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Fnord666 writes:

McAfee announced that it has acquired Canada-based virtual private network (VPN) company TunnelBear. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2011, Toronto-based TunnelBear has gained a solid reputation for its fun, cross-platform VPN app that uses quirky bear-burrowing animations to bring online privacy to the masses.

The company claims around 20 million people have used its service across mobile and desktop, while a few months back it branched out into password management with the launch of the standalone RememBear app.

[...] McAfee has said that it bought TunnelBear for its consumer-focused business, but TunnelBear has also branched out into the business realm, recently introducing a new VPN product for teams, so there is scope for McAfee to build on this foundation.

That TunnelBear has sold to a major brand such as McAfee won't be greeted warmly by many of the product's existing users. However, with significantly more resources now at its disposal, TunnelBear should be in a good position to absorb any losses that result from the transfer of ownership.

Source: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/08/mcafee-acquires-vpn-company-tunnelbear/

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Fnord666 writes:

Cisco released 22 security advisories yesterday, including two alerts for critical fixes, one of them for a hardcoded password that can give attackers full control over a vulnerable system.

The hardcoded password issue affects Cisco's Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP), a software application that can be used for the remote installation and maintenance of other Cisco voice and video products. Cisco PCP is often installed on Linux servers.

Cisco says that an attacker could exploit this vulnerability (CVE-2018-0141) by connecting to the affected system via Secure Shell (SSH) using the hardcoded password.

The flaw can be exploited only by local attackers, and it also grants access to a low-privileged user account. In spite of this, Cisco has classified the issue as "critical."

Although this vulnerability has a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Base score of 5.9, which is normally assigned a Security Impact Rating (SIR) of Medium, there are extenuating circumstances that allow an attacker to elevate privileges to root. For these reasons, the SIR has been set to Critical.

The reasons are that an attacker can infect another device on the same network and use it as a proxy for his SSH connection to the vulnerable Cisco PCP instance, allowing for remote, over-the-Internet exploitation.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hardcoded-password-found-in-cisco-software/

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Fnord666 writes:

There are two kinds of horror stories about Airbnb. When the home-sharing platform first appeared, the initial cautionary tales tended to emphasize extreme guest (and occasionally host) misbehavior. But as the now decade-old service matured and the number of rental properties proliferated dramatically, a second genre emerged, one that focused on what the service was doing to the larger community: Airbnb was raising rents and taking housing off the rental market. It was supercharging gentrification while discriminating against guests and hosts of color. And as commercial operators took over, it was transforming from a way to help homeowners occasionally rent out an extra room into a purveyor of creepy, makeshift hotels.

Several studies have looked into these claims; some focused on just one issue at a time, or measured Airbnb-linked trends across wide swaths of the country. But a recent report by David Wachsmuth, a professor of Urban Planning at McGill University, zeroes in on New York City in an effort to answer the question of exactly what home sharing is doing to the city.

Source: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/03/what-airbnb-did-to-new-york-city/552749/

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Anonymous Braveheart writes:

The Free Software Foundation's annual conference is here again. Saturday & Sunday March 24-25th in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hundreds of people, similar mindset, different view points. This year the theme is embedded systems:

LibrePlanet's 10th anniversary theme is "Freedom. Embedded." Consider: embedded systems are everywhere, in cars, digital watches, traffic lights, and even within our bodies. Right now, proprietary software is everywhere, its sinister aspects embedded in software, digital devices, and our lives. We've come to expect that our phones monitor our activity and share that data with big companies, governments enforce digital restrictions management (DRM), and even our activity on social Websites is out of our control.

In a society reliant on embedded systems, how do we defend computer user freedom? How do we insist on copylefted code, protect ourselves against government and corporate surveillance, and move toward a freer world? For many people, digital freedom seems like a pipe dream. Can we change the narrative and make free software the norm, instead of walled gardens, denial of the right to repair, and DRM?

https://libreplanet.org/2018/

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takyon writes:

Trump on Falcon Heavy: "I'm so used to hearing different numbers with NASA"

During a cabinet meeting on Thursday inside the White House, President Donald Trump called attention to several model rockets on the table before him. They included an Atlas V, a Falcon 9, a Space Launch System, and more. The president seemed enthused to see the launch vehicles. "Before me are some rocket ships," the president said. "You haven't seen that for this country in a long time."

Then, in remarks probably best characterized as spur of the moment, the president proceeded to absolutely demolish the government's own effort to build rockets by noting the recent launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket. He cited the cost as $80 million. (The list price on SpaceX's website is $90 million.)

"I noticed the prices of the last one they say cost $80 million," Trump said. "If the government did it, the same thing would have cost probably 40 or 50 times that amount of money. I mean literally. When I heard $80 million, I'm so used to hearing different numbers with NASA.''

NASA has not, in fact, set a price for flying the SLS rocket. But Ars has previously estimated that, including the billions of dollars in development cost, the per-flight fees for the SLS rocket will probably be close to $3 billion. Indeed, the development costs of SLS and its ground systems between now and its first flight could purchase 86 launches of the privately developed Falcon Heavy rocket. So President Trump's estimate of NASA's costs compared to private industry does not appear to be wildly off the mark.

[*] SLS: Space Launch System

Related: Maiden Flight of the Space Launch System Delayed to 2019
WFIRST Space Observatory Could be Scaled Back Due to Costs
Safety Panel Raises Concerns Over SpaceX and Boeing Commercial Crew Plans
After the Falcon Heavy Launch, Time to Defund the Space Launch System?
Trump Administration Budget Proposal Would Cancel WFIRST
Leaning Tower of NASA
NASA Moving to Scale Back the Space Technology Mission Directorate

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canopic jug writes:

Rhode Island is the latest US state to discuss mandatory censorship of web content, at first targeting pornography:

Rhode Island Democratic state Senators Frank Ciccone (@senatorciccone) and Hanna Gallo (@hannagallo27) have proposed grandstanding, unworkable legislation, "Relating to Public Utilities and Carriers—Internet Digital Blocking" which would mandate the state's ISPs to identify all the pornography on the [I]nternet, and then block it for all Rhode Islanders, unless those Rhode Islanders specifically requested their porn to be unblocked and paid $20 for the privilege.

These proposals fly in the face of the observation that automated pornography filters don't work and that even the manual ones are neither practical, reliable, nor scalable.

Source : Rhode Island proposes blocking all online porn and charging $20 to unblock it. Boing Boing.

Original Submission

McGruber submitted a story which became:

Tampa Bay area bomb squad members are making Easter possible this year for the blind.

"A basic switch, a little beeper or buzzer and then a nine volt battery and it's just a basic circuit that we sauter[sic] together and we build into the eggs."

Bomb squad members took a break from their usual training and turned their focus to Easter eggs and kids with disabilities.

"This gives these children the ability to [go] out and hunt Easter eggs like all the other kids. Just gives them that little bit extra ability to be able to locate the eggs utilizing the beeping Easter egg," said Sergeant Jarrett Seal with the Tampa Police Department bomb squad.

The hunt will benefit close to 50 kids who are visually impaired.

[...] Not only will kids get to have an Easter egg hunt, but they'll get to have one whenever they want.

"This year [they're] all going to take home a bag of Easter eggs donated by the bomb squad and now they can do it whenever they want to, and they can go to grandma's house and have an egg hunt or they can go to the community egg hunt and have one there," said Mongelluzzi.

Source: http://wfla.com/2018/03/05/tampa-bay-area-bomb-squad-members-make-beeping-easter-eggs-for-visually-impaired/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

California legislators are considering drafting laws that would make it easier to fix things. It is now the 18^th state in the US trying to make it easier to repair or modify things, electronic or not.

Right to repair legislation has considerable momentum this year; 18 states have introduced it, and several states have held hearings about the topic. In each of these states, big tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, John Deere, and AT&T and trade associations they're associated with have heavily lobbied against it, claiming that allowing people to fix their things would cause safety and security concerns. Thus far, companies have been unwilling to go on the record to explain the specifics about how these bills would be dangerous or would put device and consumer security in jeopardy.

It's particularly notable that the battle has come to California because many of the companies that have fought against it are headquartered there. Apple, for instance, told lawmakers in Nebraska that passing a right to repair bill there would turn the state into a "Mecca for hackers." The Electronic Frontier Foundation—which is notoriously concerned about digital security—has explicitly backed this legislation in California. Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney for the EFF, said that the bill "helps preserve the right of individual device owners to understand and fix their property."

Yep. Hackers. And note that is what Apple does not want. Like many things this boils down to the issue of who controls the many computers you ostensibly own.

From Motherboard at vice.com: The Right to Repair Battle Has Come to Silicon Valley.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Has Facebook infiltrated your life? Wait until a Facebook robot starts following you from room to room. A patent for a self-balancing robot granted to the company Tuesday shows a bot resembling a standard telepresence robot with a screen, camera and microphone.

The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but the drawings and detailed description of the little guy suggest Facebook could be looking to expand its videoconferencing capabilities with a device that adds a more human touch to long-distance electronic communications. Or takes photos of your dog and posts them to Instagram. Or just makes it easier for Mark Zuckerberg to watch you do household chores.

The patent application, filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in July 2015, presents a rolling robot that melds the advantages of two-wheeled self-balancing bots with those of their three- and four-wheeled cousins.

The patent lists Scott Wiley as the robot's inventor, and CNN, which spotted the patent, describes Wiley as a Facebook employee who previously worked at a telepresence robotics company.

[...] "Automated cameramen and sports commentators will play an important part in increasing people's ability to capture and tell stories," Atkeson told CNN. "Imagine being a proud parent, coach, or player, and being able to televise high school sports."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Esters are among the most important classes of compounds in organic chemistry. Simple esters are known for their pleasant, often fruity aromas. Meanwhile, the larger, more complex examples have a wide spectrum of industrial uses, ranging from lenses and moisturizers to “green” fuel (biodiesel).

A common way to produce complex esters is to react simpler carboxylic esters with alcohols. Known as trans-esterification, this process typically relies on metal salts as catalysts. However, such catalysts tend to be expensive and/or polluting. Worse still, if the ester is long and flexible, it tends to wrap around the metal center through coordination bonds. By effectively tying up the metal, this “chelation” shuts down the reaction.

Now, a team at Nagoya University has developed a catalyst that dramatically expands the substrate range of trans-esterification. To avoid chelation, the researchers used a metal-free catalyst, tetramethylammonium methyl carbonate (TMC). Under the right conditions, TMC reacts in-situ with an alcohol to form an alkoxide ion, which then attacks the starting ester to give the complex target ester in high yields.

[...] “Being both recyclable and free of metals, this catalyst is a genuine example of green chemistry,” says lead author Kazuaki Ishihara. “Not only is the process itself green, but we can use it to produce green biodiesel, which is a mixture of esters. We synthesized hundreds of grams of a major biodiesel component, which is quite copious for a laboratory-scale reaction. This gives us confidence that the reaction can be scaled up to industrial production.”

Original Submission

takyon writes:

World Hacks: A surprising new afterlife for chewing gum

British designer Anna Bullus is on a mission to recycle chewing gum into useful objects, cleaning up our streets in the process.

More than £14bn is spent on chewing gum around the world each year, but a lot of that gum will end up stuck to the ground. Gum is the second most common type of street litter after cigarette materials. In the UK, councils spend around £50m each year cleaning up the mess. But Anna had an idea. What if the sticky stuff could actually be recycled and turned into useful objects?

[...] But how do you persuade people to donate their gum - instead of carelessly tossing it on to the street? As part of her strategy, Anna created bright pink, bubble-shaped bins specially for disposing of gum called Gumdrop, which can be hung at head-height. These bins are themselves made of recycled chewing gum. A message next to the bins explains that any gum collected will be recycled into new objects. [...] The University of Winchester was one of the first places to sign up to use the bins. Around 8,000 people live and work on its campus and the authorities wanted to keep it clean of gum litter. [...] Eighteen months later, the university noticed a drop in gum litter and is expanding the scheme.

Butyl rubber/polyisobutylene.

Original Submission

Police Say Nerve Agent Was Used in Attempt to Kill Sergei Skripal

takyon writes:

Police say that they have identified a specific nerve agent as being used in an attempt to kill a Russian who once spied for the UK. They have not named the nerve agent that was used. Officers who responded to the scene have also been hospitalized:

A nerve agent was used to try to murder a former Russian spy and his daughter, police have said. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious in Salisbury on Sunday afternoon and remain critically ill. A police officer who was the first to attend the scene is now in a serious condition in hospital, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said.

[...] Mr Rowley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, said government scientists had identified the agent used, but would not make that information public at this stage. "This is being treated as a major incident involving attempted murder, by administration of a nerve agent," he said. "Having established that a nerve agent is the cause of the symptoms... I can also confirm that we believe that the two people who became unwell were targeted specifically."

[...] Two other police officers who attended the scene were treated in hospital for minor symptoms, before they were given the all clear. It is understood their symptoms included itchy eyes and wheezing.

aristarchus writes:

As reported by TechCrunch:

Someone at Oculus screwed up pretty badly today [Wednesday]: An expired certificate appears to have soft-bricked all of the company's Rift VR headsets, with users still unable to fire up software on the devices and no word of an incoming fix from the company yet.

Issues were first reported several hours ago on Reddit, where a post on the topic has already garnered hundreds of comments. The problem seems to have resulted from Oculus failing to update an expired certificate with the update, which is now leaving users with an error message saying that the system "Can't reach Oculus Runtime Service."

If it must phone home, it is not yours. Words to live, and die, by.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Despite push for a universal flu vaccine, the 'holy grail' stays out of reach

It is the holy grail of influenza science: a universal flu vaccine that could provide protection against virtually all strains instead of a select few. A burst of recent headlines have suggested that we might get one soon. Just last week, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases released a strategic plan for the development of a universal flu vaccine, prompting the White House science office to proclaim on Twitter that the goal is "closer than ever."

Experts, however, say we're really not there yet. And to be honest, we can't necessarily even see there from here. "I don't think we're that close at all," Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. "I think the kind of work that's gone on has been critical and important, but it's only the first 5 feet of what would need to be a 100-foot rope."

There's no doubt that there is some momentum. The release of the strategic plan — which outlines for scientists the research that NIAID sees as critical and that it would be willing to help finance — signals renewed interest in the quest for a universal vaccine. So, too, does a bill — introduced by Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts — calling for $1 billion in government spending for the project.

Previously: Progress Reported on Universal Flu Vaccines

Related: Susceptibility to a Flu Determined by Your Very First Virus Encounter

Original Submission

takyon writes:

An arXiv preprint suggests that evidence of intelligent (or trashy) life could be found by looking for space junk:

Its author, Héctor Socas-Navarro, spends most of his time at the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics in Spain studying the sun. But he was struck by a weird side effect of the ring of active and retired satellites circling Earth: it's a little bit opaque. And the more satellites we throw up there, the more opaque it gets. He realized that if we—or any technologically advanced aliens out there—build enough satellites, they'll eventually become dense enough to leave a faint shadow around the planet when it passes in front of a star.

And that's awfully convenient given that one of the best ways we have of spotting alien planets is by staring at their stars and waiting for tiny dips in brightness as planets pass in front of them. Essentially, Socas-Navarro's new paper proposes, if aliens have put enough satellites into orbit around their planet, we'll be able to spot the faintly opaque bubble before and after we spot the brightness dip of the planet itself.

The scale of the endeavor would be a real challenge for the aliens, however, since this idea relies on between 10 billion and one trillion satellites. "It's like building the pyramids," Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University, told New Scientist. "Each building block is easy, but putting it together is the hard engineering task."

Original Submission