An attempt has just been made, once again, to hack the Democratic National Committee. This time, the target: the Democratic Party’s voter database.

CNN is reporting that on Tuesday, the DNC reached out to the FBI to inform them of the attempted hack after a cybersecurity firm discovered a website that faked the look of VoteBuilder, the party’s voter database login page.

SEE ALSO: Russian hackers target Republican think tanks critical of Moscow, Microsoft says

The cybersecurity firm that first found the fake page, Lookout, does not work for the DNC, but itimmediately reached out to the party upon discovering the hacking attempt. 

In a statement provided to Mashable by Lookout, the firm explained how its “phishing AI detection discovered a domain with a custom phishing kit deployed on DigitalOcean,” which is a web hosting provider. “After notifying the hosting provider the phishing site was then taken down by DigitalOcean within hours.” In addition to reach out to the DigitalOcean and the DNC, Mike Murray, Lookout’s VP of Security Intelligence, also contacted NGP VAN, the Democratic Party’s tech provider which operates the VoteBuilder website.

CNN’s Democratic source believes that this hacking attempt was unsuccessful.

These sorts of attacks, known as spear phishing, have previously been deployed against the DNC. The now infamous DNC emails of the 2016 election were obtained via a phishing campaign targeting Democratic staffers. These operations work by mimicking the design of the actual login page of whatever service its targets use which the hacker wants to access. With spear phishing, hackers can easily reach multiple targets and increase their chances of just one staffer mistaking a fake login page for the real thing and providing the hacker with their username and password.

Russia’s intelligence agency was behind the 2016 DNC email hack, as we now know through special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers earlier last month.

Microsoft had recently announced two separate incidents where they seized domains used in unsuccessful spear phishing operations via court order. Those attempts, which were also linked to Russia, targeted vulnerable Congressional Democrats as well as conservative think tanks critical of Moscow.

So far, it’s unknown who’s behind this attempt against the Democrat’s voter database.

By now, we use Venmo so much that its name has secured a place in our cultural rolodex of new verbs. 

While we most commonly use Venmo to send cash for everything from last night’s dinner to this month’s rent, there’s plenty of behavior on the app that’s led me to raise an eyebrow from time to time. 

SEE ALSO: Venmo fare-splitting is coming to the Uber app

Sure, sometimes I catch myself attempting to decipher the meaning behind the emojis sent from one acquaintance to another, but in the year 2018 it’s time we really nail down what it means to be a good Venmo user. Here’s what you need to do to make your experience as innocuous as possible.

1. Don’t treat it like just another social media platform

Like lots of social apps, Venmo’s so woven into the fabric of our day-to-day lives that it’s sometimes treated like a fun online gathering space rather than what it actually is: just another functional tool on our phones. This happens for two reasons: Because the payment privacy settings default to public, some people make the mistake of 1) not changing it to private, or 2) taking another person’s public payment as an invitation to interact. 

“We make it default because it’s fun to share [information] with friends in the social world,” a Venmo representative once told CNET, explaining that the company has seen “people open up Venmo to see what their family and friends are up to.”

If you are this person, please stop. Venmo deserves better. Don’t use it to catch up with friends in the comments — that’s what texting or calling is for. Save your “likes” for posts of more substance than just “$ for gas!” 

2. Don’t bring up a friend’s Venmo transactions in the real world

What happens on Venmo should stay on Venmo. Please do not mention that Nicole and I got smoothies during our lunch break and use that Venmo transaction to start a conversation. Nor should you mention that I paid an Annie for bagels, whether you intentionally sought out that information on your Venmo feed or not. There are enough ways to stalk someone online without bringing up ways in which they have decided to spend their hard-earned cash. 

On a more serious note, privacy concerns on Venmo are at an all-time high after news broke in July that the tool reveals an “alarming amount” of personal information — mostly because of the app’s default public setting. As we reported, security researcher Hang Do Thi Duc compiled more than 207 million Venmo transactions and determined that they can reveal a lot about a user’s personal life. Don’t do this if you’re not a security researcher. 

In short, we should all be making our transactions private. But for those times we forget to change the setting, don’t be *that* person who takes things up to a creepy new level. 

3. Relatedly, don’t use it to stalk celebrities 

Venmo makes it a little too easy to stalk everyone from your exes to…actual celebrities. There’s an art to tracking down celebrity Venmo profiles that I unfortunately mastered at one point in my life. But no matter how desperately you want the Chainsmokers to send you money to buy their music, there’s never an excuse for this level of stalking. It doesn’t matter if they’re big or small-scale stars. No matter how much you want celebrities to send you some of that sweet cash, maybe just wait for a giveaway from Bow Wow before pressing send on that request to the Liam Hemsworths or Kevin McHales of the world. 

4. Pay — and charge — people right away

This should be a no-brainer at this point, folks. We live in a time where instant gratification is the norm and if you can’t keep up then maybe you should stick to paying people back in cash whenever you get the chance to stop by an ATM. 

That goes for charging people, too. Venmo thrives thanks to the fact that it lets you pay people back instantly, but perhaps my biggest pet peeve about transactions is when someone waits for days, or even WEEKS, before charging for some shared expense you can hardly remember.

5. Forget about the small payments 

You should know that your friends will probably judge you for charging someone for any amount under $5. (This obviously varies from person to person. We all have bills to pay.) Chances are, you and your friend’s slightly uneven debts will eventually even out. Plus, generosity makes you live longer!

6. Don’t be afraid to use that reminder function — it shouldn’t come off as passive aggressive!

Talking about money with friends is still a bit of a taboo subject. But facing your fears and communicating clearly is better than being broke, so don’t be afraid to send out some reminders should you be waiting on big payments. 

Unless you need $$ for a timely payment (like a bill, for example,) maybe ease up on the day-after reminders. I usually wait a week before sending friends that sweet, sweet prompt to pay up. That way, you’ve give them a little leeway in case they don’t have push notifications enabled, are on vacation, or are just genuinely forgetful. 

7. Don’t charge people for unexpected costs

On a similar note, communication is key — so don’t be that person who acts like they’re covering the bill only to secretly hit friends with unanticipated charges. I’ve seen Venmo charges like these break friendships! And fine, these are friendships that were, I’ll admit, already fragile, but it’s a slippery slope once you get into the habit of not communicating which expenses are shared and which you’ve got covered. 

8. And above all else, be responsible 

Venmo has thrown a wrench into modern dating etiquette, added a new card to your already crowded wallet, and likely a pretty standard part of your daily life. If you can help it, don’t succumb to its evil ways and use it as a tool to stalk your ex — or  dump someone. That’s what literally every other app is for, so use Venmo for its intended purposes and you’ll be just fine.

Hurricane Lane, which is currently bearing down on Hawaii, is “not a well behaved storm,” according to the state’s governor David Ige.

Spinning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the hurricane has grown into a monstrous Category 5 storm, the most powerful type of hurricane with winds now reaching 160 mph. 

Tuesday evening, the National Hurricane Center called the cyclone “an impressive hurricane,” and forecast that the storm will “move dangerously close to the main Hawaiian Islands as a hurricane Thursday through Saturday.”

SEE ALSO: Why Trump’s EPA wants to kill the nation’s most ambitious climate change plan

Hawaii’s residents should “prepare for a significant impact” from Hurricane Lane, Ige said.

National hurricane scientists emphasize that even if the center of the storm — where winds are strongest — doesn’t pass directly over the islands, the state could still face serious problems from the storm.

A storm this sprawling and powerful can bring threatening downpours and winds “well away from the center of the hurricane, and impacts could be felt on any of the islands,” the National Hurricane Center said.

It’s rare for powerful storms to veer near these well-populated tropical islands, in large part because hurricanes feed on warmer waters, and the oceans around Hawaii are often relatively cool for tropical seas. 

Yet, the National Hurricane Center notes that ocean waters along the storm’s predicted track are currently “warm enough to support a major hurricane.”

Hurricane Lane is only the sixth Category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the central Pacific, Federal Emergency Management Agency atmospheric scientist Michael Lowry tweeted. But, Lane is the closest Category 5 storm to Hawaii that scientists have ever observed, he added. 

Although any year can bring warmer waters to a marine region, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and university scientists published research last year arguing that the tropical Pacific will likely see more “extremely active” hurricane seasons as human-caused global warming boosts ocean temperatures.

As the planet continues an accelerated rate of warming due to human-caused climate change, around 95 percent of accumulated heat gets absorbed by the oceans, increasing the background levels of ocean warming and making warmer-than-normal temperatures more likely. 

“Global warming is really ocean warming,” Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently said in an interview.

A classic hurricane killer is wind shear — winds that hit hurricanes on their sides and can tilt them or blow off their top. 

But as of Tuesday night, government forecasters didn’t expect increasing wind shear around Hawaii until Thursday evening, after some major effects are likely already felt in the state.

As the storm skims the islands, or perhaps even makes landfall, severe and potentially historic flooding is expected. 

According to the National Hurricane Center, there will certainly be battering waves on the coast and potentially “life-threatening flash flooding from heavy rainfall” as water pours down the famously mountainous Hawaiian terrain. 

This post is part of Hard Refresh, a soothing weekly column where we try to cleanse your brain of whatever terrible thing you just witnessed on Twitter.

After hours looking at a screen and dealing with whatever trash the internet has to throw at me, my brain is frazzled.

When I need to stitch my mind back together, there’s a panacea I often rely on: The oddly calming combination of police radio and ambient music. 

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youarelistening.to blends never-ending streams from police scanners around the world, airport traffic control, spooky numbers stations, or even speeches from John F. Kennedy, with a playlist of ambient music from SoundCloud.

It started as fluke, according to its creator Eric Eberhardt, telling FACT he was listening to police radio in San Francisco after the Giants had won the World Series in 2010, before getting bored and switching on some music.

“I started playing some electronic music from my iTunes, and that combination of the police scanner audio and the ambient electronic music that I was playing worked really, really well together,” he told the publication. “It sounded like the soundtrack to a film or something.”

Indeed, listening to the indistinguishable murmurs of humans talking over the soft atmospherics of ambient music has a cinematic quality to it.

It might just be an LAPD officer reporting a narcotics spot over the radio, or a pilot requesting to land at Sydney Airport, but the addition of gently rising strings behind their voices makes it so much more compelling. Don’t knock it until you get immersed in it.

The website has expanded to a monthly radio show on London-based station NTS, in which one episode features scanner audio around the eruption of the Kilauea volcano.

Certainly the concept of interspersing field recordings and music is nothing new. 

Musicians have immortalized recordings in albums like the seminal “Chill Out,” by British group the KLF, or in the works of Scottish duo Boards of Canada, who heavily sample public broadcasting TV of the ’70s.

But the mostly improvised nature of youarelistening.to makes for a fascinating experience, and one that my mind appreciates getting lost in after a long day. 

Raise your hand if you walk 10,000 steps a day or complete 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity or 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week as recommended by the American Heart Association (AHA).

It’s wonderful if you do — you’re living a healthy and active life. But most Americans fall short of these recommended fitness goals, putting them at higher risk of getting health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or dementia.

Why? The goals feel unachievable. To help correct this, Google reached out to the AHA to build a revamped Google Fit app and platform that better translates its physical activity guidelines into more achievable goals that Americans can incorporate into their daily routines. Basically: You don’t need to have a gym membership in order to live a healthy and active life.

SEE ALSO: Google One officially launches with cheaper storage plans

Google Fit launched in 2014 as an all-in-one dashboard for Android and Wear OS (formerly Android Wear) users to track all of their physical activities and monitor their health.

The app has added numerous features over the years, and while it’s great to have so much data on oneself, non-power users have found it overwhelming.

During a sit-down preview for the new Google Fit app rolling out to Android, Wear OS, and iOS users immediately, Google Fit’s senior product manager, Margaret Hollendoner, told me the drop-off for Fit users was unsurprisingly high. Most users set up their Fit profiles and then gradually over time, they give up on their goals.

“As we talked to our users and tried to learn more about what their experience was, we heard that the flexibility of the app that might have worked for some power users was quite overwhelming for these people,” says Hollendoner.

Hollendoner listed a variety of reasons for why users might become unmotivated to continue staying active, including (but not limited to): dauntingly high goals and seasonal changes or holiday disruptions. 

“10,000 steps seemed really daunting to these people who were really far from that total,” says Hollendoner. “They weren’t really seeing any results for the effort they were putting in and so they were losing motivation and struggling to stay motivated over time.

Together with the AHA, Hollendoner and the Wear OS team worked to create a new way to measure success, while simultaneously meeting the organizations recommended guidelines.

New metrics: Move minutes and Heart Points

Though it may be fairly obvious what the AHA’s weekly 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity or 150 minutes of moderate physical activity means, it turns out there’s a larger portion of the American population that has no clue what that really shakes out to. 

What’s considered moderate activity and what’s considered vigorous? Hollendoner and her team set about to better define them with the new Google Fit app.

The new Google Fit is no less robust than the version it replaces. It still tracks everything the old app did (steps, calories, heart rate, weight, etc.) and still pulls in data from third-party apps like the running and cycling app Strava, but how this data is presented is all new.

“We are still learning what it takes to communicate those guidelines best to Americans,” says Laurie Whitsel, Vice President of Policy Research and Translation at the American Heart Association. “At the American Heart Association, we’re really supportive of companies like Google that are taking that step to incorporate evidence-based recommendations into applications that transform lives.”

Instead of focusing primarily on steps or minutes of any particular physical activity, the new Google Fit uses two new metrics to measure activity intensity: Move Minutes (moderate) and Heart Points (vigorous), represented with a blue and green ring, respectively.

“We learned from the AHA that while steps are a great way to get people moving, the intensity of the activity is really when you start to see health benefits in terms of the effort you’re putting in, more so than the amount of activity you’re getting,” says Hollendoner.

The new Google Fit uses two new metrics to measure activity intensity: Move Minutes and Heart Points.

With Move Minutes and Heart Points, the new Google Fit encourages user to live a less sedentary lifestyle, but also to get their hearts rates up, which has been scientifically proven to be good for your health.

“If you look at the health benefits of people who meet the 150 minutes a week, there’s a 35 percent reduction in heart disease in those people,” Kapil Parakh, Medical Lead for Google Fit and a practicing cardiologist, explained to me.

“It’s beyond just the heart — levels of diabetes are 45 percent lower. If you look at falls, depression, and dementia it’s 25 percent lower. Even cancer is 20 percent lower. Breast cancer and colon cancer in people who are meeting the 150 minute guideline is 20 percent lower. It’s pretty remarkable the spectrum of health benefits.” 

Move Minutes and Heart Points are far easier to understand and less overwhelming to process Hollendoner says.

Per the AHA’s Move and Heart Point translations of its recommended time-based physical activity goals, Fit recommends users get at least 60 minutes of movement per day and at least 10 Heart Points. After a week of tracking, the app will slowly suggest higher goals, based on your consistency.

Move Minutes are self-explanatory: For every minute you move, you get closer towards your Move Minutes goal. A Move Minute is any moderate intensity movement tracked by your Android phone or Wear OS smartwatch. Any heart rate that’s 50-69 percent above your max predicted heart rate is considered moderate intensity, Parakh says.

Heart Points, on the other hand, measure vigorous activity. Users get one Heart Point for every Move minute and two points if you dial up the activity if your heart rate is 70 percent or higher than your normal heart rate.

Move Minutes and Heart Points are designed to help motivate users to stay active throughout their day with small changes. 

For example, picking up the pace while you’re walking from the train station to the work office could  be recorded as a vigorous activity if gets your heart rate high enough. All that gardening work you do every weekend? That counts as vigorous physical activity towards your goals. 

The traditional physical workouts still count (Google Fit recognizes up to 120 different physical activities), so if you’re into rowing, or running, or biking, or anything that gets your heart rate going higher than usual, they’ll still be logged and translated into Heart Points.

“It’s not the case that you need to buy a gym membership or suddenly start working out if you’re not doing so today,” says Hollendoner. “That’s the kind of thing we want people to understand — design a metric to help users realize this is something they could do in their daily routines and that that would have a much greater impact on their health than sort of quantity of exercise alone.”

In many ways, the new Google Fit feels like it’s gamifying physical activities. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. Anyone who uses Apple Watch for fitness-tracking will know that the smartwatch is effective in essentially guilting you into “closing the rings” and completing your daily fitness goals. The new Google Fit is no different than that.

If a user sees they’ve already completed their Move Minute goal, but haven’t for their Heart Points, they may actually take action and walk quicker instead of slowly. 

When I asked if these two metrics were exclusive for Google to use, Hollendoner told me they’re not. 

“It’s a new concept in Google Fit, but it’s going to be in the Fit platform too,” says Hollendoller. “We are reaching out to all of the partners like Strava — so if I’ve got my activity from Strava that are showing up here we can give people credit for what they’re doing in the Fit app, but we’re also making Heart Points available in the platform so that Strava and other apps can start to pick up on this concept.

“And hopefully other apps will start to use it and it’ll become more reinforcement for the existing recommendations and guidelines. So it’s not intended to be exclusively for Google Fit, but that’s where users will see it first.”

More achievable fitness goals

Google showed me a preview of the new Google Fit app working on a Wear OS-powered Fossil smartwatch as well as on iOS and Android and I have to admit it’s quite nice.

I’m not ashamed to say that I really relate to the majority of Google Fit users. I liked that the old version of the app was so detailed with my fitness data, but I personally found the goals impossibly difficult to achieve so I gave up on using it.

I also like that the app has more emphasis on celebrating successes with features like the trophy section, which includes all of your accomplished goals and detailed breakdowns for them. It seems like such a silly thing – that you’d need little digital awards to provide reinforcement — but it goes a long way to making sure you actually continue to maintain your goals. 

The new Google Fit app feels lighter, but still powerful. Power users still have access to an immense amount of data. Most importantly, at a glance, the two new metric goals, Move Minutes and Heart Points, make physical activity feel less like work and more like a regular part of your life (because it is and should be).