Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Some Windows 7 users who installed the KB4534310 update found that their desktops turned black. With the operating system having now reached end of life, the company said that it would only make a fix available to organizations paying for Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU). But Microsoft has changed its mind. It now says that it will make a patch available for all Windows 7 users, addressing the bug introduced by the last ever freely available Windows 7 update. As we reported the other day, Microsoft had already suggested some workarounds for the black desktop problem. The company had said that it was working on a fix that would be released next month: "We are working on a resolution and estimate a solution will be available in mid-February for organizations who have purchased Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU)."

Google will shut down its low-code development platform, App Maker, early next year. From a report: Google today announced it is killing off yet another service: App Maker, G Suite's low-code environment for building custom business apps. Google App Maker will be "turned down" gradually this year and officially shut down on January 19, 2021. Google cited "low usage" as an explanation for the move. If your business was using App Maker or considering moving to App Maker, you'll need to find another tool. Indeed, Google is making today's announcement not even two weeks after acquiring no-code app development platform AppSheet. Google first launched App Maker as part of an Early Adopter Program in November 2016. At the time, we described it as a service that "lets users drag and drop widgets around on a user interface that complies with Google's Material design principles" to create apps that can be "customized further with scripts, as well as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JQuery content." Once apps are live, usage can be monitored through Google Analytics. App Maker hit general availability for all G Suite Business, Enterprise, and Education customers in June 2018. A year and a half later, and it's already headed to the grave.

Over the past two weeks, Mozilla's add-on review team has banned 197 Firefox add-ons that were caught executing malicious code, stealing user data, or using obfuscation to hide their source code. From a report: The add-ons have been banned and removed from the Mozilla Add-on (AMO) portal to prevent new installs, but they've also been disabled in the browsers of the users who already installed them. The bulk of the ban was levied on 129 add-ons developed by 2Ring, a provider of B2B software. The ban was enforced because the add-ons were downloading and executing code from a remote server. According to Mozilla's rules, add-ons must self-contain all their code, and not download code dynamically from remote locations. Mozilla has recently begun strictly enforcing this rule across its entire add-on ecosystem. A similar ban for downloading and executing remote code in users' Firefox browsers was also levied against six add-ons developed by Tamo Junto Caixa, and three add-ons that were deemed fake premium products (their names were not shared).

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pim Techamuanvivit was managing her Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in San Francisco, Kin Khao, around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when she got an unexpected call. A customer was wondering when food from his order on the online food delivery company Seamless was coming, as he had been waiting 45 minutes. "I think you must be confused, because I don't do delivery," Techamuanvivit told him. Techamuanvivit said the man then asked, "So what are you doing on Seamless?" The restaurateur soon discovered that her restaurant had a page on both Seamless and Grubhub. Both brands are owned by Grubhub, a Chicago online food delivery company that merged with New York's Seamless in 2013. The delivery sites listed her restaurant and its address with a menu that she does not serve, including pad Thai and, of all things in a restaurant that specializes in lesser-known Thai regional cuisine, Vietnamese pho.

"It's outrageous. They can't get away with this. They can't totally fake a restaurant that doesn't do delivery and go pick up food from, I don't know, some rat-infested warehouse somewhere and deliver to my guests," said Techamuanvivit, who added that she intends to sue Seamless. Grubhub said that the company partners with more than 140,000 restaurants in over 2,700 U.S. cities, and that most orders are from restaurants with which it has an explicit partnership. The company recently started adding other restaurants to its sites without such a partnership, when it finds restaurants that are in high demand, it said. In those cases, someone from the company orders the food ahead or at the restaurant, and a driver is sent to pick it up, it added.

An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world's biggest companies, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag has found. From the report: Our report relies on leaked user data, contracts, and other company documents that show the sale of this data is both highly sensitive and is in many cases supposed to remain confidential between the company selling the data and the clients purchasing it. The documents, from a subsidiary of the antivirus giant Avast called Jumpshot, shine new light on the secretive sale and supply chain of peoples' internet browsing histories. They show that the Avast antivirus program installed on a person's computer collects data, and that Jumpshot repackages it into various different products that are then sold to many of the largest companies in the world. Some past, present, and potential clients include Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Sephora, Home Depot, Conde Nast, Intuit, and many others. Some clients paid millions of dollars for products that include a so-called "All Clicks Feed," which can track user behavior, clicks, and movement across websites in highly precise detail.

jrepin writes: Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 5.5 release, codenamed as Kleptomaniac Octopus.The latest version of the open source operating system kernel brings RAID1 with 3- and 4- copies to btrfs filesystem, ext4 gets direct I/O via iomap together with fscrypt supporting smaller block sizes, and you can now use SMB as root filesystem. AMD OverDrive overclocking is now supported on Navi GPUS, wake-on-voice on newer Google Chromebooks is now supported. Added was a Logitech keyboard driver. KUnit is a new unit testing framework for the kernel. There are many more new features which you can read about on Kernel Newbies changelog page. For downloads visit The Linux Kernel Archives.

TripAdvisor is cutting hundreds of jobs underscoring the company's need to reduce costs as competition from Google intensifies. From a report: The online travel information provider is eliminating about 200 workers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company had just over 3,800 staff at the end of September, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A TripAdvisor spokesman declined to comment, but pointed to a recent earnings conference call in which the company said it was "prudently reducing and re-allocating expenses in certain parts of our business to preserve strong profitability." Google has launched new travel search tools that compete with TripAdvisor, while adding its own reviews of hotels, restaurants and other destinations. Google has also crammed the top of its mobile search results with more ads. This has forced many companies, including TripAdvisor, to buy more ads from the search giant to keep online traffic flowing.

"Cisco is urging customers to update its Firepower Management Center software," ZDNet reported Thursday, "after users informed it of a critical bug that attackers could exploit over the internet." Like many Cisco bugs, the flaw was found in the web-based management interface of its software. The bug has a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10 and means admins should patch sooner rather than later.

The vulnerability is caused by a glitch in the way Cisco's software handles Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication responses from an external authentication server. Remote attackers could exploit the flaw by sending specially crafted HTTP requests to the device. Devices are vulnerable if they've been configured to authenticate users of the web interface through an external LDAP server...

How customers should remediate the issue will depend on which release of Firepower Management Center (FMC) they're running. There is no workaround, but hotfix patches are available for several new releases of FMC, and maintenance releases that address the flaw are scheduled for later this year. "Customers may install a fix either by upgrading to a fixed release or by installing a hotfix patch," Cisco notes...

Cisco also disclosed seven high-severity flaws and 19 medium-severity security issues.

This FMC critical flaw follows updates made available earlier this month for three critical flaws affecting Cisco's Data Center Network Manager software. The researcher who reported the flaw has released proof-of-concept exploit code, but Cisco says it is not aware of any malicious use of the flaws.

"No, the luxurious Borgata Hotel, Casino and Spa isn't located in a central New Jersey wildlife preserve," reports a local news team in New York. But an ad for the casino in Waze was apparently tagged with the wrong geographical coordinates, CNN reports, and.... The Jackson township Police Department's public information officer Lt. Christopher Parise said the police department found out about the error when one his officers was out assisting a stranded car. The driver told the officer they were headed for the Borgata but wound up at the 12,000 acre wildlife area through unpaved roads after using Waze for directions...

"My department towed 10 cars in 5 days that were stuck," Parise said. "A Waze response to the error report stated 249 others reported the same location error in the past couple days, so hundreds have been misled back there."
Police complained of a "tremendous increase" in disabled motor vehicles -- one driver found themselves at least 10 minutes away from any paved roads. Long-time Slashdot reader Newer Guy tipped us off to the story, though Waze told CNN that after being made aware of it, they'd fixed the issue "within hours".

But the casino is still urging future visitors "to check the route before they begin driving" to make sure they're actually being routed to Atlantic City. And the folks in Jackson Township (population 54,856) had a real good laugh, posting over 100 comments on the police department's Facebook page.

• "You can take the people out of the city but you can't take the city out of the people..."

• "who the hell is going on unpaved roads thinking it'll lead them to a casino?"

• "You would think when they go down a dirt road common sense would kick in..."

• "This must be a short cut to Atlantic City, just keep going. Ha ha ha..."

• "This is why you need to learn how to read a map!"

• "I keep picturing in my head these people driving into the woods thinking its Atlantic City..."

• "We could just put a couple of slot machines and poker tables out there.... "

• "I knew people were stupid but this is ridiculous."

• "Don't blame the app, Blame the morons driving."

• "How stupid do you have to be to not realize that you are nowhere near the ocean??!!"

• "So natural selection is going high tech?"

• "I was wondering how this lovely couple ended up way back by the lake when I was hunting there last week. They flagged me down and pleaded with me to show them the way out.
  
  "They must've thought they were in the middle of Deliverance."

From a report: JetBrains has added further destinations to the IntelliJ-based roadmap it sketched out last year, promising more localization, machine learning and Git integration amongst a range of other goodies for the Java IDE...

The Prague-based firm's CTO Dimitry Jemerov said users had long asked to be able to use its IDEs for "general purpose text editing". While this is possible to some degree currently, in some situations it created a temporary project file, leading to disk clutter and "other inconveniences". However, recent performance improvements mean "the possibility of using our IDEs as lightweight text editors has become more plausible, so we're now building a dedicated mode for editing non-project files. In this mode, the IDE will work more like a simple text editor." This will be faster, he promised, but the feature set will be very limited and "you'll be able to easily switch to the full project mode if you need to use features such as refactoring or debugging...

Other upcoming features include more machine learning. Jemerov said this was already being used to improve code completion, but would now be rolled out for other completion features. "We're teaching ML completion to make better use of the context for ranking completion suggestions and to generate completion variants that go beyond a single identifier (full-line completion)". That might take a while, he said, but was a "major area where we are investing our efforts."

Today Boeing's new 777X aircraft completed its maiden flight, reports CNBC: The plane is the largest twin-engine jet ever built and has a wingspan so wide — more than 235 feet — it features folding wingtips that reduce that width by more than 20 feet so the plane can fit into various airport taxiways and gates. The 777X-9 is slightly longer than Boeing's most iconic plane: the hump-backed 747, which is fading away as airlines opt for twin-engine aircraft that require less fuel...

The 777X, which lists for $422.2 million although airlines usually receive discounts, can fit up to 426 passengers in a two-class configuration. Boeing had 344 firm orders for the 777X at the end of the third quarter, according to a company filing, and Emirates is its biggest single customer.
By allowing more passengers on a single flight, the plane's wide-body design achieves a smaller carbon footprint, Forbes reports. And an expected shortage of trained pilots might also help convince airlines to use the new plane. The decision may also be driven by future airport and airspace congestion. With passenger numbers expected to double over the next 20 years, it will be a real challenge for infrastructure to keep up. Fewer planes required to fly all those people would be an advantage... More planes flying requires more pilots trained to fly them and an over-reliance of narrow-bodies exacerbates the problem. The 777X can be flown by current generation 777-trained pilots, Boeing says.

It's a claim that will no doubt undergo more serious scrutiny by regulators following the 737 MAX tragedies — as will the whole aircraft — but that may be in Boeing's favor, helping to restore confidence.

Slashdot reader JoeyRox shares a disturbing story about a Boeing 737 NG flight carrying 128 passengers that crashed in 2009, killings its three pilots, another crew member and five passengers. But "the Dutch investigators focused blame on the pilots for failing to react properly when an automated system malfunctioned and caused the plane to plummet into a field," the New York Times reported this week.

"The fault was hardly the crew's alone, however. Decisions by Boeing, including risky design choices and faulty safety assessments, also contributed to the accident on the Turkish Airlines flight." But the Dutch Safety Board either excluded or played down criticisms of the manufacturer in its final report after pushback from a team of Americans that included Boeing and federal safety officials, documents and interviews show. The crash, in February 2009, involved a predecessor to Boeing's 737 Max, the plane that was grounded last year after accidents in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed 346 people and hurled the company into the worst crisis in its history.

A review by The New York Times of evidence from the 2009 accident, some of it previously confidential, reveals striking parallels with the recent crashes — and resistance by the team of Americans to a full airing of findings that later proved relevant to the Max.

In the 2009 and Max accidents, for example, the failure of a single sensor caused systems to misfire, with catastrophic results, and Boeing had not provided pilots with information that could have helped them react to the malfunction. The earlier accident "represents such a sentinel event that was never taken seriously," said Sidney Dekker, an aviation safety expert who was commissioned by the Dutch Safety Board to analyze the crash.

Dekker's study accused Boeing of trying to deflect attention from its own "design shortcomings" and other mistakes with "hardly credible" statements that admonished pilots to be more vigilant, according to a copy reviewed by The Times.

[That 2009 study was never made public -- until Tuesday, after the New York Times had published its story.

The same day Boeing announced they'd stopped production on the 737 Max.]
The Times also reports that after the first fatal 737 Max crash in 2018, one Ohio State professor who has advised the FAA sent an email to a colleague citing research from the 1990s on automation-triggered disasters -- as well as Boeing's 2009 crash. "That this situation has continued on for so long without major action is not how engineering is supposed to work.

After the second fatal 737 Max crash, he told he Times he was appalled. "This is such of a failure of responsibility," he said. "We're not supposed to let this happen.

Slashdot reader SmartAboutThings writes: While Microsoft Edge is right on track to replace Internet Explorer, it seems that the last one is a bigger security liability then you may think. In a newly released advisory, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [an agency within America's Department of Homeland Security] is warning users about an IE vulnerability.

To keep your personal data safe and don't expose your PC to dangerous malware, the agency further recommends "Consider using Microsoft Edge or an alternate browser until patches are made available." As a reminder, this is not the first international agency that ranks IE's security very low, as Germany's BSI shared a couple of months back a similar study.
Lifehacker's senior technology editor notes that the new vulnerability affects "various permutations of Internet Explorer 9, 10, and 11 across Windows 7, 8.1, and Windows 10 (as well as various editions of Windows Server).

"The bad news is that Microsoft won't likely patch this problem until February -- when the next major batch of security updates hits." But they offer a work-around of their own until then which involves opening an administrative command prompt to restrict access to the deprecated JScript library used by the exploit.

Otherwise, don't click on links from strangers, and if you're using IE switch to Edge. And Microsoft explains what will happen if you used Internet Explorer to visit a web site designed to exploit the vulnerability. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system.

"An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights."

The New York Times reports on "Ring Neighbors," a local social networking service launched by Amazon in 2018 where users "share videos of delivery people carelessly throwing packages, or failing to wait for an answer at the door; others share footage of mail people navigating treacherous ice, or merely waving at the camera." On a U.S. Postal Service forum, a mail carrier asked: "Anyone else feel kind of creeped out that people are recording and watching you, up close, deliver mail to their house or is it just me...?" The company also selects videos from its users to be shared on Ring TV, a video portal run by the company, under categories such as "Crime Prevention," "Suspicious Activity" and "Family & Friends." The videos are, essentially, free ads: The terrifying ones might convince viewers to buy cameras of their own; funny or sweet ones, at a minimum, condition viewers to understand front-door surveillance as normal, or even fun...

Ring videos also provide a constant stream of news and news-like material for media outlets. The headlines that accompany those videos portray an America both macabre and surreal: "Screams for Help Caught on Ring Camera," in Sacramento; "Man pleads for help on doorbell camera after being carjacked, shot in Arizona," in Phoenix; "WOMAN CAUGHT ON MEDFORD DOORBELL CAMERA WITH STOLEN GUN," in Oregon; "Alien abduction' caught on doorbell cam," in Porter, Tex. (it was a glitch); "Doorbell camera captures Wichita boy's plea for help after getting lost." And then there are videos like one shared by Rob Fox, in McDonough, Ga., in which his dog, locked out of the house, learns to use his doorbell. Mr. Fox posted the video to Facebook and then Reddit, from which the story drew news coverage. Ring contacted him, too, he said, to ask whether the company could use the footage in marketing materials.

Elsewhere, the footage is billed as entertainment. In early December, "America's Funniest Home Videos," which has been aggregating viewer videos since the 1980s, released a best-of compilation: "Funny Doorbell Camera Fails." It is composed almost entirely of people falling down...

Home surveillance means you're never quite home, but you're never completely away from home, either.
Footage from one Florida camera showed a bearded man who "licks the doorbell repeatedly. Then he stands back and stares," according to the Times.

And they also report that Ring cameras are now also being stolen, "leaving their owners with a final few seconds of footage — a hand, a face, a mask — before losing their connections."

On Friday America's commander-in-chief revealed the logo for the newest branch of its military, Space Force. CNBC immediately reported that the logo "has boldly gone where Star Trek has gone before." The Pentagon and White House did not immediately respond to CNBC's query as to why the Space Force and Star Trek logos -- both with blue globes, white stars, and swooshed rings around a sleek space ship -- looked similar.
"The U.S. government took a thing from a TV show and made it the official emblem of a branch of the military, " tweeted a culture writer for the New York Times.

But conservative national security commentator John Noonan argued it looks more like the logo for America's Air Force Space Command (founded in 1982). "So the Air Force originally stole the Star Trek logo?" someone asked him on Twitter -- prompting this wry reply.

"Well, that was certainly the joke we made 15 years ago."

But it may actually be the other way around. One Star Trek fan site claims that the Starfleet logo never even appeared on the original Star Trek or Star Trek: The Next Generation series, and wasn't created until after the Air Force's logo, during the fourth season of Deep Space Nine (around 1996), by American graphic designer Mike Okuda: In the Star Trek Sticker Book, on the cover of which the logo of Starfleet Command is shown at a large size, Mike Okuda writes, "The Starfleet Command seal was first seen in 'Homefront' (Deep Space 9) and later in 'In the Flesh' (Voyager), although the agency itself, of course, dates back to the original Star Trek series.

"The symbol was intended to be somewhat reminiscent of the NASA emblem."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The first person diagnosed with the Wuhan coronavirus in the United States is being treated by a few medical workers and a robot. The robot, equipped with a stethoscope, is helping doctors take the man's vitals and communicate with him through a large screen, said Dr. George Diaz, chief of the infectious disease division at the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. "The nursing staff in the room move the robot around so we can see the patient in the screen, talk to him," Diaz said, adding the use of the robot minimizes exposure of medical staff to the infected man. It's unclear when the patient will be released because the CDC, which is set to provide the discharge details, has recommended additional testing. "They're looking for ongoing presence of the virus," Diaz told CNN on Thursday. "They're looking to see when the patient is no longer contagious."

Clayton Christensen, the business scholar who coined the term "disruptive innovation," died of cancer treatment complications on Thursday at age 67. The Verge reports: You may not immediately recognize his name, but the tech industry -- and every resulting industry -- is built on the framework of technology disruption and innovation that Christensen devised. The crux of Christensen's theory is that big, successful companies that neglect potential customers at the lower end of their markets (mainframe computers, in his famous example) are ripe for disruption from smaller, more efficient, more nimble competitors that can do almost as good a job more cheaply (like personal computers). One need look no further than the biggest names in Silicon Valley to find evidence of successful disrupters, from Napster to Amazon to Uber to Airbnb and so on.

And scores of notable tech leaders have for years cited Christensen's 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma as a major influence. It's the only business book on the late Steve Jobs' must-read list; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings read it with his executive team when he was developing the idea for his company; and the late Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, said the book and Christensen's theory were responsible for that company's turnaround. [...] He later refined his thinking on disruption, introducing the concept of "jobs to be done," which stressed the need to focus on customers' needs, and acknowledged that disruption was a great way to start a company, but not a good way to grow a company. "It's not a manual for how to grow or how to predict what customers want. [Jobs to be done] is the second side of the same coin: How can I be sure that competitors won't kill me and how can I be sure customers will want to buy the product? So it's actually a very important compliment to disruption."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: On January 24, 1984, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, California, debuting the new computer equipped with a 9-inch black and white display, an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor, 128KB of RAM, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a price tag of $2,495. The now iconic machine weighed in at a whopping 17 pounds and was advertised as offering a word processing program, a graphics package, and a mouse. At the time it was introduced, the Macintosh was seen as Apple's last chance to overcome IBM's domination of the personal computer market and remain a major player in the personal computer industry. Despite the high price at the time, which was equivalent to around $6,000 today, the Macintosh sold well, with Apple hitting 70,000 units sold by May 1984. The now iconic "1984" Super Bowl ad that Apple invested in and debuted days before the Macintosh was unveiled may have helped bolster sales.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Count GE in on the "screw your customers" bandwagon. Twitter user @ShaneMorris tweeted: "My fridge has an RFID chip in the water filter, which means the generic water filter I ordered for $19 doesn't work. My fridge will literally not dispense ice, or water. I have to pay General Electric $55 for a water filter from them." Fortunately, there appears to be a way to hack them to work: How to Hack RWPFE Water Filters for Your GE Fridge. Hacks aside, count me out from ever buying another GE product if it includes anti-customer "features" like these. "The difference between RWPF and RPWFE is that the RPWFE has a freaking RFID chip on it," writes Jack Busch from groovyPost. "The fridge reads the RFID chip off your filter, and if your filter is either older than 6 months or not a genuine GE RPWFE filter, it's all 'I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't dispense any water for you right now.' Now, to be fair, GE does give you a bypass cartridge that lets you get unfiltered water for free (you didn't throw that thing away, did you?). But come on..."

Jack proceeds to explain how you can pop off the filter bypass and "try taping the thing directly into your fridge where it would normally meet up when the filter is install." If you're able to get it in just the right spot, "you're set for life," says Jack. Alternatively, "you can tape it onto the front of an expired RPWFE GE water filter, install it backward, and then keep using it (again, not recommended for too much longer than six months). Or, you can tape it to the corresponding spot on a generic filter and reinstall it."

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is urging Microsoft to open source Windows 7, which is no longer supported by the company. The Register reports: On the face of it, the logic seems pretty simple. On January 14, Windows 7 reached its end of life as Microsoft turned off the free security update taps with a final fix. "Its life doesn't have to end," cried the foundation. "We call on Microsoft to upcycle it instead." Unfortunately, the FSF couldn't resist a final dig, saying the killing of the OS had brought to an end "its updates as well as its 10 years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security."

There is a precedent. Ancient MS-DOS and Word code has been opened up, and the Calculator app found in the current Windows 10 now lurks on GitHub. But an entire, relatively recent OS? We can see some problems, not least the licensed components lurking in Windows 7 that would need to be either excised or open-sourced as well. Then there are the bits and pieces that the company would consider valuable secrets (large chunks of Windows 7 linger on in Windows 10 after all.) And then there is the fact that Windows 7 is not actually unsupported. Three more years of updates are available for those who can pay. And with Windows (as well those parts of it licensed to third parties) still accounting for a sizeable chunk of Microsoft's revenues, we can imagine a very functional and highly compatible free version is not really in the company's best fiscal interests. You can read the FSF's "Upcycle Windows 7" petition here.