128448700
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
"[Autoclaving] is like a pressure cooker — basically you enclose items into a chamber, you lock down the chamber, you heat it up and actually increase the pressure inside the chamber," Kumar said. The machines heat up to about 121 C for 15 minutes, killing bacteria and viruses. "It'll sterilize anything". The assumption has been that if you tried this on an N95 mask they would degrade rapidly. We thought we'd give it a try anyway," Kumar said. "And actually what we found is while it does degrade some [types of] masks, there's a certain group of masks that are made of kind of a fabric-type material, rather than being moulded closely to the face they're called pleated [masks]," he said.
125417342
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
As the usage share of web browsers continues to show a lopsideded dominance by Google Chrome, many previously-independent browsers have fallen by the wayside or have been reinvented as Chrome variants (i.e. Opera, Edge, Brave). Apple forges on with its Safari browser while other, smaller projects tend to be quite limited for multi-platform users, such as Dolphin and Bromite. Mozilla continues independently with Firefox for almost every platform, while variants such as Pale Moon and Sea Monkey have attempted to provide products that avoid drastic and/or controversial changes made by Mozilla but sometimes do not match the multi-platform support of Firefox. Let us not forget Tor, the Firefox-based anonymity-focused browser. Alex Kontos is a developer who attempted to provide continuity with dropped Firefox capabilities in his multi-platform Waterfox browser, proudly declaring that Firefox's user data sharing and telemetry collection was not included. For that privacy focus a certain popularity of Waterfox occurred. Now Kontos has revealed that his Waterfox project has been sold to System1, a company describing itself as 'a consumer internet and applications company with the most powerful audience expansion platform in the industry.' In short, a data-collection company.
124991154
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
Bill Gates has ordered the world’s first hydrogen-powered superyacht, worth an estimated £500m ($644m) and featuring an infinity pool, helipad, spa and gym. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft has commissioned the Aqua ship – a 112-metre (370ft) luxury vessel completely powered by liquid hydrogen – which was publicised last year at the Monaco yacht show by the Dutch design firm Sinot. Speaking about the project last year, the marine designer Sander Sinot said: “For the development of Aqua we took inspiration from the lifestyle of a discerning, forward-looking owner, the fluid versatility of water and cutting-edge technology, to combine this in a superyacht with truly innovative features.” The boat has five decks and space to accommodate 14 guests and 31 crew members. In a further environmentally friendly feature, gel-fuelled fire bowls allow guests to stay warm outside without having to burn wood or coals.
122378492
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles. More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” are set to be released over the next months. It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called “Steele dossier” into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.
119938562
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
In a growing line of whistleblowers and skeptics voicing their concerns before the expected re-certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, another rogue agent has emerged. In an email sent to regulators in the U.S., Europe and Brazil, a Transport Canada safety official called for the entire removal of the MCAS system from the 737 MAX. The official believes that the U.S. plane maker should remove the software, largely blamed for the two deadly 737 MAX 8 crashes, before the aircraft is cleared to fly again. “The only way I see moving forward at this point is that the MCAS has to go,” Jim Marko, manager of Aircraft Integration and Safety Assessment at Canada’s aviation regulator – Transport Canada – wrote in the email, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news. In the email, sent to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Brazil’s National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) on November 19, 2019, Marko expressed his “uneasiness” about Boeing’s attempts to fix the MCAS software. “Judging from the number and degree of open issues that we have, I am feeling that final decisions on acceptance will not be technically based,” he was quoted as saying by Canada’s National Post. “This leaves me with a level of uneasiness that I cannot sit idly by and watch it pass by”
118961738
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
George Lucas, whose departure from all things Star Wars seems to have been greatly exaggerated – appears to have yet again doctored the famous Greedo scene in 1977’s Star Wars prior to its being shown on the Disney+ streaming service.
118721590
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
Platinum is one of the most technologically advanced APT actors with a traditional focus on the APAC region. During recent analysis we discovered Platinum using a new backdoor that we call Titanium (named after a password to one of the self-executable archives). Titanium is the final result of a sequence of dropping, downloading and installing stages. The malware hides at every step by mimicking common software (protection related, sound drivers software, DVD video creation tools).
118616082
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
A mysterious hacker has published today a database dump of one of the internet's most infamous neo-nazi meeting places — the IronMarch forum. The data published today includes a full copy of its content, including sensitive details such as emails, IP addresses, usernames, and private messages. The database dump is currently being analyzed by a multitude of entities, including law enforcement, in the hopes of linking forum members to accounts on other sites and potentially exposing their real-world identities. The drive to unmask forum members comes from the fact that IronMarch, while a little-known site to most internet users, has been the birthplace of two of today's most extreme far-right neo-nazi movements — the Atomwaffen Division and SIEGE Culture — with the first being accused of orchestrating at least eight murders around the world.
118406084
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
Hold your favorite graphic design tome close. We now know what the classic typeface Helvetica would look like if it came from the underworld. Yes, it will keep type enthusiasts up at night. The design darling Helvetica—that ubiquitous sans-serif typeface developed by Max Miedinger in 1957, representative of the crisp Swiss design aesthetic of that period, and star of its own documentary by the same name—has made a deal with the kerning devil. The results aren’t pretty. They’re not meant to be.
117896362
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
Canada’s Hyperstealth Biotechnology already manufactures camouflage uniforms for militaries across the globe.
But now, the company has patented a new “Quantum Stealth” material that disguises a military’s soldiers — or even its tanks, aircraft, and ships — by making anything behind it seem invisible. Earlier in October, Hyperstealth filed a patent for the material, which doesn’t require a power source and is both paper-thin and inexpensive — all traits that could make it appealing for use on the battlefield. Alongside the news of the patent application, Hyperstealth released more than 100-minutes worth of footage describing and demonstrating the material, as summarized in this YouTube video.
115964352
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and consultant on numerous movie scripts, was excited to watch “Ad Astra,” the new Brad Pitt space thriller. The film was promoted with the promise of scientific realism in depicting a solar system well on its way to being settled by humanity. Unfortunately, Professor Frank finds that despite very good intentions, “Ad Astra” strikes the wrong balance between story and fact, art and artifice. While the plot ventures out to the farthest planet Neptune, the demands of the film’s theme cramp its science fiction imagination. Instead of letting us explore a vision of our common future in space, “Ad Astra” delivers a solar system stripped down to fit a very particular story.
115841978
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
phoronix reports that Lennart Poettering has presented a new set of systemd capabilities: 'Improving the Linux handling of user home directories is the next ambition for systemd. Among the goals are allowing more easily migratable home directories, ensuring all data for users is self-contained to the home directories, UID assignments being handled to the local system, unified user password and encryption key handling, better data encryption handling in general, and other modernization efforts. Among the items being explored by systemd-homed are JSON-based user records, encrypted LUKS home directories in loop-back files, and other next-gen features to offering secure yet portable home directories.'
113590830
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
Automatic license plate readers, which use networked surveillance cameras and simple image recognition to track the movements of cars around a city, may have met their match, in the form of a T-shirt. Or a dress. Or a hoodie. The anti-surveillance garments were revealed at the DefCon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Saturday by the hacker and fashion designer Kate Rose, who presented the inaugural collection of her Adversarial Fashion line. Rose credits a conversation with a friend, the Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Dave Maass, for inspiring the project: “He mentioned that the readers themselves are not very good,” she said. “They already read in things like picket fences and other junk. I thought that if they’re fooled by a fence, then maybe I could take a crack at it.”
112825058
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
When Linus Torvalds first created Linux in 1991, he built it on a 386-powered PC with a floppy drive. Things change. In 2012, Torvalds bid the i386 processor adieu saying, "I'm not sentimental. Good riddance." Now, it's the floppy drive's turn to bid Linux adieu. Torvalds has declared the floppy drive project "orphaned." Why? Because floppy drives have become historical relics. No one's using them. Indeed, Jií Kosina, the Czech Linux kernel developer in charge of the floppy drive driver, said he "no longer has working hardware."
112299388
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Freshly Exhumed writes:
Weather watchers are focused on the world's most northerly community, which is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. "It's really quite spectacular," said David Phillips, Environment Canada's chief climatologist. "This is unprecedented." The weather agency confirmed that Canadian Forces Station Alert hit a record of 21 C on Sunday. On Monday, the military listening post on the top of Ellesmere Island had reached 20 C by noon and inched slightly higher later in the day.
