108357208
submission
eatmorekix writes:
Perhaps it’s the fact that Apple solders on all of its main parts on its laptops. Perhaps it’s the inability for users to repair or upgrade their own machines. Maybe it’s the keyboard.
For whatever reason, laptops are looking mighty attractive for Hackintoshing these days, despite the knotty qualms some people have with it. (For the unfamiliar, a Hackintosh is a generally Intel-based machine not made by Apple, that runs MacOS. Often, they’re custom-built desktop machines, but laptops with the right specifications work as well.)
That said, if you can get past those, you can put together a fairly stable machine that can handle much of what Apple’s own offerings can—without the incredibly high price to boot.
I can speak from experience here because I did all the hard work myself already. As frustrated by the keyboard and the price as by the fact that nothing was upgradeable on the current generation of MacBook Pros, I went on this journey myself a year ago—and made it out on the other side much more knowledgeable about why MacOS is a great, quite flexible operating system, often (and unfortunately) placed in a not-so-perfect machine. I put in the time, offered the occasional helping hand on the forums, did a bit of research on the culture of Hackintosh, and gained a great appreciation for the process.
I’ve been using a Hackintosh laptop as a daily driver for a year. Now, I’m sharing my insights here.
108303558
submission
eatmorekix writes:
A hacker broke into thousands of accounts belonging to users of two GPS tracker apps, giving him the ability to monitor the locations of tens of thousands of vehicles and even turn off the engines for some of them while they were in motion, Motherboard has learned.
The hacker, who goes by the name L&M, told Motherboard he hacked into more than 7,000 iTrack accounts and more than 20,000 ProTrack accounts, two apps that companies use monitor and manage fleets of vehicles through GPS tracking devices. The hacker was able to track vehicles in a handful of countries around the world, including South Africa, Morocco, India, and the Philippines. On some cars, the software has the capability of remotely turning off the engines of vehicles that are stopped or are traveling 12 miles per hour or slower, according to the manufacturer of certain GPS tracking devices.
By reverse engineering ProTrack and iTrack’s Android apps, L&M said he realized that all customers are given a default password of 123456 when they sign up.
At that point, the hacker said he brute-forced “millions of usernames” via the apps’ API. Then, he said he wrote a script to attempt to login using those usernames and the default password.
This allowed him to automatically break into thousands of accounts that were using the default password and extract data from them.
108113208
submission
eatmorekix writes:
In 2012, Paragon Studios announced it was shutting down City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer online game where a community of players created their own superheroes, went on adventures together, and formed lasting friendships.
The news was crushing to the game's devoted community because they could no longer play and hang out in the virtual space they loved, and today, years after the game's shutdown, the community is in an uproar again. As Massivelyop first reported, a group of City of Heroes players called the Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers (SCORE) had created their own, private server where they could continue to play the game for the last six years, but kept it relatively secret.
"I like the rest of you have been lied to," Reddit user avoca wrote in a thread titled "BE ANGRY" on the City of Heroes subreddit. "I have been told City of Heroes has been shutdown. Today, I learn I have been mistaken. For all of these years, City of Heroes has lived on. In secret. For every passing day and every withdrawal symptom, a person is playing on this secret server, and they are gaining xp, leveling up, performing task forces and forming supergroups."
108081106
submission
eatmorekix writes:
On Saturday, Microsoft confirmed to TechCrunch that some users of the company’s email service had been targeted by hackers. A hacker or group of hackers had first broken into a customer support account for Microsoft, and then used that to gain access to information related to customers’ email accounts such as the subject lines of their emails and who they’ve communicated with.
But the issue is much worse than previously reported, with the hackers able to access email content from a large number of Outlook, MSN, and Hotmail email accounts, according to a source who witnessed the attack in action and described it before Microsoft’s statement, as well as screenshots provided to Motherboard. Microsoft confirmed to Motherboard that hackers gained access to the content of some customers’ emails.
107486406
submission
eatmorekix writes:
It only took around ten seconds.
On Wednesday, I created a fresh Instagram account, and followed ‘Beware the Needle’, a user with 34,000 followers which posts a steady stream of anti-vaccination content. I also followed the user’s "backup" account mentioned in its bio, the creator clearly aware that Instagram may soon ban them. Instagram's “Suggested for You” feature then recommended I follow other accounts, including "Vaccines are Genocide" and "Vaccine Truth." I followed the latter, and checked which accounts Instagram now thought would be a good fit for me: another 24 accounts that were either explicitly against vaccinations in their profile description, or that posted anti-vaccine content.
They included pseudo-scientists claiming that vaccines cause autism; accounts with tens of thousands of followers promising the "truth" around vaccinations through memes and images of misleading statistics, as well as individual mothers spouting the perceived, but false, dangers of vaccinating children against measles, polio, and other diseases.
“The sheep continue to line up for the massacre. No questions asked,” the caption on a post from "Vaccine Truth" reads.
107315104
submission
eatmorekix writes:
Glocom, a front company for the government of North Korea that sells sanctioned equipment, isn’t giving up. In 2017, before YouTube quietly removed Glocom’s channel, the company was advertising missile navigation and other military products on the video platform.
But Glocom has returned. It setup a new channel, and also had a presence on Twitter, until Motherboard flagged Glocom’s accounts to social media companies.
The news not only signals the perseverance of parts of the North Korean’s money-making enterprises, but also a slice of the content moderation issues that tech platforms constantly face.
Glocom “is using them as platforms to market sanctions violating products,” Shea Cotton, research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and who has a particular focus on North Korea, told Motherboard in an email.
107280428
submission
eatmorekix writes:
An international group of researchers who have been examining the source code for an internet voting system Switzerland plans to roll out this year have found a critical flaw in the code that would allow someone to alter votes without detection.
The cryptographic backdoor exists in a part of the system that is supposed to verify that all of the ballots and votes counted in an election are the same ones that voters cast. But the flaw could allow someone to swap out all of the legitimate ballots and replace them with fraudulent ones, all without detection.
“The vulnerability is astonishing,” said Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University and did not do the research but read the researchers’ report. “In normal elections, there is no single person who could undetectably defraud the entire election. But in this system they built, there is a party who could do that.”
