Tag: deals

AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the antivirus would select the same memory address space every time it would run. If attackers found out the memory space’s address, they could tell their malicious code to execute in the same space, at the same time, and have it execute with root privileges, which most antivirus have on Windows PCs. It’s a basic requirement these days for software programmers to use ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to prevent their code from executing in predictable locations. Affected products: AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky. All “quietly” issued fixes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor

New submitter insitus writes: On 10 December, Germany’s new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor

Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer Into Open Live Writer

SmartAboutThings writes: Windows Live Writer is a blogging tool that Microsoft originally released back in 2006, and it still remains popular today, which has prompted Microsoft to promise that it will make it open source earlier this year. Now the company has officially open-sourced and forked Windows Live Writer into Open Live Writer, having put its repositories on GitHub already. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer Into Open Live Writer

WordPress 4.4 Arrives

An anonymous reader with news of the newest release of open source WordPress, which adds a slew of new features to the blog management tool that will “make your site more connected and responsive.” You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download (7.3MB). WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers 25 percent of the Web. The latest version is dubbed “Clifford” in honor of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WordPress 4.4 Arrives

Theremin’s Bug Let Soviets Spy On USA For More Than 7 Years

szczys writes: Theremin, yes the same Theremin who built the instrument that made the Star Trek theme song famous, had a hand in espionage as well. Albeit not a willing one. Turns out his life is actually quite tragic. In addition to that story, Adam Fabio takes a trip through the details of “The Thing”, a bug installed in the US Embassy by the Soviet Union during the cold war. It used no batteries, instead depending on a carrier frequency transmitted by the “listener”, causing the resonant cavity to transmit back the audio from the room at a higher frequency. Pretty nifty, and so was the hiding place: a hand-carved wooden seal of the United States. Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts, right? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Theremin’s Bug Let Soviets Spy On USA For More Than 7 Years

Los Angeles Flirts With Pre-Crime

An anonymous reader writes: The city of Los Angeles is considering a new plan to fight prostitution: sending letters to men who solicit prostitutes in the hopes that the letters are seen by family members. Why not just arrest them while they’re doing it? Because these letters aren’t being sent to the houses of men who were convicted, or even arrested. Instead, automated license plate readers would scan the cars driving down streets known to have a prostitution problem, and the letters would be sent to the address associated with those vehicles. An article about the plan says, “There isn’t ‘potential’ for abuse here, this is a legislated abuse of technology that is already controversial when it’s used by police for the purpose of seeking stolen vehicles, tracking down fugitives and solving specific crimes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Los Angeles Flirts With Pre-Crime

After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name

An anonymous reader writes: From January 2016, Adobe Flash will be renamed to ‘Adobe Animate CC’, killing one of the most unfortunate names in web security as the company pushes the product further and further to HTML5 output. Adobe’s release about the update, which will form part of the annual Creative Cloud upgrade, states that a third of all material output from the program is now HTML5. The transitional HTML5 Adobe animation program Edge Animate will be replaced by the renamed Flash product. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name

MST3K Kickstarter Poised To Break Kickstarter Record

New submitter the_Bionic_lemming writes: Recently Joel Hodgson, the creator of Mystery Science 3000 — which had a successful run of over 197 shows — has after 15 years launched a kickstarter to relaunch the series. In just over two weeks Joel has been wildly successful in not only having over 25000 fans contribute, but actually scoring the second-highest show kickstarter on record — he has just under two weeks to shoot past the Number 1 kickstarter, Veronica Mars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MST3K Kickstarter Poised To Break Kickstarter Record

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

prisoninmate writes: The current daily build of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) remains based on the Linux 4.2 kernel packages of the stable Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, while the latest and most advanced Linux 4.3 kernel is tracked on the master-next branch of the upcoming operating system. In the meantime, the Ubuntu Kernel Team announced plans for moving to Linux kernel 4.4 for the final release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

DecryptorMax/CryptInfinite Ransomware Decrypted, No Need To Pay Ransom

An anonymous reader writes: Emsisoft has launched a new tool capable of decrypting files compromised by the DecryptorMax (CryptInfinite) ransomware. The tool is quite easy to use, and will generate a decryption key. For best results users should compare an encrypted and decrypted file, but the tool can also get the decryption key by comparing an encrypted PNG with a random PNG downloaded off the Internet. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DecryptorMax/CryptInfinite Ransomware Decrypted, No Need To Pay Ransom