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Submission + - DuckDuckGo Browser Now Blocks Most YouTube Ads (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: DuckDuckGo has added built-in YouTube ad blocking to its browser, allowing users to skip most pre-roll and mid-roll ads while watching videos on the YouTube website. The feature is enabled by default on Windows, macOS, and iPhone, with Android support rolling out by default soon. DuckDuckGo says it uses community-maintained filter lists from the uBlock Origin project, along with its own compatibility rules, to keep pace with changes to YouTube ad delivery. While the feature will likely be welcomed by users tired of interruptions, it also raises questions about YouTube Premium and how creators are compensated when ad revenue is bypassed.

Submission + - Windows to Linux refugees, which free/small aps do you miss and need? 1

Submitted by BrendaEM
BrendaEM writes: Windows does have a lot of useful but smaller than power-aps. Some of these are closed source, some are open--that are not available in Linux, yet. Which applications do you need, which have no parallel in Linux?

My list would have to contain GTK versions of: Irfanview image manager, which I think is unequaled in Linux, which does work to some extent under Wine. I also miss the full version of 7zip, because of its better compression settings, which File-Roller does not provide, though https://www.ruinelli.ch/p7zip-... is available but unnoticed by common distribution. Lastly, I think that Notepad++ would be a good addition to Linux.

Which daily-driver aps do you need?

Submission + - Arecibo collapsed because of engineering failures that inspectors failed to spot (behindtheblack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a new very detailed engineering analysis into the causes of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020, the failure was caused first by a surprising interaction between the radio electronics of Arecibo and the traditional methods used to anchor the cables, and second by a failure of inspections to spot the problem as it became obvious.

The surprising engineering discovery is illustrated to the right, taken from figure 2-6 of the report. The main antenna of Arecibo was suspended above the bowl below by three main cables. The figure shows the basic design of the system used to anchor the cable ends to their sockets. The end of the cable bunches would be inserted into the socket, spread apart, and then zinc would be poured in to fill the gap and then act as a plug and glue to hold the cables in place. According to the report, this system has been used for decades in many applications very successfully.

What the report found however was at Arecibo over time the cable bunch and zinc plug slowly began to pull out of the socket, what the report labels as "zinc creep." This was noted by inspectors, but dismissed as a concern because they still believed the engineering margins were still high enough to prevent failure at this point. In fact, this is exactly where the structure failed in 2020, with the first cable separating as shown in August 2020. The second cable did so in a similar manner in November 2020.

The report concluded that the "only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer to all these questions and the observed socket failure pattern is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope’s uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment. The Arecibo Telescope cables were suspended across the beam of 'the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth.'"

Submission + - EPA Pulls From the Market a Weedkiller Harmful to Fetuses (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a move not seen for almost 40 years, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesdayissued an emergency ordersuspending all uses of a weedkiller linked to serious health risks for unborn babies. The herbicide dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known as DCPA or Dacthal, is used on crops such as broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage and onions. Fetuses exposed to it could suffer from low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased I.Q., and impaired motor skills later in life, the E.P.A. said.

Tuesday’s order followed several years of “unprecedented efforts” by the Environmental Protection Agency to get AMVAC to submit its own data on the pesticide and its health risks, the agency said. The agency estimates that pregnant women handling DCPA products could be subjected to exposures four to 20 times greater than what E.P.A. has estimated is safe for fetuses. Mily Treviño Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, also known as the National Farmworkers Women’s Alliance, called E.P.A.’s decision “historic.”

Submission + - How not to hire a North Korean IT spy (csoonline.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: CISOs are urged to carry out tighter vetting of new hires to ward off potential ‘moles’ who are increasingly finding their way onto company payrolls and into their IT systems, writes John Leyden in a feature on the trend that finds North Korea actively infiltrating Western companies using skilled IT workers who use fake identities to pose as remote workers with foreign companies, typically but not exclusively in the US. "The schemes are part of illicit revenue generation efforts by the North Korean regime, which faces financial sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, as well as a component of the country’s cyberespionage activities."

Submission + - LinkedIn Hires Former Twitter Security Chief Lea Kissner as New CISO (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Business social networking giant LinkedIn has appointed former Twitter security chief Lea Kissner as its new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Kissner, who departed Twitter after the Elon Musk acquisition, will be tasked with leading LinkedIn’s security and privacy strategy, ensuring the protection of LinkedIn’s member and customer data.

Submission + - China Hackers Caught Zero-Day in Servers Used by ISPs, MSPs (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Threat hunters have caught Chinese hackers exploiting a fresh zero-day in Versa Director servers used to manage network configurations and heavily used by ISPs and MSPs, making them a critical and attractive target for threat actors seeking to extend their reach within enterprise network management.

According to SecurityWeek sources, the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies discovered active exploitation. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-39717, was added to the CISA must-patch list over the weekend after Versa Networks confirmed zero-day exploitation and warned that the Versa Director GUI can be hacked to plant malware on affected devices.

Black Lotus Labs team linked the zero-day exploitation to Volt Typhoon, a Chinese government-backed hacking team caught in a series of eyebrow-raising attacks against hundreds of critical infrastructure targets in the United States

Submission + - US grid adds batteries at 10x the rate of natural gas in first half of 2024 (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: While solar power is growing at an extremely rapid clip, in absolute terms, the use of natural gas for electricity production has continued to outpace renewables. But that looks set to change in 2024, as the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) has run the numbers on the first half of the year and found that wind, solar, and batteries were each installed at a pace that dwarfs new natural gas generators. And the gap is expected to get dramatically larger before the year is over.

Submission + - Far-Right 'Terrorgram' Chatrooms Are Fueling a Wave of Power Grid Attacks (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: People in a quiet neighborhood in Carthage, a town in Moore County, North Carolina, heard a series of six loud pops a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. on Dec. 3, 2022. A resident named Michael Campbell said he ducked at the sound. Another witness told police they thought they were hearing fireworks. The noise turned out to be someone shooting a rifle at a power substation next door to Campbell’s home. The substation, operated by the utility Duke Energy Corp., consists of equipment that converts electricity into different voltages as it’s transported to the area and then steered into individual houses. The shots hit the radiator of an electrical transformer, a sensitive piece of technology whose importance would likely be understood only by utility company employees. It began dumping a “vast amount” of oil, according to police reports. A subsequent investigation has pointed to a local right-wing group, one of a wave of attacks or planned attacks on power infrastructure.

By 8:10 the lights in Carthage went out. Minutes later, a security alarm went off at a Duke Energy substation 10 miles away, this one protected from view by large pine trees. When company personnel responded, they found that someone had shot its transformer radiator, too. Police found shell casings on the ground at the site and noticed someone had slashed the tires on nearby service trucks. The substations were designed to support each other, with one capable of maintaining service if the other went down. Knocking out both facilities prevented the company from rerouting power. Police described the two incidents as a coordinated attack. About 45,000 families and businesses remained dark for four days. This was a burden for area grocery stores and local emergency services. One woman, 87-year-old Karin Zoanelli, died in the hours after the shooting when the blackout caused her oxygen machine to stop operating. The North Carolina Medical Examiner’s office classified the death as a homicide.

The attack on Duke’s facilities in Moore County remains unsolved, but law enforcement officials and other experts suspect it’s part of a rising trend of far-right extremists targeting power infrastructure in an attempt to sow chaos. The most ambitious of these saboteurs hope to usher in societal collapse, paving the way for the violent overthrow of the US government, according to researchers who monitor far-right communities. Damaging the power grid has long been a fixation of right-wing extremists, who have plotted such attacks for many years. They’ve been getting a boost recently from online venues such as “Terrorgram,” a loose network of channels on the social media platform Telegram where users across the globe advocate violent white supremacism. In part, people use Terrorgram to egg one another on—a viral meme shows a stick figure throwing a Molotov cocktail at electrical equipment. People on the forum have also seized on recent anti-immigration riots in the UK, inciting people there to clash with police. In June 2022, months before the Moore County shootings, users on the forum began offering more practical support in the form of a 261-page document titled “Hard Reset,” which includes specific directions on how to use automatic weapons, explosives and mylar balloons to disrupt electricity. One of the document’s suggestions is to shoot high-powered firearms at substation transformers.

Submission + - Canada To Impose 100% Tariff On Chinese-Made EVs (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday Canada will impose punitive tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles — copying a similar initiative that the U.S. is already pursuing to stop a flood of what's been described as unfairly state-subsidized cars. Trudeau made the announcement at the federal cabinet retreat in Halifax where ministers are meeting to craft a strategy for the year ahead — the last year before an expected federal election in October 2025. Amid industry pressure to copy the U.S. program, Trudeau said a 100 percent surtax will be levied on all Chinese-made EVs, effective Oct. 1. The tariff would effectively double the price of imported vehicles, as it is expected most of the tax would be passed on to consumers.

Ottawa is following through now, Trudeau said, to "level the playing field for Canadian workers" and allow Canada's nascent EV industry to compete at home, in North America and globally. The tariff will apply to electric and certain hybrid passenger automobiles, trucks, buses and delivery vans. Chinese brands like BYD are not a major player in Canada's EV market right now but imports from China have exploded in recent years as Tesla switched from U.S. factories for its Canadian sales to its manufacturing plant in Shanghai. The new tariff will apply to those Shanghai-made Teslas that are sold in Canada — a development that is expected to force the U.S. automaker to supply the Canadian market with vehicles made at one if its other plants in the U.S. or Europe instead.

Submission + - No joke: Feds are banning humorous electronic messages on highways (apnews.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: It’s no joke. Humorous and quirky messages on electronic signs will soon disappear from highways and freeways across the country.

The U.S. Federal Highway Administration has given states two years to implement all the changes outlined in its new 1,100-page manual released last month, including rules that spells out how signs and other traffic control devices are regulated.

Administration officials said overhead electronic signs with obscure meanings, references to pop culture or those intended to be funny will be banned in 2026 because they can be misunderstood or distracting to drivers.

The agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, said signs should be “simple, direct, brief, legible and clear” and only be used for important information such as warning drivers of crashes ahead, adverse weather conditions and traffic delays. Seatbelt reminders and warnings about the dangers of speeding or driving impaired are also allowed.
Software

WordPress 3.0 Released 79

Posted by timothy from the now-even-wordier dept.
An anonymous reader writes "WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download and comes with 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements. Major new features in this release include a new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them easily to implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies."
Media

H.264 and VP8 Compared 337

Posted by timothy from the one-has-4-chars-and-a-dot dept.
TheReal_sabret00the writes with a snippet from StreamingMedia.com: "VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn't substandard, so that's not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself."
Security

Submission + - NYT Article About One of the Original Phreaks 1

Submitted by tmalone
tmalone writes: The New York Times is running an end of year piece about the most interesting people who have died this year. One of their picks is Joybubbles, also known as Josef Engressia, or "Whistler". He was born blind and discovered at the age of 7 that he could whistle 2600 hertz into a phone to make free long distance calls. He was one of the original phone phreaks, got arrested for phone fraud, and was even employed by the phone company. The article deals more with his personal life (he was abused at a home for the blind) than with his technical exploits, but is a very interesting story.
Cellphones

Research Finds Effects of GSM Signals on Sleep 319

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-out-of-my-brain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The effects of mobile phone radiation on sleep were studied in Sweden in a laboratory experiment where subjects were exposed either to 884 MHz GSM radiation or placebo. The study finds that compared to placebo, in the radiation-exposed subjects there was a prolonged latency to reach the first cycle of deep sleep (stage 3). The amount of stage 4 sleep was also decreased. Moreover, participants that otherwise have no self-reported symptoms related to mobile phone use, appear to have more headaches during actual radiofrequency exposure as compared to sham exposure."

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