Orome1 shares a report from Help Net Security: IOActive security consultant Mario Ballano has discovered two critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities affecting Stratos Global’s AmosConnect communication shipboard platform. The platform works in conjunction with the ships’ satellite equipment, and integrates vessel and shore-based office applications, as well as provides services like Internet access for the crew, email, IM, position reporting, etc. The first vulnerability is a blind SQL injection in a login form. Attackers that successfully exploit it can retrieve credentials to log into the service and access sensitive information stored in it. The second one is a built-in backdoor account with full system privileges. “Among other things, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute commands with SYSTEM privileges on the remote system by abusing AmosConnect Task Manager,” Bellano shared. The found flaws can be exploited only by an attacker that has access to the ship’s IT systems network, he noted, but on some ships the various networks might not be segmented, or AmosConnect might be exposed to one or more of them. The vulnerabilities were found in AmosConnect 8.4.0, and Stratos Global was notified a year ago. But Inmarsat won’t fix them, and has discontinued the 8.0 version of the platform in June 2017.

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Source: Slashdot – Critical Flaws In Maritime Communications System Could Endanger Entire Ships

According to a new study, the best way to reduce pesticides from your supermarket apple is to use a baking soda solution. The discovery was made by a team of scientists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. They compared the effectiveness of plain tap water, a commercial bleach solution and a baking soda/water mix in removing pesticides from apples. CNET reports: The scientists started with organic Gala apples and applied the fungicide thiabendazole and the insecticide phosmet before testing the different washing liquids. “The baking soda solution was the most effective at reducing pesticide,” a release on the study notes. “After 12 and 15 minutes, 80 percent of the thiabendazole was removed, and 96 percent of the phosmet was removed, respectively.” The researchers say the industry-standard approach of washing fruit in a bleach solution for two minutes after harvest is not an effective way to completely remove pesticides. They also found the fungicide thiabendazole penetrated into the apple peel much more than the insecticide. Apple lovers would need to remove the peel to also get rid of the pesticide that wasn’t washed off with the baking soda solution. The researchers published the findings this week in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

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Source: Slashdot – Scientists Find a Better Way To Wash Pesticides Off Your Apples

A computer at the center of a lawsuit digging into Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election has been wiped. “The server in question is based in Georgia — a state that narrowly backed Donald Trump, giving him 16 electoral votes — and stored the results of the state’s vote-management system,” reports The Register. “The deletion of its filesystem data makes analysis of whether the system was compromised impossible to ascertain.” From the report: There is good reason to believe that the computer may have been tampered with: it is 15 years old, and could be harboring all sorts of exploitable software and hardware vulnerabilities. No hard copies of the votes are kept, making the electronic copy the only official record. While investigating the Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, which oversees Georgia’s voting system, last year, security researcher Logan Lamb found its system was misconfigured, exposing the state’s entire voter registration records, multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers, and the software systems used to tally votes cast. Despite Lamb letting the election center knows of his findings, the security holes were left unpatched for seven months. He later went public after the U.S. security services announced there had been a determined effort by the Russian government to sway the presidential elections, including looking at compromising electronic voting machines.

In an effort to force the state to scrap the system, a number of Georgia voters bandied together and sued. They asked for an independent security review of the server, expecting to find flaws that would lend weight to their argument for investment in a more modern and secure system. But emails released this week following a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that technicians at the election center deleted the server’s data on July 7 — just days after the lawsuit was filed. The memos reveal multiple references to the data wipe, including a message sent just last week from an assistant state attorney general to the plaintiffs in the case. That same email also notes that backups of the server data were also deleted more than a month after the initial wipe — just as the lawsuit moved to a federal court. It is unclear who ordered the destruction of the data, and why, but they have raised yet more suspicions of collusion between the Trump campaign team, the Republican Party, and the Russian government.

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Source: Slashdot – US Voting Server At Heart of Russian Hack Probe Mysteriously Wiped

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Dicamba, an old weedkiller that is being used in new ways, has thrust Kevin Bradley, a professor of weed science at the University of Missouri, and a half-dozen other university weed scientists into the unfamiliar role of whistleblower, confronting what they believe are misleading and scientifically unfounded claims by one of the country’s biggest seed and pesticide companies: Monsanto. The tensions between Monsanto and the nation’s weed scientists actually began several years ago, when Monsanto first moved to make dicamba the centerpiece of a new weedkilling strategy. The company tweaked the genes in soybeans and cotton and created genetically modified varieties of those crops that can tolerate doses of dicamba. (Normally, dicamba kills those crops.) This allowed farmers to spray the weedkiller directly on their soybean or cotton plants, killing the weeds while their crops survived. It’s an approach that Monsanto pioneered with crops that were genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, or Roundup. After two decades of heavy exposure to glyphosate, however, devastating weeds like Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, developed resistance to it. So farmers are looking for new weedkilling tools. Dicamba, however, has a well-known defect. It’s volatile; it tends to evaporate from the soil or vegetation where it has been sprayed, creating a cloud of plant-killing vapor that can spread in unpredictable directions. It happens more in hot weather, and Monsanto’s new strategy inevitably would mean spraying dicamba in the heat of summer. Monsanto and two other chemical companies, BASF and DuPont, announced that they had solved this problem with new “low-volatility” formulations of dicamba that don’t evaporate as easily. Yet the companies — especially Monsanto — made it difficult for university scientists to verify those claims with independent tests before the products were released commercially.

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Source: Slashdot – Monsanto Attacks Scientists After Studies Show Trouble For Weedkiller Dicamba

Walmart is expanding a shelf-scanning robot trial to 50 additional stores, including some in its home state of Arkansas. “Machines from Bossa Nova Robotics will roam the aisles to check for stock levels, pricing and misplaced items, saving human staffers the hassle of checking everything themselves,” reports Engadget. The robots will be fully autonomous, though technicians will be available in case things go awry. They employ 3D imaging to dodge obstacles and make notes to return later if their path is completely blocked. From the report: Walmart stresses that the robots are there to supplement humans, not replace them — to eliminate drudgery and the expenses that go with it. This helps workers get to the task of filling empty shelves, and that’s a job that the company doesn’t see ending any time soon given the difficulty robots still have when grabbing objects. “Store associates will always be better at that,” Walmart’s Martin Hitch told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. And the chief of Bossa Nova rival Simbe Robotics, Brad Bogolea, added that shelf checks can cost a major retailer hundreds of millions of dollars per year. However expensive the robots may be, they could pay for themselves very quickly. Whether or not the robots see wider use will, unsurprisingly, hinge on the success of this wider trial. Walmart posted a video about the shelf-scanning robots on its YouTube page.

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Source: Slashdot – Walmart Tests Shelf-Scanning Robots In Over 50 Stores

On behalf of the hundreds of Tesla workers that were fired last week from the company’s assembly plant, the United Auto Workers filed a complaint today to the National Relations Board. The UAW posted a copy of the complaint on its website, which alleges that pro-union workers were unfairly targeted. The Verge reports: The UAW says the complaint was made on Wednesday to the Oakland offices of the National Relations Board. The union claims the recent culling of several hundred Tesla employees included many who were involved in a pro-union movement at the Fremont assembly plant, and included those who wore pro-union shirts and stickers. The Fremont factory site has roots in the UAW. It was once a former joint manufacturing facility owned by GM and Toyota, until it closed in 2010. Despite ongoing efforts, under Tesla’s ownership, the factory is not unionized. A pro-union rally was held Tuesday in front of the plant, which was documented in a Facebook post by the pro-union group A Fair Future at Tesla.

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Source: Slashdot – Tesla Hit With Labor Complaint On Behalf of Fired Factory Workers