Mark Herring had a fatal heart attack after the police swarmed his house after a fake emergency call. A Tennessee man was sentenced to five years in prison in connection with the episode. From a report: Mark Herring was at home in Bethpage, Tenn., one night in April 2020 when the police swarmed his house. Someone with a British accent had called emergency services in Sumner County and reported having shot a woman in the back of the head at Mr. Herring's address. The caller had threatened to set off pipe bombs at the front and back doors if officers came, according to federal court records. When the police arrived, they drew their guns and told Mr. Herring, a 60-year-old computer programmer and grandfather of six, to come out and keep his hands visible. As he walked out, he lost his balance and fell. He was pronounced dead that same night at a nearby hospital. The cause of death was a heart attack, according to court records.

Mr. Herring had been a victim of "swatting," the act of reporting a fake crime in order to provoke a heavily armed response from the police. The caller was a minor living in the United Kingdom, according to federal prosecutors. But the caller knew Mr. Herring's address because Shane Sonderman, 20, of Lauderdale County, Tenn., had posted the information online, prosecutors said. On Wednesday, Mr. Sonderman was sentenced to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy. "The defendant was part of a chain of events," federal prosecutors said in court documents. The police "arrived prepared to take on a life and death situation," prosecutors said. "Mr. Herring died of a heart attack at gunpoint." Mr. Sonderman's lawyer, Bryan R. Huffman, said he had argued for a lesser sentence but believed five years "was fair in light of Shane's culpability."

"Mr. Sonderman has expressed his remorse on multiple occasions. He has expressed his regret regarding Mr. Herring's death," Mr. Huffman said in an email on Saturday. "Mr. Sonderman's family had also expressed their remorse. There are many families affected by Shane's actions, including his own family." Mr. Herring was targeted because he refused to sell his Twitter handle, @Tennessee, according to his family and prosecutors. Smart, blunt and plain-spoken, Mr. Herring had loved computers since he was a teenager and joined Twitter in March 2007, less than a year after it started, his family said. He knew people wanted his handle, which he chose because of his love for the state, where he had been born and raised, and had rebuffed offers of $3,000 to $4,000 to sell it, his daughter Corinna Fitch, 37, said in an interview.

When the 150,000-member "megachurch" Hillsong opened a branch in Atlanta, its pastor Sam Collier says Facebook suggested using it to explore how churches can "go further farther on Facebook..." reports the New York Times: He is partnering with Facebook, he said, "to directly impact and help churches navigate and reach the consumer better."

"Consumer isn't the right word," he said, correcting himself. "Reach the parishioner better."
Facebook's involvement with churches has been intense: For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsong's grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was "partnering with Facebook" and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.

Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement...

"Together we are discovering what the future of the church could be on Facebook..."

[Facebook] has been cultivating partnerships with a wide range of faith communities over the past few years, from individual congregations to large denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. Now, after the coronavirus pandemic pushed religious groups to explore new ways to operate, Facebook sees even greater strategic opportunity to draw highly engaged users onto its platform. The company aims to become the virtual home for religious community, and wants churches, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their religious life into its platform, from hosting worship services and socializing more casually to soliciting money. It is developing new products, including audio and prayer sharing, aimed at faith groups...

The partnerships reveal how Big Tech and religion are converging far beyond simply moving services to the internet. Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has done for political and social life... The collaborations raise not only practical questions, but also philosophical and moral ones... There are privacy worries too, as people share some of their most intimate life details with their spiritual communities. The potential for Facebook to gather valuable user information creates "enormous" concerns, said Sarah Lane Ritchie, a lecturer in theology and science at the University of Edinburgh...

"Corporations are not worried about moral codes," she said. "I don't think we know yet all the ways in which this marriage between Big Tech and the church will play out." Last month Facebook held a summit "which resembled a religious service," the Times reports, at which Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said churches were a natural fit for Facebook "because fundamentally both are about connection."

But the article also notes the 6-million member Church of God in Christ "received early access to several of Facebook's monetization features," testing paid subscriptions for exclusive church content, as well as real-time donations during services. But "Leaders decided against a third feature: advertisements during video streams."

A post on Mozilla's security blog calls FTP "by now one of the oldest protocols still in use" — and it's suffering from "a number of serious security issues." The biggest security risk is that FTP transfers data in cleartext, allowing attackers to steal, spoof and even modify the data transmitted. To date, many malware distribution campaigns launch their attacks by compromising FTP servers and downloading malware on an end user's device using the FTP protocol.

Aligning with our intent to deprecate non-secure HTTP and increase the percentage of secure connections, we, as well as other major web browsers, decided to discontinue support of the FTP protocol. Removing FTP brings us closer to a fully-secure web which is on a path to becoming HTTPS only and any modern automated upgrading mechanisms such as HSTS or also Firefox's HTTPS-Only Mode, which automatically upgrade any connection to become secure and encrypted do not apply to FTP.

The FTP protocol itself has been disabled by default since version 88 and now the time has come to end an era and discontinue the support for this outdated and insecure protocol — Firefox 90 will no longer support the FTP protocol.

Threatpost reports on "another vast software supply-chain attack" that was "found lurking in the npm open-source code repository...a credentials-stealing code bomb" that used the password-recovery tools in Google's Chrome web browser. Researchers caught the malware filching credentials from Chrome on Windows systems. The password-stealer is multifunctional: It also listens for incoming commands from the attacker's command-and-control (C2) server and can upload files, record from a victim's screen and camera, and execute shell commands...

ReversingLabs researchers, who published their findings in a Wednesday post, said that during an analysis of the code repository, they found an interesting embedded Windows executable file: a credential-stealing threat. Labeled "Win32.Infostealer.Heuristics", it showed up in two packages: nodejs_net_server and temptesttempfile. At least for now, the first, main threat is nodejs_net_server. Some details:

nodejs_net_server: A package with 12 published versions and a total of more than 1,300 downloads since it was first published in February 2019...finally upgrading it last December with a script to download the password-stealer, which the developer hosts on a personal website. It was subsequently tweaked to run TeamViewer.exe instead, "probably because the author didn't want to have such an obvious connection between the malware and their website," researchers theorized...

ReversingLabs contacted the npm security team on July 2 to give them a heads-up about the nodejs_net_server and tempdownloadtempfile packages and circled back once again last week, on Thursday, since the team still hadn't removed the packages from the repository. When Threatpost reached out to npm Inc., which maintains the repository, a GitHub spokesperson sent this statement: "Both packages were removed following our investigation...."

Today, Amaon said it will be upgrading almost every plug-in Echo smart speaker to support Matter, a cross-platform open-source standard coming later this year. This includes most Echo and Echo Dot speakers and every Echo Studio, Echo Show, Echo Plus, and Echo Flex. "In fact, the only Echo smart speakers that won't get upgraded to Matter are the first-gen Echo, first-gen Echo Dot and Echo Tap," reports The Verge. From the report: While the company doesn't provide a timeline for those upgrades, the general idea is that Matter will launch by late 2021, so it shouldn't be long until Amazon's newest and / or more popular devices receive the capability. A bigger question is whether any of them will work as Matter hubs. Google announced in May that in addition to upgrading its Nest devices to Matter, it would allow its devices that support the Thread protocol (like the Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Hub Max, and second-gen Nest Hub) to double as connection hubs for Matter, too, not simply as a voice assistant to control Matter gadgets. But while Amazon's Eero routers were early to adopt Thread, Amazon's Echo smart speakers were not.

Virginia will use $700 million in American Rescue Plan funding to expedite broadband buildouts in underserved communities throughout the state, Governor Ralph Northam announced on Friday. Virginia is only one of the states across the country that plans to use that money to build faster internet infrastructure. Engadget reports: With the investment, Virginia says it's on track to become one of the first states in the US to achieve universal broadband access. An estimated 233,500 homes and businesses throughout the Commonwealth fall under what the Federal Communications Commission would consider an underserved location. They don't have an internet connection that can achieve download speeds of 25Mbps down. The state estimates the additional funding will allow it to connect those places to faster internet by the end of 2024, instead of 2028, as previously planned. What's more, the "majority" of those connections will be completed within the next 18 months.

On Wednesday, Google announced it will soon offer an HTTPS-first option in Chrome, which will try to upgrade page loads to HTTPS. "If you flip this option on, the browser will also show a full-page warning when you try to load up a site that doesn't support HTTPS," adds The Verge. From the report: HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP (yes, the "S" stands for "secure"), and many of the websites you visit every day likely already support it. Since HTTPS encrypts your traffic, it's a helpful privacy tool for when you're using public Wi-Fi or to keep your ISP from snooping on the contents of your browsing. Google has been encouraging HTTPS adoption with moves like marking insecure sites with a "Not secure" label in the URL bar and using https:// in the address bar by default when you're typing in a URL. For now, this HTTPS-First Mode will be just an option, but the company says it will "explore" making the mode the default in the future. The HTTPS-First Mode will be available starting with Chrome 94, according to Google. Currently, that release is set for September 21st. And HTTP connections will still be supported, the company says. Google is also "re-examining" the lock icon in the URL bar. Google explains in a blog post: "As we approach an HTTPS-first future, we're also re-examining the lock icon that browsers typically show when a site loads over HTTPS. In particular, our research indicates that users often associate this icon with a site being trustworthy, when in fact it's only the connection that's secure. In a recent study, we found that only 11% of participants could correctly identify the meaning of the lock icon."

The company plans to swap the lock icon with a downward-facing arrow starting with Chrome 93. Though, the "Not Secure" label will still be shown for sites that aren't secure.

The Russian state hackers who orchestrated the SolarWinds supply chain attack last year exploited an iOS zero-day as part of a separate malicious email campaign aimed at stealing Web authentication credentials from Western European governments, according to Google and Microsoft. Ars Technica reports: In a post Google published on Wednesday, researchers Maddie Stone and Clement Lecigne said a "likely Russian government-backed actor" exploited the then-unknown vulnerability by sending messages to government officials over LinkedIn. Attacks targeting CVE-2021-1879, as the zero-day is tracked, redirected users to domains that installed malicious payloads on fully updated iPhones. The attacks coincided with a campaign by the same hackers who delivered malware to Windows users, the researchers said.

The campaign closely tracks to one Microsoft disclosed in May. In that instance, Microsoft said that Nobelium -- the name the company uses to identify the hackers behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack -- first managed to compromise an account belonging to USAID, a US government agency that administers civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With control of the agency's account for online marketing company Constant Contact, the hackers could send emails that appeared to use addresses known to belong to the US agency. In an email, Shane Huntley, the head of Google's Threat Analysis Group, confirmed the connection between the attacks involving USAID and the iOS zero-day, which resided in the WebKit browser engine.

As Cubans take to the streets to protest against the government's mishandling of the economy and coronavirus health crisis, the country's government is turning to censorship to crack down on dissent. According to NBC News, the government "has taken steps to block citizens' use of the encrypted chat apps WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram." They've also shut off the internet. According to a case study from Top10VPN, Cuba went offline for 32 hours, which affected 7 millions users and cost the country more than $13 million. NBC News reports: Widespread internet use in Cuba is still relatively new, and Cubans mostly reach the web through their smartphones. The country only has a single major internet provider, the national telecommunications company ETECSA. That means most Cubans have to rely on a single, centralized, government-affiliated hub, making government censorship substantially easier. NetBlocks, an internet monitoring nonprofit, said Monday that it had detected disruptions to multiple messaging apps through ETECSA's service. A number of messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, are all blocked in Cuba, said Arturo Filasto, the project lead at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI).

OONI, an international nonprofit, relies on volunteers around the world to install a program that probes for which types of internet use are being censored and how. Its data showed that ETECSA began blocking WhatsApp on Sunday night, then Signal and Telegram on Monday. All three were still blocked on Tuesday, Filasto said. "We have never seen instant messaging apps being blocked in the country," he said. "It's sort of unprecedented that we would see such a heavy crackdown on the internet in Cuba." Marianne Diaz Hernandez, a fellow at the digital rights nonprofit Access Now, said some Cubans have reported that their specific SIM cards for their phones have been rendered useless, keeping them offline. And some virtual private networks have themselves been blocked, she said. Two major VPNs, Tor and Psiphon, appear to still work. While Cuba has deployed various censorship techniques in the past, this is the first time they have all been deployed at the same time, Hernandez said. "Since they have had internet, this is the largest blackout in history," she said. On Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he wants Florida companies to provide internet connection to residents in Cuba.

"What does the regime do when you start to see these images? They shut down the internet. They don't want the truth to be out, they don't want people to be able to communicate," said DeSantis during a roundtable with Republican lawmakers and members of the Cuban exile community in Miami. "And so one of the things I think we should be able to do with our private companies or with the United States is to provide some of that internet via satellite. We have companies on the Space Coast that launch these things," he added. DeSantis said he would make some calls to "see what are the options" to make it happen.

In the largest study of its kind, a team of academics from four US and Canadian universities said they were able to determine the size of China's Great Firewall internet censorship capabilities. From a report: In a research project that lasted nine months, from April to December 2020, academics developed a system called GFWatch that accessed domains from inside and outside China's internet space and then measured how the Great Firewall (GFW) would tamper with the connection at the DNS level in order to prevent Chinese users from accessing a domain, or an external entity accessing Chinese internal sites.

Using GFWatch, researchers said they tested 534 million distinct domains, accessing around 411 million domains on a daily basis in order to record and then verify that the blocks were persistent. After nine months of compiling data, they found that China's Great Firewall currently blocks around 311,000 domains, with 270,000 blocks working as intended, while 41,000 domains appear to have been blocked by accident. The research team said these latter domains appear to have been blocked accidentally when Chinese authorities tried to block a shorter domain and used a broad DNS filtering regular expression (regex) that did not account for situations where that shorter domain was also part of a longer domain name, indirectly banning other sites. For example, researchers said that when Chinese authorities blocked access to reddit.com, they also accidentally blocked access to booksreddit.com, geareddit.com, and 1,087 other sites.

An anonymous reader shares a post: Google Chrome for Android has a feature that gives Google Search an unfair advantage over its competition. Sure, it's the default search engine and that's a huge hurdle to overcome for any competitor. However, Chrome also reserves a performance-boosting feature for Google Search exclusively. I recently poked around in the Chromium project source code; the open-source foundation for Google's Chrome web browser. The Chromium project is co-developed by Google, and other corporate and individual contributors. The project is managed and controlled by Google, however. I was looking for something else when I stumbled upon a feature called PreconnectToSearch. When enabled, the feature preemptively opens and maintains a connection to the default search engine.

The preconnection feature resolves the domain name, and negotiates and sets up a secure connection to the server. All these things take time and they must happen before the search engine can receive the users' search queries. Preempting these steps can save a dozen seconds on a slow network connection or half a second on a fast connection. This optimization can yield a nice performance boost for Google's customers. Assuming the connection only requires a trivial amount of processing power and network bandwidth, of course. Setting up the connection early can be wasteful or slow down the loading of other pages if the user isn't going to search the web. There's just one small catch: Chromium checks the default search engine setting, and only enables the feature when it's set to Google Search. This preferential treatment means no other search engine can compete with Google Search on the time it takes to load search results. Every competitor must wait until the user has started to type a search query before Chrome will establish a connection.

Sweden's financial watchdog said on Monday it was investigating payments firm Klarna over a potential breach of banking secrecy laws in connection with an IT incident at the firm in May. From a report: For a 30 minute period on May 27, Klarna customers were shown other users' data - a digital mishap which the firm, in a statement on June 4, blamed on human error. "(We) will investigate whether Klarna has violated bank secrecy in connection with an IT incident in May where the bank's customers were able to access information about each other for a limited time," Sweden's Finansinspektionen said in a statement. A spokesperson for Klarna told Reuters that the probe, "was very much expected as part of our regular dialogue with the Swedish FSA and as always we approach this with full cooperation and transparency."

Since most ebook readers run some version of the kernel Linux (with some even run the GNU/Linux operating system), "This puts ebook readers a few steps closer to freedom than other devices," notes a recent call-to-action in the Free Software Foundation Bulletin.

But with e-ink screens and DRM-laden ebooks, "closing the gap will still require a significant amount of work." Accordingly, as we announced at the LibrePlanet 2021 conference, we've decided this year to prioritize facilitating the process for an ebook reader to reach the high standards of our Respects Your Freedom (RYF) hardware certification program, whether this means adapting an existing one from a manufacturer, or even contracting its production ourselves...

The free software community has made some good strides in the area of freeing ebooks. Denis "GNUToo" Carikli has composed a page on the LibrePlanet wiki documenting the components of ebook readers and other single-board computers; this has laid the groundwork for our investigation into releasing an ebook reader, and is one of the wiki's more active projects. Also, earlier in the year, a user on the libreplanet-discuss mailing list documented their project to port Parabola GNU/Linux to the reMarkable tablet, thereby creating a free ebook reader at the same time. It's steps like these that make us feel confident that we can bring an ebook reader that respects its user's freedom to the public, both in terms of hardware and the software that's shipped with the device...

If the FSF is successful in landing RYF certification on an ebook reader, which I fully believe we will be, we can ensure that users will have the ability to read digitally while retaining their freedom.

It's up to all of us to make sure we have the right to read, by avoiding ebook DRM in each and every case, and celebrating free (as in freedom) resources like Wikibooks and the Internet Archive, bridging the divide between the movement for free software and the movement for free culture, empowering both readers and computer users around the globe.
The article also warns that ebook DRM has gotten more restrictive over the years. "It's common for textbooks to now require a constant and uninterrupted Internet connection, and that they load only a discrete number of pages at a time... Even libraries fell victim to 'lending' services like Canopy, putting an artificial lock on digital copies of books, the last place it makes sense for them to be."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Like most Internet-of-things (IoT) devices these days, Amazon's Echo Dot gives users a way to perform a factory reset so, as the corporate behemoth says, users can "remove any... personal content from the applicable device(s)" before selling or discarding them. But researchers have recently found that the digital bits that remain on these reset devices can be reassembled to retrieve a wealth of sensitive data, including passwords, locations, authentication tokens, and other sensitive data. Most IoT devices, the Echo Dot included, use NAND-based flash memory to store data. Like traditional hard drives, NAND -- which is short for the boolean operator "NOT AND" -- stores bits of data so they can be recalled later, but whereas hard drives write data to magnetic platters, NAND uses silicon chips. NAND is also less stable than hard drives because reading and writing to it produces bit errors that must be corrected using error-correcting code.

Researchers from Northeastern University bought 86 used devices on eBay and at flea markets over a span of 16 months. They first examined the purchased devices to see which ones had been factory reset and which hadn't. Their first surprise: 61 percent of them had not been reset. Without a reset, recovering the previous owners' Wi-Fi passwords, router MAC addresses, Amazon account credentials, and information about connected devices was a relatively easy process. The next surprise came when the researchers disassembled the devices and forensically examined the contents stored in their memory. "An adversary with physical access to such devices (e.g., purchasing a used one) can retrieve sensitive information such as Wi-Fi credentials, the physical location of (previous) owners, and cyber-physical devices (e.g., cameras, door locks)," the researchers wrote in a research paper. "We show that such information, including all previous passwords and tokens, remains on the flash memory, even after a factory reset."

After extracting the flash contents from their six new devices, the researchers used the Autospy forensic tool to search embedded multimedia card images. The researchers analyzed NAND dumps manually. They found the name of the Amazon account owner multiple times, along with the complete contents of the wpa_supplicant.conf file, which stores a list of networks the devices have previously connected to, along with the encryption key they used. Recovered log files also provided lots of personal information. After dumping and analyzing the recovered data, the researchers reassembled the devices. The researchers wrote: "Our assumption was, that the device would not require an additional setup when connected at a different location and Wi-Fi access point with a different MAC address. We confirmed that the device connected successfully, and we were able to issue voice commands to the device. When asked 'Alexa, Who am I?', the device would return the previous owner's name. The re-connection to the spoofed access point did not produce a notice in the Alexa app nor a notification by email. The requests are logged under 'Activity' in the Alexa app, but they can be deleted via voice commands. We were able to control smart home devices, query package delivery dates, create orders, get music lists and use the 'drop-in' feature. If a calendar or contact list was linked to the Amazon account, it was also possible to access it. The exact amount of functionality depends on the features and skills the previous owner had used." Furthermore, the researchers were able to find the rough location of the previous owner's address by asking questions about nearby restaurants, grocery stores, and public libraries. "In a few of the experiments, locations were accurate up to 150 meters," reports Ars.

An Amazon spokeswoman said: "The security of our devices is a top priority. We recommend customers deregister and factory reset their devices before reselling, recycling, or disposing of them. It is not possible to access Amazon account passwords or payment card information because that data is not stored on the device." The threats most likely apply to Fire TV, Fire Tablets, and other Amazon devices, as well as many other NAND-based devices that don't encrypt user data, including the Google Home Mini.

According to Axios, Jason Miller, an aide and close advisor to Donald Trump, is launching a new social app called "Gettr" in the coming days. From the report: The app, which is in beta testing, appears in the Apple App Store and is described as "a non-bias social network for people all over the world." Gettr, which is still in its infancy, appears to have a few thousand users, according to follower counts of some of the more prominent, suggested accounts. Many users, however, appear anonymous, lacking much profile information. The app looks like Twitter, with a scrolling news feed with a small pencil at the bottom for users to compose a message. It has a search function and like Twitter, a trending topics function. While a quick scroll through the accounts suggests patterns pro-conservatism, there's no obvious suggestion that the app is built by Trump allies. Many of the more prominent suggested accounts, including a general news account called "Daily News" appear to have been created in May of this year. [...] It's unclear how Miller plans to debut the app, but sources tell Axios that other former Trump aides will help aide the rollout. "Data shows that almost every major conservative social network has seen a dramatic decrease in downloads since the Capitol insurrection," notes Axios.

One of the most recent conservative social media sites to be launched was FRANK, a social media site envisioned by Mike Lindell of MyPillow. It's off to a rough start though, as it not only resulted in a legal threat before being launched, but it suffered from many "amateur-hour mistakes" during its rollout. A Drupal expert described the code as "not even student work," adding that "they basically launched the site while it was still in development mode."

UPDATE: The Daily Beast notes that Gettr "is backed by a fugitive Chinese billionaire who once invited Steve Bannon to live on his yacht."
What's not made clear to Gettr's new users is that the site received initial funding from a foundation owned by Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and his family... "Some of the initial seed money has come from his family foundation," Trump adviser Jason Miller said of Guo, who also goes by the name Miles Kwok...

The Trump adviser said the company was backed by a "consortium of international investors," but declined to name them, beyond the Guo foundation, or the total amount of money that has been invested in the new social-media property so far. But while Miller downplayed Guo's connection, sites associated with the billionaire have suggested that Gettr is Guo's brainchild. In a June video on GTV, a media outlet that serves as a mouthpiece for Guo, a host summarizing a recent comment Guo made about Gettr said that the social media platform was "the concentration of Miles's whole life work...."

Guo's legions of social media supporters and trolls were among the first and most vocal adopters of Gettr starting on June 14, the day the app's site went live.
Citing a report from Bloomberg, New York Magazine adds that former U.S. president Trump "is not yet desperate enough to follow one of his aides in a venture that has no financial benefit to him."

As covered earlier today, the Pacific Northwest is experiencing the most severe heat wave in its history, with all-time record temperatures being set in Portland, Seattle, and Lytton, B.C, which just broke the record for hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada at 116 degrees. CBS News says this heat wave "is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans," and by one measure it's "more rare than a once in a 1,000 year event." Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli explains what's causing this "heat dome" and why events like this "are bound to become more common, more extreme and more deadly in the coming years": The heat is being caused by a combination of a significant atmospheric blocking pattern on top of a human-caused climate changed world where baseline temperatures are already a couple to a few degrees higher than nature intended. [...] In the case of this specific heat dome, which is a mountain of hot air stacked vertically through the atmosphere, it is a once in a 1,000 or even 10,000-year event for this particular area. How do we know? It's actually quite simple to explain. The intensity of a heat dome is measured by how "thick" the atmosphere is at a given spot. The hotter the air in that column, the larger the thickness of air in that column, because heat expands. In our historical record of North America's Pacific Northwest this heat dome registers a statistical standard deviation from the average of greater than 4. In layman terms, that means it falls more than 4 deviations to the right of the center of a typical bell curve (shown below) and that equates to values with less than a 99.99% chance of happening. In other words, statistically speaking, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of experiencing this value. So, if you could possibly live in that spot for 10,000 years, you'd likely only experience that kind of heat dome once, if ever. It is worth noting that our historical record is limited and statistics like this are very sensitive to small changes. But if it seems like an overstatement to say there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of having a heat dome like this, it is certainly not an overstatement to say this is the kind of event you would expect to experience once in 1000 years.

So what is causing this heat wave? Like any heat wave, it is being caused by a highly amplified jet stream pattern. These extreme jet stream perturbations are a natural, normal part of the atmosphere. But the climate science community is split as to whether these extreme jet stream perturbations are becoming even more likely because of climate change -- a phenomena known as the wavy jet stream. Along with a more wavy, buckling and slow-moving jet stream, comes a phenomena called "blocking". This is when waves in the jet stream become so elongated that they break off, sit and spin. In this case there is a textbook type of block called an Omega block over the Pacific Northwest because it looks like the Greek letter Omega. Inside this Omega, the heat pools and intensifies. There is a faction of climate scientists who believe that a warming climate -- specifically the Arctic -- results in a more wandering jet stream at certain times of the year. But it is hotly debated; there is an equal amount of research that does not arrive at this conclusion.

Mann and his colleagues have been involved in some of this research, in which he finds that a specific type of Northern Hemisphere blocking -- what he calls Quasi Resonant Amplification -- will increase by 50% this century under business as usual human-forced climate warming. "I do indeed believe that the phenomenon we describe in our work played a very important role in the record heat wave," Mann said. As for the lack of consensus in the climate research on the wavy jet stream and blocking, Mann thinks it has more to do with the current state of climate modeling "This is an area where current generation models are NOT capturing a real-world climate connection," Mann explained. Whatever the cause, the result of an extreme jet stream pattern is extreme weather across many parts of the nation and globe. Over the past few days, the central U.S. has seen over a foot of rain with flash flooding along a stalled front. And, starting on Sunday and continuing through most of the upcoming week, the major East Coast cities will also sweat through a heat wave -- although not nearly as intense as the one in the West -- with feels-like temperatures near 100 degrees from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia and New York City.

Some users who bought an external hard drive that's delightfully shaped like a book ended up with "terabytes' worth of data, years of memories and months of hard work vanished in an instant," reports Engadget. (Though according to a new statement from Western Digital, "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools.")

But why were these deletions from "My Books" happening in the first place? A Slashdot reader shares the first clue from Engadget's report: Several owners looked into the cause of the issue and determined that their devices were wiped after receiving a remote command for a factory reset. The commands starting going out at 3PM on Wednesday and lasted throughout the night. One user posted a copy of their log showing how a script was run to shut down their storage device for a factory restore.
Friday Western Digital's statement offered much more detail: Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability... The log files we have reviewed show that the attackers directly connected to the affected My Book Live devices from a variety of IP addresses in different countries. This indicates that the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, either through direct connection or through port forwarding that was enabled either manually or automatically via UPnP.

Additionally, the log files show that on some devices, the attackers installed a trojan with a file named ".nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z", which is a Linux ELF binary compiled for the PowerPC architecture used by the My Book Live and Live Duo. A sample of this trojan has been captured for further analysis and it has been uploaded to VirusTotal.

Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning...

At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live and My Book Live Duo from the Internet to protect your data on the device by following these instructions on our Knowledge Base. We have heard customer concerns that the current My Cloud OS 5 and My Cloud Home series of devices may be affected. These devices use a newer security architecture and are not affected by the vulnerabilities used in this attack. We recommend that eligible My Cloud OS 3 users upgrade to OS 5 to continue to receive security updates for your device

"Every Sony PlayStation 3 ID out there was compromised, provoking bans of legit players on the network," Threatpost is reporting, calling it "just the latest in a shocking spike in attacks on unsuspecting gamers."

tlhIngan (Slashdot user #30,335) shares Threatpost's report: Sony reportedly left a folder with every PS3 console ID online unsecured, and it was discovered and reported by a Spanish YouTuber with the handle "The WizWiki" in mid-April... Now, several weeks later, players on PlayStation Network message boards are complaining that they can't sign on and are receiving the error message 8071006. After enabling two-factor authentication (2FA), one player was able to sign back in without issue, according to posts on the PS3 subreddit, which includes a link to instructions on how to opt into 2FA on the PS3.

It appears threat actors have started using the stolen PS3 console IDs for malicious purposes, causing the legitimate players to get banned... Sony has not responded to Threatpost's request for comment or confirmed a connection between the PS3 ID breach and player reports of being locked out of the platform...

Sony is hardly the only gaming company leaking data like a sieve. A report from January found a half a million credentials stolen from the Top 25 gaming companies on caches of breached data for sale in criminal marketplaces. In June, the "Battle of the Galaxy" mobile game leaked 6 million gamer profiles, and attackers are working out how to use gaming platforms like Steam to host or deliver malware.

Slashdot reader xack points out that Windows 11, Microsoft's next version of its desktop operating system, will require a Microsoft account and internet connection for setup. They write: Based on Microsoft's official requirements you need an internet connection to install Windows 11. This means people without internet access at home, especially in rural and poorer households, won't be able to use Windows 11. I hope Microsoft fixes this problem before release. Previous versions of Windows "would let you opt out of Microsoft accounts by creating a local account instead," notes The Verge. "It's possible you'll still be able to use a local account afterwards." As for the internet requirement, The Verge says it "may make sense since Windows 11 will largely be delivered via a Windows Update, like many of the updates to Windows 10, so you'd need an internet connection to install it on your PC."

Microsoft is also changing the Windows 11 minimum requirements, though they are only slightly higher than what's required to run Windows 10.