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Comment Re:I am right there with them (Score 1) 163

by Ellis Haney (#63336137) Attached to: Nearly 40% of Software Engineers Will Only Work Remotely

I guess that most of those who preferred only remote roles would need to return to Open Spaces.

Key findings from Open Spaces At Eu Institutions Versus Traditional Work Spaces:

The following arguments oppose the introuction of open office spaces:

- Loss of productivity. Employees are distracted faster because of noise or colleagues moving around. It takes on average 25 minutes to resume a task after distraction. In an open office space employees are distracted faster because of phone calls, people walking by or nearby conversations.

- Problems with noise, temperature and fatigue. As said before, noise is one of the main distractions in an open office space. Temperature is managed centrally and it could therefore be too cold of one person and too warm for another. Fatigue is a side effect from noise and temperature and the fact that people have a constant overload of information with the introduction of multiple screens like phone, tablets and computer.

- Increase of sickness. As employees are in closer proximity of one another diseases can spread faster. The spread of diseases raise the amount of sick days taken in a company.

- Decrease of overall well-being of employees. The main cause for the diminishing of well-being is the level of stress. The idea of being watched all the time increases the levels of stress in an open office space.

Comment Re:Microsoft Says No (Score 5, Interesting) 233

Lenovo sell PCs with Linux pre installed, or no OS at all. With a blank drive they boot from CD or USB by default.

They also have back doors in their BIOS. And they are owned by the Chinese.

The Long Hack: How China Exploited a U.S. Tech Supplier (Feb 11, 2021)

Another Pentagon supplier that received attention was China's Lenovo Group Ltd. In 2008, U.S. investigators found that military units in Iraq were using Lenovo laptops in which the hardware had been altered. The discovery surfaced later in little-noticed testimony during a U.S. criminal case-a rare public description of a Chinese hardware hack.

From the testimony:

Q: Anything else going on during 2008 with other technology that was found to be counterfeit being used by the military in Iraq?

A: The primary thing that was found was Lenovo laptops. IBM Think Pads were outsourced to a company in China called Lenovo to be built. A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the US military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China.
That was a big problem. That was a huge security breach. We don't have any idea how much data they got, but we had to take all those systems off the network.

Superfish

Superfish's software is malware and adware. The software was bundled with various applications as early as 2010, and Lenovo began to bundle the software with some of its computers in September 2014.[4] On February 20, 2015, the United States Department of Homeland Security advised uninstalling it and its associated root certificate, because they make computers vulnerable to serious cyberattacks, including interception of passwords and sensitive data being transmitted through browsers.

The Chinese Threat That's Hiding in Plain Sight (Sep 12, 2019)

Lenovo's Watch X sent user locations to a server in China without their knowledge; its Superfish adware installed in hundreds of thousands of computers allowed third-parties to spy on browser traffic, resulting in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission; security researchers found that Adups data mining software on Lenovo phones could collect personal data without consent.

Lenovo PCs and Laptops seem to have a BIOS level backdoor (Aug 13, 2015)

The Chinese computer and laptop maker, Lenovo is once again in the eye of the storm after users have found that their PCs/Laptops are shipped with a hidden backdoor at the BIOS level. Earlier in the year, it was found that all Lenovo PCs/Laptops are shipped with a spyware called Superfish.

Submission + - SPAM: NASA and open-source software

Submitted by guest reader
guest reader writes: From LWN Article:

From the moon landing to the James Webb Space Telescope and many other scientific missions, software is critical for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Sharing information has also been in the DNA of the space agency from the beginning. As a result, NASA also contributes to and releases open-source software and open data. In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, Science Data Officer Steve Crawford talked about NASA and open-source software, including the challenges NASA has faced in using open source and the agency's recent initiatives to lower barriers.

Software has always been a big part of NASA's work. Who hasn't seen the photo of computer scientist Margaret Hamilton next to a hard-copy stack of the Apollo software she and her team at MIT produced? The stack of code is as tall as she is. In 2016, the original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for the command and lunar modules was published on GitHub in the public domain. You can even compile the code and run it in a simulator.

In recent years, more and more of this sharing was also in the form of releasing software. For instance, when NASA's drone copter Ingenuity made it first flight on Mars in 2021 as part of the Perseverance mission, it used an open-source flight-control framework, F Prime. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released the framework in 2017 under the Apache 2.0 license. One of the example deployments even runs on the Raspberry Pi. But the NASA mission also used a lot of open-source dependencies. To celebrate Ingenuity's first flight, GitHub recognized the more than 12,000 people who contributed to these dependencies with a badge on their profile.

While the previous examples may be some high-profile successes, open source at NASA doesn't come without its challenges. "Civil servants can't release anything copyrightable", Crawford said, referring to the fact that under US copyright law, a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties is in the public domain.

Of course NASA has contributed to many open-source projects, but according to Crawford people often do this "not in their official capacity as NASA employees". In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open Source Agreement. This license has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't consider it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects. "It isn't widely used in the community and complicates the reuse of NASA software with this license", Crawford said.

Another challenge is NASA's famous bureaucracy, Crawford admitted: "NASA does not always engage well with the open-source community." As an example, he showed how curl's main developer Daniel Stenberg received an email from NASA's Commercial IT Acquisition Team, asking him to supply country of origin information for curl, as well as a list of all "authorized resellers". Stenberg noted the keynote (which he barely missed attending) in a recent blog post.

Open-source software will clearly play an important role in open science, and was already instrumental in various breakthrough discoveries. When scientists created the first image of a black hole in 2019 from data generated by the Event Horizon Telescope, Dr. Katie Bouman who led the development of the imaging algorithm was explicit about it: "We're deeply grateful to all the open source contributors who made our work possible." This was also the message Crawford ended his talk with: "Keep contributing, building, and sustaining your code." After his "Thank you for your contributions", his words were followed by big applause from a room full of open-source developers.
Link to Original Source

Comment Love loves to love love? (Score 1) 20

This story made me think of James Joyce:

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.

On a serious note, the amount of transparency about the issue was outstanding.

Comment I will just fix my screen (Score 4, Informative) 160

From the article: Levin said he was incompetent, and my team, we were incompetent in managing funds.
Levin then began answering the submitted questions, which included harsh criticism and accusations.
After 27 minutes, he claimed he was going to fix his screen sharing and disconnected, but never returned.

Comment Re:Libreoffice, Drag Page With Middle Mouse--Not Y (Score 1) 61

by Ellis Haney (#63158030) Attached to: Mozilla Just Fixed an 18-Year-Old Firefox Bug

How do you -not- have a three button mouse?

Laptops and those using Apple mice.

Middle-click, and Middle-tap are both available on Apple mice. BetterTouchTool allows you to program a response to various gestures on the Magic Mouse, Trackpads, and other input devices.

Old Mighty Mouse had clickable scroll ball as 3rd button in 2005.

Comment Re:Lol, sign me up! (Score 1) 47

by Ellis Haney (#63156580) Attached to: A Startup Wants To Pay You To Share Your Data For Advertising

Just need a script to generate accounts, a bot to make them surf around randomly, and another script to sweep their money into my bank account from the bot accounts.

I expect that they have some plan how to verify your purchases. I can imagine that it will be based on actual purchases, not just searches and guessing based on incomplete data. Because such ads would be much more valuable than few cents. Example: There is someone who opted in to get the best deals, who is buying all books from some author and the author just published a new book which is a sequel to something they already purchased.

Submission + - Critical Windows Code-Execution Vulnerability Undetected until Now (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Researchers recently discovered a Windows code-execution vulnerability that has the potential to rival EternalBlue.
EternalBlue is the name of a different Windows security flaw used to detonate WannaCry, the ransomware that shut down computer networks across the world in 2017.

The latest vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to execute malicious code with no authentication required. It is wormable, meaning that a single exploit can trigger a chain reaction of self-replicating follow-on exploits on other vulnerable systems.

The vulnerability is in the SPNEGO Extended Negotiation Security Mechanism, which allows a client and server to negotiate the choice of security mechanism to use. This vulnerability is a pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability impacting a wide range of protocols.

“An attacker can trigger the vulnerability via any Windows application protocols that authenticates,” Valentina Palmiotti, the IBM security researcher who discovered the code-execution vulnerability. “For example, the vulnerability can be triggered by trying to connect to an SMB share or via Remote Desktop..."

Palmiotti said there’s reason for optimism but also for risk: “While EternalBlue was an 0-Day, luckily this is an N-Day with a 3 month patching lead time...”

Happy Christmas!

JoshK.

Comment Re: At least.. (Score 2) 129

by Ellis Haney (#63147820) Attached to: Russian Arms Manufacturer Developing Tech To Hunt Starlink Dishes

The tweet content for reference. Elon Musk, October 3, 2022

Ukraine-Russia Peace:
- Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.
- Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).
- Water supply to Crimea assured.
- Ukraine remains neutral.

pool results attached to that tweet, 2,748,378 votes:
'Yes' 40.9%
'No' 59.1%

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