Lucas Brooks, an avid Windows fan who digs through and analyzes its early iterations, recently shared his discovery of an easter egg that’s been hiding in Windows 1.0 for nearly 37 years. PC Gamer reports: Brooks discovered the secret, a credits list of Windows developers and a “congratulations” message, buried in the data of a smiley face bitmap file that came with the OS. The data for the credits was encrypted, and according to Brooks, the tools he needed to extract the data didn’t even exist at the time of the OS’ release.

There’s also a name in the credits all PC gamers will recognize: Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. Newell began his career at Microsoft after dropping out of Harvard, and contributed to the development of the first three iterations of Windows. He also led the team that ported Doom to Windows from DOS, a crucial step in the transition between the operating systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Windows 1.0 Easter Egg Managed To Stay Hidden For Nearly 37 Years

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Police in the United Kingdom have arrested seven people over suspected connections to the Lapsus$ hacking group, which has in recent weeks targeted tech giants including Samsung, Nvidia, Microsoft and Okta. In a statement given to TechCrunch, Detective Inspector Michael O’Sullivan from the City of London Police said: “The City of London Police has been conducting an investigation with its partners into members of a hacking group. Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with this investigation and have all been released under investigation. Our enquiries remain ongoing.”

News of the arrests comes just hours after a Bloomberg report revealed a teenager based in Oxford, U.K. is suspected of being the mastermind of the now-prolific Lapsus$ hacking group. Four researchers investigating the gang’s recent hacks said they believed the 16-year-old, who uses the online moniker “White” or “Breachbase,” was a leading figure in Lapsus$, and Bloomberg was able to track down the suspected hacker after his personal information was leaked online by rival hackers. TechCrunch has seen a copy of the the suspected hacker’s leaked personal information, which we are not sharing — but it matches Bloomberg’s reporting. City of London Police, which primarily focuses on financial crimes, did not say if the 16-year-old was among those arrested.

At least one member of Lapsus$ was also apparently involved with a recent data breach at Electronic Arts, according to [security reporter Brian Krebs], and another is suspected to be a teenager residing in Brazil. The latter is said to be so capable of hacking that researchers first believed that the activity they were witnessing was automated. Researchers’ ability to track the suspected Lapsus$ members may be because the group, which now has more than 45,000 subscribers to its Telegram channel where it frequently recruits insiders and leaks victims’ data, does little to cover its tracks. In a blog post this week, Microsoft said the group uses brazen tactics to gain initial access to a target organization, which has included publicly recruiting company insiders. As reported by Bloomberg this week, the group has even gone as far as to join the Zoom calls of companies they’ve breached and taunted employees trying to clean up their hack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – UK Police Arrest 7 People In Connection With Lapsus$ Hacks

Come July, the EPA plans to retire the archive containing old news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and more. The Verge reports: The archive was never built to be a permanent repository of content, and maintaining the outdated site was no longer “cost effective,” the EPA said to The Verge in an emailed statement. The EPA announced the retirement early this year, after finishing an overhaul of its main website in 2021, but says that the decision was years in the making. The agency maintains that it’s abiding by federal rules for records management and that not all webpages qualify as official records that need to be preserved.

The EPA says it plans to migrate much of the information to other places. Old news releases will go to the current EPA website’s page for press releases. When it comes to the rest of the content, the EPA has a process for making case-by-case decisions on what content can be deleted — and what is relevant enough to move to the modern website. Some content might be deemed important enough to join the National Archives. The public will be able to request that content through the Freedom of Information Act.

The archive is the only comprehensive way that public information about agency policies, like fact sheets breaking down the impact of environmental legislation, and actions, like how the agency implements those laws, have been preserved, [says Gretchen Gehrke, one of the cofounders of a group called Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that’s fighting for public access to resources like the EPA’s online archives]. That makes the archive vital for understanding how regulation and enforcement have changed over the years. It also shows how the agency’s understanding of an issue, like climate change, has evolved. And when the Trump administration deleted information about climate change on the EPA’s website, much of it could still be found on the archive. Besides that, Gehrke says the content should just be available on principle because it’s public information, paid for by taxpayer dollars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The EPA Plans To Sunset Its Online Archive

GitHub has introduced a new feed into the dashboard of users and it doesn’t appear to have gone down well with the code shack’s regulars. The Register reports: As soon as the new feed arrived, replete with all kinds of exciting suggestions for developers to look at, the complaints began rolling in as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into something distressingly like a social media platform. “I do not need to see recommendations, nor activity of people I don’t follow,” said one user. “Don’t fix what’s not broken.” Others were blunter, stating: “I don’t want algorithmic feed” and requesting a feed on stuff that actually mattered â” issues, releases, PRs and so on. GitHub pushed out a new beta version of its Home Feed earlier this week, with the avowed intention of developers reaching a wider audience and building communities. The plan is to make discovery easier and help users “find new repositories or users to follow based on your interests.”

As if to demonstrate the levels of discontent around GitHub’s new feature, a Chrome extension quickly showed up to disable the social feed by removing the “For You” section on the GitHub dashboard. Not all users were upset by the appearance of the new feed, and GitHub staff popped up to promise that there would be an option to make one’s profile private and opt out of pretty much everything via a single setting. It will, however, take until late April before this option is likely to appear, they said. Which prompted the obvious question: “Why is this opt-out instead of opt-in?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Complaints Mount After GitHub Launches New Algorithmic Feed