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Dozens of Journalists' iPhones Hacked With NSO 'Zero-Click' Spyware, Says Citizen Lab

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 14:46
Citizen Lab researchers say they have found evidence that dozens of journalists had their iPhones silently compromised with spyware known to be used by nation states. From a report: For more than the past year, London-based reporter Rania Dridi and at least 36 journalists, producers and executives working for the Al Jazeera news agency were targeted with a so-called "zero-click" attack that exploited a now-fixed vulnerability in Apple's iMessage. The attack invisibly compromised the devices without having to trick the victims into opening a malicious link. Citizen Lab, the internet watchdog at the University of Toronto, was asked to investigate earlier this year after one of the victims, Al Jazeera investigative journalist Tamer Almisshal, suspected that his phone may have been hacked. In a technical report out Sunday and shared with TechCrunch, the researchers say they believe the journalists' iPhones were infected with the Pegasus spyware, developed by Israel-based NSO Group. The researchers analyzed Almisshal's iPhone and found it had between July and August connected to servers known to be used by NSO for delivering the Pegasus spyware. The device revealed a burst of network activity that suggests that the spyware may have been delivered silently over iMessage. Logs from the phone show that the spyware was likely able to secretly record the microphone and phone calls, take photos using the phone's camera, access the victim's passwords, and track the phone's location.

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Pfizer, BioNTech Covid Vaccine Wins European Backing

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 14:05
Pfizer and BioNTech SE's Covid-19 vaccine won the backing of a key European review panel, clearing the way for inoculations to start before the end of the year as the continent struggles with rising death rates and tighter lockdowns. From a report: The endorsement was announced in a news briefing by the European Medicines Agency on Monday. The final step in approval is a sign-off from the European Commission. European Union leaders pushed the regulator to speed up its review amid complaints that residents across the continent were still waiting to get a vaccine -- pioneered in Germany -- that is already being used in the U.K. and U.S. The goal is to start a European immunization campaign on Dec. 27, commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week. Monday's recommendation puts the EU in position to meet that timeline. The commission last week signaled it would give the official go-ahead for distribution to start no later than two days after the agency's sign-off.

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How Do US Government Agencies Verify Security Software from Private Contractors?

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 11:34
A recent article at Politico argues that the U.S. government "doesn't do much to verify the security of software from private contractors. And that's how suspected Russian hackers got in." The federal government conducts only cursory security inspections of the software it buys from private companies for a wide range of activities, from managing databases to operating internal chat applications. That created the blind spot that suspected Russian hackers exploited to breach the Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies... Attacks on vendors in the software supply chain represent a known issue that needs to be prioritized, said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), the co-founder of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus. "The SolarWinds incident... underscores that supply chain security is a topic that needs to be front and center," Langevin said.... He said Congress needs to "incentivize" the companies to make their software more secure, which could require expensive changes. Some others are calling for regulation. Private companies regularly deploy software with undiscovered bugs because developers lack the time, skill or incentive to fully inspect them. Long-time open source advocate Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues another issue is the closed-source nature of SolarWinds' software: Proprietary software — a black box where you can never know what's really going on — is now, always has been, and always will be more of a security problem. I would no more trust anything mission critical to proprietary software than I would drive a car at night without lights or a fastened seat belt... A fundamental open source principle is that by bringing many eyeballs to programs more errors will be caught. That doesn't mean all errors are caught, just a lot more than those by a single proprietary company... Just consider the sheer number of serious Windows bugs — does a month go by without one? — compared to those of Linux... In short, proprietary software companies, like SolarWinds, are still making huge security blunders, which are hidden from users until the damage is done.

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Successful IT Workers Applaud Non-Traditional Paths to Tech

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 08:34
Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk describes what happened after Microsoft's senior cloud advocate tweeted "Hire folks with non-traditional paths to tech." Thomas Zeman, whose Twitter bio declared he's "scaling pods at daytime, working on a docker based raspberry pi router at nighttime," mused in reply: "Depends a bit what tech you are talking about. When doing machine learning for cancer recognition on medical images I am sorry but dont believe baristas will crack it...." Oddly, Zeman's comment received what might be termed a reaction.... In wandered David Brunelle... "Hi Thomas!" he said. "I'm a vp of engineering at Starbucks. I started my career as a Starbucks barista. I have no college degree. Most of my early-in-career training came from the Navy. All non-traditional. And I lead one of the biggest digital payments platforms in the world...." Here's Twitterer Ew, Ryan: "I've worked as a delivery driver, tuxedo salesman, sandwich maker, gas station attendant, server, a few summers as a plumbing apprentice, and I could go on and on... but now I've worked at Google, Twitter and TikTok. Don't confuse past work histories with future capabilities." Or this from someone with the adorable Twitter handle @SecuritySphynx: "Gatekeeping is a bad look. 4y ago I was stamping envelopes/answering phones for $12/hour. Now I'm engineering security solutions with some of the worlds largest orgs Almost no one started in tech and never did anything else before. Check your classism at the door, please...." The article ultimately asks how many tech companies (and their HR departments) "persist in seeking those with a particular qualification and a particular past history? How many think there's a tech type?" But at least the Twitter thread provoked this clarifying correction from the pod-scaling, router-builder who'd started all the reactions. "I totally believe anyone can learn and master anything (including Baristas of course) without any doubt. The point is that mastering things will take a lot of time..."

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Its Official: America's Space Force is Better than Its Other Military Branches at 'Call of Duty'

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 04:27
The military news site Task and Purpose reports: The U.S. military's youngest branch, the Space Force, just trounced its sibling services, as well the United Kingdom's military, in the second annual Call of Duty Endowment Bowl. The transatlantic Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War tournament pit eight teams from the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marine Corps, along with the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force, against each other. Each team was captained by a civilian gamer and popular streamer who offered guidance and tips to players in real-time as they vied for the top spot... The tournament was put on by the Call of Duty Endowment, which has placed more than 77,000 veterans into full-time jobs since its inception in 2009. This year alone, the endowment placed 11,000 veterans in jobs amidst the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. "Space Force isn't even a year old so this may have been their very first win in anything competitive against any of the other services," Dan Goldenberg, the endowment's executive director said during the event, according to Business Insider. "So it's a heck of a great way to start off their history."

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Elon Musk Tweeted About a Bitcoin Rival. It Soared 20%

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 03:18
"Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money," Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday, and then followed it up with another tweet. "One Word: Doge." "The tweet sent shares of Dogecoin up nearly 20% and landed it on the list of trending Twitter topics," reports CNN. (Later that day Musk tweeted "i love all u crazy ppl out there.") The tech billionaire even went as far as updating his Twitter bio with the title "Former CEO of Dogecoin..." This isn't the first time Musk has tweeted about Dogecoin, the bitcoin descendant. The SpaceX CEO mentioned the digital coin in July when he tweeted "It's inevitable" with an image depicting the dogecoin standard engulfing the global financial system. The tweet sent shares up 14% at the time. Dogecoin was created in 2014 as a parody to a popular internet meme "doge", which involved a picture of a Shiba Inu dog. Although the virtual coin started off as a joke, it currently has a market value of nearly $570 million.

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How the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Fought the Pandemic

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 01:18
In a long article titled "Gates versus the Pandemic," Fast Company looks at the many mitigation efforts launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. - It's one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. - It's partnered with the governments of Norway and India, the World Economic Forum, and the research-charity Wellcome Trust to launch an important group called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). And then Fast Company breaks down the specifics: - The Gates Foundation invested $52 million in a German mRNA startup named CureVac in 2015; a year later, it gave Massachusetts-based Moderna a $20 million grant to support its development of mRNA-based HIV therapeutics, which helped the company further its underlying platform that can also be used to make vaccines. - The foundation made an initial equity investment of $55 million in BioNTech, another German startup working on mRNA technology, in 2019. (While the foundation typically makes grants, it sometimes invests in companies to negotiate terms that require a funded product be globally accessible and affordable.) The goal of all of this spending, in part, was to encourage these companies to focus on mRNA vaccines for communicable illnesses. "If you're looking at where the money is," in medical funding, "it's in oncology and cancer immunotherapy," says Lynda Stuart, deputy director of vaccines and host-pathogen biology at the Gates Foundation. Without a push, companies working in the space "wouldn't necessarily gravitate to infectious disease vaccines." As the virus was beginning to spread, the Gates Foundation encouraged its other vaccine development partners to turn to COVID-19. - Researchers at Oxford University started work on a coronavirus vaccine made from a weakened, altered form of a chimpanzee cold virus, a platform that CEPI had supported for other vaccines such as MERS. - Novavax, a biotech startup the foundation had previously funded, also entered the race to create a vaccine. By October, more than 200 COVID-19 vaccines were in development, but only 11 had reached Phase III clinical trials (human efficacy tests, the last step before regulatory approval). Of those, four vaccine platforms — from Moderna, BioNTech, Novavax, and the University of Oxford — had received early backing from CEPI or the Gates Foundation. In November, BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca all announced that their respective vaccines had proved highly effective in preliminary study results. On December 11, the FDA approved the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, which represents a huge victory for the Gates Foundation. (In addition, the foundation is funding contenders that are at an earlier stage of development, such as Icosavax's nanoparticle vaccine construct.) "Without the efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Covid-19 crisis would almost certainly be worse," writes Fast Company. "But its extensive role raises questions about how much we rely on philanthropy." Their article includes this quote from a Northeastern University law professor focused on intellectual property rights and universal access to treatments for HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. "A fundamental question is, Well, because you have the money, should you be able to control the architecture of global health?" A former director of vaccine delivery at the Gates Foundation counters that "they add value in helping to design very effective programs."

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Google Buys Company Whose Software Turns Old PCs Into Chromebooks

Slashdot - Mon, 12/21/2020 - 00:15
This week Google "quietly acquired a company called Neverware Inc. that sells software to transform old personal computers and Macs into Chromebook devices," reports SiliconANGLE: The acquisition was announced by Neverware on Twitter, and Google later confirmed the news in a statement. Google had taken part in the company's Series B funding round three years ago. Neverware's software is called CloudReady OS, and though it's primarily aimed at schools and enterprises that want to transform fleets of machines into Chromebooks, there's also a free Home edition that anyone can use... Google's plan is to make CloudReady an official product. "We can confirm that the Neverware team is joining the Google Chrome OS team," Google said in a statement.

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Winner Announced In the World's First 'Quantum Chess' Tournament

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 23:10
Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he's also the winner of the world's first quantum chess tournament. (It's now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.) "It's a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference," explains Ars Technica (in an article shared by John Trumpian): In quantum chess, there are multiple boards on which the pieces exist, and their number is not fixed. Players can perform "quantum moves" as well as regular chess moves; players just need to indicate which type of move they're performing. Any quantum move will create a superposition of boards (doubling the number of possible boards in the superposition with each quantum move), although the player will see a single board representing all boards at the same time. And any individual move acts on all boards at the same time. Pawns move the same as in regular chess, but other pieces can make either standard moves or quantum moves, such that they can occupy more than one square simultaneously. In a 2016 blog post, Chris Cantwell of Quantum Realm Games offered the example of a white queen performing a quantum move from D1 to D3. "We get two possible boards. On one board the queen did not move at all. On the other, the queen did move. Each board has a 50 percent chance of 'existence'..." In 2016 Stephen Hawking had played a game of quantum chess against Paul Rudd in a video which also featured both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, stars of the "Bill and Ted" movies.

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China Accused of Spying On Americans Via Caribbean Phone Networks

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 21:57
"A mobile security expert has accused China of exploiting cellphone networks in the Caribbean to conduct 'mass surveillance' on Americans," reports Newsweek: Gary Miller, a former vice president of network security at California-based analytics company Mobileum, told The Guardian he had amassed evidence of espionage conducted via "decades-old vulnerabilities" in the global telecommunications system. While not explicitly mentioned in the report, the claims appear to be centered around Signaling System 7 (SS7), a communications protocol that routes calls and data around the world and has long been known to have inherent security weaknesses. According to Miller, his analysis of "signals data" from the Caribbean has shown China was using a state-controlled mobile operator to "target, track, and intercept phone communications of U.S. phone subscribers," The Guardian reported. Miller claimed China appeared to exploit Caribbean operators to conduct surveillance on Americans as they were traveling, alleging that attacks on cell phones between 2018 to 2020 likely affected "tens of thousands" of U.S. mobile users in the region. "Once you get into the tens of thousands, the attacks qualify as mass surveillance," the mobile researcher said, noting the tactic is "primarily for intelligence collection and not necessarily targeting high-profile targets." Interesting quote from the Guardian's original story: "We have an illusion of security when we talk on our mobile phones," said James Lewis, the director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). "People don't realise that we are under a sustained espionage attack on anything that connects to a network, and that this is just another example of a really aggressive and pretty sophisticated campaign." Thanks to chill (Slashdot reader #34,294) for the story!

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Facing Overwhelming Demand, Non-Profit 'RPG Research' Looks for Help

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 21:04
Software developer/sys-admin Hawke Robinson is the CEO of RPG Research, a 501(c)3 non-profit, volunteer-run, charitable organization founded in 1977. He's also long-time Slashdot reader kmleon, and shares this story from the gaming-news site The Gamer: RPG Research recently sent out an urgent call requesting more volunteers, more warehouse space, and more donations to help meet the overwhelming demand it is currently facing. In a truly good news/bad news situation, the organization has seen donations increase by 600% from previous years, while 2020 has increased demand for the organization's programs by more than 1,000%. The increased demand is simply more than RPG Research is currently staffed and equipped to handle, resulting in the call for aid. Along with the need for more volunteers, RPGR is also seeking a sizeable warehouse to house office space, events, the RPG Museum, as well as to hold the RPG bus and trailers. The ideal warehouse being sought is "a 2,000 (minimum) to 4,000+ square foot warehouse" somewhere "in the greater Spokane Washington or Post Falls Idaho region...." The international (six continents) organization began studying roleplaying games and their effects in 1983, and since then have presented their findings through various programs in educational settings, prison systems, and therapeutic medical settings.

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Facebook's Criticism of Apple's Tracking Change Called 'Laughable' by EFF

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 19:37
The MacRumors site writes: Facebook's recent criticism directed at Apple over an upcoming tracking-related privacy measure is "laughable," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world. Facebook has claimed that Apple's new opt-in tracking policy will hurt small businesses who benefit from personalized advertising, but the EFF believes that Facebook's campaign against Apple is really about "what Facebook stands to lose if its users learn more about exactly what it and other data brokers are up to behind the scenes," noting that Facebook has "built a massive empire around the concept of tracking everything you do...." According to the EFF, a number of studies have shown that most of the money made from targeted advertising does not reach app developers, and instead goes to third-party data brokers like Facebook, Google, and lesser-known firms. "Facebook touts itself in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn't be further from the truth," the EFF said. "Facebook has locked them into a situation in which they are forced to be sneaky and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend that broken system at the cost of their own users' privacy and control." "This is really about who benefits from the normalization of surveillance-powered advertising..." argues the EFF. And they ultimately come down in support of Apple's new privacy changes. "Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong."

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Due to Covid-19, Apple Closes Nearly a Fifth of Its Retail Stores

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 18:34
"New COVID-19 restrictions and worsening outbreaks have compelled Apple to temporarily close nearly one fifth of its retail stores during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the holiday season," reports 9to5Mac. 401 of Apple's 509 locations worldwide remain open as of publication. Most open locations in the US are limited to Express storefront pickup of online orders and Genius Support. Walk-in shopping and customers without an appointment are not accepted at Express locations. The site also notes that Apple recently re-closed all 18 of its stores across Germany and the Netherlands. And the Verge confirms more store closings in the U.S. and around the world: Every California store, all four in Tennessee, all three in Utah, all four in Minnesota, two in Oklahoma, and the stores in Portland, Oregon; Anchorage, Alaska; Omaha, Nebraska; and Albuquerque, New Mexico are all closed this upcoming week — as well as the 16 additional stores in the U.K., Mexico and Brazil starting tomorrow, December 20th. It's not hard to guess why the stores are reclosing, particularly in California where COVID-19 saw its four deadliest days yet in a row last week as part of an ongoing surge, and in London where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just put the city in emergency lockdown starting midnight.

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Should America's Next President Abolish the Space Force?

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 17:34
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. military's Space Force branch celebrated its one-year anniversary Friday by announcing that its members would now be known as "guardians". But the name was not universally greeted with respect and appreciation. Gizmodo announced the news with a headline which read "Space Force Personnel Will Be Called 'Guardians' Because Sure, Whatever," in an article which jokingly asks how this will affect the other ranks of this branch of the military. "Does someone get promoted from Guardian to Sentinel to Space Paladin to Tython, The Secessionist King Of Mars or something?" (Their article also suggests other names the U.S. military could have considered — like "moon buddies" or "rocketeers" — even at one point proposing "starship troopers".) Forbes wrote that "The mockery arrived instantly and in great rivers..." But there was an interesting observation from a British newspaper (which is in fact, named The Guardian). "As the Associated Press put it, delicately: 'President-elect Joe Biden has yet to reveal his plans for the space force in the next administration.'" In fact, New York magazine called the new name for members of Space Force the "strongest case yet for its demise," in an article headlined "Abolish the Space Force." ("Maybe 'stormtrooper' was too obvious...") In an apparent bid to be taken more seriously, on Friday the Space Force also shared an official anniversary greeting they'd received from Lee Majors, the actor who'd played a cybernetically-enhanced Air Force colonel in the 1970s action series The Six Million Dollar Man (who, in later seasons, befriended Bigfoot and the alien community who'd brought him to earth). But Mashable added sympathetically that "It's been a long year, though. If people want to draw some nerdy joy from a U.S. military branch inadvertently referencing comic books and video games, let them have their fun."

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Microsoft: a Second, Different Threat Actor Had Also Infected SolarWinds With Malware

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 16:34
Reuters reports: A second hacking group, different from the suspected Russian team now associated with the major SolarWinds data breach, also targeted the company's products earlier this year, according to a security research blog by Microsoft. "The investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor," the blog said... It is unclear whether SUPERNOVA has been deployed against any targets, such as customers of SolarWinds. The malware appears to have been created in late March, based on a review of the file's compile times. Microsoft's detailed blog post notes that the code "provides an attacker the ability to send and execute any arbitrary C# program on the victim's device."

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3 Million Users Have Installed 28 Malicious Chrome or Edge Extensions, Says Avast

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 15:34
More than three million internet users are believed to have installed 15 Chrome, and 13 Edge extensions that contain malicious code, reports ZDNet, citing an announcement from cybersecurity company Avast: Avast researchers said they believe the primary objective of this campaign was to hijack user traffic for monetary gains. "For every redirection to a third party domain, the cybercriminals would receive a payment," the company said. Avast said it discovered the extensions last month and found evidence that some had been active since at least December 2018, when some users first started reporting issues with being redirected to other sites. Jan Rubín, Malware Researcher at Avast, said they couldn't identify if the extensions had been created with malicious code from the beginning or if the code was added via an update when each extension passed a level of popularity. And many extensions did become very popular, with tens of thousands of installs. Most did so by posing as add-ons meant to help users download multimedia content from various social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, or Spotify. Avast said it reported its findings to both Google and Microsoft and that both companies are still investigating the extensions. ZDNet's article includes Avast's lists of the 28 extensions which they're recommending be uninstalled by users. ZDNet also notes that "A day after Avast published its findings, only three of the 15 Chrome extensions were removed, while all the Edge add-ons were still available for download. A source familiar with the investigation told ZDNet that Microsoft has not been able to confirm the Avast report."

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Amazon's Answer To SpaceX Starlink Delivers 400Mbps In Prototype Phase

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 14:34
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares this report from Ars Technica: Amazon's competitor to SpaceX Starlink is moving through the prototype-development phase, with the company announcing yesterday that it has "completed initial development on the antenna for our low-cost customer terminal." Amazon said its "Ka-band phased-array antenna is based on a new architecture capable of delivering high-speed, low-latency broadband in a form factor that is smaller and lighter than legacy antenna designs" and the "prototype is already delivering speeds up to 400Mbps." Performance will get better in future versions, Amazon said. Amazon in July received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch 3,236 low-Earth orbit satellites. The company says it plans to invest over $10 billion in its satellite-broadband division, which it calls Project Kuiper... Amazon didn't provide any updates on when Kuiper will be ready for customers. FCC rules give Amazon six years to launch and operate 50 percent of its licensed satellites, with a deadline date of July 30, 2026. Amazon would have to launch the rest of the licensed satellites by July 30, 2029. Amazon previously said it plans to offer broadband to customers "once the first 578 satellites are launched." "Custom-built antenna architecture will allow Amazon to deliver a small, affordable customer terminal to connect unserved and underserved communities around the world," explains Amazon's announcement.

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Firefox 84 Claims Speed Boost from Apple Silicon, Vows to End Flash Support

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 12:34
The Verge reports: Firefox's latest update brings native support for Macs that run on Apple's Arm-based silicon, Mozilla announced on Tuesday. Mozilla claims that native Apple silicon support brings significant performance improvements: the browser apparently launches 2.5 times faster and web apps are twice as responsive than they were on the previous version of Firefox, which wasn't native to Apple's chips... Firefox's support of Apple's Arm-based processors follows Chrome, which added support for Apple's new chips shortly after the M1-equipped MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini were released in November. Firefox 84 will also be the very last release to support Adobe Flash, notes ZDNet, calling both developments "a reminder of the influence Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has had and continues to exert on software and hardware nine years after his death." Jobs wrote off Flash in 2010 as successful Adobe software but one that was a 'closed' product "created during the PC era — for PCs and mice" and not suitable for the then-brand-new iPad, nor any of its prior iPhones. Instead, Jobs said the future of the web was HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. At the end of this year Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari also drop support for Flash. Senior Apple execs recently reflected in an interview with Om Malik what the M1 would have meant to Jobs had been alive today. "Steve used to say that we make the whole widget," Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing told Malik. "We've been making the whole widget for all our products, from the iPhone, to the iPads, to the watch. This was the final element to making the whole widget on the Mac." ZDNet also notes that Firefox 84 offers WebRender, "Mozilla's faster GPU-based 2D rendering engine" for MacOS Big Sur, Windows devices with Intel Gen 6 GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8. "Mozilla promises it will ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time." Firefox now also uses "more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux," writes Mozilla, "improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker." And Firefox 85 will include a new network partitioning feature to make it harder for companies to track your web surfing.

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Report: PHP, C++, Java, and<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.NET Applications are the Most Frequently Flawed

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 08:34
Application-security company Veracode "has released the 11th volume of its annual State of Software Security report, and its findings reveal that flawed applications are the norm, open-source libraries are increasingly untrustworthy, and it's taking a long time to patch problems," reports TechRepublic. The top three security flaws — like last year — are still information leakage, cryptographic issues, and CRLF injection: The report found a full 76% of apps contained flaws, and 24% of apps have flaws considered highly severe. Some 70% of apps are inheriting security flaws from their open-source libraries, but it's important to note that only 30% of apps have more security bugs in their open-source libraries than in code written in-house, suggesting that it isn't solely open-source projects that are to blame... In terms of how bugs are being resolved, Veracode found that 73% of the bugs it found as part of the report were patched, which is a big improvement over previous years, when that number was in the mid-50% range. Despite that good sign, it's still taking an average of six months to close half of discovered flaws... Veracode also released a heatmap of the worst bugs in the most popular languages. Interestingly enough, the language with the least use of open-source libraries is also the one with the most bugs: PHP. Looking at the heatmap, it's easy to spot which of the five popular languages included has the worst security. Following PHP is C++, then Java, .Net, JavaScript, and Python. The latter two are, doing considerably better than the competition, with the worst flaws in each only being found in roughly 30% of apps. Compared to PHP with 74.6% of its apps vulnerable to cross-site scripting, JavaScript and Python are security powerhouses.

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Could Nuclear Power Be Used For Carbon Capture?

Slashdot - Sun, 12/20/2020 - 04:34
Forbes reports: Nuclear advocates see a vast market for reactors in carbon capture and carbon-based products, not only for the next generation of reactors in development, but also for the aging dinosaurs they evolved from... The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo, California, for example, is slated to shut down in 2024 and 2025. "If the waste heat from that plant was being combined with electricity production you could be removing 20 million tons per year of carbon from the atmosphere," said Kirsty Gogan, co-founder of Energy for Humanity, at an EarthX panel on Wednesday. "Right now what's happening is these big gigawatt-scale depreciating assets — they're making baseload, clean, emissions-free power, but we're just throwing away the heat, right? Those nuclear plants could be more useful, making a big contribution toward that responsibility we all have to go negative. "We all try to be neutral, but it ain't good enough. We have to take responsibility for the carbon that's already in the atmosphere and go negative." That's just one possibility. For example, the article also suggests nuclear energy could be used to generate sustainable aviation fuel (currently made mostly from biomass) from smokestack carbon. Slashdot reader ogcricket notes the article is based on an hour-long EarthX panel that's now available on YouTube.

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