Minecraft players and server operators are facing new security risks following the discovery of a vulnerability in certain mods and subsequent mod packs that allows remote code execution if exploited. Patches are rolling out and vulnerability management is actively happening, but players could still be at risk if their mods are outdated.
Earlier
Source: Hot Hardware – Minecraft Mods Expose Gamers To Alarming BleedingPipe Exploit, What You Need To Know
This past weekend, police showed up to musician and newly minted Call of Duty operator Nicki Minaj’s Los Angeles home in what’s being called a swatting prank that’s commonly used against gamers and livestreamers, TMZ reports.
Source: Kotaku – Nicki Minaj Swatted In Apparent Prank For The Third Time This Year
Archinstall 2.6 supports the Hyperland customizable dynamic tiling Wayland window manager as well as the Limine multiprotocol bootloader.
The post Archinstall 2.6 Supports Hyperland WM, Limine Bootloader appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Archinstall 2.6 Supports Hyperland WM, Limine Bootloader
Paul Reubens, the actor who rose to fame as the iconic character Pee-wee Herman, died this week after a long fighter with cancer. He was 70 years old.
Source: Gizmodo – Pee-wee Herman Actor, Paul Reubens, Has Died
You or your kid might just need a functional laptop for school, and this refurbished Apple MacBook Air is on sale for $299.99 until August 13, just before back-to-school time.
Source: LifeHacker – This Refurbished MacBook Air Is 0 Right Now
8BitDo has released countless controllers for every console, old and new. Now it’s getting into the mechanical keyboard frenzy with two models inspired by the NES and Famicom. They’re priced at $100 each with a planned ship-date of August 10.
Source: Kotaku – Classic Nintendo Systems Get Beautiful Mechanical Keyboard Tribute Dek
Elon Musk’s lawyer sent a letter threatening to sue a hate speech research group in late July, accusing the organization of making “false and misleading claims” about Twitter in order to help the company’s competitors. Shortly after, Twitter unbanned Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, whom Musk kicked off…
Source: Gizmodo – Twitter Threatens to Sue Hate Speech Researchers as It Unbans Kanye West
The devs behind AI-based sample editing software Samplab are back with a free VST3 plugin that generates samples from text prompts. The appropriately-named TextToSample is a plugin that opens inside your DAW or as a standalone tool, allowing you to type, say, “bubbly synth melody” to create a, well, bubbly synth melody to do with as you see fit.
TextToSample utilizes Meta’s open-source AI-based sound generation toolset, MusicGen, and was trained using data provided by the algorithm. You can also drag and drop pre-existing sounds into the plugin and have it generate related samples, in addition to typing out commands.
The UI is extremely minimal and sparse, which makes it easy to use, but does present some inherent limitations. For instance, it doesn’t take pre-existing music on your track into account, so your first, second, and even third attempts will likely not match the tone you are going for. It also has trouble recognizing basic music concepts like keys, scales and BPM. Just like most AI-creation platforms, you aren’t going to get a perfect match right away. You’ll have to tweak, augment and provide further instructions, bit by bit, until satisfied.
However, when you get there, it’s pretty darn fun, creating the kinds of happy accidents you’d never stumble into on your own. Check out the demo video and that little flourish of guitar at the tail end of the sample as an example.
This is an AI tool in the year 2023, so there are some bugs. During experiments, we ran into issues like the plugin adding drums when we clearly stated that we didn’t want percussion. To that end, Samplab says the tool is not intended to “replace human musicians, which it’s not capable of doing anyway.” It’s free, though, so there’s no harm in checking it out, and the technology should improve as more people use it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/this-free-plugin-uses-ai-to-generate-music-samples-from-text-prompts-165058168.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – This free plugin uses AI to generate music samples from text prompts
Enlarge / Euclid’s Visible instrument (VIS) will image the sky in visible light (550–900 nm) to take sharp images of billions of galaxies and measure their shapes. This image was taken during the commissioning of Euclid. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA)
Nearly one month after launching into space, a European telescope has begun taking its first images and data of the Universe. And to the delight of scientists at the European Space Agency, everything seems to be working rather well.
As part of the months-long commissioning phase, both the telescope’s visual and infrared-light cameras have started snapping photos of the cosmos. Scientists who helped develop these cameras—VIS for visible light, and NISP for Near Infrared Spectrograph and Photometer—say the new instruments work superbly.
“We are very pleased that the commissioning phase of Euclid is progressing well,” Alessandra Roy, Euclid project manager at the German Space Agency at DLR, said. “The spacecraft will soon reach its final position at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and begin scientific observations.”
Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Europe turns its new .5 billion space telescope on, and happily it works
Microsoft is making it a lot more convenient to use multiple high refresh rate monitors with Windows 11. From a report: The software giant has started testing a Windows 11 update that automatically adjusts refresh rates on multiple monitors depending on what content is being displayed, which should improve power usage and could even result in some GPUs spinning up their fans less often. “We have improved refresh rate logic to allow different refresh rates on different monitors, depending on the refresh rate for each monitor and content shown on the screen,” explains Microsoft in a Windows Insider blog from last week. “This will help most with refresh rate-dependent multitasking, like playing a game and watching a video at the same time.” If you have multiple monitors that support high refresh rates then running them at their full potential often increases the power draw of your GPU. Nvidia RTX 30- and 40-series Founders Edition cards also have a zero RPM mode, which will keep the fans at zero even when you’re watching video content on a single monitor. If you add a second high refresh rate display, this often disables the zero RPM mode and means the GPU keeps its fans spinning if you have both monitors at high refresh rates.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Windows 11 Getting Multiple Monitor Refresh Rate Improvements
Watching trailers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, one of the first things to come to mind is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Spider-Verse was such a game changer in animation that when you see any animated movie after it that looks a little bit different, it’s very easy to link the two. Especially…
Source: Gizmodo – TMNT: Mutant Mayhem Director Talks Inspirations, Canon, Shredder, Marvel and More
Record-breaking heat in Arizona is killing off the iconic southwestern saguaro cactuses. Yes, cactuses are desert life and they’re made to withstand heat. But there is such a thing as temperatures that are too high, even for cactuses that grow in locations that have seen triple-digit temperatures this summer.
Source: Gizmodo – Even Phoenix’s Cactuses Can’t Beat This Summer’s Record Heat
A New York Times investigation uncovered earlier this year that the US government used spyware made by Israeli hacking firm NSO. Now, after an FBI investigation into who was using the tech, the department uncovered a confusing answer: itself, according to the New York Times on Monday.
Since 2021, the Biden administration has taken steps toward parting ways with NSO, given the firm’s reputation for shady tools like Pegasus that lets governments discreetly download personal information from hacked phones without the user’s knowledge. But even after the president signed an executive order banning commercial spyware in March, an FBI contractor used NSO’s geolocation product Landmark to track the locations of targets in Mexico.
The FBI had inked a deal with telecommunications firm Riva Networks to track drug smugglers in Mexico, according to the Times. The spyware let US officials track mobile phones because of existing security gaps in the country’s cellphone networks. While the FBI says it was misled by Riva Networks into using the tech, and has since terminated the contract, people with direct knowledge of the situation said the FBI used the spyware as recently this year.
This isn’t the FBI’s first run in with NSO and its spyware tools. Prior to the executive order banning the products for government use, the agency considered using Pegasus to aid in its criminal investigations. Spyware generally gained a bad reputation for its use to surveil citizens and suppress political dissent, with NSO considered one of the largest in the business.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fbi-investigates-use-of-nso-spyware-pegasus-landmark-163949655.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – FBI investigation reveals that it was unknowingly using NSO-backed spyware
Rafaela Vasquez, the operator of a self-driving Uber vehicle that was the first-ever involved in a pedestrian fatality, has pleaded guilty to endangerment in the criminal case that followed the crash. The guilty plea, filed nearly five years after Vasquez’s fatal collision with a woman crossing a street with her bike,…
Source: Gizmodo – Human Pleads Guilty in First Ever Self-Driving Pedestrian Death
This post is part of Lifehacker’s “Living With AI” series: We investigate the current state of AI, walk through how it can be useful (and how it can’t), and evaluate where this revolutionary tech is heading next. Read more here.
Source: LifeHacker – How AI Is Used to Scam You (and What You Can Do About It)
It was another bustling month for spaceflight, the dog days of summer are blazing with the added heat from botched engine tests and a trove of fiery rocket launches. As always, the past month of spaceflight presented a plethora of captivating visuals.
Source: Gizmodo – The Best Spaceflight Images From July Will Make Your Head Explode
You might want to run antivirus tools if you use certain Minecraft mods. The MMPA security community has learned that hackers are exploiting a “BleedingPipe” flaw in the Forge framework powering numerous mods, including some versions of Astral Sorcery, EnderCore and Gadomancy. If one of the game tweaks is running on Forge 1.7.10/1.12.2, intruders can remotely control both servers and gamers’ devices. In one case, an attacker was using a new exploit variant to breach a Minecraft server and steal both Discord chatters’ credentials as well as players’ Steam session cookies.
As Bleeping Computerexplains, BleedingPipe relies on incorrect deserialization for a class in the Java code powering the mods. Users just have to send special network traffic to a server to take control. The first evidence of BleedingPipe attacks surfaced in March 2022 and were quickly patched by modders, but MMPA understands most servers running the mods haven’t updated.
We’ve asked Mojang parent company Microsoft for comment. It’s not responsible for Forge, so the tech giant can’t necessarily stop or limit the damage. You won’t be affected if you use stock Minecraft or stick to single-player sessions.
The full scope of the vulnerability isn’t clear. While there are 46 mods known to fall prey to BleedingPipe as of this writing, there’s the potential for considerably more. Users are asked to scan their systems (including their Minecraft folder) for malware. Server operators, meanwhile, are urged to either update mods or stop running them entirely. MMPA also has a PipeBlocker mod that protects everyone involved, although mod packs may cause problems if the mods haven’t been updated.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/minecraft-mod-exploit-lets-hackers-control-your-device-162231445.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – ‘Minecraft’ mod exploit lets hackers control your device
Text generation web UI is software that offers a web user interface for a variety of large language models such as LLaMA, llama.cpp, GPT-J, OPT, and GALACTICA. It has a lofty objective; to be the AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui of text generation.
Source: LXer – Machine Learning in Linux: Text generation web UI
Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 is here with support for new devices, including Fairphone 3, F(x)tec Pro1 X, and Vollaphone X23 smartphones.
The post Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Brings New Support for Linux Smartphones appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Brings New Support for Linux Smartphones
