated the causes behind the distracting effect from social media in particular. FOMO is a big reason, as we are social monkeys who generally like to be part of the group rather than excluded. Self-regulatory issues are many, such as preferring to pop over to a social media app or site rather than complete an unpleasant or difficult task. It feeds the reward center of your brain, even if you’re not actually accomplishing the task you set out to do.

One could argue here that the demise of the third place alongside the rise of ‘everything devices’ like smartphones has led to a situation where being chronically online is a way to compensate for the lack of real-life connections, albeit in an environment that’s mentally rather toxic due to how social media in particular works. By providing a sense of belonging – whether false or not – these online places become an important part of our identity.

That a lot of unhealthy behavior is associated with such a chronically online existence ought to be self-evident. Meanwhile the push towards ‘everything devices’ like smartphones isn’t due to corporate benevolence, but rather to trap all of us into endless subscription services, accessed via a terminal device explicitly designed to siphon off every last drop of our attention, focus, and money.

Escape The Trap

Rather than hapless insects, caught in the slowly solidifying tree sap that will inevitably doom them, we humans like to brag about our intellect and ability to innovate. Thus, at least some of us are trying to get out of this veritable tar pit of FOMO and social manipulation, even as we try to figure out what exactly went wrong down this path of Future Technology™.

The question is: how far exactly should we go back in time? This is a question that’s been on the minds of many, with a wide variety of solutions offered. The most extreme is of course the digital detox approach, whereby a person completely removes all smartphones and similar technology from their lives for a set period of time. Although showing positive effects on people’s mental health, this can of course only ever be a temporary intervention.

For many people the allure of switching away from smartphones and to feature phones (‘dumbphones’) is an appealing one. Personally this is a step that I have also taken, switching from a regular Android smartphone to a KaiOS-based TCL Flip 3 feature phone that’s slightly more full-featured than a Motorola Razr V3, but also equally as user-friendly and devoid of most non-phone functionality. Photos you take also are saved to internal memory, with no cloud storage unless you jump through serious hoops.

When you’re on a PC, it is of course much harder to escape the pull of FOMO and easy ‘rewards’ by doomscrolling or watching funny cat videos on YouTube. Here you can either focus on training your self-control, or by using a zero-distraction typing device that removes all temptation.

On the training side of things, the Pomodoro Technique can be done using a bog-standard kitchen timer to set the intervals, any of a number of online timers, special YouTube videos, or by building your own physical timer, with even just recently a few examples already popping up here on Hackaday.

Back To WordPerfect 5.1

It’s hard to argue with simply installing good ol’ WordPerfect 5.1 or equivalent on some DOS flavor in a system of your choice and typing away there. We have recently seen a SvarDOS-based environment that comes preloaded with a range of word processors and kin to get you started. Since you won’t even have networking, you won’t be distracted by anything. This can of course be replicated in a variety of freely available software, with FreeDOS and any word processor available from Archive.org being fair game.

You can also go down the ‘digital typewriter’ route, with some commercial options even being available here, such as the Zerowriter Ink. Alternatively you can go fully minimalistic with an ESP32-based writer deck, or opt for something vaguely more laptop-like. A lot here depends on how much you require in terms of formatting and editing features. Although sometimes you really just need to hammer out lots of words, in which case the portable equivalent of Notepad is fine, you may want to add at least some formatting.

Personally I’m quite the fan of the calming white-on-blue text with full word processing capabilities alongside the deafening noise of the buckle-spring keyboard of an IBM PS/2, but everyone has their own preferences. And maybe that is another benefit of breaking away from the Everything Device — you get to find out what works best for yourself.