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Freeman writes:

One of the scourges of sane people everywhere and parents with sleeping children, shall soon be vanquished by Firefox. The next release should include the blocking of auto-playing video. "... by default, any site that tries to play video with audio will have that video playback blocked." Despite some of the annoying things Firefox has done in the past. They seem to still be doing things right. With Chrome recently, setting aim to disable ad-blockers. Firefox just keeps looking all the better.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/firefox-to-block-noisy-autoplaying-video-in-next-release/

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Courts Hand Down Hard Jail Time for DDoS — Krebs on Security

Seldom do people responsible for launching crippling cyberattacks face justice, but increasingly courts around the world are making examples of the few who do get busted for such crimes. On Friday, a 34-year-old Connecticut man received a whopping 10-year prison sentence for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a number of hospitals in 2014. Also last week, a 30-year-old in the United Kingdom was sentenced to 32 months in jail for using an army of hacked devices to crash large portions of Liberia’s Internet access in 2016.

Daniel Kaye, an Israel-U.K. dual citizen, admitted attacking an African phone company in 2016, and to inadvertently knocking out Internet access for much of the country in the process. Kaye launched the attack using a botnet powered by Mirai, a malware strain that enslaves hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices like poorly-secured Internet routers and Web-based cameras for use in large-scale cyberattacks.

According to court testimony, Kaye was hired in 2015 to attack Lonestar, Liberia's top mobile phone and Internet provider. Kaye pocketed $10,000 for the attack, which was alleged to have been paid for by an individual working for Cellcom, Lonestar's competitor in the region. As reported by Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Kaye testified that the attack was ordered by the CEO of Cellcom Liberia.

In February 2017, authorities in the United Kingdom arrested Kaye and extradited him to Germany to face charges of knocking more than 900,000 Germans offline in a Mirai attack in November 2016. Prosecutors withheld Kaye's full name throughout the trial in Germany, but in July 2017 KrebsOnSecurity published findings that named Kaye as the likely culprit. Kaye ultimately received a suspended sentence for the attack in Germany, and was sent back to the U.K. to face charges there.

The July 2017 KrebsOnSecurity investigation also linked Kaye to the development and sale of a sophisticated piece of spyware named GovRAT, which is documented to have been used in numerous cyber espionage campaigns against governments, financial institutions, defense contractors and more than 100 corporations.

The U.K's National Crime Agency called Kaye perhaps the most significant cyber criminal yet caught in Britain. A report on the trial from the BBC says Kaye wept as he was taken away to jail.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Indie game developer Ammobox Studios has sent Steam a DMCA takedown notice for its own game. The company says that it was forced to take such a drastic measure after the publisher stopped making payments. While it's an unusual step to take, the takedown notice achieved the desired result.

[...] "Long story short, we had to file a DMCA against our very own game on Steam to wrest it off the Publisher. The DMCA has just kicked in resulting in the game being taken off the Steam Store Page," Ammobox explained.

Both companies had a publishing agreement, but this was breached according to Ammobox, which notes that no payments were made for the sales of their game on Steam. Without a publishing agreement, the publisher would indeed violate the DMCA, transforming the previously legal copy on Steam into a pirate version. While this isn't a typical takedown notice, it certainly had the desired effect.

The game was removed from the store for over a week. While it was no longer for sale, people who previously bought it could still pay it. Then, after nearly two weeks, the developers regained control of their own game, with help from Steam.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/game-developer-uses-dmca-notice-to-free-its-game-from-steam-publisher-190124/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A new weapon installed on Russian warships can make enemy soldiers miss targets by blinding them, while also causing hallucinations and making them want to vomit.

Two Russian frigates were fitted with the new non-lethal dazzler-type weapon, the 5P-42 Filin (eagle-owl), the manufacturer’s representative told RIA Novosti. The weapon is designed to temporarily blind the enemy.

It creates a strobe-like effect that disrupts eyesight, seriously hampering the soldier’s ability to aim at night, Ruselectronics (which produces the weapon) stated.

During testing, volunteers used assault rifles, sniper rifles, and machine guns to shoot targets placed up to 2km away and protected by the device. They all had trouble aiming because they “couldn’t see the target.”

Forty-five percent of the volunteers reported feeling dizzy, nauseous, and disoriented. Twenty percent are said to have experienced hallucinations, described as “a ball of light moving in front of [our] eyes.”

https://www.rt.com/russia/450489-russian-navy-system-hallucinations/

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takyon writes:

The Milky Way in a twist

Our Milky Way galaxy's disk of stars is anything but stable and flat. Instead, it becomes increasingly 'warped' and twisted far away from the Milky Way's center, according to astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

From a great distance, our galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbit once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars, together with a huge mass of dark matter, provide the gravitational 'glue' to hold it all together.

But the pull of gravity becomes weaker far away from the Milky Way's inner regions. In the galaxy's far outer disk, the hydrogen atoms making up most of the Milky Way's gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, but they give the disk an S-like warped appearance.

[...] "Somewhat to our surprise, we found that in 3D our collection of 1339 Cepheid stars and the Milky Way's gas disk follow each other closely. This offers new insights into the formation of our home galaxy," says Prof. Richard de Grijs from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and senior co-author of the paper. "Perhaps more importantly, in the Milky Way's outer regions, we found that the S-like stellar disk is warped in a progressively twisted spiral pattern."

An intuitive 3D map of the Galactic warp's precession traced by classical Cepheids (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0686-7) (DX)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The US government is seeking public comments on blocking sites accused of hosting copyright infringing materials and ISP liability in such cases. The discussion includes possible harmonization with current developments in the EU in regards to copyright and will take place in two parts. The first stage will deal with US case law developments since the last meetings. The second stage will focus on foreign developments, such as the infamous Articles 11, 12a, and 13, and how these relate to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Internet service provider liability.

The U.S. Government's Copyright Office is continuing its review on the future of the DMCA's safe harbor provisions. It's specifically asking the public for input on recent domestic and international developments that relate to ISP liability, including Article 13 and pirate site blocking.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for hopdevil

Special Report: Inside the UAE's secret hacking team of U.S. mercenaries

Two weeks after leaving her position as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. National Security Agency in 2014, Lori Stroud was in the Middle East working as a hacker for an Arab monarchy.

She had joined Project Raven, a clandestine team that included more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence operatives recruited to help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy.

Stroud and her team, working from a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi known internally as "the Villa," would use methods learned from a decade in the U.S intelligence community to help the UAE hack into the phones and computers of its enemies.

Stroud had been recruited by a Maryland cyber security contractor to help the Emiratis launch hacking operations, and for three years, she thrived in the job. But in 2016, the Emiratis moved Project Raven to a UAE cyber security firm named DarkMatter. Before long, Stroud and other Americans involved in the effort say they saw the mission cross a red line: targeting fellow Americans for surveillance.

"I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting U.S. persons," she told Reuters. "I am officially the bad kind of spy."

The story of Project Raven reveals how former U.S. government hackers have employed state-of-the-art cyber-espionage tools on behalf of a foreign intelligence service that spies on human rights activists, journalists and political rivals.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Poor sleep at night, more pain the next day

After one night of inadequate sleep, brain activity ramps up in pain-sensing regions while activity is scaled back in areas responsible for modulating how we perceive painful stimuli. This finding, published in JNeurosci, provides the first brain-based explanation for the well-established relationship between sleep and pain.

In two studies -- one in a sleep laboratory and the other online -- Matthew Walker and colleagues show how the brain processes pain differently when individuals are sleep deprived and how self-reported sleep quality and pain sensitivity can change night-to-night and day-to-day. When the researchers kept healthy young adults awake through the night in the lab, they observed increased activity in the primary somatosensory cortex and reduced activity in regions of the striatum and insula cortex during a pain sensitivity task.

Adam J. Krause, Aric A. Prather, Tor D. Wager, Martin A. Lindquist, Matthew P. Walker. The pain of sleep loss: A brain characterization in humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2019; 2408-18 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2408-18.2018

Original Submission

takyon writes:

FBI reportedly carried out a sting operation on Huawei at a burger joint - While a Bloomberg reporter watched from a nearby gelato stand.

The makers of a super-hard smartphone glass made partially of synthetic diamonds took part in an FBI sting on Huawei, according to a new Bloomberg report. The operation apparently took place at a Prime Burger joint in Vegas during CES last month, while a Businessweek reporter watched from a nearby gelato stand. The embattled Chinese company had ordered samples of the "Miraj Diamond Glass" from US startup Akhan Semiconductor in 2017, only to return them badly damaged. Suspecting Huawei of intellectual property theft, Akhan's founder Adam Khan reportedly contacted the FBI, which drafted him and COO Carl Shurboff to take part in its Huawei investigations.

Email and text communications between the startup and a Huawei engineer were reportedly forwarded to the agency as part of the inquiry. A phone call between Khan, Shurboff and the same Huawei representative was also allegedly tapped on December 10th. Then came the Vegas sting, with the same Huawei staffer in attendance along with her colleague, Jennifer Lo, a senior official with the company in Santa Clara, California. Unbeknown to them, Khan and Shurboff were allegedly taping the entire get-together.

Throughout the meeting, the Huawei reps denied that it had violated US export laws, including provisions of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which control the export of materials with defense applications -- diamond being one of those materials. They also "claimed ignorance" when it came to the damaged samples.

The FBI also raided a Huawei lab in San Diego. This particular investigation has not resulted in any charges yet.

Also at CNBC.

Related: Arrest of Huawei Executive Causing Discontent Among Chinese Elites
China Arrests Former Canadian Diplomat; Chinese Companies Ban iPhones, Require Huawei Phones
Huawei Under Investigation by DoJ for Theft of T-Mobile Trade Secrets

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Five Reasons are provided by the U.K. DailyMail on why we won't be seeing autonomous cars take over any time soon.

SNOW AND WEATHER

[...] Heavy snow, rain, fog and sandstorms can obstruct the view of cameras. Light beams sent out by laser sensors can bounce off snowflakes and think they are obstacles.

Radar can see through the weather, but it doesn't show the shape of an object needed for computers to figure out what it is.

[...] PAVEMENT LINES AND CURBS

Across the globe, roadway marking lines are different, or they may not even exist. Lane lines aren't standardized, so vehicles have to learn how to drive differently in each city.

[...] DEALING WITH HUMAN DRIVERS

For many years, autonomous vehicles will have to deal with humans who don't always play by the rules.

[...] LEFT TURNS

Deciding when to turn left in front of oncoming traffic without a green arrow is one of the more difficult tasks for human drivers and one that causes many crashes. Autonomous vehicles have the same trouble.

[...] CONSUMER ACCEPTANCE

The fatal Uber crash near Phoenix last year did more than push the pause button on testing.

It also rattled consumers who someday will be asked to ride in self-driving vehicles.

Surveys taken after the Uber crash showed that drivers are reluctant to give up control to a computer.

I fully intend to spend my twilight years relaxing in relative safety while the car drives me around; I'm gonna be torqued if they take too long.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

UK TSB Bank Business Customers Reportedly Unable to Access Accounts Online:

Totally Shocked Businesses have faced a morning without access to their online accounts following yet another IT meltdown at embattled TSB.

It follows a terrible 2018 for the bank that started in April with a week-long outage after a failed migration off its former parent firm’s infrastructure, and also included a series of smaller PR and IT disasters that eventually led to the departure of foot-in-mouth CEO Paul Pester. The bank revealed last week that the chaos had cost it some £330m, and reported a full-year loss of £105.4m.

According to DownDetector, TSB has been experiencing problems this morning since earlier in the morning. Users reported being unable to access internet banking, being shown blank screens on a range of browsers.

[...] TSB sent [The Register] a statement regarding the latest woes. "For some customers, clearing their cache or using an alternative browser has rectified the situation. If anyone has any queries they should speak to their local branch or contact our Business Banking Centre, however, call volumes are higher than usual."

Related: Warning Signs for TSB's IT Meltdown were Clear a Year Ago
Watchdog Slams TSB Boss for Underplaying Extent of IT Meltdown
Go Pester Someone Else: TSB Ditches CEO Over Bank's IT Meltdown

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Wired has an article up on hackers serving up stolen credentials in an all you can eat buffet.

WHEN HACKERS BREACHED companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years—stealing 71 million and 117 million passwords, respectively—they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more into a gargantuan, unprecedented collection of 2.2 billion unique usernames and associated passwords and is freely distributing them on hacker forums and torrents, throwing out the private data of a significant fraction of humanity like last year's phone book.

In a bit of libre philosophy remeniscent of 'data wants to be free' Chris Rouland, a cybersecurity researcher opines on the megadump

"It's entropy. When the data is out there, it’s going to leak."

Random Reminder - Password managers such as Password Safe and the always cheerful site for checking if your credentials are already pwned https://haveibeenpwned.com/ are your friends. Might be worth an update check on your email addresses (as of 1/30 the new dump was not fully reflected in haveibeenpwned results, but that has likely been remedied by now.)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/goodbye-to-the-dollar/

The inept and corrupt presidency of Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow to the American empire—the abandonment of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency. Nations around the globe, especially in Europe, have lost confidence in the United States to act rationally, much less lead, in issues of international finance, trade, diplomacy and war. These nations are quietly dismantling the seven-decade-old alliance with the United States and building alternative systems of bilateral trade. This reconfiguring of the world’s financial system will be fatal to the American empire, as the historian Alfred McCoy and the economist Michael Hudson have long pointed out. It will trigger an economic death spiral, including high inflation, which will necessitate a massive military contraction overseas and plunge the United States into a prolonged depression. Trump, rather than make America great again, has turned out, unwittingly, to be the empire’s most aggressive gravedigger.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Step Closer to Self-Aware Machines

Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially the robot does not know if it is a spider, a snake, an arm—it has no clue what its shape is. After a brief period of "babbling," and within about a day of intensive computing, their robot creates a self-simulation. The robot can then use that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body. The work [DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aau9354] is published today in Science Robotics.

[...] For the study, Lipson and his PhD student Robert Kwiatkowski used a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm. Initially, the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories, each comprising one hundred points. The robot then used deep learning, a modern machine learning technique, to create a self-model. The first self-models were quite inaccurate, and the robot did not know what it was, or how its joints were connected. But after less than 35 hours of training, the self-model became consistent with the physical robot to within about four centimeters. The self-model performed a pick-and-place task in a closed loop system that enabled the robot to recalibrate its original position between each step along the trajectory based entirely on the internal self-model. With the closed loop control, the robot was able to grasp objects at specific locations on the ground and deposit them into a receptacle with 100 percent success.

[...] The self-modeling robot was also used for other tasks, such as writing text using a marker. To test whether the self-model could detect damage to itself, the researchers 3D-printed a deformed part to simulate damage and the robot was able to detect the change and re-train its self-model. The new self-model enabled the robot to resume its pick-and-place tasks with little loss of performance.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Hawaii is considering a bill that bans cigarette sales to anyone under 100

(CNN) "The legislature finds that the cigarette is considered the deadliest artifact in human history."
So begins the text of a new bill introduced in Hawaii's State House, calling for a phased ban on cigarette sales in the state by 2024.
Hawaii has some of the most restrictive cigarette laws in the nation. In 2016, it became the first state to raise the age to buy cigarettes to 21. Now, its new bill calls for raising the cigarette-buying age to 30 by next year, up to 40, 50 and 60 in each subsequent year, and up to 100 by 2024.

That would effectively clear Hawaii's store shelves of cigarettes, although tourists could still bring them in.

And curiously, Hawaii would offer its centenarians the chance to buy cigarettes near the end of their life -- if they could find them.

Can't we instead simply restrict kids under 100 to designated smoking areas?

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations.

But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?

That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."

The World Might Actually Run Out of People (archive)

Empty Planet

Who do you think is right ? The United Nations or Darrel Bricker/John Ibbitson ?

Original Submission