As any radio amateur will tell you, the world of radio abounds with exciting possibilities. Probably the simplest pursuit of them all is that of the SWL, or short wave listener, who scours the airwaves in search of interesting stations. SWLs will often have fully-featured setups with high-end general-coverage communications receivers and tuned antenna arrays, but it can start with the cheapest of radios at its bottom end. Such a radio is the subject of this review, the XHDATA D-219 is a miniature portable receiver that costs under ten dollars, yet is currently the talk of the town in SWL circles. This interest is in no small amount due to its being an especially low-price way to get your hands on a shortwave radio using one of the SIlicon Labs integrated software-defind radio receiver chips. We dont often review a consumer radio here at Hackaday, but with an avid eye for unexpected gems at the cheaper end of the market this ones worth a second look.

What Do You Get For Your Tenner?

A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed YoroTrooper has been targeting government, energy, and international organizations across Europe as part of a cyber espionage campaign that has been active since at least June 2022. "Information stolen from successful compromises include credentials from multiple applications, browser histories and cookies, system information and screenshots," Cisco

Microsofts latest layoffs throw ethics out the window and we should all be worried.

The 2023 election for the Debian project leader looks to be a relatively unexciting affair: incumbent leader Jonathan Carter is running unopposed for a fourth term. His platform lays out his hopes and plans for that term.

Thats got molecules in it that will prevent cancer, among other things like anti-inflammatory properties, he said. Some older research has shown, for example, that green tea consumption might be linked to a lower risk of stomach cancer.

Sinclair also said he takes supplements (like those sold on the Tally Health website) that contain resveratrol, which his teams research has shown can extend the lifespan of organisms like yeast and worms.

While the compound, famously found in red wine, is known to have anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, heart health, and brain health benefits, the research is mixed on if or how well such benefits can be achieved in humans through a pill.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-sqlite3 and qemu), Fedora (libmemcached-awesome, manifest-tool, sudo, and vim), Red Hat (gnutls, kernel, kernel-rt, lua, and openssl), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (amanda, firefox, go1.19, go1.20, jakarta-commons-fileupload, java-1_8_0-openjdk, nodejs18, peazip, perl-Net-Server, python, python-cryptography, python-Django, python3, rubygem-rack, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (ipython, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, and linux-kvm).

Never forget how mainstream/corporate controlled medicine refused to acknowledge the Vitamin D Covid relationship. My guess is that you wont hear much about this Vitamin D dementia research from them either. Via: Dr. John Campbell:

If you are developing a modern medical, manufacturing, or logistics facility, theres no doubt that a large portion of your investment was made into the electronic aspects of your device. Sensors, connected devices, and machinery are synchronized to deliver a streamlined experience. For facility operators, this includes elevators, HVAC systems, PLC controls, valves, pumps, and a whole slew of systems that we dont think of as connected. And thats precisely the problem. Many of the More

The post How Mirel Sehic relies on simplicity to focus on product security appeared first on Help Net Security.

guest reader writes:

First demonstration of universal control of encoded spin qubits:

HRL Laboratories, LLC, has published the first demonstration of universal control of encoded spin qubits. This newly emerging approach to quantum computation uses a novel silicon-based qubit device architecture, fabricated in HRL's Malibu cleanroom, to trap single electrons in quantum dots. Spins of three such single electrons host energy-degenerate qubit states, which are controlled by nearest-neighbor contact interactions that partially swap spin states with those of their neighbors.

[...] The encoded silicon/silicon germanium quantum dot qubits use three electron spins and a control scheme whereby voltages applied to metal gates partially swap the directions of those electron-spins without ever aligning them in any particular direction. The demonstration involved applying thousands of these precisely calibrated voltage pulses in strict relation to one another over the course of a few millionths of a second.

The quantum coherence offered by the isotopically enriched silicon used, the all-electrical and low-crosstalk-control of partial swap operations, and the configurable insensitivity of the encoding to certain error sources combine to offer a strong pathway toward scalable fault tolerance and computational advantage, major steps toward a commercial quantum computer.

[...] "It is hard to define what the best qubit technology is, but I think the silicon exchange-only qubit is at least the best-balanced," said Thaddeus Ladd, HRL group leader and co-author.

Journal Reference: Aaron J. Weinstein et al, Universal logic with encoded spin qubits in silicon, Nature (2023). https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05777-3

Original Submission

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These days, we dont have to wait long until the next breakthrough in artificial intelligence impresses everyone with capabilities that previously belonged only in science fiction.

In 2022, AI art generation tools such as Open AIs DALL-E 2, Googles Imagen, and Stable Diffusion took the internet by storm, with users generating high-quality images from text descriptions.

Unlike previous developments, these text-to-image tools quickly found their way from research labs to mainstream culture, leading to viral phenomena such as the Magic Avatar feature in the Lensa AI app, which creates stylized images of its users.

ESET researchers have uncovered a compromise of an East Asian data loss prevention (DLP) company. The attackers utilized at least three malware families during the intrusion, compromising both the internal update servers and third-party tools utilized by the company. This resulted in two of the companys customers being subsequently compromised. Illustration of the chain of compromise ESET attributes the campaign with high confidence to the Tick APT group. Based on Ticks profile, the objective of More

The post Data loss prevention company hacked by Tick cyberespionage group appeared first on Help Net Security.

Thanks to its high orbital inclination, the International Space Station (ISS) eventually passes over most inhabited parts of the Earth. Like other artificial satellites, though, its typically only visible overhead during passes at sunrise and sunset. If youd like to have an idea of where it is beyond the times that its directly visible, take a look at this tabletop ISS tracking system created by [dpelgrift].

...

A patch series is proposing that the SLOB memory allocator be removed from the Linux 6.4 kernel this summer...

New Horizons is, like the two Voyagers, a gift that keeps on giving, even as it moves through the Kuiper Belt in year 17 of its mission. Thus the presentations that members of the spacecraft team made on March 14 at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Papers will flow out of these observations, including interpretations of the twelve mounds on the larger lobe of Arrokoth, the contact binary that is being intensely studied through stereo imaging to identify how these features formed around a larger center mound. Alan Stern (SwRI) is principal investigator for the New Horizons mission:

We discovered that the mounds are similar in many respects, including their sizes, reflectivities and colors. We believe the mounds were likely individual components that existed before the assembly of Arrokoth, indicating that like-sized bodies were formed as precursors to Arrokoth itself. This is surprising, and a new piece in the puzzle of how planetesimals building blocks of the planets, like Arrokoth and other Kuiper Belt objects come together.

Science team members also discussed the so-called bladed terrain, evidently the product of methane ice, that seems to stretch across large areas of Plutos far side, as observed during the spacecrafts approach. It was intriguing to learn as well about the spacecrafts observations of Uranus and Neptune, which will complement Voyager imaging at different geometries and longer wavelengths. And Plutos true polar wander (the tilt of a planet with respect to its spin axis came into play (and yes, I do realize Ive just referred to Pluto as a planet). Co-investigator Oliver White:

Were seeing signs of ancient landscapes that formed in places and in ways we cant really explain in Plutos current orientation. We suggest the possibility is that they formed when Pluto was oriented differently in its early history, and were then moved to their current location by true polar wander.

Image: Plutos Sputnik Planitia, the huge impact basin found in Plutos heart region, seems to have much to do with the worlds axial tilt, while the possibility of a deep ocean pushing against the basin from below has to be taken into account. This image is from the presentation by Oliver...

Data security firm Rubrik discloses a data breach, attackers exploited recent GoAnywhere zero-day to steal its data.

Cybersecurity firm Rubrik disclosed a data breach, a ransomware group stolen compeny data by exploiting the recently disclosed zero-day vulnerability in the Fortra GoAnywhere secure file transfer platform.

The company was the victim of a large-scale campaign targeting GoAnywhere MFT devices worldwide by exploiting the zero-day vulnerability.

Rubrik immediately launched an investigation into the incident with the help of third-party forensics experts.

In early February, the popular investigator Brian Krebs first revealed details about the zero-day on Mastodon and pointed out that Fortra has yet to share a public advisory.

According to the private advisory published by Fortra, the zero-day is a remote code injection issue that impacts GoAnywhere MFT. The vulnerability can only be exploited by attackers with access to the administrative console of the application.

Installs with administrative consoles and management interfaces that are not exposed on the internet are safe, however, security researcher Kevin Beaumont discovered about 1000 Internet-facing consoles.

Fortra recommends GoAnywhere MFT customers review all administrative users and monitor for unrecognized usernames, especially those created by system.

According to a statement published by Rubrik, the breach was quickly contained and only impacted a non-production IT testing environment.

We detected unauthorized access to a limited amount of information in one of our non-production IT testing environments as a result of the GoAnywhere vulnerability. Importantly, based on our current investigation, being conducted with the assistance of third-party forensics experts, the unauthorized access did NOT include any data we secure on behalf of our customers via any Rubrik products. reads the statement.  

The current investigation has determined there was no lateral movement to other environments. Rubrik took the involved non-production environment offline and leveraged our own security systems and solutions to quickly contain the threat and help restore our test environment. 

The company states that stolen data include internal sales information, certain customer and partner company information, and a limited number of purchase orders from its distributors. The company pointed out that customer...

Open3D as an open-source library for 3D data processing from 3D machine learning tasks to adaptable viewing of 3D data is out with its newest feature release...

The latest notable high performance computing (HPC) open-source project adding mainline support for AMD HIP with ROCm is SPECFEM3D...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered the first-ever illicit cryptocurrency mining campaign used to mint Dero since the start of February 2023. "The novel Dero cryptojacking operation concentrates on locating Kubernetes clusters with anonymous access enabled on a Kubernetes API and listening on non-standard ports accessible from the internet," CrowdStrike said in a new report shared with The

Being merged today into the GCC 13 compiler is the set of T-Head vendor extensions to the RISC-V ISA. This set of vendor extensions is designed to augment the RISC-V ISA and provide faster and more energy efficient capabilities...

The Qt Group as the company behind the Qt open-source toolkit has launched Qt Insight as their newest software offering. However, Qt Insight does not appear to be open-source and is marketed as a SaaS product...

Posted by Jan Engelhardt on Mar 15

Summary: In some parts of the world it is already the 16^th of the month; thats the 70^th birthday of Richard Stallman

The stakes could not be higher for cyber defenders. With the vast amounts of sensitive information, intellectual property, and financial data at risk, the consequences of a data breach can be devastating. According to a report released by Ponemon institute, the cost of data breaches has reached an all-time high, averaging $4.35 million in 2022. Vulnerabilities in web applications are often the

Posted by Hanno Bck on Mar 15

Posted by Casper Dik on Mar 15

ChatGPTs successor GPT-4 has not just passed various major exams, but has actually aced them. Elon Musk has now reacted to the news and says, What will humans do?

A cyberespionage actor known as Tick has been attributed with high confidence to a compromise of an East Asian data-loss prevention (DLP) company that caters to government and military entities. "The attackers compromised the DLP company's internal update servers to deliver malware inside the software developer's network, and trojanized installers of legitimate tools used by the company, which

upstart writes:

It'll allow researchers to develop a 'a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works':

Researchers understand the structure of brains and have mapped them out in some detail, but they still don't know exactly how they process data for that, a detailed "circuit map" of the brain is needed.

Now, scientists have created just such a map for the most advanced creature yet: a fruit fly larva. Called a connectome, it diagrams the insect's 3016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, Neuroscience News has reported. The map will help researchers study better understand how the brains of both insects and animals control behavior, learning, body functions and more. The work may even inspired improved AI networks.

"Up until this point, we've not seen the structure of any brain except of the roundworm C. elegans, the tadpole of a low chordate, and the larva of a marine annelid, all of which have several hundred neurons," said professor Marta Zlatic from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. "This means neuroscience has been mostly operating without circuit maps. Without knowing the structure of a brain, we're guessing on the way computations are implemented. But now, we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works."

[...] As a next step, the team will investigate the structures used for behavioural functions like learning and decision making, and examine connectome activity while the insect does specific activities. And while a fruit fly larva is a simple insect, the researchers expect to see similar patterns in other animals. "In the same way that genes are conserved across the animal kingdom, I think that the basic circuit motifs that implement these fundamental behaviours will also be conserved," said Zlatic.

Original Submission

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It will be released with a new tool called MakerSuite, which lets you prototype ideas, do prompt engineering, synthetic data generation and custom-model tuning. Waitlist available soon.

Microsofts Kosmos-1 can take image and audio prompts, paving the way for the next stage beyond ChatGPTs text prompts.

Microsoft has unveiled Kosmos-1, which it describes as a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that can not only respond to language prompts but also visual cues, which can be used for an array of tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering, and more.

OpenAIs ChatGPT has helped popularize the concept of LLMs, such as the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model, and the possibility of transforming a text prompt or input into an output.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
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  • Instructionals/Technical
  • Desktop Environments/WMs
    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
• Distributions and Operating Systems
  • New Releases
  • Fedora Family / IBM
  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
  • Programming/Development
• Leftovers
  • Science
  • Hardware
  • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
  • Proprietary
  • Security
    • Privacy/Surveillance
    • Confidentiality
  • Defence/Aggression
  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting
  • Environment
    • Energy/Transportation
    • Wildlife/Nature
  • Finance
  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
  • Censorship/Free Speech
  • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
  • Civil Rights/Policing
  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
  • ...

Brazils crackdown against pirate sites, IPTV services, infringing apps, and other mechanisms delivering illegal content to the masses, continues to press ahead.

In the wake of similar operations in previous years, including action reported in August 2022, a new phase of Brazils Operation 404 anti-piracy initiative was announced on Tuesday.

Operation 404.5 Phase 5

The launch of the 5th phase of Operation 404 is described by Brazils Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP) as an international mobilization coordinated by the MJSP, through the National Secretariat for Public Security (Senasp), with support from police in eight states.

The objective is the removal of audio and video content, such as games and music, blocking and suspension of illegal streaming websites and applications, de-indexing of content in search engines and removal of profiles and pages on social networks, an MJSP announcement reads.

In this 5th phase, eleven people were arrested: four in So Paulo, two in Paran, one in Bahia and four in Minas Gerais, the government ministry reports.

Search and seizure warrants to locate computer equipment were executed in the states of Pernambuco, So Paulo, Paran, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Bahia, Cear and Rio de Janeiro.

199 illegal streaming and gaming sites and 63 music apps were also removed, in addition to blocking 128 domains, the ministry says.

A total of six messaging app channels with more than 4,000 subscribers were also blocked, reportedly for distributing music that had not been officially released.

International Cooperation

The local operation received significant international support. Authorities say they collaborated with the UKs Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit and the British Embassy, Peruvian intellectual property protection agency INDECOPI, MPA Latin American, anti-piracy group Alianza, and US-based videogame industry group Entertainment Software Alliance (ESA).

TorrentFreak obtained what appears to be a notice directed toward visitors to seized sites and domains. In addition to the groups listed above, it reveals the participation of the UKs Intellectual Property Office, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, Brazil-based music industry group APDIF, and global music industry group IFPI.

Posted by Dave Horsfall on Mar 15

Posted by Jarek Potiuk on Mar 15

Posted by Fabian Keil on Mar 15

Top aviation company Safran Group left itself vulnerable to cyberattacks, likely for well over a year, underlining how vulnerable big aviation firms are to threat actors, according to research by Cybernews.

Original post at https://cybernews.com/security/key-aerospace-player-leaks-sensitive-data/

The Cybernews research team recently discovered that the French-based multinational aviation company, the eighth largest aerospace supplier worldwide, was leaking sensitive data due to a misconfiguration of its systems. The vulnerability left the company at risk from cyberattacks over an extended period of time.

According to its own estimates, Safran Group s revenue for 2022 was above 19 billion. It collaborates with Airbus, the second-largest aerospace company globally after Boeing, to manufacture aerospace equipment.

The Safran Group is also involved in developing cutting-edge technologies beyond aviation, such as modules currently in use in the James Webb Telescope, the worlds largest optical telescope in space. Also, the company manufactures surface-to-air defense systems and missiles.

Cybernews reached out to Safran Group regarding the leak researchers found, and at the time of writing, the misconfiguration has been fixed.

The discovery

Researchers found a publicly available environment file used by the beta deployment of the open-source video-calling app Jitsi Meet. The Cybernews team estimates that the file stayed publicly available for around a year-and-a-half, leaving Safran Group vulnerable to potential attacks throughout that time.

The leaked sensitive information included the Laravel app key, JSON Web Token (JWT) key, MySQL credentials, and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) credentials for the no-reply email.

The Cybernews researchers highlight that the exposure of these keys and credentials could have made it relatively easy for attackers to gain access to the websites backend, employee computers, and other servers.

The Laravel app key is a token that helps to keep user browser cookies safe. If threat actors know this token, they can use it to decrypt cookies, which might contain session IDs. Knowing them, a threat actor could be able to hijack the session and therefore the account.

The leak also included the JWT secret key, another type of token, which is usually used for authentication. These tokens can be both for a user, and for an admin. If attackers had access to this key, they could create an admin account and have privileged access to a website.

The JWT secret key is used to generate and verify...

New talk: Ken Thompson Closing Keynote SCaLE 20x Invidious

Video download link | md5sum 37094b98ccf1f1e690ddd4f2739085b5
The Person Who Created UNIX Has Abandoned It and Is Now Moving to Debian GNU/Linux (Raspbian)

Summary: Ken Thompson has shared incredible news; hes moving to GNU/Linux (transcript of the excerpt above can be found below)

[00:00] Audience member: ok, Ken. Whats your operating system of choice, today?

Ken Thompson: I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it run Apple. Right now, recently, meaning within the last five years Ive become more and more and more depressed and

[laughter from audience]

what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work

[00:30] is just atrocious but they are taking space and time to do it so its ok. And I have come within the last month or two to say even though Ive invested a zillion years in Apple, Im throwing it away and Im going to Linux, Raspbian in particular.

[applause and cheers from audience]

Ken Thompson: Anyway, Im half transitioned now.

In an ideal smart home, the explosion of cheap WiFi and Bluetooth chips has allowed hundreds of small wireless devices to control the switches, lights, and everything else required for a smart home at a relatively low price. But what if you dont want hundreds of internet-connected devices in your home polluting the wireless spectrum and allowing potential security holes into your network? If youre like [Lucas Teske], you might reach for something wired and use cheap and (currently) available Raspberry Pi Picos to create PicoHome.

The unique twist of PicoHome is that it uses a CAN bus for communication. One of [Lucas] goals was to make the boards easily swappable when hardware failed. This meant board-to-board communication and protocols like I2C were susceptible to noise (every time a relay triggered, the bus would lock up briefly). The CAN bus is designed to work in an electrically noisy environment.

There are two parts to the system: pico-relay and pico-input. The first connects to a 16 relay board and can control 16 different 24v relays. The second has 16 optoisolators to read from 12v-24v switches and various buttons throughout the house. These can be placed in a giant metal box in a central wiring location and not worry about it.

The...

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techrights-140323.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-140323.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-social-140323.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techbytes-140323.gmi

Over HTTP:

The bank has been testing the artificial intelligence tool with 300 advisors and plans to roll it out widely in the coming months, according to Jeff McMillan, head of analytics, data and innovation at the firms wealth management division.

Morgan Stanleys move is one of the first announcements by a financial incumbent after the success of OpenAIs ChatGPT, which went viral late last year by generating human-sounding responses to questions. The bank is a juggernaut in wealth management with more than $4.2 trillion in client assets. The promise and perils of artificial intelligence have been written about for years, but seemingly only after ChatGPT did mainstream users understand the ramifications of the technology.

The idea behind the tool, which has been in development for the past year, is to help the banks 16,000 or so advisors tap the banks enormous repository of research and data, said McMillan.