An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Elderly people living near or downwind from unconventional oil and gas wells such as fracking sites are more likely to die prematurely, according to a major new US study. Extracting oil and gas through newer or unconventional methods like fracking has expanded rapidly across America over the past two decades with at least 17.6 million people now living within one kilometer of an active well. Compared with traditional drilling, unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is linked to higher levels of exposure to toxic air pollution and poor water quality, as well as noise and light pollution which can be harmful to human health. The impact of fossil fuel extraction — including by unconventional methods — has disproportionately affected low income communities and people of color.

Researchers from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health studied the health records of 15 million people on Medicare, the health insurance program that includes at least 95% of Americans aged 65 and older, living in all significant drilling regions from 2001 to 2015. They also gathered data on about 2.5 million oil and gas wells covering leading exploration states, from Montana to Texas and Pennsylvania. The closer people live to an oil and gas operation, the higher the risk of dying prematurely, even after accounting for socioeconomic, environmental and demographic factors such as gender and race, according to the study published in Nature Energy.

Residents most adversely affected are those living nearby and downwind, suggesting toxic airborne contaminants emitted from UOGD sites probably contributed to higher mortality rates. Exposure to toxins associated with unconventional drilling such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides and radioactive materials are linked to a wide range of life-threatening medical conditions. Overall, elderly residents living near these wells have about 2.5% higher mortality rates than those living far away compared with 3.5% for those who are also downwind. This would mean thousands of premature deaths linked to the oil and gas boom, though the peer-reviewed study does not include estimates of lives lost.

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Source: Slashdot – Living Near Fracking Sites Raises Risk of Premature Death For Elderly, Study Finds

The Android malware known as BRATA has added new and dangerous features to its latest version, including GPS tracking, the capacity to use multiple communication channels, and a function that performs a factory reset on the device to wipe all traces of malicious activity. BleepingComputer reports: BRATA was first spotted by Kaspersky back in 2019 as an Android RAT (remote access tool) that mainly targeted Brazilian users. In December 2021, a report by Cleafy underscored the emergence of the malware in Europe, where it was seen targeting e-banking users and stealing their credentials with the involvement of fraudsters posing as bank customer support agents. Analysts at Cleafy continued to monitor BRATA for new features, and in a new report published today, illustrate how the malware continues to evolve.

The latest versions of the BRATA malware now target e-banking users in the UK, Poland, Italy, Spain, China, and Latin America. Each variant focuses on different banks with dedicated overlay sets, languages, and even different apps to target specific audiences. The authors use similar obfuscation techniques in all versions, such as wrapping the APK file into an encrypted JAR or DEX package. This obfuscation successfully bypasses antivirus detections […]. On that front, BRATA now actively seeks signs of AV presence on the device and attempts to delete the detected security tools before proceeding to the data exfiltration step.

The best way to avoid being infected by Android malware is to install apps from the Google Play Store, avoid APKs from shady websites, and always scan them with an AV tool before opening. During installation, pay close attention to the requested permissions and avoid granting any that appear unnecessary for the app’s core functionality. Finally, monitor battery consumption and network traffic volumes to identify any inexplicable spikes that may be attributed to malicious processes running in the background.

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Source: Slashdot – Android Malware BRATA Wipes Your Device After Stealing Data

According to CNBC, Apple “beat analyst estimates for sales in every product category except iPads and overall revenue was up 11% annually.” This is despite global supply chain challenges caused by the covid-19 pandemic. Here is how Apple did in the quarter ending Dec. 25 versus Refinitiv consensus estimates (via CNBC): EPS: $2.10 vs. $1.89 estimated, up 25% year-over-year
Revenue: $123.9 billion vs. $118.66 billion estimated, up 11% year-over-year
iPhone revenue: $71.63 billion vs. $68.34 billion estimated, up 9% year-over-year
Services revenue: $19.52 billion vs. $18.61 billion estimated, up 24% year-over-year
Other Products revenue: $14.70 billion vs. $14.59 billion estimated, up 13% year-over-year
Mac revenue: $10.85 billion vs. $9.52 billion estimated, up 25% year-over-year
iPad revenue: $7.25 billion vs. $8.18 billion estimated, down 14% year-over-year
Gross margin: 43.8% vs. 41.7% estimated

[Apple CEO Tim Cook] said that the company’s supply issues were improving. He said that in terms of supply challenges, the December quarter was worse than Apple’s September quarter, but that he is projecting the March quarter to improve. “Our biggest issue is chip supply, it’s chip supply on legacy nodes,” Cook said. “And we’re doing okay on the leading edge stuff.” […] “What we expect for the March quarter is solid year-over-year revenue growth,” Cook said. “And we expect supply constraints in the March quarter to be less than they were in the December quarter.”

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Source: Slashdot – Apple Revenue Pops 11% To 3.9 Billion Despite Supply Chain Concerns

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: The next class of Chrome OS devices may be targeted at the gaming market — more than one Chromebook is set to release with a full RGB keyboard. Similar to how Chrome OS offers support for Linux apps and Android apps, there’s been a long-running effort — codenamed Borealis — to get Steam and various Linux-compatible PC games running in a virtual machine on your Chromebook. While there’s yet to be any formal announcement of Steam games for Chromebooks, work has steadily continued since the project was first discovered.

Whether through Steam games or game streaming services, it seems Google’s gaming ambitions for Chrome OS may be coming to fruition in the near future. According to changes to Chrome OS code in the last few weeks, Google has begun working to support Chromebooks with full color RGB keyboards — you can’t have a product for gamers without RGB, right? Right? — starting with a new feature flag. From what we can find, each keyboard key can be individually customized to your liking to vary the intensity of the red, green, and blue lighting to create different colors and adjust the keyboard’s overall backlight brightness. For now, this is only possible through an internal command for Chrome OS developers to use in testing. In time, one would assume there would be a tool within Chrome OS to let gamers change the colors of their keyboards.

At first glance, one could argue that this is just about supporting the many USB and Bluetooth connected keyboards you can buy with RGB lighting built in. However, with a bit more digging, we’ve found that rather than being a generic feature, Chrome OS’s RGB support is being prepared for a select few unreleased devices. So who is going to be making the first gaming Chromebooks? For the time being, there appear to be at least three hardware codenames associated with RGB keyboards. The first two are Vell and Taniks, both of which are based on Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake laptop processors. […] A third hardware codename attached to RGB keyboards for Chrome OS is Ripple. However, rather than being the name of a particular Chromebook, it seems that Ripple is the internal name of a detachable keyboard, like that of the Pixel Slate.

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Source: Slashdot – Gaming Chromebooks Are On the Way With Full RGB Keyboards