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Submission + - CISA warns of GPS bug that may roll back dates by 1,024 weeks, to March 2002 (therecord.media)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US government is warning companies about a bug in a software library used to synchronize time via the GPS navigational system that will rollback time on unpatched devices by 1,024 weeks to a date of March 2002.

The bug is set to trigger this Sunday, on October 24th, and the implications are somewhat unpredictable as it could cause systems to become unresponsive or unavailable. On October 24, 2021, all Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers using GPSD versions 3.20 through 3.22 are going to jump back 1024 weeks in time, to March 3, 2002.

Submission + - Test-takers busted for using Bluetooth-connected flip-flops to cheat (thenationalnews.com)

Submitted by campuscodi
campuscodi writes: Dozens of people taking an exam to be teachers in India were caught using flip-flops with wireless communication devices hidden inside. The cheaters wore small Bluetooth earpieces deep in their ear to avoid detection. The sandals are made by organized criminal gangs and sell for about $8000 a pair.

Submission + - Russian security firm founder arrested in Moscow on state treason charges

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russian law enforcement agencies have raided the office of cybersecurity company Group-IB and detained its founder and chief executive officer, Ilya Sachkov, for two months, on state treason charges for allegedly sharing threat data with foreign intelligence services.

The arrest comes after, in a 2020 Bloomberg feature, Sachkov infamously said that Russia wasn’t serious about catching hackers and that he moved the company to Singapore to preserve its independence.

Submission + - SPAM: LinkedIn Censors US Reporter's Account in China

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Axios reporter Beth Allen-Ebrahimian, who covers China, tweeted: "I woke up this morning to discover that LinkedIn had blocked my profile in China. I used to have to wait for Chinese govt censors, or censors employed by Chinese companies in China, to do this kind of thing. Now a U.S. company is paying its own employees to censor Americans."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Human Footprints in North America Dated to Twenty Thousand Years Ago (nature.com) 1

Submitted by Opyros
Opyros writes: Fossil footprints in New Mexico have been dated to 21,000-23,000 years before present. As a result, human habitation of the Americas can be pushed back several thousand years.

The footprints were found in sedimentary rock at White Sands National Park, near the location of a long-vanished lake. Since the rock contains seeds of ditchgrass, it was possible to apply radiocarbon dating, leading to the remarkably early date. Until now, the oldest unequivocally dated signs of human presence in the New World were only 16,000 years old. Hence the great significance of the find.

Submission + - Web host admin gets 27 years in prison for hosting 200+ child pornography sites (therecord.media)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An Irish man who ran a cheap dark web hosting service has been sentenced today to 27 years in prison for turning a blind eye to customers hosting child sex abuse material. Eric Eoin Marques, 36, from Dublin, operated the Freedom Hosting service between July 2008 and July 2013, when he was arrested following an FBI investigation.

“The investigation revealed that the hosting service contained over 200 child exploitation websites that housed millions of images of child exploitation material,” the US Department of Justice said today, announcing Marques’ sentencing. "Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement. Many of these images involved sadistic abuse of infants and toddlers to include bondage, bestiality and humiliation to include urination, defecation and vomit," officials said.

Submission + - Astronomers spot new impact on Jupiter (groups.io)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A recent flurry of posts to astronomy news sites points to an amateur astronomer spotting a new impact on Jupiter.

Every such case documented improves our estimates of how many bodies are flying around in the (inner) Solar system, and improves our estimates of how likely we are to get another hit in a year, a decade, or a century.

Sky and Telescope have been pulling in more information at Amateur Spots Possible New Impact Flash at Jupiter — Sky & Telescope.

An image on SpaceWeather.com. (Some of these images have been "flipped" to an "on sky" orientation, and others haven't — because astronomical telescopes generally produce an inverted image, since it requires fewer reflections.)

Estimates of the impactor size are unclear, but minimum sizes seem to be in the several kg range, and could (depending on how long the flash lasted — 1 video frame, 2, 10, 100?) go up into the tonnes. Which is important for estimating the number of potentially hazardous objects in the inner Solar system. S&T's correspondents put the size at "up to" (important words!) the 30m range (100ft in Tudor measure) which would be around 10000 tonnes — a Chelyabinsk 2013 size body.

Submission + - SPAM: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Facebook has repeatedly found that its photo-sharing app is harmful to a significant percentage of teenagers, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday.

The Journal cited internal Facebook studies over the past three years that examined how Instagram affects its young user base, with teenage girls being most notably harmed.

The company is in the process of making a version of Instagram for kids.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Western Digital Caught Bait-and-Switching Customers With Slow SSDs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue — which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market — has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

This is unacceptable. It is unethical for any company to sample and launch a product to strong reviews only to turn around and sell an inferior version of that hardware at a later date without changing the product SKU or telling customers that they’re buying garbage. I do not use the term “garbage” lightly, but let me be clear: If you silently change the hardware components you use in a way that makes your product lose performance, and you do not disclose that information prominently to the customer (ideally through a separate SKU), you are selling garbage. There’s nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there’s nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts to kick bad hardware out the door.

As a reviewer of some twenty years, I do not care at all about the fact that SLC cache performance is identical. While I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote up the Crucial bait-and-switch on August 16, I’ve actually been affected by this problem personally. The 2TB Crucial SSD I purchased for my own video editing work is one of the bait-and-switched units, and it’s always had a massive performance problem — as soon as it empties the SLC cache, it falls to what I’d charitably call hard drive-level performance. Performance can drop as low as 60MB/s via USB3.2 (and ~150MB/s when directly connected via NVMe) and it stays there until the copy task is done. The video upscaling projects I work on regularly generate between 300-500GB of image data per episode, per encode. Achieving ideal results can require weaving the output of 3-5 models together. That means I generate up to 1.5TB of data to create a single episode. God help you if you need to copy that much information to or from one of these broken SSDs. It’s not literally as bad as a spinning disk from circa 2003, but it’s nowhere near acceptable performance.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: NASA: Moon 'Wobble' In Orbit May Lead To Record Flooding On Earth

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Every coast in the U.S. is facing rapidly increasing high tide floods. NASA says this is due to a "wobble" in the moon's orbit working in tandem with climate change-fueled rising sea levels. The new study from NASA and the University of Hawaii, published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that upcoming changes in the moon's orbit could lead to record flooding on Earth in the next decade. Through mapping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) sea-level rise scenarios, flooding thresholds and astronomical cycles, researchers found flooding in American coastal cities could be several multiples worse in the 2030s, when the next moon "wobble" is expected to begin. They expect the flooding to significantly damage infrastructure and displace communities.

While the study highlights the dire situation facing coastal cities, the lunar wobble is actually a natural occurrence, first reported in 1728. The moon's orbit is responsible for periods of both higher and lower tides about every 18.6 years, and they aren't dangerous in their own right. "In half of the Moon's 18.6-year cycle, Earth's regular daily tides are suppressed: High tides are lower than normal, and low tides are higher than normal," NASA explains. "In the other half of the cycle, tides are amplified: High tides get higher, and low tides get lower. Global sea-level rise pushes high tides in only one direction – higher. So half of the 18.6-year lunar cycle counteracts the effect of sea-level rise on high tides, and the other half increases the effect." But this time around, scientists are more concerned. With sea-level rise due to climate change, the next high tide floods are expected to be more intense and more frequent than ever before, exacerbating already grim predictions.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Chinese government lays out new vulnerability disclosure rules (therecord.media)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Chinese government has published new regulation on Tuesday laying out stricter rules for vulnerability disclosure procedures inside the country’s borders. The new rules include controversial articles, such as ones introducing restrictions to prevent security researchers from disclosing bug details before a vendor had a reasonable chance to release fixes and the mandatory disclosure of bug details to state authorities within two days of a bug report.

“This appears to be a sweeping law. It codifies in law some responsible vulnerability disclosure penalties, threatening law enforcement repercussions via the Ministry of Public Safety for any researcher that does not follow the prescribed process,” Dmitri Alperovitch, Chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington-based cybersecurity think tank, told The Record.

Submission + - SPAM: Over 10,000 Amazon Rainforest Species Risk Extinction, Landmark Report Warns

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 10,000 species of plants and animals are at high risk of extinction due to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest — 35 per cent of which has already been deforested or degraded, according to the draft of a landmark scientific report published on Wednesday. Produced by the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), the report brings together research on the world's largest rainforest from 200 scientists from across the globe. It is the most detailed assessment of the state of the forest to date and both makes clear the vital role the Amazon plays in global climate and the profound risks it is facing. Cutting deforestation and forest degradation to zero in less than a decade "is critical," the report said. It also called for massive restoration of already destroyed areas. Furthermore, the report said the continued destruction caused by human interference in the Amazon puts more than 8,000 endemic plants and 2,300 animals at high risk of extinction. According to the report, of the Amazon basin's original size, 18 per cent has already been deforested — mostly for agriculture and illegal timber. Another 17 per cent has been degraded.

A separate study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday showed that some parts of the Amazon are emitting more carbon than they absorb, based on measurements of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide taken from above the rainforest between 2010 and 2018. Lead author Luciana Gatti, a scientist at Brazil's Inpe space research agency, suggests the increased carbon emissions in southeastern Amazonia — where deforestation is fierce — is not only the result of fires and direct destruction, but also due to rising tree mortality as severe drought and higher temperatures become more common.
Link to Original Source

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