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Submission + - Philae Found! Rosetta Spies Dead Comet Lander (seeker.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: With only a month before its mission ends, the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission swooped low over Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko to see the stranded Philae lander jammed in a crack. After months of searching for the lander, which made its dramatic touchdown on Nov. 14, 2014, mission scientists had a good idea as to the region the robot was in, but this is the first photographic proof of the lander, on its side, stuck in the craggy location called Abydos. "This wonderful news means that we now have the missing 'ground-truth' information needed to put Philae's three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is!" said Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor in a statement.

Submission + - Compromising Linux Virtual Machines Via FFS Rowhammer Attack (helpnetsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of Dutch researchers have demonstrated a variant of the Rowhammer attack that can be used to successfully compromise Linux virtual machines on cloud servers. The Flip Feng Shui (FFS) attack is not performed by triggering a software vulnerability. Instead, it relies on exploiting the widespread Rowhammer DRAM glitch to induce bit flips in controlled physical memory pages, and the Linux’ memory deduplication system.

Submission + - Cisco patches 'ExtraBacon' zero-day exploit leaked by NSA hackers (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: After a group of hackers stole and published a set of NSA cyberweapons earlier this week, the multibillion dollar tech firm Cisco is now updating its software to counter two potent leaked exploits that attack and take over crucial security software used to protect corporate and government networks.

  “Cisco immediately conducted a thorough investigation of the files released, and has identified two vulnerabilities affecting Cisco ASA devices that require customer attention,” the company said in a statement. “On Aug. 17, 2016, we issued two Security Advisories, which deliver free software updates and workarounds where possible.”

Submission + - Wrong chemical dumped into Olympic pools made them green (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Z00L00K
Z00L00K writes:

After a week of trying to part with green tides in two outdoor swimming pools, Olympic officials over the weekend wrung out a fresh mea culpa and yet another explanation—neither of which were comforting. According to officials, a local pool-maintenance worker mistakenly added 160 liters of hydrogen peroxide to the waters on August 5, which partially neutralized the chlorine used for disinfection. With chlorine disarmed, the officials said that “organic compounds”—i.e. algae and other microbes—were able to grow and turn the water a murky green in the subsequent days. The revelation appears to contradict officials’ previous assurances that despite the emerald hue, which first appeared Tuesday, the waters were safe.

I would personally have avoided using the green pools, but that's just me.

Submission + - Adblock Plus Offers Workaround To block Facebook Ads Again 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, Facebook announced it will begin showing ads in desktop browsers “for people who currently use ad blocking software.” Adblock Plus, the most popular ad blocking tool with over 500 million downloads, responded the same day by calling the move “a dark path against user choice.” Today, just two days later, Adblock Plus is offering a workaround that users can implement themselves now, and which will automatically take effect for all users in “a couple of days.”

Submission + - DARPA wants to build very low frequency wireless systems (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Wireless transmitters that operate at very or ultra low frequencies (0.330 kHz) typically require some big antenna complexes to handle their communications. Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said they are interested looking to eliminate that issue and develop smaller physical structures that could handle new long-distance communication applications.

Submission + - Banner Health the Latest Victim of Cyber Attack (bannerhealth.com)

Submitted by Netdoctor
Netdoctor writes: Apparently Banner Health is the latest victim of a cyber attack, with the Health conglomeration reporting on two incidents in July. While not all Banner customers were affected, payment details as well as customer information were leaked, according to their news brief.
Social Networks

Olympics Committee Says Non-Sponsors Are Banned From Tweeting About the Olympics (gizmodo.com) 247

Posted by msmash from the my-house-my-rules dept.
An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report:The U.S. Olympics Committee has gone off the deep end, when it comes to intellectual property. It's willing to sue anyone to protect their trademarks, even when the use is no real threat. But the committee's latest claim is an entirely new level of absurdity. What's getting the U.S. Olympics Committee in a tizzy this time? Tweets. Specifically any company that tweets about the Olympic Games and isn't a sponsor. ESPN obtained a letter from the U.S. Olympic Committee chief marketing officer Lisa Baird who outlines the absurd demands. "Commercial entities may not post about the Trials or Games on their corporate social media accounts," Baird writes, apparently in earnest. "This restriction includes the use of USOC's trademarks in hashtags such as #Rio2016 or #TeamUSA. And according to ESPN, it gets even more absurd. Apparently the letter says that any company whose primary mission isn't media is forbidden from using any pictures taken at the Olympics, sharing, and even reposting anything from the official Olympics account.

Submission + - SPAM: Class of Large but Very Dim Galaxies Discovered

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Astronomers have now detected and measured a new class of large but very dim galaxy that previously was not expected to exist.

‘Ultradiffuse’ galaxies came to attention only last year, after Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and Roberto Abraham of the University of Toronto in Canada built an array of sensitive telephoto lenses named Dragonfly. The astronomers and their colleagues observed the Coma galaxy cluster 101 megaparsecs (330 million light years) away and detected 47 faint smudges.

“They can’t be real,” van Dokkum recalls thinking when he first saw the galaxies on his laptop computer. But their distribution in space matched that of the cluster’s other galaxies, indicating that they were true members. Since then, hundreds more of these galaxies have turned up in the Coma cluster and elsewhere.

Ultradiffuse galaxies are large like the Milky Way — which is much bigger than most — but they glow as dimly as mere dwarf galaxies. It’s as though a city as big as London emitted as little light as Kalamazoo, Michigan.

More significantly, they have now found that these dim galaxies can be as big and as massive as the biggest bright galaxies, suggesting that there are a lot more stars and mass hidden out there and unseen than anyone had previously predicted.

Submission + - Ubuntu Forums Hacked, IPs and Emails of 2 Million Users Compromised

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: It would appear that, on the day of July 14, 2016, the Ubuntu Forums were compromised by someone who managed to get past the security measures implemented by Canonical and access the forum's database. Canonical was immediately notified of the fact that someone claimed to have a copy of the Ubuntu Forums database. After some investigation, it appears that the forum's database was indeed attacked at 20:33 UTC on July 14, 2016, by someone who injected certain formatted SQL to the database servers on the Ubuntu Forums. Canonical reports that the attacker managed to download parts of the "user" table that contained IP addresses, email addresses, and usernames of over 2 million registered users, but no valid password were compromised. Canonical apologise for any inconvenience caused by the breach.

Submission + - SPAM: Alzheimer's gene already shrinking brain by age of three

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Alzheimer’s gene, which dramatically raises the risk of developing dementia, is already affecting carriers by the age of three, shrinking their brains and lowering cognition, a new study suggests.

Children who carry the APOEe4 gene mutation , which raises the chance of dementia by 15 fold, were found to do less well in memory, attention and function tests.

Areas of the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease, such as the hippocampus and parietal gyri, were also found to be up to 22 per cent smaller in volume.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - "Miniature Pluto" Discovered in Outer Solar System (seeker.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Astronomers have found another Pluto-like dwarf planet located about 20 times farther away from the sun than Neptune. The small planet, designed 2015 RR245, is estimated to be about 435 miles in diameter and flying in an elliptical, 700-year orbit around the sun. At closest approach, RR245 will be about 3.1 billion miles from the sun, a milestone it is expected to next reach in 2096. At its most distant point, the icy world is located about 7.5 billion miles away. It was found by a joint team of astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Maunakea, Hawaii, in images taken in September 2015 and analyzed in February. The discovery was announced on Monday in the Minor Planet Electronic Circular.

Submission + - Slackware 14.2 Released, Still systemd-Free

Submitted by sombragris
sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux distribution still in active maintenance, was released just minutes ago. Slackware is noted for being the most Unix-like of all Linux distributions. While sporting kernel 4.4.14 and gcc 5.3, other goodies include Perl 5.22.2, Python 2.7.11, Ruby 2.2.5, Subversion 1.9.4, git-2.9.0, mercurial-3.8.2, KDE 4.14.21 (KDE 4.14.3 with kdelibs-4.14.21) Xfce 4.12.1... and no systemd!

According to the ChangeLog:

The long development cycle (the Linux community has lately been living in "interesting times", as they say) is finally behind us, and we're proud to announce the release of Slackware 14.2. The new release brings many updates and modern tools, has switched from udev to eudev (no systemd), and adds well over a hundred new packages to the system. Thanks to the team, the upstream developers, the dedicated Slackware community, and everyone else who pitched in to help make this release a reality.

Grab the ISOs at a mirror near you. Enjoy!

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