I'd have thought that necessary cookies are the most valuable to miscreants.
Posts by petef
238 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2010
Billions of cookies up for grabs as experts warn over session security
Samsung admits Galaxy devices can leak passwords through clipboard wormhole
Bybit declares war on North Korea's Lazarus crime-ring to regain $1.5B stolen from wallet
"The transaction was manipulated by a sophisticated attack that altered the smart contract logic and masked the signing interface, enabling the attacker to gain control of the ETH cold wallet. As a result, over 400,000 ETH and stETH worth more than $1.5 billion were transferred to an unidentified address."
This is not unique to crypto but whenever I see an attack described as "sophisticated" I read it as "oh yes, we didn't think of that".
And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples
Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.
I'll bite, no way.
The chemicals analysed from Bennu were racemic. If they had originated from Earth, either ejecta or contamination of these experiments, then the enantiomers would be unbalanced. Most of the essential amino acids of (Earth) life are laevorotatory.
I'm not seeking to bamboozle, rather leaving it to the reader to follow up on the technical terms. Chirality is important and simple in some respects but often overlooked.
Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service
Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024
WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics
The sad tale of the Alpha massacre
I've done that. We had personal Interactive Unix workstations. The owner of another WS asked me to remove the account I had there to free up space. I deleted my /home/me but left my /etc/passwd entry, changing the home field in there to / so that I could still log in. Unfortunately the owner then proceeded to invoke the remove user admin script blithely accepting all the "are you sure?" prompts. Well it certainly freed up space. 15 5¼" disks were needed to reinstall.
Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running
Samsung phone users under attack, Google warns
Here are two sites that show phones or wearables for each affected Exynos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos
https://www.kimovil.com/en/list-smartphones-by-processor-group/exynos-9820
Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise
Opera has built in ad blocking for several years. They have just announced Opera One R2. It will continue to support Manifest V2 extensions beyond the expected June 2025 cutoff. UBlock Origin [full fat] is explicitly mentioned.
https://blogs.opera.com/news/2024/10/opera-support-manifest-v2-ad-blocking/
AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players, says Baidu CEO
Open source LLM tool primed to sniff out Python zero-days
After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share
Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all
CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide
EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'
Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler
Perseverance pays off as Mars rover's SHERLOC brought back from the brink
Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US
Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets
Battery University is an extensive resource for all things about batteries.
Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June
Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world
Microsoft, Google do a victory lap around passkeys
Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig
Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick
Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack
World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads
Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale
Microsoft admits issues with Windows 10 patch almost 2 months after release
NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane
Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'
Windows?
You would hope that a product called Windows would do a half decent job remembering where Joe user had positioned them. Windows 11 does a marginally better job than its predecessors but that is still rubbish. Worst is Teams which continues to select its own size and monitor regardless of where I last put it.
It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end
Researcher bags two-for-one deal on Linux bugs while probing GNOME component
Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard
Microsoft Edge still forcing itself on users in Europe
I'm no Microsoft apologist but in my recent firing up of Windows 10 (22H2) I notice that Settings has stopped bugging me that my browser settings are sub-optimal. I forget the exact wording but the essence used to be that M$ thought that I should be using Edge instead of the preference I had set for Opera.
I'm referring to the top panel of Settings whose three remaining buttons are OneDrive, Windows Update and Rewards.
The computer in question is dual boot and spends most of its time in openSUSE Tumbleweed / KDE Plasma which I find to be an altogether more pleasurable experience.
USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix
Toyota Japan back on the road after probably-not-cyber attack halted production
The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves
For me the worst aspect of the ZX81 membrane keyboard was that your fingers moved a bit leading to you pushing at dead space and then being eaten by Rex. We mitigated that somewhat by taping things over the keys but that only improved the action marginally. As others have mentioned programs could come to an abrupt end when the 16 KiB (count 'em!) RAM pack perched on the back was breathed on.
Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem
Many years ago a colleague ask me to clear my files to free up space on their workstation. I duly removed my /home but left an entry in /etc/passwd so that I could still login but with a home of root. After I'd informed the owner they blindly followed a remove user script, part of which was a question that asked are you sure you want to remove the user's home? A box full of floppies was needed to reimage.