Daily Archives: February 9, 2023

Jeremy Clarkson Meghan Markle Column to be Investigated by Regulator after tweeting self righteous idiots decide to cancel him

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The U.K. press watchdog has launched an investigation into a British tabloid column by former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson that attracted around 25,100 complaints.

On Thursday, the Independent Press Standards Organization confirmed it will probe the Dec. 17, 2022 article in The Sun where Clarkson wrote that Prince Harry was being “controlled” by Meghan Markle, and he was “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

The press watchdog will take forward complaints from two parties, The Fawcett Society and The Wilde Foundation, who said they were impacted by breaches of the UK Editor’s Code over accuracy, harassment and discrimination via the column.

“We will make public the outcome of this investigation through our website and on our social media channels when it is concluded,” the press watchdog said in a statement.

Clarkson wrote the opinion piece under the headline “One day, Harold the glove puppet will tell the truth about A Woman Talking B*****ks” after the Harry & Meghan docuseries launched on Netflix. The series sees the couple revealing new behind-the-scenes information about how they were treated by both the U.K. press and royal family, ultimately leading to their separation from royal life

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Source: Jeremy Clarkson Meghan Markle Column to be Investigated by Regulator – The Hollywood Reporter

So, no the article wasn’t nice, it was crude. Was it misogynist? No, not really. I’m pretty sure most people who use that word don’t know what it means. Does an army of fat village idiots up in virtual arms from behind the safety of their screens on the Internet who spend their days looking for someone to self righteously cancel warrant any attention at all? No.

Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills

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Vestas, the world’s largest producer of wind turbines, says it has developed a chemical solution that allows the blades — made with durable epoxy resin — to be broken down and recycled. Bloomberg reports: “This signals a new era for the wind industry,” Vestas said in a statement. If it’s implemented at scale, the technology can be used on both old blades sitting in landfills and those in active wind farms, the company added. It’s a potential solution for what could be a massive sustainability problem for the wind industry. Industry body Wind Europe has previously estimated that about 25,000 metric tons of blades a year will be decommissioned by 2025, rising to 52,000 tons a year by 2030. The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.

Vestas’s process is the result of joint initiative including Denmark’s Aarhus University and US-based Olin Corp. The company now plans to move it from the lab to a pilot project for two years, before rolling it out on a commercial scale. Its cost hasn’t been disclosed.

Source: Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills – Slashdot

It Took Months For Anker To Finally Admit Its Eufy Cameras Weren’t Really Secure

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Last November, The Verge discovered that Anker, the maker of popular USB chargers and the Eufy line of “smart” cameras, had a bit of a security issue. Despite the fact the company advertised its Eufy cameras as having “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, security researcher Paul Moore and a hacker named Wasabi found it was pretty easy to intercept user video streams.

The researchers found that an attacker simply needed a device serial number to connect to a unique address at Eufy’s cloud servers using the free VLC Media Player, giving them access to purportedly private video feeds. When approached by The Verge, Anker apparently thought the best approach was to simply lie and insist none of this was possible, despite repeated demonstrations that it was very possible:

When we asked Anker point-blank to confirm or deny that, the company categorically denied it. “I can confirm that it is not possible to start a stream and watch live footage using a third-party player such as VLC,” Brett White, a senior PR manager at Anker, told me via email.

Not only that, Anker apparently thought it would be a good idea to purge its website of all of its past promises related to privacy, thinking this would somehow cause folks to forget they’d misled their customers on proper end to end encryption. It didn’t.

It took several months, but The Verge kept pressing Anker to come clean, and only this week did the company finally decide to do so:

In a series of emails to The Verge, Anker has finally admitted its Eufy security cameras are not natively end-to-end encrypted — they can and did produce unencrypted video streams for Eufy’s web portal, like the ones we accessed from across the United States using an ordinary media player.

But Anker says that’s now largely fixed. Every video stream request originating from Eufy’s web portal will now be end-to-end encrypted — like they are with Eufy’s app — and the company says it’s updating every single Eufy camera to use WebRTC, which is encrypted by default. Reading between the lines, though, it seems that these cameras could still produce unencrypted footage upon request.

I don’t know why anybody in tech PR in 2023 would think the best response to a privacy scandal is to lie, pretend nothing happened, and then purge your company’s website of past promises. Perhaps that works in some industries, but when you’re selling products to techies with very specific security promises attached, it’s just idiotic, and kudos to The Verge for relentlessly calling Anker out for it.

Source: It Took Months For Anker To Finally Admit Its Eufy Cameras Weren’t Really Secure | Techdirt

Chinese balloon part of worldwide fleet, US officials say

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The US believes a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down over its territory is part of a wider fleet that has spanned five continents.

“The United States was not the only target of this broader programme,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

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Citing unnamed officials, the Washington Post reported that the US believes the suspected surveillance balloon project was being operated from China’s coastal Hainan province and targeted countries including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines.

At a Wednesday news conference, Defence Department spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder confirmed that the US believed similar balloons had operated over North and South America, South East Asia, East Asia and Europe.

“We’ve learned a lot about these balloons and how to track them,” Gen Ryder said, adding that the US was now confident it had the ability to be “on the look-out for these kinds of capabilities”.

He said while the objects were all used for surveillance missions, there were “variations” in terms of their size and capabilities.

The US believes that balloons have operated over US territory on at least four occasions, but Gen Ryder did not give further detail on these instances.

Washington briefed 40 allied countries about the alleged espionage programme earlier this week, a senior Biden administration official confirmed to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

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Source: Chinese balloon part of worldwide fleet, US officials say – BBC News

Hogwarts Legacy Is Twitch’s Most Popular Game Right Now – woke loud minority haters don’t actually have any influence at all

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According to the data analytics site TwitchTracker, Hogwarts Legacy had a peak concurrent viewership of over 1.2 million between February 6 and 7. The game’s ranked sixth overall on the site, with more than 16 million hours watched in the last few days. Looking at Twitch right now, Hogwarts Legacy is the most popular game in the livestreaming platform’s Browse section, beating out the Just Chatting category with 636,000 viewers and counting. At one point this week, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, one of Twitch’s most well-known broadcasters, streamed it to over 100,000 live viewers. xQc’s video-on-demand (VOD), an archived recording of a past livestream, also garnered 5.7 million total views. In short, Hogwarts Legacy is now more popular than Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring at the peak of their launches. The numbers here are wild.

Streamers Grapple With Covering Hogwarts Legacy

Just as Hogwarts Legacy is gaining traction online, so too is the heated discourse around financially supporting Harry Potter author and blatant transphobe J.K. Rowling. Twitch streamers, in particular, seem to be having a hard time covering it, with some opting to boycott the game entirely while others, including xQc, defend folks who choose to stream the game. People, such as gaming couple Girlfriend Reviews, have reportedly been criticized over their choice to stream the game. Then you have a few folks, like socialist political commentator Hasan “Hasanabi” Piker, staying away from the game because it’s “not worth” getting bullied over. And one Twitter user created a watchdog website that apparently puts whichever streamer currently playing the game on blast, though when Kotaku tried viewing the site, we were met with a brief message saying the service has been “suspended.”

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Source: Hogwarts Legacy Is Twitch’s Most Popular Game Right Now

The surprise here is that anti J.K. Rowlings village idiots have been calling her anti trans in an attempt to cancel her. If you actually read what they claim as being anti trans, it turns out it’s not anti trans at all, it’s basically some woke people leading and abusing social media in an anti Rowlings movement doing their best to cancel her. It turns out that these people aren’t as influential and that cancelling isn’t as effective in the Real World as some people thought – considering the size of the game release.

Among ESXiArgs’ ransomware victims? FBI, CISA here to help

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The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a recovery script to help companies whose servers were scrambled in the recent ESXiArgs ransomware outbreak.

The malware attack hit thousands of servers over the globe but there’s no need to enrich criminals any more. In addition to the script, CISA and the FBI today published ESXiArgs ransomware virtual machine recovery guidance on how to recover systems as soon as possible.

The software nasty is estimated to be on more than 3,800 servers globally, according to the Feds. However, “the victim count is likely higher due to Internet search engines being a point-in-time scan and devices being taken offline for remediation before a second scan,” Arctic Wolf Labs’ security researchers noted.

Uncle Sam urged all organizations managing VMware ESXi servers to update to the latest version of the software, harden ESXi hypervisors by disabling the Service Location Protocol (SLP) service, and make sure that ESXi isn’t exposed to the public internet.

VMware has its own guidance here for administrators.

Also: the government agencies really don’t encourage paying the ransom, except when they do.

Bad news, good news

Last Friday, France and Italy’s cybersecurity agencies sounded the alarm on the ransomware campaign that exploits CVE-2021-21974 – a 9.1/10 rated bug disclosed and patched two years ago.

The bad news: the ransomware infects ESXi, VMware’s bare metal hypervisor, which is a potential goldmine for attackers. Once they’ve compromised ESXi, they could move onto guest machines that run critical apps and data.

The good news is that it’s not a very sophisticated piece of malware. Sometimes the encryption and data exfiltration doesn’t work, and shortly after government agencies sounded the alarm, security researchers released their own decryption tool. Now CISA’s added its recovery tool to the pool of fixes.

Organizations can access the recovery script on GitHub.

The US agency compiled the tool using publicly available resources, including the decryptor and tutorial by Enes Sonmez and Ahmet Aykac. “This tool works by reconstructing virtual machine metadata from virtual disks that were not encrypted by the malware,” according to CISA.

Source: Among ESXiArgs’ ransomware victims? FBI, CISA here to help • The Register

Alphabet stock price drops $120b / 10% after Google Bard launch blunder

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About 10 percent of Alphabet’s market value – some $120 billion – was wiped out this week after Google proudly presented Bard, its answer to Microsoft’s next-gen AI offerings, and the system bungled a simple question.

In a promotional video to show off Bard, a web search assistant to compete against Microsoft’s ChatGPT-enhanced Bing, the software answered a science question incorrectly, sending Alphabet’s share price down amid an overall lackluster launch by the Chocolate Factory.

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In an example query-response offered by Google’s spinners, Bard was asked to explain discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at a level a nine-year-old would understand. Some of the text generated by the model, however, was wrong.

Bard claimed “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system,” yet the first image of just such an exoplanet, 2M1207b, was actually captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004, according to NASA.

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Source: Alphabet stock price drops after Google Bard launch blunder • The Register

This is a bit of a harsh reaction by the market considering that ChatGPT comes with all kinds of disclaimers saying don’t trust it (and you shouldn’t!) and Bing will also make mistakes. The problem is that these systems are created using very imperfect human input, so they never will be perfect. They need to be fact checked, just like the responses you get on the 1st page of a search engine. They are not perfect either. Expecting perfection is unrealistic and will never happen.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Endure Outages

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Did someone actually break the internet? It sorta seems like it. Users of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, some of the web’s biggest platforms, reported experiencing major issues on Wednesday, with many losing access to basic features and functions.

Reports first poured in concerning Twitter, where users reported being met with a message telling them they’d reached their “Tweet limit” for the day. Twitter actually does have a tweet limit (it’s 2,400 tweets per day), which the platform says it uses to alleviate strain on its backend. However, most people don’t tweet that much, and many of the people who reported receiving the message said they hadn’t even tweeted yet that day.

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Weirdly enough, an almost identical affliction seemed to descend upon Facebook and Instagram Wednesday, with users reporting that they were unable to post new Insta stories or reach Facebook Messenger. Downdetector, which tracks individual complaints for web platforms, showed a spike in incident reports for both platforms around 4:30 p.m. EST, around the same time that Twitter also began having trouble.

To top it all off, some YouTube users reported being unable to reach the platform’s homepage Wednesday.

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Source: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Endure Outages