Talynebear

Google has a set a date of September 1 for when its Chrome browser will block all Flash content that isn't "central to the webpage." Flash content, such as ads or auto-playing videos on non-video websites, will be automatically paused by default—but you can click to play them if you wish. Embedded video players on sites like YouTube and Vimeo will still work, of course.

The Flash-blocking feature was initially rolled out to a beta version of Chrome earlier this year. At the time, Google's Tommi Li claimed that the reason for the blocking was battery life, thanks to auto-playing Flash ads consuming a large amount of CPU time.

The move could also help stop the spread of malware via malicious Flash ads. Flash has had a long history of security exploits, with the most recent exploit being uncovered in July, which potentially allowed hackers to remotely execute malicious code.

In announcing its latest app initiative Wednesday, Amazon put an italicized emphasis on the fact that apps and games in the new "Amazon Underground" section are "actually free" for Android devices. That means users can go on an in-app purchase shopping spree for all of the chapters, items, options, and "energy" they want, while developers get pennies on the hour in exchange for giving up their beloved monetization plan.

Amazon Underground promises that its offerings are really, truly, and wholly free. Formerly paid apps cost nothing, while former freemium apps no longer ring users up for however many in-app purchases they make. Want fifty gazillion "coins" that would normally cost $100 of real cash, or free versions of productivity software, solid games like Goat Simulator, or kids' fare from the Sesame Workshop? They're yours for the taking. Amazon reminds you at every checkout opportunity how much you're not paying.

While you might expect that this new system would have developers launching social media campaigns about getting ripped off, Amazon made very clear that game and app creators whose livelihoods depended on IAPs would still get paid: "We're paying developers a certain amount on a per-minute-played basis in exchange for them waiving their normal in-app fees," the company's announcement stated. "We're the one picking up those per-minute charges."

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal reports that Tesla Motors is trying to press the Obama administration to make foreign auto sales in China a vital topic when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the US in September. Primarily, Tesla wants China to relax its requirements for foreign auto companies to sell within the country as electric-vehicle competition there continues to rise.

As far back as February 2014, Tesla identified China as an extremely important market for the car company's continued growth. Around that time, the Chinese government announced it would give Model S buyers a larger-than-expected subsidy in an effort to improve air quality in the country. Soon after, CEO Elon Musk told investors and reporters that the Chinese market will be good to Tesla when the company started shipping its cars. “It will be unlikely that we will be able to satisfy demand in China this year," Musk said back in early 2014.

Last year, however, did not pan out as Musk imagined. Tesla reportedly sold only 2,499 Model S units in China for 2014, falling well short of its goal to make one third of the company's global sales in that country, according to investment site Seeking Alpha.

Following in the footsteps of Google Now, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana, Facebook has launched its own virtual personal assistant, simply named M. M is being baked into the company's Messenger app, and, unlike its competitors, is powered not just by technology, but by real people.

A team of employees, dubbed M trainers, will work alongside the software to ensure that every request is answered. The idea is to go beyond the likes of Siri and Cortana, and offer a true personal assistant experience, allowing users to do things like have gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements.

Currently, M is entirely text based. The few hundred users in the Bay Area who have been given access to the app can tap a new button in Messenger to send a request directly to M, at which point either software completes it, or a human does. Users won’t directly know whether it was a computer or a person that helped them.

In a massive study, a team of researchers from around the world has found a depressing, but unsurprising, result: the Universe is dying. Pretty quickly, too. This isn’t really an unexpected finding, but it’s the most detailed examination of its eventual death yet.

The study was part of the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) Project, the largest multi-wavelength survey ever put together. The team, which was composed of researchers from across the globe, made use of some of the most powerful telescopes on the planet, including ESO’s VISTA and VST telescopes (both part of the Paranal University in Chile), as well as data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and NASA’s space telescopes, WISE and GALEX, and one from the European Space Agency, Herschel.

“We used as many space and ground-based telescopes as we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200,000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible,” said Simon Driver (ICRAR, The University of Western Australia), who leads the large GAMA team.

The maintainers of the open BitTorrent protocol for file sharing have fixed a vulnerability that allowed lone attackers with only modest resources to take down large sites using a new form of denial-of-service attack.

The technique was disclosed two weeks ago in a research paper submitted to the 9th Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies. By sending vulnerable BitTorrent applications maliciously modified data, attackers could force them to flood a third-party target with data that was 50 to 120 times bigger than the original request. By replacing the attacker's IP address in the malicious user datagram protocol request with the spoofed address of the target, the attacker could cause the data flood to hit the victim's computer.

In a blog post published Thursday, BitTorrent engineers said the vulnerability was the result of a flaw in a reference implementation called libuTP. To fix the weakness, the uTorrent, BitTorrent, and BitTorrent Sync apps will require acknowledgments from connection initiators before providing long responses.

Comic by: (via Kohney)

Hackers behind the breach of the Ashley Madison cheater's dating service have released a second, much bigger dump of sensitive materials that may include a massive amount of e-mail from its parent company's CEO Noel Biderman.

The BitTorrent download totals 19GB and includes 13 GB file titled noel.biderman.mail.7z, prompting speculation it contains e-mail from Biderman, who is CEO of Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media. Update: Researchers have now completed the download and found the noel.biderman.mail.7z file can't be unpacked because it is inexplicably corrupted. According to this analysis, the TL;DR of the leak is:

• The leak contains lots of source code
• 73 different git repositories are present
• Ashley Madison used gitlab internally
• The 13GB compressed file which could contain AM CEO’s emails seems corrupted. Is it a fake one?
• The leak contains plain text or poorly hashed (md5) db credentials

The new leak comes two days after Avid Life Media officials left open the possibility a previous 10GB download may not have been genuine. As it turned out, the leaked materials were real and showed the hackers had burrowed further into Ashley Madison than almost anyone had imagined.

While Comcast has started deploying 2Gbps fiber-to-the-home service to certain parts of its territory, much of its network is going to be stuck on cable for years to come.

But customers outside the fiber footprint will still be able to buy gigabit Internet service after Comcast upgrades to DOCSIS 3.1, a faster version of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. Comcast said in April that DOCSIS 3.1 will be available to some of its customers in early 2016 and eventually across its whole US footprint. Last week, Comcast said it wants to complete the whole upgrade within two years.

"Our intent is to scale it through our footprint through 2016," Comcast VP of network architecture Robert Howald said in an interview with FierceCable. "We want to get it across the footprint very quickly... We're shooting for two years." It could take up to three years, the story said.