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FBI Hacked Over 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries Based on One Warrant

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: In January, Motherboard reported on the FBI’s “unprecedented” hacking operation, in which the agency, using a single warrant, deployed malware to over one thousand alleged visitors of a dark web child pornography site. Now, it has emerged that the campaign was actually several orders of magnitude larger. In all, the FBI obtained over 8, 000 IP addresses, and hacked computers in 120 different countries, according to a transcript from a recent evidentiary hearing in a related case. The figures illustrate the largest ever known law enforcement hacking campaign to date, and starkly demonstrate what the future of policing crime on the dark web may look like. This news comes as the US is preparing to usher in changes that would allow magistrate judges to authorize the mass hacking of computers, wherever in the world they may be located. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Hacked Over 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries Based on One Warrant

US Dementia Rates Drop 24%, New Study Finds

A new study involving more than 21, 000 people across the country finds that dementia rates in people over age 65 fell from 11.6 percent in 2000 to 8.8 percent in 2012 — a decline of 24 percent. CNN reports: The decline in dementia rates translates to about one million fewer Americans suffering from the condition, said John Haaga, director of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the new study. Dementia is a general term for a loss of memory or other mental abilities that’s severe enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s disease, which is believed to be caused by a buildup of plaques and tangles in the brain, is the most common type of dementia. Vascular dementia is the second most common type of dementia and occurs after a stroke. The study, which began in 1992, focuses on people over age 50, collecting data every two years. Researchers conduct detailed interviews with participants about their health, income, cognitive ability and life circumstances. The interviews also include physical tests, body measurements and blood and saliva samples. Although researchers can’t definitively explain why dementia rates are decreasing, Langa said doctors may be doing a better job controlling high blood pressure and diabetes, which can both boost the risk of age-related memory problems. High blood pressure and diabetes both increase the risk of strokes, which kill brain cells, increasing the risk of vascular dementia. Authors of the study found that senior citizens today are better educated than even half a generation ago. The population studied in 2012 stayed in school 13 years, while the seniors studied in 2000 had about 12 years of education, according to the study. People who are better educated may have more intellectually stimulating jobs and hobbies that help exercise their brains, Langa said. The study has been published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Dementia Rates Drop 24%, New Study Finds

The MacBook Pro Touch Bar plays ‘Doom’ because of course it does

Doom is the rice of the video game world. It’s a staple of the industry and it works with everything , running flawlessly on ATMs , printers , pianos , calculators , e-readers , chainsaws and even on a terminal within Doom itself . This week, Facebook iOS engineer Adam Bell got Doom running on one more unlikely appliance: the Touch Bar of the latest MacBook Pro. Playing the original Doom on a MacBook Pro isn’t impressive in and of itself, but squeezing those monstrous pixels onto the 2170 x 60 resolution Touch Bar is a notable accomplishment (even if the bar is basically a thin, elongated Apple Watch). Bell showed off his handiwork in a YouTube video published on Sunday, complete with classic sound effects, music and all. Bell also configured the Touch Bar to display the Doom HUD, featuring health, ammo, weapons and other in-game stats at the top of the MacBook Pro keyboard, ostensibly while the game itself runs on the main screen. Side note, as ridiculous (ly amazing) as Doom is running on the Touch Bar is… the HUD is equally great pic.twitter.com/RFwq7nJ7ae — Adam Bell (@b3ll) November 20, 2016 Bethesda and developer id Software released a big Doom reboot this year and it’s just as gloriously gory as the series’ pixelated roots. It features multiple nods to the original game, including a level editor with classic assets . It’s nominated in multiple Game Awards categories , including Game of the Year. Via: The Verge Source: @b3ll

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The MacBook Pro Touch Bar plays ‘Doom’ because of course it does

New York’s District Attorney: Roll Back Apple’s iPhone Encryption

An anonymous reader quotes Mashable: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that he wants Apple’s encryption to go back to how it was in early 2014. Back then, police could basically extract any information they wanted after getting a warrant. “Doing nothing about this problem will perpetuate an untenable arms race between private industry and law enforcement, ” Vance said on Thursday. “Federal legislation is our only chance to lay these arms aside.” Vance said he’s got 423 “lawfully-seized Apple devices” that his employees can’t do anything with. Forty-two of those devices “pertain to homicide or attempted murder cases” according to the district attorney’s office, and a similar number “relate to sex crimes.” The argument, of course, is that the district attorney’s office would have an easier time solving crimes if they had access to these phones… Apple believes being forced to hack into phones at the government’s will is an unreasonable burden. ZDNet adds that “the call for federal legislation could be given a popular boost by president elect Donald Trump, who previously called for a boycott on Apple products when it refused to help the FBI.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New York’s District Attorney: Roll Back Apple’s iPhone Encryption

Final NASA Eagleworks Paper Confirms Promising EM Drive Results

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hacked: Earlier this month Hacked reported that a draft version of the much expected EmDrive paper by the NASA Eagleworks team, had been leaked. Now, the final version of the paper has been published. The NASA Eagleworks paper, titled “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum, ” has been published online as an open access “article in advance” in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. The paper will appear in the December print issue of the journal. The final version of the paper is very similar to the leaked draft. In particular, the NASA scientists confirm the promising experimental results: “Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggested that the system was consistently performing at 1.2 +/- 0.1 mNkW, which was very close to the average impulsive performance measured in air. A number of error sources were considered and discussed.” The scientists add that, though the test campaign was not focused on optimizing performance and was more an exercise in existence proof, it is still useful to put the observed thrust-to-power figure of 1.2 mN/kW in context. “[For] missions with very large delta-v requirements, having a propellant consumption rate of zero could offset the higher power requirements. The 1.2 mN/kW performance parameter is over two orders of magnitude higher than other forms of ‘zero propellant’ propulsion, such as light sails, laser propulsion, and photon rockets having thrust-to-power levels in the 3.33–6.67 uN/kW (or 0.0033–0.0067 mN/kW) range.” In other words, a modest thrust without having to carry fuel can be better, especially for long-distance space missions, than a higher thrust at the cost of having to carry bulky and heavy propellant reserves, and the EmDrive performs much better than the other “zero propellant” propulsion systems studied to date. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Final NASA Eagleworks Paper Confirms Promising EM Drive Results

Mozilla Releases Firefox 50

Mozilla has begun seeding the binary and source packages of the final release of Firefox 50 web browser on all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux and macOS. From a report on Softpedia: We have to admit that we expected to see some major features and improvements, but that hasn’t happened. The biggest new feature of the Firefox 50.0 release appears to be emoji for everyone. That’s right, the web browser now ships with built-in emoji for GNU/Linux distributions, as well as other operating systems that don’t include native emoji fonts by default, such as Windows 8.0 and previous versions. Also new, Firefox 50.0 now shows lock icon strikethrough for web pages that offer insecure password fields. Another interesting change that landed in the Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser is the ability to cycle through tabs in recently used order using the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut. Moreover, it’s now possible to search for whole words only using the “Find in page” feature. Last but not the least, printing was improved as well by using the Reader Mode, which now uses the accel-(opt/alt)-r keyboard shortcut, the Guarana (gn) locale is now supported, the rendering of dotted and dashed borders with rounded corners (border-radius) has been fixed as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Releases Firefox 50

Facebook Employees Are In Revolt Over Fake News

Some Facebook employees have formed a secret, unofficial task force to help the company combat fake news, according to a Buzzfeed report that broke last night. The group has reportedly challenged Mark Zuckerberg’s comments claiming that fake news on the platform didn’t affect the election. Read more…

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Facebook Employees Are In Revolt Over Fake News

Microsoft Says Windows 10 Version 1607 is The Most Secure Windows Ever

A new white paper from Microsoft claims that “devices running Windows 10 are 58% less likely to encounter ransomware than when running Windows 7”. But an anonymous reader brings more news from Windows-watcher Paul Thurrott: in a separate blog post, it also makes its case for why Windows 10 version 1607 — that is, Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update installed — is the most secure Windows version yet. Improvements in this release include: Microsoft Edge runs Adobe Flash Player in an isolated container, and Edge exploits cannot execute other applications… [And] the Windows Defender signature delivery channel works faster than before so that the in-box anti-virus and anti-malware solution can help block ransomware, both in the cloud and on the client. Additionally, Windows Defender responds to new threats faster using improved cloud protection and automatic sample submission features, plus improved behavioral heuristics aimed at detecting ransomware-related activities. Interestingly, the paper also touts Microsoft’s “Advancing machine-learning systems in our email services to help stop the spread of ransomware via email delivery.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Says Windows 10 Version 1607 is The Most Secure Windows Ever

Hack Exposes 412 Million Accounts on AdultFriendFinder Sites

“Almost every account password was cracked, thanks to the company’s poor security practices, ” reports ZDNet — even for “deleted” accounts. An anonymous reader quotes their article: The hack includes 339 million accounts from AdultFriendFinder.com, which the company describes as the “world’s largest sex and swinger community [and] also includes over 15 million “deleted” accounts that weren’t purged from the databases. On top of that, 62 million accounts from Cams.com, and 7 million from Penthouse.com were stolen, as well as a few million from other smaller properties owned by the company. The data accounts for two decades’ worth of data from the company’s largest sites, according to breach notification LeakedSource, which obtained the data… The three largest site’s SQL databases included usernames, email addresses, and the date of the last visit, and passwords, which were either stored in plaintext or scrambled with the SHA-1 hash function, which by modern standards isn’t cryptographically as secure as newer algorithms. The attack apparently coincides with the discovery of “a local file inclusion flaw on the AdultFriendFinder site, which if successfully exploited could allow an attacker to remotely run malicious code on the web server. ” Ironically, Friend Finder Networks doesn’t even own Penthouse.com anymore. They sold the site to a new owner last February. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hack Exposes 412 Million Accounts on AdultFriendFinder Sites

Web of Trust, Downloaded 140M Times, Pulled From Extension Stores After Revelations That It Sells Users’ Data

According to multiple reports, Web of Trust, one of the top privacy and security extensions for web browsers with over 140 million downloads, collects and sells some of the data of its users — and it does without properly anonymizing it. Upon learning about this, Mozilla, Google and Opera quickly pulled the extension off their respective extension stores. From a report on The Register: A browser extension which was found to be harvesting users’ browsing histories and selling them to third parties has had its availability pulled from a number of web browsers’ add-on repositories. Last week, an investigative report by journalists at the Hamburg-based German television broadcaster, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), revealed that Web of Trust Services (WoT) had been harvesting netizens’ web browsing histories through its browser add-on and then selling them to third parties. While WoT claimed it anonymised the data that it sold, the journalists were able to identify more than 50 users from the sample data it acquired from an intermediary. NDR quoted the data protection commissioner of Hamburg, Johannes Caspar, criticising WoT for not adequately establishing whether users consented to the tracking and selling of their browsing data. Those consent issues have resulted in the browser add-on being pulled from the add-on repositories of both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, although those who have already installed the extension in their browsers will need to manually uninstall it to stop their browsing being tracked. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Web of Trust, Downloaded 140M Times, Pulled From Extension Stores After Revelations That It Sells Users’ Data