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Submission + - Chinese Coal Output has Risen to 2015 Levels, Undermining Climate Pledges (nasdaq.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: China’s coal output rose last year to its highest since 2015, despite Beijing’s climate change pledge to reduce consumption of the dirty fossil fuel and months of disruption at major coal mining hubs.

The world’s biggest coal miner and consumer produced 3.84 billion tonnes of coal in 2020, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed on Monday.

China’s coal output dropped after reaching a peak of 3.97 billion tonnes in 2013, as Beijing axed excessive mining capacity and promoted clean energy consumption. But production is rising amid surging industrial demand and an unofficial restriction on coal imports aimed at shoring up the domestic mining industry.

Submission + - Capital Riot Suspect Plotted To Sell Stolen Pelosi Laptop To Russian Intel (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Pennsylvania woman accused of being one of the Capitol rioters told a former "romantic partner" that she planned to steal a laptop computer from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office and sell it to Russian intelligence, court documents revealed Monday. The woman, Riley June Williams, 22, was on the run, charged with disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds with the intent to disturb a session of Congress and other charges after her former flame turned her in.

"Williams is not in custody," a federal law enforcement officials said Monday afternoon. William's ex, who was described in Special Agent Jonathan Lund's charging document as W1 (witness one), called the FBI and told it that she "intended to send the computer device to a friend in Russia, who then planned to sell the device to SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service." "According to W1, the transfer of the computer device to Russia fell through for unknown reasons and Williams still has the computer device or destroyed it," the document states. Lund said the device and circumstances of what Williams was doing with it remain under investigation.

Submission + - Suspicious Twitter Ban - As Sci-Hub Case Takes off in India, Twitter bans it :( (thewire.in)

Submitted by ami.one
ami.one writes: The Wire reports on suspicious banning activity by twitter where it banned Sci-Hub just a day after a court made some comments favourable to Sci-Hub in an ongoing case. ( https://science.thewire.in/the... )

Publishers Elsevier Pvt. Ltd., Wiley India Pvt. Ltd. and the American Chemical Society sued Sci-Hub in India last year.

During the ongoing hearings, Delhi high court deemed the matter important with respect to public good, and admitted a plea from some Science Forums / Societies and 20 scientists, researchers & scholars.

Next day Twitter permanently suspended Sci-Hub’s account. Since the matter was sub judice in India, the timing is highly questionable

Sci-Hub creator Alexandra Elbakyan is quoted by The Wire: “It was very obvious from Twitter that nobody supports the block and everyone is against the publishers. On Twitter, people voted in favour of Sci-Hub, but now these votes cannot be seen since Twitter banned the account.”

Maybe it's time for twitter & its investors to start making losses again till they get the point that people's attention & eye balls come with a clear condition of the platform not being censored, that too privately and without any due process. For that we already have Weibo & VK...

Meanwhile, Sci-Hub created a censorship-resistant Handshake gateway available at sci-hub.hns https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ...

Interestingly, Twitter seems to have now banned HNS, NextDNS, Namebase etc too !

Submission + - macOS Malware Used Run-Only AppleScripts To Avoid Detection For Five Years (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware operation that used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised in pirated (cracked) games and software such as League of Legends and Microsoft Office for Mac, security firm SentinelOne said in a report published this week. But the cryptominer did not go entirely unnoticed. SentinelOne said that two Chinese security firms spotted and analyzed older versions of the OSAMiner in August and September 2018, respectively. But their reports only scratched the surface of what OSAMiner was capable of, SentinelOne macOS malware researcher Phil Stokes said yesterday.

The primary reason was that security researchers weren't able to retrieve the malware's entire code at the time, which used nested run-only AppleScript files to retrieve its malicious code across different stages. As users installed the pirated software, the boobytrapped installers would download and run a run-only AppleScript, which would download and run a second run-only AppleScript, and then another final third run-only AppleScript. Since "run-only" AppleScript come in a compiled state where the source code isn't human-readable, this made analysis harder for security researchers.

Submission + - U. of Florida Asks Students to Use App to Report Profs Who Don't Teach In Person (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Professors at U of Florida are outraged that the university essentially put a "tattle" button on a campus safety app that lets students report if professors aren't teaching in person. Apparently more than 100 profs there have asked to teach online for health reasons but have been denied, and administrators worry that they'll just teach online anyway. Profs feel the app is akin to a "police state."

Submission + - Medical study suggests iPhone 12 with MagSafe can deactivate pacemakers (9to5mac.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: When Apple revived MagSafe with the iPhone 12 lineup, one question brought up was how these latest devices with more magnets would interact with medical devices like pacemakers. Apple’s official word was that iPhone 12/MagSafe wouldn’t interfere more than previous iPhones. Now one of the first medical studies has been published by the Heart Rhythm Journal that saw a Medtronic pacemaker deactivated by holding an iPhone 12 near it (via MacMagazine). It doesn’t sound like there is concrete evidence that iPhone 12 and MagSafe do pose a greater risk of increased interference but with this study out now, we may see more testing in the medical field to find out for sure.

Of course it’s not just iPhones or smartphones that can create interference issues, it can be any item that contains magnets strong enough create a problem.

Submission + - Al Franken urges FBI to prosecute "revenge porn" (nationaljournal.com) 1

Submitted by mi
mi writes: National Journal writes:

Sen. Al Franken is urging the FBI to more quickly and aggressively pursue and respond to reports of revenge porn, marking a rare burst of attention on a controversial topic about which Congress has typically been quiet.

In a letter to FBI Director James Comey, the Minnesota Democrat asked for more information about the agency's authority to police against revenge porn, or the act of posting explicit sexual content online without the subject's consent, often for purposes of humiliation and extortion. Its popularity has ballooned in recent years, and victims are disproportionately women.

Extortion is illegal, but humiliating somebody is not. I am not sure, how it can be made illegal without violating the First Amendment.

Submission + - DHS: Drug Infusion Pumps Vulnerable to Trivial Hacks (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: The Department of Homeland Security warned that drug infusion pump management software sold by Hospira contains serious and exploitable vulnerabilities that could be used to remotely take control of the devices.

The MedNet server software manages drug libraries, firmware updates, and configurations of Hospira intravenous pumps. DHS’s Industrial Control System Computer Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) said in an advisory (https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSA-15-090-03) issued Tuesday that the MedNet software from the firm Hospira contains four, critical vulnerabilities – three of them capable of being exploited remotely. The vulnerabilities could allow a malicious actor to run malicious code on and take control of the MedNet servers, which could be used to distribute unauthorized modifications to medication libraries and pump configurations.

The vulnerabilities were discovered by independent security researcher Billy Rios and reported to both Hospira and ICS-CERT. The vulnerabilities vary in their severity. Among the most serious is Rios’s discovery of a plaintext, hard-coded password for the SQL database used by the MedNet software (CVE-2014-5405e). By obtaining that password, an attacker could compromise the MedNet SQL server and gain administrative access to the workstation used to manage deployed pumps.

Rios also discovered that the MedNet software uses vulnerable versions of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform software. That software could allow unauthenticated users to execute arbitrary code on the target system. The vulnerability assigned to that issue, CVE-2014-5401k, was assigned a CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) severity rating of 10 – the highest possible rating. While no known public exploits specifically target these vulnerabilities, the alert notes that even an unskilled attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities.

Submission + - Google 'Makes People Think They Are Smarter Than They Are'

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Karen Knapton reports at The Telegraph that according to a study at Yale University, because they have the world's knowledge at their fingertips, search engines like Google or Yahoo make people think they are smarter than they actually are giving people a ‘widely inaccurate’ view of their own intelligence that can lead to over-confidence when making decisions. In a series of experiments, participants who had searched for information on the internet believed they were far more knowledgeable about a subject that those who had learned by normal routes, such as reading a book or talking to a tutor. Internet users also believed their brains were sharper. "The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," says lead researcher Matthew Fisher. "It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet." In the tests searching for answers online leads to an illusion such that externally accessible information is conflated with knowledge “in the head” (PDF). This holds true even when controlling for time, content, and search autonomy during the task. "The Internet is an enormous benefit in countless ways, but there may be some trade-offs that aren't immediately obvious and this may be one of them," concludes Fisher. “Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the Internet may be making that task even harder."

Submission + - Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Today, Intel took the wraps off new NVMe PCI Express Solid State Drives, which are the first products with these high speed interfaces, that the company has launched specifically for the enthusiast computing and workstation market. Historically, Intel's PCI Express-based offerings, like the SSD DC P3700 Series, have been targeted for datacenter or enterprise applications, with price tags to match. However, the Intel SSD 750 Series PCI Express SSD, though based on the same custom NVMe controller technology as the company's expensive P3700 drive, will drop in at less than a dollar per GiB, while offering performance almost on par with its enterprise-class sibling. Available in 400GB and 1.2TB capacities, the Intel SSD 750 is able to hit peak read and write bandwidth numbers of 2.4GB/sec and 1.2GB/sec, respectively. In the benchmarks, it takes many of the top PCIe SSD cards to task easily and at $389 for a 400GB model, you won't have to sell an organ to afford one.

Submission + - GAO discovers another out-of-control NASA project 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A new GAO report has found that NASA's effort to upgrade the ground-based portion of its satellite communications system, used by both military satellites and manned spacecraft, is more than 30 percent over budget, with its completion now delayed two years to 2019.

Worse, the GAO found that this problem program was actually one of three that have had budget problems. And that doesn't include the disastrously overbudget James Webb Space Telescope.

In its latest assessment of NASA's biggest programs, the U.S. Government Accountability Office identified the Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment (SGSS) as one of three — not counting the notoriously overbudget James Webb Space Telescope — that account for most of the projected cumulative cost growth this year. The others are the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which launched March 12, and the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, mission, the congressional watchdog agency said.

The last two projects are part of the climate focus that Obama imposed on NASA.

Submission + - Visual Studio 2015 Can Target Linux

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Phoronix has noticed that the Visual Studio 2015 product page mentions that the new IDE can target Linux out of the box. Specifically the page says "Build for iOS, Android, Windows devices, Windows Server or Linux". What this actually means is not completely certain at this point, but it certainly laces nicely with the company opening up the .NET Framework.

Submission + - One in three jobs will be taken by software or robots by 2025, says Gartner (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director at its big Orlando conference. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will make sense of data faster than humans can," he said. Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice test for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner. "Knowledge work will be automated."

Submission + - Why do contextual ads fail? (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by minstrelmike
minstrelmike writes: If we give up all our privacy on-line for contextual ads, then how come so many of them are so far off the mark? Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing. They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you. And then the online world becomes customized, just for you. The real problem with this scenario is that is we're paying for contextual ads and content with our personal data, but we're not getting what we pay for.

Facebook advertising is off target and almost completely irrelevant.

The question is: Why? Facebook has a database of our explicitly stated interests, which many users fill out voluntarily. Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web. Yet, while the degree of personal data collection is extreme, the advertising seems totally random.

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