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Submission + - Open Letter to Richard M. Stallman (RMS) (github.com) 3

Submitted by Philantrop
Philantrop writes: There's now an Open Letter to RMS live on github calling for the removal of the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the light of the well-documented public incidents concerning RMS who recently announced his return to the board as reported here on Slashdot.

Furthermore, the open letter asks for RMS to be removed from all leadership positions he might still serve in. It details several public incidents as well to better understand the reasons.

Submission + - Ongoing scams in Apple iOS App Store (slashdot.org)

Submitted by YeOldeTimeMachine
YeOldeTimeMachine writes: Just read the Feb 8, 2021 Slashdot article about developer Kosta Eleftheriou pointing out scams in Apple iOS app store. I recently tripped over one those scams and also complained to Apple. Apple agents did not seem to understand the scam or investigate it vigorously.

The scam I saw started as a malvertising campaign in Safari on the iPhone. In Safari, a popup appeared claiming the iPhone was infected with viruses that could be removed with an app from the official app store. Clicking the link led to an app claiming to be a secure browser, without mention of an antivirus feature. It required a subscription of at least 5 USD per WEEK. I do not remember the exact amount.

I reported it to Apple, which asked for screenshots and incorrectly summarized my complaint. The actual malvertising popup appeared on the iPhone of a friend, not mine, so I did not have a screenshot. I told Apple that the app itself does not appear to be malicious but it coordinates with a malvertising campaign not detected by the app store. The subscription of at least 5 USD per WEEK should be evidence enough for a thorough investigation. Pretty ingenious scam, really.

Suggesting to Apple that they look at the log files of the store to see if they can discern the referring IPs and better yet, the urls, that led to the app page seemed to fall on deaf ears. Neither me or my friend got scammed so I stopped trying to explain it to Apple.

Seems everything popular on the internet ultimately gets infiltrated by crooks then devolves into chaos. Where moths and rust doth corrupt. ;)

Submission + - Sony Won't Back Down on $1,400.00 in Charges Made to Grandmothers's Credit Card (ctvnews.ca) 5

Submitted by theshowmecanuck
theshowmecanuck writes: A grandmother let her 13 year old grandson use her credit card to buy added content for one of his games for which she thought would be a $15 charge. After the account opened up because of the credit card on it, he started downloading other things not realizing they were adding substantial charges to her credit card. She asked Sony to refund the charges, it's not like they can't disable the added content if they wanted, but they told her basically too bad so sad.

Submission + - "Shkreli Award" goes to Moderna for "blatantly greedy" COVID vaccine prices (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: One of the leading developers of COVID-19 vaccines has now been placed in the ranks of people like Martin Shkreli—the disgraced pharmaceutical executive infamous for jacking up the price of an old, life-saving drug by more than 5,000 percent. He is now serving an 84-month prison sentence from a 2017 conviction on fraud counts unrelated to the drug pricing.

Moderna, maker of one of only two vaccines granted emergency authorizations to prevent COVID-19 in the US, has been shamed with a 2020 “Shkreli Award” by the Lown Institute, a healthcare think tank. The awards, announced annually for four years now, go to “perpetrators of the ten most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care.”

Award judges cited Moderna’s pricing of its COVID-19 vaccine, which was developed with $1 billion in federal funding. Still, despite the tax-payer backing, Moderna set the estimated prices for its vaccine significantly higher than other vaccine developers.

Submission + - Apple's Failure To Ensure Backwards Compatibility In Big Sur Leaves Developers Q (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple's recent Big Sur MacOS release has show a variety of problems with older software compatibility. This article list some of the problems reported on the web like Starcraft 2, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, Apache's Netbeans IDE, other IDEs. It list some example on how developers are working hard to try to get Big Sur compatibility with their applications.

Submission + - Drug Reverses Age-Related Mental Decline Within Days (ucsf.edu) 3

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists. The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer, and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.

In the new study, published Dec. 1, 2020, in the open-access journal eLife, researchers showed rapid restoration of youthful cognitive abilities in aged mice, accompanied by a rejuvenation of brain and immune cells that could help explain improvements in brain function.

“ISRIB’s extremely rapid effects show for the first time that a significant component of age-related cognitive losses may be caused by a kind of reversible physiological “blockage” rather than more permanent degradation,” said Susanna Rosi, PhD, Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair II and professor in the departments of Neurological Surgery and of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science.

Submission + - Apple M1 and T2 Macs Requiring Internet to Activate is a Flaw: Researcher (iphoneincanada.ca)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: In a recently published blog post, hacker and security researcher Jeffrey Paul casts doubt over the sanctity and security of Apple’s Macs, stating that they can no longer be used safely and with confidence in completely offline environments.

Paul takes particular issue with Apple’s T2 chip — a security chip made by TSMC for Apple that comes pre-installed on all Intel-based Macs, and is part of the CPU on the latest generation of MacBooks powered by the Apple M1.

The T2 chip is primarily designed to enhance security on Macs, cross-checking a Mac’s signature with encrypted signatures for its hardware stored on Apple’s servers upon initial setup and disabling a MacBook’s mic when its lid is closed to prevent exploitation.

However, it is exactly the fact that basically every MacBook, be it Intel-powered or run on Apple’s own Silicon, needs to connect to the internet for setup following a complete wipe and OS restore that has the security researcher worried.

These practices endanger the privacy and personal freedoms of the private citizen — if you cannot even set your Mac up without letting it talk to Apple’s servers, is the Mac really yours? It’s not like infiltration or server outages are unheard of, and privacy concerns against Apple are certainly mounting.

Submission + - UK's first all-electric car charging forecourt opens in Essex (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Britain’s first all-electric car charging forecourt is set to open for business in Braintree, Essex, to charge electric vehicles with 100% renewable energy. From Monday, the super-fast electric forecourt will deliver 350KW of charging power, or enough to add 200 miles of driving range, within 20 minutes, to up to 36 cars at a time. It will use clean energy sourced from one of the UK’s first subsidy-free solar farms at Clayhill in Bedfordshire, overhead solar canopies, and a battery capable of storing enough energy to drive 24,000 miles. It is the first of more than 100 electric forecourts that Gridserve, a clean energy company, plans to roll out across the country over the next five years as part of a billion-pound “sun-to-wheel” infrastructure.

Submission + - Does Digital Advertising Actually Work? (freakonomics.com)

Submitted by Thelasko
Thelasko writes: This week's Freakonomics podcast goes into depth at asking if digital advertising actually works.

Economist Steve Tadelis was interested in answering that question while working for eBay. So, when eBay, in planning to renegotiate their deal with Bing, turned off their brand-keyword advertising, it created a natural experiment.

TADELIS: "We could measure visits and we could measure purchases and we could see whether there was any drop in clicks and purchases. And — not surprisingly — all the search that was taken away from the ads just ended up coming for free through the organic search. Because right below the ad was the free link to eBay. Once we had those results, I went to the chief financial officer of eBay North America and showed him the analysis, to which he responded, “Okay, you guys were right. What do we do next?” And that gave us the open door to design more sophisticated experiments. "

Submission + - AWS outage affected doorbells, vacuum cleaners and lights (gizmodo.com.au) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: AWS recently had an outage, resulting in numerous IoT devices failing to work as they relied on cloud services. iRobot, maker of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, acknowledged the issue on Twitter after users noticed their bots malfunctioning. Next to go down were smart doorbells, with owners reporting loss of functionality. Some owners in Japan reported that they were unable to switch off their lights at bed time due to the outage. AWS is now working normally again.

Submission + - Scotland Makes Period Products Free

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Scotland has passed a bill that has made period products such as tampons and pads free to all who need them, and becomes the first country in the world to make period products free. The Period Products Bill, which passed unanimously, requires local authorities to ensure that period products are generally obtainable free of charge. Schools and colleges must ensure period products are freely available to students, and designated public places must also make the products available. The debate over the bill spurred what was at times a remarkable public discussion of issues rarely spoken about in government chambers. Members of the Scottish Parliament discussed endometriosis and heavy bleeding, why toilet paper and bins for menstrual products are required in restrooms but not menstrual products themselves, and the wide base of support the legislation had drawn from men as well as women.

A BBC video is also available.

Submission + - First Starlink Public Beta bandwidth and latency figures reported

Submitted by Rei
Rei writes: Reddit user FourthEschelon19 recently posted photos of their new Starlink dish (which SpaceX calls "Dishy McFlatface") and a link to their speed test. This includes 134Mbps downlink (which they've been using to stream 4k videos with no buffering), but only 14,8Mbps uplink, and ping times of 38ms with 7ms jitter. Elon responded to the user, stating, "Latency will improve significantly soon. Bandwidth too."

Submission + - Facebook tells academics to stop monitoring its political ads. (theregister.com) 1

Submitted by couchslug
couchslug writes: Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform. The social media goliath informed New York University (NYU) that research by its Tandon School of Engineering's Online Transparency Project's Ad Observatory violates Facebook's terms of service on bulk data collection and demanded it end the program immediately. The project recruited 6,500 volunteers to install its AdObserver browser extension that collects data on the ads that Facebook shows them personally. It sends the information to the American university, allowing it to perform a real-time check that Facebook is living up its promise to clearly disclose not only who paid for political ads shown on the platform but also how much and when the adverts would be shown. “We launched the Online Transparency Project two years ago to make it easier to see who was purchasing political ads on Facebook,” said co-founder Laura Edelson, of the project.

Submission + - French bar owners arrested for offering free WiFi but not keeping logs (cozyit.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: At least five bar owners in Grenoble, France have been arrested for providing WiFi at their businesses without keeping logs. The bar owners were arrested under a 2006 law that technically classifies WiFi hotspot providing establishments as ISPs, and requires them to store one year’s worth of logs or connection records for anti-terrorism purposes. This requirement is in place even if the WiFi network is password protected.

That all public WiFi hotspots in France are required by law to be logging shouldn’t be too surprising.BFM Businessnoted that most large providers of free WiFi like hotels, conference centers, airports, and such do so with business packages that include this logging. However, it seems that most people aren’t aware that even small businesses like bars, cafes, nightclubs, and restaurants that offer WiFi to their patrons are faced with these logging requirements. One of the arrested bar owners noted that the relevant organization, Umih, never noted this requirement when renewing his license: “Nobody, not even the professionals of Umih who provide compulsory training as part of a license IV resumption, to me never said I should keep this history.”

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