Tag: advertising

Forbes Asks Readers To Disable Adblock, Serves Up Malvertising

Deathlizard writes with a report at Engadget that when this year’s “Forbes 30 Under 30” list came out , “it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list. On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Forbes Asks Readers To Disable Adblock, Serves Up Malvertising

After Years of Serving X11, X.Org Stands To Lose Its One-Letter Domain

An anonymous reader writes: The X.Org domain predates the X.Org Foundation. It was used in the ’90s as a destination by The Open Group around the X Window System. While many are expecting Mir and Wayland to eventually succeed the X.Org Server, it seems the X.Org/X11 Server may outlive the valuable domain. Thanks to poor management by the X.Org Foundation, they risk losing access to their one-letter domain. Procrastination, paired with not transferring the domain when forming the non-profit foundation, has led to a last-minute mess. They left the domain registered for years to a person who is no longer involved with X.Org — and doesn’t want to relinquish it. In the few days until the domain expires, they are hoping for a “Hail Mary.” Let this be a lesson for open-source projects to better manage their assets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After Years of Serving X11, X.Org Stands To Lose Its One-Letter Domain

Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets

An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10, 000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. “Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can’t see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets

How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers

Trailrunner7 writes: Few, if any, companies or government agencies store more sensitive personal information than the IRS, and consumers have virtually no insight into how that data is used and secured. But, as the results of a recent Justice Department investigation show, when you start poking around in those dark corners, you sometimes find very ugly things. Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. The scheme relied upon one key ingredient for its success: access to taxpayers’ personal information. And it brought the alleged perpetrators more than $1 million. What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers

IPv6 Turns 20, Reaches 10 Percent Deployment

An anonymous reader writes: Ars notes that the RFC for IPv6 was published just over 20 years ago, and the protocol has finally reached the 10% deployment milestone. This is an increase from ~6% a year ago. (The percentage of users varies over time, peaking on the weekends when most people are at home instead of work.) “If a 67 percent increase per year is the new normal, it’ll take until summer 2020 until the entire world has IPv6 and we can all stop slicing and dicing our diminishing stashes of IPv4 addresses.” “A decade or so ago, it was still quite common for people to complain about certain IPv6 features, and proclaim the protocol would never catch on. Although part of that can be blamed on the conservative nature of network administrators, it’s true that adopting IPv6 requires abandoning some long standing IPv4 practices. For instance, with IPv4, it’s common to use Network Address Translation (NAT) so multiple devices can share the use on an IPv4 address. IPv6 has more than enough addresses to give each device its own, so there’s no NAT in IPv6. The Internet is probably better off without NAT and the complications that it adds, but without NAT as a first but relatively porous line of defense against random packets coming in from the open Internet, it’s necessary to be much more deliberate about which types of packets to accept and which to reject.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IPv6 Turns 20, Reaches 10 Percent Deployment

State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified

An anonymous reader sends this report from NBC News: The State Department on Thursday released 5, 500 more pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails, but fell short of meeting a court-ordered target of making 82 percent of the former secretary of state’s messages public by the end of 2015. The email dump is the latest release from the private server Clinton used during her time as America’s top diplomat. The State Department said it failed to meet the court’s goal because of “the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule.” Portions of 275 documents in the batch were upgraded to classified, though they were not classified at the time they were sent to Clinton’s personal email, according to the State Department. In total, 1, 274 of her emails were retroactively classified by the government before their release. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified

New York Begins Public Gigabit Wi-Fi Rollout

An anonymous reader writes: Workers in New York City have begun installing the city’s first LinkNYC kiosks. The kiosks are free, public Wi-Fi access points, which are taking the spots formerly occupied by phone booths. 500 more of these hubs will be installed by mid-July, and the full network will eventually include over 7, 500 of them. “Once completed, the hubs will also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two 55-inch advertising displays.” The displays are expected to bring the city $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years. When the project was announced in 2014, officials said construction would start “next year.” They sure cut it close. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New York Begins Public Gigabit Wi-Fi Rollout

Google Glass For Work Is Sleeker, Tougher and Foldable

An anonymous reader writes: FCC filings published today are offering a glimpse of the “Enterprise Edition” of Google Glass. According to Engadget: “…The work-focused eyepiece touts a much slicker (and likely more durable) design with both a larger display prism and a hinge that lets you fold it up for travel. The test photos also reveal a spot for a magnetic battery attachment and what looks to be a speedier Atom processor. There’s still no word on when Google will announce this headset, although the FCC presence hints that it might not take long.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Glass For Work Is Sleeker, Tougher and Foldable

North Korea’s Operating System Analyzed

Bruce66423 points out an analysis at The Guardian of North Korea’s Red Star Linux-based OS, based on a presentation Sunday to the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin : The features of their Fedora based OS include a watermarking system to enable tracking of files — even if unopened. The operating system is not just the pale copy of western ones that many have assumed, said Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess of the German IT security company ERNW, who downloaded the software from a website outside North Korea and explored the code in detail. … This latest version, written around 2013, is based on a version of Linux called Fedora and has eschewed the previous version’s Windows XP feel for Apple’s OS X – perhaps a nod to the country’s leader Kim Jong-un who, like his father, has been photographed near Macs. The OS, unsurprisingly, allowed only tightly fettered access to web sites, using a whitelist approach that gives access to government-controlled or approved sites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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North Korea’s Operating System Analyzed

APT Speed For Incremental Updates Gets a Massive Performance Boost

jones_supa writes: Developer Julian Andres Klode has this week made some improvements to significantly increase the speed of incremental updates with Debian GNU/Linux’s APT update system. His optimizations have yielded the apt-get program to suddenly yield 10x performance when compared to the old code. These improvements also make APT with PDiff now faster than the default, non-incremental behavior. Beyond the improvements that landed this week, Julian is still exploring other areas for improving APT update performance. More details via his blog post. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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APT Speed For Incremental Updates Gets a Massive Performance Boost