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Submission + - Citizenlab spyware research

Submitted by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite
ISayWeOnlyToBePolite writes: Original paper: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcitizenlab.ca%2F2025%2F03%2F...

Techcrunch coverage: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2025%2F03...
"The governments of Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore are likely customers of Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions, according to a new technical report by a renowned digital security lab.

On Wednesday, The Citizen Lab, a group of academics and security researchers housed at the University of Toronto that has investigated the spyware industry for more than a decade, published a report about the Israeli-founded surveillance startup, identifying the six governments as “suspected Paragon deployments.”

At the end of January, WhatsApp notified around 90 users that the company believed were targeted with Paragon spyware, prompting a scandal in Italy, where some of the targets live. "

The Guardian additional coverage of activist David Yambino :https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2025%2Fmar%2F19%2Fitalian-activist-david-yambio-alerts-icc-spyware-attack

"A prominent activist in Italy has warned the international criminal court that his mobile phone was under surveillance when he was providing the ICC with confidential information about victims of torture in Libya.

A report released on Wednesday by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which tracks digital surveillance of members of civil society, has confirmed that David Yambio, the founder of an organisation called Refugees in Libya, was targeted by mercenary spyware. The attack occurred at a time when he was in communication with The Hague, he said. At least one attack took place around June 2024, researchers said."

Submission + - New open source Windows-compatible operating system released (github.com) 2

Submitted by paugq
paugq writes: Free95, a new lean, Windows-compatible operating system is available from GitHub. In its current form, it can run very basic Win32 GUI and console applications but its developer promises to keep working on it to reach DirectX and een game compatibility.

Submission + - Slashdot Dies A Slow Death with Crippling Advertisements (slashdot.org) 2

Submitted by zamboni1138
zamboni1138 writes: Anybody familiar with the technology news web forum known as Slashdot have known about the recent decline in quality of stories and comments. Recently Slashdot decided to "upgrade" their advertisement experience resulting in an almost broken user experience for users that implement any kind of ad-blocking technology. Over the last week visitors to the site using ad blockers have noticed a unique experience with javascript alerts explaining "This page could not be loaded properly due to incorrect / bad filtering rule(s) of adblockers in use. Please disable all adblockers to continue using the website. (click OK if you'd like to learn more)". These notices are almost non-stop while trying to load/read a page making the site unusable.

Submission + - Slashdot goes mental with advertising 9

Submitted by sizzlinkitty
sizzlinkitty writes: Has anyone else noticed Slashdot failing to load because of your ad blocker? I know I sure have and it's breaking my user experience like no other.

Please post the blocking patterns you're using to make Slashdot usable again.

Submission + - Blistering Data Transmission Record Clocks Over 1 Petabit Per Second (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission – a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure. For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will “only” get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team.

The new record was set by researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), using several emerging technologies. First, the optical fiber contains four cores – the glass tubes that transmit the signals – instead of the usual one. The transmission bandwidth is extended to a record-breaking 20 THz, thanks to a technology known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). That bandwidth is made up of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread across three bands – the commonly used C- and L-bands, as well as the experimental S-band. With the help of some other new optical amplification and signal modulation technologies, the team achieved the record-breaking speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km (32.1 miles) of optical fiber cables.

Submission + - Linux Random Number Generator Sees Major Improvements (zx2c4.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Linux kernel's random number generator has seen its first set of major improvements in over a decade, improving everything from the cryptography to the interface used. Not only does it finally retire SHA-1 (in favor of BLAKE2s), but it also at long last unites `/dev/random` and `/dev/urandom`, finally ending years of Slashdot banter and debate:

The most significant outward-facing change is that /dev/random and /dev/urandom are now exactly the same thing, with no differences between them at all, thanks to their unification in random: block in /dev/urandom. This removes a significant age-old crypto footgun, already accomplished by other operating systems eons ago. [...] The upshot is that every Internet message board disagreement on /dev/random versus /dev/urandom has now been resolved by making everybody simultaneously right! Now, for the first time, these are both the right choice to make, in addition to getrandom(0); they all return the same bytes with the same semantics. There are only right choices.

Submission + - Installing a third party OS on M1 Macs just got easier

Submitted by mrwireless
mrwireless writes: The Asahi Linux team is very close to releasing an installer for their flavour of Linux that can run on Apple's M1 chip.

It once again seems Apple is informally supportive of these efforts, as the recent release of OS Monterey 12.3 makes the process even simpler. As Twitter user Matthew Garrett writes:

"People who hate UEFI should read https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FAsahiLinux%2F... — Apple made deliberate design choices that allow third party OSes to run on M1 hardware without compromising security, and with much less closed code than on basically any modern x86."

Submission + - IT Staff got infected with COVID-19 while working unvaccinated and w/o masks. (baynews9.com) 1

Submitted by luis_a_espinal
luis_a_espinal writes: In another case of "Floriduh" being "Floriduh", a government building in Manatee County had to shut down due to an outbreak. TL;DR; it could be the Delta Variant, and this incident saw a 40% fatality rate. The county doesn't require the use of masks, even among the unvaccinated, allowing unvaccinated people to work indoors and in proximity without any form of protection. From the story:

In all, five employees of the IT department contracted the virus. Of that group, four were hospitalized and two died last week. “That’s a 40% case fatality rate,” said Dr. Scott Hopes, the county administrator. “That’s a high fatality rate.”

Submission + - Texas gov knew of natural gas shortages days before blackout, blamed wind anyway (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars.

Abbott’s office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor’s office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state’s electrical grid. The PUC chair’s diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.

Submission + - 6th Grader Expelled for 3 Months after Zoom provided inaccurate IP address info (ajc.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: On one day in February, 11-year-old Malachi Battle was not feeling well, so he stayed home sick and attended his 6th grade classes virtually via Zoom. Strange things started happening. In one class, Malachi said he heard an unknown person yell a racial slur. Teachers said other unidentified people were trying to get into their virtual classrooms. Two days later, Malachi was suspended, accused of repeatedly trying to log into Zoom classes with threatening phrases and racial slurs in lieu of his name

Malachi’s lawyers say Gwinnett County Public Schools accused him based on an inaccurate list of students’ Internet Protocol addresses from Zoom, a problem that could repeat elsewhere since the company’s online sessions are replacing classrooms for millions of students amid the coronavirus pandemic. Chris Gilliard, a fellow with the Technology and Social Change Project of the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, had not heard of a situation similar to Malachi’s but said “it’s hugely unlikely that this is the first time” a student had been disciplined based on questionable data from Zoom.

During the “Zoom bombing” attempts, Malachi had already logged into the classes under his regular name, according to his appeal.

The school district retrieved from Zoom a list of the names and IP addresses in each waiting room, Malachi’s legal team said. The Zoom bombers’ public IP addresses matched Malachi’s — but four other students who did not appear to be Zoom bombers were also listed as having Malachi’s public IP address, an impossibility since they were not in the same house, said Scott Moulton, a Woodstock-based forensics expert hired by the attorney working on Malachi’s case.

Moulton said the school district’s technology employee who investigated should have been able to tell that many of the IP addresses in the Zoom report were wrong.

“I would have at least picked up the phone and called Zoom before hanging the life of an 11-year-old kid based on a log that looks like an error,” Moulton said.

The Zoom bombers’ local IP addresses, which identify the exact device being used, did not match Malachi’s, according to the log his attorneys provided. Nor did the local IP addresses match any of the possible sequences available under the configuration of the router in Malachi’s house, Moulton said. There were no other routers or devices in the house that could have used those local IP addresses, Moulton said.

Submission + - Ingenuity to take first Mars flight on Monday (cnn.com)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: Assuming no last minute glitches, the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is scheduled to take its first flight at 3:30 AM ET on Monday, April 19th.

Ingenuity's initial flight test was cancelled when the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a "watchdog" timer expiration. This occurred as it was trying to transition the flight computer from 'Pre-Flight' to 'Flight' mode.

Results of the flight won't be known right away. Instead, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will analyze the results and have a briefing at 2 PM ET on Monday.

Submission + - SPAM: Several security flaws have been found in dnsmasq 7

Submitted by Joe2020
Joe2020 writes: According to a cert note does the popular Linux server software dnsmasq have several security flaws. Dnsmasq is used to provide DNS, DHCP and TFTP services on networks. The types of attacks possible by these bugs range from cache poisoning to redirect users to alternative sites, to remote code execution due to a memory corruption.

[spam URL stripped]...
[spam URL stripped]...

Submission + - Mozilla is working on a Firefox design refresh (ghacks.net) 4

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Mozilla is working on a design refresh for the organization's Firefox web browser that it refers to as Photon internally. The last major design refresh of Firefox was unveiled in Firefox 57 in November 2017; it was known as Proton back then.

Mozilla did change several interface elements after the release of Firefox 57, recently the controversial address bar overhaul that it launched in Firefox 75 Stable.

Information about the design refresh is limited at this point in time. Mozilla created a meta bug on Bugzilla as a reference to keep track of the changes. While there are not any mockups or screenshots posted on the site, the names of the bugs provide information on the elements that will get a refresh. These are:

The Firefox address bar and tabs bar.
The main Firefox menu.
Infobars.
Doorhangers.
Context Menus.
Modals.

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