Millions of WordPress-powered websites are using the Advanced Custom Fields and Advanced Custom Fields Pro plugins, which security researchers say have been vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

fliptop writes:

Photonic circuits are a very promising technology for neural networks because they make it possible to build energy-efficient computing units. For years, the Politecnico di Milano has been working on developing programmable photonic processors integrated on silicon microchips only a few mm2 in size for use in the field of data transmission and processing, and now these devices are being used to build photonic neural networks:

"An artificial neuron, like a biological neuron, must perform very simple mathematical operations, such as addition and multiplication, but in a neural network consisting of many densely interconnected neurons, the energy cost of these operations grows exponentially and quickly becomes prohibitive. Our chip incorporates a photonic accelerator that allows calculations to be carried out very quickly and efficiently, using a programmable grid of silicon interferometers. The calculation time is equal to the transit time of light in a chip a few millimeters in size, so we are talking about less than a billionth of a second (0.1 nanoseconds)," says Francesco Morichetti, Head of the Photonic Devices Lab of the Politecnico di Milano.

"The advantages of photonic neural networks have long been known, but one of the missing pieces to fully exploit their potential was network training.. It is like having a powerful calculator, but not knowing how to use it. In this study, we succeeded in implementing training strategies for photonic neurons similar to those used for conventional neural networks. The photonic 'brain' learns quickly and accurately and can achieve precision comparable to that of a conventional neural network, but faster and with considerable energy savings. These are all building blocks for artificial intelligence and quantum applications," adds Andrea Melloni, Director of Polifab the Politecnico di Milano micro and nanotechnology center.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Journal Reference: Sunil Pai et al, Experimentally realized in situ backpropagation for deep learning in photonic neural networks, Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.ade8450

Related: New Chip Can Process and Classify Nearly Two Billion Images Per Second

Original Submission...

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi definitely didnt plan on devoting most of this episode to 3D printing and space stories, but lets be honest, it was bound to happen sooner or later. After an update on the Hackaday Prize, the discussion moves on to a pair of troubled spacecraft and the challenges of exploring the final frontier. From there youll hear about a chocolate 3D printer weve had our eyes on for years, the tools you should have next to your own (non-chocolate) 3D printer, and a bit of contemplation of what it really means to design for 3D printing versus traditional manufacturing methods. But its not all plastic fantastic by the end of the episode youll also hear about some particularly bold high-altitude aviators and the surprisingly short time we have left with the humble barcode.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

OK, perhaps I should remove my ebay alert for Gary Panter, because Im starting to have a sufficient volume of Panter ephemera

James Dean, dude.

Back Again.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

LibreOffice 7.5.3 offers improved compatibility with MS Office, as well as numerous minor improvements throughout the suite.

The post LibreOffice 7.5.3: Coming Soon to a Repository Near You appeared first on FOSS Force.

The History Guy on YouTube has posted an interesting video on the history of the supercomputer, with a specific focus on their use by NASA for the implementation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of aeronautical assemblies.

The aero designers of the day were quickly finding out the limitations of the wind tunnel testing approach, especially for so-called transonic flow conditions. This occurs when an object moving through a fluid (like air can be modeled) produces regions of supersonic flow mixed in with subsonic flow and makes for additional drag scenarios. This severely impacts aircraft performance. Not accounting for these effects is not an option, hence the great industry interest in CFD modeling. But the equations for which (usually based around the Navier-Stokes system) are non-linear, and extremely computationally intensive.

...

Mirantis announced the latest update of open source k0s, which adds compatibility with the latest release of Kubernetes 1.27, as well as improvements and bug fixes to k0s. The latest update of Mirantis k0s makes improvements that simplify installation and management of Kubernetes clusters. New features include support for containerD plug-ins that simplify running, for example, WASM and gVisor container sandboxes, making it easier for users to extend their clusters with additional container runtimes. Also, More

The post Mirantis k0s updates simplify management of Kubernetes clusters appeared first on Help Net Security.

Some things, it seems, just cannot be hurried. Back in 2007, your editor first started considering alternatives to the proprietary accounting system that had been used by LWN since the beginning. That search became more urgent in 2012, and returned in 2017 with a focused effort to find something better. But another five years passed before some sort of conclusion was reached. It has finally happened, though; LWN is no longer using proprietary software for its accounting needs.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Kernel Space
  • Applications
  • Instructionals/Technical
  • Games
  • Desktop Environments/WMs
    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
    • GNOME Desktop/GTK
• Distributions and Operating Systems
  • SUSE/OpenSUSE
  • Devices/Embedded
  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
  • Web Browsers/Web Servers
    • Mozilla
  • Education
  • Programming/Development
    • Python
• Leftovers
  • Science
  • Hardware
  • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
  • Proprietary
  • Security
    • Privacy/Surveillance
  • Defence/Aggression
  • Environment
    • Energy/Transportation
  • Finance
  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
  • Censorship/Free Speech
  • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Pr...

For those that haven't yet watched the AMD openSIL presentation from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague from April, the most interesting takeaway was deserving of its own article... AMD openSIL is planned to eventually replace the well known AGESA and that it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack -- just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned but will support all AMD processors...

^* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. Its like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

England and Wales death totals by week:

urther to what I published on Wednesday, heres a breakdown of increase in deaths by age group, debunking the notion that it is impacting only very old people.

The number on the left is the total deaths for week 16 (latest on record) in 2019, compared to the same week in 2023 (shown on the right below), i.e. last month:

For ages 15-45, 321 compared to 251: 28% increase in fatalities
For ages 45-64, 1478 compared to 1100: 34.4% increase in fatalities
For ages 65-74, 1878 compared to 1446: 30% increase in fatalities

Seems like a national health crisis, but the media hardly talks about it, so lets pretend its not happening.

AutoCrypt KEY enables OEMs and suppliers to manage all types of cryptographic keys used for the components of connected and electric vehicles. Modern vehicles function through communications, including internal communications between ECUs and application processors, and external connections with nearby vehicles, roadside infrastructure, mobile devices, and charging stations. To ensure that all transmitted data are safely encrypted and all connected components can be securely verified, the use of cryptographic keys is essential in establishing trust More

The post AutoCrypt KEY provides the key management features needed for automotive production appeared first on Help Net Security.

Theres a problem with Opera. No, not that kind of opera. The Oracle kind. Oracle OPERA is a Property Management Solution (PMS) that is in use in a bunch of big-name hotels around the world. The PMS is the system that handles reservations and check-ins, talks to the phone system to put room extensions in the proper state, and generally runs the back-end of the property. Its old code, and handles a bunch of tasks. And researchers at Assetnote found a serious vulnerability. CVE-2023-21932 is an arbitrary file upload issue, and rates at least a 7.2 CVSS.

Its a tricky one, where the code does all the right things, but gets the steps out of order. Two parameters, jndiname and username are encrypted for transport, and the sanitization step happens before decryption. The username parameter receives no further sanitization, and is vulnerable to path traversal injection. There are two restrictions to exploitation. The string encryption has to be valid, and the request has to include a valid Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) name. It looks like these are the issues leading Oracle to consider this flaw difficult to exploit vulnerability allows high privileged attacker.

The only problem is that the encryption key is global and static. It was pretty straightforward to reverse engineer the encryption routine. And JDNI strings can be fetched anonymously from a trio of endpoints. This lead Asse...

Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver has increased its instruction heap size to 2Gb in order to address a hang experienced with the game Overwatch while this is also likely to help other software/games moving forward...

Various sectors in East Asian markets have been subjected to a new email phishing campaign that distributes a previously undocumented strain of Android malware called FluHorse that abuses the Flutter software development framework. "The malware features several malicious Android applications that mimic legitimate applications, most of which have more than 1,000,000 installs," Check Point said in

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, evolution, and odoo), Fedora (java-11-openjdk), Oracle (samba), Red Hat (libreswan and samba), Slackware (libssh), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, apache2-mod_auth_openidc, cmark, containerd, editorconfig-core-c, ffmpeg, go1.20, harfbuzz, helm, java-11-openjdk, java-1_8_0-ibm, liblouis, podman, and vim), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-intel-iotg, and linux-oem-6.1).

upstart writes:

A baby girl who developed a life-threatening brain condition was successfully treated before she was born:

Her parents signed up for a clinical trial of an in-utero surgical treatment to see if doctors could intervene before any of these outcomes materialized. It seems to have worked. The team behind the operation now plans to treat more fetuses in the same way. Other, similar brain conditions might benefit from the same approach. For conditions like these, fetal brain surgery could be the future.

The baby's condition, known as vein of Galen malformation, was first noticed during a routine ultrasound scan at 30 weeks of pregnancy. The condition occurs when a vein connects with an artery in the brain. These two types of vessels have different functions and should be kept separatearteries ferry high-pressure flows of oxygenated blood from the heart, while thin-walled veins carry low-pressure blood back the other way.

When the two combine, the high-pressure blood flow from an artery can stretch the thin walls of the vein. "Over time the vein essentially blows up like a balloon," says Darren Orbach, a radiologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts, who treats babies born with the condition.

The resulting balloon of blood can cause serious problems for a baby. "It's stealing blood from the rest of the circulation," says Mario Ganau, a consultant neurosurgeon at Oxford University Hospitals in the UK, who was not involved in this particular case. Other parts of the brain can end up being starved of oxygenated blood, causing brain damage, and there's a risk of bleeding in the brain. The extra pressure put on the heart to pump blood can lead to heart failure. And other organs can suffer tooespecially the lungs and kidneys, says Ganau.

Fetuses with the condition are thought to be protected by the placenta to some degree. But that changes from the moment the umbilical cord is clamped at birth. "All of a sudden there's this enormous burden placed right on the newborn heart," says Orbach. "Most babies with this condition will become very sick, very quickly."

Journal Reference:
Darren B. Orbach, Louise E. Wilkins-Haug, Carol B. Benson, et al., Transuterine Ultrasound-Guided Fetal Embolization of Vein of Galen Malformation, Eliminating Postnatal Pathophysiology [open], Stroke, 2023. DOI: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.123.043421

Original Submission

Read more of this story at...

I might have mentioned the issues involving the James Webb Space Telescopes MIRI instrument in my earlier post on in-flight maintenance and repair. MIRI is the Mid-Infrared Instrument that last summer had issues with friction in one of the wheels that selects between short, medium and longer wavelengths. Now there seems to be a problem, however slight, that affects the amount of light registered by MIRIs sensors.

The problems seem minor and are under investigation, which is a good thing because we need MIRIs capabilities to study systems like GJ 486, where a transiting rocky exoplanet may or may not be showing traces of water in an atmosphere that may or may not be there. MIRI should help sort out the issue, which was raised through observations with another JWST instrument, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). The latter shows tantalizing evidence of water vapor, but the problem is untangling whether that signal is coming from the rocky planet or the star.

This points to an important question. GJ 486b is about 30 percent larger than Earth and three times as massive, a rocky super-Earth orbiting its red dwarf host in about 1.5 Earth days. The proximity to the star almost demands tidal lock, with one side forever dark, the other facing the star. If the water vapor NIRSpec is pointing to actually comes from a planetary atmosphere, then that atmosphere copes with surface temperatures in the range of 430 Celsius and the continual bombardment of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation associated with such stars. That would be encouraging news for other systems in which rocky worlds orbit further out, in an M-dwarfs habitable zone.

Sarah Moran (University of Arizona, Tucson) is lead author of the study, which has been accepted for publication at The Astrophysical Journal Letters:

We see a signal, and its almost certainly due to water. But we cant tell yet if that water is part of the planets atmosphere, meaning the planet has an atmosphere, or if were just seeing a water signature coming from the star.

Image: This graphic shows the transmission spectrum obtained by Webb observations of rocky exoplanet GJ 486b. The science teams analys...

North Korea-linked APT group Kimsuky has been observed using a new reconnaissance tool dubbed ReconShark in a recent campaign.

SentinelOne researchers observed an ongoing campaign from North Korea-linked Kimsuky Group that is using a new malware called ReconShark.

The reconnaissance tool is delivered through spear-phishing emails, OneDrive links leading to document weaponized downloads, and the execution of malicious macros.

Kimsuky cyberespiona group (aka ARCHIPELAGO, Black Banshee, Thallium, Velvet Chollima, APT43) was first spotted by Kaspersky researcher in 2013. At the end of October 2020, the US-CERT published a report on Kimuskys recent activities that provided information on their TTPs and infrastructure.

The APT group mainly targets think tanks and organizations in South Korea, other victims were in the United States, Europe, and Russia.

In the latest Kimsuky campaign, the state-sponsored group focused on nuclear agendas between China and North Korea, relevant to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

The threat actor recently targeted the staff of Korea Risk Group (KRG), the information and analysis firm specializing in matters directly and indirectly impacting the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK). SentinelOne reported that the same campaign is still targeting other entities and individuals in at least the United States, Europe, and Asia, including think tanks and universities.

For the deployment of ReconShark, Kimsuky continues to make use of specially crafted phishing emails. Notably, the spear-phishing emails are made with a level of design quality tuned for specific individuals, increasing the likelihood of opening by the target. This includes proper formatting, grammar, and visual clues, appearing legitimate to unsuspecting users. reads the analysis published by SentinelOne. Notably, the targeted emails, which contain links to download malicious documents, and the malicious documents themselves, abuse the names of real individuals whose expertise is relevant to the lure subject such as Political Scienti...

Going back to mid-2022 AMD engineers have been working on Virtual NMI support with SVM for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an efficiency optimization. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the AMD VNMI support has been merged...

Fusion reactor.

Without a doubt someday it is possible to have fusion power plants providing sustainable energy resolving our long-standing energy problems. This is the main reason so many scientists throughout the world are carrying out research on this power source. The generation of power from this method actually mimics the sun.

Researchers in Germany and the U.S. have shown for the first time that terahertz (THz) light pulses can stabilize ferromagnetism in a crystal at temperatures more than three times its usual transition temperature. As the team reports in Nature, using pulses just hundreds of femtoseconds long (a millionth of a billionth of a second), a ferromagnetic state was induced at high temperature in the rare-earth titanate YTiO₃ which persisted for many nanoseconds after the light exposure. Below the equilibrium transition temperature, the laser pulses still strengthened the existing magnetic state, increasing the magnetization up to its theoretical limit.

Using light to control magnetism in solids is a promising platform for future technologies. Todays computers mainly rely on the flow of electrical charge to process information. Moreover, digital memory storage devices make use of magnetic bits that must be switched external magnetic fields. Both of these aspects limit the speed and energy efficiency of current computing systems. Using light instead to optically switch memory and computing devices could revolutionize processing speeds and efficiency.

YTiO₃ is a transition metal oxide that only becomes ferromagnetic, with properties resembling those of a fridge magnet, below 27 K or 246C. At these low temperatures, the spins of the electrons on the Ti atoms align in a particular direction. It is this collective ordering of the spins which gives the material as a whole a macroscopic magnetization and turns it ferromagnetic. In contrast, at temperatures above 27 K, the individual spins fluctuate randomly so that no ferromagnetism develops.

The machine, which weighs only 22 lb (10 kg), is a single-piston-linear-engine, that runs exclusively on hydrogen. As it has only 20 components and one moving part, the engine is also much cheaper to produce and maintain than traditional engines.

Ive blogged about this movie before, and its not a new entry on the 2022 directors list, so I shouldnt be re-watching it now, eh why not.

...

Summary: The self-described owner of Sirius Open Source probably did not understand what he was getting into; for instance, did he know staff had been defrauded (his colleagues at the time)?

Italian corporate banking clients are the target of an ongoing financial fraud campaign that has been leveraging a new web-inject toolkit called drIBAN since at least 2019. "The main goal of drIBAN fraud operations is to infect Windows workstations inside corporate environments trying to alter legitimate banking transfers performed by the victims by changing the beneficiary and transferring

Internal documents show evidence

Summary: The finances of Sirius are dodgy; with at least three different shells (in at least two countries) and an unknown number of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), its hard to know where money comes from and where it is going to (even the companys registered address isnt authentic anymore)

AS noted this morning, the police is far too slow (if not reluctant) to investigate crimes of Sirius Open Source, so lets examine the facts, based on the Sirius Business Case as it was presented 12 months ago.

Quite a few people were involved in the blunders and the crimes. We chose not to name them. Anyway, of note are the following parts:

Where did the surplus go? Another country? Seems plausible. There we go:

They dont even mention the Gates Foundation because of the non-disclosure agreement, but its what likely drew the CEO to the US because, according to him, it was the first Sirius US client (strange, right?) and it was never mentioned anywhere in writing.

Several things are noteworthy and might be relevant to the police investigation. First, in March the CEO was publicly advertising that he had money (about 100,000 pounds per year to offer in salaries). So where does he hide the money? Where did that money come from? In the report he kept secret from us the finances in the US. Well, maybe he stashed it aside over the years and now he hides money in the US (from his ex-wives), who knows

The only other possibility is that he fakes everything or that he advertises openings for which he cannot even pay a s...

Internal documents show evidence

Summary: The finances of Sirius are dodgy; with at least three different shells (in at least two countries) and an unknown number of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), its hard to know where money comes from and where it is going to (even the companys registered address isnt authentic anymore)

AS noted this morning, the police is far too slow (if not reluctant) to investigate crimes of Sirius Open Source, so lets examine the facts, based on the Sirius Business Case as it was presented 12 months ago.

Quite a few people were involved in the blunders and the crimes. We chose not to name them. Anyway, of note are the following parts:

Where did the surplus go? Another country? Seems plausible. There we go:

They dont even mention the Gates Foundation because of the non-disclosure agreement, but its what likely drew the CEO to the US because, according to him, it was the first Sirius US client (strange, right?) and it was never mentioned anywhere in writing.

With two grown up girls in the UK and two more young girls in the UK the CEO (two failed marriages) is probably chased for many other expenses.Several things are noteworthy and might be relevant to the police investigation. First, in March the CEO was...

[Evan] couldnt find a phone he liked, so he decided to build his own. There are advantages and disadvantages, as you might expect. On the plus side, you have the ultimate control. On the negative side, it doesnt quite have the curb appeal at least to the average user of a sleek new cell phone from a major manufacturer.

The phone uses a Raspberry Pi, along with a 4G modem and a 480800 touchscreen. Theres a laser cut box that measures 90x160x30 mm. For reference, a Google Pixel 7 is about 73x156x9 mm, so a little easier on the pocket.

But not one the pocketbook. The OURPhone only costs about $200 USD to build. There are trade-offs. For example, the touchscreen is resistive, so youll want a stylus (theres a slot for it in the case). On the other hand, if you dont like something, it is all there for you to change.

Obviously, a better screen would help. Thinner batteries might be a good enhancement too. But thats the beauty of an open project. You can do all these things and more.

We wondered if you could get one of the mobile Linux editions to run or even Android. It seems like the hardest part is coming up with a sophisticated enclosure.

upstart writes:

The notorious Monopoly Market site has been seized and 288 suspects have been arrested:

Monopoly Market has been seized by authorities, while 288 suspects have been arrested. These individuals are believed to have bought or sold drugs on the dark web through this site.

The international operation called SpecTor involved "separate complementary actions" in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, the UK, the US and Switzerland. The information used to conduct the operation stemmed from "troves of evidence provided by German authorities", according to Europol which coordinated the international law enforcement action. These German authorities successfully seized "criminal infrastructure" in December 2021, which was used to create evidence for hundreds of national investigations.

"A number of investigations to identify additional individuals behind dark web accounts are still ongoing," Europol wrote in a statement. "As law enforcement authorities gained access to the vendors' extensive buyer lists, thousands of customers across the globe are now at risk of prosecution as well."

The US Department of Justice claims that Operation SpecTor led to more seizures "than any prior operation". The total seizures include 117 firearms, 850kg of different drugs and $53.4m in both cash and virtual currencies.

Commenting on the successful operation, Europol executive director Catherine De Bolle said the law enforcement coalition proves that "we all do better when we work together".

"This operation sends a strong message to criminals on the dark web: international law enforcement has the means and the ability to identify and hold you accountable for your illegal activities, even on the dark web," De Bolle said.

Original Submission

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

Joe Sullivan, the former Uber CSO who has been convicted last year for attempting to cover up a data breach Uber suffered in 2016 and kept it hidden from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has been sentenced to three years of probation plus 200 hours of community service. The conviction Sullivan became Chief Security Officer at Uber in April 2015, and in November 2016 testified before the FTC under oath that the company had taken More

The post Former Uber CSO avoids prison for concealing data breach appeared first on Help Net Security.

While Intel Thunder Bay sparked rumors years ago as potentially being a mix of Intel x86 cores and Movidius VPU cores, although the Linux patches put it as ARM cores paired with the Movidius VPU, Thunder Bay is no more. As I wrote back in March, Intel Linux engineers have acknowledged Thunder Bay is cancelled and there are no end-customers/users so they are going ahead and removing the Linux support...

Chinese tech company Loongson continues working on improving the upstream Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived, RISC-V-inspired domestic CPU architecture. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is another batch of optimizations and implementing more kernel functionality for the LoongArch CPU architecture...

The North Korean state-sponsored threat actor known as Kimsuky has been discovered using a new reconnaissance tool called ReconShark as part of an ongoing global campaign. "[ReconShark] is actively delivered to specifically targeted individuals through spear-phishing emails, OneDrive links leading to document downloads, and the execution of malicious macros," SentinelOne researchers Tom Hegel

Third-party apps such as Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, HotJar, and JQuery have become critical tools for businesses to optimize their website performance and services for a global audience. However, as their importance has grown, so has the threat of cyber incidents involving unmanaged third-party apps and open-source tools. Online businesses increasingly struggle to maintain complete visibility

The reference AVIF image encoder for the AV1 Image File Format has added experimental support for AV2, the next-generation codec that remains in development by the Alliance for Open Media...

Fleckpe is a new Android subscription Trojan that was discovered in the Google Play Store, totaling more than 620,000 downloads since 2022.

Fleckpe is a new Android subscription Trojan that spreads via Google Play, the malware discovered by Kaspersky is hidden in photo editing apps, smartphone wallpaper packs, and other general-purpose apps.

The malicious campaign has been active since 2022, the experts discovered eleven apps infected with Fleckpe on Google Play, which have been installed on more than 620,000 devices. Once discovered, the apps have been quickly removed from the Play Store, but the threat actors might have already uploaded other tainted apps that have yet to be discovered.

Upon executing one of the infected apps, it loads a heavily obfuscated native library containing a dropper that decrypts and runs malicious code from the app assets.

The payload sends information about the infected device to the C2 servers, including the MCC (Mobile Country Code) and MNC (Mobile Network Code). In turn, the C2 server returns a paid subscription page. The Trojan opens the page in an invisible web browser and attempts to complete a subscription of the victim. In case the subscription process requires a confirmation code, the malware is able to get it from the notifications.

Once installed, the apps continue providing their legitimate functionality, for example, installing wallpapers, after the victim has been subscribed to a paid service

The experts noticed that the authors of the malware are upgrading it, for example, they moved most of the subscription code to the native library. The payload is only used to intercept notifications and view web pages. This move makes hard the analysis and the detection of the malware.

Most of the victims are from Thailand, however, other infections were observed in Poland, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.

Sadly, subscription Trojans have only gained popularity with scammers lately. Their operators h...

The space technology industry is defying gravity both literally and figuratively driving innovation that pushes into new frontiers.

Keysights new in-depth survey of the latest trends in this fast-paced industry can help you identify:

• Top satellite applications driving market growth
• Top enabling technologies, technology trends, and novel solutions
• What space technology leaders consider to be the top challenges and applications with the greatest future impact

The report provides industry analysis that adds essential context to the survey findings.

Register now to download this free whitepaper.

Dav1d as the open-source AV1 video decoder developed as part of the VideoLAN project is out with a new minor feature release...

PHP software package repository Packagist revealed that an "attacker" gained access to four inactive accounts on the platform to hijack over a dozen packages with over 500 million installs to date. "The attacker forked each of the packages and replaced the package description in composer.json with their own message but did not otherwise make any malicious changes," Packagist's Nils Adermann said

Cisco has revealed the existence of a critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-20126) in the web-based management interface of Cisco SPA112 2-Port Phone Adapters. The adapters are widely used to integrate analog phones into VoIP networks without the need for an upgrade. About the vulnerability (CVE-2023-20126) CVE-2023-20126 can be exploited without prior authentication. This vulnerability is due to a missing authentication process within the firmware upgrade function. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by upgrading an affected device More

The post Critical RCE vulnerability in Cisco phone adapters, no update available (CVE-2023-20126) appeared first on Help Net Security.

By providing free access to millions of books, Z-Library became the go-to site for many readers in recent years.

Z-Librarys very existence was put to the test last November when U.S. law enforcement agencies seized over 200 domain names connected to the site. Two alleged Z-Library operators from Russia were arrested in Argentina as part of a criminal investigation.

Down, Not Out

Despite the gravity of the copyright infringement accusations and pending extraditions, Z-Library never went completely offline. The site continued to operate on the dark web, offering millions of pirated books and articles as it did before.

The site eventually returned on the clearnet too, providing a unique subdomain for all Z-Library users. The idea behind this move was to make it more difficult for law enforcement to take down the whole operation all at once.

This setup worked well for a few months allowing the remaining Z-Library team to focus on expanding the community. Starting this week, however, legal trouble hit Z-Library once again when the U.S. Department of Justice carried out a new round of domain name seizures.

New Domain Seizures

A few days ago we noticed that several domain names associated with the shadow library had stopped working. Instead, users were directed to a seizure banner which most of the sites users are familiar with by now.

The first seized domain we spotted was b-ok.lat. It previously redirected to the main login portal at singlelogin.me which was still operational at the time. Soon after, however, these domain names were seized by U.S. authorities along with booksc.me and b-ok.as.

The seized domains now point to the name servers of seizedservers.com which are controlled by the U.S. Government. Since Z-Library has domains at multiple registries, its possible that more seizur...

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techrights-040523.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-040523.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-social-040523.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techbytes-040523.gmi

Over HTTP:

Summary: Dont be too baffled by very large-scale Microsoft layoffs (a lot more were laid off than the media admits^*) and endless vapourware, even attempts to take over other companies (maybe just to offload debt before insolvency^**)

Microsoft, the worlds most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers.

The Economist, 1999

_____
^* Number of rounds of layoffs seems to be two or three so far this year; its rather clear, based on scattered reports, that it is multiple rounds and not just a one-off in January.

^** To quote a Techrights associate: Its important to drive home the point that Microsoft has hidden an $18 billion loss in 1999 and probably also a running loss ever since with the help of the occasional bailout and offloading debt onto newly-acquired victims.

An AI-powered brain decoder can now read your thoughts with surprising accuracy.

Servers running software sold by Salesforce are leaking sensitive data managed by government agencies, banks, and other organizations, according to a post published Friday by KrebsOnSecurity.

At least five separate sites run by the state of Vermont permitted access to sensitive data to anyone, Brian Krebs reported. The states Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program was among those affected. It exposed applicants full names, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and bank account numbers. Like the other organizations providing public access to private data, Vermont used Salesforce Community, a cloud-based software product designed to make it easy for organizations to quickly create websites.

Another affected Salesforce customer was Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank. It recently acquired TCF Bank, which used Salesforce Community to process commercial loans. Data fields exposed included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, titles, federal IDs, IP addresses, average monthly payrolls, and loan amounts.

Located in Fort Lauderdale, the French country-style homes have their own pools, but share the bass-stocked lake between them.

Astronomers spotted a dying star swallowing a large planet, a discovery that fills in a missing link in understanding the fates of Earth and many other planets.

Cryonicists hope that modern technology will one day bring frozen bodies back from the dead. But how realistic is a second life after a deep freeze?

An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experimentsas many as 10,000 per daypotentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the research was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.

That artificial intelligence platform, dubbed BacterAI, mapped the metabolism of two microbes associated with oral health with no baseline information to start with. Bacteria consume some combination of the 20 amino acids needed to support life, but each species requires specific nutrients to grow. The U-M team wanted to know what amino acids are needed by the beneficial microbes in our mouths so they can promote their growth.

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space to generate coarse geometry, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork, and a neural facial tracker for video input. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments validate the effectiveness and generalizability of DreamFace. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.