An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The director of Witcher 3, the most successful video game by Polish publisher CD Projekt SA, resigned after he was accused of bullying colleagues, sending its shares to their steepest decline since March. CD Projekt conducted a months-long investigation into the allegations against Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, according to an email to staff reviewed by Bloomberg. In the message, Tomaszkiewicz wrote that a commission had investigated the allegations and found him not guilty. "Nonetheless, a lot of people are feeling fear, stress or discomfort when working with me," he wrote. He apologized to staff "for all the bad blood I have caused."

Tomaszkiewicz's work on Witcher 3 inspired the creation of a popular Netflix series, both based on novels by the author Andrzej Sapkowski, and at one point turned CD Projekt into Poland's most valuable company. [...] Tomaszkiewicz was expected to play a significant role in the company's next game in the Witcher series. When reached for comment, Tomaszkiewicz confirmed his departure and said he was "sad, a bit disappointed and resigned." A representative for CD Projekt declined to comment. In the email to employees, Tomaszkiewicz said the decision was agreed upon with the company's board. "I am going to continue working on myself," he wrote. "Changing behavior is a long and arduous process, but I'm not giving up, and I hope to change."

Sunday IT Wire counted up the number of signatories on two open letters, one opposing Richard Stallman's return to the FSF and one supporting it.

- The pro-Stallman letter had 3,632 individual signers
- The anti-Stallman letter had 2,812 individual signers (plus 48 companies and organizations).

But the question of Stallman's leadership has now also arisen in the GCC community:

A long-time developer of GCC, the compiler created by the GNU Project and used in Linux distributions, has issued a call for the removal of Free Software Founder Richard Stallman from the GCC steering committee. Nathan Sidwell [also a software engineer at Facebook] said in a post directed to the committee that if it was unwilling to remove Stallman, then the panel should explain why it was not able to do so.

Stallman is also the founder of the GNU Project and the original author of GCC.

"RMS [Stallman] is no longer a developer of GCC, the most recent commit I can find regards SCO in 2003," Sidwell wrote in a long email. "Prior to that there were commits in 1997, but significantly less than 1994 and earlier. GCC's implementation language is now C++, which I believe RMS neither uses nor likes.

"When was RMS' most recent positive input to the GCC project? Even if it was recent and significant, that doesn't mean his toxic behaviour should be accepted."
Meanwhile, the following groups have also issued statements opposing Stallman's return to the FSF:

- Mozilla: We can't demand better of the internet if we don't demand better of our leaders, colleagues and ourselves. We're with the Open Source Diversity Community, Outreachy & the Software Conservancy project in supporting this petition.
- The Tor Project: The Tor Project is joining calls for Richard M. Stallman to be removed from board, staff, volunteer, and other leadership positions in the FOSS community, including the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project.
Rust creator Graydon Hoare: He's been saying sexist shit & driving women away for decades. He can't change, the FSF board knows it, is sending a "sexism doesn't matter" message. This is bad leadership and I'm sad about all of it, agree with calls to resign.

If someone is a public leader their public behaviour matters. I don't criticize private individuals here and I don't think twitter-justice is especially nuanced. But this is so far over the line, such a stupid and tone-deaf choice, and it is about community leadership.
The EFF: We at EFF are profoundly disappointed to hear of the re-election of Richard Stallman to a leadership position at the Free Software Foundation, after a series of serious accusations of misconduct led to his resignation as president and board member of the FSF in 2019. We are also disappointed that this was done despite no discernible steps taken by him to be accountable for, much less make amends for, his past actions or those who have been harmed by them. Finally, we are also disturbed by the secretive process of his re-election, and how it was belatedly conveyed to FSF's staff and supporters.

Stallman's re-election sends a wrong and hurtful message to free software movement, as well as those who have left that movement because of Stallman's previous behavior.

Free software is a vital component of an open and just technological society: its key institutions and individuals cannot place misguided feelings of loyalty above their commitment to that cause. The movement for digital freedom is larger than any one individual contributor, regardless of their role. Indeed, we hope that this moment can be an opportunity to bring in new leaders and new ideas to the free software movement.

We urge the voting members of the FSF1 to call a special meeting to reconsider this decision, and we also call on Stallman to step down: for the benefit of the organization, the values it represents, and the diversity and long-term viability of the free software movement as a whole.
Finally, the Free Software Foundation itself has now pinned the following tweet at the top of its Twitter feed: No LibrePlanet organizers (staff or volunteer), speakers, award winners, exhibitors, or sponsors were made aware of Richard Stallman's announcement until it was public.

"Microsoft has implemented an automatic mitigation tool within Defender Antivirus to tackle critical vulnerabilities in Exchange Server," reports ZDNet: On March 18, the Redmond giant said the software will automatically mitigate CVE-2021-26855, a severe vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild. This vulnerability is one of four that can be used in a wider attack chain to compromise on-premise Exchange servers.

Microsoft released emergency fixes for the security flaws on March 2 and warned that a state-sponsored threat group called Hafnium was actively exploiting the bugs, and since then, tens of thousands of organizations are suspected to have been attacked. At least 10 other advanced persistent threat (APT) groups have jumped on the opportunity slow or fragmented patching has provided.

The implementation of a recent security intelligence update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus and System Center Endpoint Protection means that mitigations will be applied on vulnerable Exchange servers when the software is deployed, without any further input from users. According to the firm, Microsoft Defender Antivirus will automatically identify if a server is vulnerable and apply the mitigation fix once per machine.
The article also points out Microsoft also released a one-click mitigation tool earlier this week, which is "still readily available as an alternative way to mitigate risk to vulnerable servers if IT admins do not have Defender Antivirus."

One key lesson from the recent T-Mobile and several other breaches: our phone numbers, that serve as a means to identity and verify ourselves, are increasingly getting targeted, and the companies are neither showing an appetite to work on an alternative identity management system, nor are they introducing more safeguards to how phone numbers are handled and exchanged. From a report: Identity management experts have warned for years about over-reliance on phone numbers. But the United States doesn't offer any type of universal ID, which means private institutions and even the federal government itself have had to improvise. As cell phones proliferated, and phone numbers became more reliably attached to individuals long term, it was an obvious choice to start collecting those numbers even more consistently as a type of ID. But over time, SMS messages, biometric scanners, encrypted apps, and other special functions of smartphones have evolved into forms of authentication as well.

"The bottom line is society needs identifiers," says Jeremy Grant, coordinator of the Better Identity Coalition, an industry collaboration that includes Visa, Bank of America, Aetna, and Symantec. "We just have to make sure that knowledge of an identifier can't be used to somehow take over the authenticator. And a phone number is only an identifier; in most cases, it's public." Think of your usernames and passwords. The former are generally public knowledge; it's how people know who you are. But you keep the latter guarded, because it's how you prove who you are.

The use of phone numbers as both lock and key has led to the rise, in recent years, of so-called SIM swapping attacks, in which an attacker steals your phone number. When you add two-factor authentication to an account and receive your codes through SMS texts, they go to the attacker instead, along with any calls and texts intended for the victim. Sometimes attackers even use inside sources at carriers who will transfer numbers for them.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Mimic implements a devilishly sick idea floated on Twitter by Peter Ritchie: "Replace a semicolon (;) with a Greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error." There are quite a few characters in the Unicode character set that look, to some extent or another, like others – homoglyphs. Mimic substitutes common ASCII characters for obscure homoglyphs. Caution: using this script may get you fired and/or beaten to a pulp.