Tag: funny

Alibaba Posts $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

Alibaba Group posted $1 billion (6.81 billion yuan) of sales within the first five minutes of its Singles’ Day sales, a 24-hour event that may offer clues on the health of the Chinese economy and its largest online retailer. From a report on Bloomberg:Investors are keeping a close eye on the annual Nov. 11 spending blitz that dwarfs Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S., to see if Alibaba can reprise the 60 percent leap in transactions to 91.2 billion yuan it managed last year. The e-commerce giant again turned up the star-wattage for 2016, enlisting Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson, sports celebrity David Beckham, basketball legend Kobe Bryant and pop-rock band One Republic to headline a pre-sale gala and drum up international attention. Pioneered by Alibaba in 2009 and since replicated by rivals including JD.com Inc., Singles’ Day has become somewhat of a barometer of Chinese consumer sentiment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alibaba Posts $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

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

DDoS Attack Halts Heating in Finland Amidst Winter

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack halted heating distribution at least in two properties in the city of Lappeenranta, located in Eastern Finland. In both of these events, the attacks disabled the computers that were controlling heating in the buildings. An anonymous reader writes: Both of the buildings were managed by Valtia, the company which is in charge of managing the buildings overall operation and maintenance. According to Valtia CEO, Simo Ruonela, in both cases the systems that controlled the central heating and warm water circulation were disabled. In the city of Lappeenranta, there were at least two buildings whose systems were knocked down by the network attack. According to Rounela, the attack in Eastern Finland lasted from late October to Thursday — the 3rd of November. The systems that were attacked tried to respond to the attack by rebooting the main control circuit. This was repeated over and over so that heating was never working. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DDoS Attack Halts Heating in Finland Amidst Winter

Researchers Create An Undetectable Rootkit That Targets Industrial Equipment

An anonymous reader quotes Bleeping Computer: “Two researchers presenting at the Black Hat Europe security conference in London revealed a method of infecting industrial equipment with an undetectable rootkit component that can wreak havoc and disrupt the normal operations of critical infrastructure all over the world. The attack targets PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), devices that sit between normal computers that run industrial monitoring software and the actual industrial equipment, such as motors, valves, sensors, breakers, alarms, and others.” Researchers say they packed their attack as a loadable kernel module [PDF], which makes it both undetectable and reboot persistent. The attack goes after PLC pin configurations, meaning the PLC won’t be able to tell which are the actual input and output pins, allowing the attacker full-control to make up bogus sensor data, send fake commands, or block legitimate ones. The researchers acknowledge that the attack is extremely complicated, but the article argues it would still be of interest to a state-sponsored actor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Create An Undetectable Rootkit That Targets Industrial Equipment

A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil

Big Hairy Ian shares this report from New Atlas: The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gallons of raw sewage that Americans create every day… [T]he raw sewage is placed in a reactor that’s basically a tube pressurized to 3, 000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit, which mimics the same geological process that turned prehistoric organic matter into crude oil by breaking it down into simple compounds, only…it takes minutes instead of epochs… The end product is very similar to fossil crude oil with a bit of oxygen and water mixed in and can be refined like crude oil using conventional fractionating plants. After six years of development, they’ve licensed the process for a $6 million pilot plant that’s expected to launch in 2018. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil

More Than 50 Percent of All Pages In Chrome Are Loaded Over HTTPS Now

Reader Trailrunner7 writes: After years of encouraging site owners to transition to HTTPS by default, Google officials say that the effort has begun to pay off. The company’s data now shows that more than half of all pages loaded by Chrome on desktop platforms are served over HTTPS. Google has been among the louder advocates for the increased use of encryption across the web in the last few years. The company has made significant changes to its own infrastructure, encrypting the links between its data center, and also has made HTTPS the default connection option on many of its main services, including Gmail and search. And Google also has been encouraging owners of sites of all shapes and sizes to move to secure connections to protect their users from eavesdropping and data theft. That effort has begun to bear fruit in a big way. New data released by Google shows that at the end of October, 68 percent of pages loaded by the Chrome browser on Chrome OS machines were over HTTPS. That’s a significant increase in just the last 10 months. At the end of 2015, just 50 percent of pages loaded by Chrome on Chrome OS were HTTPS. The numbers for the other desktop operating systems are on the rise as well, with macOS at 60 percent, Linux at 54 percent, and Windows at 53 percent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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More Than 50 Percent of All Pages In Chrome Are Loaded Over HTTPS Now

Microsoft Stops Selling Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 To Computer Makers

An anonymous reader shares a report on VentureBeat: Out with the old, and in with the new. Microsoft yesterday stopped providing Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 licenses to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including its PC partners and systems builders. This means that, as of today, the only way you can buy a computer running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 is if you can still find one in stock. Two years ago, Microsoft stopped selling Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate licenses to OEMs. Now Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 are also out of the picture, leaving Windows 10 as the only remaining option, assuming you want a PC with a Microsoft operating system. This is Microsoft’s way of slowly phasing out old operating systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Stops Selling Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 To Computer Makers

Foxconn Testing Wireless Charging For iPhone 8

One of the first big secrets regarding Apple’s upcoming smartphone has been spilled. According to a report from Nikkei Asian Review, Foxconn, the firm responsible for assembling iPhones, is testing wireless charging modules for the iPhone 8. TrustedReviews reports: Citing ‘an industry source familiar with the matter, ‘ the report states the wireless charging feature could appear on the next Apple handset, but it depends whether the company can produce enough satisfactory units. The source told Nikkei: “Whether the feature can eventually make it into Apple’s updated devices will depend on whether Foxconn can boost the yield rate to a satisfactory level later on.” The yield rate refers to the ‘number of satisfactory units in the production of a batch of components, ‘ and if it’s found to be too low, the wireless charging feature could be left out of the iPhone 8 according to the report. It’s also claimed the wireless tech could make it into some versions of the iPhone 8 and not others. Nikkei is also reporting that Apple’s next gen smartphones are expected to arrive in three different sizes — 4.7-inch, 5-inch and 5.5-inch — all of which will come with glass-backed bodies. The Next Web reports: “Nikkei further suggests out of the three new iPhones will be a premium model with a curved edge-to-edge OLED display; the other two models will likely have standard LCD displays. Here’s what Nikkei’s source said: “Apple has tentatively decided that all the 5.5-inch, 5-inch and 4.7-inch models will have glass backs, departing from metal casings adopted by current iPhones, and Biel and Lens are likely to be providing all the glass backs for the new iPhones next year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Foxconn Testing Wireless Charging For iPhone 8

WordPress Founder Accuses Wix Of Stealing Code

An anonymous reader writes: “Wow, dude I did not even know we were fighting, ” Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami posted on the company’s blog Saturday — responding to WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, who on Friday accused Wix of stealing their code. “The claim is that the Wix mobile apps distribute GPL code and aren’t themselves GPL, so they violate the license, ” Mullenweg wrote. Abrahami argued that “Everything we improved there or modified, we submitted back as open source, ” adding “we will release the app you saw as well… ” Mullenweg responded “It appears you and [lead engineer] Tal might share a misunderstanding of how the GPL works, ” ultimately adding “software licensing can be tricky and many people make honest mistakes.” Wix had also argued they’re giving back to the open source community by listing 224 public projects on their GitHub page. “Thank you for the offer to use them, ” Mullenweg responded. “If we do, we’ll make sure to follow the license you’ve put on the code very carefully.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WordPress Founder Accuses Wix Of Stealing Code

Mozilla Announces Quantum, a New Browser Engine For Firefox

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is currently working on a new browser engine called Quantum, which will take parts from the Servo project and create a new core for the Firefox browser. The new engine will replace the aging Gecko, Firefox’ current engine. Mozilla hopes to finish the transition to Quantum (as in Quantum Leap) by the end of 2017. The first versions of Quantum will heavily rely on components from Servo, a browser engine that Mozilla has been sponsoring for the past years, and which shipped its first alpha version this June. In the upcoming year, Mozilla will slowly merge Gecko and Servo components with each new release, slowly removing Gecko’s ancient code, and leaving Quantum’s engine in place. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Announces Quantum, a New Browser Engine For Firefox