Monthly Archives: February 2021

Source: Ars Technica

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Source: Kentucky.com -- Fayette County

No-knock search warrants like the one involved in the police shooting death last March of Breonna Taylor in Louisville would be curtailed under legislation filed Monday in the Kentucky General … Click to Continue »

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | CalypsoArt)

AT&T and Frontier have let their copper phone networks deteriorate through neglect since 2010, resulting in poor service quality and many lengthy outages, a report commissioned by the California state government found. Customers in low-income areas and areas without substantial competition have fared the worst, the report found. AT&T in particular was found to have neglected low-income communities and to have imposed severe price increases adding up to 152.6 percent over a decade.

The report was written in April 2019 but kept private because data submitted by the carriers was deemed confidential and proprietary. The report finally became public after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ruled in December 2020 that a redacted version had to be released by mid-January.

A summary of the CPUC-commissioned report identified six key findings:

Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

After 28 years, the Daft Punk duo are hanging up their helmets.

Daft Punk announced their retirement on Monday by way of an eight-minute video called "Epilogue," which according to Pitchfork was excerpted from Electroma, their 2006 film. In it, the "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" duo slowly walk into the desert in total silence before one of them blows up and the other walks into the distance, with "1993-2021" appearing on screen. In case that wasn't definitive enough, Daft Punk's publicist confirmed to Variety they have, indeed, split up after almost three decades.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo formed Daft Punk in 1993, releasing their most recent studio album, the Grammy-winning Random Access Memories, in 2013. Fans quickly flooded social media Monday to pay tribute and express sadness over the news — not to mention concern that, after Daft Punk's unforgettable work on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack, Tron 3 just won't be the same.

Source: OSNews

One of the most important tasks of the distribution packager is to ensure that the software shipped to our users is free of security vulnerabilities. While finding and fixing the vulnerable code is usually considered upstream’s responsibility, the packager needs to ensure that all these fixes reach the end users ASAP. With the aid of central package management and dynamic linking, the Linux distributions have pretty much perfected the deployment of security fixes. Ideally, fixing a vulnerable dependency is as simple as patching a single shared library via the distribution’s automated update system.

Of course, this works only if the package in question is actually following good security practices. Over the years, many Linux distributions (at the very least, Debian, Fedora and Gentoo) have been fighting these bad practices with some success. However, today the times have changed. Today, for every 10 packages fixed, a completely new ecosystem emerges with the bad security practices at its central point. Go, Rust and to some extent Python are just a few examples of programming languages that have integrated the bad security practices into the very fabric of their existence, and recreated the same old problems in entirely new ways.

This post explains the issue packagers run into very well – and it sure does look like these newer platforms are not very good citizens. I know this isn’t related, but this gives me the same feelings and reservations as Flatpak, Snap, and similar tools.

Source: adafruit industries blog

In a follow-up to her recent video where she electroplated the gas tank of her motorcycle with copper, Laura Kampf decided to try a much easier method of simply painting on a copperplate solution.

She saw a video demonstrating the technique and wanted to try it out. It appears to work. Amazing. As she points out, this could lend itself to all sorts of applications.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Slashdot

In the year 2000, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich answered questions from Slashdot's readers. Late Friday night, the AV Club described Metallica's appearance at the opening ceremonies for the (now online) version of Blizzard Entertainment's annual event BlizzCon: The opening ceremonies were being broadcast online, both through the official BlizzCon page, YouTube, and Twitch. And you know what happens when licensed music gets played on the internet, don't you, folks? That's right: Copyright issues! Per Uproxx, the audio of James, Lars, and the boys' performance apparently went out as per usual on YouTube and the BlizzCon page — although the whole thing appears to have been excised from the YouTube upload of the event. But on Twitch... On Twitch, things did not go so well. Which is to say that, even though it was being hosted on the company's official twitchgaming channel, the performance was ominously preceded by a chyron noting that "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder." And then this happened.... Can we prove that someone at Twitch intentionally picked the dorkiest, most Zelda forest-ass music imaginable to have Metallica rock their little hearts out to, instead of broadcasting their extremely copyrighted music (and thus having to deal with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous DMCA takedown notices to themselves)? Obviously not.... On the other hand, we can prove that it is extremely funny to watch this happen, especially — as many people have pointed out — since Metallica is at least partially responsible for the restrictive character of many online musical streaming laws that dominate the internet today, after their high-profile campaign against Napster way back at the dawn of the MP3. In other news, Diablo II is being remastered and re-released later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: Jayson Photography / Getty Images)

A previously undetected piece of malware found on almost 30,000 Macs worldwide is generating intrigue in security circles, which are still trying to understand precisely what it does and what purpose its self-destruct capability serves.

Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malware’s ultimate goal unknown. The lack of a final payload suggests that the malware may spring into action once an unknown condition is met.

Also curious, the malware comes with a mechanism to completely remove itself, a capability that’s typically reserved for high-stealth operations. So far, though, there are no signs the self-destruct feature has been used, raising the question why the mechanism exists.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments