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upstart writes:

Apple's New Lockdown Mode for iPhone Fights Hacking:

Apple for years has marketed its iPhones, iPads and Mac computers as the most secure and privacy-focused devices on the market. Last week, it bolstered that effort with a new feature coming this fall called Lockdown Mode, designed to fight targeted hacking attempts such as the Pegasus malware, which some governments reportedly used on human rights workers, lawyers, politicians and journalists around the world. Apple also announced a $10 million grant and up to $2 million bug bounty to encourage further research into this growing threat.

The tech giant said that Lockdown Mode is designed to activate "extreme" protections to its phones, such as blocking attachments and link previews in messages, potentially hackable web browsing technologies, and incoming FaceTime calls from unknown numbers. Apple devices will also not accept accessory connections unless the device is unlocked, and people can't install new remote management software on the devices while they're in Lockdown Mode as well. The new feature is already available in test software being used by developers this summer and will be released for free publicly in the fall as part of iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and MacOS Ventura. Here's how to use Apple's Lockdown mode on an iPhone.

[...] The company's efforts to enhance its device security comes at a time when the tech industry is increasingly confronting targeted cyberattacks from oppressive governments around the world. Unlike widespread ransomware or virus campaigns, which are often designed to indiscriminately spread furthest and quickest through homes and corporate networks, attacks like those using Pegasus are designed for quiet intelligence gathering.

owl writes:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/media/hollywood-china-censors-box-office-intl-hnk/index.html

Hollywood has long bent over backwards to give Chinese censors what they want. Not anymore.

Over the past year, producers behind some of the hottest US blockbusters have kept in scenes that could irk China's censors, apparently less concerned about the potential loss of access to theaters across the country of 1.4 billion people.

As a result, some of the most anticipated movies released in recent months — including "Top Gun: Maverick," "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and "Lightyear" — have not, and may never, hit the world's second largest box office.

All films publicly screened in China need a permit from regulators. Censorship is rife, with authorities increasingly clamping down on what they perceive to be inappropriate, including in some cases the appearance of cleavage, tattoos or people smoking, as well as more obviously politically sensitive elements.

[...] So why would these companies push back, putting tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at risk? For one, industry veterans say that China's movie market isn't what it used to be.

[...] "Pleasing Beijing no longer guarantees big revenues in China," he told CNN Business. "Such risk and effort no longer guarantee results, and I expect this lack of certainty to prolong this era of pushback for quite some time."

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on a paper published on 7 July 2022 in the journal Science, where researchers believe they've identified one of the first vertebrates.

From the article:

A group of organisms called yunnanozoans had gills, precursor to jaws.

Because we're a member of the group, it's easy to see vertebrates as the pinnacle of evolution, a group capable of producing bats, birds, and giant whales in addition to ourselves. But when they first evolved, vertebrates were anything but a sure thing. They branched off from a group that lived in the mud and didn't need to tell its top from its bottom or its left from its right, and so ended up losing an organized nerve cord. Our closest non-vertebrate relatives re-established a nerve cord (on the wrong side of the body, naturally) but couldn't be bothered with niceties like a skeleton.

How exactly vertebrates came out of this hasn't been clear, and the probable lack of a skeleton in our immediate ancestors has helped ensure that we don't have a lot of fossils to help clarify matters.

But in Thursday's issue of Science, researchers have re-evaluated some enigmatic fossils that date back to the Cambrian period and settled several arguments about exactly what features the yunnanozoans had. The answers include cartilaginous structures that supported gills and a possible ancestor to what became our lower jaw. In the process, they show that yunnanozoans are likely the earliest branch of the vertebrate tree.
[...]
You can get a sense of what a yunnanozoan looks like from the image above. The soft tissue down its flanks was divided into segments, a feature in both our closest living non-vertebrate relatives (the amphioxus or lancelet) and is present in vertebrate embryos but generally gets lost as they proceed through development into adults. Near the animal's head—and it does have a clear head and mouth—there's also an array of arched structures that look a lot like the similarly located gill arches found near the head of modern fish.

Journal Reference:
Qingyi Tian, Fangchen Zhao, Han Zeng, et al., Ultrastructure reveals ancestral vertebrate pharyngeal skeleton in yunnanozoans, Science, 377, 6602, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abm2708

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/intel-and-amd-cpus-vulnerable-to-a-new-speculative-execution-attack/

Some microprocessors from Intel and AMD are vulnerable to a newly discovered speculative execution attack that can covertly leak password data and other sensitive material, sending both chipmakers scrambling once again to contain what is proving to be a stubbornly persistent vulnerability.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have named their attack Retbleed because it exploits a software defense known as retpoline, which was introduced in 2018 to mitigate the harmful effects of speculative execution attacks.

Speculative execution attacks, also known as Spectre, exploit the fact that when modern CPUs encounter a direct or indirect instruction branch, they predict the address for the next instruction they're about to receive and automatically execute it before the prediction is confirmed. Spectre works by tricking the CPU into executing an instruction that accesses sensitive data in memory that would normally be off-limits to a low-privileged application. Retbleed then extracts the data after the operation is cancelled.

hubie writes:

Vestibular function expert says the young are better equipped to handle carnival rides:

Is the classic Tilt-A-Whirl now more of a Tilt-and-Hurl? Has a ride on the Zipper become a stomach flipper?

Take solace, aging Calgary Stampede midway fans: finding nausea where you once sought the thrills-and-spills joy of carnival rides is not only common, it's also as much a part of getting older as wrinkles and grey hair.

"I suspect it is some degree of sensory incongruence that crops up when older adults hop on a midway ride, which is something they likely don't do very often in everyday life," says Dr. Ryan Peters, PhD, assistant professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and a member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute in the Cumming School of Medicine.

Peters has spent a lot of time studying the vestibular system, part of your inner ear that senses head motion and relays this to the brain to help regulate balance, and compensate for external forces like those experienced on a ride and Earth's gravity.

[...] "This is analogous to the hearing loss we experience with age — both the auditory and vestibular systems rely on tiny, delicate, hair cell receptors in the inner ear to detect sound pressure waves and head motion," says Peters. "We lose these hair cells across the lifespan at a steady rate."

In basic terms, we need those receptors to help our brain deal with the sensory information that comes with a thrill ride at the Stampede, and when the vestibular system can't keep up, we get sick.

[...] The good news? Practice can reduce this effect, with the human nervous system able to adjust and compensate for this type of incongruence.

[...] "That would mean that older adults should just hop on more and more midway rides to alleviate their symptoms," says Peters.

The Calgary Stampede is a large annual festival held in July in Calgary, Canada that includes midway rides such as the Zipper.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft: Phishing bypassed MFA in attacks against 10,000 orgs:

Microsoft says a massive series of phishing attacks has targeted more than 10,000 organizations starting with September 2021, using the gained access to victims' mailboxes in follow-on business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

The threat actors used landing pages designed to hijack the Office 365 authentication process (even on accounts protected by multifactor authentication (MFA) by spoofing the Office online authentication page.

In some of the observed attacks, the potential victims were redirected to the landing pages from phishing emails using HTML attachments that acted as gatekeepers ensuring the targets were being sent via the HTML redirectors.

After stealing the targets' credentials and their session cookies, the threat actors behind these attacks logged into the victims' email accounts. They subsequently used their access in business email compromise (BRC) campaigns targeting other organizations.

"A large-scale phishing campaign that used adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing sites stole passwords, hijacked a user's sign-in session, and skipped the authentication process even if the user had enabled multifactor authentication (MFA)," the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team and Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said.

"The attackers then used the stolen credentials and session cookies to access affected users' mailboxes and perform follow-on business email compromise (BEC) campaigns against other targets."

Original Submission

Fire Enema writes:

Tails Linux Version 5.2 Is Out (2022-07-12)

https://tails.boum.org/news/version_5.2/index.en.html

--> Changes and updates

Included software
------------------------------
Update Tor Browser to 11.5.
Update Thunderbird to 91.11.0.
------------------------------

--> Changelog:

https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/blob/master/debian/changelog

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists Cloned Mice From Freeze-Dried Skin Cells, Opening the Door to Biopreservation:

On the surface, Dorami was just an average mouse. She grew to a healthy weight, had pups of her own, and died naturally near her second birthday—roughly 70 years in human age, and completely unexceptional for a lab mouse.

Except for one thing: Dorami was cloned from freeze-dried cells. And not just any cell—she was cloned from somatic cells (the cells that make up our bodies) rather than sperm or eggs.

Dorami is the latest foray into a decades-long push to use cloning as a way to preserve biodiversity. The triumph of Dolly the sheep made it clear that it's possible to revive animals using reproductive cells. The dream of restoring extinct animals, or biobanking current ones, has captured the imagination of scientists ever since. One powerful way to preserve a species' DNA is to store sperm in liquid nitrogen. At roughly -320 degrees Fahrenheit, the cells can be frozen in time for years.

But there's one hiccup. Collecting reproductive cells from animals on the brink of extinction is—to put it mildly—extremely difficult. In contrast, scratching off a few skin cells or shaving some fur is relatively simple. These cells contain the animal's complete DNA, but they're fragile.

The new study, led by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama at the University of Yamanashi in Japan, made the leap from sperm to skin. Developing a highly technical recipe that would make any fine-dining chef proud, the team successfully cloned 75 healthy mice from freeze-dried somatic cells collected from both male and female donors. Many offspring, including Dorami, went on to have pups of their own.

With a success rate of roughly five percent at most—and as low as 0.2 percent—the technique is far from efficient. But the strategy carves a path towards the bigger picture: our ability to store and potentially revive genetic variations of near-extinct species.

[...] Ultimately, this is just the first step. Somatic cells are easier to capture compared to reproductive ones, especially for infertile or juvenile animals. Doing it easier and cheaper is a plus. The team is now looking to capture genetic material from cadavers or feces to broaden the scope.

Journal Reference:
Wakayama, Sayaka, Ito, Daiyu, Hayashi, Erika, et al. Healthy cloned offspring derived from freeze-dried somatic cells [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31216-4)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"Going forward, we won't do a spin start test with all 33 engines at once":

A ground-based test of the Super Heavy rocket that is intended to boost a Starship upper stage into orbit ended in flames on Monday afternoon at SpaceX's launch site in South Texas. A fire burned in the vicinity of the pad, on and off, for more than an hour.

This is the first time SpaceX has tested a booster stage—this one bears the designation Booster 7—equipped with a full complement of 33 Raptor rocket engines. Monday's test was not intended to lead to a static fire test, during which the engines are briefly ignited, so seeing fire erupt from the aft end of the vehicle at 4:20 pm CT local time was a surprise.

The methane-fueled Raptor engine has a complicated sequence of events that must unfold precisely in order for it to ignite, and SpaceX was testing the "spin start" portion of this ignition sequence when the anomaly occurred. Something must have caused methane propellant to ignite, with the ambient oxygen in the air serving as an oxidizer, inside the vehicle.

[...] Internally, SpaceX had been targeting a potential orbital launch attempt for the Super Heavy rocket and Starship upper stage in August, which would boost the upper stage to an altitude of about 250 km before the vehicle returned to Earth. The company has yet to get a formal launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for this test.

[...] If Booster 7 cannot be salvaged, it would not be the end of the world. SpaceX has established an assembly line in South Texas where boosters and Starship vehicles can be built in a matter of months. Several are presently in various stages of work. The potential loss of 33 Raptor engines, however, would be more significant.

Test video.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Will start generating electricity in a span of two years:

In a major push toward renewable power generation, the Sindh government announced to install Pakistan's first floating solar power plant with a 500MW generation capacity.

The project would be set up at Keenjhar Lake at a cost of $400 million, informed Provincial Minister of Sindh for Energy Imtiaz Shaikh.

Taking to social media, the provincial minister informed that the floating solar power plant would start generating electricity in a span of two years. "A letter of Intent (Lol) of the project has been issued," he said.

[...] The development comes as Pakistan is taking steps to ramp up its renewable power generation capacity, as it faces a deepening energy crisis, while the country struggles to grab tenders for the purchase of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

[...] Meanwhile, the federal government also decided to announce the national solar energy policy on 1st August with implementation contingent on the approval of the Council of Common Interests (CCI).

[...] The premier further stated that the government is trying to make the country self-sufficient in the energy sector as the meeting was informed that a proposal to convert fuel-powered powerhouses in the country to solar energy is under consideration besides another proposal for the generation of solar energy on 2,000 feeders of 11kV is also under consideration the meeting was further informed.

Floating solar - Wikipedia:

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Study: Video Game Players Show Enhanced Brain Activity, Decision-Making Skill:

Frequent players of video games show superior sensorimotor decision-making skills and enhanced activity in key regions of the brain as compared to non-players, according to a recent study by Georgia State University researchers.

The authors, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) in the study, said the findings suggest that video games could be a useful tool for training in perceptual decision-making.

"Video games are played by the overwhelming majority of our youth more than three hours every week, but the beneficial effects on decision-making abilities and the brain are not exactly known," said lead researcher Mukesh Dhamala, associate professor in Georgia State's Department of Physics and Astronomy and the university's Neuroscience Institute.

"Our work provides some answers on that," Dhamala said. "Video game playing can effectively be used for training — for example, decision-making efficiency training and therapeutic interventions — once the relevant brain networks are identified."

[...] "These results indicate that video game playing potentially enhances several of the subprocesses for sensation, perception and mapping to action to improve decision-making skills," the authors wrote. "These findings begin to illuminate how video game playing alters the brain in order to improve task performance and their potential implications for increasing task-specific activity."

The study also notes there was no trade-off between speed and accuracy of response — the video game players were better on both measures.

"This lack of speed-accuracy trade-off would indicate video game playing as a good candidate for cognitive training as it pertains to decision-making," the authors wrote.

Journal Reference:
Timothy Jordana and Mukesh Dhamala, Video game players have improved decision-making abilities and enhanced brain activities [open], Neuroimage: Reports, 2, 3, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.ynirp.2022.100112

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Uber lobbied politicians, broke laws in global push: reports:

Uber Technologies Inc. attempted to lobby politicians and flouted laws as part of efforts to expand globally from 2013 to 2017, according to newspaper reports based on leaked documents.

The company allegedly received assistance in its efforts from politicians including French President Emmanuel Macron, reports from outlets including the Guardian and Le Monde said. The so-called "Uber Files" — based on more than 124,000 documents shared with the non-profit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — cover a period of time when co-founder Travis Kalanick was chief executive officer and detail the lengths to which the company sought to expand into key cities like Paris.

In a statement released shortly after the reports were published, Uber didn't deny any of the allegations and instead focused on the changes that have been made since Dara Khosrowshahi was named CEO in 2017.

"There has been no shortage of reporting on Uber's mistakes prior to 2017," the San Francisco-based company said in a statement. "Thousands of stories have been published, multiple books have been written — there's even been a TV series."

Uber said that Khosrowshahi has transformed the company, making safety a top priority.

"When we say Uber is a different company today, we mean it literally: 90% of current Uber employees joined after Dara became CEO," according to the statement.

Uber's aggressive tactics as it took on the taxi industry have been reported on for years. Bloomberg News reported in 2018 that the company had deployed a remote system to prevent police from obtaining internal data during raids.

See Also: Leaked Documents Show Uber Thwarted Police and Secretly Courted Politicians

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Fentanyl Has Been Shown To Cause Autism-Like Behavior in a Harvard-Funded Study:

One of the most often administered analgesics in hospitals is fentanyl, a mu-opioid receptor agonist that has the potential to permanently damage rats' behavior and sensorimotor abilities. It is unknown, however, if fentanyl usage contributes to the development of autism. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Shanghai 10th People's Hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania have shown in an animal study that fentanyl can cause alterations in young male and female mice that are comparable to behaviors seen in autism. The results have been published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

Other studies have demonstrated that N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor dysfunction contributes to autism. Autism is linked to variations in the Grin2a and Grin2b genes, which encode the GluN2A and GluN2B subunits of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor. Autism also affects the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain.

The current study found that fentanyl causes autistic-like behaviors in young male and female mice by activating the mu-opioid receptor in the anterior cingulate brain. Furthermore, these fentanyl-induced autistic-like behaviors seem to be partially driven by the reduction of Grin2b expression in the mice's anterior cingulate cortex induced by hypermethylation.

"Because the anterior cingulate cortex is a hub for mediating social information, we focused on the expression of Grin2b in that area," says Yuan Shen, MD, Ph.D., the paper's senior author and a professor of Psychiatry at Shanghai 10th People's Hospital. "We found fentanyl decreased expression of Grin2b in the anterior cingulate cortex. The overexpression of Grin2b prevents fentanyl-induced autism-like behavior in the mice. These findings suggest a potential mechanism to prevent or treat the autism-like behavior," says Shen.

owl writes:

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html

After I mentioned that Lenovo are now shipping laptops that only boot Windows by default, a few people pointed to a Lenovo document that says:

"Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default."

"Secured-core" is a term used to describe machines that meet a certain set of Microsoft requirements around firmware security, and by and large it's a good thing - devices that meet these requirements are resilient against a whole bunch of potential attacks in the early boot process. But unfortunately the 2022 requirements don't seem to be publicly available, so it's difficult to know what's being asked for and why. But first, some background.

[...] Given the association with the secured-core requirements, this is presumably a security decision of some kind. Unfortunately, we have no real idea what this security decision is intended to protect against. The most likely scenario is concerns about the (in)security of binaries signed with the third-party signing key - there are some legitimate concerns here, but I'm going to cover why I don't think they're terribly realistic.

The first point is that, from a boot security perspective, a signed bootloader that will happily boot unsigned code kind of defeats the point. Kaspersky did it anyway. The second is that even a signed bootloader that is intended to only boot signed code may run into issues in the event of security vulnerabilities - the Boothole vulnerabilities are an example of this, covering multiple issues in GRUB that could allow for arbitrary code execution and potential loading of untrusted code.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk, was indeed "decades ahead of his time and truly deserves the title of 'founder of genetics.'" So concludes an international team of scientists as the 200th birthday of Mendel approaches on 20 July.

The team, from KeyGene in the Netherlands and the John Innes Centre in the UK, draw on newly-discovered historical information to conclude that, when his proposals are viewed in the light of what was known of cells in the mid-19th century, Mendel was decades ahead of his time.

"Uncovering hidden details about Mendel has helped to build a picture of the scientific and intellectual environment in which he worked. At the outset Mendel knew nothing about Genetics and had to deduce it all for himself. How he went about this is highly instructive," said Dr Noel Ellis from the John Innes Centre, one of the contributors to the study.

The new information shows that Mendel began his work with the practical objectives of a plant breeder, before he became interested in the underlying biological processes that condition the heritable differences between organisms. It also shows that Mendel recognised the importance of understanding the formation of reproductive cells and the process of fertilisation.

[...] Thanks to modern technology, the authors were able to extract valuable information from 19th-century newspaper articles, proceedings, and yearbooks that have recently been digitised. These show how advanced the ideas and work of Mendel were as he used cell biological theory to come to conclusions on how traits of plants are transmitted from parents to their offspring.

Unfortunately paywalled. This looks like it would have made for some fascinating reading, but at least an interesting appendix is made available.

Journal Reference:
van Dijk, P.J., Jessop, A.P. & Ellis, T.H.N. How did Mendel arrive at his discoveries?. Nat Genet (2022). 10.1038/s41588-022-01109-9

Original Submission