Showing posts with label chrome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chrome. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Tech News

ZD Net: U.S. to share less intel with Germany unless Huawei banned on 5G.
According to The Wall Street Journal, United States Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell told the German government in a letter on Friday that allowing Chinese vendor equipment across 5G networks would reduce US cooperation with intelligence agencies in Germany.

Grenell pointed out that Chinese law requires Chinese companies to support China's security agencies[.]
More - Security WeekGermany will define their own standards, says Merkel.
"We will define our standards for ourselves," [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel told reporters at a Berlin press conference with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.
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WIRED: How the FAA decides when, and when not, to ground airplanes.
...the FAA is notoriously safety-conscious. Planes in search of an airworthiness certificate must meet stringent standards; the certification process usually takes years. And it gets results: Just one person has died in American airspace on a commercial airplane since 2009. But, it seems, the agency has not yet found reason to ground the new 737.
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Beta NewsChrome browser assists in filtering out toxic comments.

TechSpot: Tune browser AI to filter toxic comments.
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C|Net: Jaguar's station wagon faces uncertain future in U.S.
The car nerds of the internet tend to love them, and because we're a loud bunch, once in a while a manufacturer will take a chance and try to sell one here. Inevitably this lasts a couple of years, few people buy them new, and they go away[.]
I'm guessing its uncertain future has to do with the words "station wagon" following "Jaguar".
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TechDirtJames Woods - 1, Defamation lawsuit - 0.
The lower court did take a couple of shots at Woods during its dismissal of the suit, pointing out he was as uncooperative as possible when the plaintiff, Portia Boulger, tried to serve him.
And we would expect no less from Mr. Woods. Congrats!
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Phys.orgWhat scientists found after sifting through solar system dust.
So far, no evidence has been found of dust-free space, but that's partly because it would be difficult to detect from Earth. No matter how scientists look from Earth, all the dust in between us and the Sun gets in the way, tricking them into thinking perhaps space near the Sun is dustier than it really is.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Tech News

Slashgear - Washington Redskins nix Huawei deal over privacy concerns:
...a new report claims [the deal was killed] due to government prodding. According to sources, officials were concerned about Huawei installing WiFi service in Washington, DC. 
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SC Mag15 DDoS-for-hite sites shut down by FBI:
Authorities charged Matthew Gatrel, 30, of St. Charles, Ill, and Juan Martinez, 25, of Pasadena, Calif., with conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act through the operation of their DDoS-for-hire services sites known as Down them and Ampnode.

According to the release, Downthem’s database showed over 2000 customer subscriptions, and had been used to conduct, or attempt to conduct, over 200,000 DDoS attacks which were carried out between October 2014 and November 2018.
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SlashgearWin 10 fix hurting Lenovo lap tops.

BetaNews: A generally positive review of Win 11.

Jolt: Chrome exploit causing crashes in Win 10.
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Nextgov: Cali court finds First Amendment Rights not necessarily protected in social media.
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The Next Web: 2018: year of the fabled Linux desktop.

It's Foss: Why Linux hasn't succeeded as a desktop, by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Tech News

ArsTechnia - Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to.
Microsoft adopting Chromium puts the Web in a perilous place.
A must-read. Also: Google evil? You have no idea. - InfoWorld, March 2014

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Peering into 2019 at Beta News - Cyber predictions for 2019:
The end of the password
Increased regulation
IoT risks
And more.
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BGR - Intelligent parrot instructed Alexa to play music and order food from Amazon
The African grey parrot, however, is something of an exception to the rule. Interestingly enough, a 2012 study published in The Royal Society found that the grey parrot has cognitive thinking skills in some areas that are on the same level as a three-year old human child.
And then, there's this parrot.
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C|NetRussian social media actors moved to Instagram after pressure on Facebook and Twitter:

Once the Internet Research Agency got outed on Facebook and Twitter, Instagram became the new haven for Russia's disinformation campaign.

That's the takeaway from two comprehensive reports Monday on Russia's social media manipulation efforts. One is from researchers at New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm, and the other is from researchers at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Research Project and Graphika. 
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Brave browser going Chromium - Computer World:
As of last week, however, Brave relies on the Chromium UI. In plainer words, Brave has gone "full-Chromium."
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Tech News WorldBlackberry opens door for offering services to autonomous vehicle sector:
BlackBerry this week introduced its new Security Credential Management System.
[.]
Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry,...undertook development of this technology to provide the critical infrastructure for vehicles and traffic lights to exchange information securely.
[.]
The company likely hopes to gain the trust of automakers, as well as local governments that are involved in the development of smart city infrastructure.
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Fake package covers porch thieves in glitter and fart spray. TechCrunch:
As soon as it’s opened, a custom-built spinning tub flings ridiculously fine glitter in every direction...A few seconds later comes a blast of canned fart spray. Or, I should say, the first blast of canned fart spray[.]
See the video at the link.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Tech News

Why driving is hard for AI. ArsTechnia:
The Society for Automotive Engineering and the US Department of Transportation specify six degrees of autonomy, running from Level 0 (human drivers in complete control) to Level 5 (a fully self-driving vehicle). The commercially available car currently considered the most autonomous—the Cadillac CT6 with Super Cruise—makes it to Level 2... but only on the 130,000 miles (many of them highways) that its maps know. Tesla's Autopilot mode, the name notwithstanding, is also considered Level 2. Neither of them are anything like set-and-forget systems.
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Duckduckgo discovers Google personalizing searches in incognito mode and when not signed in.
BetaNews:
[The study] found that even when people searched without logging into a Google account -- or when they used private browsing mode --  "most participants saw results unique to them".
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China denounces U.S. as "despicable rogue" over Huawei CFO arrest. BGR:
The Chinese government has demanded [CFO Meng Wanzhou] be released and claimed that her arrest is a potential human rights violation.
The accusations, CBC.ca:
[CFO Meng Wanzhou, 46] is wanted for extradition from Vancouver to the U.S. on allegations of fraud, including using a shell company to skirt international American sanctions over five years, court heard.
The Justice Department affidavit painted a picture of a woman with immense financial resources who had already attempted to evade U.S. arrest warrants for allegedly violating American and European Union sanctions.
It said she possesses "no fewer than seven passports from both China and Hong Kong."
The lesson here is if you're going to have seven passports, mix-up more countries. Use Luxembourg, Lithuania, Liechtenstein and Monaco. No one will question them.
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If you're looking at buying a new TV, a review on Smart display models at C|Net.
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Here's a rare item. MicroSoft surrenders. Computer World
After a years-long pummeling, Microsoft this week surrendered in the browser war, saying that it will junk Edge's home-grown rendering engine and replace it with Blink, the engine that powers Google's Chrome.
More...

RIP MS Edge. ZD Net:
Microsoft today confirmed the rumors that have been swirling all week. As part of a sweeping change to one of the flagship components of Windows 10, it will rebuild its Microsoft Edge browser from the ground up, ripping out its proprietary EdgeHTML rendering engine and replacing it with the open-source Chromium code base.
Image: ZD Net
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Are you a member of Quora? Looks like it was hacked. WIRED:
In a blog post on Monday, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo admitted that Quora was breached. The company discovered the problem last Friday, and more than 100 million accounts may have had their data taken.
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Expired certificate causes millions to lose Ericsson network. TechSpot:
Certificates are software keys that enable certain functionality, but they can require occasional updates so that they don’t expire, something Swedish owned telecommunication equipment manufacturer Ericsson didn’t do.
They forgot to use a sticky-note.
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GizmodoA free streaming service you didn't know you had. (Not Reddit?)
I want to tell you about a free streaming service that’s in many ways just as good as Filmstruck, offers Criterion films, and has at least one feature that no one else does.
Kanopy is not new, it got its start in Australia a decade ago and has slowly expanded its services around the globe.
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UberGizmoTeen electrocuted to death wearing charging headphones:
It has been suggested that you not use your headphones while they’re plugged into a phone that’s charging, or to use them if their wires are frayed and exposed.
The above never occurred to me. I'd never heard of anyone dying from this until now. Makes sense. What a way to go, geeez.
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I can't quite make the stretch to classify this under Tech News, but here goes.

From The Independent:  Mom sends five-year old son to school nativity with...(plastic blowup, think adult) ...sheep doll.
Helen Cox said she had no idea what the real purpose of the product when she bought it for her son Alfie.
Yeeeaaahhhhhhhh....click the link and read the story.

 Image: The Independent.

I obscured the kid's face, I just had to. The image at the link is intact.

Monday, July 16, 2018

Tech News

The police pull you over, go on a fishing expedition, allegedly find some controlled substance and, later, because you can't remember the passwords to your recently purchased cell phones the judge sentences you for contempt of court.  (WTF?) TechDirt:
The police have a warrant and claim that's all they need to demand access to the phones' contents. But that's predicated on a string of events that seem constitutionally-dubious, to say the least.
[.]
As it stands now, [suspect William] Montanez is going to spend six months in jail for preventing police from rooting around in seized cellphones for evidence they don't need and which would likely be highly irrelevant to these criminal proceedings. The police can't show probable cause for this search because none exists. And yet, the judge trying the case demanded Montanez unlock the phones in court and when he failed to do so (Montanez claimed he could not remember the passcodes), the judge tossed him in jail to, I guess, jog his memory.

This case stinks all over.
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Is your DVR a Dahua? If so, your password and/or security may have been compromised. Bleeping Computer:
Login passwords for tens of thousands of Dahua devices have been cached inside search results returned by ZoomEye [...] these passwords are for Dahua DVRs running very old firmware that is vulnerable to a five-year-old vulnerability
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Wonderful articleWhy Politicians always get tech wrong.  ZD Net:
...technology is one of the biggest drivers of change in society, because it underpins almost everything we do. It's one of the biggest sources both of threats and opportunities.
We need to vote tech-challenged politicians out of office. The future depends on it.
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A lot of businesses failing to detect malware, phishing domains and rogue imitation sites. Info Security:
Of the Alexa top 10,000 domains, 3390 were running one potentially vulnerable web component; 1,036,657 potentially vulnerable web components were found overall.
[.]
“Some of the cryptomining scripts we found have been active for over 160 days, suggesting that organizations are failing to detect them”[.]
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MotherboardAI-assisted fake...adult entertainment:
...this new type of fake [adult entertainment] shows that we're on the verge of living in a world where it's trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did.
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The DriveNissan's GT-R will be the fastest sports car in the world.

The Nissa GT-R, fastest ever.

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Tech XPlore - You're movie preferences analyzed so to better market to you In other words, tech enables Hollywood with a new tool designed to get more of your money. 
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BGR - New, 50-inch 4k TV for $399.99.
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Gadgets Now - The world should fear sex-bots and not AI.
Today, it seems impossible that even the most high-tech AI can create a robotic substitute for human relationships. Yet robots could play a supplementary role.
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France, an up-and-coming tech giant.  TechCrunch:
France has now graduated from “asteroid” to “planet,” and is well on its way to “gas giant.”
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Ars Technia: Chrome. Redesigned. (Yes...again.)
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Technocracy: "Anonymous" can be ID'ed on Twitter with over 97% accuracy.  (I bet it was a tech-savvy politician, U.S. no doubt, who discovered this.)


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Wccftech - Gamer or not...this chair looks really comfortable.

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Tech News



It resembles a mini-MRI machine, but it's actually a rotating cat poop prison. C|Net:
[It's] a rotating cat toilet/washing machine/kitty litter tray to deal with your animal's mess.
Is it just me, or has too much tech and innovation been devoted to cats? It's only a matter of time until we read where someone tried to see if this device worked on their baby.
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ArsTechnia: [Over] 92 million MyHeritage users were exposed in a cybersecurity breach on October 26, 2017, the popular genealogy company reported Monday, June 4, 2018.
MyHeritage said that it only learned of the breach earlier that day—more than seven months after the fact—when an unidentified “security researcher” sent the company’s chief information security officer a message. The researcher said they had found a file containing users’ data on a private server and passed a copy of the file along.
"We only learned of that Monday." Yeah - who believes this?
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The electric 2020 Porsche Mission E Prototype is just around the corner. C|Net:
"If you're having some fun on the track," said [Detlev von Platen, Porsche board member and former CEO of Porsche Cars North America], "waiting 6 hours to recharge would bother you. That's why we are working so hard on a technology that would charge the battery in 15 minutes."
2020 Porsche Mission E
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IMO, this is not good: MSoft, Guugle and Twatter seem to be acquiring everything. From WIRED:
Microsoft officially announced Monday that it will acquire the code repository site GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The platform is an important resource for some 28 million developers and home to billions of lines of open source code.
[.]
Microsoft will soon need to formally decide what will happen to the many GitHub repositories that conflict with its own interests. The tech giant will face similar content moderations challenge that peers like Facebook and Google have, but with code instead of speech.
Yeah, we thought free speech moderation would be problematic, how do you think MS will rule on GitHub? I'm guessing not in the best interests of GitHub.
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FCC email redactions? Why...this can't be. TechCrunch:
You may remember the FCC explaining that in both 2014 and 2017, its comment system was briefly taken down by a denial of service attack. At least, so it says — but newly released emails show that the 2014 case was essentially fabricated, and the agency has so aggressively redacted documents relating to the 2017 incident that one suspects they’re hiding more than ordinary privileged information.
Oh, that FCC - their Sharpie pen budget must a budget-buster.
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The Google Chrome Swamp Monster keeps growing. Computer World:
Mozilla's Firefox landed on a slippery slope last month and may face a slow demise as users desert the browser for Google's Chrome.

According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, Firefox lost a quarter of a percentage point of user share in May, ending the month at 9.9%. It was the first time Firefox has fallen below the 10% marker since November 2016.
[.]
Eight years ago, Firefox accounted for more than a quarter of the globe's browser share. That's fallen to less than a tenth.
Apple's Safari, Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge are also in decline. Guugle is going to own the world soon. This is not good.
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Geek.com: Streaming Culture is Diseased. And this is being noticed...just now?
...ordinary folks hooking up their cameras to the Internet and letting the world watch them play video games, take their clothes off, disseminate conspiracy theories or just live their lives. Services like Twitch, YouTube Live and Periscope attract millions of viewers and the most popular users can become self-made millionaires.

It’s also making us into monsters.
First person that popped into my mind is "activist" David Hogg.
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Beta News: Floridians have the worst cybersecurity habits in the U.S.
A study by cybersecurity company Webroot in conjunction with the Ponemon Institute finds Florida to be the worst state in the US for cyber-hygiene.
[.]
72 percent of Floridians report that they share passwords or other access credentials with others. In comparison, over half (53 percent) of survey respondents in New Hampshire claim that they never share passwords with others.
I wonder of if John Podestaphile has changed his password to something other than "password"?
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One step closer to our Orwellian Utopia - Extreme TechAI Powered Psychopath named Norman created.
... the team has named “Norman” after movie psychopath Norman Bates.
[.]
The MIT team fed Norman a steady diet of data culled from gruesome subreddits that exist to share photos of death and destruction.
[.]
What Norman does address is the danger that artificial intelligence can become dangerously biased. 
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Technocracy: California Gov. Moonbeam is labeled as a Technocrat.
Gov. Jerry Brown has more in common with a Technocrat than a left-wing Democrat...[.] Whatever the United Nations proposes, Brown puts into practice, which is the unspoken reason NY Times can call him a “pragmatic, results-focused technocrat”.
Brown escaped the cuckoo's nest a long, long time ago. Where is the white van with the guys dressed in white wielding the butterfly nets?
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TechDirt: Australian Cops Caught Faking 258,000 Breathalyzer Tests.
Victorian police faked more than a quarter of a million roadside breath tests in what appears to be a deliberate ruse to dupe the system.
An internal investigation has found 258,000 alcohol breath tests were falsified over 5½ years[.]
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Information Week: In-flight airplanes successfully hacked...from the ground.
Ruben Santamarta rocked the security world with his chilling discovery of major vulnerabilities in satellite equipment that could be abused to hijack and disrupt communications links to airplanes, ships, military operations, and industrial facilities.

Santamarta has now proven out those findings and taken his research to the level of terrifying, by successfully hacking into in-flight airplane WiFi networks and satcom equipment from the ground. "As far as I know I will be the first researcher that will demonstrate that it's possible to hack into communications devices on an in-flight aircraft … from the ground," he says.

He accessed on-board WiFi networks including passengers' Internet activity, and also was able to reach the planes' satcom equipment, he says, all of which in his previous research he had concluded – but not proven - was possible. And there's more: "In this new research, we also managed to get access to important communications devices in the aircraft," Santamarta, principal security consultant with IO/Active, says.
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Ubergizmo: The 6 Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon Thinkpad.

Fixed Typo 6/6/2018