Source: Hacker News
Setting up a new machine, I was reminded that the default Firefox tab style after 89 is “utter lack of visual separation, but with lots of useless empty space.” I’ve hacked sloppy solutions on several other machines, but it looks … Continue reading
Source: Hacker News
Source: Engadget
Politicians are determined to put a stop to brokers who compromise privacy by selling your data. Motherboard has learned Elizabeth Warren and other senators are introducing a bill, the Health and Location Data Protection Act, that would ban brokers from selling or transferring a person's medical and positional info outside of limited circumstances. The main exceptions would include HIPAA-compliant activities (such as sharing patient records between facilities) and First Amendment-protected speech.
The legislation would also give the Federal Trade Commission $1 billion over the next decade to help fund enforcement. The FTC, state attorneys general and individuals would also have the power to sue and seek injunctions. Bill cosponsors include longtime data privacy advocate Ron Wyden as well as Bernie Sanders, finance committee chair Patty Murray and HELP committee chair Sheldon Whitehouse.
The act comes in response to numerous instances where companies and government bodies violated privacy by purchasing data through brokers. Bounty hunters bought location data from carriers, for instance, while Google banned a company last year for allegedly selling Android location data indiscriminately. Critics have also accused agencies like ICE and the Secret Service of buying location info through brokers to get data that would normally require a warrant. At the same time, lawmakers are worried about access to abortion seekers' data when the Supreme Court is expected to overturn Roe vs. Wade. This measure could limit anti-abortion politicians and activists hoping to target patients.
Protection bills like this aren't new. Wyden's stalled Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would require agencies to obtain warrants for location data. This would represent one of the most sweeping data controls yet if it became law, however, and reflects mounting opposition to companies that profit from trading sensitive content.
Source: Ars Technica
Microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and other companies contain a newly discovered weakness that remote attackers can exploit to obtain cryptographic keys and other secret data traveling through the hardware, researchers said on Tuesday.
Hardware manufacturers have long known that hackers can extract secret cryptographic data from a chip by measuring the power it consumes while processing those values. Fortunately, the means for exploiting power-analysis attacks against microprocessors is limited because the threat actor has few viable ways to remotely measure power consumption while processing the secret material. Now, a team of researchers has figured out how to turn power-analysis attacks into a different class of side-channel exploit that's considerably less demanding.
The team discovered that dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS)—a power and thermal management feature added to every modern CPU—allows attackers to deduce the changes in power consumption by monitoring the time it takes for a server to respond to specific carefully made queries. The discovery greatly reduces what's required. With an understanding of how the DVFS feature works, power side-channel attacks become much simpler timing attacks that can be done remotely.
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Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge / Beyond adventure lies... forgery? (credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson)
Before last month, Enrico Ricciardi was one of the most respected members of a niche community of classic PC game collectors, with a practically unrivaled collection of rarities that he regularly bragged about on social media. Today, he’s a pariah in that community, the central figure in a wide-ranging alleged forgery scandal that has changed the way many collectors look at their hobby.
At least seven PC game collectors have publicly or privately identified dozens of suspected forgeries they say Ricciardi traded or sold as far back as 2015 and as recently as last month. Collectors estimate that those trades and sales include games that would be valued at well over $100,000 total on the open market if they were authentic.
Ricciardi told Ars he is also a victim who simply unknowingly passed along suspect collectibles without checking them thoroughly enough. Regardless, the overwhelming evidence suggesting that there are many forgeries circulating through the world of rare PC games has shaken the trust of that community to the core.
