Tag: internet

After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills ‘Firebug’ Dev Tool

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: The Firebug web development tool, an open source add-on to the Firefox browser, is being discontinued after 12 years, replaced by Firefox Developer Tools. Firebug will be dropped with next month’s release of Firefox Quantum (version 57). The Firebug tool lets developers inspect, edit, and debug code in the Firefox browser as well as monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in webpages. It still has more than a million people using it, said Jan Honza Odvarko, who has been the leader of the Firebug project. Many extensions were built for Firebug, which is itself is an extension to Firefox… The goal is to make debugging native to Firefox. “Sometimes, it’s better to start from scratch, which is especially true for software development, ” Odvarko said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills ‘Firebug’ Dev Tool

Saudi Arabia Becomes First Nation To Grant Citizenship To Humanoid Robot

Saudi Arabia became the first country in the world to offer citizenship to a humanoid robot, but Brad Keywell, CEO of Uptake, a predictive analytics technology company, told FOX Business on Thursday artificial intelligence (AI) will not replace humans anytime soon. From a report: “Humans are made super-human through the intelligence that can be derived from these sensors and there is a clear argument that’s made about the possibility that there will be no humans, there’d be just autonomous everything… but this is something that has historically involved humans and I just don’t see that changing, ” he told Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings with Maria.” Uptake’s products are used in a collection of industries ranging from energy to aviation, helping “people and machines work better and faster, ” according to the company website. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Saudi Arabia Becomes First Nation To Grant Citizenship To Humanoid Robot

Slack screen sharing will let your coworkers control your computer

Virtual-office app Slack is adding one of its most requested features : screen sharing. And more than just simply letting a coworker look at what’s on your display, you can grant control so that they can add a few lines of code, or values to a cell in a spread sheet. Everyone will have their own cursor for typing and clicking around, which almost makes it sound like Slack is turning your screen into a Google Doc. All thanks to the magic of the internet. Not into relinquishing full control of your machine? Your call participants can still interact, but they’ll be limited to drawing on things. Still, that’s pretty cool. Facebook recently added screen sharing to its Workplace desktop app, so Slack is just a touch late to this party. However, Workplace is still in a limited beta and doesn’t quite have the user base that Slack does. There’s also that whole deal where Slack is basically becoming the last work chat app you’ll need. What with it adding integrations and features that used to require myriad logins to various disparate services like Join.Me for sharing a screen with multiple remote people, and all. That’s to say nothing of how consistently easy it is to use the new collaboration tools. If you’re just using the app to chat with friends on a private channel, the new functionality won’t be available to you; a post on Medium says that you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to access it. Source: Slack HQ (Medium)

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Slack screen sharing will let your coworkers control your computer

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

2 Million IoT Devices Enslaved By Fast-Growing BotNet

An anonymous reader writes: Since mid-September, a new IoT botnet has grown to massive proportions. Codenamed IoT_reaper, researchers estimate its current size at nearly two million infected devices. According to researchers, the botnet is mainly made up of IP-based security cameras, routers, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, network video recorders (NVRs), and digital video recorders (DVRs), primarily from vendors such as Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, GoAhead, JAWS, Vacron, AVTECH, MicroTik, TP-Link, and Synology. The botnet reuses some Mirai source code, but it’s unique in its own right. Unlike Mirai, which relied on scanning for devices with weak or default passwords, this botnet was put together using exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities. The botnet’s author is still struggling to control his botnet, as researchers spotted over two million infected devices sitting in the botnet’s C&C servers’ queue, waiting to be processed. As of now, the botnet has not been used in live DDoS attacks, but the capability is in there. Today is the one-year anniversary of the Dyn DDoS attack, the article points out, adding that “This week both the FBI and Europol warned about the dangers of leaving Internet of Things devices exposed online.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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2 Million IoT Devices Enslaved By Fast-Growing BotNet

Over 500 Million PCs Are Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency, Researchers Reveal

Ad blocking firm AdGuard has found that over 500 million people are inadvertently mining cryptocurrencies through their computers after visiting websites that are running background mining software. The company found 220 popular websites with an aggregated audience of half a billion people use so-called crypto-mining scripts when a user opens their main page. Newsweek reports: The mining tool works by hijacking a computer’s central processing unit (CPU), commonly referred to as “the brains” of a computer. Using part of a computer’s CPU to mine bitcoin effects the machine’s overall performance and will slow it down by using up processing power. The researchers found that bitcoin browser mining is mostly found on websites “with a shady reputation” due to the trouble such sites have with earning revenue through advertising. However, in the future it could become a legitimate and ethical way of making money if the website requests the permission of the visitor first. “220 sites may not seem like a lot, ” the researchers wrote in a blogpost detailing their discovery. “But CoinHive was launched less than one month ago on September 14. The growth has been extremely rapid: from nearly zero to 2.2 percent of Alexa’s top 100, 000 websites. “This analysis well illustrates the whole web, so it’s safe to say that one of every forty websites currently mines cryptocurrency (namely Monero) in the browsers their users employ.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Over 500 Million PCs Are Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency, Researchers Reveal

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

Equifax may have been hacked again (updated)

When Equifax’s interim CEO penned a letter of apology on The Wall Street Journal , he admitted that it will take a lot of effort to regain people’s trust. Unfortunately, the company still seems to be lacking when it comes to security, because according to Ars Technica , it’s been hacked yet again. Independent security analyst Randy Abrams told Ars that he was redirected to hxxp:centerbluray.info and was met with a Flash download when he went to equifax.com to contest a false info on his credit report. The fake Flash installer apparently tricks people into downloading what Symantec identifies as Adware.Eorezo , an adware that inundates Internet Explorer with advertisements. Unfortunately, we can’t replicate the problem, but Abrams said he encountered the issue on three separate visits and captured one of them on video: We reached out to Equifax to ask whether the company has already cleaned up the adware downloader. To be safe, though, don’t click on any random Flash installer that pops up when you visit the agency’s website in the near future. Update: Equifax says its IT and security teams are looking into the issue, but while the investigation is in progress, the page has been taken offline. The company plans to share more information as it becomes available. Source: Ars Technica

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Equifax may have been hacked again (updated)

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

Russian Hackers Exploited Kaspersky Antivirus To Steal NSA Data on US Cyber Defense: WSJ

An NSA contractor brought home highly classified documents that detailed how the U.S. penetrates foreign computer networks and defends against cyberattacks. The contractor used Kaspersky antivirus on his home computer, which hackers working for the Russian government exploited to steal the documents, the WSJ reported on Thursday (the link could be paywalled; alternative source), citing multiple people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The hackers appear to have targeted the contractor after identifying the files through the contractor’s use of a popular antivirus software made by Russia-based Kaspersky Lab, these people said. The theft, which hasn’t been disclosed, is considered by experts to be one of the most significant security breaches in recent years. It offers a rare glimpse into how the intelligence community thinks Russian intelligence exploits a widely available commercial software product to spy on the U.S. The incident occurred in 2015 but wasn’t discovered until spring of last year, said the people familiar with the matter. Having such information could give the Russian government information on how to protect its own networks, making it more difficult for the NSA to conduct its work. It also could give the Russians methods to infiltrate the networks of the U.S. and other nations, these people said. Ahead of the publication of WSJ report, Kaspersky founder Eugene Kaspersky tweeted, “New conspiracy theory, anon sources media story coming. Note we make no apologies for being aggressive in the battle against cyberthreats.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russian Hackers Exploited Kaspersky Antivirus To Steal NSA Data on US Cyber Defense: WSJ