Tag: facebook

Facebook Admits Blocking WikiLeaks’ DNC Email Links, But Won’t Say Why

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has admitted it blocked links to WikiLeaks’ DNC email dump, but the company has yet to explain why. WikiLeaks has responded to the censorship via Twitter, writing: “For those facing censorship on Facebook etc when trying to post links directly to WikiLeaks #DNCLeak try using archive.is.” When SwiftOnSecurity tweeted, “Facebook has an automated system for detecting spam/malicious links, that sometimes have false positives. /cc, ” Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos replied with, “It’s been fixed.” As for why there was a problem in the first place, we don’t know. Nate Swanner from The Next Web writes, “It’s possible its algorithm incorrectly identified them as malicious, but it’s another negative mark on the company’s record nonetheless. WikiLeaks is a known entity, not some torrent dumping ground. The WikiLeaks link issue has reportedly been fixed, which is great — but also not really the point. The fact links to the archive was blocked at all suggests there’s a very tight reign on what’s allowed on Facebook across the board, and that’s a problem.” A Facebook representative provided a statement to Gizmodo: “Like other services, our anti-spam systems briefly flagged links to these documents as unsafe. We quickly corrected this error on Saturday evening.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Admits Blocking WikiLeaks’ DNC Email Links, But Won’t Say Why

Glassdoor Exposes 600,000 Email Addresses

A web site where users anonymously review their employer has exposed the e-mail addresses — and in some cases the names — of hundreds of thousands of users. An anonymous reader quotes an article from Silicon Beat: On Friday, the company sent out an email announcing that it had changed its terms of service. Instead of blindly copying email recipients on the message, the company pasted their addresses in the clear. Each message recipient was able to see the email addresses of 999 other Glassdoor users… Ultimately, the messages exposed the addresses of more than 2 percent of the company’s users… Last month, the company said it had some 30 million monthly active users, meaning that more than 600, 000 were affected by the exposure… Although the company didnâ(TM)t directly disclose the names of its users, many of their names could be intuited from their email addresses. Some appeared to be in the format of “first name.last name” or “first initial plus last name.” A Glassdoor spokesperson said “We are extremely sorry for this error. We take the privacy of our users very seriously and we know this is not what is expected of us. It certainly isn’t how we intend to operate.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Glassdoor Exposes 600,000 Email Addresses

Linux Kernel 4.7 Officially Released

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The Linux 4.7 kernel made its official debut today with Linus Torvalds announcing, “after a slight delay due to my travels, I’m back, and 4.7 is out. Despite it being two weeks since rc7, the final patch wasn’t all that big, and much of it is trivial one- and few-liners.” Linux 4.7 ships with open-source AMD Polaris (RX 480) support, Intel Kabylake graphics improvements, new ARM platform/board support, Xbox One Elite Controller support, and a variety of other new features. Slashdot reader prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: The biggest new features of Linux kernel 4.7 are support for the recently announced Radeon RX 480 GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) from AMD, which, of course, has been implemented directly into the AMDGPU video driver, a brand-new security module, called LoadPin, that makes sure the modules loaded by the kernel all originate from the same file system, and support for generating virtual USB Device Controllers in USB/IP. Furthermore, Linux kernel 4.7 is the first one to ensure the production-ready status of the sync_file fencing mechanism used in the Android mobile operating system, allow Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) programs to attach to tracepoints, as well as to introduce the long-anticipated “schedutil” frequency governor to the cpufreq dynamic frequency scaling subsystem, which promises to be faster and more accurate than existing ones. Linus’s announcement includes the shortlog, calling this release “fairly calm, ” though “There’s a couple of network drivers that got a bit more loving.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.7 Officially Released

Laser-Armed Martian Robot Now Vaporizing Targets of Its Own Free Will

Slashdot reader Rei writes: NASA — having already populated the Red Planet with robots and armed a car-sized nuclear juggernaut with a laser — have now decided to grant fire control of that laser over to a new AI system operating on the rover itself. Intended to increase the scientific data-gathering throughput on the sometimes glitching rover’s journey, the improved AEGIS system eliminates the need for a series of back-and-forth communication sessions to select targets and aim the laser. Rei’s original submission included a longer riff on The War of the Worlds, ending with a reminder to any future AI overlords that “I have a medical condition that renders me unfit to toil in any hypothetical subterranean lithium mines…” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Laser-Armed Martian Robot Now Vaporizing Targets of Its Own Free Will

Turn Your Android Phone Into a Laptop For $99 With the Superbook

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: A company called Andromium is attempting to harness the processing power of your Android smartphone and turn it into a full fledged computer. The ‘Superbook’ consists of a 11.6-inch laptop shell, which you connect to your phone via a USB Micro-B or Type-C cable, and run the Andromium OS application (currently in beta, but available in the Play Store)… The leader of the project and Company co-founder Gordon Zheng, previously worked at Google and pitched the idea to them… They refused so he quit his job and founded Andromium Inc. In December 2014 the company had introduced their first product which was a dock which used the MHL standard to output to external monitor. That campaign failed, however their newest creation, the Superbook smashed their Kickstarter goal in just over 20 minutes. And within their first 38 hours, they’d crowdfunded $500, 000. In an intriguing side note, Andromium “says it’ll open its SDK so developers can tailor their apps for Andromium, too, though how much support that gets remains to be seen, ” reports Tech Insider. But more importantly, “Andromium says its prototypes are finished, and that it hopes to ship the Superbook to backers by February 2017.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Turn Your Android Phone Into a Laptop For $99 With the Superbook

Hacker Steals 1.6 Million Accounts From Top Mobile Game’s Forum

Zack Whittaker, reporting for ZDNet: A hacker has targeted the official forum of popular mobile game “Clash of Kings, ” making off with close to 1.6 million accounts. The hack was carried out on July 14 by a hacker, who wants to remain nameless, and a copy of the leaked database was provided to breach notification site LeakedSource.com, which allows users to search their usernames and email addresses in a wealth of stolen and hacked data. In a sample given to ZDNet, the database contains (among other things) usernames, email addresses, IP addresses (which can often determine the user’s location), device identifiers, as well as Facebook data and access tokens (if the user signed in with their social account). Passwords stored in the database are hashed and salted. LeakedSource has now added the total 1, 597, 717 stolen records to its systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hacker Steals 1.6 Million Accounts From Top Mobile Game’s Forum

Fortune 500 Company Hires Ransomware Gang To Hack the Competition

It’s no secret that ransomware hackers are in the business to make money. But a new business arrangement hitting the news today may surprise many. Vice’s Motherboard, citing research and investigation (PDF) from security firm F-Secure, is reporting that a Fortune 500 company, the name of which hasn’t been unveiled, hired a ransomware gang to hack its competitors. From the article: In an exchange with a security researcher pretending to be a victim, one ransomware agent claimed they were working for a Fortune 500 company. “We are hired by [a] corporation to cyber disrupt day-to-day business of their competition, ” the customer support agent of a ransomware known as Jigsaw said, according to a new report by security firm F-Secure. “The purpose was just to lock files to delay a corporation’s production time to allow our clients to introduce a similar product into the market first.”In a statement to Motherboard, Mikko Hypponen said, “If this indeed was a case where ransomware was used on purpose to disrupt a competitor’s operation, it’s the only case we know of.” F-Secure adds that the consumer representative noted that “politicians, governments, husbands, wives — people from all walks of life contract [them] to hack computers, cell phones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fortune 500 Company Hires Ransomware Gang To Hack the Competition

Facebook Messenger Hits 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All VoIP Calls

Speaking of instant messaging and VoIP call apps, Facebook announced on Wednesday that Facebook Messenger has hit the 1 billion monthly active users milestone. The company adds that Messenger is just more than a text messenger — in addition to the ambitious bot gamble, a digital assistant, and the ability to send money to friends — Messenger now accounts for 10 percent of all VoIP calls made globally. Messenger’s tremendous growth also underscores Facebook’s mammoth capture of the world. The social network is used by more than 1.6 billion people actively every month. WhatsApp, the chat client it owns, is also used by more than one billion people. TechCrunch has a brilliant story on the growth of Messenger from the scratch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Messenger Hits 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All VoIP Calls

Record-Setting Hard Drive Writes Information One Atom At a Time

Researchers working in the Netherlands have developed an atomic-scale rewritable data-storage device capable of packing 500 terabits onto a single square inch. Incredibly, that’s enough to store every book written by humans on a surface the size of a postage stamp. Holy shit . Read more…

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Record-Setting Hard Drive Writes Information One Atom At a Time

How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive

FreeDOS was originally created in response to Microsoft’s announcement that after Windows 95, DOS would no longer be developed as a standalone operating system, according to a new interview about how (and why) Jim Hall keeps FreeDOS alive. For its newest version, Hall originally imagined “what ‘DOS’ would be like in 2015 or 2016 if Microsoft hadn’t stopped working on MS-DOS in favor of Windows” — before he decided there’s just no such thing as “modern DOS”. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: No major changes are planned in the next version. “The next version of FreeDOS won’t be multitasking, it won’t be 32-bit, it won’t run on ARM, ” Hall said. “FreeDOS is still intended for Intel and Intel-compatible computers. You should still be able to run FreeDOS on your old 486 or old Pentium PC to play classic DOS games, run legacy business programs, and support embedded development.” By day, Hall is the CIO for a county in Minnesota, and he’s also a member of the board of directors for GNOME (and contributes to other open source projects) — but he still remembers using DOS’s built-in BASIC system to write simple computer programs. “Many of us older computer nerds probably used DOS very early, on our first home computer…” he tells ComputerWorld. Even without John Romero’s new Doom level, “The popularity of DOS games and DOS shareware applications probably contributes in a big way to FreeDOS’s continued success.” I’d be curious how many Slashdot readers have some fond memories about downloading DOS shareware applications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive