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Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020, Report Says

Michael Larabel, writing for Phoronix: Intel is planning to end “legacy BIOS” support in their new platforms by 2020 in requiring UEFI Class 3 or higher. Making rounds this weekend is a slide deck from the recent UEFI Plugfest. Brian Richardson of Intel talked about the “last mile” barriers to removing legacy BIOS support from systems. By 2020, they will be supporting no less than UEFI Class 3, which means only UEFI support and no more legacy BIOS or CSM compatibility support mode. But that’s not going to force on UEFI Secure Boot unconditionally: Secure Boot enabled is considered UEFI Class 3+. Intel hasn’t removed legacy BIOS / CSM support yet due to many customers’ software packages still relying upon legacy BIOS, among other reasons. Removing the legacy BIOS support will mitigate some security risks, needs less validation by vendors, allows for supporting more modern technologies, etc. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020, Report Says

A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever

New submitter mrcoder83 shares a report from Futurism: Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been able to create a stable plasma ring without a container. According to the Caltech press release, it’s “essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle.” This remarkable feat was achieved using only a stream of water and a crystal plate, made from either quartz and lithium niobate. The union of these tools induced a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect. The researchers blasted the crystal plate with an 85-micron-diameter jet of water (narrower than a human hair) from a specially designed nozzle. The water hit the crystal plate with a pressure of 632.7 kilograms of force per centimeter (9, 000 pounds per square inch), generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1, 000 feet per second) — as fast as a bullet from a handgun. Plasma was formed as a result of the creation of an electric charge when the water hit the crystal surface. The flow of electrons from the point of contact ionizes the molecules and atoms in the gas area surrounding the water’s surface, forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that’s dozens of microns in diameter. Caltech posted a video of the plasma ring on their YouTube channel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever

Boeing 757 Testing Shows Airplanes Vulnerable To Hacking, DHS Says

schwit1 shares a report from Aviation Today: A team of government, industry and academic officials successfully demonstrated that a commercial aircraft could be remotely hacked in a non-laboratory setting last year, a DHS official said Wednesday at the 2017 CyberSat Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia. “We got the airplane on Sept. 19, 2016. Two days later, I was successful in accomplishing a remote, non-cooperative, penetration. [Which] means I didn’t have anybody touching the airplane, I didn’t have an insider threat. I stood off using typical stuff that could get through security and we were able to establish a presence on the systems of the aircraft.” Hickey said the details of the hack and the work his team are doing are classified, but said they accessed the aircraft’s systems through radio frequency communications, adding that, based on the RF configuration of most aircraft, “you can come to grips pretty quickly where we went” on the aircraft. Patching avionics subsystem on every aircraft when a vulnerability is discovered is cost prohibitive, Hickey said. The cost to change one line of code on a piece of avionics equipment is $1 million, and it takes a year to implement. For Southwest Airlines, whose fleet is based on Boeing’s 737, it would “bankrupt” them. Hickey said newer models of 737s and other aircraft, like Boeing’s 787 and the Airbus Group A350, have been designed with security in mind, but that legacy aircraft, which make up more than 90% of the commercial planes in the sky, don’t have these protections. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Boeing 757 Testing Shows Airplanes Vulnerable To Hacking, DHS Says

Linux 4.14 Has Been Released

diegocg quotes Kernel Newbies: Linux 4.11 has been released. This release adds support for bigger memory limits in x86 hardware (128PiB of virtual address space, 4PiB of physical address space); support for AMD Secure Memory Encryption; a new unwinder that provides better kernel traces and a smaller kernel size; support for the zstd compression algorithm has been added to Btrfs and Squashfs; support for zero-copy of data from user memory to sockets; support for Heterogeneous Memory Management that will be needed in future GPUs; better cpufreq behaviour in some corner cases; faster TBL flushing by using the PCID instruction; asynchronous non-blocking buffered reads; and many new drivers and other improvements. Phoronix has more on the changes in Linux 4.14 — and notes that its codename is still “Fearless Coyote.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Text Adventure Competition Reports A 36% Spike In Entries

There’s just four days left to vote for the winner of the 23rd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. An anonymous reader writes: This year’s contest set a record, drawing 79 new text adventures — 36% more entries than the previous year’s 58. All of this year’s games are available online, furthering the competition’s goal of “making them freely available in order to encourage the creation, play, and discussion of interactive fiction.” (And they’re also available in a 236-megabyte .zip archive.) Each game’s developer is competing for $4, 800 in cash prizes, to be shared among everyone who finishes in the top two-thirds (including a $247 prize to the first-place winner). Authors of the top-rated games will also get to choose from a 38-prize pool (which includes another $200 cash prize donated by Asymmetric Publications, as well as a “well-loved” used Wii console). But the most important thing is there’s a bunch of fun new text adventures to play. Reviews are already appearing online, lovingly collected by the Interactive Fiction Wiki. And one game designer even livestreamed their text adventure-playing on Twitch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Text Adventure Competition Reports A 36% Spike In Entries

Windows 10’s Version ofd AirDrop Lets You Quickly Share Files Between PCs

Microsoft is testing its “Near Share” feature of Windows 10 in the latest Insider build (17035) today, which will let Windows 10 PCs share documents or photos to PCs nearby via Bluetooth. The Verge reports: A new Near Share option will be available in the notification center, and the feature can be accessed through the main share function in Windows 10. Files will be shared wirelessly, and recipients will receive a notification when someone is trying to send a file. Microsoft’s addition comes just a day after Google unveiled its own AirDrop-like app for Android. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10’s Version ofd AirDrop Lets You Quickly Share Files Between PCs

MINIX: Intel’s Hidden In-chip Operating System

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ZDNet: Matthew Garrett, the well-known Linux and security developer who works for Google, explained recently that, “Intel chipsets for some years have included a Management Engine [ME], a small microprocessor that runs independently of the main CPU and operating system. Various pieces of software run on the ME, ranging from code to handle media DRM to an implementation of a TPM. AMT [Active Management Technology] is another piece of software running on the ME.” At a presentation at Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Ronald Minnich, a Google software engineer reported that systems using Intel chips that have AMT, are running MINIX. So, what’s it doing in Intel chips? A lot. These processors are running a closed-source variation of the open-source MINIX 3. We don’t know exactly what version or how it’s been modified since we don’t have the source code. In addition, thanks to Minnich and his fellow researchers’ work, MINIX is running on three separate x86 cores on modern chips. There, it’s running: TCP/IP networking stacks (4 and 6), file systems, drivers (disk, net, USB, mouse), web servers. MINIX also has access to your passwords. It can also reimage your computer’s firmware even if it’s powered off. Let me repeat that. If your computer is “off” but still plugged in, MINIX can still potentially change your computer’s fundamental settings. And, for even more fun, it “can implement self-modifying code that can persist across power cycles.” So, if an exploit happens here, even if you unplug your server in one last desperate attempt to save it, the attack will still be there waiting for you when you plug it back in. How? MINIX can do all this because it runs at a fundamentally lower level. According to Minnich, “there are big giant holes that people can drive exploits through.” He continued, “Are you scared yet? If you’re not scared yet, maybe I didn’t explain it very well, because I sure am scared.” Also read: Andrew S. Tanenbaum’s (a professor of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit) open letter to Intel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MINIX: Intel’s Hidden In-chip Operating System

Another Million Subscribers Cut the Pay TV Cord Last Quarter

A report from FierceCable says that a million more U.S. pay TV subscribers cut the TV cord last quarter. “Only five of the seven biggest pay TV providers have released their third quarter subscriber data, but collectively these companies saw a net loss of 632, 000 pay TV subscribers during the period (385, 000 for AT&T and DirecTV, 125, 000 for Comcast, 104, 000 for Charter, 18.000 for Verizon FiOS TV), ” reports DSLReports. “Dish has yet to report its own cord cutting tallies, but the company is again expected to be among the hardest hit due to a high level of retransmission fee feuds and a lack of broadband bundles.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Another Million Subscribers Cut the Pay TV Cord Last Quarter

Student Charged By FBI For Hacking His Grades More Than 90 times

An anonymous reader shares a report: In college, you can use your time to study. Or then again, you could perhaps rely on the Hand of God. And when I say “Hand of God, ” what I really mean is “keylogger.” Think of it like the “Nimble Fingers of God.” “Hand of God” (that makes sense) and “pineapple” (???) are two of the nicknames allegedly used to refer to keyloggers used by a former University of Iowa wrestler and student who was arrested last week on federal computer-hacking charges in a high-tech cheating scheme. According to the New York Times, Trevor Graves, 22, is accused in an FBI affidavit of working with an unnamed accomplice to secretly plug keyloggers into university computers in classrooms and in labs. The FBI says keyloggers allowed Graves to record whatever his professors typed, including credentials to log into university grading and email systems. Court documents allege that Graves intercepted exams and test questions in advance and repeatedly changed grades on tests, quizzes and homework assignments. This went on for 21 months — between March 2015 and December 2016. The scheme was discovered when a professor noticed that a number of Graves’ grades had been changed without her authorization. She reported it to campus IT security officials. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Student Charged By FBI For Hacking His Grades More Than 90 times

After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills ‘Firebug’ Dev Tool

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: The Firebug web development tool, an open source add-on to the Firefox browser, is being discontinued after 12 years, replaced by Firefox Developer Tools. Firebug will be dropped with next month’s release of Firefox Quantum (version 57). The Firebug tool lets developers inspect, edit, and debug code in the Firefox browser as well as monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in webpages. It still has more than a million people using it, said Jan Honza Odvarko, who has been the leader of the Firebug project. Many extensions were built for Firebug, which is itself is an extension to Firefox… The goal is to make debugging native to Firefox. “Sometimes, it’s better to start from scratch, which is especially true for software development, ” Odvarko said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills ‘Firebug’ Dev Tool