Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes an article from Fortune: The controversial entrepreneur Kim Dotcom said last month that he was preparing to relaunch Megaupload, the file-sharing site that U.S. and New Zealand authorities dramatically shut down in 2012, with bitcoins being involved in some way… This system will be called Bitcache, and Dotcom claimed its launch would send the bitcoin price soaring way above its current $575 value. The launch of Megaupload 2.0 will take place on January 20, 2017, he said, urging people to “buy bitcoin while cheap, like right now, trust me…” Crucially, Dotcom said the Bitcache system would overcome bitcoin’s scaling problems. “It eliminates all blockchain limitations,” he claimed.
Every file transfer taking place over Megaupload “will be linked to a tiny Bitcoin micro transaction,” Dotcom posted on Twitter. His extradition trial begins Monday, and he’s asking the court to allow live-streaming of the trial “because of global interest in my case.” Meanwhile, the FBI apparently let the registration lapse on the Megaupload domain, which they seized in 2012, and Ars Technica reports that the site is now full of porn ads.

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Source: Slashdot – Kim Dotcom Will Revive Megaupload, Linking File Transfers To Bitcoin Microtransactions

An anonymous Slashdot reader reports that the European Commission “is planning reforms that would allow media outlets to request payment from search engines such as Google, for publishing snippets of their content in search results.” The Stack reports:
The working paper recommends the introduction of an EU law that covers the rights to digital reproduction of news publications. This would essentially make news publishers a new category of rights holders under copyright law, thereby ensuring that “the creative and economic contribution of news publishers is recognized and incentivized in EU law, as it is today the case for other creative sectors.”

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Source: Slashdot – EU Copyright Reform Proposes Search Engines Pay For Snippets

“Microsoft can’t tell North from South on Bing Maps,” joked The Register, reporting that Microsoft’s site had “misplaced Melbourne, the four-million-inhabitant capital of the Australian State of Victoria.” Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes:
Though they’re trying to minimise it, the recent relocation of Melbourne Australia to the ocean east of Japan in Microsoft’s flagship mapping application is blamed on someone having flipped a sign in the latitude given for the city’s Wikipedia page. Which may or may not be true. But the simple stupidity of using a globally-editable data source for feeding a mapping and navigation system is … “awesome” is (for once) an appropriate word.

Well, it’s Bing, so at least no-one was actually using it.

“Bing’s not alone in finding Australia hard to navigate,” reports The Register. “In 2012 police warned not to use Apple Maps as it directed those seeking the rural Victorian town of Mildura into the middle of a desert.”

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Lost a City Because They Used Wikipedia Data

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On The Wire: Apple has patched three critical vulnerabilities in iOS that were identified when an attacker targeted a human rights activist in the UAE with an exploit chain that used the bugs to attempt to remotely jailbreak and infect his iPhone. The vulnerabilities include two kernel flaws and one in WebKit and Apple released iOS 9.3.5 to fix them. The attack that set off the investigation into the vulnerabilities targeted Ahmed Mansoor, an activist living in the UAE. Earlier this month, he received a text message that included a link to what was supposedly new information on human rights abuses. Suspicious, Manor forwarded the link to researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, who recognized what they were looking at. “On August 10 and 11, 2016, Mansoor received SMS text messages on his iPhone promising ;new secrets’ about detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked on an included link. Instead of clicking, Mansoor sent the messages to Citizen Lab researchers. We recognized the links as belonging to an exploit infrastructure connected to NSO Group, an Israel-based ‘cyber war’ company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product,” Citizen Lab said in a new report on the attack and iOS flaws.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Apple Fixes Three Zero Days Used In Targeted Attack

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On The Wire: Apple has patched three critical vulnerabilities in iOS that were identified when an attacker targeted a human rights activist in the UAE with an exploit chain that used the bugs to attempt to remotely jailbreak and infect his iPhone. The vulnerabilities include two kernel flaws and one in WebKit and Apple released iOS 9.3.5 to fix them. The attack that set off the investigation into the vulnerabilities targeted Ahmed Mansoor, an activist living in the UAE. Earlier this month, he received a text message that included a link to what was supposedly new information on human rights abuses. Suspicious, Manor forwarded the link to researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, who recognized what they were looking at. “On August 10 and 11, 2016, Mansoor received SMS text messages on his iPhone promising ;new secrets’ about detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked on an included link. Instead of clicking, Mansoor sent the messages to Citizen Lab researchers. We recognized the links as belonging to an exploit infrastructure connected to NSO Group, an Israel-based ‘cyber war’ company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product,” Citizen Lab said in a new report on the attack and iOS flaws.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Apples Fixes Three Zero Days Used In Targeted Attack