Month: August 2024
Unpatchable 0-day in surveillance cam is being exploited to install Mirai
Vulnerability is easy to exploit and allows attackers to remotely execute commands.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Malicious hackers are exploiting a critical vulnerability in a widely used security camera to spread Mirai, a family of malware that wrangles infected Internet of Things devices into large networks for use in attacks that take down websites and other Internet-connected devices.
The attacks target the AVM1203, a surveillance device from Taiwan-based manufacturer AVTECH, network security provider Akamai said Wednesday. Unknown attackers have been exploiting a 5-year-old vulnerability since March. The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-7029, is easy to exploit and allows attackers to execute malicious code. The AVM1203 is no longer sold or supported, so no update is available to fix the critical zero-day.
That time a ragtag army shook the Internet
Akamai said that the attackers are exploiting the vulnerability so they can install a variant of Mirai, which arrived in September 2016 when a botnet of infected devices took down cybersecurity news site Krebs on Security. Mirai contained functionality that allowed a ragtag army of compromised webcams, routers, and other types of IoT devices to wage distributed denial-of-service attacks of record-setting sizes. In the weeks that followed, the Mirai botnet delivered similar attacks on Internet service providers and other targets. One such attack, against dynamic domain name provider Dyn paralyzed vast swaths of the Internet.
OpenAI reportedly in talks to close a new funding round at $100B+ valuation
Whatever size the tranche ends up being it’ll be OpenAI’s biggest outside infusion of capital since January 2023.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Whatever size the tranche ends up being it’ll be OpenAI’s biggest outside infusion of capital since January 2023.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sonos’ latest app update fixes just a fraction of its problems
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Sonos has released an update to its app as it attempts to reverse the fallout from a disastrous redesign. But while the update adds enhanced accessibility settings and improved stability during the product setup process, the update addresses just a fraction of user complaints.
Sonos is reintroducing the ability to clear your music queue on the Android app — a feature that’s been sorely missed since the app’s relaunch. It also added a Night Mode toggle for sound bars, which enhances dialogue without you having to turn up the volume on your TV.
There’s still plenty of room for improvement, and Sonos has a long list of features to add in its queue. Since the app’s controversial redesign in May, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence apologized for disappointing customers and said fixing the app is the company’s “number one priority,” leading to the delay of two new products.
Earlier this month, Spence dashed hopes that the old app could be rereleased. Instead, the company plans to continue following its roadmap to add features to improve the app, with better volume responsiveness, enhanced queue editing, and better alarm reliability coming in future updates.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Sonos has released an update to its app as it attempts to reverse the fallout from a disastrous redesign. But while the update adds enhanced accessibility settings and improved stability during the product setup process, the update addresses just a fraction of user complaints.
Sonos is reintroducing the ability to clear your music queue on the Android app — a feature that’s been sorely missed since the app’s relaunch. It also added a Night Mode toggle for sound bars, which enhances dialogue without you having to turn up the volume on your TV.
There’s still plenty of room for improvement, and Sonos has a long list of features to add in its queue. Since the app’s controversial redesign in May, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence apologized for disappointing customers and said fixing the app is the company’s “number one priority,” leading to the delay of two new products.
Earlier this month, Spence dashed hopes that the old app could be rereleased. Instead, the company plans to continue following its roadmap to add features to improve the app, with better volume responsiveness, enhanced queue editing, and better alarm reliability coming in future updates.
What to Do With Unwanted Political Spam Texts
From Apple’s own documentation for the “Delete and Report Junk” feature in Messages:
The sender’s information and the message are sent to Apple, and
the message is permanently deleted from your iPhone.
If you accidentally report and delete messages, you can
recover them.
Reporting junk or spam doesn’t prevent the sender from
sending messages, but you can block the number to stop
receiving them.
Via Andrew Leahey, responding to Marco Arment on Mastodon.
I’ve been inundated with spam text messages from Democratic political campaigns and PACs for the last year. I know why: because in the past, my wife and I have both contributed to Democratic political campaigns. I add my wife here, because for whatever reason, a good chunk of the political text message spam I get is addressed to “Amy” not me, and the opposite is true for her. But: every time I have ever contributed money to a political campaign — or to any charity — I pay close attention to any checkboxes allowing me to “opt out” of any further marketing communications. That doesn’t seem to matter. Stores and charities are pretty bad at honoring this, but political campaigns are the absolute worst.
For several months this year — while receiving, I’d say, around half a dozen such messages per day, every day, every week — I tried using Messages’s “Delete and Report Junk” feature. As far as I can tell it didn’t do a damn thing. Now that I see Apple’s own documentation, I can see why. Using this feature doesn’t even block the sender from sending more messages.
About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. But this has actually worked. Election season is heating up but I’m getting way way fewer political spam texts now. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.
Two other observations:
Every single unwanted text message I’ve gotten in the past few years — every one — has been an SMS message, not iMessage. iMessage spam exists, but for me at least it’s a night-and-day difference from SMS. I fail to see how RCS won’t be just as bad or worse (because it supports larger images) than SMS in this regard. Apple should have let carrier-based messaging wither on the vine.
Almost every single text message this year sent to my personal phone number that I’d describe as “spam” was an attempt to get to me to contribute to a political campaign. I get random phishing texts sent to the public phone number I use for Signal and WhatsApp (which I encourage you to use to contact me, if you prefer, instead of email), but that’s to be expected, and those don’t come to Messages. It doesn’t feel like merely a minor inconvenience for having contributed to U.S. political campaigns in the past — it feels like punishment. Like anyone who gives to a political campaign is a sucker. It’s absolutely infuriating. I care deeply about U.S. politics, particularly in this ongoing Trump era, but these spam text messages absolutely have made me less willing to contribute money to campaigns and causes I believe in. Political consultants may well have analytics that show that these spams-to-people-who’ve-previously-donated-money-to-our-side “work”, but for me — and many of my friends — it has had the opposite effect. I’ve contributed significantly less money this year than in 2020 — and I now avoid ever donating small amounts to down-ballot campaigns — and the one and only reason why is that I’m annoyed that my previous contributions directly led Democratic campaigns and PACs to send me a zillion spam texts. Not only have I never, in my life, given a penny to any group whom I feel is spamming me, but this has made me gun-shy about contributing any money at all. I’ll never ever give out my actual phone number or email address to any political campaign ever again. They clearly have no respect for my time and attention. I think they’ve talked themselves into thinking this strategy “works” because it works for some of the previous donors they spam with new solicitations, but their analytics won’t show the people like me who just stop or greatly decrease their contributions without clicking any of their links. I suppose their analytics can count the “STOP” responses I’ve started sending, but I doubt they can correlate those “STOP”s with my drop-off in contributions.
★
From Apple’s own documentation for the “Delete and Report Junk” feature in Messages:
The sender’s information and the message are sent to Apple, and
the message is permanently deleted from your iPhone.
If you accidentally report and delete messages, you can
recover them.
Reporting junk or spam doesn’t prevent the sender from
sending messages, but you can block the number to stop
receiving them.
Via Andrew Leahey, responding to Marco Arment on Mastodon.
I’ve been inundated with spam text messages from Democratic political campaigns and PACs for the last year. I know why: because in the past, my wife and I have both contributed to Democratic political campaigns. I add my wife here, because for whatever reason, a good chunk of the political text message spam I get is addressed to “Amy” not me, and the opposite is true for her. But: every time I have ever contributed money to a political campaign — or to any charity — I pay close attention to any checkboxes allowing me to “opt out” of any further marketing communications. That doesn’t seem to matter. Stores and charities are pretty bad at honoring this, but political campaigns are the absolute worst.
For several months this year — while receiving, I’d say, around half a dozen such messages per day, every day, every week — I tried using Messages’s “Delete and Report Junk” feature. As far as I can tell it didn’t do a damn thing. Now that I see Apple’s own documentation, I can see why. Using this feature doesn’t even block the sender from sending more messages.
About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. But this has actually worked. Election season is heating up but I’m getting way way fewer political spam texts now. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.
Two other observations:
Every single unwanted text message I’ve gotten in the past few years — every one — has been an SMS message, not iMessage. iMessage spam exists, but for me at least it’s a night-and-day difference from SMS. I fail to see how RCS won’t be just as bad or worse (because it supports larger images) than SMS in this regard. Apple should have let carrier-based messaging wither on the vine.
Almost every single text message this year sent to my personal phone number that I’d describe as “spam” was an attempt to get to me to contribute to a political campaign. I get random phishing texts sent to the public phone number I use for Signal and WhatsApp (which I encourage you to use to contact me, if you prefer, instead of email), but that’s to be expected, and those don’t come to Messages. It doesn’t feel like merely a minor inconvenience for having contributed to U.S. political campaigns in the past — it feels like punishment. Like anyone who gives to a political campaign is a sucker. It’s absolutely infuriating. I care deeply about U.S. politics, particularly in this ongoing Trump era, but these spam text messages absolutely have made me less willing to contribute money to campaigns and causes I believe in. Political consultants may well have analytics that show that these spams-to-people-who’ve-previously-donated-money-to-our-side “work”, but for me — and many of my friends — it has had the opposite effect. I’ve contributed significantly less money this year than in 2020 — and I now avoid ever donating small amounts to down-ballot campaigns — and the one and only reason why is that I’m annoyed that my previous contributions directly led Democratic campaigns and PACs to send me a zillion spam texts. Not only have I never, in my life, given a penny to any group whom I feel is spamming me, but this has made me gun-shy about contributing any money at all. I’ll never ever give out my actual phone number or email address to any political campaign ever again. They clearly have no respect for my time and attention. I think they’ve talked themselves into thinking this strategy “works” because it works for some of the previous donors they spam with new solicitations, but their analytics won’t show the people like me who just stop or greatly decrease their contributions without clicking any of their links. I suppose their analytics can count the “STOP” responses I’ve started sending, but I doubt they can correlate those “STOP”s with my drop-off in contributions.
Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland crawls out of its playpen on September 10
There are a ton of Rugrats games from early CD-ROM games to the Nintendo 64 but there’s never really been one that truly stood out on its own. The MIX Games, Wallride and Limited Run Games may have given us the definitive Rugrats game with Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland set for release on September 10 on Steam and both current and previous-gen consoles.
The new throwback Rugrats game was announced last year almost to the date. Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland looks like it was inspired by those classic NES platformers that fueled your childhood fun and frustration (funstration?). The game comes in two modes: HD mode featuring graphics that look just like the Nicktoon and a special 8-bit mode that looks like it came out on a throwback console.
You’ll be able to play as Tommy, Chuckie, Phil and Lil as you traverse the Pickles house. The babies are pretending that their homestead has transformed into their own video game, which may just be the most adorably meta thing ever.
Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland can be played in solo or two-player co-op mode. Limited Run Games is also releasing the game on orange and classic gray NES cartridges but you missed your chance to buy one because they’ve already sold out.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/rugrats-adventures-in-gameland-crawls-out-of-its-playpen-on-september-10-212021343.html?src=rss
There are a ton of Rugrats games from early CD-ROM games to the Nintendo 64 but there’s never really been one that truly stood out on its own. The MIX Games, Wallride and Limited Run Games may have given us the definitive Rugrats game with Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland set for release on September 10 on Steam and both current and previous-gen consoles.
The new throwback Rugrats game was announced last year almost to the date. Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland looks like it was inspired by those classic NES platformers that fueled your childhood fun and frustration (funstration?). The game comes in two modes: HD mode featuring graphics that look just like the Nicktoon and a special 8-bit mode that looks like it came out on a throwback console.
You’ll be able to play as Tommy, Chuckie, Phil and Lil as you traverse the Pickles house. The babies are pretending that their homestead has transformed into their own video game, which may just be the most adorably meta thing ever.
Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland can be played in solo or two-player co-op mode. Limited Run Games is also releasing the game on orange and classic gray NES cartridges but you missed your chance to buy one because they’ve already sold out.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/rugrats-adventures-in-gameland-crawls-out-of-its-playpen-on-september-10-212021343.html?src=rss
The Papers That Most Heavily Cite Retracted Studies
Data from giant project show how withdrawn research propagates through the literature. Nature: In January, a review paper about ways to detect human illnesses by examining the eye appeared in a conference proceedings published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. But neither its authors nor its editors noticed that 60% of the papers it cited had already been retracted. The case is one of the most extreme spotted by a giant project to find papers whose results might be in question because they cite retracted or problematic research. The project’s creator, computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, shared his data with Nature’s news team, which analysed it to find the papers that most heavily cite retracted work yet haven’t themselves been withdrawn.
“We are not accusing anybody of doing something wrong. We are just observing that in some bibliographies, the references have been retracted or withdrawn, meaning that the paper may be unreliable,” Cabanac says. He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, referring to an analogy, originally from the Bible, about statues or edifices that collapse because of their weak clay foundations. The IEEE paper is the second-highest on the list assembled by Nature, with 18 of the 30 studies it cites withdrawn. Its authors didn’t respond to requests for comment, but IEEE integrity director Luigi Longobardi says that the publisher didn’t know about the issue until Nature asked, and that it is investigating. Cabanac, a research-integrity sleuth, has already created software to flag thousands of problematic papers in the literature for issues such as computer-written text or disguised plagiarism. He hopes that his latest detector, which he has been developing over the past two years and describes this week in a Comment article in Nature, will provide another way to stop bad research propagating through the scientific literature — some of it fake work created by ‘papermill’ firms.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Data from giant project show how withdrawn research propagates through the literature. Nature: In January, a review paper about ways to detect human illnesses by examining the eye appeared in a conference proceedings published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. But neither its authors nor its editors noticed that 60% of the papers it cited had already been retracted. The case is one of the most extreme spotted by a giant project to find papers whose results might be in question because they cite retracted or problematic research. The project’s creator, computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, shared his data with Nature’s news team, which analysed it to find the papers that most heavily cite retracted work yet haven’t themselves been withdrawn.
“We are not accusing anybody of doing something wrong. We are just observing that in some bibliographies, the references have been retracted or withdrawn, meaning that the paper may be unreliable,” Cabanac says. He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, referring to an analogy, originally from the Bible, about statues or edifices that collapse because of their weak clay foundations. The IEEE paper is the second-highest on the list assembled by Nature, with 18 of the 30 studies it cites withdrawn. Its authors didn’t respond to requests for comment, but IEEE integrity director Luigi Longobardi says that the publisher didn’t know about the issue until Nature asked, and that it is investigating. Cabanac, a research-integrity sleuth, has already created software to flag thousands of problematic papers in the literature for issues such as computer-written text or disguised plagiarism. He hopes that his latest detector, which he has been developing over the past two years and describes this week in a Comment article in Nature, will provide another way to stop bad research propagating through the scientific literature — some of it fake work created by ‘papermill’ firms.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.