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Returning to Second Life

Seriously, this once happened. A decade ago, dozens of media outlets and technologists discovered “The Next Internet.” An original cyberspace science fiction fantasy had finally come to fruition as the world gained a second digitized reality. In a short period of time, countries  established embassies , media companies  opened bureaus , one of Earth’s biggest rock bands played a concert , political campaigns took to its streets, and people became real-world millionaires plying their skills in this new arena. That much hyped “Next Internet?” You may remember it better by its official name—Second Life. For many modern Internet users, the platform has likely faded far, far from memory. But there’s no denying the cultural impact Second Life had during the brief height of its popularity. Explaining Second Life today as a MMORG or a social media platform undersells things for the unfamiliar; Second Life became an entirely alternative online world for its users. And it wasn’t just the likes of Reuters and U2 and Sweden embracing this platform. Second Life boasted 1.1 million active users at its peak roughly a decade ago. Even cultural behemoth Facebook only boasted 20 million at the time. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Returning to Second Life

First Mass-Produced Electric Truck Unveiled

AmiMoJo shares a report from NHK WORLD: Japan’s Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus has unveiled what it says is the world’s first mass-produced electric truck, as automakers around the world go all out to develop cars that run on battery power. The vehicle can carry about 3 tons of cargo and travel about 100 kilometers on a single charge. The truck, unveiled on Thursday, will be used by Japan’s largest convenience store chain, Seven-Eleven. Seven-Eleven President Kazuki Furuya says some people complain about the noise delivery vehicles make, and says he is very impressed at how quiet the electric truck is. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Mass-Produced Electric Truck Unveiled

Chrome 62 Released With OpenType Variable Fonts, HTTP Warnings In Incognito Mode

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, Google released version 62 of its Chrome browser that comes with quite a few new features but also fixes for 35 security issues. The most interesting new features are support for OpenType variable fonts, the Network Quality Estimator API, the ability to capture and stream DOM elements, and HTTP warnings for the browser’s Normal and Incognito mode. The most interesting of the new features is variable fonts. Until now, web developers had to load multiple font families whenever they wanted variations on a font family. For example, if a developer was using the Open Sans font family on a site, if he wanted a font variation such as Regular, Bold, Black, Normal, Condensed, Expanded, Highlight, Slab, Heavy, Dashed, or another, he’d have to load a different font file for each. OpenType variable fonts allow font makers to merge all these font family variations in one file that developers can use on their site and control via CSS. This results in fewer files loaded on a website, saving bandwidth and improving page load times. Two other features that will interest mostly developers are the Network Quality Estimator and the Media Capture from DOM Elements APIs. As the name hints, the first grants developers access to network speed and performance metrics, information that some websites may use to adapt video streams, audio quality, or deliver low-fi versions of their sites. Developers can use the second API — the Media Capture from DOM Elements — to record videos of how page sections behave during interaction and stream the content over WebRTC. This latter API could be useful for developers debugging a page, but also support teams that want to see what’s happening on the user’s side. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chrome 62 Released With OpenType Variable Fonts, HTTP Warnings In Incognito Mode

First Floating Wind Farm Delivers Electricity

The world’s first floating offshore wind farm began delivering electricity to the Scottish grid today. “The 30MW installation, situated 25km (15.5mi) from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, will demonstrate that offshore wind energy can be harvested in deep waters, miles away from land, where installing giant turbines was once impractical or impossible, ” reports Ars Technica. “At peak capacity, the wind farm will produce enough electricity to power 20, 000 Scottish homes.” From the report: The installation, called Hywind Scotland, is also interesting because it was built by Statoil, a Norwegian mega-corporation known for offshore oil drilling. Statoil has pursued offshore wind projects in recent years, using the companyâ(TM)s experience building and managing infrastructure in difficult open sea conditions to its advantage. Hywind Scotland began producing power in September, and today it starts delivering electricity to the Scottish grid. Now, all that’s left is for Statoil and its partner company Masdar to install a 1MWh lithium-ion battery, charmingly called âoeBatwind, â on shore. Batwind will help the offshore system regulate power delivery and optimize output. After a number of small demonstration projects, the five 6MW turbines are the first commercial turbines to lack a firm attachment to the seafloor. They’re held in place using three giant suction anchors, which are commonly used in offshore oil drilling. Essentially, an enormous, empty, upside-down âoebucketâ is placed on the seafloor, and air is sucked out of the bucket, which forces the bucket downward, further into the seafloor sediment. The report mentions a 2013 video that shows how offshore wind farms work. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Floating Wind Farm Delivers Electricity

Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark Released

Canonical has made available the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark”. It comes with a range of new features, changes, and improvements including GNOME as the default desktop, Wayland display server by default, Optional X.org server session, Mesa 17.2 or Mesa 17.3, Linux kernel 4.13 or kernel 4.14, new Subiquity server installer, improved hardware support, new Ubuntu Server installer, switch to libinput, an always visible dock using Dash to Dock GNOME Shell extension, and Bluetooth improvements with a new BlueZ among others. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark Released

Microsoft Has Already Fixed the Wi-Fi Attack Vulnerability; Android Will Be Patched Within Weeks

Microsoft says it has already fixed the problem for customers running supported versions of Windows. From a report: “We have released a security update to address this issue, ” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “Customers who apply the update, or have automatic updates enabled, will be protected. We continue to encourage customers to turn on automatic updates to help ensure they are protected.” Microsoft is planning to publish details of the update later today. While it looks like Android and Linux devices are affected by the worst part of the vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to manipulate websites, Google has promised a fix for affected devices “in the coming weeks.” Google’s own Pixel devices will be the first to receive fixes with security patch level of November 6, 2017, but most other handsets are still well behind even the latest updates. Security researchers claim 41 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to an “exceptionally devastating” variant of the Wi-Fi attack that involves manipulating traffic, and it will take time to patch older devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Has Already Fixed the Wi-Fi Attack Vulnerability; Android Will Be Patched Within Weeks

8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

dryriver writes: China launched a space laboratory named Tiangong 1 into orbit in 2011. The space laboratory was supposed to become a symbol of China’s ambitious bid to become a space superpower. After two years in space, Tiangong 1 started experiencing technical failure. Last year Chinese officials confirmed that the space laboratory had to be scrapped. The 8.5 ton heavy space laboratory has begun its descent towards Earth and is expected to crash back to Earth within the next few months. Most of the laboratory is expected to burn up in earth’s atmosphere, but experts believe that pieces as heavy as 100 kilograms (220 pounds) may survive re-entry and impact earth’s surface. Nobody will be able to predict with any precision where those chunks of space laboratory will land on Earth until a few hours before re-entry occurs. The chance that anyone would be harmed by Tiangong-1’s debris is considered unlikely. When NASA’s SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 — for littering. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

Researcher Turns HDD Into Rudimentary Microphone

An anonymous reader writes from Bleeping Computer: Speaking at a security conference, researcher Alfredo Ortega has revealed that you can use your hard disk drive (HDD) as a rudimentary microphone to pick up nearby sounds. This is possible because of how hard drives are designed to work. Sounds or nearby vibrations are nothing more than mechanical waves that cause HDD platters to vibrate. By design, a hard drive cannot read or write information to an HDD platter that moves under vibrations, so the hard drive must wait for the oscillation to stop before carrying out any actions. Because modern operating systems come with utilities that measure HDD operations up to nanosecond accuracy, Ortega realized that he could use these tools to measure delays in HDD operations. The longer the delay, the louder the sound or the intense the vibration that causes it. These read-write delays allowed the researcher to reconstruct sound or vibration waves picked up by the HDD platters. A video demo is here. “It’s not accurate yet to pick up conversations, ” Ortega told Bleeping Computer in a private conversation. “However, there is research that can recover voice data from very low-quality signals using pattern recognition. I didn’t have time to replicate the pattern-recognition portion of that research into mine. However, it’s certainly applicable.” Furthermore, the researcher also used sound to attack hard drives. Ortega played a 130Hz tone to make an HDD stop responding to commands. “The Linux kernel disconnected it entirely after 120 seconds, ” he said. There’s a video of this demo on YouTube. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researcher Turns HDD Into Rudimentary Microphone

Cyberstalking Suspect Arrested After VPN Providers Shared Logs With the FBI

An anonymous reader writes: “VPN providers often advertise their products as a method of surfing the web anonymously, claiming they never store logs of user activity, ” writes Bleeping Computer, “but a recent criminal case shows that at least some do store user activity logs.” According to the FBI, VPN providers played a key role in identifying an aggressive cyberstalker by providing detailed logs to authorities, even if they claimed in their privacy policies that they don’t. The suspect is a 24-year-old man that hacked his roommate, published her private journal, made sexually explicit collages, sent threats to schools in the victim’s name, and registered accounts on adult portals, sending men to the victim’s house… FBI agents also obtained Google records on their suspect, according to a 29-page affidavit which, ironically, includes the text of one of his tweets warning people that VPN providers do in fact keep activity logs. “If they can limit your connections or track bandwidth usage, they keep logs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cyberstalking Suspect Arrested After VPN Providers Shared Logs With the FBI

Uber’s iOS App Had Secret Permissions That Allowed It to Copy Your Phone Screen, Researchers Say

To improve functionality between Uber’s app and the Apple Watch, Apple allowed Uber to use a powerful tool that could record a user’s iPhone screen, even if Uber’s app was only running in the background, security researchers told news outlet Gizmodo. From a report: After the researchers discovered the tool, Uber said it is no longer in use and will be removed from the app. The screen recording capability comes from what’s called an “entitlement” — a bit of code that app developers can use for anything from setting up push notifications to interacting with Apple systems like iCloud or Apple Pay. This particular entitlement, however, was intended to improve memory management for the Apple Watch. The entitlement isn’t common and would require Apple’s explicit permission to use, the researchers explained. Will Strafach, a security researcher and CEO of Sudo Security Group, said he couldn’t find any other apps with the entitlement live on the App Store. “It looks like no other third-party developer has been able to get Apple to grant them a private sensitive entitlement of this nature, ” Strafach said. “Considering Uber’s past privacy issues I am very curious how they convinced Apple to allow this.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Uber’s iOS App Had Secret Permissions That Allowed It to Copy Your Phone Screen, Researchers Say