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Submission + - Let's Encrypt revoking 3 million certificates (letsencrypt.org)

Submitted by CaptSlaq
CaptSlaq writes: Per Let's Encrypt, a bug discovered on 2020-02-29 (detailed here) caused several certificates to be issued without sufficient checking. If you're using Let's Encrypt, please checkout out the link above for information on how to check if this impacts you and steps to remedy if it does.

Submission + - Brave deemed most private browser in terms of 'phoning home.' (zdnet.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The new Microsoft Edge and the Yandex Browser deemed the most data greedy.

Prof. Leith says that in their "out of the box" states, Brave is by far the most private browser, sending back the fewest amount of information.

"We did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address overtime, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers," he said.

Submission + - Earth May Have Been a 'Water World' 3 Billion Years Ago, Scientists Find (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have found evidence that Earth was covered by a global ocean that turned the planet into a “water world” more than 3 billion years ago. Telltale chemical signatures were spotted in an ancient chunk of ocean crust which point to a planet once devoid of continents, the largest landmasses on Earth. If the findings are confirmed by future work, they will help researchers to refine their theories on where and how the first single-celled life emerged on Earth, and what other worlds may be habitable.

“An early Earth without emergent continents may have resembled a ‘water world’, providing an important environmental constraint on the origin and evolution of life on Earth, as well as its possible existence elsewhere,” the scientists write in Nature Geoscience. Their work centered on a geological site called the Panorama district in north-western Australia’s outback, where a 3.2 billion-year-old slab of ocean floor has been turned on its side. Locked inside the ancient crust are chemical clues about the seawater that covered Earth at the time. The scientists focused on different types of oxygen that seawater had carried into the crust. In particular, they analyzed the relative amounts of two isotopes, oxygen-16 and the ever-so-slightly-heavier oxygen-18, in more than 100 samples of the stone. They found that seawater contained more oxygen-18 when the crust was formed 3.2 billion years ago. The most likely explanation, they believe, is that Earth had no continents at the time, because when these form, the clays they contain absorb the ocean’s heavy oxygen isotopes.

Submission + - UC Santa Cruz fires 54 graduate student workers striking for higher pay (latimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Housing is expensive in Santa Cruz, and student workers have a difficult time living on the typical stipend of $2,400 a month before taxes, said Veronica Hamilton, vice president of UC Santa Cruz’s graduate student association and chair of the campus’ unit of UAW Local 2865, the union for more than 19,000 student workers at the UC system.

The cost-of-living-adjustment movement has spread to other UC campuses.

UC Santa Barbara graduate students voted Monday for a full strike, and UC Davis students decided Thursday to withhold student grades for the winter quarter until the university raises their housing supplement. Students from across the 10-campus UC system have held rallies in support of student workers at UC Santa Cruz.

UC Santa Cruz spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason said in a statement that 96% of grades were submitted and the “vast majority” of graduate students have returned to work, but 54 students continued to “disrupt campus by withholding grades for undergraduate students in a way that unfairly impairs their education.”

Submission + - American Woman Who Left Cruise Ship Tests Positive for Coronavirus (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “An American woman who left a cruise ship in Cambodia last week and flew to Malaysia with more than a hundred other passengers has tested positive for the coronavirus, alarming health experts who fear that some exposed passengers who then traveled onward could become a new source for global transmission.”

Submission + - What happens to our online lives after we die? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Over the course of the next few decades, there will be more and more dead people on Facebook. In fact, according to some estimates, as early as 2060 the number of deceased users’ accounts will exceed the number of accounts with a living person behind them.

But people’s “digital afterlives” extend far beyond Facebook. When a 21st century citizen dies, they often leave behind a trove of posts, private messages, and personal information on everything from Twitter to online bank records. Who owns this data, and whose responsibility is it to protect the privacy of the deceased? Faheem Hussain, a social scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, has spent the past few years peering into the murky waters of how people, platforms, and governments manage the digital lives we leave behind.

Hussain gave a presentation on our digital legacies today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science Magazine caught up with Hussain to talk about why online platforms should encourage people to plan ahead for their imminent deaths, whether you have a right to privacy after you die, and the strange new culture of digital mourning.

Submission + - Warning: New Windows 10 Update Bug Is Deleting User Data And Preventing Login (forbes.com)

Submitted by golden_donkey
golden_donkey writes: Are you booting up your Windows 10 machine and discovering you can’t log in to your profile? It appears you’re not alone. Reports are increasing across Twitter and Microsoft forums that following the most recent Patch Tuesday update (KB4532693), users are complaining that their profiles and desktop files are missing, and that custom icons and wallpaper have all been reset to their default state.

Submission + - Linux 5.6 will be ready with the "2038" time fix (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by nickwinlund77
nickwinlund77 writes: On 03:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, aka Coordinated Universal Time) January 19, 2038 (that's a Tuesday), the world ends. Well, not in the biblical Book of Revelations sense. But, what will happen is the value for time in 32-bit based Unix-based operating systems, like Linux and older versions of macOS, runs out of numbers and starts counting time with negative numbers. That's not good. We can expect 32-bit computers running these operating systems to have fits. Fortunately, Linux's developers already had a fix ready to go.

Submission + - Today is the 30th Anniversary of the Pale Blue Dot photo

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/...

For the 30th anniversary of one of the most iconic views from the Voyager mission, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is publishing a new version of the image known as the "Pale Blue Dot."

The updated image uses modern image-processing software and techniques while respecting the intent of those who planned the image. Like the original, the new color view shows Planet Earth as a single, bright blue pixel in the vastness of space. Rays of sunlight scattered within the camera optics stretch across the scene, one of which happens to have intersected dramatically with Earth.

The view was obtained on Feb. 14, 1990, just minutes before Voyager 1's cameras were intentionally powered off to conserve power and because the probe — along with its sibling, Voyager 2 — would not make close flybys of any other objects during their lifetimes. Shutting down instruments and other systems on the two Voyager spacecraft has been a gradual and ongoing process that has helped enable their longevity.

This celebrated Voyager 1 view was part of a series of 60 images designed to produce what the mission called the "Family Portrait of the Solar System." This sequence of camera-pointing commands returned images of six of the solar system's planets, as well as the Sun. The Pale Blue Dot view was created using the color images Voyager took of Earth.

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