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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces it has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of the securities of Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) from April 17, 2019 through July 17, 2019, inclusive (the "Class Period"). The lawsuit seeks to recover damages for Netflix investors under the federal securities laws.

[...] According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Netflix would not be able to gain its expected target number of new subscribers in the second quarter of 2019; (2) Netflix would also lose subscribers from the United States in the second quarter of 2019; and (3) as a result, defendants' public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190722005575/en/

This is in addition to the investigation by the Schall Law Firm. I guess Rosen beat them to the punch.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Equifax to Pay at Least $650 Million in Largest Data-Breach Settlement Ever

The credit bureau Equifax will pay at least $650 million and potentially significantly more to end an array of state, federal and consumer claims over a data breach two years ago that exposed the sensitive information of more than 148 million people. The breach was one of the most potentially damaging in an ever-growing list of digital thefts.

The settlement, which was announced on Monday and still needs court approval, would be the largest ever paid by a company over a data breach. The deal requires Equifax to put a minimum of $380.5 million into a restitution fund for American consumers who file claims showing that they were financially harmed.

A portion of that money will pay for lawyers' fees, but at least $300 million must go to victims, according to settlement documents filed in federal court in Atlanta. If the initial cash is depleted, the company will add up to $125 million more to settle consumers' claims, bringing the total fund size to more than $500 million.

Also at: Ars Technica.

Previously:
Lawsuits Aim Billions in Fines at Equifax and Ad-Targeting Companies
The True Cost of a Data Breach
Equifax Admits 2.5 Million More Americans Were Affected by Cyber Theft
Equifax Data Breach Could Affect 143 Million Americans [Updated]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists have confirmed that viruses can kill marine algae called diatoms and that diatom die-offs near the ocean surface may provide nutrients and organic matter for recycling by other algae, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The study in the journal Nature Microbiology^[$] also revealed that environmental conditions can accelerate diatom mortality from viral infection, which is important for understanding how diatoms influence carbon cycling and respond to changes in the oceans, including warming waters from climate change.

Diatoms, which are single-celled algae that generate about 20 percent of the Earth's oxygen, help store carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, in the oceans.

[...] Diatoms take up dissolved silicon from the environment and turn it into glass for their cell walls. But most of the surface waters where diatoms live have low silicon levels, so these findings suggest viral infection may play an important role in controlling diatom populations globally.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow7671:

Most consumers still don't know how brands are using their data - Help Net Security

Despite the past year’s global focus on GDPR and other data privacy regulations designed to give consumers more power over their data, more than half (55 percent) of consumers still don’t know how brands are using their data, according to the Acquia survey of more than 1,000 U.S.-based consumers.

On top of that, 65 percent don’t even know which brands are using their data.

Additional key findings from the survey include:

• 59 percent of consumers wait at least a month before sharing any personal data with brands
• 49 percent of respondents are more comfortable giving personal information to brands with a physical store presence
• 65 percent of respondents would stop using a brand that was dishonest about how it was using their data

California’s CCPA data privacy law and Maine’s Internet privacy protection bill, some of the most restrictive in the nation, are standing behind the consumers who want to understand and control their data – and other states are following. Brands trying to reach those consumers will need to act accordingly, and the stakes are high.

Acquia’s research found that consumers are not willing to give brands a second chance to protect the integrity of their data. This means that businesses have only one chance to make sure their customers know that their personal information, and their privacy, is in safe hands.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/108410

From the RedHat bug discussion:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1709180

A flaw was found in the Linux kernels implementation of IPMI (remote baseband access) where an attacker with local access to read /proc/ioports may be able to create a use-after-free condition when the kernel module is unloaded. The use after-free condition may result in privilege escalation. Investigation is ongoing.

See https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2019-11811 for a lot of other distro links (the Source section at the top).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Over the last several weeks, some of the most prominent digital companies like Google, Cloudflare, Amazon and most recently Apple experienced issues with the services they are offering. While the types of services each of these companies differ, the common thread between these incidents was that they were a direct result of problems with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)—the protocol that more than any other technology makes the Internet a reality. Of course the other commonality across these incidents was that they were quite costly for the affected companies and their users.

BGP events such as these are meticulously investigated and reported at least internally by each organization, and in some cases quite publicly. However, in the aftermath of all the analysis and hand-wringing about the vulnerable state of the Internet, not much ever seems to happen in the big picture to prevent further routing problems from recurring. That is the situation we find ourselves, decades after BGP’s inception.

Now, it’s not that there are no norms or built-in mechanisms for doing and making BGP right on the Internet. Over the years, methods such as maximum prefix limits, Internet Route Registry (IRR) based filtering and Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have been defined and implemented. For more information on some of these methods, check out our earlier post on Best Practices to Combat Route Leaks and Hijacks.

Yet all of these best practice methods suffer from the same fundamental limitation—there’s no way to make these practices binding on all the networks that make up the Internet. The only way that best practices grow on the Internet is through social promotion and business pressure.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a graphene device that's thinner than a human hair but has a depth of special traits.

It easily switches from a superconducting material that conducts electricity without losing any energy, to an insulator that resists the flow of electric current, and back again to a superconductor - all with a simple flip of a switch. Their findings were reported today in the journal Nature.

"Usually, when someone wants to study how electrons interact with each other in a superconducting quantum phase versus an insulating phase, they would need to look at different materials. With our system, you can study both the superconductivity phase and the insulating phase in one place," said Guorui Chen, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Feng Wang, who led the study.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Humans will make pets of nearly anything. Unbeknownst to most of us, giant leeches are kept not just by hospitals, but also by loving pet owners who care for and feed them.

"They're amazing, curious creatures that grow like crazy and make wonderful pets," leech keeper Ariane Khomjani told ScienceAlert.

He explained how individual leeches have their own unique personalities, with some being more adventurous and others more shy.

"Some like to try and sneak a feed more often than others, haha! But once they're full, they're content to sit and rest for a bit out of water if handled gently," he said.

Giant leeches of the variaty Ariane keeps (the massive Hirudinaria manillensis or 'buffulo' leech) need only be fed once a year, although it is recommended to feed them 2-3 times that often.

The UK has one commercial Leech farm, and the U.S. has several (complete with sales, coupons, and at-home kits), In addition to making wonderful pets, leeches have medical uses as well.

"Leeches are used post-operatively in patients who have had digit reattachment or muscle or flap surgery," nurse Julie Smolders from South Western Sydney Local Health District told ScienceAlert.

"The leeches are applied to the site and suck away the congested blood to allow for blood flow to the peripheries to keep the surgical site viable."

Unfortunately for the leeches, which could be considered 'used needles that can walk', they are classified as 'single-use only' by the FDA and are promptly disposed of after they do their job and drop off. (Humans can be an ungrateful lot.)

If the idea of keeping one of these little Draculas intrigues you, but you've no interest of offering yourself up as a meal, there are various accounts online of pet leeches being fed raw liver or heated blood from the butcher.

Feeding this way potentially allows the little guys to Liv Moore places than if they had to feed exclusively on the living.

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Shkreli stays in jail; Infamous ex-pharma CEO quickly loses appeal

In a swift 3-0 vote Thursday, a panel of judges in a New York federal appeals court upheld the August 2017 conviction of Martin Shkreli. The infamous ex-pharmaceutical CEO is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for fraud stemming from what prosecutors had described as a Ponzi-like scheme.

Shkreli, 36, must continue to serve his sentence and also still forfeit more than $7.3 million in assets, the judges affirmed.

The judges' ruling came just three weeks after hearing arguments in the appeal—rather than the normal period of months, Bloomberg notes. The ruling was also an unusually short seven pages.

In it, the panel rejected Shkreli's argument that the judge in his trial, US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, confused jurors with the wording of some of their instructions on how to deliberate the case.

"The instruction given here correctly stated the law," the panel said in its decision. "As such, we disagree with Shkreli that exclusion of additional language describing an element not required for the charged crime constituted a prejudicial error."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Quantum information processing promises to be much faster and more secure than what today's supercomputers can achieve, but doesn't exist yet because its building blocks, qubits, are notoriously unstable.

Purdue University researchers are among the first to build a gate - what could be a quantum version of a transistor, used in today's computers for processing information - with qudits. Whereas qubits can exist only in superpositions of 0 and 1 states, qudits exist in multiple states, such as 0 and 1 and 2. More states mean that more data can be encoded and processed.

The gate would not only be inherently more efficient than qubit gates, but also more stable because the researchers packed the qudits into photons, particles of light that aren't easily disturbed by their environment. The researchers' findings appear in npj Quantum Information.

The gate also creates one of the largest entangled states of quantum particles to date - in this case, photons. Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon that allows measurements on one particle to automatically affect measurements on another particle, bringing the ability to make communication between parties unbreakable or to teleport quantum information from one point to another, for example.

The more entanglement in the so-called Hilbert space - the realm where quantum information processing can take place - the better.

Previous photonic approaches were able to reach 18 qubits encoded in six entangled photons in the Hilbert space. Purdue researchers maximized entanglement with a gate using four qudits - the equivalent of 20 qubits - encoded in only two photons.

[...] Next, the team wants to use the gate in quantum communications tasks such as high-dimensional quantum teleportation as well as for performing quantum algorithms in applications such as quantum machine learning or simulating molecules.

Qudit

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Rocket scientists at Purdue University in west Lafayette, Indiana have come up with a new approach to plasma thrusters which will potentially increase their reliability and efficiency making them more suitable for softball sized nanosatellites, which are becoming more and more common.

Plasma thrusters have traditionally used one of two approaches to fuel. A solid propellant, usually Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene, that is ablated and vaporized and then passed through a field that accelerates it.

The problem is that this ablation is a hit-and-miss process. The rate is difficult to control, and this can make the thrust non-uniform. Also, the Teflon surface sometimes breaks down and ejects debris in the form of macroparticles that interfere with the engine operation.

What's more, the igniter that triggers the flashover process can become damaged over time. All these problems ultimately limit the efficiency of the solid-fuel plasma thrusters to less than 15%.

The other common way is to store the propellant as a gas. This increases the efficiency of a plasma thruster by up to 70%.

But these systems are bulky and complex, and the gas itself has a significantly larger volume than an equivalent solid mass. That makes it hard to build into a nanosat.

According to lead author Adam Patel, these issues can be addressed by storing the propellant as a liquid, which "could potentially overcome several disadvantages associated with traditional pulsed plasma thruster devices"

The team has built and, using a vacuum chamber, tested a proof-of-principle micro-propulsion system fed by liquid propellant. The liquid they used was pentaphenyl trimethyl trisiloxane (C₃₃H₃₄O₂Si₃), a viscous liquid with low vapor pressure that is also an excellent dielectric.

RandomFactor writes:

https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/88716/hacking/zerofucks-ransomware-decryptor.html:

A few days ago, the experts at Emsisoft released a free decryptor for the ims00ry ransomware, now the malware team announced the released[sic] of a decryptor for the ZeroFucks ransomware.

Victims of the ZeroFucks ransomware don't have to pay the ransom, they only need to download the decryptor form[sic] the link below:

• Download the ZeroFucks Decryptor Here

[...] ZeroFucks ransomware encrypts files with AES-256 and replaces the extension in the filename with ".zerofucks" (i.e. "myphoto.jpg" is changed to " myphoto.zerofucks".

The note left on systems infected by this ransomware reads, in part:

"All your important files have been encrypted. If you want your files back, you need to pay €400 in Bitcoins. After the payment is received, we will give you access to unlock your files. Click on the Payment button to get more info." reads ransom note

Emsisoft's Decryptors for these and fifty other ransomware families are available at https://www.emsisoft.com/decrypter/.

If you have an old system or drive lying around that was ransomwared and want to see if there is a free decryptor for it, steps to identify the ransomware and an extensive list of free ransomware decryptors is available at https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/ransomware-decryption-tools/.

Original Submission

SoyCow1984 brings us this Ars Technica story via IRC:

Chrome 76 prevents NYT and other news sites from detecting Incognito Mode

Google Chrome 76 will close a loophole that websites use to detect when people use the browser's Incognito Mode.

Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed some websites preventing you from reading articles while using a browser's private mode. The Boston Globe began doing this in 2017, requiring people to log in to paid subscriber accounts in order to read in private mode. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers impose identical restrictions.

Chrome 76 - which is in beta now and is scheduled to hit the stable channel on July 30 - prevents these websites from discovering that you're in private mode. Google explained the change yesterday in a blog post titled, "Protecting private browsing in Chrome."

Google wrote:

Today, some sites use an unintended loophole to detect when people are browsing in Incognito Mode. Chrome's FileSystem API is disabled in Incognito Mode to avoid leaving traces of activity on someone's device. Sites can check for the availability of the FileSystem API and, if they receive an error message, determine that a private session is occurring and give the user a different experience.

With the release of Chrome 76 scheduled for July 30, the behavior of the FileSystem API will be modified to remedy this method of Incognito Mode detection.

Using the Chrome 76 beta today, I confirmed that the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times were unable to detect that my browser was in private mode. However, all three sites were able to detect private mode in Safari for Mac, Firefox, and Chrome 75.

Google acknowledged that websites might find new loopholes to detect private mode, but it pledged to close those, too. "Chrome will likewise work to remedy any other current or future means of Incognito Mode detection," Google's blog post said. [...]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HongMeng OS Isn't an Android Smartphone Alternative, Confirms Huawei Executive; Will Be Used for Other Applications

Huawei's HongMeng OS was supposed to be the company's answer to counter the Android license ban if it ended up meddling in the company consumer business. There were near-endless waves of rumors talking about software optimization and how it was faster than Google's mobile platform, but it looks like Huawei's Senior Vice President has finally cleared the air on the company's efforts towards HongMeng OS. Apparently, it is not going to be presented as an Android alternative for smartphones, but it will still have a variety of benefits.

Huawei board member and Senior Vice President Catherine Chen at a meeting in Brussels stated that HongMeng OS isn't designed for smartphones. That is rather strange to hear, especially when the Huawei co-founder repeatedly stated that the company's custom operating system is likely faster than Android or iOS, but lacks a competitive app ecosystem. Catherine also says that smartphone operating systems feature millions of lines of code, while HongMeng OS doesn't.

Even though she claims that HongMeng OS features an extremely low latency compared to a smartphone OS, it will be used in IoT-related applications, with the platform apparently being in development way before the Android license ban came into effect.

Previously: Google Pulls Huawei's Android License
The Huawei Disaster Reveals Google's Iron Grip On Android
Google Doesn't Want Huawei Ban Because It Would Result in an Android Competitor
Trump Administration Will Loosen Restrictions Against Huawei
What Huawei To Go: Hundreds Of Chinese Tech Giant's US Workers To Get Pink Slip

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Chandrayaan-2 Launch: How to Watch First Mission to the Moon's South Pole:

India's exploration mission to the moon is readying for launch. The Chandrayaan-2 mission, aiming to put robots at the lunar south pole for the first time, has suffered several delays leading up to lift-off. It was originally scheduled for July 14 but the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) postponed the departure less than an hour before launch due to a "technical snag."

The landmark mission is now set to depart from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, north of Chennai, at 2:13 a.m. PT (5:13 a.m. ET), Monday July 22. [...] Chandrayaan-2 is carrying three lunar exploration robots that will be able to survey the moon from both the surface and the sky.

The payload of Chandrayaan-2 consists of a lunar orbiter, a lunar lander and a lunar rover and will be launched atop the ISRO-developed GSLV Mk-III rocket. That rocket is about half as powerful as the SpaceX Falcon 9 and will put Chandrayaan-2 into what's known as an "Earth parking orbit" before the module uses its own power to extend that orbit and eventually position itself for a lunar rendezvous.

Want to tune in to the historic mission? ISRO will handle livestreaming duties across its social media pages, which means you could tune in at the ISRO Twitter or follow along on the agency's Facebook page. The agency's YouTube channel is also covering the event.

The launch is also to be carried by the Indian public broadcaster Doordarshan's YouTube channel.

Previously: Scrubbed Chandrayaan 2 Mission to Moon's South Pole to Launch on Mon July 22 0913 UTC.

Original Submission

SoyCow1984 brings us this Ars Technica story via IRC:

The judge noted that the "health coach" was free to offer pro bono advice.

A federal court on Wednesday rejected claims by an unlicensed "health coach" that the unqualified health advice she provided to paying clients was protected speech under the First Amendment.

In rejecting her claim, the court affirmed that states do indeed have the right to require that anyone charging for health and medical services - in this case, dietetics and nutrition advice - be qualified and licensed. (State laws governing who can offer personalized nutrition services vary considerably, however.)

Heather Del Castillo, a "holistic health coach" based in Florida, brought the case in October of 2017 shortly after she was busted in an undercover investigation by the state health department. At the time, Del Castillo was running a health-coaching business called Constitution Nutrition, which offered a personalized, six-month health and dietary program. The program involved 13 in-home consulting sessions, 12 of which cost $95 each.

Under a Florida state law called the Dietetics and Nutrition Practice Act (DNPA), anyone offering such services needs to be qualified and licensed to protect against bogus advice that could cause significant harms. Those qualifications include having a bachelor's or graduate degree in a relevant field, such as nutrition, from an accredited institution; having at least 900 hours of education or experience approved by the state's Board of Medicine; and passing the state's licensing exam.

Del Castillo had completed none of those things. Her only credential for providing health services was a certificate from an unaccredited, for-profit online school called the Institution for Integrative Nutrition. Otherwise, she had a bachelor's degree in geography and a master's in education. [...]

Original Submission