Miscellaneous Tech News
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Facebook and Google have ad trackers on your streaming TV, studies find
You just can't get away from the big ad tech companies, it seems.
Modern TV, coming to you over the Internet instead of through cable or over the air, has a modern problem: all of your Internet-connected streaming devices are watching you back and feeding your data to advertisers. Two independent sets of researchers this week released papers that measure the extent of the surveillance your TV is conducting on you. They also sort out who exactly is benefiting from the massive amounts of consumer data that is taken with or without consumer knowledge. The first study (PDF), conducted by researchers at Princeton and the University of Chicago, looked specifically at Roku and Amazon set-top devices. A review of more than 2,000 channels across the two platforms found trackers on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Amazon Fire TV channels. -
@mlnews My Pi-hole sure does show a lot of blocked telemetry sites (Roku, Amazon, Google, etc). I hope some or most of that traffic is those nasty tracking bits.
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This article makes for very interesting reading about Oracle and a lawsuit against them: https://www.itassetmanagement.net/2019/09/19/oracle-cloud-class-action-lawsuit-a-deep-dive/?mc_cid=56118f9508&mc_eid=474a74bd76. It will be interesting to see if this affects their audit practices with Java.
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@RojoLoco said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews My Pi-hole sure does show a lot of blocked telemetry sites (Roku, Amazon, Google, etc). I hope some or most of that traffic is those nasty tracking bits.
y block percentage is low. not sure why.
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In How To: XKCD author offers absurd advice for ordinary tasks
Review: A book of deliberately, hilariously, wrong advice—with explainers and diagrams
Any time physicists gets together, one of them will tell a very old joke about a farmer who wants to make their farm more efficient. In the joke, a list of inappropriate professionals offer the farmer reasonable suggestions. The punchline comes from the physicist who responds "Well, let's assume that cows are spheres... " The actual punchline isn't in the joke itself—it's what happens next: one of the physicists listening to the joke will lecture the rest on how the approximation isn't that bad really. They will end with a list of all the things you can learn about the world from spherical cows. The joke only ends when the bar closes. Physicists: ruining jokes, cows, farming, and most of biology since 1687. Randall Munroe's new book, How To, is the spherical cows joke relentlessly replicated and explained without—and this is the important part—removing the humor. Munroe has, as the subtitle Absurd Advice for Real-World Problems explains, produced a book of absurd scientific advice. It is, essentially, a "how you shouldn't" manual. With that in mind, you should not read How To as you would an ordinary book -
Paper leaks showing a quantum computer doing something a supercomputer can’t
Google's system generates quantum statistics that we just can't simulate.
Mathematically, it's easy to demonstrate that a working general purpose quantum computer can easily outperform classical computers on some problems. Demonstrating it with an actual quantum computer, however, has been another issue entirely. Most of the quantum computers we've made don't have enough qubits to handle the complex calculations where they'd clearly outperform a traditional computer. And scaling up the number of qubits has been complicated by issues of noise, crosstalk, and the tendency of qubits to lose their entanglement with their neighbors. All of which raised questions as to whether the theoretical supremacy of quantum computing can actually make a difference in the real world. -
Iranian Government Hackers Target US Veterans
'Tortoiseshell' discovered hosting a phony military-hiring website that drops a Trojan backdoor on visitors.
A nation-state hacking group recently found attacking IT provider networks in Saudi Arabia as a stepping stone to its ultimate targets has been spotted hosting a fake website, called "Hire Military Heroes," that drops spying tools and other malicious code onto victims' systems.
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https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/25/cloudflares-warp-vpn-is-now-available-to-all-a-first-look/
My app is still showing me on the wait list. Anyone actually get the warp vpn working?
Edit: NVM. It's now working after an app update
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No, it wasn’t a virus; it was Chrome that stopped Macs from booting
Google pulls Chrome update that kept some Macs from booting.
On Monday night, Variety reported that film editors around Los Angeles who had Avid Media Composer software installed were suddenly finding that their Macs were unable to reboot. The publication speculated that malware may have been the cause. On Wednesday, Google disclosed the real cause—a Chrome browser update. Specifically, it was a new version of Chrome's Keystone updater that caused so many Macs to stop rebooting, according to this Chrome open bug post. When the update was installed on Macs that had disabled a security feature known as system integrity prevention and met several other conditions, a crucial part of the Mac system file was damaged, a Google employee said in the forum. -
@mlnews oops
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@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
No, it wasn’t a virus; it was Chrome that stopped Macs from booting
Google pulls Chrome update that kept some Macs from booting.
On Monday night, Variety reported that film editors around Los Angeles who had Avid Media Composer software installed were suddenly finding that their Macs were unable to reboot. The publication speculated that malware may have been the cause. On Wednesday, Google disclosed the real cause—a Chrome browser update. Specifically, it was a new version of Chrome's Keystone updater that caused so many Macs to stop rebooting, according to this Chrome open bug post. When the update was installed on Macs that had disabled a security feature known as system integrity prevention and met several other conditions, a crucial part of the Mac system file was damaged, a Google employee said in the forum.So they were performing a public service?
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Google Play apps laden with ad malware were downloaded by millions of users
Remote configuration files allowed malware to slide past Google security checks.
This week, Symantec Threat Intelligence's May Ying Tee and Martin Zhang revealed that they had reported a group of 25 malicious Android applications available through the Google Play Store to Google. In total, the applications—which all share a similar code structure used to evade detection during security screening—had been downloaded more than 2.1 million times from the store.
The apps, which would conceal themselves on the home screen some time after installation and begin displaying on-screen advertisements even when the applications were closed, have been pulled from the store. But other applications using the same method to evade Google's security screening of applications may remain. -
What Would Make You Cancel a Video-Streaming Service?
According to a PCMag survey, 65 percent of streaming users said they'd cancel their streaming subscription over price increases. Another 14 percent would cancel over losing their favorite movies and shows, while 9 percent prioritize exclusive original content.
The video streaming war will be fought over viewers. Among the deep-pocketed, big-budget streaming services entering an already-crowded market in the next year, which players can snag the most subscribers? Is there room for all of them? PCMag recently surveyed 1,001 US streaming subscribers on a variety of streaming topics and preferences: whether they share passwords and with whom; if they plan on subscribing to new services like Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, and Peacock; and how much they're willing to pay for both an individual service and for their monthly streaming budget. We also asked what would make them cancel a service to which they already subscribe. For the vast majority of respondents, the deciding factor in keeping or canceling a streaming service comes down to price; 65 percent said they would cancel over price increases. -
SSDs are on track to get bigger and cheaper thanks to PLC technology
Storage of five bits in every NAND cell is coming, courtesy of Intel and Toshiba.
Wednesday, Intel announced it's joining Toshiba in the PLC (Penta-Level Cell, meaning 5 bits stored per individual NAND cell) club. Intel has not yet commercialized the technology, so you can't go and buy a PLC SSD yet—but we can expect the technology will lead eventually to higher-capacity and cheaper solid state drives. To understand how and why this works, we need to go over a little bit of SSD design history. One of the most basic architectural features of a solid state disk is how many bits can be stored in each individual NAND cell. The simplest and most robust design is SLC—Single Layer Cell—in which each floating-gate NAND cell is either charged or not, representing a 1 or a 0. SLC flash can be written at very high speed and typically survives several times more write cycles than more complex designs can. (Endurance levels are specified per drive, but National Instruments uses 100K, 20K, and 3K as sample program/erase cycle endurance levels for SLC, eMLC, and MLC drives here.) -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
SSDs are on track to get bigger and cheaper thanks to PLC technology
Storage of five bits in every NAND cell is coming, courtesy of Intel and Toshiba.
Wednesday, Intel announced it's joining Toshiba in the PLC (Penta-Level Cell, meaning 5 bits stored per individual NAND cell) club. Intel has not yet commercialized the technology, so you can't go and buy a PLC SSD yet—but we can expect the technology will lead eventually to higher-capacity and cheaper solid state drives. To understand how and why this works, we need to go over a little bit of SSD design history. One of the most basic architectural features of a solid state disk is how many bits can be stored in each individual NAND cell. The simplest and most robust design is SLC—Single Layer Cell—in which each floating-gate NAND cell is either charged or not, representing a 1 or a 0. SLC flash can be written at very high speed and typically survives several times more write cycles than more complex designs can. (Endurance levels are specified per drive, but National Instruments uses 100K, 20K, and 3K as sample program/erase cycle endurance levels for SLC, eMLC, and MLC drives here.)
That's telling -
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/30/email_signature_legally_binding_contract/
UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts -
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/whats-a-backup-baltimore-city-it-kept-data-on-local-drives/
Councilman “mind-boggled” by Baltimore City IT department ineptitude
In a report to a committee of the Baltimore City Council last week, City Auditor Josh Pasch said that the city's Information Technology department could not provide any documentation of its work toward meeting agency performance goals because the only copies of that data were kept on local hard drives and never backed up to a server or the cloud.
Just for extra highlighting: the only copies of that data were kept on local hard drives -
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/victorian-hospitals-go-offline-after-ransomware-attack-531696
Victorian hospitals go offline after ransomware attackA number of regional Victorian hospitals and health services have been forced to shutdown their IT systems, including some electronic health records, after experiencing a ransomware attack on Monday.
