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."

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

"A new satellite from Capella Space was described as "pretty creepy" by Bustle's technology site Input: Like other hunks of metal currently orbiting Earth, the Capella-2 satellite's onboard radar system makes it capable of producing ludicrously high-resolution visuals from its data. More unconventional is the service Capella has launched to match: the government or private customers can, at any time, request a view of anything on the planet that's visible from the sky...

The Capella-2's system of cameras and sensors is nothing short of magnificent. The satellite uses something called Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), a technology used by NASA since the 1970s, to detect the Earth's surface through even the densest of clouds. SAR sends a 9.65 GHz radio signal toward the Earth and interprets the signal as it returns, using that data to form a visual... The Capella-2 is now the highest-resolution commercial SAR satellite in the world, capable of 50 cm x 50 cm resolution imaging. Other satellites are only capable of resolution up to about five meters....

Once Capella's full squadron of satellites is airborne, the company will have the ability to quickly snap views of just about any place in the world. That power could quickly be abused if left unchecked.
The article notes Capella already has a contract with the U.S. Air Force, adding "It's not much of a stretch to imagine high-resolution SAR technology turning into a tool for national surveillance...

"Right now there's just one Capella-2 satellite roaming around in the atmosphere, so that functionality is somewhat limited. Capella plans to launch six additional satellites with similar capabilities in the next year."

In response on Friday Capella Space penned a blog post reminding readers that their satellite "does not see through buildings," and that at 50-centimeter resolution "What it cannot do...is see people, license plates or reveal any personally identifiable information. Unlike other technologies that have recently been under scrutiny for privacy infringement such as cell phone geolocation data or automatic license plate readers, SAR imaging specializes in a macro view of the world to see the general patterns of life.

"Our company was founded on the belief that technology in space can significantly benefit life on Earth, and invading privacy does not help that mission. Part of that also means thoroughly vetting our customers and partners to ensure they will use our information for ethical purposes."

One day after they were uploaded, RubyGems discovered and removed two malicious packages that had been designed to steal cryptocurrency from unsuspecting users by installing a clipboard hijacker, reports Bleeping Computer, citing research by open-source security firm Sonatype.

Fortunately, while the packages were downloaded a total of 142 times, "At this time, none of the cryptocurrency addresses have received any funds." These packages were masquerading as a bitcoin library and a library for displaying strings with different color effects. A clipboard hijacker monitored the Windows clipboard for cryptocurrency addresses, and if one is detected, replaces it with an address under the attacker's control. Unless a user double-checks the address after they paste it, the sent coins will go to the attacker's cryptocurrency address instead of the intended recipient...

The base64 encoded string is a VBS file that is executed to create another malicious VBS file and configure it to start automatically when a user logs into Windows. This VBS script is the clipboard hijacker and is stored at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft Essentials\Software Essentials.vbs to impersonate the old Microsoft Security Essentials security software. The clipboard hijacking script monitors the Windows clipboard every second and check if it contains a Bitcoin address, an Ethereum address, or a raw Monero address.

fahrbot-bot quotes an article from Science Alert: Nothing keeps time like the beating heart of an atom. But even the crisp tick-tock of a vibrating nucleus is limited by uncertainties imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics.

Several years ago, researchers from MIT and the University of Belgrade in Serbia proposed that quantum entanglement could push clocks beyond this blurry boundary. Now, we have a proof of concept in the form of an experiment. Physicists connected together a cloud of ytterbium-171 atoms with streams of photons reflected from a surrounding hall of mirrors and measured the timing of their tiny wiggles.

Their results show that entangling atoms in this way could speed up the time-measuring process of atomic nuclei clocks, making them more precise than ever. In principle, a clock based on this new approach would lose just 100 milliseconds since the dawn of time itself.

Facebook added banner ads criticizing Apple into some of its iOS apps, 9to5Mac reports, in its ongoing war against Apple's new privacy changes: By tapping the Learn More button, the app opens an article written by Facebook in which the company says Apple's policies announced at WWDC 2020 with iOS 14 will "harm the growth of business and the free internet." Facebook refers both to the new App Store privacy labels and also an option in iOS 14 that prevents apps from tracking users.

The fact that Facebook is now showing these messages in its iOS apps criticizing Apple demonstrates that the company is trying to get popular appeal to change Apple's mind about its new App Store privacy rules. That's because Facebook is one of the companies that will be most impacted by Apple's new privacy policies as its social networks rely heavily on ads and personal data from users.

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said it doesn't want to force Facebook to change its business model, but the company expects Facebook to be more transparent about how it collects data from users and let them choose whether or not to offer such data.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: At a McDonald's restaurant in Georgia, an angry customer in the drive-through lane threw his drink at the pregnant fast-food worker who had served him. "She was crying and covered in ice and soda and syrup..." remembers another driver in the next car parked in the line. "[C]overed in syrup all over her shoes, pants, and shirt."

That driver created an online fundraiser for the fast-food worker, ultimately raising $1,700 within 24 hours which was later presented to the fast-food worker. "She gave me the envelope and I couldn't do nothing but cry," the worker told CNN later, "because I wasn't expecting that."

The driver also publicized a registry for baby supplies (along with the Cash App handle for future donations), but insisted to CNN that it wasn't doing anything special. "I just saw somebody being mistreated and I didn't like what I saw."

Reuters reports: A new strain of coronavirus identified in the United Kingdom is up to 70% more infectious but it is not thought to be more deadly and vaccines should still be effective, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and scientists said on Saturday.... "This is early data and it's subject to review. But it's the best that we have at the moment and we have to act on information as we have it, because this is now spreading very fast.
Prime minister Johnson also announced new and tougher lockdown restrictions for millions of people in the U.K., according to Reuters, which elsewhere reports the following known facts about the new variant: - The new variant is thought to have first occurred in mid-September in London or Kent, in the southeast of England.

- UK analysis suggests it may be up to 70% more transmissible than the old variant, which could increase the reproduction "R" rate by 0.4...

- The new variant contains 23 different changes, many of them associated with alterations in a protein made by the virus. Patrick Vallance, the UKâ(TM)s chief scientific adviser, said this was an unusually large number of changes...

- In London, 62% of cases were due to the new variant in the week of Dec. 9. That compared to 28% three weeks earlier. In London, the overall infection rate doubled in the last week.

Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The U.S. Space Force celebrated its one-year anniversary Friday with a new announcement: that members of this branch of the military will be referred to as "guardians." They're describing it as "A name chosen by space professionals, for space professionals." The site Space.com notes that the phrase is a nod to the original long-standing "Space Command" branch of the Air Force (founded in 1982), whose motto had been "Guardians of the High Frontier."

In other news, the Space Force now has one member who is actually in outer space — astronaut Michael Hopkins. Launched by SpaceX to the International Space Station in the Crew-1 capsule, Hopkins agreed to join the Space Force in a ceremony in space which a Space Force official said would "spotlight the decades-long partnership" between NASA and America's Defense Department (which oversees its armed forces).

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine pointed out that 60% of the astronaut corps comes from the military, according to Space.com, which adds that "At least one other member of NASA's active astronaut corps, Air Force Col. Nick Hague, has also requested to transfer to the Space Force."