180879942
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Chronic ocean heating is fueling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade.
Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year.
“To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish,” said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study’s lead author.
“A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small,” he added. “But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life.”
175905939
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
I'm using the Brave browser so YMMV, but after blocking about 20 elements, Slashdot appears almost normal to me now.
169701912
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Midas Investments, the hybrid centralized/decentralized (CeDeFi) cryptocurrency platform, announced Tuesday that they will shut down operations as of Dec. 27 and will deduct 55% from most customer accounts to “balance assets and liabilities.” This morning, Midas’ CEO shut down his own AMA with customers after less than half an hour. “I am writing to you today with a heavy heart to announce that the Midas platform is closing down,” wrote Iakov Levin, CEO of Midas Investments, who also goes by ‘Trevor,’ in a Dec. 27 blog post. Levin said that in the spring of 2022, the advent of the crypto winter saw Midas’ DeFi portfolio lose $50 million of its $250 million market value, or 20%. Then, following the bankruptcy of Celsius on Jul. 13 and FTX on Nov. 11, “the platform experienced over 60% of AUM being withdrawn, creating a large asset deficit” of $63.3 million, based on assets of $51.7 million against liabilities of $115 million in BTC, ETH and stablecoins. “Based on this situation and current CeFi market conditions, we have reached the difficult decision to close the platform,” Levin wrote.
157182667
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
The popular anti-virus software company Norton recently "added" a new "feature" which will "allow" the company to use your computer to mine for the Ethereum cryptocurrency whenever you're not using it. Yes, that's right: the anti-virus software wants you to let them remotely control your computer. Norton Crypto is included as part of Norton 360 subscriptions. However, there are coin mining fees as well as transaction costs to transfer Ethereum. The coin mining fee is currently 15% of the crypto allocated to the miner. Transfers of cryptocurrencies may result in transaction fees (also known as "gas" fees) paid to the users of the cryptocurrency blockchain network who process the transaction. In addition, if you choose to exchange crypto for another currency, you may be required to pay fees to an exchange facilitating the transaction. Transaction fees fluctuate due to cryptocurrency market conditions and other factors. These fees are not set by Norton.
151818735
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Chinese authorities have banned all new video games from being released indefinitely, as the government attempts to tackle what it calls gaming addiction in the under-18s. The suspension was revealed at a meeting with game company Tencent. The ban was reportedly revealed during a meeting between Chinese gaming companies Tencent and the authorities. Neither company has commented on the suspension, which has not yet been given an end date. The suspension comes as part of a wider bid by the Chinese Communist Party to crack down on gaming addiction amongst children. Just last month, the Chinese government banned under-18s from playing online games for more than three hours per week, and restricted weekend play between 8PM and 9PM. Online gaming companies are required to enforce the ban, which came after state media labelled videogames "spiritual opium" and "electronic drugs" a few weeks prior.
135548178
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Apple plans to change its iPhone software to make it more difficult for advertisers to track Apple customers, and in response Facebook became the latest organization to speak openly about the changes, telling investors and users that Apple's move will hurt the social network's bottom line because it will limit the kind of personalized targeting that makes Facebook's ads so valuable to advertisers. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50% drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple. Personally, I don't see the problem here.
126905972
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
"I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime," said Zachary McCoy. Yep, that's all it took. Google’s legal investigations support team emailed him to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The man's lawyer dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a “geofence warrant,” a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby. An avid biker, he used an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides. The app relied on his phone’s location services, which fed his movements to Google. He looked up his route on the day of the March 29, 2019, burglary and saw that he had passed the victim’s house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood, he said. “It was a nightmare scenario,” McCoy recalled. “I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect.”
125872946
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Japanese company Tone Mobile has released a very special new smartphone. Aimed at parents who want to keep their kids from making bad choices, the TONE e20 has an AI-powered “Smartphone Protection” feature that prevents users from shooting or saving “inappropriate” photos (read: naked pictures).
The official Tone Mobile press release hails the TONE e20 as the world’s first phone with an AI that “regulates inappropriate images” through an AI built into the so-called TONE Camera.
The system is powered by what Tone Mobile calls “TONE Security AI,” which is implemented into the phone’s TONE Camera to “prevent self-portrait damage caused by children under the age of 18 being deceived or threatened to photograph their own nudity.” If the AI recognizes that the subject of a photo is “inappropriate,” the camera will lock up; and if you somehow manage to snap a photo before the AI kicks in, the phone won’t let you save or share it.
Additionally, a feature called “TONE Family” can be set to send an alert to parents whenever an inappropriate image is detected. According to SoraNews24, this alert will contain location data and a pixelated thumbnail of the photo in question.
124239150
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Facebook issued a disappointing quarterly report, sending its stock price down by 6%, reports CNBC. In the report, "Facebook also warned of advertising headwinds related to privacy and regulatory changes on the horizon, leading to slowing growth in the U.S. Facebook said privacy improvements on Apple’s iPhones and Google’s Android software could hurt its ability to target advertising."
124085974
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Security experts have published a report today warning that the new and fast-rising LoRaWAN technology is vulnerable to cyberattacks and misconfigurations, despite claims of improved security rooted in the protocol's use of two layers of encryption. LoRaWAN stands for "Long Range Wide Area Network." It is a radio-based technology that works on top of the proprietary LoRa protocol. LoRaWAN takes the LoRa protocol and allows devices spread across a large geographical area to wirelessly connect to the internet via radio waves. But broadcasting data from devices via radio waves is not a secure approach. However, the protocol's creators anticipated this issue. Since its first version, LoRaWAN has used two layers of 128-bit encryption to secure the data being broadcast from devices — with one encryption key being used to authenticate the device against the network server and the other against a company's backend application. In a 27-page report published today, security researchers from IOActive say the protocol is prone to misconfigurations and design choices that make it susceptible to hacking and cyber-attacks. The company lists several scenarios it found plausible during its analysis of this fast-rising protocol:
123829754
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Count GE in on the "screw your customers" bandwagon. Twitter user Shane Morris tweeted, "My fridge has an RFID chip in the water filter, which means the generic water filter I ordered for $19 doesn't work. My fridge will literally not dispense ice, or water. I have to pay General Electric $55 for a water filter from them." Fortunately, there appears to be a way to hack them to work: How to Hack RWPFE Water Filters for Your GE Fridge. Hacks aside, count me out from ever buying another GE product if it includes anti-customer 'features' like these.
123671390
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
The FBI has shut down a website that offered hackers easy access to 12 billion records stolen in thousands of data breaches. On Thursday, the Justice Department announced it had seized the internet domain to WeLeakInfo.com, a site that was cataloging data taken from more than 10,300 data breaches at various companies and websites over the years.
Customers could pay as little as $2 to gain access to the massive trove of data, which was carefully indexed and searchable. In return, subscribers could look up a person's email address to find out what previously leaked passwords, names, phone numbers, and IP addresses had been associated with it. It isn't entirely clear how WeLeakInfo.com was obtaining the data breach records. But hackers routinely sell, trade, and collect such information on dark web marketplaces and forums.
119648214
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
or well over a decade, identity thieves, phishers, and other online scammers have created a black market of stolen and aggregated consumer data that they used to break into people's accounts, steal their money, or impersonate them. In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server, comprising 4 terabytes of personal information—about 1.2 billion records in all. While the collection is impressive for its sheer volume, the data doesn't include sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers. It does, though, contain profiles of hundreds of millions of people that include home and cell phone numbers, associated social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github, work histories seemingly scraped from LinkedIn, almost 50 million unique phone numbers, and 622 million unique email addresses.
117673624
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Two reports published in the last few months show that malware operators are experimenting with using WAV audio files to hide malicious code. The first of these new malware campaigns abusing WAV files was reported back in June by Symantec security researchers who said they spotted a Russian cyber-espionage group known as Waterbug (or Turla) using WAV files to hide and transfer malicious code from their server to already-infected victims. The second malware campaign was spotted this month by BlackBerry Cylance. In a report published today and shared with ZDNet last week, Cylance said it saw something similar to what Symantec saw a few months before. But while the Symantec report described a nation-state cyber-espionage operation, Cylance said they saw the WAV steganography technique being abused in a run-of-the-mill crypto-mining malware operation.
117023340
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JustAnotherOldGuy writes:
Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and revealed that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie's was "dmac", Bourne's was "bourne", Schmidt's was "wendy!!!" (his wife's name), Feldman's was "axlotl", and Kernighan's was "/.,/.,".
Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Özalp Babaolu's was "12ucdort", Howard Katseff's was "graduat;", Tom London's was "..pnn521", Bob Fabry's was "561cml.." and Ken Thompson's was "p/q2-q4!" (chess notation for a common opening move).
