Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Chrome's "Topics" advertising system is here, whether you want it or not (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: After the failure of the Chrome user-tracking system that was called FLoC, Google's latest try at topic tracking to replace the 3rd party cookie (that Chrome is the only browser to still support) is FLEDGE and the most recent drop of Canary has this on full display for users and privacy advocates to dive deeper into. This recent release shows Google's hand that it views user tracking as a mandatory part of Internet usage, especially given this system's eye rolling name of "Privacy Sandbox" and the tightness in the coupling of this new API to the browser directly.

The new API will allow the browser itself to build what it believes to be things that you are interested in, based on broad topics that Google creates. New topics and methods for how you are placed into those topics will be added to the browser's database and indexing software via updates from Google. The main point to take away here though is that the topic database is built using your CPU's time. At this time, opting out of the browser building this interest database is possible thus saving you a few cycles from being used for that purpose. In the future there may be not way to stop the browser from using cycles to build the database, the only means may be to just constantly remove all interest from your personal database. At this time there does not seem to be anyway to completely turn off the underlying API. A website that expects this API, will always succeed in "some sort of response" so long as you are using Chrome. The response may be that you are interested in nothing, but a response none-the-less. Of course, sending a response of "interested in nothing" would more than likely require someone constantly and timely clearing out the interest database, especially if at some later time the option to turn off the building of the database is removed.

With 82% of Google's empire based on ad revenue this latest development in Chrome shows that Google is not keen on any moves to threaten their main money maker. Google continues to argue that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won't block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that, no matter what the final solution may ultimately be. The upshot, if it can be called that, of the FLEDGE API over FLoC, is that abuse of FLEDGE looks to yield less valuable results. And attempting to use the API alone to pick out an individual user via fingerprinting or other methods employed elsewhere seems to be rather difficult to do, but only time will tell if that remains true or just Google idealizing this new API.

Submission + - Wyze Cam Security Flaw Gave Hackers Access To Video (9to5mac.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A major Wyze Cam security flaw easily allowed hackers to access stored video, and it went unfixed for almost three years after the company was alerted to it, says a new report today. Additionally, it appears that Wyze Cam v1 – which went on sale back in 2017 – will never be patched, so it will remain vulnerable for as long as it is used.

Bleeping Computer reports: "A Wyze Cam internet camera vulnerability allows unauthenticated, remote access to videos and images stored on local memory cards and has remained unfixed for almost three years. The bug, which has not been assigned a CVE ID, allowed remote users to access the contents of the SD card in the camera via a webserver listening on port 80 without requiring authentication. Upon inserting an SD card on the Wyze Cam IoT, a symlink to it is automatically created in the www directory, which is served by the webserver but without any access restrictions."

And as if that weren’t bad enough, it gets worse. Many people re-use existing SD cards they have laying around, some of which still have private data on them, especially photos. The flaw gave access to all data on the card, not just files created by the camera. Finally, the AES encryption key is also stored on the card, potentially giving an attacker live access to the camera feed. Altogether, Bitdefender security researchers advised the company of three vulnerabilities. It took Wyze six months to fix one, 21 months to fix another, and just under two years to patch the SD card flaw. The v1 camera still hasn’t been patched, and as the company announced last year that it has reached end-of-life status, so it appears it never will.

Submission + - A new proposal for interstellar communication with alien intelligences (arxiv.org) 1

Submitted by OneHundredAndTen
OneHundredAndTen writes: A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can't help but wonder whether it is too elaborate — for example, for 1 + 1 = 2 the article proposes something far more visually complex than 1 + 1 = 2, which could also be, with small adjustments, easily coerced to have a representation as a bitmap with the limitations in the article. It is not clear why the representation that the authors are proposing would be easier for aliens to decode and understand than something much closer to 1 + 1 = 2: either representation would be — well, alien to them.

Submission + - Court: Texas Cannot Prohibit Journalists from Drone Photography

Submitted by Wrath0fb0b
Wrath0fb0b writes: Over at the Volokh Conspiracy there's a breakdown of a decision throwing out a Texas law that specifically makes it unlawful to take photographs from a drone and to "possesses, discloses, displays [or] distributes" that image, even if the operator is in other respects licensed and qualified to fly the drone.

The law lumps together a number of prohibited targets — including jails, water plants, oil refineries and livestock operations — in a scheme the court found is over inclusive and thus over broad. The court also found the law under-inclusive, as it permits UAVs for 21 other purposes (but not journalism) and vague because it has an exemption for "commercial" use that doesn't Most shockingly, the law doesn't apply to helicopters and Texas argues that they can facilitate the same role.

Submission + - Chess Broadcast To Include Players' Heart Rate Determined By AI (chessbase.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The official broadcast of the final rounds of the FIDE Grand Prix Series, an important part of the World Chess Championship cycle, will feature players’ heart rate indicator, according to World Chess, the Series organizer. This is the first time when the players’ heart rate is measured and displayed in the broadcast of the World Chess Championship cycle event. It will allow spectators to better understand players’ emotions and true feelings (as far as they are reflected in the heart rate) — a rare insight into the psychology of the elite chess players who are trained and especially good at keeping a poker face. By adding a heart rate indicator, World Chess brings a new dimension into chess broadcasting and opens a new page of the way fans follow chess.

To accurately measure the heart rate without disturbing the players, World Chess is deploying a bespoke AI technology similar to that used by hospitals to track patients’ vitals over video. It’s the first time such technology is used in sports broadcasting. AI has been trained to read almost invisible changes in reflections of the skin color that change based on a person’s heart rate. The official broadcast of the FIDE Grand Prix is available for free on http://www.worldchess.com worldchess.com and on World Chess Youtube and Twitch channels. [...] World Chess will continue developing and using the video heart rate reading technology in future events and broadcasting.

Submission + - Russian Game Dev Tells Players To 'Raise the Pirate Flag' To Get Around Sanction (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With Russian gamers effectively cut off from purchases on most major gaming platforms due to corporate sanctions against the country, the Russian game developer behind indie darling Loop Hero is encouraging Russian customers to pirate the game. In a Sunday post on Russian social network VK (Google translated version), Loop Hero developer Four Quarters said, "In such difficult times, we can only help everyone to raise the pirate flag (together with vpn)" to get the game. The developer then included a link to a copy of Loop Hero on a popular Russian torrent tracker to aid in that process directly.

In a follow-up post the next day (Google translated version), Four Quarters insisted that "we didn't do anything special, there's nothing wrong with torrents." The company also notes that players wanting to offer the developer donations in lieu of buying the game should refrain. "The truth is that everything is fine with us, send this support to your family and friends at this difficult time," they wrote.

While players outside of Russia should still be able to purchase Loop Hero on Steam, Valve said earlier this month that banking issues prevented it from sending payments to developers in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (ironically enough). Valve recently told PC Gamer that developers in these countries will have to provide "intermediary banking information" in a foreign country to receive the payments they're due. "It's a very frustrating situation, and we hope to find the resolution soon," Valve wrote in a note to affected developers.

Submission + - How Long Can Cats Go Without Food? (innewsweekly.com)

Submitted by InNewsWeekly
InNewsWeekly writes: How much time can cats go without food ? If you are cat moms and dad and also always questioned the eating habits of your pet, after that you have actually concerned the best place. This post clarifies the length of time can cats go without food as well as various other questions that family pet proprietors ask. The length of time can cats do without food is a question vets dealing with pet cats with consuming disorders have to answer on many celebrations. Pet cats are interesting creatures. Typically located to be the most usual pets throughout cultures, cats have stayed in close distance to humans given that time timeless.

Submission + - A retro computer museum in Mariupol beloved by children was attacked by Russia (npr.org)

Submitted by Firedog
Firedog writes: Nearly two decades ago, Dmitriy Cherepanov started a collection of retro computers in Mariupol, Ukraine, that grew into an internationally-known assemblage of historic machines, housed in a private museum he called IT 8-bit.

Russia's campaign to take over his city in southeast Ukraine has killed at least 2,000 civilians, destroyed most of the city's homes and turned Cherepanov's beloved computer museum into rubble.

"I'm very upset," Cherepanov, 45, told NPR. "It's been a hobby of my life."

IT 8-bit held more than 120 examples of computer technology and game consoles from the last century. Cherepanov estimates that up to 1,500 people visited the free museum every year before he closed it at the start of the pandemic.

Cherepanov knows the small building housing the museum was bombed, like many other structures in the city, sometime after March 15. He believes that any machines that weren't destroyed by the blast were likely taken, given the desperate circumstances in the city now.

Comment It's like the fluoride debate all over again (Score 1) 302

...with no scientific inquiry as to which adjust is better for the populations health? Standard time is by far, the better solution for everyone. Those that stayed on year-round DST quickly reverted dropped them after a year when a number of parents started complaining about their kids getting hit on crosswalks walking to school because it's fucking pitch-black until 9am. Health science also says staying on DST year round is really bad for our health - we need that light in the morning for our circadian cycle. Look up the dozens and dozens of news and science articles on it.

Submission + - Hundreds of millions of unsupported Linux devices can be trivially hacked (cm4all.com) 1

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Max Kellermann has uncovered in a vulnerability named "The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability" in the Linux kernel which allows a local unprivileged user to write to any files which allows to trivially hack a system and get full access to it. Hundreds of millions of unsupported Linux devices including smartphones, Wi-Fi routers and IoT are vulnerable. It was secretly fixed in kernels 5.16.11, 5.15.25 and 5.10.102 with this commit message: "lib/iov_iter: initialize "flags" in new pipe_buffer" which would never let anyone guess it fixes such a critical vulnerability. The exploit contains a little over a hundred lines of code and doesn't require anything other than GCC and a few standard header files.

Submission + - Nvidia hackers leak 190GB of sensitive data from Samsung (techspot.com)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: On Saturday, the hackers leaked nearly 190GB of data from Samsung, subsequently publishing the files through torrent. This reportedly includes sensitive information that may be used to compromise Samsung devices.

The publication vx-underground, which tracks information about malware across the web, tweeted a message that Lapsus$ released to their followers. It alleges that the hack includes "source code from every Trusted Applet installed on all Samsung devices" and "confidential source code from Qualcomm."

The leak also purportedly includes the algorithms for biometric unlock operations and the source code for Samsung Accounts, a login service associated with Samsung's mobile devices.

According to Bleeping Computer, the torrent has been shared by more than 400 peers, and includes a text file that describes the content available in the download:

        "Part 1 contains a dump of source code and related data about Security/Defense/Knox/Bootloader/TrustedApps and various other items
        Part 2 contains a dump of source code and related data about device security and encryption
        Part 3 contains various repositories from Samsung Github: mobile defense engineering, Samsung account backend, Samsung pass backend/frontend, and SES (Bixby, Smartthings, store)"

Submission + - Will Microsoft's 'Reading Coach' be a 15-Year Overnight Success With Teachers?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Microsoft on Wednesday announced Reading Coach (video), software that allows children to practice reading out loud and receive personalized feedback. Reading Coach will be integrated into Word Online, OneNote, Teams, Forms, and many other places in M365 later this summer.

The Reading Coach announcement comes 15 years after a 2007 paper from Microsoft Research employees that described an Automatic Children's Reading Tutor , which could track children’s oral reading against story texts, detect reading miscues, measure the level of reading fluency, diagnose the nature of the miscues, and provide feedback to improve reading skills. The same Microsoft team described in a 2008 paper an implementation of the Automatic Reading Tutor software on a PDA running Windows Mobile 6, which they dubbed 'Reading Coach'.

Microsoft's 2022 Reading Coach comes after the release of read-aloud helper software from other tech giants — Amazon's Reading Sidekick and Google's Read Along. Efforts to use software to help develop early reading skills are hardly new — in 1994, CMU researchers described a NeXT implementation of A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens as part of Project LISTEN — although widespread adoption has proved elusive. But with advances in tech, schools seeking ways to help students catch up on unfinished learning from the pandemic, and 1:1 computing for most students, could things truly be different this time? When the 2022-23 school year comes around, will Microsoft's Reading Coach be a 15-year 'overnight success' with teachers and parents?

Submission + - [Ask Slashdot] Has online troll activity decreased? 2

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Scott Adams in his most recent podcast noted the horde of trolls that plague his podcast has virtually disappeared in the past few days.

This got me to wondering: has Slashdot seemed particularly civil recently?

Has anyone noticed a marked decrease in internet trolling since the Russian sanctions kicked in? Has this happened at other sites as well?

Submission + - SPAM: The rat problem in D.C. is so bad, two people got hantavirus

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, DC health officials ratted out the first two known cases of hantavirus spillover in the city. The virus festers quietly in rats and other rodent populations, but in humans it can cause potentially deadly respiratory and hemorrhagic diseases. Humans pick up the infection by direct contact with rodent urine or nest dust or by breathing in aerosolized viral particles from urine, droppings, or saliva. There’s also the possibility that the virus can spread from rat bites, but this is less common. Once in a human, the virus almost never jumps from human to human.

Fortunately for DC residents, the type of hantavirus found in the city is one of the milder types: an “Old World” hantavirus called the Seoul virus. Old World hantaviruses cause a disease called Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. HFRS can start out like a generic infection with fever, chills, nausea, and headache. But it can progress to low blood pressure, acute shock, vascular leakage, and acute kidney failure, the CDC notes. The severity of HFRS varies by which hantavirus you catch, but fatality rates can reach up to 15 percent. The Seoul virus is one of the milder forms, with a fatality rate of only about 1 percent. As such, in both of the cases reported by DC health officials, the infected individuals recovered.
Link to Original Source

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Close