A proposed law in New York would cut down on law enforcement’s ability to use controversial surveillance tactics—including warrants that can clandestinely target you because of your search engine history or nab your location data without you knowing.
Source: Gizmodo – New Bill Could Stop New York Police From Using Keyword Search and Geofencing Warrants
Last week, video game music festival Super MAGFest was held at an in-person venue in National Harbor, Maryland. Yesterday, the organizers announced that several dozen attendees later tested positive for coronavirus. The official website lists 75 different exposed events and locations, including a party room that had a…
Source: Kotaku – MAGFest Discloses Dozens Of Covid Exposures
If you are facing issues in connection while using Firefox, then you are not alone. There seems to be an HTTP3-related bug in the browser.
Source: LXer – Firefox Is Currently Facing A Major Bug In Connection
If you’re anxiously awaiting NVIDIA’s new affordable GeForce RTX 3050 series but were skeptical you’d ever see one, we may have a reason to take heart. The word on the street is that NVIDIA has a large stock of the budget RTX 30 series GPUs making its way to graphics card manufacturers. It may not be as powerful as the GeForce RTX 3060 or
Source: Hot Hardware – Good News, GeForce RTX 3050 Cards May Actually Be Obtainable At Launch This Month
Sinclair Broadcast Group has reached a deal to stream 16 NBA teams’ games to fans in local markets. The company, which is aiming to launch a standalone streaming service this year, previously secured local rights for some NHL and MLB teams, but the NBA deal is a major piece of the puzzle.
The agreement covers the Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets, Cleveland Cavaliers, Dallas Mavericks, Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers, LA Clippers, Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat, Milwaukee Bucks, Minnesota Timberwolves, New Orleans Pelicans, Oklahoma City Thunder, Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs.
The service, which is expected to debut in the first half of the year, is likely to be fairly pricey at north of $20 per month, according to Sports Business Journal. However, it should give fans a way to see their local teams if games aren’t broadcast nationally or they can’t watch Sinclair’s Bally Sports regional sports networks (RSNs). Those networks aren’t available on YouTube TV or Hulu, for instance. Local games are typically blacked out in any case, including on NBA League Pass.
Sinclair snapped up a batch of Fox Sports RSNs that Disney had to sell off as part of the Fox acquisition. The RSNs were later rebranded to Bally Sports.
Source: Engadget – Sinclair locks down local streaming rights for 16 NBA teams
We talk a lot about what it’s like to start lifting weights, or to start exercising at all. But one day, you’ll come to the end of your beginner stage, and some things will have to change.
Source: LifeHacker – All the Ways You Need to Adapt Your Training As You Get Stronger
It’s hard to talk about HBO Max’s Peacemaker without bringing up creator James Gunn’s previous work. Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films helped catapult him into cinematic stardom after creating a solid resume of B-movies, and he was brought into the fold at Warner Bros. to write and direct The Suicide Squad after he…
Source: Gizmodo – Peacemaker Is a Fun, Sinister Palette Swap of Guardians of the Galaxy
The House select committee investigating the deadly Capitol riot has subpoenaed social media giants Twitter, Reddit and the parent companies of Facebook and Google, the panel’s chairman said Thursday. CNBC reports: The select committee had asked a trove of records last summer from those and other social companies, but received “inadequate responses” from four of the largest platforms, according to a press release Thursday. The committee is once again demanding that Google parent company Alphabet, Twitter, Reddit and Meta — formerly known as Facebook — hand over a slew of records relating to domestic terrorism, the spread of misinformation and efforts to influence or overturn the 2020 election.
“Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in the press release. “It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” Thompson said. “The Select Committee is working to get answers for the American people and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again. We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – January 6 Committee Subpoenas Social Media Giants In Probe of Capitol Attack
Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit have been subpoenaed by the Congressional select committee investigating the Jan. 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In a statement, the committee said the companies’ responses so far have been “inadequate.”
“Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps—if any—social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence,” committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said.
“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions. The Select Committee is working to get answers for the American people and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again. We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further.”
The committee is looking for a range of records related to users’ activity on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, as well as internal documents about the companies’ handling of Jan. 6th.
In a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg, Thompson addresses Facebook’s handling of the “Stop the Steal” movement that was organized on its platform. An internal memo detailed how Facebook failed to recognize the danger posed by the groups until after the violence on January 6th. The letter also references testimony from whistleblower Frances Haugen, who told Congress last year that Facebook disbanded its civic integrity team after the election.
We’ve reached out to Meta, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube for comment.
Developing…
Source: Engadget – Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit subpoenaed by Jan. 6 committee
My mind has been consumed by it for the last 24 hours. I woke up in a cold sweat last night, almost convinced that I imagined it in a fever dream. But no. Flipping open my laptop today and clocking into work, the inescapable truth was still waiting there, staring me in the face and daring me to acknowledge the grim…
Source: Kotaku – They Gave Kirby A Gun
The far-right extremist group Oath Keepers may soon face particularly serious repercussions for its actions on top of a string of internet bans. A DC federal grand jury has unsealed seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and 10 other individuals for their alleged roles in the US Capitol breach on January 6th, 2021. Rhodes and followers face accusations they planned to use force to oppose the electoral college vote certification, including the direct attempt to seize the Capitol building as well as through multiple “quick reaction force” teams that planned to deliver guns and other weapons to extremists inside the building.
The Oath Keepers’ digital savviness played an important role in the charges. The paramilitary group discussed plans with co-conspirators through encrypted messaging apps, social media, text messaging and websites, according to the Justice Department. Federal investigators revealed they’d used Signal messages as part of the case, although it wasn’t clear how they’d obtained the discussions — CNBC speculated that a participant in group chats leaked the contents to federal agents.
Rhodes and Edward Vallejo, who reportedly helped coordinate the quick reaction teams, are the only ones facing charges for the first time. The rest, including prominent members like Donovan Crowl and Jessica Watkins, were already facing indictments. The conspiracy charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The legal action could effectively bring down a group long accused of promoting harm both on- and offline. The Oath Keepers had threatened violence online, prompting a Twitter ban in September 2020, and spread COVID-19 conspiracy theories that sometimes included QAnon-linked hashtags. The group’s Capitol incursion, meanwhile, was partly fuelled by online election misinformation promoting unsupported claims of widespread fraud during the 2020 presidential vote.
The Oath Keepers already lost much of their online presence in the months before and after the Capitol incident, but the new charges could make it that much harder for the group or its members to maintain that internet representation. This also underscores social media outlets’ imperfect attempts to curb violent organizations and the misinformation that fuels them. While more aggressive crackdowns wouldn’t have necessarily stopped the 2021 breach, outlets like Facebook have acknowledged they could have done more to curb groups that spread and acted on that misinformation.
Source: Engadget – Oath Keepers leader charged with ‘seditious conspiracy’ for role in US Capitol breach
Scientists say they’ve found striking evidence that a common infection caused by the Epstein-Barr virus is the leading cause of multiple sclerosis. Their research has found that military personnel who newly tested positive for the virus went on to have a substantially higher risk of later developing multiple sclerosis…
Source: Gizmodo – Epstein-Barr Virus Could Be the Leading Cause of Multiple Sclerosis, Large Study Finds
In the computing field, it can be extremely difficult to differentiate buzzword bunkum from meaningful messages. That’s especially true when we’re talking about emerging technologies and the products based on them. It seems like every other week there’s a big announcement about an upcoming bit of tech that will “revolutionize [x] industry”
Source: Hot Hardware – Samsung’s Breakthrough In Human Brain-Like MRAM Tech Claims To Excel At AI Workloads
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
For more than a decade, the Internet has remained vulnerable to a class of attacks that uses browsers as a beachhead for accessing routers and other sensitive devices on a targeted network. Now, Google is finally doing something about it.
Starting in Chrome version 98, the browser will begin relaying requests when public websites want to access endpoints inside the private network of the person visiting the site. For the time being, requests that fail won’t prevent the connections from happening. Instead, they’ll only be logged. Somewhere around Chrome 101—assuming the results of this trial run don’t indicate major parts of the Internet will be broken—it will be mandatory for public sites to have explicit permission before they can access endpoints behind the browser.
The planned deprecation of this access comes as Google enables a new specification known as private network access, which permits public websites to access internal network resources only after the sites have explicitly requested it and the browser grants the request. PNA communications are sent using the CORS, or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, protocol. Under the scheme, the public site sends a preflight request in the form of the new header Access-Control-Request-Private-Network: true. For the request to be granted, the browser must respond with the corresponding header Access-Control-Allow-Private-Network: true.
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Source: Ars Technica – New Chrome security measure aims to curtail an entire class of Web attack
The Supreme Court, ruling 6-3 on a predictable partisan axis, has tossed out Joe Biden’s federal coronavirus vaccine mandate for large employers. But it will allow the administration’s less sweeping vaccine requirements for health care workers at federally funded facilities to move forward.
Source: io9 – Supreme Court Blocks Workplace Vaccine Mandate, Says Covid Not an Occupational Hazard
Google has called on the US government to take a more proactive role in identifying and protecting open-source projects that are critical to internet security. In a blog post the company published following the White House’s Log4j vulnerability summit on Thursday, Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer at Google and Alphabet, said the country needs a public-private partnership that will work to properly fund and staff the most essential open-source projects.
“For too long, the software community has taken comfort in the assumption that open source software is generally secure due to its transparency and the assumption that ‘many eyes’ were watching to detect and resolve problems,” he said. “But in fact, while some projects do have many eyes on them, others have few or none at all.”
According to Walker, the partnership would look at the influence and importance of a project to determine how critical it is to the wider ecosystem. Looking to the future, he says the industry needs new ways to identify software that may, down the line, pose a systemic risk to internet security.
Walker said there’s also a need for more public and private funding, noting Google is ready to contribute to an organization that matches volunteers from companies like itself to critical projects that need the most support. “Open source software is a connective tissue for much of the online world — it deserves the same focus and funding we give to our roads and bridges,” he said.
The importance of open-source software has been a topic of a lot of discussions following the discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability. Log4j happens to be one of the most popular and widely used logging library, with services like Steam and iCloud depending on it. Security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who helped stop the spread of WannaCry, called the vulnerability “extremely bad” as it left millions of applications open to attack.
Source: Engadget – Google wants to work with government to secure open-source software
Watching a movie is one thing. Reading one is something else entirely—which, admittedly, sounds like the most obvious statement ever written: “reading is different from watching.” You’re welcome for that genius insight. But seriously, when it comes to a movie, the dynamic between the mediums is a bit more complex and…
Source: Gizmodo – Download Dune and Other Great 2021 Sci-Fi Screenplays for Free
Ground temperatures climbed above 129 degrees Fahrenheit (54 degrees Celsius) in parts of Argentina this week as the country suffers through a shockingly hot start to summer. Air temperatures were equally suffocating, leading to widespread blackouts as the Southern Cone attempts to beat the heat. From a report: Copernicus’s Sentinel 3 satellite recorded the extreme ground temperatures. Those temperatures are different than air temperatures, which is our usual way of conveying how hot a place is. The surface of the Earth tend to be hotter than air temperatures, given that heat can more easily dissipate in the air. But air temperatures are still pretty unbearable in Argentina. On Tuesday, temperatures rose to 106.7 degrees Fahrenheit (41.5 degrees Celsius) in Buenos Aires, the second-highest reading in the city in more than 100 years of records. Other parts of the country saw temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius). The heat was so bad in Argentina on Tuesday that it was briefly the hottest place in the world, surpassing parts of Australia that usually have that honor during austral summer. “This is a heat wave of extraordinary characteristics, with extreme temperature values ââthat will even be analyzed after its completion, and it may generate some historical records for Argentina temperatures and persistence of heat,” meteorologist Lucas Berengua told Reuters.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ground Temperatures Hit 129F as Argentina Suffers Blackouts
In Halo Infinite, as in previous Halo games, you’re often carted from one key location to the next in a transport vehicle called a pelican. It’s a massive hovercraft, one you’re emphatically not supposed to pilot at any point in the campaign. Hey, doesn’t mean you can’t.
Source: Kotaku – Halo Infinite Actually Lets You Fly The Pelican
A Kailh Box Black mechanical keyboard switch. (credit: Scharon Harding)
Ever have a microwave with buttons that won’t work properly? If you hit the keys at the right angle, maybe the microwave will respond. Or perhaps, no matter how you push them, the microwave stays silent. What if you could fix the issue without calling a repair company—and simultaneously make pressing the microwave’s keypad more enjoyable?
Kailh, which makes mechanical keyboard switches, shared a tweet on Tuesday, highlighting a use for its switches that the company had never seen before. A Reddit user employed some Kailh Box Blacks to make his microwave usable again.
The Reddit user, who goes by gregschlom, wrote that his 9-year-old microwave started malfunctioning, and instead of settling for cold leftovers and unpopped popcorn kernels until repairs could be done, he hardwired the device to Box Black switches. Based on the shared image, the new switches can be used to add 30 seconds, add a minute, cancel the operation, and access the settings menu.
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Source: Ars Technica – Microwave hack replaces flat keypad with mechanical keyboard switches
