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Last month, Facebook deleted a historic Vietnam war photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, claiming it violated Facebook's restrictions on nudity. Now it appears that the company has removed a video on breast cancer awareness posted in Sweden after deeming the images offensive, the Swedish Cancer Society said on Thursday. The Guardian reports: The video, displaying animated figures of women with circle-shaped breasts, was aimed at explaining to women how to check for suspicious lumps. Sweden's Cancerfonden said it had tried in vain to contact Facebook, and had decided to appeal against the decision to remove the video. "We find it incomprehensible and strange how one can perceive medical information as offensive," Cancerfoden communications director Lena Biornstad told Agence France-Presse. "This is information that saves lives, which is important for us," she said. "This prevents us from doing so." The Guardian went on to report in a separate article that the the Swedish Cancer Society decided to make the round breasts square to evade Facebook's censorship of female anatomy. The group issued an open letter to Facebook featuring the pair of pair of breasts constructed of pink squares as opposed to pink circles. Facebook did apologize for banning the video, saying in a statement to the Guardian: "We're very sorry, our team processes millions of advertising images each week, and in some instances we incorrectly prohibit ads. This image does not violate our ad policies. We apologize for the error and have let the advertiser know we are approving their ads."

Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, which launches next month on November 10th, is the company's most powerful console that will be capable of outputting 4K and HDR content, including movies, TV shows and games. In an effort to find out how developers will make use of the console and whether or not the PS4 Pro will in any way undermine the audience of the current PS4, The Verge sat down with Mark Cerny, Sony's chief PlayStation architect, and asked him some questions. The Verge reports: The PS4 Pro is 2.28 times more powerful than its predecessor, but not everything will run in native 4K
Instead of using an entirely new GPU, Cerny said the PS4 Pro is using a "double-sauced one." In effect, the new console has a second, identical GPU configured next to the original, more than doubling the processing power of the Pro. While the standard PS4 produces 1.8 teraflops, the PS4 Pro achieves 4.2 teraflops. This is how the device can achieve native 4K and, in some cases, what Cerny said are results "extremely close to 4K." For select software, including games like adventure title Horizon Zero Dawn and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the PS4 Pro will use a crafty technique called checkerboard rendering to achieve 2160p resolution. Checkboard rendering changes the formation of pixels to achieve higher-fidelity graphics.

Standard PS4 games will play just the same unless devs patch them
For the more than 700 or so existing PS4 games, Cerny said the goal was to ensure those titles played smoothly no matter what. That's why the Pro incorporates an identical GPU. Because the new console has "the old GPU next to a mirror version of itself," Sony can support existing games with a simple trick: "We just turn off the second GPU," he said. Developers can patch these titles to boost graphics and performance in very subtle ways. But unless you have a 4K television, the difference will not be substantial.

Sony says it doesn't want games released solely for the PS4 Pro
When asked whether Sony would ever let a game run exclusively on the PS4 Pro, Cerny was blunt. "We're putting a very high premium on not splitting the user base in that fashion," he said. That doesn't rule out the possibility that, two or even three years down the line, a game comes out that relies so heavily on the hardware improvements of the Pro that it becomes unplayable on the standard PS4. Cerny wouldn't really speak much to that scenario, saying that Sony is asking developers to take advantage of the new console without leaving older hardware behind. You can also watch Mark Cerny chat with PlayStation Blog's Sid Shuman about the creation of the PS4 Pro here on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Lawyers representing Artem Vaulin have filed their formal legal response to prosecutors' allegations of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, among other charges. Vaulin is the alleged head of KickassTorrents (KAT). KAT was the world's largest BitTorrent distribution site before it was shuttered by authorities earlier this year. Vaulin was arrested in Poland, where he now awaits extradition to the United States. "Vaulin is charged with running today's most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials," Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said in a July 2016 statement. The defense's new 22-page court filing largely relies on the argument that there is no such thing as secondary criminal copyright infringement. While secondary copyright infringement as a matter of civil liability was upheld by the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster in 2005, Vaulin and his associates have been charged criminally. "The fundamental flaw in the government's untenable theory of prosecution is that there is no copyright protection for such torrent file instructions and addresses," [the brief's author, Ira Rothken,] argued in his Monday motion to dismiss the charges against Vaulin. "Therefore, given the lack of direct willful copyright infringement, torrent sites do not violate criminal copyright laws." "The extradition procedures have formally been started by the US in Poland," Rothken told Ars. "We are in a submissions or briefing period, and our Polish team is opposing extradition." Rothken also said that he has yet to be allowed to meet or speak directly with his client. For now, Rothken has been required to communicate via his Polish counterpart, Alek Kowzan. "Maybe they are afraid that Artem's extradition defense will be enhanced if American lawyers can assist in defending against the US extradition," Rothken added. No hearings before US District Judge John Z. Lee have been set.

Ecuadorian government said earlier this week that it did cut off Julian Assange's internet connection. They noted that Assange's continued interference in the U.S. election campaign was the reason why they decided to disconnect Assange from the internet. But it appears some people are going to great lengths to beam internet connectivity to Mr. Assange. This week 4chan urged people to head to the embassy to set up mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, and many are doing just that. From a Motherboard report:"We are now calling all BRITS to get their ass down to the embassy and stand around in mass, taking shifts with wifi-hotspots on hand!" reads the post. "Give Assange constant network and morale support all while streaming it live for the world to see." Are people actually going to try this? Motherboard UK visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed political asylum since August 2012, today to find out. Admittedly, on a late October afternoon, things were rather quiet on the street outside the embassy. Nevertheless, I found my guy. "Marco" was loitering outside the embassy, turning on and off his mobile hotspot. I approached him, and while tentative at first, Marco finally started explaining how he was hoping to aid Assange.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On March 19 of this year, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta received an alarming email that appeared to come from Google. The email, however, didn't come from the internet giant. It was actually an attempt to hack into his personal account. In fact, the message came from a group of hackers that security researchers, as well as the U.S. government, believe are spies working for the Russian government. At the time, however, Podesta didn't know any of this, and he clicked on the malicious link contained in the email, giving hackers access to his account. The data linking a group of Russian hackers -- known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Sofacy -- to the hack on Podesta is also yet another piece in a growing heap of evidence pointing toward the Kremlin. And it also shows a clear thread between apparently separate and independent leaks that have appeared on a website called DC Leaks, such as that of Colin Powell's emails; and the Podesta leak, which was publicized on WikiLeaks. All these hacks were done using the same tool: malicious short URLs hidden in fake Gmail messages. And those URLs, according to a security firm that's tracked them for a year, were created with Bitly account linked to a domain under the control of Fancy Bear. The phishing email that Podesta received on March 19 contained a URL, created with the popular Bitly shortening service, pointing to a longer URL that, to an untrained eye, looked like a Google link. Inside that long URL, there's a 30-character string that looks like gibberish but is actually the encoded Gmail address of John Podesta. According to Bitly's own statistics, that link, which has never been published, was clicked two times in March. That's the link that opened Podesta's account to the hackers, a source close to the investigation into the hack confirmed to Motherboard. That link is only one of almost 9,000 links Fancy Bear used to target almost 4,000 individuals from October 2015 to May 2016. Each one of these URLs contained the email and name of the actual target. The hackers created them with with two Bitly accounts in their control, but forgot to set those accounts to private, according to SecureWorks, a security firm that's been tracking Fancy Bear for the last year. Bitly allowed "third parties to see their entire campaign including all their targets -- something you'd want to keep secret," Tom Finney, a researcher at SecureWorks, told Motherboard. Thomas Rid, a professor at King's College who studied the case extensively, wrote a new piece about it in Esquire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On March 19 of this year, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta received an alarming email that appeared to come from Google. The email, however, didn't come from the internet giant. It was actually an attempt to hack into his personal account. In fact, the message came from a group of hackers that security researchers, as well as the U.S. government, believe are spies working for the Russian government. At the time, however, Podesta didn't know any of this, and he clicked on the malicious link contained in the email, giving hackers access to his account. The data linking a group of Russian hackers -- known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Sofacy -- to the hack on Podesta is also yet another piece in a growing heap of evidence pointing toward the Kremlin. And it also shows a clear thread between apparently separate and independent leaks that have appeared on a website called DC Leaks, such as that of Colin Powell's emails; and the Podesta leak, which was publicized on WikiLeaks. All these hacks were done using the same tool: malicious short URLs hidden in fake Gmail messages. And those URLs, according to a security firm that's tracked them for a year, were created with Bitly account linked to a domain under the control of Fancy Bear. The phishing email that Podesta received on March 19 contained a URL, created with the popular Bitly shortening service, pointing to a longer URL that, to an untrained eye, looked like a Google link. Inside that long URL, there's a 30-character string that looks like gibberish but is actually the encoded Gmail address of John Podesta. According to Bitly's own statistics, that link, which has never been published, was clicked two times in March. That's the link that opened Podesta's account to the hackers, a source close to the investigation into the hack confirmed to Motherboard. That link is only one of almost 9,000 links Fancy Bear used to target almost 4,000 individuals from October 2015 to May 2016. Each one of these URLs contained the email and name of the actual target. The hackers created them with with two Bitly accounts in their control, but forgot to set those accounts to private, according to SecureWorks, a security firm that's been tracking Fancy Bear for the last year. Bitly allowed "third parties to see their entire campaign including all their targets -- something you'd want to keep secret," Tom Finney, a researcher at SecureWorks, told Motherboard. Thomas Rid, a professor at King's College who studied the case extensively, wrote a new piece about it in Esquire.

On the sidelines of the Tesla announcements, CEO Elon Musk accused media of "killing people" by dissuading consumers from using an autonomous vehicle. Musk said that media is aggressively reporting on autopilot crashes, but does "virtually none" reporting of hundreds of thousands of actual accidents that involve non-self driving cars. He said, via a report on The Verge:Once you view autonomous cars sort of like an elevator in a building, does Otis take responsibility for all elevators around the world? No, they don't. What really matters here at the end of the day is "what is the absolute safety." One of the things I should mention that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of Autopilot crashes, which are basically almost none relative to the paucity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year in manual crashes. [It is] something that I think does not reflect well upon the media. It really doesn't. Because, and really you need to think carefully about this, because if, in writing some article that's negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you're killing people.

Netflix's movie library has declined over the last two years when cross referenced with IMDB's 250 movies list. Earlier this month, we learned that if you were in the United States, Netflix only had 31 of the 250 movies listed on the holy-grail of all movie databases. Gizmodo today reports that if you were in Brazil or Canada, that same library looks a lot better. From the report: According to analysis by both The Streaming Observer and AddonHQ, Canada and Brazil have the best content ecosystems, when it comes to movies on Netflix. But when it comes to good movies, Brazil is tops. The Streaming Observer found that Brazil had 85 movies from IMDb's Top 250 in its library. The site also put together a ridiculously huge chart if you want to see exactly which movies are available on each service. It's worth checking out. Brazil has movies that those of us in America could only dream of streaming, like The Godfather Part II, Fight Club, and The Empire Strikes Back. Mexico and Sweden have solid showings too, with 73 and 70 movies from the IMDb's Top 250 in their respective libraries.

Late Wednesday, Tesla announced the Model X and Model S electric vehicles, boasting that they will come with the necessary hardware to drive completely autonomously at some point in the future. Naturally, one of the frequent questions that followed the event was: "Can I use my Tesla car as a Uber driver?" Well, Tesla was anticipating this question and even buried the answer on its website. From an ArsTechnica report: On Tesla's website, the section that describes the new "Full Self-Driving Capability" (A $3,000 option at the time of purchase, $4,000 after the fact) states "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Redmond Pie: The Galaxy Note 7 wasn't just recalled, it was cancelled. For good. And that makes Samsung very cranky indeed. So when YouTube user HitmanNiko created a video showing a Grand Theft Auto 5 mod in which Galaxy Note 7 handsets can be used as grenades, it's perhaps somewhat understandable that someone inside Samsung took offense to the idea. What's incomprehensible though is the fact that Samsung has apparently set about trying to erase that video, and presumably others like it, from the Internet. The first step? Forcing YouTube to remove HitmanNiko's video. Trying to view the video now does nothing but display a message which says that the video is "no longer available due to a copyright claim by Samsung Electronics America" which leaves quite the bad taste in our mouths. The biggest issue here is that this is arguably the worst misuse of the DMCA we have ever come across, simply because nothing was copied, unless Samsung is trying to claim that by making the in-game grenades look like Galaxy Note 7 smartphones then the video creator was in fact in breach of copyright.

Soon after it was announced that Project Include, a community for building meaningful, enduring diversity and inclusion into tech companies, would no longer work with Y Combinator startups, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended Thiel's status as a Facebook board member in a message to employees. "We can't create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate," Zuckerberg wrote. "There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia, or accepting sexual assault." The Verge reports: A screenshot of the memo was posted to Hacker News yesterday, and it later surfaced on Boing Boing. A Facebook spokesman confirmed the authenticity of the five-paragraph memo to The Verge. It appears to have been posted on Facebook for Work, the enterprise version of Facebook that the company recently made available to other companies. Thiel's endorsement of Trump has put those CEOs in a difficult position. On one hand he is a close adviser; on the other, his support for an erratic, racist demagogue has outraged many of their employees and partners. Like Y Combinator's Sam Altman before him, Zuckerberg defended the company's ties to Thiel by saying that the company has a moral obligation to consider a variety of viewpoints, no matter how abhorrent. "We care deeply about diversity," Zuckerberg wrote. "That's easy to do when it means standing up for ideas you agree with. It's a lot harder when it means standing up for the rights of people with different viewpoints to say what they care about. That's even more important." Of course, as the designer Jason Putorti wrote on Medium this week, Thiel already has an outsized capacity to stand up for ideas he agrees with: he spent $1.25 million to promote them. Zuckerberg's memo reads as if he is defending Thiel's right to post on Facebook. In fact, the question is whether someone who promotes opposition to gender and racial equality should be allowed to serve as a steward for a company whose stated mission is to connect the world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: First the headphone jack, now the USB port? Rumor has it that Apple may get rid of the USB 3.0 port and the Magsafe port (where the charger plugs in) on the next generation of MacBooks. Japanese tech site Macotakara, which accurately predicted that Apple would kill the headphone jack on the iPhone 7, now also claims that the USB port is on the way out. The move would be similar to Apple's latest 12-inch MacBook and its streamlined profile. There's also word that Apple may discontinue the 11-inch MacBook Air to focus instead on the 13-inch laptop. Discontinuing the 11-inch MacBook Air would also potentially boost sales on the 12-inch MacBook. If these rumors are in fact true, then the new MacBooks will have only a USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 ports. Both of these ports are about the size of the part of an iPhone charger that plugs into the phone. But since most laptop accessories still plug in via the USB port, Apple owners might have to use an adaptor, or upgrade their technology. Meanwhile, the new MacBooks would likely be charged through the USB-C port or Thunderbolt 3 port. Currently, Apple already sells a USB-C dock with other USB and HDMI ports for $79. The USB-C port uses USB 3.1 Standard, according to PCWorld, which will connect to a wide variety of accessories, such as external hard drives, cameras, and printers. The USB 3.1 can also transfer data between the host computer and the peripheral accessories at a speed of 10 gigabits per second, which is twice as fast as the USB 3.0. Apple is expected to reveal the new Macs at an October 27th event in Cupertino, California.

Apple announced on Wednesday that it will be holding an event on October 27. The tagline of the invite is, "hello again." This suggests that the rumors are true and that the company will indeed announce a fleet of new Mac products. The original Mac was introduced with the word "hello" in 1984. People have waited for years now for Apple to refresh its Macbooks -- some of the products in Mac line haven't received an update in 1000 days. Many expert even said earlier that Apple should stop selling the old MacBooks. The new MacBooks are expected to ship with Intel Skylake processor and a contextual keyboard. Not long ago, the company was also exploring the idea of a MacBook without a 3.5mm audio jack.

Apple announced on Wednesday that it will be holding an event on October 27. The tagline of the invite is, "hello again." This suggests that the rumors are true and that the company will indeed announce a fleet of new Mac products. The original Mac was introduced with the word "hello" in 1984. People have waited for years now for Apple to refresh its Macbooks -- some of the products in Mac line haven't received an update in 1000 days. Many expert even said earlier that Apple should stop selling the old MacBooks. The new MacBooks are expected to ship with Intel Skylake processor and a contextual keyboard. Not long ago, the company was also exploring the idea of a MacBook without a 3.5mm audio jack.

Alexandra Valencia, reporting for Reuters: Ecuador's government acknowledged on Tuesday it had partly restricted internet access for Julian Assange, the founder of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks who has lived in the South American country's London embassy since mid-2012. WikiLeaks said Assange lost connectivity on Sunday, sparking speculation Ecuador might have been pressured by the United States due to the group's publication of hacked material linked to U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In a statement, Ecuador's leftist government said WikiLeaks' decision to publish documents impacting the U.S. election campaign was entirely its own responsibility, and the South American country did not cede to pressure from other nations. "In that respect, Ecuador, exercising its sovereign right, has temporarily restricted access to part of its communications systems in its UK Embassy," it added in a statement. "The Ecuador government respects the principle of non-intervention in other countries' affairs, it does not meddle in election processes underway, nor does it support any candidate specially."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Dot: An online surveillance tool that enabled hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies to track and collect information on social media users was also marketed for use in American public schools, the Daily Dot has learned. Geofeedia sold surveillance software typically bought by police to a high school in a northern Chicago suburb, less than 50 miles from where the company was founded in 2011. An Illinois school official confirmed the purchase of the software by phone on Monday. In the fall of 2014, the Lincolnshire-Prairie School District paid Geofeedia $10,000 to monitor the social media posts of children at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. "We did have for one year a contract with Geofeedia," said Jim Conrey, a spokesperson for Lincolnshire-Prairie School District. "We were mostly interested in the possibility of trying to prevent any kind of harm, either that students would do to themselves or to other students." Conrey said the district simply wanted to keep its students safe. "It was really just about student safety; if we could try to head off any potential dangerous situations, we thought it might be worth it," he said. Ultimately, the school found little use for the platform, which was operated by police liaison stationed on school grounds, and chose not to renew its subscription after the first year, citing cost and a lack of actionable information. "A lot of kids that were posting stuff that we most wanted, they weren't doing the geo-tagging or making it public," Conrey said. "We weren't really seeing a lot there." The school's experience, added Conrey, was that more often than not students would approach school administrators with sensitive issues, as opposed to the school unearthing problems affecting students using Geofeedia. "Quite frankly, we found that it wasn't worth the money," Conrey said.

According to Recode's sources, Apple's updated Macs will be unveiled at an event in Cupertino on October 27th. Recode reports: The move had been long expected, given that the company released MacOS Sierra last month but had yet to introduce any new computer models sporting the software. It also comes just in time for Apple to have the new products on sale for the full holiday season. Apple has gone a long time without making significant changes to any of its Mac models, with most experts encouraging customers to hold off all but essential new purchases until the lineup was updated. Tops among the rumors have been reports that Apple will introduce a new MacBook Pro sporting a row of customizable touchscreen keys. The Mac event is expected to take place at or near Apple's Cupertino campus rather than in San Francisco, where the company held many recent events, including the iPhone 7 announcement.

According to Recode's sources, Apple's updated Macs will be unveiled at an event in Cupertino on October 27th. Recode reports: The move had been long expected, given that the company released MacOS Sierra last month but had yet to introduce any new computer models sporting the software. It also comes just in time for Apple to have the new products on sale for the full holiday season. Apple has gone a long time without making significant changes to any of its Mac models, with most experts encouraging customers to hold off all but essential new purchases until the lineup was updated. Tops among the rumors have been reports that Apple will introduce a new MacBook Pro sporting a row of customizable touchscreen keys. The Mac event is expected to take place at or near Apple's Cupertino campus rather than in San Francisco, where the company held many recent events, including the iPhone 7 announcement.

According to Recode's sources, Apple's updated Macs will be unveiled at an event in Cupertino on October 27th. Recode reports: The move had been long expected, given that the company released MacOS Sierra last month but had yet to introduce any new computer models sporting the software. It also comes just in time for Apple to have the new products on sale for the full holiday season. Apple has gone a long time without making significant changes to any of its Mac models, with most experts encouraging customers to hold off all but essential new purchases until the lineup was updated. Tops among the rumors have been reports that Apple will introduce a new MacBook Pro sporting a row of customizable touchscreen keys. The Mac event is expected to take place at or near Apple's Cupertino campus rather than in San Francisco, where the company held many recent events, including the iPhone 7 announcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Wednesday. That means there's about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database, the study by Georgetown's Center on Privacy and Technology says. The report (PDF), titled "The Perpetual Line-up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America," shows that one-fourth of the nation's law enforcement agencies have access to face-recognition databases, and their use by those agencies is virtually unregulated. Where do the mug shots come from? For starters, about 16 states allow the FBI to use facial recognition to compare faces of suspected criminals to their driver's licenses or ID photos, according to the study. "In this line-up," the study says, "it's not a human that points to the suspect -- it's an algorithm." The study says 26 states or more allow police agencies to "run or request searches" against their databases or driver's licenses and ID photos. This equates to "roughly one in two American adults has their photos searched this way," according to the study. Many local police agencies also insert mug shots of people they arrest into searchable, biometric databases, according to the report. According to the report, researchers obtained documents stating that at least five "major police departments," including those in Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles, "either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology that can do so, or expressed an interest in buying it." The Georgetown report's release comes three months after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the FBI has access to as many as 411.9 million images as part of its face-recognition database. The study also mentioned that the police departments have little oversight of their databases and don't audit them for misuse: "Maryland's system, which includes the license photos of over two million residents, was launched in 2011. It has never been audited. The Pinellas Country Sheriff's Office system is almost 15 years old and may be the most frequently used system in the country. When asked if his office audits searches for misuse, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri replied, "No, not really." Despite assurances to Congress, the FBI has not audited use of its face recognition system, either. Only nine of 52 agencies (17%) indicated that they log and audit their officers' face recognition searchers for improper use. Of those, only one agency, the Michigan State Police, provided documentation showing that their audit regime was actually functional."

WikiLeaks has been releasing thousands of emails over the past couple of weeks belonging to Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. One of the more interesting tidbits revealed from the email dump was the list of potential running mates considered by Clinton's campaign. The Verge reports: Clinton's vice presidential candidates, while not altogether surprising, include some vaguely interesting choices like Bill and Melinda Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra. In the mail, Podesta says he has organized the list into "rough food groups," one of which includes all the people mentioned above. Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz are also in this "food group," along with Michael Bloomberg. With just under 40 names on the list, it's not immediately obvious how close any of these people came to actually being asked to take on the role (Tim Kaine is on the list).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Orbital ATK Antares rocket -- the same rocket that exploded on its way to the International Space Station two years ago -- returned to flight today with a much-anticipated launch. Lifting off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the Antares rocket is now on its way to deliver the Cygnus spacecraft filled with over 5,000 pounds of cargo to crew members aboard the ISS. Today's launch was particularly special for Orbital ATK, a company contracted by NASA to deliver 66,000 pounds of cargo to the ISS through 2018. After their Antares rocket exploded during a launch in 2014, destroying thousands of pounds of experiments and cargo bound for the space station, Orbital ATK worked for two years to upgrade that rocket and prepare for its return to flight. Today, the Orbital ATK was finally able to fly Cygnus on top of their own rocket again. The RD-181-equipped Antares rocket carried Cygnus, which housed science experiments and supplies for the ISS crew, for their fifth operational cargo resupply mission for NASA. Along with crew supplies, spacewalk equipment and computer resources, Cygnus will bring over 1,000 pounds of science investigations to the five crew members on the ISS. One of those experiments is Saffire-II, the second Saffire experiment to be conducted inside Cygnus in order to study realistic flame propagation in space. Cygnus will spend over a month attached to the ISS. In late November, the spacecraft will be filled with about 3,000 pounds of trash and then released to begin its descent back to Earth. During reentry through Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft, along with trash and Saffire-II, will be destroyed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Matt Furie, the creator of the widely known "Pepe the Frog" meme, is joining forces with the Anti-Defamation League to reclaim the symbol from the alt-right and make it a "force for good," according to a press release. Furie and the ADL plan to start a social-media campaign by creating "a series of positive Pepe memes and messages" and promoting them with the hashtag #SavePepe, according to the release. The ADL declared "Pepe the Frog" to be a hate symbol in late September. "It's completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate," Furie said in a column for Time magazine. While fiercely condemning the "racist and fringe groups" that use Pepe to propagate divisive views, Furie said Pepe was meant to "celebrate peace, togetherness, and fun." The meme, which originated from a 2005 cartoon, has been hijacked by the alt-right movement in the past several months. Members of the movement have used the meme to convey often racist and anti-Semitic messages. The messages prompted the ADL to add Pepe to its "Hate on Display" database, which documents anti-Semitic hate symbols. According to the ADL's press release on the #SavePepe campaign, Furie will speak at its "Never Is Now" summit against anti-Semitism on November 17 in New York City. The panel will focus specifically on online hate campaigns. Furie published a new Pepe cartoon on Monday detailing his "alt-right election nightmare," which depicts a sad Pepe morphing into a frog that resembles Donald Trump and then a monster. Pepe appears trapped in the mouth of the monster. The next panel depicts a nuclear explosion. Pepe then awakes and hides under his mattress.

pdclarry writes: While all of the recent news has been about hacking the Democratic National Committee, apparently the Republicans have also been hacked over many months (since March 2016). This was not about politics, however; it was to steal credit card numbers. Brian Krebs reports: "a report this past week out of The Netherlands suggests Russian hackers have for the past six months been siphoning credit card data from visitors to the web storefront of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). [...] If you purchased a 'Never Hillary' poster or donated funds to the NRSC through its website between March 2016 and the first week of this month [October 2016], there's an excellent chance that your payment card data was siphoned by malware and is now for sale in the cybercrime underground." Krebs says his information comes from Dutch researcher Willem De Groot, co-founder and head of security at Dutch e-commerce site byte.nl. The Republicans were not alone; theirs was just one of 5,900 e-commerce sites hacked by the same Russian actors. You can view De Groot's analysis of the malware planted on the NRSC's site and other services here. Krebs adds: "The NRSC did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but a cached copy of the site's source code from October 5, 2016 indicates the malicious code was on the site at the time (load this link, click 'view source' and then Ctrl-F for 'jquery-cloud.net')."

pdclarry writes: While all of the recent news has been about hacking the Democratic National Committee, apparently the Republicans have also been hacked over many months (since March 2016). This was not about politics, however; it was to steal credit card numbers. Brian Krebs reports: "a report this past week out of The Netherlands suggests Russian hackers have for the past six months been siphoning credit card data from visitors to the web storefront of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). [...] If you purchased a 'Never Hillary' poster or donated funds to the NRSC through its website between March 2016 and the first week of this month [October 2016], there's an excellent chance that your payment card data was siphoned by malware and is now for sale in the cybercrime underground." Krebs says his information comes from Dutch researcher Willem De Groot, co-founder and head of security at Dutch e-commerce site byte.nl. The Republicans were not alone; theirs was just one of 5,900 e-commerce sites hacked by the same Russian actors. You can view De Groot's analysis of the malware planted on the NRSC's site and other services here. Krebs adds: "The NRSC did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but a cached copy of the site's source code from October 5, 2016 indicates the malicious code was on the site at the time (load this link, click 'view source' and then Ctrl-F for 'jquery-cloud.net')."

Following a report from WikiLeaks claiming that its co-founder's internet service was intentionally cut off by a state actor, the anti-secrecy organization released a statement confirming the state actor was Ecuador. WikiLeaks tweeted: "We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs." BBC reports: There was no way to immediately verify if he had been knocked offline, and if so, what was Ecuador's motivation. The anti-secrecy organization did not return calls and emails on Monday, though it said in a tweet: "We have activated the appropriate contingency plans." A woman who picked up the phone at the Ecuadorean embassy said: "I cannot disclose any information." The Wikileaks claim follows the latest emails it disclosed from a hack of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails. It released three transcripts on Saturday of Mrs Clinton's paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, which her campaign had long refused to release. The scrips reveal her bantering relationship with the investment bank's executives, which is unlikely to allay fears among liberal Democrats that she is too cosy with Wall Street.

An anonymous reader writes: London's Metropolitan Police Service has begun a roll-out of 22,000 Body Worn Video (BWV) cameras to officers over the city's 32 boroughs after ten years of country-wide trials. The device, which records video only when the officer decides, has a 130-degree field of view and a 30-second buffer which permits police to begin recording even after an event has started. The makers of the camera also provide an Android/iOS app which can allow a remote viewer to connect to an officer's camera, effectively turning police operatives into walking CCTVs. Academic research has suggested that use of BWV cams can reduce complaints against officers by 93%, and the Met contends that the new technology, whose cloud-based systems erases unwanted videos after 31 days, is particularly effective in domestic violence cases.

More performers -- and other venues -- are discovering a new anti-piracy technology called Yondr -- including comedian Dave Chappelle. Slashdot reader HughPickens.com quotes the New York Times: Fans are required to place their cellphones into Yondr's form-fitting lockable pouch when entering the show, and a disk mechanism unlocks it on the way out. Fans keep the pouch with them, but it is impossible to snap pictures, shoot videos or send text messages during the performance while the pouch is locked.

'I know my show is protected, and it empowers me to be more honest and open with the audience,' says Dave Chappelle...But some fans object to not being able to disseminate and see live shows via videotape...
"In this day and age, my phone is how I keep my memory," one live-music fan told the Washington Post, adding "If you don't want your music heard, then don't perform it." But the device is becoming more common, and according to the Times it's now also being used at weddings, restaurants, schools, and when movies are being prescreened.

While "the vast majority" of lithium-ion batteries will never malfunction, lithium itself "is highly combustible and batteries made with it are subject to 'thermal runaway'," which can be triggered by damage -- or by bad design. An anonymous reader quotes the San Jose Mercury News: Battery and electronics manufacturers take numerous steps to try to mitigate such dangers... But while the industry has tried to make lithium-ion batteries safer, 'the technology itself isn't foolproof,' said Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage research at GTM Research... And there's reason to think that the problem could get worse before it gets better. Consumer demand for devices that are ever more powerful and longer lasting has encouraged manufacturers to make batteries that can hold even more charge. To do that, they typically pack the battery cells closer and closer together...

Since June of this year, educational toy company Roylco recalled 1,400 light tables designed for kids... Razor, Swagway and some eight other manufacturers recalled a total of 500,000 hoverboards. And HP and Sony between them recalled more than 42,000 notebook computers. All for similar reasons -- lithium-ion batteries that either had caught fire or which have posed a fire hazard... Other notorious examples include the several different Tesla Model S's that have caught fire, typically after crashes compromised their battery packs, and Sony's wide-scale recall a decade ago of the batteries that powered its Vaio and other laptop computers.
In a related story, Samsung's recall of their Note 7 is now expected to cost $5.3 billion.

While "the vast majority" of lithium-ion batteries will never malfunction, lithium itself "is highly combustible and batteries made with it are subject to 'thermal runaway'," which can be triggered by damage -- or by bad design. An anonymous reader quotes the San Jose Mercury News: Battery and electronics manufacturers take numerous steps to try to mitigate such dangers... But while the industry has tried to make lithium-ion batteries safer, 'the technology itself isn't foolproof,' said Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage research at GTM Research... And there's reason to think that the problem could get worse before it gets better. Consumer demand for devices that are ever more powerful and longer lasting has encouraged manufacturers to make batteries that can hold even more charge. To do that, they typically pack the battery cells closer and closer together...

Since June of this year, educational toy company Roylco recalled 1,400 light tables designed for kids... Razor, Swagway and some eight other manufacturers recalled a total of 500,000 hoverboards. And HP and Sony between them recalled more than 42,000 notebook computers. All for similar reasons -- lithium-ion batteries that either had caught fire or which have posed a fire hazard... Other notorious examples include the several different Tesla Model S's that have caught fire, typically after crashes compromised their battery packs, and Sony's wide-scale recall a decade ago of the batteries that powered its Vaio and other laptop computers.
In a related story, Samsung's recall of their Note 7 is now expected to cost $5.3 billion.

While "the vast majority" of lithium-ion batteries will never malfunction, lithium itself "is highly combustible and batteries made with it are subject to 'thermal runaway'," which can be triggered by damage -- or by bad design. An anonymous reader quotes the San Jose Mercury News: Battery and electronics manufacturers take numerous steps to try to mitigate such dangers... But while the industry has tried to make lithium-ion batteries safer, 'the technology itself isn't foolproof,' said Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage research at GTM Research... And there's reason to think that the problem could get worse before it gets better. Consumer demand for devices that are ever more powerful and longer lasting has encouraged manufacturers to make batteries that can hold even more charge. To do that, they typically pack the battery cells closer and closer together...

Since June of this year, educational toy company Roylco recalled 1,400 light tables designed for kids... Razor, Swagway and some eight other manufacturers recalled a total of 500,000 hoverboards. And HP and Sony between them recalled more than 42,000 notebook computers. All for similar reasons -- lithium-ion batteries that either had caught fire or which have posed a fire hazard... Other notorious examples include the several different Tesla Model S's that have caught fire, typically after crashes compromised their battery packs, and Sony's wide-scale recall a decade ago of the batteries that powered its Vaio and other laptop computers.
In a related story, Samsung's recall of their Note 7 is now expected to cost $5.3 billion.

Earlier this month Mashable wrote "it's now even more obvious what [Apple] is working to bring to the masses, and it's probably not, as some rumors have indicated, virtual reality." They cited CEO Tim Cook's recent predictions that augmented reality "is going to become really big" -- he said it again on Thursday -- and BuzzFeed noted that Apple "has quietly put into place the components of what could prove to be an AR ecosystem: The iPhone 7 Plus has...a two-camera system capable of gathering stereoscopic data and generating image depth maps... In Apple Watch, the company has a spatially-aware, wearable device outfitted with an accelerometer and GPS. In its new AirPod wireless earphones, Apple essentially has a pair of diminutive, spatially-aware microcomputers -- each one with an Apple W1 wireless chip (the company's first), two accelerometers, two optical sensors, beam-forming microphones, and an antenna... And sources tell BuzzFeed News that the company has recently been taking meetings with immersive content companies like Jaunt.
Their article also lists AR companies that Apple's bought over the last three years -- plus their patents for a "head-mounted display" and a "peripheral treatment for head-mounted displays." BGR adds that Tim Cook "likes to tease future products," and points out that Cook has even said Apple is working on AR features "behind the curtain". This casts a new light on those rumors of an all-glass case for next year's iPhone 8. Will the whole body of the phone become part of an Augmented Reality display system? (And could AR also explain Apple's aggressive push for wireless headphones?)

Earlier this month Mashable wrote "it's now even more obvious what [Apple] is working to bring to the masses, and it's probably not, as some rumors have indicated, virtual reality." They cited CEO Tim Cook's recent predictions that augmented reality "is going to become really big" -- he said it again on Thursday -- and BuzzFeed noted that Apple "has quietly put into place the components of what could prove to be an AR ecosystem: The iPhone 7 Plus has...a two-camera system capable of gathering stereoscopic data and generating image depth maps... In Apple Watch, the company has a spatially-aware, wearable device outfitted with an accelerometer and GPS. In its new AirPod wireless earphones, Apple essentially has a pair of diminutive, spatially-aware microcomputers -- each one with an Apple W1 wireless chip (the company's first), two accelerometers, two optical sensors, beam-forming microphones, and an antenna... And sources tell BuzzFeed News that the company has recently been taking meetings with immersive content companies like Jaunt.
Their article also lists AR companies that Apple's bought over the last three years -- plus their patents for a "head-mounted display" and a "peripheral treatment for head-mounted displays." BGR adds that Tim Cook "likes to tease future products," and points out that Cook has even said Apple is working on AR features "behind the curtain". This casts a new light on those rumors of an all-glass case for next year's iPhone 8. Will the whole body of the phone become part of an Augmented Reality display system? (And could AR also explain Apple's aggressive push for wireless headphones?)

Slashdot reader whoever57 writes: Navinder Sarao has lost his appeal and is set to be extradited to the USA, where he faces charges with a possible maximum sentence of 380 years. He is accused of causing the "flash crash" in 2010, when the Dow Jones index dropped by 1000 points.

He ran his trading from his bedroom in his parents' house and it is claimed that he made more than 30 million pounds (approximately $40 million) in five years. His parents had no idea what he was doing, nor the scale of his income. He is accused of placing trades that he never intended to fill, so, to this naive person, it's hard to distinguish what he did from the large high-speed trading firms.
"Lawyers for Mr Sarao tried to argue that the U.S. crime of spoofing had no equivalent under English law, meaning he could not be sent for trial overseas," reports The Telegraph, adding that he's already spent four months in jail because he didn't have enough money to post his own bail.

Slashdot reader whoever57 writes: Navinder Sarao has lost his appeal and is set to be extradited to the USA, where he faces charges with a possible maximum sentence of 380 years. He is accused of causing the "flash crash" in 2010, when the Dow Jones index dropped by 1000 points.

He ran his trading from his bedroom in his parents' house and it is claimed that he made more than 30 million pounds (approximately $40 million) in five years. His parents had no idea what he was doing, nor the scale of his income. He is accused of placing trades that he never intended to fill, so, to this naive person, it's hard to distinguish what he did from the large high-speed trading firms.
"Lawyers for Mr Sarao tried to argue that the U.S. crime of spoofing had no equivalent under English law, meaning he could not be sent for trial overseas," reports The Telegraph, adding that he's already spent four months in jail because he didn't have enough money to post his own bail.

For the first time ever, secure HTTPS encryption was used for over half the pageloads served to Mozilla users, representing a big milestone for encryption. TechCrunch reports on the telemetry data tweeted by the Head of Let's Encrypt: Mozilla, which is one of the organizations backing Let's Encrypt, was reporting that 40% of page views were encrypted as of December 2015. So it's an impressively speedy rise...

The Let's Encrypt initiative, which exited beta back in April, is doing some of that work by providing sites with free digital certificates to help accelerate the switch to HTTPS. According to [co-founder Josh] Aas, Let's Encrypt added more than a million new active certificates in the past week -- which is also a significant step up. In the initiative's first six months (when still in beta) it only issued around 1.7 million certificates in all.
The "50% HTTPS" figure is just a one-day snapshot, and it's from "only a subset of Firefox users who are running Mozilla's telemetry browser...not default switched on for most Firefox users (only for users of pre-release Firefox builds)." But the biggest caveat is it's only counting Firefox users, which in July represented just 7.7% of web surfers (according to Statista), behind both Chrome (49.5%) and Safari (13.68%) -- but also ahead of Internet Explorer (5.4%) and Opera (5.99%).

From a report on Inverse: When Mercedes-Benz starts selling self-driving cars, it will choose to prioritize driver safety over pedestrians', a company manager has confirmed. The ethical conundrum of how A.I.-powered machines should act in life-or-death situations has received more scrutiny as driverless cars become a reality, but the car manufacturer believes that it's safer to save the life you have greater control over. "You could sacrifice the car. You could, but then the people you've saved initially, you don't know what happens to them after that in situations that are often very complex, so you save the ones you know you can save," said Christoph von Hugo, Mercedes' manager of driver assistance systems. "If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car. This moral question of whom to save: 99 percent of our engineering work is to prevent these situations from happening at all. We are working so our cars don't drive into situations where that could happen and [will] drive away from potential situations where those decisions have to be made."As long as they are better at driving and safety than humans, it is a progress, in my opinion.

Earlier this week, the Obama administration discussed a new strategic plan aimed at fostering the development of AI-centered technologies in the United States. What's striking about it is, the Washington Post notes, although the United States was an early leader in deep-learning research (a subset of the overall branch of AI known as machine learning), China has effectively eclipsed it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). From the report: The rate of increase is remarkably steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted. The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.

Drivers stuck in traffic in Mexico city are lately seeing a fleet of sign-toting drones buzzing at them, saying (in Spanish) "Driving by yourself? This is why you can never see the volcanoes." (It's a reference to the smog that often hovers over the city and obscures two nearby peaks.) Turns out, it's an ad for UberPOOL, part of Uber's big push into markets across Latin America. From an MIT Technology Review article: Uber already does more business in Mexico City than any other city it operates in, and Brazil is its third-largest market after the U.S. and India. Uber sees Latin American countries as generally easier targets for expansion than either of its top two markets.Umm, I get that Uber has self-driving cars now in Pittsburgh, but they don't fly (at least as of now). So wouldn't they be stuck in the traffic as well?

Drivers stuck in traffic in Mexico city are lately seeing a fleet of sign-toting drones buzzing at them, saying (in Spanish) "Driving by yourself? This is why you can never see the volcanoes." (It's a reference to the smog that often hovers over the city and obscures two nearby peaks.) Turns out, it's an ad for UberPOOL, part of Uber's big push into markets across Latin America. From an MIT Technology Review article: Uber already does more business in Mexico City than any other city it operates in, and Brazil is its third-largest market after the U.S. and India. Uber sees Latin American countries as generally easier targets for expansion than either of its top two markets.Umm, I get that Uber has self-driving cars now in Pittsburgh, but they don't fly (at least as of now). So wouldn't they be stuck in the traffic as well?

Silicon Valley's big data startup Palantir, founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, has filed a response to the Department of Labor after the agency sued the company for discriminating against Asian job applicants. From a Fortune report: Palantir says that no discrimination took place and that the Labor Department's statistical analysis -- the basis for the recent suit -- is faulty. The suit, according to Palantir's 15-page response, wrongly suggests that the company "should have hired a workforce that matched the racial composition of the group of individuals whose resumes Palantir received, without regard to candidate qualifications." Palantir's response also points out that the suit addressed only three out of 44 job titles for which Palantir hired employees within the 18-month analysis period conducted by the Labor Department. What's more, says the response, 36% of those eventually hired across all the job openings within that timeframe were Asian -- a rate that exceeds the percentage of qualified Asian employees in the external labor market, according to stats from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

You asked, he answered!

Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at security firm F-Secure, has answered a range of your questions. Read on to find his insight on the kind of security awareness training we need, whether anti-virus products are relevant anymore, and whether we have already lost the battle to bad guys. Bonus: his take on whether or not you should take backups of your data. Security awareness training
by Anynoymous reader

Do you have any suggestions on how to create a successful security awareness program in a tech company? Some people like Bruce Schneier prefer the time and money spent on better security engineering. What's your take on this?

Mikko Hypponen: If there's one thing that I have learned over my 25-year career in computer security, it is that people never learn. They just won't. They will always follow every link, they will always double-click on every attachment, they will always type their password on every phishing site. Quite often, education just seems like a waste of time. I think we should do the best we can to move the responsibility away from the end user, as much as we can. Most users can't handle it, anyway. The average Slashdot reader can, but most can't.

Anti-virus software
by NotInHere

With recent reports of anti-virus software sometimes actually adding security vulnerabilities to the system, and the fact that Windows ships with its own bundled anti-virus, what advantages do commercial third-party anti-virus solutions offer these days?

MH: Security companies should clearly do a better job in making sure their low-level code is not exploitable. Heck, there's still a lot of security companies who do not run an open bug bounty (we do)! Having said that, it's clear that anti-virus products drastically improve the security level of a typical workstation. We see this every day from our analytics. Every single day, we prevent tens of thousands of our customer from getting infected with malware. These are real cases where our product is the last layer of protection and the user would have been infected without us. The malware went through everything else, including Windows' own security layers and we blocked it. Feels good, man.

Is it too late? Have we lost the battle?
by dougTheRug

Hi Mikko, in my day job I am a security evangelist, carrying out developer education and design reviews. For 8 years previous to that I helped companies use static analysis to detect and eliminate security vulnerabilities at the implementation layer. I am becoming convinced that, with the poor state of software today and extreme complexity, there is simply no way the good guys can win. Defenders have to get it right, every single time while the bad guys only need to be right once, to establish an APT and destroy your company. If the bad guys were parasites I would say this would all simmer down to a balancing point where the parasites existed off a slow background noise of constant attacks, but never enough to kill civilization completely. But with a lack of collusion, attackers are more likely to race to the bottom and to not pay attention to the health of their host. So basically my prediction is: crime will eventually kill technology; it will become unusable. Do you have a more hopeful outcome for us?

MH: Criminals need the internet to make money. They do not want to kill the net and they do not want to make it unusable for their victims. They do want to keep it operational - so they can make money. So, the internet is not about to crash any time soon.

Some wisdom on the future...
by Anonymous reader

We (as a society) put different emphasis on security and privacy at different times. What do you think we should optimize for and where do you think is the optimum?

MH: We are the first generation in mankind's history that can be monitored at this level. We can be monitored digitally throughout our lives. Almost all of our communication can be monitored one way or another. We even carry small tracking devices on us all the time - we just don't call them tracking devices, we call them smartphones. What does that level of monitoring mean to us in the long run? I'm afraid we do not have an answer for that yet. And, security and privacy are not a direct trade off. We need both. It might be that we've already lost the war on privacy, But I refuse to accept that we would have lost the war on security too.

Complicated issues #1
by Aryeh Goretsky

Do you think it is still possible to secure embedded systems (aka the Internet of Things), or is that an impossibility now, practically speaking?

MH: Legacy appliance vendors know a lot about safety. But they don't know much about security. So you can rest assured that your smart lightbulb will not give you an electric shock, and it will not catch fire. But it will leak your wifi password. And this isn't getting better quickly, as security is not a selling point for household appliances: price is. Which means vendors are installing the minimum to their security features.

Users mostly don't care, as they don't understand the scope of the problem. "Why would anybody hack my fridge?" "Why would anybody hack my toaster?" Well, the attackers are not after your toaster: they are after your network. Your toaster is just the easiest way in. IoT devices are not the target - they are the vector. Even more so when those IoT devices are not at your home but at your office.

I'd like to think that in the long run IoT will turn out to be useful like the internet itself. It's clear that the internet exposed our systems to a wide range of new kinds of risks, but the benefits outweighed the risks. I hope that will apply to IoT one day as well.

Complicated issues #2
by Aryeh Goretsky

If there was one thing you could suggest every average computer user to do to improve their security, what would it be?

MH: Back up.

Back up your computer. Back up your phone. Back up your tablet.

Back them up so you can recover them even if your house burns down.
And then take a backup of your backup.

"Question"
by Anonymous reader

Do you have a favorite "That one who got away" story? By that I mean some piece of malware you could almost track down the creator of, figure out how it worked or automate discovery of it, but not quite?

MH: Oh, there are several mysteries in the world of malware research. I've always wondered where Dark Avenger is today. He was a legendary Bulgarian virus writer in the early 1990s and he was never caught. One rumour is that he's working at some motherboard vendor nowadays, writing BIOS code. Then there was the mystery of the WHALE virus. I still think about that sometimes, and about what the mysterious message 'I AM '~knzyvo}' IN HAMBURG' means. And then we have Conficker. It's still the most common malware out there today. It was a massive and well-orchestrated operation, for apparently now reason. I believe there's more to that story, but we don't have all the pieces of the puzzle.

Computer health class
by hendric

What would you like to see in a computer 'health' class?

MH: Things like:
- how to uninstall Java and Flash
- how to install a better browser
- how to drop the admin rights
- how to use a password manager
- a lecture on how things that seem too good to be true are never true
- especially on the net

As the Trump campaign refuses to point blame at Russia for the DNC hacks, top democrats on four House committees are questioning possible connections between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. They have formally asked the FBI to investigate the matter, citing new comments from a Trump confidant. Politico reports: "Troubling new evidence appears to show that the Trump campaign not only was aware of cyber attacks against Secretary [Hillary] Clinton's campaign chairman, but was openly bragging about it as far back as August," said Reps. Elijah Cummings from Government Affairs, John Conyers from Judiciary, Eliot Engel from Foreign Affairs and Bennie Thompson from Homeland Security. "For months, we have been asking the FBI to examine links between the Trump campaign and illegal Russian efforts to affect our election, including interviewing Trump advisor Roger Stone," they said. "In light of this new evidence -- and these exceptional circumstances -- we call on the FBI to fully investigate and explain to the American people what steps it is taking to disrupt this ongoing criminal activity." Earlier this week Stone said that "I do have a back-channel communication with Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose organization has been dropping documents online from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and has been unloading documents from other Democrats as well. U.S. intelligence agencies last week declared that a connection exists between Russia and allegedly hacked documents leaked by WikiLeaks and others.

As the Trump campaign refuses to point blame at Russia for the DNC hacks, top democrats on four House committees are questioning possible connections between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. They have formally asked the FBI to investigate the matter, citing new comments from a Trump confidant. Politico reports: "Troubling new evidence appears to show that the Trump campaign not only was aware of cyber attacks against Secretary [Hillary] Clinton's campaign chairman, but was openly bragging about it as far back as August," said Reps. Elijah Cummings from Government Affairs, John Conyers from Judiciary, Eliot Engel from Foreign Affairs and Bennie Thompson from Homeland Security. "For months, we have been asking the FBI to examine links between the Trump campaign and illegal Russian efforts to affect our election, including interviewing Trump advisor Roger Stone," they said. "In light of this new evidence -- and these exceptional circumstances -- we call on the FBI to fully investigate and explain to the American people what steps it is taking to disrupt this ongoing criminal activity." Earlier this week Stone said that "I do have a back-channel communication with Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose organization has been dropping documents online from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and has been unloading documents from other Democrats as well. U.S. intelligence agencies last week declared that a connection exists between Russia and allegedly hacked documents leaked by WikiLeaks and others.

As the Trump campaign refuses to point blame at Russia for the DNC hacks, top democrats on four House committees are questioning possible connections between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. They have formally asked the FBI to investigate the matter, citing new comments from a Trump confidant. Politico reports: "Troubling new evidence appears to show that the Trump campaign not only was aware of cyber attacks against Secretary [Hillary] Clinton's campaign chairman, but was openly bragging about it as far back as August," said Reps. Elijah Cummings from Government Affairs, John Conyers from Judiciary, Eliot Engel from Foreign Affairs and Bennie Thompson from Homeland Security. "For months, we have been asking the FBI to examine links between the Trump campaign and illegal Russian efforts to affect our election, including interviewing Trump advisor Roger Stone," they said. "In light of this new evidence -- and these exceptional circumstances -- we call on the FBI to fully investigate and explain to the American people what steps it is taking to disrupt this ongoing criminal activity." Earlier this week Stone said that "I do have a back-channel communication with Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose organization has been dropping documents online from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and has been unloading documents from other Democrats as well. U.S. intelligence agencies last week declared that a connection exists between Russia and allegedly hacked documents leaked by WikiLeaks and others.

Verizon has been growing wary of their pending $4.83 billion acquisition deal of Yahoo ever since the technology company revealed a massive data breach affecting at least 500 million of its users. Today, Yahoo canceled their earnings call to avoid talking about the incident. Huffington Post reports: The internet company announced Friday that it will not hold the customary conference call after it released its third-quarter earnings next week "due to the pending transaction with Verizon." Verizon announced in July that it had agreed to buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion. The New York Post reported last week that Verizon wanted to cut $1 billion off the acquisition price due to the hack. Verizon denied the report. Yahoo's announcement reads in part: "Due to the pending transaction with Verizon, Yahoo will not have an earnings call or webcast for its third quarter results. Concurrently with release of its financial results, supplemental financial information will also be posted on the Company's Investor Relations website at investor.yahoo.net.

Verizon has been growing wary of their pending $4.83 billion acquisition deal of Yahoo ever since the technology company revealed a massive data breach affecting at least 500 million of its users. Today, Yahoo canceled their earnings call to avoid talking about the incident. Huffington Post reports: The internet company announced Friday that it will not hold the customary conference call after it released its third-quarter earnings next week "due to the pending transaction with Verizon." Verizon announced in July that it had agreed to buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion. The New York Post reported last week that Verizon wanted to cut $1 billion off the acquisition price due to the hack. Verizon denied the report. Yahoo's announcement reads in part: "Due to the pending transaction with Verizon, Yahoo will not have an earnings call or webcast for its third quarter results. Concurrently with release of its financial results, supplemental financial information will also be posted on the Company's Investor Relations website at investor.yahoo.net.

Verizon has been growing wary of their pending $4.83 billion acquisition deal of Yahoo ever since the technology company revealed a massive data breach affecting at least 500 million of its users. Today, Yahoo canceled their earnings call to avoid talking about the incident. Huffington Post reports: The internet company announced Friday that it will not hold the customary conference call after it released its third-quarter earnings next week "due to the pending transaction with Verizon." Verizon announced in July that it had agreed to buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion. The New York Post reported last week that Verizon wanted to cut $1 billion off the acquisition price due to the hack. Verizon denied the report. Yahoo's announcement reads in part: "Due to the pending transaction with Verizon, Yahoo will not have an earnings call or webcast for its third quarter results. Concurrently with release of its financial results, supplemental financial information will also be posted on the Company's Investor Relations website at investor.yahoo.net.

New images of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living thing on Earth, are alarming and show the extent of the damage climate change has caused to the coral. But it's not dead yet, scientists have assured, reports the HuffingtonPost citing several scientists. In April, researchers found that more than a third of corals in central and northern parts of the reef had been killed and 93 percent of individuals reefs had been affected by a condition known as coral bleaching (which happens when the water is too warm). New research shows the damage has worsened. A story, however, doing rounds on social media claims that the Great Barrier Reef has died. The viral story has been picked up by many well-read outlets, creating confusion among people. From a HuffingtonPost article: But as a whole, it is not dead. Preliminary findings published Thursday of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority surveys show 22 percent of its coral died from the bleaching event. That leaves more than three quarters still alive -- and in desperate need of relief. Two leading coral scientists that The Huffington Post contacted took serious issue with Outside's piece (the misleading viral story), calling it wildly irresponsible. Russell Brainard, chief of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, told HuffPost he expects the article was meant to highlight the urgency of the situation. But those who don't know any better "are going to take it at face value that the Great Barrier Reef is dead," he said. The Spokesman-Review, in Spokane, Washington, fueled the myth Thursday, when it published a blog with the headline: "Great Barrier Reef pronounced dead by scientists." Brainard told HuffPost the recent bleaching event was a "severe blow" that resulted in serious mortality. Still, "we're very far from an obituary," he said.

Earlier this month, Yahoo disabled the auto-forwarding feature from its Yahoo Mail email service, leaving people with little choice but to use Yahoo Mail client to check the emails their received on their Yahoo account. The company has now acknowledged the issue, explaining why it all happened, and most importantly, switched email forwarding feature on again. From a BusinessInsider report: "Why the pause? Over the past year, Yahoo Mail has been upgrading its platform. This has allowed us to bring a better search experience to Yahoo Mail, add multiple account support, and improve performance as we quickly scale this new system globally. The feature was temporarily disabled as part of this process," Michael Albers, VP of Yahoo Mail product management, wrote in a blog post. To turn on mail forwarding, go to Settings -- Account in Yahoo Mail and enter your forwarding address. After confirming that you, in fact, control that other address, automatic forwarding should be turned on.