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Comment Oh, the irony (Score 1) 31

The irony when someone who was accused of being a Microsoft mole for a long time before assuming a public relationship with them, with this work relationship seen by many as a reward for his role in creating dissent in the open source/Linux community, is now referred in /. as "famed software engineer".

Of course, slashvertisements aren't new.

Submission + - Facebook's "independent" fact checks face quiet political, financial pressures (fastcompany.com) 1

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: Facing questions about a mysterious series of changes to some fact-check labels, Facebook recently wrote to a group of senators with an assurance: its fact checkers can and do label "opinion" content if it crosses the line into falsehood.

What Facebook didn't tell the senators: the company draws that line, and can pressure changes to fact checks & misinformation penalties. And it does. Facebook acknowledged to me that it may ask fact checkers to change their ratings, and that it exercises control over pages' internal misinformation strikes.

In one case—a video containing misinformation about climate change published by PragerU—Facebook downgraded a fact-check label from "false" to "partly false," and removed the page's misinformation strikes.

Was the change warranted? "Let me put it this way," says Scott Johnson, an editor at Climate Feedback, one of Facebook's third-party fact checking organizations. "Our reviewers gave it a -2 rating on our +2 to -2 scale and our summary describes it as 'incorrect and misleading to viewers,' so we had selected the 'false' label accordingly."

In some cases the video now carries no apparent label at all. After an update that Facebook announced last week, the company is using what it calls a "lighter-weight warning label" for "partly false" content in the U.S.: an unobtrusive box below the video under "related articles" that says "fact check," with a link. Meanwhile, older versions of the video appeared to evade labels completely: A handful of other PragerU posts containing the video appear without any labeling, a review by Fast Company found. Versions of the labeled and unlabeled video have now racked up millions of views since April 2016, when it was first published.

Submission + - SPAM: Police Tracked a Terror Suspect—Until His Phone Went Dark After a FB Warn

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A team of European law-enforcement officials was hot on the trail of a potential terror plot in October, fearing an attack during Christmas season, when their keyhole into a suspect’s phone went dark.

WhatsApp, Facebook Inc. ’s popular messaging tool, had just notified about 1,400 users—among them the suspected terrorist—that their phones had been hacked by an “advanced cyber actor.” An elite surveillance team was using spyware from NSO Group, an Israeli company, to track the suspect, according to a law-enforcement official overseeing the investigation.

On the day WhatsApp sent its alert, the official overseeing the terror investigation in Western Europe said, he was stuck in traffic on his way to work when a call came in from Israel. “Have you seen the news? We’ve got a problem,” he said he was told. WhatsApp was notifying suspects whom his team was tracking that their phones had been hacked. “No, that can’t be right. Why would they do that?” the official said he asked his contact, thinking it a joke.The official said counterparts in other

Western European countries told him more than 10 of their investigations may have been compromised by the WhatsApp alert. “I talked about it with my colleagues,” the official said. “They also couldn’t believe this was happening. It affected them more because they used this WhatsApp tool more than we did.” The former security official, from a different nation in Western Europe, said several countries there rely on NSO spyware in counterterrorism investigations.

Facebook and other U.S. technology companies often inform users when a government agency is legally requesting their data, unless prohibited by law or if the company believes there are “exceptional circumstances, such as child-exploitation cases,” Facebook says on its website.

NSO’s technology bypasses the traditional legal request process, however, according to Facebook, Citizen Lab and others.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Code.org Boasts It's 'Served' an Hour of Code to 910+ Million Students 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The Hour of Code home page captured by the Internet Archive on Dec. 17th boasted that 835,581,513 students had been 'served' an Hour of Code. Three days later, however, the numbers had jumped to 910,905,104 served, presumably due to counter updates that were deferred during this year's event. "It has been a HUGE year-and decade!-for computer science education," tweeted tech-backed Code.org. All over the world, more than 910 MILLION students have started an #HourOfCode since we began this journey in 2013. Thank YOU for being part of this global movement!" In 2015, Code.org explained, "We're switching our counter to a McDonald's format — because the Hour of Code counter is both double-counting and under-counting participation." Speaking of possible over-counting, the Hour of Code Leaderboards consistently suggest the city in the world with the greatest Hour of Code participation is tiny Boardman, OR (population 4,490), perhaps because of the Amazon data centers that an AWS Case Study notes power Code.org.

Submission + - AMD Launches Threadripper 3970X, 3960X And Smokes Intel's New 18-Core CPU (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel and AMD have been duking it out in the high-end desktop processor space lately. AMD's return to competitive footing versus Intel has propelled the company forward and the brand has a loyal, passionate following due the competitive performance-per-dollar its 3d Gen Ryzen processors bring versus Intel offerings. Today, both companies have launched new flagship many-core CPUs, the Intel Core i9-10980XE, which is an 18-core chip, and the AMD 3rd Gen Threadripper 3970X and 3960X, which are 32-core and 24-core chips, respectively. Intel's Core i9-10980XE brings a lower price of $999 and competes more favorably versus AMD's lower-end 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X that's priced at just $750. Meanwhile, the new AMD Threadripper 3960X at $1399 and Threadripper 3970X at $1999 leave Intel's fastest desktop chip in the dust in multi-threaded workloads, sometimes by a wide margin. In addition, while Threadripper 3960X and 3970X pull only about 26 to 36 Watts of additional power versus Intel's new Core i9-10980XE, they do it with 33% — 77% more core resources. Regardless, it's impressive how the tables have turned, as AMD is now firmly entrenched with some better value propositions in high-end desktop processors, and better performance in many cases as well.

Submission + - Ursula K Leguin, 88 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.

Submission + - The reason to use Devuan is hard calculated costs (ungleich.ch)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: While I am writing here in flowery words, the reason to use Devuan is hard calculated costs. We are a small team at ungleich and we simply don't have the time to fix problems caused by systemd on a daily basis. This is even without calculating the security risks that come with systemd. Our objective is to create a great, easy-to-use platform for VM hosting, not to walk a tightrope.

Yes, you read right: what the Devuan developers are doing is creating stability. Think about it not in a few repeating systemd bugs or about the insecurity caused by a huge, monolithic piece of software running with root privileges. Why do people favor Linux on servers over Windows? It is very easy: people don't use Windows, because it is too complex, too error prone and not suitable as a stable basis. Read it again. This is exactly what systemd introduces into Linux: error prone complexity and instability.

With systemd the main advantage to use Linux is obsolete.

Submission + - TrustZone Downgrade Attack Opens Android Devices to Old Vulnerabilities (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An attacker can downgrade components of the Android TrustZone technology — a secure section of smartphone CPUs — to older versions that feature known vulnerabilities. The attacker can then use previously published exploit code to attack up-to-date Android OS versions.

The research team proved their attack in tests on devices running the ARM TrustZone technology, such as Samsung Galaxy S7, Huawei Mate 9, Google Nexus 5, and Google Nexus 6. They replaced updated versions of the Widevine trustlet with an older version that was vulnerable to CVE-2015-6639, a vulnerability in Android's Qualcomm Secure Execution Environment (QSEE) — Qualcomm's name for its ARM TrustZone version that runs on Qualcomm chips. This vulnerability allows attackers root level access to the TrustZone OS, which indirectly grants the attack control over the entire phone.

The research paper is available here, and one of the researcher's authors explains the attack chain in an interview here.

Submission + - Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate announced (devuan.org)

Submitted by jaromil
jaromil writes: Devuan 1.0.0-RC is announced, following its beta 2 release last year. The Debian fork that spawned over systemd controversy is reaching stability and plans long term support. Devuan deploys an innovative continuous integration setup: with fallback on Debian packages, it overlays its own modifications and then uses the merged source repository to ship images for 11 ARM targets, a desktop and a minimal live, vagrant and qemu virtual machines and the classic installer isos. The release announcements contains several links to project that have already adopted this distribution as a base OS.

Submission + - Wasps have injected new genes into butterflies (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you’re a caterpillar, you do not want to meet a parasitic wasp. The winged insect will inject you full of eggs, which will grow inside your body, develop into larvae, and hatch from your corpse. But a new study reveals that wasps have given caterpillars something beneficial during these attacks as well: pieces of viral DNA that become part of the caterpillar genome, protecting them against an entirely different lethal virus. In essence, the wasps have turned caterpillars into genetically modified organisms.

Submission + - Developer Exposes Indian Telco's Net Neutrality Violation, Gets Threatened

Submitted by knightsirius
knightsirius writes: Indian broadband and cellular operator Airtel was discovered to be injecting third-party JavaScript files into web pages delivered over their wireless networks. A developer was viewing the source of his own blog and noticed the additional script when viewed on a Airtel connection. He traced the file back to Flash Networks, an Israel-based company, which specializes in "network monetization" and posted the source on GitHub. Since then, he has received a cease-and-desist from Flash Networks and the code on GitHub has been removed following a DMCA takedown notice.

Readers may remember Airtel from its previous dubious record with network neutrality.

Submission + - Thanks to the Montreal Protocol, we avoided severe ozone depletion (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Concentrations of ozone depleting chemicals was at its peak in 1993, but over the years they have declined and a new research points out that the Montreal Protocol, which came into force in 1987, has played a major role in not only ensuring that use of these chemicals is reduced, but has also helped us avoid a severe ozone depletion.

Submission + - MS undecided on suing users of its open source .NET

Submitted by ciaran2014
ciaran2014 writes: With Microsoft proudly declaring its .NET runtime open source, a collegue and I decided to look at the licensing aspects. One part, the MIT licence, is straight forward, but there's also a patent promise. The first two-thirds of the first sentence seems to announce good news about Microsoft not suing people. Then the conditions begin. It seems Microsoft can't yet bring itself to release something as free software without retaining a patent threat to limit how those freedoms can be exercised. Overall, we found 4 Shifty Details About Microsoft's "Open Source" .NET.

Submission + - It's official: NSA spying is hurting the US tech economy (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China is backing away from US tech brands for state purchases as NSA revelations, according to Reuters, which confirms what many US technology companies have been saying for the past year: the activities by the NSA are harming their businesses in crucial growth markets, including China.

Submission + - Antitrust case against Google thrown out of SF court (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Just a few days ago Google was threatened with legal action for anti-competitive behavior in Russia. While we don't yet know if that will amount to anything, there has been some better news for the search giant in the US. A San Francisco judge dismissed a case brought against the firm by two men who thought the inclusion of Google services in Android pushed up the prices of their handsets.

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