Month: January 2018

Danish police charge 1,000 people following Facebook sex video

Facebook is no stranger to notifying police when there’s clear evidence of a crime, but its latest action has had consequences on a much larger scale than usual. Danish police have charged 1, 004 young people (some under 18) after Facebook notified authorities that Messenger users were sharing a video of two teens under 15 years old having sex, violating laws against the distribution of indecent images of children. Many of those who shared the video did so ‘just’ a few times, police said , but others shared it hundreds of times — they knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t realize it was illegal. Anyone found guilty would face no more than 20 days in prison, but they’d also be added to an offender registry for the next 10 years. The last messages were shared in the fall of 2017, but charges are only coming now because it’s a “very large and complex case, ” according to police. The investigation included four Danish police bureaus, and came after US authorities relayed Facebook’s warning to Europol. It can be tricky to catch ad hoc sharing of illegal videos on messaging services like this, both because of the private nature of the messages and because some users are bound to have end-to-end encryption turned on. Ultimately, it relies on someone in the sharing chain deciding to report the offending material — and in this case, it’s clear that it took a while before someone came forward. Privacy concerns are going to rule out active monitoring, but this does suggest that Facebook and others might want to do more to encourage voluntary reports. Via: BBC Source: The Local

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Danish police charge 1,000 people following Facebook sex video

Quika promises free satellite internet for developing countries

Facebook’s plans for free satellite internet access may have run into some… setbacks , but another company is promising to make that ubiquitous data a practical reality. Quika, a company led by the chief of satellite provider Talia, is launching a free satellite broadband service in the second quarter of 2018. It’s promising speedy, low-latency Ka-band data in developing countries where income inequality and a lack of infrastructure (especially in rural areas) make conventional internet access impractical for most. Service will begin with Afghanistan, Iraq and most of Africa, but there are promises of more countries afterward. The strategy behind this no-charge access isn’t terribly complicated: Quika is planning to support its free plan through its paid services for enterprises and internet providers. Also, while the service itself will be free, Quika notes that customers may have to pay for setup or make a deposit on the necessary hardware. It’s far from certain that this will work as well as advertised. It depends on having enough corporate customers to subsidize free access, and capacity could be an issue. It may not be very fast if there are loads of users, and launching additional satellites isn’t always quick or easy. If this lives up to promises, though, it could go a long way toward fulfilling promises of democratizing internet access. Google is already providing some free balloon-based internet , but only on a limited, experimental scale. This could make free internet a staple in many parts of the world. Source: BusinessWire , Quika

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Quika promises free satellite internet for developing countries

‘Very High Level of Confidence’ Russia Used Kaspersky Software For Devastating NSA Leaks

bricko shares a report from Yahoo Finance: Three months after U.S. officials asserted that Russian intelligence used popular antivirus company Kaspersky to steal U.S. classified information, there are indications that the alleged espionage is related to a public campaign of highly damaging NSA leaks by a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers. In August 2016, the Shadow Brokers began leaking classified NSA exploit code that amounted to hacking manuals. In October 2017, U.S. officials told major U.S. newspapers that Russian intelligence leveraged software sold by Kaspersky to exfiltrate classified documents from certain computers. (Kaspersky software, like all antivirus software, requires access to everything stored on a computer so that it can scan for malicious software.) And last week the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. investigators “now believe that those manuals [leaked by Shadow Brokers] may have been obtained using Kaspersky to scan computers on which they were stored.” Members of the computer security industry agree with that suspicion. “I think there’s a very high level of confidence that the Shadow Brokers dump was directly related to Kaspersky … and it’s very much attributable, ” David Kennedy, CEO of TrustedSec, told Yahoo Finance. “Unfortunately, we can only hear that from the intelligence side about how they got that information to see if it’s legitimate.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Very High Level of Confidence’ Russia Used Kaspersky Software For Devastating NSA Leaks

Lenovo Discovers and Removes Backdoor In Networking Switches

An anonymous reader writes: Lenovo engineers have discovered a backdoor in the firmware of RackSwitch and BladeCenter networking switches. The company released firmware updates last week. The Chinese company said it found the backdoor after an internal security audit of firmware for products added to its portfolio following the acquisitions of other companies. Lenovo says the backdoor affects only RackSwitch and BladeCenter switches running ENOS (Enterprise Network Operating System). The backdoor was added to ENOS in 2004 when ENOS was maintained by Nortel’s Blade Server Switch Business Unit (BSSBU). Lenovo claims Nortel appears to have authorized the addition of the backdoor “at the request of a BSSBU OEM customer.” In a security advisory regarding this issue, Lenovo refers to the backdoor under the name of “HP backdoor.” The backdoor code appears to have remained in the firmware even after Nortel spun BSSBU off in 2006 as BLADE Network Technologies (BNT). The backdoor also remained in the code even after IBM acquired BNT in 2010. Lenovo bought IBM’s BNT portfolio in 2014. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lenovo Discovers and Removes Backdoor In Networking Switches

Yuzu emulates Nintendo’s Switch

Yuzu is an experimental emulator for Nintendo’s Switch console. No, it does not run commercial games. It is written in C++ with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux and macOS. The emulator is currently only useful for homebrew development and research purposes. yuzu only emulates a subset of Switch hardware and therefore is generally only useful for running/debugging homebrew applications. At this time, yuzu does not run any commercial Switch games. yuzu can boot some games, to varying degrees of success, but does not implement any of the necessary GPU features to render 3D graphics.

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Yuzu emulates Nintendo’s Switch

Gut bacteria linked to cataclysmic epidemic that wiped out 16th-century Mexico

Enlarge / Entrance of Hernan Cortes into Mexico (credit: Kurz & Allison ) In the wake of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, waves of epidemics slammed Mexico. By 1576, the population, which had been more than 20 million before the Spanish arrived, had crashed to two million. One brutal outbreak in 1545 was estimated to have killed between five and 15 million alone—or up to 80 percent of the population . But, like the other epidemics, the disease behind the 1545 outbreak was a complete mystery—until now. Genetic evidence pulled from the teeth of 10 victims suggests that the particularly nasty bacterium Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Paratyphi C contributed to the scourge of fever, bleeding, dysentery, and red rashes recorded at the time. The genetic data, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution , offers the first molecular evidence to try to explain what’s “regarded as one of the most devastating epidemics in New World history,” the authors conclude. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gut bacteria linked to cataclysmic epidemic that wiped out 16th-century Mexico

Google’s museum app finds your fine art doppelgänger

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s a museum portrait somewhere that looks like you and you’re ready to have your ego crushed, there’s now an app for that. Google Arts & Culture’s latest update now lets you take a selfie, and using image recognition, finds someone in its vast art collection that most resembles you. It will then present you and your fine art twin side-by-side, along with a percentage match, and let you share the results on social media, if you dare. My Google Arts & Culture match is with a guy literally named Bourgeois A post shared by Steve Dent (@stevetdent) on Jan 15, 2018 at 1:43am PST The app is like an automated version of an article that circulated recently showing folks standing in front of portraits at museums. In many cases, the old-timey people in the paintings resemble them uncannily, but, other than in rare cases, that’s not the case at all with Google’s app. Google matched me with someone who doesn’t look like me in the slightest, a certain Sir Peter Francois Bourgeois, based on a painting hanging in Dulwich Picture Gallery. Taking a buzz around the internet, other folks were satisfied with their matches, some took them as a personal insult, and many were just plain baffled, in that order, as presented below. From all that, it’s pretty clear that deep learning systems like those from Google are great at matching individual details, but painfully miss the big picture. The left is from “Children Begging, ” from the second half of the 17th century. Anonymous painter, Italy. I can kind of see it #googleartsandculture A post shared by Avren Keating (@mxavren) on Jan 12, 2018 at 7:59am PST Nothing like a little self esteem boost from google arts and culture on a Saturday night pic.twitter.com/hYYtdNN308 — Amy Stone (@amyhannumstone) January 14, 2018 Cool 🙂 #googleartsandculture A post shared by BoyWonder (@boywonderrocks) on Jan 14, 2018 at 5:12am PST Via: GQ Source: Google Arts & Culture (Play Store)

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Google’s museum app finds your fine art doppelgänger

Ford teases ‘Mach 1’ electric performance SUV for 2020

At its NAIAS 2018 preview event, Ford just dropped a few details about an electric vehicle it plans to release in 2020. The “Mach 1” (cribbing its name from the famous Mustang model ) is an all-electric performance SUV under development by Team Edison in Ford’s recently-opened Corktown facility . That group’s stated mission is to “accelerate both the development and adoption of electric vehicles, ” but this is the first project we’re getting any information about. Appropriately, its reveal comes at an event where Ford also showed off a performance gas SUV with the Edge ST and a “Bullitt” edition of the Mustang. Whatever Mach 1 is, it appears the Tesla Model X will have some competition… eventually. Source: Ford (Twitter)

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Ford teases ‘Mach 1’ electric performance SUV for 2020

Watch this timelapse of a guy single-handedly building a log cabin the woods

Well, this is damn impressive. Outdoorsman Shawn James built a log cabin in the Canadian woods all by himself — without power tools — and created this timelapse video to prove it. He writes : At the beginning of the video, I show a winter drone photo of the cabin in the snow in December. Then I flashback to the first balsam fir tree I cut down with a saw and axe near the cabin. I drag the trees into place and clear the cabin site. All summer, I cut the notches in the logs as I built the cabin up, offsite. Once I was finished notching the logs with a log scribe, saw, axe, adze and wood carving gouge, I loaded up the entire cabin of logs and moved them to my land near Algonquin Park, Ontario Canada… Because the cabin is offgrid, I have used handtools for most of the build and without power, I have no options on site regardless. The tiny house will continue to be operated with power, not even renewable energy for now, so I’m heating the cabin with a woodstove fire place, which I also cook on. ( digg )

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Watch this timelapse of a guy single-handedly building a log cabin the woods

How do you play this boardgame from 375 C.E.

This board game was found in Poprad, Slovakia inside a German prince’s tomb that dates to 375 C.E. Now, researchers at Switzerland’s Museum of Games are trying to figure out how to play it. From Smithsonian: It’s likely the board is designed to play Latrunculi or Ludus latrunculorum, which translates as “Mercenaries” or the “Game of Brigands” or some variant. That game was originally derived from an ancient Greek game called petteia which is referenced in the works of Homer. There are a handful of vague descriptions of how the game was played in ancient sources, but researchers have not successfully figured out the complete set of rules so far, though many gamers have come up with their own guesses. “There were plenty of board games in ancient times with many variants, but reconstructing the playing technique is a very complicated process that only top experts can solve,” Karol Pieta, the archaeologist in charge of the dig, tells the Spectator. ” Researchers Are Trying to Figure Out How to Play This Ancient Roman Board Game ” (Smithsonian)

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How do you play this boardgame from 375 C.E.