Tag: open source

NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval

An anonymous reader writes: A recently released draft of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s digital identity guidelines has met with approval by vendors. The draft guidelines revise password security recommendations and altering many of the standards and best practices security professionals use when forming policies for their companies. The new framework recommends, among other things: “Remove periodic password change requirements.” There have been multiple studies that have shown requiring frequent password changes to actually be counterproductive to good password security, said Mike Wilson, founder of PasswordPing. NIST said this guideline was suggested because passwords should be changed when a user wants to change it or if there is indication of breach. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval

Google’s mysterious Fuchsia OS looks like an Android re-do

When we last looked at Google’s Fuchsia operating system , it was very modest. While it was designed for everything from Internet of Things devices to PCs, there wasn’t even a graphical interface to show. Well, things have… evolved. Ars Technica has revisited Fuchsia several months later, and it now touts an interface (nicknamed Armadillo) that makes it clear this isn’t just some after-hours experiment. It’s only a set of placeholders at the moment, but it gives you a good idea as to what to expect. The home screen is a large, vertically scrolling list of cards for “stories, ” or collections of apps and OS components that work together to complete a given task. There’s also a Google Now -style section that has “suggestion” cards for tasks — use them and you’ll either add to an existing story or create a new one. The prototype UI also includes a simple split-screen interface, and scales up to tablet size. Fuchsia isn’t based on Linux, like Android or Chrome OS, but it still uses open source code that would let anyone tinker with the inner workings. Apps, meanwhile, are built using Google’s Flutter kit, which lets developers write both Android and iOS apps. Things are clearly coming along. But there’s one overriding question: just what role will Fuchsia have? Google’s Travis Geiselbrecht stresses that this “isn’t a toy thing, ” but there’s no public strategy. Ars speculates that Google is treating this as a sort of Android re-do: what if the company could design a platform while dumping all the technology it no longer needs or wants, such as Linux or any traces of Java ? The use of Flutter would let you run Android apps until there’s broader software support. It might take years before Fuchsia is ready for public use, assuming that’s the ultimate plan, but there could be a day where Android is no longer the center of Google’s computing universe. Source: Ars Technica

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Google’s mysterious Fuchsia OS looks like an Android re-do

NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval

An anonymous reader writes: A recently released draft of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s digital identity guidelines has met with approval by vendors. The draft guidelines revise password security recommendations and altering many of the standards and best practices security professionals use when forming policies for their companies. The new framework recommends, among other things: “Remove periodic password change requirements.” There have been multiple studies that have shown requiring frequent password changes to actually be counterproductive to good password security, said Mike Wilson, founder of PasswordPing. NIST said this guideline was suggested because passwords should be changed when a user wants to change it or if there is indication of breach. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval

NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval

An anonymous reader writes: A recently released draft of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s digital identity guidelines has met with approval by vendors. The draft guidelines revise password security recommendations and altering many of the standards and best practices security professionals use when forming policies for their companies. The new framework recommends, among other things: “Remove periodic password change requirements.” There have been multiple studies that have shown requiring frequent password changes to actually be counterproductive to good password security, said Mike Wilson, founder of PasswordPing. NIST said this guideline was suggested because passwords should be changed when a user wants to change it or if there is indication of breach. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval

Google’s mysterious Fuchsia OS looks like an Android re-do

When we last looked at Google’s Fuchsia operating system , it was very modest. While it was designed for everything from Internet of Things devices to PCs, there wasn’t even a graphical interface to show. Well, things have… evolved. Ars Technica has revisited Fuchsia several months later, and it now touts an interface (nicknamed Armadillo) that makes it clear this isn’t just some after-hours experiment. It’s only a set of placeholders at the moment, but it gives you a good idea as to what to expect. The home screen is a large, vertically scrolling list of cards for “stories, ” or collections of apps and OS components that work together to complete a given task. There’s also a Google Now -style section that has “suggestion” cards for tasks — use them and you’ll either add to an existing story or create a new one. The prototype UI also includes a simple split-screen interface, and scales up to tablet size. Fuchsia isn’t based on Linux, like Android or Chrome OS, but it still uses open source code that would let anyone tinker with the inner workings. Apps, meanwhile, are built using Google’s Flutter kit, which lets developers write both Android and iOS apps. Things are clearly coming along. But there’s one overriding question: just what role will Fuchsia have? Google’s Travis Geiselbrecht stresses that this “isn’t a toy thing, ” but there’s no public strategy. Ars speculates that Google is treating this as a sort of Android re-do: what if the company could design a platform while dumping all the technology it no longer needs or wants, such as Linux or any traces of Java ? The use of Flutter would let you run Android apps until there’s broader software support. It might take years before Fuchsia is ready for public use, assuming that’s the ultimate plan, but there could be a day where Android is no longer the center of Google’s computing universe. Source: Ars Technica

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Google’s mysterious Fuchsia OS looks like an Android re-do

IT Contractors In Australia Are Not Being Paid Due To Dispute With Payroll Service

New submitter evolutionary writes: Plutus Payroll, an Australian payroll company, is refusing to pay contractors due to a dispute with companies using their services. Around 1, 000 IT workers are unable to receive payment for services rendered. One may ask, “Where are the companies who actually hired the IT workers?” The Register reports: “This story starts with Australia’s employment laws, which see lots of contractors officially employed by recruitment companies or payroll companies. The company at which the contractor works likes this arrangement as it means they don’t have to put such people on their books. Recruitment companies and payroll companies charge for the service. Contractors generally like the convenience of having one employer even though they hop from gig to gig. The system requires fluid payments. Companies who hire contractors pay the recruiter, which either pays contractors direct or pays the payroll company contractors prefer. If the cash stops flowing, contractors get crunched. That’s what’s happened to around 1, 000 contractors who elected to use Plutus as their paymasters: the company says it is in the midst of a completely unexplained ‘dispute’ that leaves it unable to pay contractors, or receive money from recruitment companies, but is still solvent. The Register has checked with the bank that Plutus clients say sends them their money — the bank says it is aware of no dispute. One possible reason for the mess is that Plutus did not charge for its services. How it made money is therefore a mystery. Another scenario concerns the company’s recent acquisition: perhaps its new owners are being denied access to some service Plutus could access as a standalone company. Plutus is saying nothing of substance about the situation. A spokesperson tells us the company deeply regrets the situation but won’t divulge anything about the dispute and has offered no details about when contractors can expect resolution.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IT Contractors In Australia Are Not Being Paid Due To Dispute With Payroll Service

UK’s Newest Tokamak Fusion Reactor Has Created Its First Plasma

After being switched on for the first time last Friday, the UK’s newest fusion reactor has successfully generated a molten mass of electrically-charged gas, or plasma, inside its core. Futurism reports: Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030. Now that the ST40 is running, the company will commission and install the complete set of magnetic coils needed to reach fusion temperatures. The ST40 should be creating a plasma temperature as hot as the center of the Sun — 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) — by Autumn 2017. By 2018, the ST40 will produce plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), another record-breaker for a privately owned and funded fusion reactor. That temperature threshold is important, as it is the minimum temperature for inducing the controlled fusion reaction. Assuming the ST40 succeeds, it will prove that its novel design can produce commercially viable fusion power. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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UK’s Newest Tokamak Fusion Reactor Has Created Its First Plasma

India Aims To Make Every Car Electric By 2030 In Bid To Tackle Pollution

India’s energy minister has unveiled plans for every car sold in the country to be powered by electricity by the year 2030. “The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles, ” reports The Independent. From the report: âoeWe are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way, ” coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi. “We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient… The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country.” Mr Goyal said the electric car industry would need between two and three years of government assistance, but added that he expected the production of the vehicles to be “driven by demand and not subsidy” after that. “The cost of electric vehicles will start to pay for itself for consumers, ” he said according to the International Business Times. “We would love to see the electric vehicle industry run on its own, ” he added. An investigation by Greenpeace this year found that as many as 2.3 million deaths occur every year due to air pollution in the country. The report, entitled “Airpocalypse, ” claimed air pollution had become a “public health and economic crisis” for Indians. It said the number of deaths caused by air pollution was only “a fraction less” than the number of deaths from tobacco use, adding that 3 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was lost to the levels of toxic smog. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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India Aims To Make Every Car Electric By 2030 In Bid To Tackle Pollution

Linux Kernel 4.11 Officially Released

prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Linux kernel 4.11 has been in development for the past two months, since very early March, when the first Release Candidate arrived for public testing. Eight RCs later, we’re now able to download and compile the final release of Linux 4.11 on our favorite GNU/Linux distributions and enjoy its new features. Prominent ones include scalable swapping for SSDs, a brand new perf ftrace tool, support for OPAL drives, support for the SMC-R (Shared Memory Communications-RDMA) protocol, journalling support for MD RAID5, all new statx() system call to replace stat(2), and persistent scrollback buffers for VGA consoles… The Linux 4.11 kernel also introduces initial support for Intel Gemini Lake chips, which is an Atom-based, low-cost computer processor family developed using Intel’s 14-nanometer technology, and better power management for AMD Radeon GPUs when the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver is used. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.11 Officially Released

Open Ports Create Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones

An anonymous reader writes: “Mobile applications that open ports on Android smartphones are opening those devices to remote hacking, claims a team of researchers from the University of Michigan, ” reports Bleeping Computer. Researchers say they’ve identified 410 popular mobile apps that open ports on people’s smartphones. They claim that an attacker could connect to these ports, which in turn grant access to various phone features, such as photos, contacts, the camera, and more. This access could be leveraged to steal photos, contacts, or execute commands on the target’s phone. Researchers recorded various demos to prove their attacks. Of these 410 apps, there were many that had between 10 and 50 million downloads on the official Google Play Store and even an app that came pre-installed on an OEMs smartphones. “Research on the mobile open port problem started after researchers read a Trend Micro report from 2015 about a vulnerability in the Baidu SDK, which opened a port on user devices, providing an attacker with a way to access the phone of a user who installed an app that used the Baidu SDK, ” reports Bleeping Computer. “That particular vulnerability affected over 100 million smartphones, but Baidu moved quickly to release an update. The paper detailing the team’s work is entitled Open Doors for Bob and Mallory: Open Port Usage in Android Apps and Security Implications, and was presented Wednesday, April 26, at the 2nd IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy that took place this week in Paris, France.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Open Ports Create Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones