Linux fréttir

AmiMoJo writes: Link previews are a ubiquitous feature found in just about every chat and messaging app, and with good reason. They make online conversations easier by providing images and text associated with the file that's being linked. Unfortunately, they can also leak our sensitive data, consume our limited bandwidth, drain our batteries, and, in one case, expose links in chats that are supposed to be end-to-end encrypted. Among the worst offenders, according to research published on Monday, were messengers from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Line. [...] Facebook Messenger and Instagram both downloaded a 2.6GB test file, as well as executing arbitrary Javascript code on their servers. When informed of this Facebook (which owns Instagram) said that was the intended behaviour, even though it could be used to e.g. hijack their servers for cryptocurrency mining. The three best messaging platforms were Signal, WhatsApp, Threema and iMessage, at least in terms of properly protecting your personal data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We'll see how long it lasts as 20H2 starts doing the rounds

While Microsoft celebrates Halloween with scary data deletion stories of Windows past, May's Windows 10 has swiped the popularity prize from its predecessor.…

A group of search engines from around the world are banding together to demand European Union regulators address Google's dominance in the online search market. They are also urging the EU to take a closer look at Google's controversial auction process. From a report: The news comes hot on the heels of the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) antitrust case, which formally launched last week. The suit alleges that Google violates anti-competition laws by crowding out rivals in the internet search and advertising markets. DuckDuckGo (U.S.), Ecosia (Germany), Lilo and Qwant (France), and Seznam (Czech Republic) have penned an open letter to European Commission executive VP Margrethe Vestager asking her to take a "renewed look" at the policing of Google's search market dominance. As an initial step, the companies are calling for a trilateral meeting between themselves, the European Commission (EC), and Google to look at the issue of search engine competition in Europe and elsewhere. More specifically, Google's smaller rivals want to establish a more "effective preference menu," giving Android users an easier way to choose a default search engine when setting up their device for the first time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'I've seen programmes on American prisons' says wife

A Briton is reportedly fighting extradition to the United States after deploying webcam malware onto hundreds of women's laptops so he could spy on them undressing and having sex.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google knows that many people will be using YouTube to keep up with the US election on November 3rd. Many politicians use the platform to communicate with voters, and some news organizations will likely livestream round-the-clock coverage. Keeping up with Election Day can be difficult, though, so YouTube is preparing a small but useful information panel that will appear at the top of search results and election-centric videos. It will remind users that "results may not be final" and, using a massive 'SHOW ME' button, point them toward a Google-run election hub. It's not the first time that YouTube has used this feature. Back in March 2019, the Google-owned operation added an alert that appeared alongside controversial search queries. If someone had typed 'virus in paracetamol,' for instance, YouTube would throw up a small card that details the hoax and, more importantly, a trustworthy assessment from a fact-checking partner such as The Quint. It was launched in India but has since expanded to other countries including the US. Last month, YouTube also introduced some panels that appear alongside election-related queries -- such as how to vote, and how to register to vote in your state -- and link to information by authoritative sources such as the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chip industry consolidation dance continued this morning as AMD has entered into an agreement to buy Xilinx for $35 billion, giving the company access to a broad set of specialized workloads. From a report: AMD sees this deal as combining two companies that complement each other's strengths without cannibalizing its own markets. CEO Lisa Su believes the acquisition will help make her company the high performance chip leader. "By combining our world-class engineering teams and deep domain expertise, we will create an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to define the future of high performance computing," Su said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First you could break up by text – next year you can take the phone with you

UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom is introducing new rules that will stop phone companies selling carrier-locked handsets.…

Amid fanfare in March, California officials celebrated the launch of a multimillion-dollar contract with Verily -- Google's health-focused sister company -- that they said would vastly expand COVID testing among the state's impoverished and underserved communities. But seven months later, San Francisco and Alameda counties -- two of the state's most populous -- have severed ties with the company's testing sites amid concerns about patients' data privacy and complaints that funding intended to boost testing in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods instead was benefiting higher-income residents in other communities. From a report: San Francisco and Alameda are among at least 28 counties, including Los Angeles, where California has paid Verily to boost testing capacity through contracts collectively worth $55 million, according to a spokesperson for the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services. About half of them have received COVID tests through six mobile units that travel among rural areas. Gov. Gavin Newsom has heralded the investment as a game changer in addressing persistent inequities in access to COVID testing across the state that tend to fall along lines of ethnicity and income. The goal, he said in April, touting six new Verily testing sites, was to "make sure we're truly testing California broadly defined, not just parts of California and those that somehow have the privilege of getting ahead of the line." Yet the roadblocks for getting underrepresented populations to use the program soon became apparent to Alameda County officials. In a June letter to California Secretary of Health Mark Ghaly, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and other members of the county's COVID-19 Racial Disparities Task Force raised numerous concerns about the Verily protocols.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel rival up 50%+ in revs, profits - just one week after Chipzilla 30% profit plunge

Chipmaker AMD celebrated bonzer revenue and profit jumps for its third quarter ended Sept 26 [PDF] with a $35bn all-stock acquisition of adaptive computing outfit Xilinx.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Link previews are a ubiquitous feature found in just about every chat and messaging app, and with good reason. They make online conversations easier by providing images and text associated with the file that's being linked. Unfortunately, they can also leak our sensitive data, consume our limited bandwidth, drain our batteries, and, in one case, expose links in chats that are supposed to be end-to-end encrypted. Among the worst offenders, according to research published on Monday, were messengers from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Line. More about that shortly. The researchers behind Monday's report, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk, found that Facebook Messenger and Instagram were the worst offenders. As the chart below shows, both apps download and copy a linked file in its entirety -- even if it's gigabytes in size. Again, this may be a concern if the file is something the users want to keep private. It's also problematic because the apps can consume vast amounts of bandwidth and battery reserves. Both apps also run any JavaScript contained in the link. That's a problem because users have no way of vetting the security of JavaScript and can't expect messengers to have the same exploit protections modern browsers have. LinkedIn performed only slightly better. Its only difference was that, rather than copying files of any size, it copied only the first 50 megabytes. Haj Bakry and Mysk reported their findings to Facebook, and the company said that both apps work as intended. Meanwhile, when the Line app opens an encrypted message and finds a link, it appears to send the link to the Line server to generate a preview. "We believe that this defeats the purpose of end-to-end encryption, since LINE servers know all about the links that are being sent through the app, and who's sharing which links to whom," Haj Bakry and Mysk wrote. Discord, Google Hangouts, Slack, Twitter, and Zoom also copy files, but they cap the amount of data at anywhere from 15MB to 50MB. [This chart] provides a comparison of each app in the study.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Which is proof such fripperies are down to the developer, rather than Apple

Microsoft has finally introduced trackpad support for Office Microsoft 365 on the iPad.…

PSA: Maintaining the open-source OS can turn your beard grey

Open Source Summit Europe It's official. The upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel is destined to become the next "longterm maintenance" release for the open-source operating system.…

Microsoft program outputs ready-to-roll model from image input set

Microsoft has built a desktop app called Lobe that can be used to train object-recognition models without having to write a single line of code. Getting that model into an application, though, will require some programming.…

Situation: The New Normal?

Bork!Bork!Bork! A train with supernatural powers of prediction features in today's edition of signage behaving strangely. Who would could have known that the electronic information panel was warning passengers of what was to come?…

And Deutsche Telekom's happy with this airborne base station plan

A British startup is hoping to strap 5G antennas to liquid-hydrogen-powered high-altitude pseudo-satellites in the hope of replacing mobile base stations on the ground.…

According to Phys.Org, about 3% of SpaceX's Starlink satellites "have proven to be unresponsive and are no longer maneuvering in orbit, which could prove hazardous to other satellites and spacecraft in orbit." From the report: In order to prevent collisions in orbit, SpaceX equips its satellites with krypton Hall-effect thrusters (ion engines) to raise their orbit, maneuver in space and deorbit at the end of their lives. However, according to two recent notices SpaceX issued to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the summer (mid-May and late June), several of their satellites have lost maneuvering capability since they were deployed. Unfortunately, the company did not provide enough information to indicate which of their satellites were affected. For this reason, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Chandra X-ray Center presented his own analysis of the satellites' orbital behavior to suggest which satellites have failed. The analysis was posted on McDowell's website (Jonathan's Space Report), where he combined SpaceX's own data with U.S. government sources. From this, he determined that about 3% of satellites in the constellation have failed because they are no longer responding to commands. Naturally, some level of attrition is inevitable, and 3% is relatively low as failure rates go. But every satellite that is incapable of maneuvering due to problems with its communications or its propulsion system creates a collision hazard for other satellites and spacecraft. As McDowell told Business Insider: "I would say their failure rate is not egregious. It's not worse than anybody else's failure rates. The concern is that even a normal failure rate in such a huge constellation is going to end up with a lot of bad space junk."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

v5.28 of open-source Arm OS brings support for latest mini 'puter as well as hundreds of fixes

An update for open-source Arm operating system RISC OS at the weekend features stable support for the Raspberry Pi 4 computer.…

Get a feel for the gizmo's programming environment

If you’ve been thinking about playing with an Nvidia single-board computer for an AI task, but you’re not quite ready to part with your cash for something like the Jetson Nano just yet, here’s an application-level emulator of the hardware you can tinker with.…

Analyst firm asserts coordinated action without central brain is the way to cope with turmoil

IT organisations that want to thrive in plague-time need to model themselves on jellyfish, says analyst firm Gartner.…

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has developed a concept for a new Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) engine that they claim is safer and more reliable than previous NTP designs and with far greater efficiency than a chemical rocket. The concept could reduce Earth-Mars travel time to just three months. New Atlas reports: According to Dr. Michael Eades, principal engineer at USNC-Tech, the new concept engine is more reliable than previous NTP designs and can produce twice the specific impulse of a chemical rocket. Specific impulse is a measure of a rocket's efficiency. To fuel the concept, UNSC-Tech uses a Fully Ceramic Micro-encapsulated (FCM) fuel to power the engine's reactor. This fuel is based on High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU), which is derived from reprocessed civilian nuclear fuel and is enriched to between 5 and 20 percent -- greater than that of civilian reactors and less than that of naval reactors. The fuel is then encapsulated into particles coated with zirconium carbide (ZrC). The company claims that this fuel is much more rugged than conventional nuclear fuels and can operate at high temperatures. This produces safer reactor designs and a high thrust and specific impulse that could previously only be obtained with highly-enriched uranium. In addition, such fuel can be produced with current supply chains and manufacturing plants. It is hoped the new concept could lead to nuclear engines that reduce deep space mission times drastically, with a crewed mission to Mars arriving in as little as three months. Beyond that, the concept is aimed at a commercial market as well as with NASA and the US Department of Defense, allowing for more ambitious private missions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.