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Submission + - Honda Plants Shutdown (reuters.com)

Submitted by Dharkfiber
Dharkfiber writes: Ransomware causing heartburn in manufacturing again. âoe Production resumed at most of the plants by Tuesday, but its main plant in Ohio, as well as those in Turkey, India and Brazil remain suspended as the ransomware disputed the companyâ(TM)s production systems, he said.â

Submission + - US Supreme Court Will Revisit Ruling On Collecting Internet Sales Tax (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Supreme Court will consider freeing state and local governments to collect billions of dollars in sales taxes from online retailers, agreeing to revisit a 26-year-old ruling that has made much of the internet a tax-free zone. Heeding calls from traditional retailers and dozens of states, the justices said they’ll hear South Dakota’s contention that the 1992 ruling is obsolete in the e-commerce era and should be overturned. State and local governments could have collected up to $13 billion more in 2017 if they’d been allowed to require sales tax payments from online merchants and other remote sellers, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s non-partisan audit and research agency. Other estimates are even higher. All but five states impose sales taxes.

The high court’s 1992 Quill v. North Dakota ruling, which involved a mail-order company, said retailers can be forced to collect taxes only in states where the company has a “physical presence.” The court invoked the so-called dormant commerce clause, a judge-created legal doctrine that bars states from interfering with interstate commerce unless authorized by Congress. South Dakota passed its law in 2016 with an eye toward overturning the Quill decision. It requires retailers with more than $100,000 in annual sales in the state to pay a 4.5 percent tax on purchases. Soon after enacting the law, the state filed suit and asked the courts to declare the measure constitutional.

Submission + - Researcher Finds Another Security Flaw In Intel Management Firmware (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Meltdown and Spectre are not the only security problems Intel is facing these days. Today, researchers at F-Secure have revealed another weakness in Intel's management firmware that could allow an attacker with brief physical access to PCs to gain persistent remote access to the system, thanks to weak security in Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) firmware—remote "out of band" device management technology installed on 100 million systems over the last decade, according to Intel. [T]he latest vulnerability—discovered in July of 2017 by F-Secure security consultant Harry Sintonen and revealed by the company today in a blog post—is more of a feature than a bug. Notebook and desktop PCs with Intel AMT can be compromised in moments by someone with physical access to the computer—even bypassing BIOS passwords, Trusted Platform Module personal identification numbers, and Bitlocker disk encryption passwords—by rebooting the computer, entering its BIOS boot menu, and selecting configuration for Intel’s Management Engine BIOS Extension (MEBx).

If MEBx hasn't been configured by the user or by their organization's IT department, the attacker can log into the configuration settings using Intel's default password of "admin.” The attacker can then change the password, enable remote access, and set the firmware to not give the computer's user an "opt-in" message at boot time. "Now the attacker can gain access to the system remotely," F-Secure's release noted, "as long as they’re able to insert themselves onto the same network segment with the victim (enabling wireless access requires a few extra steps)."

Submission + - Over 70% of Seagate Central NAS Hard-Drives Infected with Malware (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new malware family has infected over 70% of all Seagate Central NAS devices connected to the Internet. The malware, named Miner-C or PhotoMiner, uses these hard-drives as an intermediary point to infect connected PCs and install software that mines for the Monero cryptocurrency. The hard-drives are easy to infect because Seagate does not allow users to delete or deactivate a certain "shared" folder when the device is exposed to the Internet. Over 5,000 Seagate Central NAS devices are currently infected. The crooks made over $86,000 from Monero mining so far.

Submission + - Dissecting a frame of DOOM

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An article takes us through the process of rendering one frame of DOOM (2016). The game released earlier this year uses the Vulkan API to push graphics quality and performance at new levels.
The article shades light on rendering techniques, mega-textures, reflection computation... all the aspects of a modern game engine.

Submission + - NVidia GeForce now requires mandatory registration (pcworld.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the newly released GeForce Experience 3.0 software, Nvidia might irk some users. While you will still be able to download the drivers from their web site sans registration, you will now be required to register in order to use the GeForce Experience software http://www.pcworld.com/article... While the Experience software does add some powerful streaming features for games and is "three times faster and consumes 50 percent less memory than the old GeForce Experience", it might seem like a bit of overkill for those users that only used the software to keep their drivers up to date.

Submission + - Buggled - bankrupted by a software bug

Submitted by Dharkfiber
Dharkfiber writes: Bloomberg is covering a story today (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/cisco-s-network-bugs-are-front-and-center-in-bankruptcy-fight) about a hosting business that is now filing chapter 11 due to bugs in a switch. Good,bad, or ugly is it time to admit that business really can't continue without IT? When will IT training become formal curriculum in schools?

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