December 11, 2016 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Facebook adds a ‘fake news’ reporting option (updated)

Facebook has been getting dragged hard since November 8th — and rightfully so — given the unprecedented amount of shitposts and fake news that dominated the social site in the months leading up to the election. After his initial defense of ” nuh-uh, wasn’t us ” fell on deaf ears, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided to do something about it . The company has begun hitting fake news sites in the wallet , as well as scrubbing BS content through both curation and automation . And, on Sunday, Facebook appears to have quietly rolled out a third method: a new user-reporting feature that specifically calls out fake news for what it is. Update : Turns out that the false news option has been active on the site since last year . Now, when a user reports a post in their timeline (after selecting “I think it shouldn’t be on Facebook” option), they are able to select “It’s a false news story” from the subsequent screen. Notice that it is specifically differentiated from the “It goes against my views” option — namely because facts and your opinions are not interchangeable, regardless of how strongly you believe in either. This move is actually well within the standard Facebook MO. The company has taken a similar stand with regards to the sale of illicit items, like guns, on its website wherein users are expected to self-police the virtual groups they subscribe to. Hopefully though, this reporting tool will be effective because it’s still terrifyingly easy to buy assault weapons from strangers on the social network. Source: Matt Navarra (Twitter)

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Facebook adds a ‘fake news’ reporting option (updated)

Linux Kernel 4.9 Officially Released

“As expected, today, December 11, 2016, Linus Torvalds unleashed the final release of the highly anticipated Linux 4.9 kernel, ” reports Softpedia. prisoninmate shares their article: Linux kernel 4.9 entered development in mid-October, on the 15th, when Linus Torvalds decided to cut the merge window short by a day just to keep people on their toes, but also to prevent them from sending last-minute pull requests that might cause issues like it happened with the release of Linux kernel 4.8, which landed just two weeks before first RC of Linux 4.9 hit the streets… There are many great new features implemented in Linux kernel 4.9, but by far the most exciting one is the experimental support for older AMD Radeon graphics cards from the Southern Islands/GCN 1.0 family, which was injected to the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver… There are also various interesting improvements for modern AMD Radeon GPUs, such as virtual display support and better reset support, both of which are implemented in the AMDGPU driver. For Intel GPU users, there’s DMA-BUF implicit fencing, and some Intel Atom processors got a P-State performance boost. Intel Skylake improvements are also present in Linux kernel 4.9. There’s also dynamic thread-tracing, according to Linux Today. (And hopefully they fixed the “buggy crap” that made it into Linux 4.8.) LWN.net calls this “by far the busiest cycle in the history of the kernel project.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.9 Officially Released

Surprise virus in child mummy unravels thousands of years of disease history

Enlarge (credit: Duggan et al. | Current Biology ) From the pockmarked mummified pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the epic triumph of complete global eradication, smallpox had a remarkable history. But that lengthy history may be in for a massive revision, thanks to a little mummy found in the crypt of a Lithuanian church. The mummy, thought to be of a child between the ages of two and four who died sometime between 1643 and 1665, teemed with the genetic remains of the bygone virus. That smallpox DNA was the oldest ever found—yet it was quite young, evolutionarily speaking. In fact, genetic analysis of the preserved smallpox blueprints, published Thursday in Current Biology , suggests that smallpox is just hundreds of years old, not millennia as many had thought. The finding stands to rewrite the virus’ storied past. Reports of blistering, puss-packed rashes have speckled historical records for thousands of years. The dimpled pharaohs and spotted plagues in China during the 4th century were considered proof that the smallpox virus—aka Variola —plagued humankind for a long, long time. Smallpox caused massive outbreaks throughout Europe in the 17 th century and devastated populations in the New World. But, in 1796, it became the first disease for which there was a vaccine. And in 1979, smallpox was declared the first—and still only—infectious disease of humans to be globally eradicated. (Rinderpest, an infectious disease of cattle and some other animals, has also been eradicated.) Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Surprise virus in child mummy unravels thousands of years of disease history

There’s A New Way People Can Break Into Cars With Keyless Entry Systems And Drive Off

It’s freaky enough when hackers can disable brakes, control a steering wheel or shut down an engine as a vehicle goes down the road. But hacking can happen when a car is vacant, and there’s apparently a device making its way over from Europe that tricks keyless systems into unlocking and starting a car for theft. Read more…

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There’s A New Way People Can Break Into Cars With Keyless Entry Systems And Drive Off

Bank Glitch Allows Man to Spend Over $1 Million and Walk Away Free

Normally a glitch is a bad thing. Maybe it means your video game character gets stuck in a wall or maybe a glitch gets you wrongfully arrested . For an Australian man named Luke Moore, a simple bank glitch meant that he was able to blow $1.3 million on cars, travel, strippers and drugs over the course of two years. Read more…

5-Year-Old Critical Linux Vulnerability Patched

msm1267 quotes Kaspersky Lab’s ThreatPost: A critical, local code-execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel was patched more than a week ago, continuing a run of serious security issues in the operating system, most of which have been hiding in the code for years. Details on the vulnerability were published Tuesday by researcher Philip Pettersson, who said the vulnerable code was introd in August 2011. A patch was pushed to the mainline Linux kernel December 2, four days after it was privately disclosed. Pettersson has developed a proof-of-concept exploit specifically for Ubuntu distributions, but told Threatpost his attack could be ported to other distros with some changes. The vulnerability is a race condition that was discovered in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel, and Pettersson said that a local attacker could exploit the bug to gain kernel code execution from unprivileged processes. He said the bug cannot be exploited remotely. “Basically it’s a bait-and-switch, ” the researcher told Threatpost. “The bug allows you to trick the kernel into thinking it is working with one kind of object, while you actually switched it to another kind of object before it could react.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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5-Year-Old Critical Linux Vulnerability Patched