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Submission + - Apple Card can be damaged by wallets and jeans (bbc.co.uk) 3

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Apple has advised owners of its new credit card to keep it away from leather and denim. Keeping the card in a leather wallet or in the pocket of a pair of jeans could cause "permanent discolouration".

The Apple Card is a relatively plain matt white credit card made of titanium, which was designed to stand out against other credit cards. But people have poked fun at the company after reading that the card could be so easily damaged.

Apple has published a guide advising customers how to "safely store and carry" their Apple Card.

Submission + - Moscow's Blockchain Voting System Cracked a Month Before Election (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A French security researcher has found a critical vulnerability in the blockchain-based voting system Russian officials plan to use next month for the 2019 Moscow City Duma election. Pierrick Gaudry, an academic at Lorraine University and a researcher for INRIA, the French research institute for digital sciences, found that he could compute the voting system's private keys based on its public keys. This private keys are used together with the public keys to encrypt user votes cast in the election. Gaudry blamed the issue on Russian officials using a variant of the ElGamal encryption scheme that used encryption key sizes that were too small to be secure. This meant that modern computers could break the encryption scheme within minutes.

What an attacker can do with these encryption keys is currently unknown, since the voting system's protocols weren't yet available in English, so Gaudry couldn't investigate further. "Without having read the protocol, it is hard to tell precisely the consequences, because, although we believe that this weak encryption scheme is used to encrypt the ballots, it is unclear how easy it is for an attacker to have the correspondence between the ballots and the voters," the French researcher said. "In the worst case scenario, the votes of all the voters using this system would be revealed to anyone as soon as they cast their vote."

Submission + - Japan's Digital Pop Stars Blur Line Between Virtual and Reality (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ryosei Takehisa, 24 years old, doesn’t have any children—unless you count an animated character with elfin ears called Mikuriya Kuon.

In live appearances on YouTube, the kimono-clad Kuon character, voiced by an actor hired by Mr. Takehisa, dispenses advice about the latest videogames and plays rock-paper-scissors with her fans.

The creator says he considers Kuon his “real daughter” even though she “resides within pixels.” While others may compete for fame or page views, “for me, I’m totally satisfied just with the fact that she was born and is continuing to live life in good health,” says Mr. Takehisa.

Digital avatars with human traits have long carved out a role on social media, on Instagram in particular. Japan, as it often does, has taken the idea and run with it, with its virtual characters now estimated to number more than 3,000.

Submission + - FAA Considers Relaxing Licensing Requirements for Rockets (regulations.gov)

Submitted by apoc.famine
apoc.famine writes: In a proposed change to the licensing of spaceflight operations, the FAA writes:

"This action would fundamentally change how the FAA licenses launches and reentries...by proposing a regulatory approach that relies on performance-based regulations rather than prescriptive regulations.....This action would also enable flexible timeframes, remove unnecessary ground safety regulations, redefine when launch begins to allow specified pre-flight operations prior to license approval, and allow applicants to seek a license to launch from multiple sites. This proposal would significantly streamline and simplify licensing of launch and reentry operations, would enable novel operations, and would result in net cost savings."

The proposal is out for public comment at the link provided. Numerous companies engaged in spaceflight operations (ULA, Boeing, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, etc.) have requested clarifications about what this proposal means. Concerns about public safety are understandably being voiced as well.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 132

by Zorro (#59102134) Attached to: A Major Cyber Attack Could Be Just As Deadly As Nuclear Weapons

"A GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb is one of the most powerful conventional weapons in existence. The bomb weighs more than 10,000 kilograms and contains 8,164 kilograms of explosive. Its explosion is equivalent to 11 tons of TNT and the blast radius is a mile wide."

That is 11 Tons not Kilotons. You would still be red mist from the blast effect far beyond 100 feet.

Submission + - Smart ovens are a dumb idea (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: At least three smart June Ovens have turned on in the middle of the night and heated up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The ovens’ owners aren’t sure why this happened, and June is claiming that the users are at fault.

The June Oven debuted in 2015 as a $1,495 countertop oven that uses a camera and computer vision to identify food that’s been placed inside. It also pairs with an app that allows people to choose their temperature and cooking settings, as well as live stream their food as it cooks thanks to the built-in camera. Since its launch, competitors have sprung up, including Tovala and Brava.

June blamed people accidentally clicking "pre heat" while browsing recipes in their own app, and in one case an Alexa malfunction.

Submission + - A New Species of Leech Is Discovered Near Washington, D.C. (smithsonianmag.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

In the summer of 2015, when Smithsonian research zoologist Anna Phillips and other scientists were standing in slow-moving swamp water, letting leeches latch onto their bare legs or gathering them up in nets from muddy pond bottoms, they didn't realize that some of the bloodsuckers they'd collected belonged to an entirely new species. But in a just-published paper in the Journal of Parasitology , Phillips and her colleagues from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Royal Ontario Museum report that a previously unknown leech species, Macrobdella mimicus, is the first to be discovered on the continent in more than 40 years.

These are not the leeches on K street or Capitol Hill.

Submission + - SPAM: Advertisers Blacklist News Stories Containing Forbidden Words

Submitted by Zorro
Zorro writes: Companies are increasingly insisting their ads do not appear near articles or videos that contain any of a long list of words.

Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits.

If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more than 400 words, including “bomb,” “immigration” and “racism.” Also off-limits: “Trump.”

Top 15 Forbidden Words: Dead, Shooting, Murder, Gun, Rape, Bomb, Died, Attack, Killed, Suicide, Trump, Crash, Crime, Explosion, Accident.
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