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New Ransomware Offers The Decryption Keys If You Infect Your Friends

MalwareHunterTeam has discovered “Popcorn Time, ” a new in-development ransomware with a twist. Gumbercules!! writes: “With Popcorn Time, not only can a victim pay a ransom to get their files back, but they can also try to infect two other people and have them pay the ransom in order to get a free key, ” writes Bleeping Computer. Infected victims are given a “referral code” and, if two people are infected by that code and pay up — the original victim is given their decryption key (potentially). While encrypting your files, Popcorn Time displays a fake system screen that says “Downloading and installing. Please wait” — followed by a seven-day countdown clock for the amount of time left to pay its ransom of one bitcoin. That screen claims that the perpetrators are “a group of computer science students from Syria, ” and that “all the money that we get goes to food, medicine, shelter to our people. We are extremely sorry that we are forcing you to pay but that’s the only way that we can keep living.” So what would you do if this ransomware infected your files? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Ransomware Offers The Decryption Keys If You Infect Your Friends

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

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

‘Star In a Jar’ Fusion Reactor Works, Promises Infinite Energy

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would generate energy in the same manner as the sun and other stars, but down here on Earth. Incorporated into terrestrial power plants, this “star in a jar” technology would essentially provide Earth with limitless clean energy, forever. And according to new reports out of Europe this week, we just took another big step toward making it happen. In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device is on track and working as planned. The space-age system, known as a stellerator, generated its first batch of hydrogen plasma when it was first fired up earlier this year. The new tests basically give scientists the green light to proceed to the next stage of the process. It works like this: Unlike a traditional fission reactor, which splits atoms of heavy elements to generate energy, a fusion reactor works by fusing the nuclei of lighter atoms into heavier atoms. The process releases massive amounts of energy and produces no radioactive waste. The “fuel” used in a fusion reactor is simple hydrogen, which can be extracted from water. The W7-X device confines the plasma within magnetic fields generated by superconducting coils cooled down to near absolute zero. The plasma — at temperatures upwards of 80 million degrees Celsius — never comes into contact with the walls of the containment chamber. Neat trick, that. David Gates, principal research physicist for the advanced projects division of PPPL, leads the agency’s collaborative efforts in regard to the W7-X project. In an email exchange from his offices at Princeton, Gates said the latest tests verify that the W7-X magnetic “cage” is working as planned. “This lays the groundwork for the exciting high-performance plasma operations expected in the near future, ” Gates said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers Point Out ‘Theoretical’ Security Flaws In AMD’s Upcoming Zen CPU

An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: The security protocol that governs how virtual machines share data on a host system powered by AMD Zen processors has been found to be insecure, at least in theory, according to two German researchers. The technology, called Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), is designed to encrypt parts of the memory shared by different virtual machines on cloud servers. AMD, who plans to ship SEV with its upcoming line of Zen processors, has published the technical documentation for the SEV technology this past April. The German researchers have analyzed the design of SEV, using this public documentation, and said they managed to identify three attack channels, which work, at least in theory. [In a technical paper released over the past weekend, the researchers described their attacks:] “We show how a malicious hypervisor can force the guest to perform arbitrary read and write operations on protected memory. We describe how to completely disable any SEV memory protection configured by the tenant. We implement a replay attack that uses captured login data to gain access to the target system by solely exploiting resource management features of a hypervisor.” AMD is scheduled to ship SEV with the Zen processor line in the first quarter of 2017. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber

The tail of a beautiful, feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar. It is a huge breakthrough that could help open a new window on the biology of a group that dominated Earth for more than 160 million years. From a report on the National Geographic: The semitranslucent mid-Cretaceous amber sample, roughly the size and shape of a dried apricot, captures one of the earliest moments of differentiation between the feathers of birds of flight and the feathers of dinosaurs. Inside the lump of resin is a 1.4-inch appendage covered in delicate feathers, described as chestnut brown with a pale or white underside. CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae. NPR has a story on how this amber was found. An excerpt from it reads: In 2015, Lida Xing was visiting a market in northern Myanmar when a salesman brought out a piece of amber about the size of a pink rubber eraser. Inside, he could see a couple of ancient ants and a fuzzy brown tuft that the salesman said was a plant. As soon as Xing saw it, he knew it wasn’t a plant. It was the delicate, feathered tail of a tiny dinosaur. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cesarean Births Could Be Affecting Human Evolution, Study Says

CanadianRealist writes: Larger babies delivered by cesarean section may be affecting human evolution. Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1, 000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1, 000 births today, [according to estimates from researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria.] Science Alert reports: “In the past, larger babies and mothers with narrow pelvis sizes might both have died in labour. Thanks to C-sections, that’s now a lot less likely, but it also means that those ‘at risk’ genes from mothers with narrow pelvises are being carried into future generations. More detailed studies would be required to actually confirm the link between C-sections and evolution, as all we have now is a hypothesis based on the birth data.” Agreed, more studies required part. Cesareans may simply be becoming more common with “too large” defined as cesarean seems like a better idea. It’s reasonable to pose the question based simply on an understanding of evolution. Like it’s reasonable to conjecture that length of human pregnancy is a compromise between further development in utero, and chance of mother and baby surviving the delivery. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cesarean Births Could Be Affecting Human Evolution, Study Says

Qualcomm Debuts 10nm Server Chip To Attack Intel Server Stronghold

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: Qualcomm and its Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies subsidiary announced today that the company has already begun sampling its first 10nm server processor. The Centriq 2400 is the second generation of Qualcomm server SOCs, but it is the first in its new family of 10nm FinFET processors. The Centriq 2400 features up to 48 custom Qualcomm ARMv8-compliant Falkor cores and comes a little over a year after Qualcomm began developing its first-generation Centriq processors. Qualcomm’s introduction of a 10nm server chip while Intel is still refining its 14nm process appears to be a clear shot across Intel’s bow–due not only to the smaller process, but also its sudden lead in core count. Intel’s latest 14nm E7 Broadwell processors top out at 24 cores. Qualcomm isn’t releasing more information, such as clock speeds or performance specifications, which would help to quantify the benefit of its increased core count. The server market commands the highest margins, which is certainly attractive for the mobile-centric Qualcomm, which found its success in the relatively low-margin smartphone segment. However, Intel has a commanding lead in the data center with more than a 99% share of the world’s server sockets, and penetrating the segment requires considerable time, investment, and ecosystem development. Qualcomm unveiled at least a small portion of its development efforts by demonstrating Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux and Java running on the Centriq 2400 processor. The company also notes that Falkor is SBSA compliant, which means that it is compatible with any software that runs on an ARMv8-compliant server platform. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

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