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Submission + - The Origin of the Blinking Cursor (inverse.com) 1

Submitted by jimminy_cricket
jimminy_cricket writes: These were some of the first growing pains of early word processing. Devoid of the seamless trackpad and mouse control we take for granted today, wordsmiths of the era were instead forced to hack through a digital jungle of their own creation. Unbeknownst to them, engineers were already developing a seemingly innocuous feature that would quietly change computing forever: the blinking cursor.

Patented in 1967 by Charles Kiesling, the blinking cursor "is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text." According to Kiesling's son, his father said, "there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."

Submission + - Asahi Linux Dev Reveals 'M1RACLES' Flaw in Apple M1 (tomshardware.com) 2

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Asahi Linux developer Hector Martin has revealed a covert channel vulnerability in the Apple M1 chip that he dubbed M1RACLES, and in the process, he’s gently criticized the way security flaws have started to be shared with the public.

Martin’s executive summary for M1RACLES sounds dire: “A flaw in the design of the Apple Silicon ‘M1’ chip allows any two applications running under an OS to covertly exchange data between them, without using memory, sockets, files, or any other normal operating system features. This works between processes running as different users and under different privilege levels, creating a covert channel for surreptitious data exchange. [] The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision.“

Submission + - SPAM: The IRS Wants Help Hacking Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallets

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The IRS is looking for help to break into cryptocurrency hardware wallets, according to a document posted on the agency website in March of this year. Many cryptocurrency investors store their cryptographic keys, which confer ownership of their funds, with the exchange they use to transact or on a personal device. Some folks, however, want a little more security and use hardware wallets—small physical drives which store a user's keys securely, unconnected to the internet. The law enforcement arm of the tax agency, IRS Criminal Investigation, and more specifically its Digital Forensic Unit, is now asking contractors to come up with solutions to hack into cryptowallets that could be of interest in investigations, the document states.

"The decentralization and anonymity provided by cryptocurrencies has fostered an environment for the storage and exchange of something of value, outside of the traditional purview of law enforcement and regulatory organizations," the document reads. "There is a portion of this cryptographic puzzle that continues to elude organizations—millions, perhaps even billions of dollars, exist within cryptowallets." The security of hardware wallets presents a problem for investigators. The document states that agencies may be in possession of a hardware wallet as part of a case, but may not be able to access it if the suspect does not comply. This means that authorities cannot effectively "investigate the movement of currencies" and it may "prevent the forfeiture and recovery" of the funds. "The explicit outcome of this contract is to tame the cybersecurity research into measured, repeatable, consistent digital forensics processes that can be trained and followed in a digital forensics’ laboratory," the document says.
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:GIVE THESE BASTARDS A NAME (Score 1) 149

by semper_statisticum (#58133044) Attached to: Lobbyists Demonize 'Right To Repair' Legislation

But New Hampshire would be the first to pass such a bill, and for good reason, said Matt Mincieli, the Northeast executive director of TechNet, a technology advocacy organization that includes companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon and Uber. Bills in other states, including Massachusetts, have gotten no traction.

“This bill would be a gift to cybercriminals,” Mincieli wrote in the Concord Monitor, and circulated the article to the lawmakers. And he testified at the hearing, “No one really knows once we open up tech to anyone. Who would protect your security?”

The bill would scare technology companies away from New Hampshire, he insisted, and it’s so broad that it would affect nearly every type of industry.

The bill, he noted, didn’t just ask companies to reveal schematics, but also diagnostic software, services access passwords, updates and corrections to firmware (though advocates said it wouldn’t reveal encrypted security information).

Indeed, the bill drew testimony from beyond usual technology suspects: securities companies, the entertainment and gaming industry and even farm equipment.

William Taranovich, Jr., president of North Country Tractor, an authorized John Deere dealer from Pembroke, testified brandishing a long screwdriver and a laptop. In 1991, he mainly used the former to fix equipment, but today even chainsaw repairs need proprietary software, “so the saw won’t jump up and hit you in the face.”

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, John Deere, Microsoft, Verizon and Uber
I am somewhat terrified that John Deere recommends maintenance on operating machinery.
source: TechNet report

Comment What I'm really looking forward to (Score 1) 215

by semper_statisticum (#57299794) Attached to: Apple Unveils iPhone Xs, iPhone Xs Max, iPhone Xr

Is the max ipad plus. Obviously that needs to come next year, but we can dream, because the ipad plus max just sounds terrible.

Also, just to ask: how do we pluralise the iphone Maxs? As the MaxSS? I suppose that we can be thankful that the Lightning connector is being removed, since they would have to do something clever, like denote the SS with lightning bolts...

Comment Re:Because Wikipedia is not reliable as a source (Score 1) 140

As one of those grad students once upon a time: 95% of the social scientists have absolutely no clue about the tools they use. They do things because they are traditional checkboxes, and those are the marks reviewers look for. They don't care about the logic of the tools they use, and as a result, shit gets dumped out without comprehension by either reviewers or authors.

Submission + - New Study Claims That The "Black Death" Was Spread By Humans, Not Rats (bbc.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports: Rats were not to blame for the spread of plague during the Black Death, according to a study. The rodents and their fleas were thought to have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe. But a team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice". The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, uses records of its pattern and scale. The Black Death claimed an estimated 25 million lives, more than a third of Europe's population, between 1347 and 1351. "We have good mortality data from outbreaks in nine cities in Europe," Prof Nils Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, told BBC News. "So we could construct models of the disease dynamics [there]." He and his colleagues then simulated disease outbreaks in each of these cities, creating three models where the disease was spread by: 1) rats 2) airborne transmission 3) fleas and lice that live on humans and their clothes. In seven out of the nine cities studied, the "human parasite model" was a much better match for the pattern of the outbreak. It mirrored how quickly it spread and how many people it affected. "The conclusion was very clear," said Prof Stenseth. "The lice model fits best.It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats. It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person." Plague is still endemic in some countries of Asia, Africa and the Americas, where it persists in "reservoirs" of infected rodents. According to the World Health Organization, from 2010 to 2015 there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide, including 584 deaths. And, in 2001, a study that decoded the plague genome used a bacterium that had come from a vet in the US who had died in 1992 after a plague-infested cat sneezed on him as he had been trying to rescue it from underneath a house.

Comment Re:Application (Score 3, Informative) 117

The more prime numbers that are discovered, the more likely we are to be able to discover a pattern within an arbitrary base number set. The larger numbers are useful because we also want to make sure that the entire range is consistent, or in other words that any pattern, or lack of pattern, is the same across the entire set of numbers. There is always a benefit to trying to find patterns in number theory -- it's one of the coolest and most interesting fields in pure mathematics.

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