LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support

prisoninmate writes: LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it’s the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen. LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support

Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills To West Virginia Town of 2,900

A congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis has discovered out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers over a decade to two pharmacies in a Southern West Virginia town with 2, 900 people. From a report: Between 2006 and 2016, two drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported. “These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia, ” the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J. said in a joint statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills To West Virginia Town of 2,900

Amateur Astronomer Discovers Long-Dead NASA Satellite Has Come Back To Life

schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: In his hunt to locate Zuma, an amateur astronomer has discovered that a long-dead NASA satellite, designed to study the magnetosphere, has come back to life. IMAGE went dead in 2005, and though NASA thought it might come back to life after experiencing a total eclipse in 2007 that would force a reboot, no evidence of life was seen then. It now appears that the satellite came to life sometime between then and 2018, and was chattering away at Earth waiting for a response. NASA is now looking at what it must do to take control of the spacecraft and resume science operations. Zuma is the secret U.S. government payload that was launched by SpaceX earlier this month and reportedly lost. As for why Scott Tilley — the amateur radio astronomer — decided to have a look for the present of secret military satellites, Ars Technica reports that he apparently does this semi-regularly as a hobby and, in this case, was inspired by the Zuma satellite. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amateur Astronomer Discovers Long-Dead NASA Satellite Has Come Back To Life

Crooks Created 28 Fake Ad Agencies To Disguise Massive Malvertising Campaign

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: A group of cyber-criminals created 28 fake ad agencies and bought over 1 billion ad views in 2017, which they used to deliver malicious ads that redirected unsuspecting users to tech support scams or sneaky pages peddling malware-laden software updates or software installers. The entire operation — codenamed Zirconium — appears to have started in February 2017, when the group started creating the fake ad agencies which later bought ad views from larger ad platforms. These fake ad agencies each had individual websites and even LinkedIn profiles for their fake CEOs. Their sole purpose was to interface with larger advertising platforms, appearing as legitimate businesses. Ad security company Confiant, the one who discovered this entire operation, says ads bought by this group reached 62% of ad-monetized websites on a weekly basis. All in all, Confiant believes that about 2.5 million users who’ve encountered Zirconium’s malicious ads were redirected to a malicious site, with 95% of the victims being based in the U.S. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Crooks Created 28 Fake Ad Agencies To Disguise Massive Malvertising Campaign

Now Even YouTube Serves Ads With CPU-draining Cryptocurrency Miners

YouTube was recently caught displaying ads that covertly leach off visitors’ CPUs and electricity to generate digital currency on behalf of anonymous attackers, it was widely reported. From a report: Word of the abusive ads started no later than Tuesday, as people took to social media sites to complain their antivirus programs were detecting cryptocurrency mining code when they visited YouTube. The warnings came even when people changed the browser they were using, and the warnings seemed to be limited to times when users were on YouTube. On Friday, researchers with antivirus provider Trend Micro said the ads helped drive a more than three-fold spike in Web miner detections. They said the attackers behind the ads were abusing Google’s DoubleClick ad platform to display them to YouTube visitors in select countries, including Japan, France, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain. The ads contain JavaScript that mines the digital coin known as Monero. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Now Even YouTube Serves Ads With CPU-draining Cryptocurrency Miners

Apple Prepares MacOS Users For Discontinuation of 32-Bit App Support

Last year, Apple announced that macOS High Sierra “will be the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromise.” Now, in the macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 beta, Apple is notifying users of the impending change, too. “To prepare for a future release of macOS in which 32-bit software will no longer run without compromise, starting in macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, a user is notified on the launch of an app that depends on 32-bit software. The alert appears only once per app, ” Apple says in the beta release notes. Ars Technica reports: When users attempt to launch a 32-bit app in 10.13.4, it will still launch, but it will do so with a warning message notifying the user that the app will eventually not be compatible with the operating system unless it is updated. This follows the same approach that Apple took with iOS, which completed its sunset of 32-bit app support with iOS 11 last fall. Developers and users curious about how this will play out will be able to look at the similar process in iOS for context. On January 1 of this year, Apple stopped accepting 32-bit app submissions in the Mac App Store. This June, the company will also stop accepting updates for existing 32-bit applications. iOS followed a similar progression, with 32-bit app submissions ending in February of 2015 and acceptance of app updates for 32-bit apps ending in June of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Prepares MacOS Users For Discontinuation of 32-Bit App Support

Intel Plans To Release Chips That Have Built-in Meltdown and Spectre Protections Later This Year

Intel plans to release chips that have built-in protections against the Spectre and Meltdown attacks later this year, company CEO Brian Krzanich said during company’s quarterly earnings call this week. From a report: The company has “assigned some of our very best minds” to work on addressing the vulnerability that’s exploited by those attacks, Krzanich said on a conference call following Intel’s quarterly earnings announcement. That will result in “silicon-based” changes to the company’s future chips, he said. “We’ve been working around clock” to address the vulnerability and attacks, Krzanich said. But, he added, “we’re acutely aware we have more to do.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Plans To Release Chips That Have Built-in Meltdown and Spectre Protections Later This Year

Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bitcoin News: In information released to shareholders this week, Coinbase revealed that it recorded turnover of $1 billion last year, which works out at an astonishing $2.74 million a day or $2, 000 a minute. As America’s largest bitcoin broker, Coinbase claims the lion’s share of the money that’s pouring into the crypto space at a dizzying rate. 2017 was a bumper year for all crypto exchanges, which reported record numbers across the board: new signups, new staff hired, new trading pairs, and new revenue. Those revenue streams have turned into a torrent that has caused Coinbase’ coffers to swell. Recode reports that the company’s revenue exceeded $1 billion last year, most of it derived from the trading fees it levies. These vary from between 0.25% and 1%. and quickly add up: in the past 24 hours, 36, 000 BTC were traded on Coinbase, accounting for more than 15% of the total market. Coinbase isn’t the world’s largest exchange (and is technically a broker rather than a conventional exchange — that duty falls to its GDAX subsidiary) but it’s the best known and carries great weight in the cryptocurrency industry. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day

Linux 4.15 Becomes Slowest Release Since 2011

An anonymous reader shares a report: Linus Torvalds has decided that Linux 4.15 needs a ninth release candidate, making it the first kernel release to need that much work since 2011. Torvalds flagged up the possibility of an extra release candidate last week, with the caveat that “it obviously requires this upcoming week to not come with any huge surprises” after “all the Meltdown and Spectre hoopla” made his job rather more complicated in recent weeks. Fast-forward another week and Torvalds has announced “I really really wanted to just release 4.15 today, but things haven’t calmed down enough for me to feel comfy about it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 4.15 Becomes Slowest Release Since 2011

Tesla Is Last In the Driverless Vehicle Race, Report Says

Navigant Research has compiled a new report on 19 companies working on automated driving systems, and surprisingly, Tesla came in last place. U.S. News & World Report: Navigant ranked the 19 major companies developing AV technology based on 10 criteria, including vision, market strategy, partnerships, production strategy, technology, product quality and staying power. According to the report, General Motors Co. and Waymo, the auto unit of Alphabet, are the top two AV investment opportunities in the market today. Tesla and Apple are the two biggest laggards in the AV race, according to Navigant’s rankings. Investors are acutely aware of Tesla’s production and distribution disadvantages compared to legacy automakers like GM, but Navigant is also highly critical of Tesla’s technology. “The autopilot system on current products has stagnated and, in many respects, regressed since it was first launched in late 2015, ” Navigant says in the report, according to Ars Technica. “More than one year after launching V2, Autopilot still lacks some of the functionality of the original, and there are many anecdotal reports from owners of unpredictable behavior.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla Is Last In the Driverless Vehicle Race, Report Says