Miscellaneous Tech News
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Digital exchange loses $137 million as founder takes passwords to the grave
A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers’ assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access to the offline wallet that stored the digital coins. British Columbia-based QuadrigaCX is unable to access most or all of another $53 million because it’s tied up in disputes with third parties.
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@DustinB3403 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice vulnerable to same bug; only one is fixed
LibreOffice, an open source clone of Microsoft Office, has patched a bug that allowed attackers to execute commands of their choosing on vulnerable computers. A similar flaw in Apache OpenOffice remains unfixed.
LibreOffice is on another level compare to OpenOffice. Why is that project still alive. Development is fast and there are more options for installing LibreOffice.
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Microsoft shaking up how Windows feature updates are rolled out—again
Each feature update now has one release date rather than two.
When Microsoft first started delivering Windows 10 "as a Service" with a regular flow of feature updates, the company planned to have two release tracks: a "Current Branch" (CB) that was consumer-oriented and "Current Branch for Business" (CBB) aimed at enterprises. The CBB track would trail the CB one by a few months, with consumers acting as guinea pigs to iron out bugs before the quality of each release was deemed good enough for corporate customers.
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@DustinB3403 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Digital exchange loses $137 million as founder takes passwords to the grave
A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers’ assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access to the offline wallet that stored the digital coins. British Columbia-based QuadrigaCX is unable to access most or all of another $53 million because it’s tied up in disputes with third parties.
Cryptocurrencies present a whole new opportunity for going from rich to nothing in an instant. With traditional banking, it's essentially impossible for large sums of money to just cease to exist in that way.
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@black3dynamite said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@DustinB3403 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice vulnerable to same bug; only one is fixed
LibreOffice, an open source clone of Microsoft Office, has patched a bug that allowed attackers to execute commands of their choosing on vulnerable computers. A similar flaw in Apache OpenOffice remains unfixed.
LibreOffice is on another level compare to OpenOffice. Why is that project still alive. Development is fast and there are more options for installing LibreOffice.
Totally this..
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Jon Toigo, found of the Data Management Institute, has passed away.
Margaret Romao Toigo:
Jon William Toigo, of Dunedin, Florida, passed away at home from natural causes at age 59 on February 12, 2019. He was born in Springfield, IL. on November 2, 1959.
Jon held Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from The Catholic University of America and a Professor Honorario in Computer Technology from Universidad Abierta Interamericana.
Jon was Founder and chairman of Toigo Partners International, and the Data Management Institute. An outspoken technology consumer advocate and vendor watchdog, Jon was the author of eleven books, including The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management, and the classic Disaster Recovery Planning series, as well as a widely read blog, DrunkenData.com, and more than 3000 articles for business technology media. He was incredibly dedicated, passionate and honest.
Jon was a big-hearted and generous man who gladly shared his hard-won fortunes with his family, friends, and even strangers in need. He extended his table and never heightened his fence, and would always want to help someone out of a jam in any way he could.
Jon had a dark and wicked sense of humor, a real lust for life, and a deep and abiding appreciation of good food from all over the world. Jon travelled to six continents and collected t-shirts and refrigerator magnets from almost every country he visited. An avid gardner, Jon loved to grow tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and many different kinds of hot peppers. He was also a huge movie fan, especially of the science fiction and horror genres, and a music lover who enjoyed playing his bass, various guitars, and mandolin.
Jon was the father of six children; Alexandra and Maximilian from his first marriage, and Mercedes, Vincent (a.k.a. “Guy”), Carrie Loretta and Isabella from his last marriage. And he was also a second father to every child whoever visited his home.
Jon is also survived by his wife of more than 23 years, Margaret, his mother, Esther, his brothers, Mark and Dante, and his sisters; Michelle Siegrist, Denice Riley, Cindy Brittin, Marguerite “Peggy” Toigo, Martine “Tina” Ward, Bess “Missy” Garret, and Jennifer Rourk, as well as many nieces and nephews and grand nieces and grand nephews. He was preceded in death by his father, Bill, sister Leslie Craven, and brother Billy.
“Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human.” — Captain Kirk, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Catholic Funeral Mass will be held on Friday, February 22, 2019 at 1:30 pm
at St. Cecelia Catholic Church, 820 Jasmine Way, Clearwater, FL 33756Immediately followed by food and drinks at the Toigo home: 1538 Patricia Avenue, Dunedin, FL 34698
A private burial will take place on a later date.
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Liveblog: The Samsung Galaxy S10 launch happens Wednesday, February 20
Hear all about the S10, S10 Plus, S10e, and foldable phone, live!
Samsung Unpacked 2019 will kick off Wednesday, February 20, at 11am Pacific (2pm ET) in San Francisco. We're going to hear all about Samsung's Flagship lineup for 2019, which includes the Galaxy S10 in many variants.
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@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Liveblog: The Samsung Galaxy S10 launch happens Wednesday, February 20
Hear all about the S10, S10 Plus, S10e, and foldable phone, live!
Samsung Unpacked 2019 will kick off Wednesday, February 20, at 11am Pacific (2pm ET) in San Francisco. We're going to hear all about Samsung's Flagship lineup for 2019, which includes the Galaxy S10 in many variants.
I'm holding out for the Note 10, or the Galaxy F (the foldable one). My Pixel XL still runs halfway decent, so I'm hoping it will hold together a little longer.
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HP Elitebook x360 1040 G5 review: A little bit bigger, a little bit better
It's similar to HP's 13-inch convertible, but extra screen space makes a difference.
The battle of the business notebooks is in full swing as HP tries to one-up Lenovo—and itself—all in one go. HP scored a winner with an updated 13-inch Elitebook x360 it released last year. Now it's full-speed ahead with the new Elitebook x360 1040 G5, the newest version of HP's 14-inch business notebook. The 13-inch model is smaller and lighter overall, but HP offers upgraded features in this larger convertible and promises a 14-inch display in a 13-inch chassis.
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Google partially backtracks on Chrome changes that would break ad blockers
Benchmarks showed that most ad blockers don't make network requests much slower.
Google has said that it will revise the proposed changes to Chrome's extension API that would have broken or reduced the functionality of a wide range of ad-blocking extensions, to ensure that the current variety of content-blocking extensions is preserved. The initial plans generated a wide backlash from both the developers and users of those extensions, but Google maintains that "It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to prevent or break content blocking" [emphasis Google's] and says that it will work to update its proposal to address the capability gaps and pain points.
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Inside the DNSpionage hacks that hijack domains at an unprecedented scale
KrebsOnSecurity details how attackers took control of sensitive domains around the world.
Since the beginning of the year, the US government and private security companies have been warning of a sophisticated wave of attacks that’s hijacking domains belonging to multiple governments and private companies at an unprecedented scale. On Monday, a detailed report provided new details that helped explain how and why the widespread DNS hijackings allowed the attackers to siphon huge numbers of email and other login credentials.
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Researchers, scared by their own work, hold back “deepfakes for text” AI
OpenAI's GPT-2 algorithm shows machine learning could ruin online content for everyone.
OpenAI, a non-profit research company investigating "the path to safe artificial intelligence," has developed a machine learning system called Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2 ), capable of generating text based on brief writing prompts. The result comes so close to mimicking human writing that it could potentially be used for "deepfake" content. Built based on 40 gigabytes of text retrieved from sources on the Internet (including "all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma"), GPT-2 generates plausible "news" stories and other text that match the style and content of a brief text prompt.
The performance of the system was so disconcerting, now the researchers are only releasing a reduced version of GPT-2 based on a much smaller text corpus.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Researchers, scared by their own work, hold back “deepfakes for text” AI
OpenAI's GPT-2 algorithm shows machine learning could ruin online content for everyone.
OpenAI, a non-profit research company investigating "the path to safe artificial intelligence," has developed a machine learning system called Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2 ), capable of generating text based on brief writing prompts. The result comes so close to mimicking human writing that it could potentially be used for "deepfake" content. Built based on 40 gigabytes of text retrieved from sources on the Internet (including "all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma"), GPT-2 generates plausible "news" stories and other text that match the style and content of a brief text prompt.
The performance of the system was so disconcerting, now the researchers are only releasing a reduced version of GPT-2 based on a much smaller text corpus.
So... Instead of J R. R. Tolkien, we get Spongebob?
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Retina resolution headset puts the “reality” into “virtual reality”
Clever dual-display tech means you really can't see the pixels.
Current virtual reality headsets are pretty good at the "virtual" bit but tend to fall down on the "reality" side of things. It's all too obvious that you're looking at a screen, albeit a screen held very close to your face, and a lot of screens just aren't meant to be looked at that close. The "screen door" effect that breaks the display up into a grid of individual pixels is distracting, and resolutions are low enough that curved lines are noticeably jagged, and fine detail gets lost. Second-generation headsets like the Vive Pro certainly do better than their first-generation counterparts, but they haven't eliminated these shortcomings. Even with eyes as appalling as mine, the human optical systems are clearly higher quality than the VR headsets can satisfy.
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Mandatory update coming to Windows 7, 2008 to kill off weak update hashes
Microsoft is phasing out SHA-1 hashes on its patches.
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 users will imminently have to deploy a mandatory patch if they want to continue updating their systems, as spotted by Mary Jo Foley.
Currently, Microsoft's Windows updates use two different hashing algorithms to enable Windows to detect tampering or modification of the update files: SHA-1 and SHA-2. Windows 7 and Server 2008 verify the SHA-1 patches; Windows 8 and newer use the SHA-2 hashes instead. March's Patch Tuesday will include a standalone update for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and WSUS to provide support for patches hashed with SHA-2. April's Patch Tuesday will include an equivalent update for Windows Server 2008.
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Apple reportedly planning to combine iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps by 2021
Project Marzipan and a new Mac Pro could be talking points at WWDC in June.
A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggests that Apple is serious about combining apps across the iOS and macOS App Stores. The iPhone make is reportedly planning on expanding Project Marzipan, a multistep initiative that will allow developers to create an app only once and have it work across iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices. Apple may reveal the first steps of this program as early as June 2019 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
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@black3dynamite said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/02/access-linux-files-from-windows-explorer-wsl
Windows, late to the game as usual!
Should be their tagline.
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Users alarmed by undisclosed microphone in Nest Security System
"The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret," Google says.
Google's Nest smart home brand is in hot water this week after news surfaced (via Daring Fireball) that its home security system, Nest Secure, shipped with an undisclosed microphone. Google activated the microphone earlier this month for Google Assistant functionality, but that meant the device sat in users' homes for up to a year as an unknown potential listening device.
