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Submission + - Microsoft's Meltdown and Spectre patch is bricking some AMD PCs (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: As if the Meltdown and Spectre bug affecting millions of processors was not bad enough, the patches designed to mitigate the problems are introducing issues of their own. Perhaps the most well-known effect is a much-publicized performance hit, but some users are reporting that Microsoft's emergency patch is bricking their computers.

We've already seen compatibility issues with some antivirus tools, and now some AMD users are reporting that the KB4056892 patch is rendering their computer unusable. A further issue — error 0x800f0845 — means that it is not possible to perform a rollback.
Security

100 Million Facebook Pages Leaked On Torrent Site 163

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-many-pokes dept.
Stoobalou writes "A directory containing personal details about more than 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on an Internet file-sharing site. The 2.8GB torrent was compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security, who created a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook's open access directory, which lists all users who haven't bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines."
NASA

X-Ray Burst Temporarily Blinds NASA Satellite 117

Posted by Soulskill from the galaxy-sized-shark-thought-to-be-responsible dept.
RedEaredSlider writes with news that a recently-detected gamma-ray burst, originating roughly five billion light-years away, was powerful enough to temporarily blind NASA's Swift satellite. Phil Plait has an interesting writeup on the event. Quoting: "Swift, normally easily able to handle the X-ray load from these explosions, was overwhelmed, and actually shut down temporarily when software detected that the cameras onboard might get damaged by the flood of light. That’s never happened before. The burst was so bright in X-rays it put other GRBs to shame: slamming Swift with 143,000 X-ray photons per second, it was 5 times brighter than the previous record holder, and nearly 200 times as bright as a typical GRB! Weirdly, it didn’t look out of the ordinary in visible light."
Government

US Gov't Orders 73,000 Private Websites Offline 536

Posted by Soulskill from the one-fell-swoop dept.
joeszilagyi sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "... according to the owner of a free WordPress platform which hosts more than 73,000 blogs, his network of sites has been completely shut down on the orders of the authorities. Blogetery.com has been with host BurstNet for 7 months, but on Friday July 9th the site disappeared. ... Due to the fact that the authorities aren't sharing information and BurstNet are sworn to secrecy, it is proving almost impossible to confirm the exact reason why Blogetery has been completely taken down. The owner does, however, admit to handling many copyright-related cease and desists in the past, albeit in a timely manner as the DMCA requires."

Comment Re:Ubuntu needs two things added. (Score 2, Interesting) 244

by w0mprat (#31336618) Attached to: Matt Asay Answers Your Questions About Ubuntu and Canonical

for non Unix people... it's an EPIC fail. there is NO reason for them to copy paste and open a terminal. that can be written as a simple one click, enter password, done procedure. and it NEEDS to be.

Anyone who's ever tried to support any friends and family who you've encouraged to make the switch to linux then one knows exactly what you mean. Non-unix people often question why it doesn't just work, that by design it can't and won't do these simple and useful things automatically, and forces them to jump through flaming hoops ("The Ubuntu Way") to get something working.

Reccently I had a lay person rightly point out the danger of entering a root password everywhere for otherwise trivial administrative tasks (She had called me because she didn't want to enter the root password... just to download a update).

This is a concern I've had for some time, indeed an attacker only needs to phish for this one password and thats pwnership.

Sounds like one step removed from a certain popular operating system.

Partly my fault as I told her not to give out this password to anyone, when I explained that yes she would have to, often, and offered the standard apologies for contemporary technology , that we have to do to folk from an older and simpler time. You know what I mean.
Businesses

eBay Urges Rethink On EU Plan's "Brick and Mortar" Vendor Requirement 139

Posted by timothy from the them-as-has-gits dept.
mernil writes with this snippet from Reuters: "According to a draft regulation drawn up by the European Commission and seen by Reuters, suppliers may be allowed to require that distributors have a 'brick-and-mortar' shop before they can sell online. The proposed rules would replace existing guidelines exempting companies from strict EU competition rules under certain circumstances. Those rules expire at the end of May."

Comment Or... (Score 4, Insightful) 223

by asdf7890 (#31200878) Attached to: Google Buys iPhone Search App, Kills It

They have effectively employed a Developer (or more than one if the company wasn't a one man band) for work on their mail related projects taking his existing work on a (popular?) mail related application as part of his CV. They were perhaps on the lookout for a developer with good experience in both mail protocols and UIs for mobile devices (I can see that skillset fitting in to their plans as I understand them). Said developer/company does not have time to maintain/support the iPhone app long term on top of new responsabilities in the new position with Google so decided to stop, and Google has not particular interest in keeping it going by passing it to another team either because the market for it is too small for them to care or it just isn't the direction they want to send a dev team in at the moment.

There doesn't need to be any anti-Apple consideration here at all. Apple users need not worry: if there is a good market for such an application someone will step up to the bat and create one. In fact I predict many will turn up soon as people try follow in this fellow's footsteps - you just need to hope one of the new projects will be both good and long lived...

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