Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks At US Embassy In Cuba Deepens

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he’d walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 U.S. victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top U.S. diplomat has called them “health attacks.” New details learned by the Associated Press indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity, baffling U.S. officials who say the facts and the physics don’t add up. Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the state department and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the investigation. Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the U.S. government initially realized. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August — nine months after symptoms were first reported. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks At US Embassy In Cuba Deepens

Bitcoin Plummets Below $3,000 on Rising China Worries

Bitcoin dropped below $3, 000 on Friday as the cryptocurrency extended a brutal eight-day sell-off that has reduced its value against the dollar by a third. Financial Times reports: The currency traded as low as $2, 972, marking a 36 per cent fall from bitcoin’s close on September 7, and a collapse of 40 per cent from the highs struck earlier this month. The latest bout of selling came after BTCChina, one of the country’s biggest bitcoin exchanges, said it would halt trading at the end of the month. Focus has now shifted to the communist country’s other two big exchanges: OKCoin and Huobi. Alternative source. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Plummets Below $3,000 on Rising China Worries

Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in the Safari Browser

The biggest advertising organizations say Apple will “sabotage” the current economic model of the internet with plans to integrate cookie-blocking technology into the new version of Safari. Marty Swant, reporting for AdWeek: Six trade groups — the Interactive Advertising Bureau, American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers, the 4A’s and two others — say they’re “deeply concerned” with Apple’s plans to release a version of the internet browser that overrides and replaces user cookie preferences with a set of Apple-controlled standards. The feature, which is called “Intelligent Tracking Prevention, ” limits how advertisers and websites can track users across the internet by putting in place a 24-hour limit on ad retargeting. In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary, ” warning that the changes could affect the “infrastructure of the modern internet, ” which largely relies on consistent standards across websites. The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more “generic and less timely and useful.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in the Safari Browser

Backdoor Found In WordPress Plugin With More Than 200,000 Installations

According to Bleeping Computer, a WordPress plug that goes by the name Display Widgets has been used to install a backdoor on WordPress sites across the internet for the past two and a half months. While the WordPress.org team removed the plugin from the official WordPress Plugins repository, the plugin managed to be installed on more than 200, 000 sites at the time of its removal. The good news is that the backdoor code was only found between Display Widgets version 2.6.1 (released June 30) and version 2.6.3 (released September 2), so it’s unlikely everyone who installed the plugin is affected. WordPress.org staff members reportedly removed the plugin three times before for similar violations. Bleeping Computer has compiled a history of events in its report, put together with data aggregated from three different investigations by David Law, White Fir Design, and Wordfence. The report adds: The original Display Widgets is a plugin that allowed WordPress site owners to control which, how, and when WordPress widgets appear on their sites. Stephanie Wells of Strategy11 developed the plugin, but after switching her focus to a premium version of the plugin, she decided to sell the open source version to a new developer who would have had the time to cater to its userbase. A month after buying the plugin in May, its new owner released a first new version — v2.6.0 — on June 21. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Backdoor Found In WordPress Plugin With More Than 200,000 Installations

Equifax Had ‘Admin’ as Login and Password in Argentina

Reader wired_parrot writes: The credit report provider Equifax has been accused of a fresh data security breach, this time affecting its Argentine operations. The breach was revealed after security researchers discovered that an online employee tool used by Equifax Argentina was accessible using the “admin/admin” password combination. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Equifax Had ‘Admin’ as Login and Password in Argentina

Google Drive Faces Outage, Users Report [Update]

Numerous Slashdot readers are reporting that they are facing issues access Google Drive, the productivity suite from the Mountain View-based company. Google’s dashboard confirms that Drive is facing outage. Third-party web monitoring tool DownDetector also reports thousands of similar complaints from users. The company said, “Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. Google Drive is not loading files and results in a failures for a subset of users.” Update: 09/07 17:13 GMT: Google says it has resolved the issue. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Drive Faces Outage, Users Report [Update]

Linux Kernel 4.13 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: As expected, the Linux 4.13 kernel series was made official this past weekend by none other than its creator, Linus Torvalds, which urges all Linux users to start migrating to this version as soon as possible. Work on Linux kernel 4.13 started in mid-July with the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone, which already gave us a glimpse of the new features coming to this major kernel branch. There are, of course, numerous improvements and support for new hardware through updated drivers and core components. Highlights of Linux kernel 4.13 include Intel’s Cannon Lake and Coffee Lake CPUs, support for non-blocking buffered I/O operations to improve asynchronous I/O support, support for “lifetime hints” in the block layers and the virtual filesystem, AppArmor enhancements, and better power management. There’s also AMD Raven Ridge support implemented in the AMDGPU graphics driver, which received numerous improvements, support for five-level page tables was added in the s390 architecture, and the structure randomization plugin was added as part of the build system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.13 Officially Released

Nearly 3,000 Bitcoin Miners Exposed Online Via Telnet Ports, Without Passwords

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Dutch security researcher Victor Gevers has discovered 2, 893 Bitcoin miners left exposed on the internet with no passwords on their Telnet port. Gevers told Bleeping Computer in a private conversation that all miners process Bitcoin transactions in the same mining pool and appear to belong to the same organization. “The owner of these devices is most likely a state sponsored/controlled organization part of the Chinese government, ” Gevers says, basing his claims on information found on the exposed miners and IP addresses assigned to each device. “At the speed they were taken offline, it means there must be serious money involved, ” Gevers added. “A few miners is not a big deal, but 2, 893 [miners] working in a pool can generate a pretty sum.” According to a Twitter user, the entire network of 2, 893 miners Gevers discovered could generate an income of just over $1 million per day, if mining Litecoin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nearly 3,000 Bitcoin Miners Exposed Online Via Telnet Ports, Without Passwords

Linux Desktop Market Share Crosses 3%

Data for the month of August 2017 from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications is here, and it suggests that Linux has finally surpassed the three percent mark, quite possibly for the first time in recent years. According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August. There’s no explanation for what amounted for this growth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Desktop Market Share Crosses 3%

Cummins Unveils Electric Semi Truck Before Tesla

Cummins has beat Tesla to the punch by unveiling its own electric semi truck. According to Forbes, the fully electric, class 7 day-cab urban hauler, called Aeos, gets 100 miles of range from its 140-kWh battery pack and can haul a 22-ton trailer. While the company does offer the options of additional battery packs to triple the range or a range-extending engine generator, the Aeos is better suited for city use rather than long-haul trucking. Autoblog reports: While this electric truck is a concept, it’s a working demonstration of a product Cummins plans to start producing in 2019. At the unveiling in Columbus, Ind., Cummins also revealed its latest near-zero-emissions natural gas engines, as well as the X15 and lightweight X12 clean diesel engines. The company said it is embracing new technologies that allow its customers to contribute to a sustainable future. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cummins Unveils Electric Semi Truck Before Tesla