Long-time Slashdot reader davesag writes:
I’m a regular long-term Slashdot reader and have been living in Delhi for the last 9 months. As of last Friday 25th August the only way I can access Slashdot at all is via a VPN. It appears that Slashdot has joined the growing list of websites the Indian Government finds threatening.

The Indian Government is deeply paranoid over internet access, with many sites being blocked, jail sentences for viewing blocked URLs, and bans on open wifi networks.

In 2015 the Indian government blocked access to over 800 adult web sites, and earlier this month they reportedly blocked access to Archive.org.

“A block on Slashdot is over the top,” davesag writes, “and makes me wonder what it is about this news site that the government here finds so terrifying.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Is Slashdot Blocked In India?

An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Someday soon your Domino’s Pizza could be delivered to you — without an actual delivery person. Ford and Domino’s are testing out a specially-equipped Ford Fusion that comes not only with self-driving technology but also an oven. It sounds cool but there is a catch — there’s no one to walk the pizza to your front door and ring the bell. That’s what Ford and Domino’s say they’re really testing. “How will customers react to coming outside to get their food?” Domino’s president Russell Weiner said in a statement, “We need to make sure the interface is clear and simple.”

During the testing phase, an engineer and a driver will be in the car — but the windows will be heavily tinted so customers can’t see them. And both have been instructed not to interact with people at all. Domino’s wants to see how well customers deal with coming out and getting their own pie from what is, basically, a pizza ATM built into the car. To get their pizzas, customers will have to enter a number on the touchpad, then a back window will lower, revealing the pizza. Over the next five weeks, randomly selected customers around Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be offered the option of getting their pizza delivered by the hi-tech “driverless” car.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Domino’s Market Tests A Self-Driving Pizza Delivery Car

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
A huge spambot ensnaring 711 million email accounts has been uncovered. A Paris-based security researcher, who goes by the pseudonymous handle Benkow, discovered an open and accessible web server hosted in the Netherlands, which stores dozens of text files containing a huge batch of email addresses, passwords, and email servers used to send spam. Those credentials are crucial for the spammer’s large-scale malware operation to bypass spam filters by sending email through legitimate email servers.
The spambot, dubbed “Onliner,” is used to deliver the Ursnif banking malware into inboxes all over the world. To date, it’s resulted in more than 100,000 unique infections across the world, Benkow told ZDNet. Troy Hunt, who runs breach notification site Have I Been Pwned, said it was a “mind-boggling amount of data.” Hunt, who analyzed the data and details his findings in a blog post, called it the “largest” batch of data to enter the breach notification site in its history… Those credentials, he explained, have been scraped and collated from other data breaches, such as the LinkedIn hack and the Badoo hack, as well also other unknown sources.

The data includes information on 80 million email servers, and it’s all used to identify which recipients have Windows computers, so they can be targeted in follow-up emails delivering Windows-specific malware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Massive New Spambot Ensnares 711,000,000 Email Addresses

An anonymous reader writes:Researchers from Positive Technologies — a provider of enterprise security solutions — have found a way to disable the Intel Management Engine (ME), a much-hated component of Intel CPUs that many have called a secret backdoor, even if Intel advertised it as a “remote PC management” solution. People have been trying for years to find a way to disable the Intel ME component, but have failed all this time. This is because disabling Intel ME crashes computers, as Intel ME is responsible for the initialization, power management, and launch of the main Intel processor.

Positive Technologies experts revealed they discovered a hidden bit inside the firmware code, which when flipped (set to “1”) will disable ME after ME has done its job and booted up the main processor. The bit is labelled “reserve_hap” and a nearby comment describes it as “High Assurance Platform (HAP) enable.” High Assurance Platform (HAP) is an NSA program that describes a series of rules for running secure computing platforms. Researchers believe Intel has added the ME-disabling bit at the behest of the NSA, who needed a method of disabling ME as a security measure for computers running in highly sensitive environments.
The original submission linked to a comment with more resources on the “Intel CPU backdoor” controversy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Researchers Find a Way To Disable Intel ME Component Courtesy of the NSA

In America the Internal Revenue Service used to pick who got audited based on math mistakes or discrepancies with W-2 forms — but not any more. schwit1 shares an article from the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law describing their new technique:
The IRS is now engaging in data mining of public and commercial data pools (including social media) and creating highly detailed profiles of taxpayers upon which to run data analytics. This article argues that current IRS practices, mostly unknown to the general public, are violating fair information practices. This lack of transparency and accountability not only violates federal law regarding the government’s data collection activities and use of predictive algorithms, but may also result in discrimination. While the potential efficiencies that big data analytics provides may appear to be a panacea for the IRS’s budget woes, unchecked these activities are a significant threat to privacy [PDF]. Other concerns regarding the IRS’s entrée into big data are raised including the potential for political targeting, data breaches, and the misuse of such information. While tax evasion cost the U.S.$3 trillion between 2000 and 2009, one of the report’s authors argues that people should be aware âoethat what they say and do onlineâ could be used against them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The IRS Decides Who To Audit By Data Mining Social Media

“No country should have missiles flying over them like those 130 million people in Japan,” the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations said Monday. Though it was only a test, the scene on-the-ground is described by Slashdot reader AppleHoshi:
Our phones went crazy on receipt of an automated alert from the “J-Alert” system. Shortly afterwards, loudspeakers broadcast another alert (there are loudspeakers everywhere in Japan, to warn of earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons). As normal with any disaster situation in Japan, all of the available television channels immediately switched over to full-coverage mode, with a repetition of what the situation was (“There’s a missile heading in the direction of north-central Japan”) followed by basic instructions of what to do (“If it comes down in your area, try to extinguish any fires and immediately inform your local police and fire departments”).

Shortly before twenty past six we got the news that the missile had over-flown northern Japan and landed in the Pacific, about 1,000 km [621 miles] from the coast of Hokkaido. The “all-clear” was broadcast over the local speakers a short while later. Strange as it may seem, this all had an air of normality about it. Japan gets more than it’s fair share of natural disasters, so anyone living here gets plenty of exposure to this same routine. (It’s just that the reason is usually an earthquake, typhoon or tsunami, rather than a megalomaniac).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Japan Activated Air Raid Sirens During North Korea’s Missile Test Monday

Long-time walterbyrd shared a new article about NASA’s contingency plan for “vast quantities of searing magma and clouds of fumes” erupting from a Wyoming supervolcano and slowly “burying much of the United States under a thick coat of ash and lava…enough to change the climate of the world for several centuries.”
NASA believes the Yellowstone supervolcano is a greater threat to life on Earth than any asteroid. So it’s come up with a plan to defuse its explosive potential… NASA scientists propose, a 10km [6.2 miles] deep hole into the hydrothermal water below and to the sides of the magma chamber. These fluids, which form Yellowstone’s famous heat pools and geysers, already drain some 60-70 per cent of the heat from the magma chamber below. NASA proposes that, in an emergency, this enormous body of heated water can be injected with cooler water, extracting yet more heat. This could prevent the super volcano’s magma from reaching the temperature at which it would erupt.
A member of NASA’s Advisory Council on Planetary Defense told the BBC he’d concluded “the super volcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – NASA’s Plan To Stop A Supervolcano from Destroying The Earth’s Climate