program3 – Page 7 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Linux Mint hit by malware infection on its website, forum after hack attack

(credit: Wired UK/Shuttershock) Linux Mint forum users, and anyone who downloaded and installed a copy of the 17.3 Cinnamon edition on Saturday have probably been compromised by hackers and need to take action immediately, the distro’s creator has warned. Clem Lefebvre, confirmed in a blog post that the “intrusion” had taken place over the weekend. He said: “Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.” He added that the resultant malware infection had only affected ISOs downloaded from the Linux Mint site on Saturday, February 20. “As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition,” Lefebvre said. However, by Sunday it was a different story , with Linux Mint confirming that its forums database had also been targeted in the hack of its systems. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip

(credit: Drexel University ) Since the tech boom began decades ago, we’ve seen a dramatic transformation of electronics. Today, some technological dreamers are talking about “smart environments” where electronics are seamlessly integrated into our environment, providing comfort and convenience. For these dreams to be achieved, we need to get electronics—not just the chips—miniaturized to the point where sensors can be pervasive. This involves developing high-performance electrochemical storage devices to enable long-lived sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. But efficient miniaturized energy storage devices have proven to be challenging to create; it can be done, but it’s hard to integrate the results with other electronics. Supercapacitors According to an article in Science , an international team of scientists has now reported some progress in this area—specifically with the design of micro-supercapacitors. Supercapacitors are a class of materials that can store energy through accumulation of charge at the surface of a high-surface-area carbon sheet. They typically have a good cycle life, moderate energy density (6 Wh/kg), and high power densities (> 10 kW/kg). Supercapacitors are a great replacement for batteries in applications that require high power delivery and uptake with a very long charge-discharge cycle life; micro-supercapacitors are the same kind of material but much, much smaller. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip

Chrome OS distro for regular PCs can now dual-boot with Windows

Enlarge / Dell’s old Latitude E6410 becomes a modern Chromebook. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) A few months ago, we wrote about CloudReady , a version of the open source Chromium OS from Neverware that can transform older Windows PCs into what are essentially Chromebooks (give or take a couple of media codecs and other features). Neverware takes the Chromium OS code provided by Google and does all the hard work of testing and maintaining driver compatibility and providing updates, the same things that Google handles for actual Chromebooks. The OS is aimed at schools that either want to move to Chromebooks but can’t afford the cost of all-new hardware or schools that have already begun a transition to Chromebooks but want to repurpose old hardware they already have. Today, Neverware announced a new version of CloudReady aimed at schools and individuals who want to try the software on their PCs without losing the capability to run Windows. CloudReady version 45.3 can be installed on any system with an existing UEFI-mode installation of Windows 7, 8, or 10 and 32GB of free disk space. You can find detailed installation directions on Neverware’s site. The UEFI requirement means that the list of PCs that support dual-booting is much shorter than the normal CloudReady support list, so this won’t be of much use to people with older BIOS-based PCs and Windows installations. But if you happen to have a device on the list, and you want to give the software a spin, you can download the free version from Neverware’s site. The fully featured version that supports Google’s Chrome OS management console costs $59 per machine for an unlimited license or $25 for a one-year license. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Chrome OS distro for regular PCs can now dual-boot with Windows

The fall… and rise and rise and rise of chat networks

At the end of October 2014, something very important came to an end. After 15 years of changing the way people communicated forever, Microsoft closed down its MSN Windows Live service. Originally named MSN Messenger, its demise was not an overnight failure. Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype for £5.1 billion in 2012 meant it was only a matter of time before it was finally closed. China was the last territory to migrate the service to Skype; other countries did so 12 months earlier. At its height, MSN Messenger had more than 330 million users after originally being launched to rival the emerging chat networks of AOL’s AIM service and ICQ, followed by the entry of Yahoo Messenger. It was the social network of its day and as influential and dominant as Facebook is today. Read 47 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The fall… and rise and rise and rise of chat networks

Warning: Bug in Adobe Creative Cloud deletes Mac user data without warning

Enlarge (credit: Backblaze) Adobe Systems has stopped distributing a recently issued update to its Creative Cloud graphics service amid reports a Mac version can delete important user data without warning or permission. The deletions happen whenever Mac users log in to the Adobe service after the update has been installed, according to officials from Backblaze , a data backup service whose users are being disproportionately inconvenienced by the bug. Upon sign in, a script activated by Creative Cloud deletes the contents in the alphabetically first folder in a Mac’s root directory. Backblaze users are being especially hit by the bug because the backup service relies on data stored in a hidden root folder called .bzvol. Because the folder is the alphabetically top-most hidden folder at the root of so many users’ drives, they are affected more than users of many other software packages. “This caused a lot of our customers to freak out,” Backblaze Marketing Manager Yev Pusin wrote in an e-mail. “The reason we saw a huge uptick from our customers is because Backblaze’s .bzvol is higher up the alphabet. We tested it again by creating a hidden file with an ‘.a’ name, and the files inside were removed as well.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Warning: Bug in Adobe Creative Cloud deletes Mac user data without warning

Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

(credit: Netflix) Netflix has been moving huge portions of its streaming operation to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for years now, and it says it has finally completed its giant shift to the cloud. “We are happy to report that in early January of 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service,” Netflix said in a blog post that it plans to publish at noon Eastern today. (The blog should go up at this link .) Netflix operates “many tens of thousands of servers and many tens of petabytes of storage” in the Amazon cloud, Netflix VP of cloud and platform engineering Yury Izrailevsky told Ars in an interview. Netflix had earlier planned to complete the shift by the end of last summer . Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

IRS website attack nets e-filing credentials for 101,000 taxpayers

The US Internal Revenue Service was the target of a malware attack that netted electronic tax-return credentials for 101,000 social security numbers, the agency disclosed Tuesday. Identity thieves made the haul by using taxpayers’ personal data that was stolen from a source outside the IRS, according to a statement . The attackers then used an automated bot against an application on the IRS website that provides personal identification numbers for the electronic filing of tax returns. In all, the hackers made unauthorized queries against 464,000 social security numbers but succeeded against only 101,000 of them. No personal information was obtained from the IRS systems. Agency officials are flagging the accounts of all affected taxpayers and plan to notify them by mail of the incident. The IRS is also working with other government agencies and industry partners to investigate the hack or stem its effects. The hack occurred last month. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Fans rejoice: Bryan Fuller named showrunner on new Star Trek series

Maybe we’ll be hanging out on the USS Reliant for this series. (credit: Paramount) Ever since Paramount announced last year that it would be launching a new Star Trek TV series, rumors have swirled about what it might be like. Now we know that the show is in good hands, at least when it comes to the writing. Bryan Fuller, who also worked on Deep Space Nine and Voyager , will be taking the helm as showrunner . Despite his long association with the Star Wars franchise, Fuller is probably best known for creating his own original visions on television in beloved cult series like Pushing Daisies and Hannibal. He has a flair for the weird, and he’s drawn to stories that are driven by characters as well as gripping plots. He’s currently working on a miniseries of Neil Gaiman’s classic novel American Gods for Starz. Obviously we can’t get too excited until we know what Fuller has planned, but I think cautious optimism is in order. Fuller knows the Trek universe, and he’s a smart writer who isn’t afraid to strike out in interesting new directions. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fans rejoice: Bryan Fuller named showrunner on new Star Trek series

Yahoo sued over employee rankings, anti-male discrimination

(credit: Clever Cupcakes ) A new lawsuit (PDF) filed against flailing tech giant Yahoo claims that company managers governing the “Media Org” were biased against men. It also claims that the company’s Quarterly Performance Review (QPR) process favored female employees and that the company engaged in mass layoffs without proper warnings. Gregory Anderson was editorial director of Yahoo’s Autos, Homes, Shopping, Small Business, and Travel sections until he was terminated in 2014. In his complaint, Anderson says that between 2012 and 2015, Yahoo reduced its work force by more than 30 percent to fewer than 11,000 employees. That constitutes a mass-layoff, which requires 60-day notice under state and federal law, he says. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Oracle deprecates the Java browser plugin, prepares for its demise

The much-maligned Java browser plugin, source of so many security flaws over the years, is to be killed off by Oracle. It will not be mourned. Oracle, which acquired Java as part of its 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems, has announced that the plugin will be deprecated in the next release of Java, version 9, which is currently available as an early access beta. A future release will remove it entirely. Of course, Oracle’s move is arguably a day late and a dollar short. Chrome started deprecating browser plugins last April , with Firefox announcing similar plans in October . Microsoft’s new Edge browser also lacks any support for plugins. Taken together, it doesn’t really matter much what Oracle does: even if the company continued developing and supporting its plugin, the browser vendors themselves were making it an irrelevance. Only Internet Explorer 11, itself a legacy browser that’s receiving only security fixes, is set to offer any continued plugin support. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oracle deprecates the Java browser plugin, prepares for its demise