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Our universe has been developing for about 14 billion years, but human-level intelligence, at least on Earth, has emerged in a remarkably short period of time, measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years. What then is the future of intelligence? With the exponential growth of computing, will non-biological intelligence dominate?

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Watch more interviews on the future of the universe: https://rb.gy/xxeav.

Sasselov has been a professor at Harvard since 1998. He arrived to CfA in 1990 as a Harvard-Smithsonian Center post-doctoral fellow. Between 1999 and 2003 he was the Head Tutor of the Astronomy Department.

Register for free at CTT.com for subscriber-only exclusives: https://bit.ly/3He94Ns.

Presenting its findings as Unlocking the future of computing Microsoft is edging ever closer to photon computing technology with the Analog Iterative Machine (AIM). Right now, the light-based machine is being licensed for use in financial institutions, to help navigate the endlessly complex data flowing through them.

According to the Microsoft Research Blog, Microsoft researchers have been developing a new kind of analog optical computer that uses photons and electrons to process continuous value data, unlike todays digital computers that use transistors to crunch through binary data (via Hardware Info).

By Waqas

The arrests took place in Singapore over complaints from unsuspecting victims.

This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Teen among suspects arrested in Android banking malware scheme

A word of advice: If you see an old direct satellite TV dish put out to the curb, grab it before the trash collector does. Like microwave ovens, satellite dishes are an e-waste wonderland, and just throwing them away before taking out the good stuff would be a shame. And with dishes, the good stuff basically amounts to the bit at the end of the arm that contains the feedhorn and low-noise block downconverter (LNB).

But what does one do with such a thing once its harvested? Lots of stuff, including modifying it for use with the QO-100 geosynchronous satellite. Thats what [Sebastian Westerhold] did with his commodity LNB, although it seems more like something he scored on the cheap from one of the usual sources rather than picking through trash. Either way, these LNBs are highly integrated devices that at built specifically for satellite TV use, but with just a little persuasion can be nudged into the K-band to receive the downlink signals from hams using QO-100 as a repeater.

The mods are simple snipping out the 25 MHz reference crystal on the LNB board and replacing it with a simple LC bandpass filter. This allows the local oscillator on the LNB to be referenced to an external signal generator; when fed with a 25.78 MHz signal, its enough to goose the LNB up to 10,490 MHz right about the downlink frequency. [Sebastian] tested his mods and found tha...

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Personal data of the personnel at the Dublin Airport was compromised due to a MOVEit attack on professional service provider Aon.

Data of about 3000 employees of Dublin Airport (DDA) were compromised after professional service provider Aon fell victim to a MOVEit Transfer attack. Dublin Airport notified local authorities and Irelands Data Protection Commission.

Aon is the last victim of the attacks exploiting the flaw CVE-2023-34362 affecting the Progress Softwares MOVEit file transfer platform.

MOVEit Transfer is a managed file transfer that is used by enterprises to securely transfer files using SFTP, SCP, and HTTP-based uploads.

The vulnerability is a SQL injection vulnerability, it can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to gain unauthorized access to MOVEit Transfers database.

A few days after the release of Progresss advisory, the Clop ransomware gang (aka Lace Tempest) was credited by Microsoft for the recent campaign that exploits a zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-34362, in the MOVEit Transfer platform.

While DAA announced that it is assisting the impacted employees, Aon has yet to publish a public statement about the security breach.

The Clop ransomware group recently claimed to have hacked hundreds of companies globally by exploiting MOVEit Transfer vulnerability.

The list of victims of ransomware attacks exploiting the MOVEit Transfer zero-day includes the U.S. Department of Energy, British Airways, Boots, the BBC, Aer Lingus, Ofcom, Shell, University of Rochester,...

In a significant leap for the field of quantum computing, Google has reportedly engineered a quantum computer that can execute calculations in mere moments that would take the worlds most advanced supercomputers nearly half a century to process.

The news, reported by the Daily Telegraph, could signify a landmark moment in the evolution of this emerging technology.

Quantum computing, a science that takes advantage of the oddities of quantum physics, remains a fast-moving and somewhat contentious field.

Chuck Lever led a filesystem session at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit on the Linux NFS server, which is also known as NFSD. He wanted to talk about converting the network filesystem to use iomap; that kind of "https://lwn.net/Articles/935934/">previous session at the summit. Beyond that, he wanted to discuss using folios, which has been a frequent topic at recent LSFMM+BPF gatherings, including this year.

The product itself is an interesting one, and seems built to hit a sweet price/performance ratio for anyone that plans on using a discrete GPU solution. Of course, the absence of an integrated GPU does limit the users flexibility I cant count the number of times I used an integrated GPU to try and pinpoint issues with my systems (and graphics cards). But the fact remains that more consumer choice is best: users can make their own decision on whether thats worth the extra $10 or not.

Most of this information comes courtesy of Harukaze (via Twitter), as well as a benchmark on PugetBench, where the Ryzen 5 7500F was paired with an X670E motherboard and 32 GB of DDR5-4800 memory.

A team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of Birmingham, University College London and Queens University Belfast have discovered one of the most dramatic switches on of a black hole ever seen. They will present their findings on Tuesday 4 July at the 2023 National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff. The work will also be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

J221951-484240, known as J221951, is one of the most luminous transientsastrophysical objects that change their brightness over a short period of timeever recorded. It was discovered by Dr. Samantha Oates, an astronomer at the University of Birmingham, and her team, in September 2019 while searching for the electromagnetic light from a gravitational wave event. The team were using the Ultra-Violet and Optical Telescope on board the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to look for a kilonova, the sign of a neutron star merging with another neutron star or a black hole. A kilonova typically appears blue, then fades and turns more red in color over a timescale of days. What they found instead something even more unusual: J221951. The transient appeared blue, but didnt change color or fade rapidly as a kilonova would.

Multiple telescopes were used to follow-up J221951 and determine its nature, including NASAs Swift/UVOT and Hubble Space Telescope, the South African Large Telescope, and ESO facilities such as the Very Large Telescope and the GROND instrument on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory.

Researchers have developed a technique for growing conductive polymer wire connections between electrodes to realize artificial neural networks that overcome the limits of traditional computer hardware.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ghostscript), Fedora (apache-ivy, chromium, golang-github-schollz-croc, golang-github-schollz-mnemonicode, and webkitgtk), SUSE (amazon-ecs-init, dnsdist, libcap, python-tornado, terraform, and xmltooling), and Ubuntu (imagemagick, openldap, php7.4, php8.1, and screen).

By Habiba Rashid

Another day, another lawsuit against the developers of the groundbreaking AI chatbot ChatGPT.

This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Authors Sue OpenAI: ChatGPTs Training Methods Challenged in Lawsuit

Mozilla Firefox 115.0 official builds are now available for this notable update to this open-source web browser while also marking the new Extended Support Release (ESR) series...

Posted by Arnout Engelen on Jul 04

Artificial intelligence can predict on-and off-target activity of CRISPR tools that target RNA instead of DNA, according to new research published in Nature Biotechnology.

The study by researchers at New York University, Columbia University, and the New York Genome Center, combines a deep learning model with CRISPR screens to control the expression of human genes in different wayssuch as flicking a light switch to shut them off completely or by using a dimmer knob to partially turn down their activity. These precise gene controls could be used to develop new CRISPR-based therapies.

CRISPR is a gene editing technology with many uses in biomedicine and beyond, from treating sickle cell anemia to engineering tastier mustard greens. It often works by targeting DNA using an enzyme called Cas9. In recent years, scientists discovered another type of CRISPR that instead targets RNA using an enzyme called Cas13.

OpenAIs large language models (LLMs) are trained on a vast array of datasets, pulling information from the internets dustiest and cobweb-covered corners.

But what if such a model were to crawl through the dark web the internets seedy underbelly where you can host a site without your identity being public or even available to law enforcement instead? A team of South Korean researchers did just that, creating an AI model dubbed DarkBERT to index some of the sketchiest domains on the internet.

Its a fascinating glimpse into some of the murkiest corners of the World Wide Web, which have become synonymous with illegal and malicious activities from the sharing of leaked data to the sale of hard drugs.

SAN MATEO, Calif. A flying car being developed for both roadways and vertical takeoff and landing capabilities is now one step closer to becoming a reality after receiving a special approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

Alef Aeronautics, based in San Mateo, California, has been developing the Model A flying car, which is 100% electric and will carry one or two occupants.

The company envisions the car, which costs roughly $300,000, saving individuals time during the commutes with the ability to fly over stopped traffic and accidents on roadways.

JoeMerchant writes:

https://earthsky.org/space/interstellar-meteor-papua-new-guinea-2014-u-s-space-command/

In 2019, two researchers from Harvard University Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb, both of whom had published on 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov earlier also wrote a study of this meteor, suggesting its interstellar origins. If true, then this meteor which predates both 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov by a few years would be the first known interstellar object.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/harvard-scientist-avi-loeb-claims-collected-remains-of-extraterrestrial-technology-from-bottom-of-the-pacific-101688188241635.html

Deep-sea explorers found 50 spherulesmolten droplets, about half a millimetre in diameter.

Loeb's team collected 35 milligrams of this promising material by dragging a large magnetic sled across the surface of the ocean. The astrophysicist believes that the spherules are most likely made from a steel-titanium alloy

"The spherules were found primarily along the most likely path of IM1 and not in control regions far from it," read his blog. "In the coming weeks, we will analyze their elemental and isotopic composition and report our data in a paper submitted to a peer-reviewed journal."

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/summary-of-the-successful-interstellar-expedition-61ff4467070d

These sub-millimeter-sized spheres, which appear under a microscope as beautiful metallic marbles, were concentrated along the expected path of IM1 about 85 kilometers off the coast of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

-------

It's just un-spectacular enough to be believable.

Original Submission

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

A Mexican threat actor that goes online with the moniker Neo_Net is behind an Android malware campaign targeting banks worldwide.

A joint study conducted by vx-underground and SentinelOne recently revealed that a Mexican threat actor that goes online with the moniker Neo_Net is behind an Android malware campaign targeting financial institutions worldwide.

The case was reported by security researcher Pol Thill.

Neo_Nets eCrime campaign was reportedly targeting clients of banks globally, with a focus on Spanish and Chilean banks, from June 2021 to April 2023. The threat actor uses relatively unsophisticated tools, but experts speculate that the reason behind the success of this campaign is the capability of tailoring the attack infrastructure to specific targets.

It has been estimated that the threat actor has stolen over 350,000 EUR from victims bank accounts and compromised Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of thousands of victims.

The campaign employs a multi-stage attack strategy, starting with targeted SMS phishing messages distributed across Spain and other countries, using Sender IDs (SIDs) to create an illusion of authenticity and mimicking reputable financial institutions to deceive victims. Thill explained.

Neo_Net has established and rented out a wide-ranging infrastructure, including phishing panels and Android trojans, to multiple affiliates, sold compromised victim data to third parties, and launched a successful Smishing-as-a-Service offering targeting various countries worldwide.

30 out of 50 targeted financial institutions are located in Spain or Chile, the list of targets includes Santander, BBVA and CaixaBank. The threat actor also targeted banks in other regions, including Deutsche Bank, Crdit Agricole and ING. 

Neo_Net has set up and rented out a wide-ranging infrastructure, including phishing panels, Smishing software, and Android trojans to its network of affiliates. The criminal also sold stolen victim data and has launched a successful Smishing-as-a-Service named Ankarex. The Ankarex platform was launched in May 2022 and has about 1,700 subscribers. The threat actor advertises the Smishing-as-a-Service platform on Telegram.

Heres a curious conundrum: given its extraordinary traffic and likely position as the worlds largest pirate site, why does Zoro.to feature so rarely in rightsholders public complaints over piracy?

One explanation could be the sites age; at just over two years old, its possible that established sites are considered more of a priority.

Another factor could be that Zoro.to focuses on Japanese anime rather than mainstream Hollywood movies. But with over 205 million visits per month, all mainstream movie piracy sites are left behind in a cloud of dust double their size.

Zoro.to Gone for good.

Based on average traffic levels reported by SimilarWeb, Zoro.to should receive over six million visits today alone. Those visitors are in for a surprise because starting a few hours ago, Zoro.to unexpectedly ceased to exist.

Zoro.to is Dead, Aniwatch.to Takes Over

Visitors to the Zoro.to domain are currently redirected to a new one; Aniwatch.to. The transition is seamless via a redirect, but the culture shock shouldnt be too great for former Zoro.to users. Old logins appear to work on the new domain and apart from a new color scheme, the design is very familiar indeed.

Aniwatch.to is the new Zoro.to

User reactions to the sudden change range from nooooo what did they do to my boy zoro to WHAT THE **** IS ANIWATCH???? The most predictable center around a common theme: why zoro turn into aniwatch?

As questions go, thats a good one.

Zoro.to Was Acquired By a New Dev Team

Pirate sites are known for moving to new domains. Domain seizures or suspensions can often play a part in sudden changes, but domain jumping has served two addit...

Back in 2020, students from Universidad Del Valle De Guatemala (UVG) pulled off a really impressive feat, designing and building a CubeSat that lasted a whopping 211 days in orbit. In addition to telemetry and radio equipment, it carried a black-and-white camera payload.

But it turns out space is hard. The first pictures were solid black or white, with the automatic exposure process failing pretty badly. A pair of good pictures were taken by waiting until the satellite was passing over Guatemala during sunrise or sunset. A hung I2C bus led to battery drain, and the team tried a system reset to clear the hung state. Sadly the craft never came back to life after the reset, likely because of one of the Lithium-Ion battery cells failed completely in the low charge state.
...

Node4 announced the acquisition of ThreeTwoFour, an information security and technology risk specialist. The acquisition is Node4s third significant growth purchase in the last 18 months, having also bought risual, an IT managed services and solutions provider and Tisski, a leading UK-based independent Microsoft Business applications partner. ThreeTwoFour is renowned for its extensive suite of information security services, including programme delivery, cyber strategy, risk and control assessment and governance. It also brings strong experience across More

The post Node4 acquires ThreeTwoFour to strengthen its security capabilities appeared first on Help Net Security.

The threat actors behind the DDoSia attack tool have retrieve the list of targets to be bombarded with junk HTTP requests in an attempt to bring them down. The updated variant, written in Golang, "implements an additional security mechanism to conceal the list of targets, which is transmitted from the [command-and-control] to the

The GNU Compiler Collection 14 (GCC 14) will feature support for the new RISC-V processor ISA vector cryptographic extensions...

Tejun Heo last week submitted the workqueue changes for the Linux 6.5 kernel and they include an interesting addition...

An e-crime actor of Mexican provenance has been linked to an Android mobile malware campaign targeting financial institutions globally, but with a specific focus on Spanish and Chilean banks, from June 2021 to April 2023. The activity is being attributed to an actor codenamed Neo_Net, according to security researcher Pol Thill. The findings were published by SentinelOne following a Malware

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techrights-030723.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-030723.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-social-030723.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techbytes-030723.gmi

Over HTTP:

A new tool for creating flexible, route based site to site virtual private networks (site-to-site VPNs) is entering its call for testing phase on OpenBSD-current.

In a message to the tech@ mailing list on July 4th, 2023, David Gwynne (dlg@) presented a diff that adds a new virtual network interface dubbed sec(4). The message reads,

Subject:    sec(4): route based ipsec vpns
From:       David Gwynne 
Date:       2023-07-04 5:26:30

tl;dr: this adds sec(4) p2p ip interfaces. Traffic in and out of these
interfaces is protected by IPsec security associations (SAs), but
there's no flows (security policy database (SPD) entries) associated
with these SAs. The policy for using the sec(4) interfaces and their
SAs is route-based instead.

Longer version:

I was going to use "make ipsec great again^W" as the subject line,
but thought better of it. The reason I started on this was to better
interoperate with "site-to-site" vpns, in particular AWS Site-to-Site
VPNs, and the Auto-Discovery VPN (ADVPN) stuff on fortinet fortigate
appliances. Both of these negotiate IPsec tunnels that can carry any
traffic at the IPsec level, but use BGP and routes to direct traffic
into those tunnels.

Read more

Only a tiny portion of the budget of the Linux Foundation goes to actual developers (rather than administrators who dont even use Linux)

Summary: While or whereas the Linux Foundation reports 20% increase in spendings on already-huge salaries (during a pandemic!), SparkyLinux has just reported donations of 335.66, PLN 1593.83, and $ 10 (all in all not enough to even pay one persons rent^*) because corporations like IBM view and treat volunteers like slaves
_____
^* It might be enough for that in parts of Poland, but what about water, electricity, site hosting, food and so on?

Poly Network platform suspended its services during the weekend due to a cyber attack that resulted in the theft of millions of dollars in crypto assets.

Threat actors have stolen millions of dollars worth of crypto assets from the Poly Network platform during the weekend.

The platform suspended its services due to the cyber attack to investigate the security breach and assess the extent of the incident.

Dear users, we would like to inform you that Poly Network is temporarily suspending its services due to a recent attack. We are actively engaging with relevant parties and diligently assessing the extent of the affected assets. 1/3

Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) July 2, 2023

Please remain calm and trust that we are committed to safeguarding your assets. 3/3

Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) July 2, 2023

Poly Network is a decentralized interoperability protocol that facilitates cross-chain transactions and communication between different blockchain networks. It allows the transfer of digital assets across multiple blockchains. The platform acts as a bridge between different blockchain networks, it relies on a combination of smart contracts and other technical mechanisms.

The services were suspended early Sunday and during the afternoon the company shared a Google spreadsheet showing crypto assets that have been stolen by the attackers.

As a result of the attack, 57 assets have been affected on 10 blockchains. https://t.co/Q5MudJInr9
The major portion of the assets currently held by following addresses.
3/7

Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) July 2, 2023

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao promtly declared that the security breach did not affect Binance users.

This does not affect @Binance users. We do not support deposits from this ne...

• GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Jupiter Broadcasting Caught Red-Hatted | LINUX Unplugged 517

      Just about every take on the Red Hat news seems to have missed the mark. Special Guest: Carl George.

    • GNU World Order (Audio Show) GNU World Order 519

      More about EPUB, and then **farstream** and **ffmpeg**

      shasum -a256=6981776b59b473cbae4201bee8616a9303fe4d3a10087b899a87adcc51cf2dcc

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Nobuto Murata: Ubuntu Server autoinstall with a physical machine

      There is a great set of articles in the Ubuntu Server guide about how to achieve an unattended in...

• Leftovers

  • France24 Presumed human remains, debris from Titan submersible recovered by US Coast Guard [Ed: Human beings are drowning and media still obsesses over rich people's corpses]

    The US Coast Guard says it has likely recovered human remains from the wreckage of the Titan submersible and is bringing the evidence back to the United States. The submersible imploded last week, killing all five people on board. The vessel was on a voyage see the wreck of the Titanic.

  • The Hindu ...

VE just checked the numbers ONS released only a few minutes ago. Again, as before, the total number of deaths in England and Wales this year is about 1,000 higher for the latest week on record than in the same week before COVID-19 broke out. Thats an increase of more than 10% in 4 years.

2019:

2023:

Exactly 4 weeks ago (by IBM):

Hours ago:

Summary: IBM is making false promises and taking away lots of code, some of which developed by the community (volunteers), selling back access to it via paywalls

Sure, there are or were Windows phones. But [neozed] wanted something different. An earlier project ran Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 4 with some tricks, but those are sometimes hard to come by lately, so the next project was to put one on a Xiaomi PocoPhone F1.

The choice of phone wasnt an accident. There was enough support and information on the Snapdragon 845 to pull the trick off, and this is one of the phones that looked like it should work. They were pretty inexpensive on eBay and have 128 GB of flash and 6 GB of RAM.

After a few false starts, the phone yielded to fastboot mode. Loading UEFI firmware allows you to re-partition the disks using a PC. With the partitions set up, you must find an ARM Windows 10 image to load. Sounds simple, but as youll see in the post, the devil is always in the details. Combined with a USB dock, the end result is a tiny Windows computer. However, it does seem like a lot of work. Even the original poster says: TL;DR dont do it get a used Surface X instead.

Weve seen old phones repurposed before, of course. Or, go the other way: start from scratch and build a new phone. We wont judge, either way.

At Browserling and Online Tools, we love sales.

We just created a new automated 4th of July sales campaign.

Now each year, on the 4th of July, we show a 50% discount offer to all users who visit our site.

Here's how it looks.

Run 4th of July sale too and see you next time!

fab23 writes:

France's browser-based website blocking proposal will set a disastrous precedent for the open internet

In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list. Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.

While motivated by a legitimate concern, this move to block websites directly within the browser would be disastrous for the open internet and disproportionate to the goals of the legal proposal fighting fraud. It will also set a worrying precedent and create technical capabilities that other regimes will leverage for far more nefarious purposes. Leveraging existing malware and phishing protection offerings rather than replacing them with government provided, device level block-lists is a far better route to achieve the goals of the legislation.

[...] Browsers have played a critical role in the growth of the web by serving as user agents that mediate our experiences with the internet. This role, which Mozilla has been an integral actor in for over 25 years via Firefox, is based on some fundamental presumptions that enable browsers to focus on serving the interests of their users while keeping content regulation decisions further up the chain with either network intermediaries (such as ISPs) or service providers (websites).

The two most commonly used malware and phishing protection systems in the industry are Google's Safe Browsing and Microsoft's Smart Screen, where Mozilla (along with Apple, Brave, and many others) use Google's Safe Browsing. The Safe Browsing service has been around since at least 2005 and currently protects close to half the world's online population on various devices and software. It covers malware, unwanted software, and social engineering (phishing and other deceptive sites). It also has bro...

No less than 330000 FortiGate firewalls are still unpatched and vulnerable to CVE-2023-27997, a critical security flaw affecting Fortinet devices that have come under active exploitation in the wild. Cybersecurity firm Bishop Fox, in a report published last week, said that out of nearly 490,000 Fortinet SSL-VPN interfaces exposed on the internet, about 69 percent remain unpatched. CVE-2023-27997

Posted under an hour ago in thelayoff.com (we monitor these things closely):

Summary: Not only rumours about July Microsoft layoffs but exact dates are being leaked out, assuming those are authentic comments

A common false dichotomy (a salary does not emancipate people and financial rewards are disproportionate for actual effort, very lopsided in the Linux Foundation):

Summary: Madame Ladson (Ursula von der Leyen) adopted the name that stands for slavery; she now runs a leading facilitator of EPO crimes. Richard Stallman keeps a low profile (nowadays his public talks are barely advertised) and the FSF won't comment on IBM and the GPL; likewise, Linus Torvalds was compelled to make a public apology and go see therapists (for insisting on good-quality code), so it doesnt seem like they enjoy the same freedom they had back in the 1990s.

Linux Foundation is governed not by geeks but by people who oppress them

...

Dont know where the nearest caf is? Or if it will rain today? Or even the meaning of life? Fear not, ask your e-bike.

An avant-garde company in the cycling industry has found the solution to your long lonely rides.

Urtopia made waves at EUROBIKE 2023 with the introduction of the worlds first e-bike integrated with ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI that is all the rage right now.

Researchers reported that there are 490,000 Fortinet firewalls exposing SSL VPN interfaces on the internet, and roughly 69% of them are still vulnerable to CVE-2023-27997.

In Mid-June Fortinet addressed a critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-27997 (CVSS score: 9.2), in FortiOS and FortiProxy that is likely exploited in a limited number of attacks.

A heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability [CWE-122] in FortiOS and FortiProxy SSL-VPN may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via specifically crafted requests. reads the advisory

The vulnerability is a heap-based buffer overflow issue and according to the vendor it may have been exploited in a limited number of attacks aimed at government, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure sectors.

Our investigation found that one issue (FG-IR-23-097) may have been exploited in a limited number of cases and we are working closely with customers to monitor the situation. states the report published by Fortinet. For this reason, if the customer has SSL-VPN enabled, Fortinet is advising customers to take immediate action to upgrade to the most recent firmware release. If the customer is not operating SSL-VPN the risk of this issue is mitigated however, Fortinet still recommends upgrading.

A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability to execute arbitrary code or commands by sending specifically crafted requests to vulnerable devices.

The vulnerability was reported to Fortinet by the researcher Charles Fol and Dany Bach (DDXhunter) from Lexfo Security. The researcher describes the issue as a reachable pre-authentication that impacts every SSL VPN appliance.

Researchers from the security firm Bishop Fox reported that there are 490,000 affected SSL VPN interfaces exposed on the internet, and roughly 69% of them are currently unpatched.

Bishop Foxs Capability Development team built an exploit for the vulnerability CVE-2023-27997.

The researchers created their own Shodan query to locate the vulnerable instance only, they searched for any servers returning the HTTP response header Server: xxxxxxxx-xxxxxoddly and then filter down on those that redirect to /remote/login, the path that exposes the SSL VPN interface.

$ shodan count '"Server: xxxxxxxx-xxxxx" ht...

Video download link | md5sum 2a0e0a8564e17efb26b9f0cccd911048
Against Code Quality and Community
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Series parts:

• Sceptical of Cancel Artists in Corporate Press
• Upcoming New Series: The Corporate Cancel Culture Industry
• The Corporate Cancel Culture Industry Part I: Somebody Wants to be Your Buddy
• The Corporate Cancel Culture Industry Part II: People Who Defamed Linus Torvalds Say Torvalds Was Grateful for It
• YOU ARE HERE Non-Technical People Trying to Ruin the Lives of the Geeks

Summary: Corporate takeover (over the code produced by volunteers who like to code and are good at it) should be a cause for concern to communities composed of altruistic people who share; to the people who see everything as assets and IP were just temporarily-valuable resources to be discarded like slaves or serfs

THE other week I was contacted by someone who had been a cause for concern and then decided to do this series...

While many Hackaday readers will have their own pieces of classic hardware lovingly preserved, it still remains that most of us get our fix of retro goodness through emulation. And while there are emulators aplenty for almost every platform imaginable, the world of emulation is never complete. Thus were happy to encounter a new player in the form of MartyPC, a cycle-accurate 8088 PC emulator written in Rust.

Its a project that started only in April 2022, but alongside such in-depth processor support it has the full range of PC and XT peripherals including CGA and VGA cards to the extent that it will run even the most hardware-demanding demos. Below the break you can see it running the fiendishly hardware-specific PC demo Area 5150 thought to be the first time an emulator has managed this task.

If theres a snag its that the releases are so far Windows-only, though its claimed that it should also compile on other major platforms. Theres also a WebAssembly version, though sadly the link to it doesnt work. We look forward to this emulator maturing, because were sure it will become a PC standby. After all, not everyone managed to snag one of the recent batch of new hardwar...

Aggregated honeypot data, over a six-month period, showed that more than 50% of the attacks focused on defense evasion, according to Aqua Security. Threat actors avoid detection These attacks included masquerading techniques, such as files executed from /tmp, and obfuscated files or information, such as dynamic loading of code. In addition, in 5% of the attacks, threat actors used a memory resident malware. Compared with prior Aqua Nautilus research in 2022, there was a 1,400% More

The post Fileless attacks increase 1,400% appeared first on Help Net Security.

Enterprise leaders in procurement, IT, and finance need to take immediate action to rationalize their SaaS portfolios to prevent spending and governance challenges from spiraling out of control, according to Productiv. Productiv analyzed how nearly 100 million SaaS licenses were used over the last three years including more than 100 billion app usage data points to produce an in-depth look at pivotal SaaS stats and insights on SaaS growth, spend, consolidation and usage. Our More

The post 53% of SaaS licenses remain unused appeared first on Help Net Security.

IT leaders are losing sleep over improving overall IT performance (60%), data security (50%), process risk and compliance (46%), and the need to improve agility (41%), according to Rocket Software. To overcome these challenges, IT organizations are turning to hybrid solutions to leverage the benefits of the cloud and the mainframe. An astounding 93% of respondents strongly agree with the sentence, I believe my organization needs to embrace a hybrid infrastructure model that spans from More

The post IT leaders believe hybrid cloud solutions are the future of IT appeared first on Help Net Security.

upstart writes:

Janitor heard 'annoying alarms' and turned off freezer, ruining 20 years of school research worth $1 million, lawsuit says:

A university janitor who turned off a freezer after hearing multiple "annoying alarms," ruined more than 20 years of research, according to a lawsuit filed against his employer by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.

[...] The lab's freezer contained over 20 years of research, including cell cultures and samples, to which a "small temperature fluctuation of three degrees would cause catastrophic damage," according to the lawsuit filed with the Rensselaer County Supreme Court.

[...] The lawsuit states that cell cultures and specimens in the freezer needed to be maintained at -80 degrees Celsius and a small fluctuation of 3 degrees would cause damage, so alarms would sound if the temperature increased to -78 degrees or decreased to -82 degrees.

K.V. Lakshmi, a professor and director of the school's Baruch '60 Center for Biochemical Solar Energy Research who oversaw the research, noticed the freezer alert went off on or around September 14, 2020, because its temperature had risen to -78 degrees, according to the suit.

Despite the alarm, Lakshmi and her team determined that the cell samples would be safe until emergency repairs could be done, the suit said. While Lakshmi waited for the freezer's manufacturer to come perform repairs, her team added a safety lock box around the freezer's outlet and socket. A warning was posted on the freezer, according to the court filing.

[...] But, on September 17, the janitor heard what he later called "annoying alarms," according to the suit. In apparent attempt to be helpful, he flipped the circuit breakers, which provided electricity to the freezer, mistakenly turning them from "on" to "off," according to the lawsuit. It said the freezer's temperature rose to -32 degrees Celsius.

The next day, research students found the freezer switched off and despite attempts to preserve the research, a majority of the cultures were "compromised, destroyed, and rendered unsalvageable demolishing more than twenty years of research," the lawsuit states.

Original Submission

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

Stories about the latest prediction of superstring theory here and here, based on a Tsukuba University press release about this paper. Generally ignoring this kind of nonsense these days, but the new feature of this one is that the press release sure seems to have been written by ChatGPT.

The libjpeg-turbo 3.0 open-source release occurred today for this open-source JPEG image codec implementation focused on SIMD instruction usage for optimized efficiency. While libjpeg-turbo has been a great open-source development success and has seen widespread use, its feature development moving forward may be limited due to funding gaps...

Parsing algebraic expressions is always a pain. If you need to compute, say, 2+4*2, the answer should be the same as (2 + (4 *2)), not ((2 + 4) * 2) in other words, the right answer is 10, not 12. The classic way to do this is to use two stacks and a table of precedences for the operators. However, [Martin Janiczek] prefers to use Pratt Parsers and wants to show you how they work.

The parser is named after [Vaughn Pratt]. The algorithm works with a table of precedence where operators with higher precedence have higher numbers. It then builds a left and right portion of a string, using recursion. So if you consider 2+4*2, you wind up, on the first pass, with (2+ parse(4*2)). The second parse returns a full expression to produce: (2+(4*2)).

If that was too fast, read the post which has a nice flowchart and an example step-by-step parse of 1+2-3*4+5/6^7-8*9.  Towards the bottom, theres a nice animated flow chart that you can step through, almost like a debugger.

There are a few details left for the end. For example, there is a way to allow right-associative operators (e.g., 2^3^4 is actually ((2^(3^4)). You can also make some easy modifications to get things like unary negation and parenthesis.

Of course, there are other ways to go. You could stick with RPN. Or use...

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • School Dinners

      I grew up in England before celebrity chef Jamie Olivers campaign for better quality food in schools.

      At primary schoolup until age elevenit was already pretty bad. At highschool, it was something else.

      A popular meal at was chips and gravy. Chips means what much of the rest of the world calls fries, and gravy means something brown out of a packet with hot water added. And that was the whole meal. Chips and cheese was popular, too. The cheese did not, of course, deserve the name.

    • An Interpersonal Quandary

      There is a person in my life, whom I have known for a very long time, who previously lived in my area but left several years ago. A number of my real-life friends know this person and are also friends with them. Not long ago they came to visit the area, and as a result, they were included in many of my in-person interactions for a while.

      Though this person and I were (and to an extent still are) close, I have always had my grievances about them. When they lived near me, they would frequently get on my nerves, intentionally or otherwise. We once thought very similarly about the world, but our views have drifted apart over the years, I moving more in one direction and they in another. They wish they still lived in the area, and I sympathize with that, but I have to admit to myself that I appreciate the distance.

    • Re: jsreed5: An Interpersonal Quandary

      Constantly thinking (about an) I maintains that dynamic.

      Therefore, think less about your self while interacting with them, and all will be fine.

  • Politics and World Events

    • I miss when point was simply a beer

      But the phrase blac...

How successful can a business truly be when it cannot even become profitable? The longer Twitter runs, the more money he loses.

Summary: Even before Elon Musk totally wrecked Twitter the media had wondered aloud about its financial state and viability as a business; the crisis of this botfarm predates Musk

55 minutes ago

56 is not retirement age

Summary: While some media distracts from Microsofts mass layoffs (by focusing on salaries), with plenty more to be announced later this month, there are also high-profile figures stepping down ahead of the impending storm (amid morale issues and growing employee frustration)

Video download link | md5sum 48a5d064885c5dd7041807fd4336708b
Dealing With Scarcity of News
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: For a number of years in our Git forge weve developed Free software tools to help identify and study news online; the problem is that over time theres less and less of it left online (old material goes offline and almost nothing replaces it except chaff)

THE sheer bloat of Web pages is one prominent issue, but what about signal-to-noise ratio? What about gossip instead (or in place) of news? What about so-called news deserts or skeleton crews pretending to produce news but instead spewing political propaganda, sometimes with machine-generated text? What about SEO, clickbait, and tweets presented as news? As Ryan puts it in IRC today, the news is under pressure to sell hits and make it seem like things are happening all the time.

Theres a mostly unspoken-about crisis and it involves the rotting of the Web. We can see some symptoms of it, such as the demise of social control networks.Each week or each month not just every year we can easily spot further reduction in news on the Web. This isnt limited to news sites; blogs are the same. This doesnt affect just BSD- and GNU/Linux-centric writers. It doesnt affect just technology. It doesnt affect just English language sites. Its universal.

A few years ago we started developing software tools to help us do Daily Links. This investment of time always paid off and nowadays were able to find all sorts of news of interest, including tips about Microsoft layoffs (not typically covered by the media but instead covered up or drowned out of view).

Theres a mostly unspoken-about crisis and it involves the rotting of the Web. We can see some symptoms of it, such as the demise of social control networks.