95430107
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Mozilla engineers are working on a notifications system for Firefox that shows a security warning to users visiting sites that have suffered data breaches. The notifications system will use data provided by Have I Been Pwned?, a website that indexes public data breaches and allows users to search and see if their details have been compromised in any of these incidents.
Work on this project has only recently started. The code to show these warnings is not even in the Firefox codebase but managed separately as an add-on available (on GitHub). The alert also includes an input field. In the add-ons current version this field doesn't do anything, but we presume it's there to allow users to search and see if their data was exposed during that site's security breach. Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned's author has confirmed his official collaboration with Mozilla on this feature.
93565887
submission
tengu1sd writes:
Jerry Pournelle died in his sleep 8 Sep 2017. Fiction and technical reviews may be the reason he's known here. Pournelle was a former Army officer who served in the Korean War, science adviser to Newt Gingrich, an analyst for the DoD touching just a few of his activities. His public appearances showed preparation and thoughtful exchange of ideas. Frequently loud, but well reasoned.
91627119
submission
schwit1 writes:
Astronomers have confirmed that the Wow! signal, thought to be the most promising detection by SETI of alien life, was actually caused by a comet.Last year, a group of researchers from the Center of Planetary Science proposed a new hypothesis that argued a comet might be the culprit. The frequency could be caused by the hydrogen cloud they carry, and the fact that they move accounts for why it seemingly disappeared. Two comets, named 266/P Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs), happened to be transiting through that region of space when the Wow! signal was detected, but they weren’t discovered until after 2006.
To test the hypothesis, the team made 200 radio spectrum observations between November 2016 and February 2017. Sure enough, 266/P Christensen was found to emit radio waves at a frequency of 1,420 MHz, and to double check, the researchers moved their radio telescope by one degree. As expected, the signal vanished, and only returned when the telescope was trained back on the comet.
91413733
submission
dryriver writes:
There appear to be 2 main ways to write code today. One is with text based languages ranging from BASIC to Python to C++. The other is to use a flow-based or dataflow programming based visual programming language where you connect boxes or nodes with lines. What I have never (personally) come across is a way to program by drawing classical vertical (top to bottom) flowcharts. Is there a programming environment that lets you do this? Also, there are software tools that can turn, say, C code into a visual flowchart representation of said C code. Is there any way to do the opposite — draw a flowchart, and have that flowchart turn into working C code?
91308855
submission
williamyf writes:
As reported in ArsTechnica, a wormable bug has remiended undetected for seven years in SaMBa verions 3.5.0 onwards. From the article:
Dan Tentler, founder of security firm Phobus Group, told Ars that more than 477,000 Samba-enabled computers exposed port 445, although it wasn't clear how many of them were running a vulnerable version of the utility. Tentler cited figures returned by the Shodan computer search engine. Researchers with security firm Rapid7, meanwhile, said they detected 110,000 devices exposed on the internet that appeared to run vulnerable versions of Samba. 92,500 of them appeared to run unsupported versions of Samba for which no patch was available.
Fortunately, there is a mitigation. Again, from the article:
Those who are unable to patch immediately can work around the vulnerability by adding the line
nt pipe support = no
to their Samba configuration file and restart the network's SMB daemon. The change will prevent clients from fully accessing some network computers and may disable some expected functions for connected Windows machines.
The patch came in fast, but the "Many eyes" took seven years for to "make the bug shallow".
90890513
submission
puddingebola writes:
Facebook has closed Occulus VR Studio. The studio was a maker of original VR films, but now will only assist other studios. This makes it official, as the studio had been shuttered since the departure of Palmer Luckey.
90865237
submission
troublemaker_23 writes:
The new leader of the Debian GNU/linux Project, Chris Lamb, has plans to launch an outreach programme to draw in more developers of all shades, genders and colours, "with diverse opinions and cultures". In his first interview since assuming leadership of what is possibly the largest community free software project worldwide — the Linux kernel project comes close — Lamb, a man who like many nerds is economical with words, said he also wanted to have more face-to-face meetings with current developers.
90862231
submission
Lauren Weinstein writes:
The issue in focus today is YouTube’s vast cornucopia of so-called “prank” – “dare” – “challenge” (PDC) videos, which range from completely innocuous and in good fun, to an enormous array of videos portraying vile, dangerous, harmful, and often illegal activities.
You may never have experienced this particular YouTube subculture. YouTube’s generally excellent recommendation engine tends to display new videos that are similar to the videos that you’ve already viewed, so unless you’ve looked for them, you could be completely forgiven for not even realizing that the entire PDC YouTube world even existed. But once you find them, YouTube will make sure that you’re offered a bountiful supply of new ones on a continuing basis.
This category of YouTube videos was flung into the mainstream news over the last few days, with a pair of egregious (but by no means isolated) examples.
90861803
submission
BrianFagioli writes:
Google has decided to take artificial intelligence to the maker community with a new initiative called AIY. This initiative (found here) will introduce open source AI projects to the public that makers can leverage in a simple way. Today, Google announces the first-ever AIY project. Called "Voice Kit," it is designed to work with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B to create a voice-based virtual assistant.
Billy Rutledge, Director of AIY Projects, Google explains, "The included Voice Hardware Accessory on Top (HAT) contains hardware for audio capture and playback: easy-to-use connectors for the dual mic daughter board and speaker, GPIO pins to connect low-voltage components like micro-servos and sensors, and an optional barrel connector for dedicated power supply. It was designed and tested with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B."
90858777
submission
mirandakatz writes:
Artificial intelligence has a diversity problem: Too many of the people creating it share similar backgrounds, and unless the field gets diversified, quickly, the systems we're building will be biased—and potentially impossible to fix. That's why Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li, the chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning for Google Cloud, are teaming up to expose underrepresented high school students to artificial intelligence through a new nonprofit called AI4All. At Backchannel, Jessi Hempel sat down with Gates and Li to discuss how to make AI research more appealing to women, why hoodies shouldn’t be tech’s status symbol, and what it takes to work in AI.
90858661
submission
Andrey_Karpov writes:
We regularly check various projects to spread the word about static analysis methodology in general, and about our tool PVS-Studio in particular, so I couldn't miss a chance to check the Valgrind project. It is a kind of a challenge to us to find errors in it. This is a high-quality, well-tested project that is already being checked by Coverity. In general, I am sure that this code was checked by enthusiasts and various tools. Even several errors found would be a great success. Let's see if there was anything interesting that PVS-Studio managed to find in the code of Valgrind.
90857345
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
When uploaded to Netflix, an episode of the educational children's show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" was edited to remove a segment saying that chromosomes determine one's gender.
In the original episode, titled "Probability," a young woman told viewers, "I'm a girl. Could have just as easily been a boy, though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always 1 in 2."
The 1996 segment appears to contradict Netflix's new series "Bill Nye Saves the World", which endorses a socially liberal understanding of gender, under which gender is defined by self-identification rather than genetics.
90835481
submission
mirandakatz writes:
David Molina was finishing up his 12-year time in the army when he started teaching himself to code, and started to think that he might like to pursue it professionally once his service was done. But with a wife and family, he couldn't dedicate the four years he'd need to get an undergraduate degree in computer science—and the GI Bill, he learned, won't cover accelerated programs like code schools. So he started an organization dedicated to changing that. Operation Code is lobbying politicians to allow vets to attend code schools through the GI Bill and prepare themselves for the sorts of stable, middle-class jobs that have come to be called "blue-collar coding." At Backchannel, Andrew Zaleski profiles Molina and Operation Code, who see it as a serious failing that the GI Bill will cover myriad vocational programs, but not those that can prepare veterans for one of the fastest-growing industries in existence.
90833955
submission
martiniturbide writes:
For those who lived the console emulator and retrogaming boom on the late 90’s there is this interesting article about the story of Nesticle posted at Motherboard. Nesticle was Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console emulator that had a huge success in the early internet and helped to start the emulation scene. The author of the story, Ernie Smith, also posted an extra sencond part of the story with more interesting tips.
90610863
submission
bobbied writes:
A large power outage has hit a large portion of San Francisco.
