Luciano

"Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity," argues an column in the Guardian, adding "They are kidding themselves..." "There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life... " AI — far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations — is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation... What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon ...) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent. This should not be legal. In the case of copyrighted material that we now know trained the models (including this newspaper), various lawsuits have been filed that will argue this was clearly illegal... The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft "disruption" — and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don't apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China — all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands... These companies must know they are engaged in theft, or at least that a strong case can be made that they are. They are just hoping that the old playbook works one more time — that the scale of the heist is already so large and unfolding with such speed that courts and policymakers will once again throw up their hands in the face of the supposed inevitability of it all... [W]e trained the machines. All of us. But we never gave our consent. They fed on humanity's collective ingenuity, inspiration and revelations (along with our more venal traits). These models are enclosure and appropriation machines, devouring and privatizing our individual lives as well as our collective intellectual and artistic inheritances. And their goal never was to solve climate change or make our governments more responsible or our daily lives more leisurely. It was always to profit off mass immiseration, which, under capitalism, is the glaring and logical consequence of replacing human functions with bots. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

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Spring break is here, and summer vacations are just around the bend. But while increasingly stressed-out US workers say having paid time off is critical, many still don't even take all that they're allowed. From a report: Only 48% of US workers say they use all their vacation days, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. Those who don't take all their time off say it's because they don't need it, or they worry about falling behind at work or feel badly about co-workers carrying their load. A few even think vacation time hurts their chances for promotions or could cost them their job. There is growing anxiety in the labor force with layoffs spreading, hiring slowing and organizations cutting perks and other costs. Last month, the job site Indeed said it was reducing headcount because it's "simply too big for what lies ahead" -- an excuse used by many companies to justify recent cutbacks. It's no wonder that workers are exhausted.

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Two studies published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found a link between several types of bacteria in the gut and depressive symptoms. The first study, titled "Gut microbiome-wide association study of depressive symptoms," reports: Here we investigate the relation of fecal microbiome diversity and composition with depressive symptoms in 1,054 participants from the Rotterdam Study cohort and validate these findings in the Amsterdam HELIUS cohort in 1,539 subjects. We identify association of thirteen microbial taxa, including genera Eggerthella, Subdoligranulum, Coprococcus, Sellimonas, Lachnoclostridium, Hungatella, Ruminococcaceae (UCG002, UCG003 and UCG005), LachnospiraceaeUCG001, Eubacterium ventriosum and Ruminococcusgauvreauiigroup, and family Ruminococcaceae with depressive symptoms. These bacteria are known to be involved in the synthesis of glutamate, butyrate, serotonin and gamma amino butyric acid (GABA), which are key neurotransmitters for depression. Our study suggests that the gut microbiome composition may play a key role in depression. The second study, titled "The gut microbiota and depressive symptoms across ethnic groups," reports: Both the microbiome and depressive symptom levels vary substantially across ethnic groups. Thus, any intervention for depression targeting the microbiome requires understanding of microbiome-depression associations across ethnicities. Analyzing data from the HELIUS cohort, we characterize the gut microbiota and its associations with depressive symptoms in 6 ethnic groups (Dutch, South-Asian Surinamese, African Surinamese, Ghanaian, Turkish, Moroccan; N=3211), living in the same urban area. Diversity of the gut microbiota, both within (a-diversity) and between individuals (B-diversity), predicts depressive symptom levels, taking into account demographic, behavioural, and medical differences. These associations do not differ between ethnic groups. Further, B-diversity explains 29%-18% of the ethnic differences in depressive symptoms. Bacterial genera associated with depressive symptoms belong to mulitple families, prominently including the families Christensenellaceae, Lachnospiraceae, and Ruminococcaceae. In summary, the results show that the gut microbiota are linked to depressive symptom levels and that this association generalizes across ethnic groups. Moreover, the results suggest that ethnic differences in the gut microbiota may partly explain parallel disparities in depression. The Wall Street Journal shared (paywalled) the findings.

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Alcohol will not be sold to fans at the World Cup's eight stadiums in Qatar after Fifa changes its policy two days before the start of the tournament.

When it comes to getting into the groove on the dancefloor, it really is all about the bass, researchers have found. From a report: Scientists say when very low frequency (VLF) sound was introduced during a live electronic music event, gig-goers moved more even though they could not hear the frequencies. "This is real world -- real electronic music dance concert -- validation that the bass really does make people dance more, and this isn't just something that comes from our conscious awareness," said Dr Daniel Cameron, a neuroscientist and first author of the work from McMaster University in Canada. Cameron and colleagues note that previous studies suggested music that induces dance has more low frequency sound, and that low pitches help people to move in time to music. However, it was not clear this impact of low frequencies would be seen in the real world, or when such sounds are not consciously detectable. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team report how they set up an electronic music concert by the Canadian duo Orphx at McMaster and asked attenders to wear motion-capture headbands before turning on and off specialised VLF speakers every 2.5 minutes during the 55-minute performance. Results from 43 attenders who agreed to wear a headband revealed they moved 11.8% more, on average, when the VLF speakers were turned on. Cameron noted this meant people danced more vigorously, or with more exaggerated movements. At the end of the concert, 51 attenders completed a questionnaire that asked whether they could feel the music in their body, and whether the bodily sensations affected their compulsion to move.

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A Redditor says they've managed to get a hold of an old Netflix server for free, and has posted a detailed online look at the once mysterious hardware. The devices were part of Netflix's Open Connect Content Delivery Network (CDN), and can often be found embedded within major ISP networks to ensure your Netflix streams don't suck. From a report: Reddit user PoisonWaffle3 said the ISP he currently works for has been offloading old Netflix servers as they upgrade to more modern equipment. In a Reddit thread titled "So I got a Netflix cache server..." he posted a photo of the server, which is bright Netflix red, and explained how he was curious about what's inside the boxes given how little public information was available. "All I could find online was overviews, installation/config guides for their proprietary software, etc.," he said. "No specs, no clue what was inside the red box." Dave Temkin, Netflix's former Vice President of Network Systems Infrastructure told Motherboard there's nothing too mysterious about what the servers can do, though they significantly help improve video streaming by shortening overall content transit time. "They're just an Intel FreeBSD box," he said. "We got Linux running on some of the generations of that box as well." Netflix's Open Connect Content Delivery Network hardware caches popular Netflix content to reduce overall strain across broadband networks. Netflix lets major broadband ISPs embed a CDN server on the ISP network for free; the shorter transit time then helps improve video delivery, of benefit to broadband providers and Netflix alike. It took all of three screws for PoisonWaffle3 to get inside the mysterious red unit, at which point users discovered a "fairly standard" Supermicro board, a single Xeon E5 2650L v2 processor, 64GB of DDR3 memory, and a 10 gigabit ethernet card. They also found 36 7.2TB 7200RPM drives and six 500GB Micron solid state drives, for a grand total of 262 terabytes of storage.

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United Launch Alliance has been developing a heavy-lift space vehicle since 2014 (with investment from the U.S. military) called the Vulcan Centaur. So CNN reports that the ashes of the late Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols "will head to deep space on a Vulcan rocket." Nichols' cremated remains will be aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Celestis, Inc., is a private company that conducts memorial spaceflights. Among the remains also aboard the flight will be the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry; his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played various roles in the show and films; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the films and TV series.... The spaceflight will travel beyond NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and into interplanetary deep space. In addition to cremated remains, capsules onboard will also carry complete human genome DNA samples from willing participants. People can participate in the flight — by having DNA or loved ones' remains in a spaceflight container — for a price starting at $12,500, and reservations close August 31. (Celestis offers other voyages that don't travel as far, but can cost less than $5,000.) Ahead of the flight's liftoff, Celestis will host a three-day event with mission briefings, an astronaut-hosted dinner, launch site tours, an on-site memorial service and launch viewing. All events will be shown via webcast, according to Celestis. An announcement on the flight's site invites fans of Nichelle Nichols to "share your own story about how she inspired you and it will be sent into deep space aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight — the Enterprise Flight, launching later in 2022."

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schwit1 writes: Mickey will be for the public domain in 2024, following U.S. copyright laws that state intellectual property on artistic work expires at the 95-year mark. When Mickey Mouse first appeared, Disney's copyright was protected for 56 years. The company supported the Copyright Act of 1976 which extended protections for 75 years. In 1998, Disney lobbied for a further extension. It is unclear whether the entertainment giant plans to make another move before 2023 to prevent Mickey from being moved into the public domain. Once copyright expires, anyone wishing to use characters from everyone's favorite rodent will not have to request permission or pay copyright charge.

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An official tells state TV the items "promote homosexual colours targeting the younger generation".

The group suffered burns after walking over a bed of coals as part of a team building exercise.

Haze Fan of Bloomberg news was held 18 months ago and accused of threatening China's security.

The head of the UK government's digital transformation unit recently announced a change to the nation's government services site gov.uk: they've "removed jQuery as a dependency for all frontend apps, meaning 32 KB of minified and compressed JavaScript was removed" for everything from selecting elements to attaching event listeners.... Nearly 84% of mobile pages used jQuery in 2021, points out a new essay at Gov.UK — before explaining why they decided not to: jQuery was an instrumental tool in a time when we really needed a way to script interactivity in a way that smoothed over the differing implementations of stuff like event handling, selecting elements, animating elements, and so on. The web is better because of jQuery — not just because it has such incredible utility, but because its ubiquity led to making what it provided part of the web platform itself. Nowadays, we can do just about anything jQuery can do in vanilla JavaScript... It really begs the question: Do we really need jQuery today? That's a question that GOV.UK has answered with a resounding "no".... This is a big deal when it comes to the user experience, because GOV.UK provides services and information online for The United Kingdom at scale. Not everyone is tapping away on their 2022 MacBook Pro on a rip-roarin' broadband connection. GOV.UK has to be accessible to everyone, and that means keepin' it lean.... dependencies matter when it comes to performance. Don't shortchange your users if the web platform can easily do the job a framework can. This level of commitment to the user experience from a institution that works at the scale GOV.UK does is commendable. I can only hope others follow in their footsteps.

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Across three different animal models researchers have demonstrated how short bursts of ultrasound targeted at specific clusters of nerves in the liver can effectively lower insulin and glucose levels. New Atlas reports: Reporting in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by GE Research, including investigators from the Yale School of Medicine, UCLA, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, demonstrated a unique non-invasive ultrasound method designed to stimulate specific sensory nerves in the liver. The technology is called peripheral focused ultrasound stimulation (pFUS) and it allows highly targeted ultrasound pulses to be directed at specific tissue containing nerve endings. "We used this technique to explore stimulation of an area of the liver called the porta hepatis," the researchers explained in a Nature briefing. "This region contains the hepatoportal nerve plexus, which communicates information on glucose and nutrient status to the brain but has been difficult to study as its nerve structures are too small to separately stimulate with implanted electrodes." The newly published study indicates short targeted bursts of pFUS at this area of the liver successfully reversed the onset of hyperglycaemia. The treatment was found to be effective in three separate animal models of diabetes: mice, rats and pigs. [...] The study found just three minutes of focused ultrasound each day was enough to maintain normal blood glucose levels in the diabetic animals. Studies in humans are currently underway to work out whether this method translates from animal studies. But there are other hurdles facing broad clinical deployment of the technique beyond simply proving it works. Current ultrasound tools used to perform this kind of pFUS technique require trained technicians. The researchers suggest the technology exists to simplify and automate these systems in a way that could be used by patients at home, but it will need to be developed before this treatment can be widely deployed.

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A top official of India's central bank has compared cryptocurrency to a "Ponzi scheme" and suggested an outright ban in its sharpest criticism just weeks after the government proposed taxation of the virtual digital asset and paved way to recognize it as legal tender in the world's second-largest internet market. From a report: T. Rabi Sankar, deputy governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), told an audience at a banking conference that cryptocurrencies have been "specifically developed to bypass the regulated financial system," and are not backed by any underlying cash flow. "We have also seen that cryptocurrencies are not amenable to definition as a currency, asset or commodity; they have no underlying cash flows, they have no intrinsic value; that they are akin to Ponzi schemes, and may even be worse," he said. "As a store of value, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have given impressive returns so far, but so did tulips in 17th century Netherlands."

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Lunes 24 de enero 2022 Todavía seguimos con lo obvio.

 

Martes 25 de enero 2022 Fue muy comentada una foto de los señores de Fuerza Nueva paseándose por las calles de León vestidos de... no sé sabe muy bien qué. Pablo Casado, el líder nacional del Partido Popular por su parte sigue dando ruedas de prensa rodeado de rumiantes, únicos seres que pueden darle dos y hasta tres vueltas a su alimento.

A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make public the data it relied on to license Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, imposing a dramatically accelerated schedule that should result in the release of all information within about eight months. Reuters reports: That's roughly 75 years and four months faster than the FDA said it could take to complete a Freedom of Information Act request by a group of doctors and scientists seeking an estimated 450,000 pages of material about the vaccine. The court "concludes that this FOIA request is of paramount public importance," wrote U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump in 2019. The FDA didn't dispute it had an obligation to make the information public but argued that its short-staffed FOIA office only had the bandwidth to review and release 500 pages a month. While Pittman recognized "the 'unduly burdensome' challenges that this FOIA request may present to the FDA," in his four-page order, he resoundingly rejected the agency's suggested schedule. Rather than producing 500 pages a month -- the FDA's proposed timeline -- he ordered the agency to turn over 55,000 a month. That means all the Pfizer vaccine data should be public by the end of the summer rather than, say, the year 2097. "Even if the FDA may not see it this way, I think Pittman did the agency -- and the country -- a big favor by expediting the document production," writes Reuters' Jenna Greene. "Making the information public as soon as possible may help assuage the concerns of vaccine skeptics and convince them the product is safe." "Still, the FDA is likely to be hard-pressed to process 55,000 pages a month," Greene adds. "The office that reviews FOIA requests has just 10 employees, according to a declaration filed with the court by Suzann Burk, who heads the FDA's Division of Disclosure and Oversight Management. Burk said it takes eight minutes a page for a worker 'to perform a careful line-by-line, word-by-word review of all responsive records before producing them in response to a FOIA request.' [...] But as lawyers for the plaintiffs Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency pointed out in court papers (PDF), the FDA as of 2020 had 18,062 employees. Surely some can be dispatched to pitch in at the FOIA office."

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The British Psychological Society: Watching lecture videos is now a major part of many students' university experience. Some say they prefer them to live lectures, as they can choose when to study. And, according to a survey of students at the University of California Los Angeles, at least, many students also take advantage of the fact that video playback can be sped up, so cutting the amount of time they spend on lectures. But what impact does sped-up viewing have on learning? The answer, according to a new paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology, is, within some limits, none. In fact, if used strategically, it can actually improve learning. However, what students think is going to be the best strategy isn't actually what's most beneficial, Dillon Murphy at UCLA and colleagues also report. First, the team assigned 231 student participants to watch two YouTube videos (one on real estate appraisals and the other on the Roman Empire) at normal speed, 1.5x speed, 2x speed or 2.5x speed. They were told to watch the videos in full screen mode and not to pause them or take any notes. After each video, the students took comprehension tests, which were repeated a week later. The results were clear: the 1.5x and 2x groups did just as well on the tests as those who'd watched the videos at normal speed, both immediately afterwards and one week on. Only at 2.5x was learning impaired. When the team surveyed a separate group of UCLA students, they found that a massive 85% usually watched pre-recorded lectures at faster than normal speed. However, 91% said they thought that normal speed or slightly faster (1.5x) would be better for learning than 2x or 2.5x. These new results certainly suggest that this isn't right: double-time viewing was just as good as normal viewing. It seems, then, that as long as the material can still be accurately perceived and comprehended, it's okay to speed up playback. So, a student could just watch videos at 2x speed and halve their time spent on lectures...Or, according to the results of other studies reported in the paper, they could watch a video at 2x normal speed twice, and do better on a test than if they'd watched it once at normal speed. The timing mattered, though: only those who'd watched the 2x video for a second time immediately before a test, rather than right after the first viewing, got this advantage.

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Posted by malvuln on Jul 26

Discovery / credits: Malvuln - malvuln.com (c) 2021
Original source:
https://malvuln.com/advisory/6fab73bf104c6a9211b94f9559faa134.txt
Contact: malvuln13 () gmail com
Media: twitter.com/malvuln

Threat: Backdoor.Win32.Nbdd.bgz
Vulnerability: Remote Stack Buffer Overflow
Description: NetBot_Attacker VIP 5.9 on initial startup listens on port
8080 and on subsequent restarts port 80. Third-party attackers who can
reach an infected system can send...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon One, the technology that lets customers pay in shops by scanning their palm, is expanding to more stores in the greater Seattle area. The company says it's available starting today in its 4-star store in Lynnwood, and in the coming weeks, Amazon One is also coming to its Amazon Books store in Bellevue and its 4-star and Pop Up stores in South Lake Union. In total, 12 of Amazon's physical stores will soon feature the technology. The e-commerce giant announced its palm recognition Amazon One system last year. It works by scanning your hand and identifying its unique characteristics like surface area details and vein patterns. Palm scanning technology has been around for a few years, and it's pretty secure as biometric security methods go, though there are concerns about how Amazon might use the data gathered as part of the system. So far, Amazon has made Amazon One available as a payment option across a number of its own-branded physical stores around Seattle. But in the longer term, the company hopes the convenience factor of being able to confirm your identity using just your hand will convince third-party businesses to use the service, too.

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Nvidia has shared its Q4 2021 earnings, and despite the company's GPUs being in extremely low supply, it didn't seem to hurt how much money the company made. From a report: In fact, it reported a record $5 billion in revenue, which is up 61 percent year-over-year. What's more impressive is that Nvidia expects to make another $5 billion in revenue during Q1 2022. This positive outlook is surprising given that Q1 is generally slower than other quarters, even for the biggest tech companies, as it follows the rush of people buying lots of products during the holiday period. It's generally a slower period in general for product releases across tech and gaming. Also, let's not forget the GPU shortage is still happening. Nvidia reiterated that sparse supply will continue through the next quarter, but that's likely factored into its rosy revenue prediction. Nvidia says it expects most of that $5 billion revenue estimate in Q1 2022 to come from the gaming market, despite being the segment it's currently having the toughest time serving. Since the launch of the RTX 30-series desktop graphics cards, leading with the RTX 3080, 3090, 3070, and followed by other products, Nvidia hasn't been able to meet the demand -- though it's not the only company affected. AMD has also struggled, perhaps more than Nvidia, to keep a steady stock of graphics cards heading to retailers.

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Domingo 23 de agosto 2020 Cuando se oye hablar de héroes, de sacrificios, de extenuantes esfuerzos y de futuras apuestas... malo. La política, la sociedad, la economía, la educación y la sanidad nada tienen que ver con excepciones, ni deben apoyarse en ellas. Un mecanismo debe funcionar sin milagros.

Sábado 22 de agosto 2020 Nuestro presidente, el ínclito Mañueco, ha desaparecido (o se ha invisibilizado) definitivamente. Ha pasado de no tomar ninguna decisión a no... estar.

Viernes 21 de agosto 2020 Las circunstancias cambian cada día (a peor). Nuestros políticos parecen esperar a que las circunstancias... se detengan. Eso no va a ocurrir.

Jueves 20 de agosto 2020 Pues lo mismo de antes. ¿Qué pensaba la gente que los votó que iban a resolver estas personas? En situación de alarma o en cualquier otra.

Miércoles 19 de agosto 2020 El consejero de Economía y Hacienda Javier Fernández Carriedo sigue flotando en nuestros autonómicos lodos, como un Rey Leño especialmente... tarugo.

Martes 18 de agosto 2020 Parece que en la campaña de rebajas de... ahora (nunca sé cuándo hay rebajas) no se vendió tanto como otras veces en la misma época. En el momento en que se prohíben cosas perfectamente razonables (no echar humo de la boca a la jeta de otras personas) a la ciudadanía, aparecen adalides de LA LIBERTAD que, es curioso, dejan, han dejado y dejarán pasar enormes atropellos reales sin levantar jamás la voz.

Lunes 17 de agosto 2020 Problemático se presenta el comienzo del curso escolar. ¿Qué harán curas y monjas, por ejemplo? ¿Tienen personal, sitio, protocolos...? Mmmm... quizá no hagan nada. O sí: poner pegas. Ya ha pasado antes.

IBM's Global Technology Services has posted a job ad calling for candidates with a "minimum 12+ years' experience in Kubernetes administration and management." From a report: Which is a little odd because the first GitHub commit for the project was made on June 7, 2014. And the feature freeze for version 1.0 was announced on May 22, 2015. Sharp-minded Reg readers will have recognised that -- absent time travel -- it is therefore not possible for anyone to have 12 years' experience with Kubernetes. The ad is sadly silent on just how IBM expects candidates will have found the time to accumulate a dozen years' experience in a six-year-old project.

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"A newly-discovered comet is giving skywatchers quite the show during the month of July," reports CBS News: Astronomers discovered the comet, known as Comet C2020 F3 NEOWISE, back in March. It was named for the NASA mission that spotted it, for the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer... But astronomers knew they found something unique when they spotted Neowise. On July 3, Neowise was closer to the sun than the orbit of Mercury, coming dangerously close to breaking apart. The sun heated up much of the comet's icy makeup, erupting in a large debris trail of gas and dust. Measuring about 3 miles across, Neowise is considered a fairly large comet — providing skywatchers with a spectacular view from Earth. The comet, which has a bright opulent tail, has been putting on a stunning show in the early hours before sunrise in the Northern Hemisphere... But late sleepers need not worry — the comet will start appearing in the evening, just after sunset, starting Saturday. To view it, people in the Northern Hemisphere can look to the northwestern sky, just below Ursa Major, commonly known as the Big Dipper constellation. Scientists say the comet will be visible across the Northern Hemisphere for about another month. The comet is made up of material dating back 4.6 billion years, to the origins of our solar system, according to the article. "The event is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience — the comet takes about 6,800 years to complete its path around the sun, according to NASA..." "NASA says it will be one of the brightest comets this century."

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New submitter wb9syn7 writes: The last two days have seen a variety of Samsung Blu-ray players worldwide suddenly cease working. The symptom is that they turn on when power is applied, whereupon they reboot themselves every few seconds endlessly. The power and eject buttons are ignored and all attempts at resetting them fail. After many owners contacted Samsung support and were told they needed to send their players in for hardware repair, Samsung appears to have admitted there is a common problem, not individual player failure. As they are all out of warranty and the reboot cycle precludes the normal software update process, we are awaiting a solution from them. A community post has hundreds of users confirming the issue across various models. We've reached out to Samsung but they have yet to comment on the matter.

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The Indian government said on Tuesday that it is "empowered" to intercept, monitor, or decrypt any digital communication "generated, transmitted, received, or stored" on a citizen's device in the country in the interest of national security or to maintain friendly relations with foreign states. From a report: Citing section 69 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and section 5 of the Telegraph Act, 1885, Minister of State for Home Affairs G. Kishan Reddy said local law empowers federal and state government to "intercept, monitor or decrypt or cause to be intercepted or monitored or decrypted any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence." Reddy's remarks were in response to the parliament, where a lawmaker had asked if the government had snooped on citizens' WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, and Google calls and messages.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After years of inexplicably getting drunk without drinking alcohol, having mood swings and bouts of aggression, landing a DWI charge on the way to work one morning, and suffering a head injury in a drunken fall, an otherwise healthy 46-year-old North Carolina man finally got confirmation of having alcohol-fermenting yeasts overrunning his innards, getting him sloshed any time he ate carbohydrate-laden meals. Through the years, medical professionals and police officers refused to believe he hadn't been drinking. They assumed the man was lying to hide an alcohol problem. Meanwhile, he went to an untold number of psychiatrists, internists, neurologists, and gastroenterologists searching for answers. Those answers only came after he sought help from a support group online and then contacted a group of researchers at Richmond University Medical Center in Staten Island, New York. By then, it was September of 2017 -- more than seven years after his saga began. The New York researchers finally confirmed that he had a rarely diagnosed condition called "auto-brewery syndrome." From there, the researchers started him on powerful anti-fungal medications to try to clear the boozy germs from his system. But he relapsed just weeks later after sneaking some forbidden pizza and soda. The researchers tried again, giving him an even stronger round of anti-fungal drugs, this time through a tube directly into his veins (central catheter). By February of 2018, tests indicated he was free of the fermenting fungi. He went back to eating his normal diet and passed his daily breathalyzer tests. He has stayed that way since, the researchers report.

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I finally managed to build LibreOffice for armv7 and I have LibreOfficeDev on my TV screen right now. There’s a link to build instructions above and I’ll update it with the autogen flags I used. They’re somewhat arbitrary but yeah.

Now the stage is set for this week’s/ next week’s work of controlling LibreOffice from Python, and also the additions needed in LO’s source code to actually make things work properly.

(y)

P.S. I am aware that this site is incredibly ugly, I’ll fix it soon.

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: Vulnerabilities in Flash and Internet Explorer dominated the exploit kit landscape in the last year, with a high-profile bug in Flash being found in seven separate kits, new research shows. Exploit kits have long been a key tool in the arsenal of many attackers, from low-level gangs to highly organized cybercrime crews. Their attraction stems from their ease of use and the ability for attackers to add exploits for new vulnerabilities as needed. While there are dozens of exploit kits available, a handful of them attract the most use and attention, including Angler, Neutrino, Nuclear, and Rig. Researchers at Recorded Future looked at more than 140 exploit kits and analyzed which exploits appeared in the most kits in the last year, and it's no surprise that Flash and IE exploits dominated the landscape. Six of the top 10 most-refquently targeted vulnerabilities in the last year were in Flash, while the other four were in Microsoft products, including IE, Windows, and Silverlight. Flash has been a favorite target for attackers for a long time, for two main reasons: it's deployed on hundreds of millions of machines, and it has plenty of vulnerabilities. Recorded Future's analysis shows that trend is continuing, and one Flash bug disclosed October 2015 was incorporated into seven individual exploit kits. The flaw was used by a number of high-level attackers, including some APT groups. "Adobe Flash Player's CVE-2015-7645, number 10 in terms of references to exploit kits, stands out as the vulnerability with the most adoption by exploit kits. Exploit kits adopting the Adobe bug in the past year include Neutrino, Angler, Magnitude, RIG, Nuclear Pack, Spartan, and Hunter," the analysis by Recorded Future says.

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