Wait, What? MIPS Becomes RISC-V
Classic CPU Company Exits Bankruptcy, Throws in the Towel

What a long, strange trip it’s been. MIPS Technologies no longer designs MIPS processors. Instead, it’s joined the RISC-V camp, abandoning its eponymous architecture for one that has strong historical and technical ties. The move apparently heralds the end of the road for MIPS as a CPU family, and a further (slight) diminution in the variety of processors available. It’s the final arc of an architecture.

https://www.eejournal.com/article/wait-what-mips-becomes-risc-v

#mips #riscv #cpu

Seattle’s surveillance contractor has history of illegal sales, bribery, worrying privacy advocates

At street corners across downtown Seattle, eye-catching public art dresses up drab metal boxes full of the electronic guts that operate traffic signals. But there’s something more to these gussied-up casings.

Across the top of hundreds of them are flat black discs the size of a short stack of fluffy pancakes — so unobtrusive that someone would need to be looking for one to notice it.

When a cellphone passes within Wi-Fi range, sensors atop traffic signals detect it and in a flash send its digital fingerprint to the little dish — an antenna. Instantaneously, the data is piped through Ethernet cables to a hub where Seattle city traffic planners can track movements in real-time, sifting massive tranches of data to analyze traffic patterns.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/seattles-surveillance-contractor-has-history-of-illegal-sales-bribery-worrying-privacy-advocates/

#US #Seattle #surveillance #privacy

Hacked Surveillance Camera Firm Shows Staggering Scale of Facial Recognition

A hacked customer list shows that facial recognition company Verkada is deployed in tens of thousands of schools, bars, stores, jails, and other businesses around the country.

Hackers have broken into Verkada, a popular surveillance and facial recognition camera company, and managed to access live feeds of thousands of cameras across the world, as well as siphon a Verkada customer list. The breach shows the astonishing reach of facial recognition-enabled cameras in ordinary workplaces, bars, parking lots, schools, stores, and more.

The spreadsheet, provided by one of the hackers to Motherboard, shows more than 24,000 unique entries in the "organization name" column. Verkada's cameras are capable of identifying particular people across time by detecting their faces, and are also capable of filtering individuals by their gender, the color of their clothes, and other attributes.

"It's so abysmal," Tillie Kottman, one of the hackers claiming responsibility, told Motherboard in an online chat, referring to the ease of access to the cameras once they discovered a username and password online. Bloomberg first reported the news of the breach on Tuesday, and reported that the hackers had managed to access live video feeds from companies such as Tesla and Cloudflare, as well as jails and hospitals.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx83bz/verkada-hacked-facial-recognition-customers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/hackers-expose-tesla-jails-in-breach-of-150-000-security-cams

#US #face #recognition #surveillance #privacy #hacker #hacking

Google and Facebook Killed Free

Is the mania for subscriptions a choice, or the only path in an ad system dominated by giants?

We’re constantly being nudged to pay to subscribe.

There are all those paid streaming video and music services. News organizations, including The New York Times, want subscribers. Your favorite dating site, email service or messaging app might also ask you to pay for stuff you once got free. Paid subscriptions are nothing new, but increasingly they seem to be the future of everything.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/technology/google-and-facebook-killed-free.html

#subscriptions #google #facebook #DeleteFacebook #DeleteGoogle #thinkabout #why
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Fire destroys servers at French data company OVHcloud (Update)

PARIS (Reuters) - A fire tore through a data complex housing servers run by cloud computing company OVHcloud in Strasbourg, eastern France, on Wednesday, destroying some units and forcing the temporary shutdown of others, the company’s chief executive said.

OVHcloud, which on Monday had launched the process for a potential IPO, urged clients to activate their disaster recovery plans.

“Fire destroyed SBG2. A part of SBG1 is destroyed. Firefighters are protecting SBG3. No impact SBG4,” Chief Executive Octave Klaba said on Twitter in reference to different units housing servers.

“We don’t have access to the site. That is why SBG1, SBG3, SBG4 won’t be restarted today,” he added.

The data centre in Strasbourg is one of OVHcloud’s 17 data centres in France, out of 32 globally.

Founded by Klaba in 1999, OVHcloud is the biggest European-based cloud services provider, competing against U.S. giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, which dominate the market.

French politicians have championed OVHcloud as a possible alternative to U.S. cloud services providers, but it has so far lacked the scale and financial clout to dent their market share.

Klaba said the fire was over and that all employees were safe.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-ovh-fire-idUSKBN2B20NU

https://nitter.nixnet.services/olesovhcom

Update:
https://nitter.nixnet.services/olesovhcom/status/1369621032131264514

#OVHcloud #fire #french #strasbourg
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USA terrorist organization will steal 0 to 30% of the earnings generated in YouTube channels abroad from June and waste it in bombs

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10391362?hl=en

Creators who reside outside the United States: if you submit your United States tax information, a tax withholding of between 0% and 30% will be applied to the income generated by users in the United States and depending on whether your country has a tax treaty with the United States. Creators residing in the United States: we will not apply tax withholding to your income if you have provided your tax information and it is valid. Most creators in the United States have already submitted their tax information

#yt #Youtube #extortion #taxes

link to the old channel for while it still exists.

https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAE9rjn1W-I6cwTEgsg

How Amazon Assistant lets Amazon track your every move on the web

I recently noticed that Amazon is promoting their Amazon Assistant extension quite aggressively. With success: while not all browsers vendors provide usable extension statistics, it would appear that this extension has beyond 10 million users across Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Edge. Reason enough to look into what this extension is doing and how.

Here I must say that the privacy expectations for shopping assistants aren’t very high to start with. Still, I was astonished to discover that Amazon built the perfect machinery to let them track any Amazon Assistant user or all of them: what they view and for how long, what they search on the web, what accounts they are logged into and more. Amazon could also mess with the web experience at will and for example hijack competitors’ web shops.

https://palant.info/2021/03/08/how-amazon-assistant-lets-amazon-track-your-every-move-on-the-web/

#amazon #assistant #browser #extension #privacy

LibreTranslate

Free and Open Source Machine Translation API

https://libretranslate.com

https://github.com/uav4geo/LibreTranslate
License: AGPLv3

by UAV4GEO
powered by Argos Translate
https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate/

The public API on libretranslate.com should be used for testing, personal or infrequent use. If you're going to run an application in production, please host your own server or get in touch to obtain an API key.

#libretranslate #translator

Spotifeed

https://github.com/timdorr/spotifeed

A simple service to serve up Spotify podcasts as RSS feeds for use in any podcast app

#spotifeed #spotify #podcast

From Whitney Webb @unlimitedhangout

Patreon @PatreonSupport has moved to suspend my account due to alleged "misinformation", but they have been unable to give my a single example of misinfo, instead leaving that part of the email completely blank.

https://nitter.nixnet.services/_whitneywebb/status/1369697440971042825

If you support my work on Patreon, please read what will be my last post on the platform for more information: https://patreon.com/posts/48582461

#patreon #censorship #whitneywebb

How the Russian government accidentally blocked its own websites

Reminder: Internet censorship can have unintended consequences.

Russian internet users began noticing something strange on Wednesday: a number of websites, including the Kremlin’s own Kremlin.ru, were down. Just hours earlier, Roskomnadzor, the Russian government body overseeing communications and technology, announced that it was purposely slowing down access to Twitter, claiming the company had allowed over 3,000 posts featuring suicide, child exploitation, and drug use to remain up in violation of Russian law.

But the outage that followed affected far more than just the social media site, including domains like Reddit.com and Microsoft.com. The Russian government appears to have bungled its latest attempt at internet censorship, accidentally blocking its own websites in the process. And this isn’t even the first time it’s made a similar mistake in the last few years.

“With the aim of protecting Russian citizens and forcing the internet service to follow the law on the territory of the Russian Federation, centralized responses have been taken against Twitter starting March 10, 2021 — specifically, the initial throttling of the service’s speeds, in accordance with the regulations,” Roskomnadzor said in a statement.

https://restofworld.org/2021/how-the-russian-government-accidentally-blocked-access-to-its-own-websites/

#russia #censorship

The UK is secretly testing a controversial web snooping tool

The Investigatory Powers Act, or Snooper’s Charter, was introduced in 2016. Now one of its most contentious surveillance tools is being secretly trialled by internet firms

For the last two years police and internet companies across the UK have been quietly building and testing surveillance technology that could log and store the web browsing of every single person in the country.

The tests, which are being run by two unnamed internet service providers, the Home Office and the National Crime Agency, are being conducted under controversial surveillance laws introduced at the end of 2016. If successful, data collection systems could be rolled out nationally, creating one of the most powerful and controversial surveillance tools used by any democratic nation.

Despite the National Crime Agency saying “significant work” has been put into the trial it remains clouded in secrecy. Elements of the legislation are also being challenged in court. There has been no public announcement of the trial, with industry insiders saying they are unable to talk about the technology due to security concerns.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/internet-connection-records-ip-act

#UK #internet #surveillance

7-Zip developer releases the first official Linux version

An official version of the popular 7-zip archiving program has been released for Linux for the first time.

Linux already had support for the 7-zip archive file format through a POSIX port called p7zip but it was maintained by a different developer.

As the p7zip developer has not maintained their project for 4-5 years, 7-Zip developer Igor Pavlov decided to create a new official Linux version based on the latest 7-Zip source code.

Pavlov has released 7-Zip for Linux in AMD64, ARM64, x86, and armhf versions, which users can download at the following links:

👉🏼 7-Zip for 64-bit Linux x86-64 (AMD64)
👉🏼 7-Zip for 64-bit Linux ARM64
👉🏼 7-Zip for 32-bit Linux x86
👉🏼 7-Zip for 32-bit Linux armhf

This first version of 7-Zip for Linux is released as a console application and has similar, but not identical, command-line arguments as p7zip.

https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/cec5e63147/

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/7-zip-developer-releases-the-first-official-linux-version/

#7zip #sevenzip #official #linux #tools
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Inside Israel’s lucrative — and secretive —cybersurveillance industry

The country’s hacking software is recognized the world over. Not everyone thinks it’s a good thing.

At age 18, K., like almost all Israelis, began his mandatory army service. “This was my way to give back to society and defend my country,” he says. “I was one of them. I was one of the radical ones.” From violent policing in the occupied West Bank to obscure, mundane office work, assignments in the Israeli Defense Forces vary wildly. K. remembers thinking, “Whatever job I’m given, I’ll do it.”

He also knew: “My head is stronger than my body. So, I thought, intelligence.”

After his initial assessment, K. was offered a chance to enter Unit 8200, an elite intelligence unit in the IDF. (K. spoke to Rest of World on condition of anonymity). Akin to the NSA, 8200 has attained an almost mythical cachet in the global tech industry. Graduates of 8200 go on to launch successful startups and land coveted jobs. Officially, an 8200 soldier’s status is classified both during and after service. Publicly, 8200 graduates happily boast of their experience in cover letters. In the many industries that touch their work, Unit 8200 is a brand name.

https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-israels-lucrative-and-secretive-cybersurveillance-talent-pipeline/

#Israel #cyber #surveillance

15-year-old Linux kernel bugs let attackers gain root privileges.

Three vulnerabilities found in the iSCSI subsystem of the Linux kernel could allow local attackers with basic user privileges to gain root privileges on unpatched Linux systems.

These security bugs can only be exploited locally, which means that potential attackers will have to gain access to vulnerable devices by exploiting another vulnerability or using an alternative attack vector.

🆘 The 15-year old Linux kernel bugs

GRIMM researchers discovered the bugs 15 years after they were introduced in 2006 when the iSCSI kernel subsystem was being developed.

According to GRIMM security researcher Adam Nichols, the flaws affect all Linux distributions, but luckily, the vulnerable scsi_transport_iscsi kernel module is not loaded by default.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/15-year-old-linux-kernel-bugs-let-attackers-gain-root-privileges/

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15-year-old Linux kernel bugs let attackers gain root privileges.

Three vulnerabilities found in the iSCSI subsystem of the Linux kernel could allow local attackers with basic user privileges to gain root privileges on unpatched Linux systems.

These security bugs can only be exploited locally, which means that potential attackers will have to gain access to vulnerable devices by exploiting another vulnerability or using an alternative attack vector.

🆘 The 15-year old Linux kernel bugs

GRIMM researchers discovered the bugs 15 years after they were introduced in 2006 when the iSCSI kernel subsystem was being developed.

According to GRIMM security researcher Adam Nichols, the flaws affect all Linux distributions, but luckily, the vulnerable scsi_transport_iscsi kernel module is not loaded by default.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/15-year-old-linux-kernel-bugs-let-attackers-gain-root-privileges/

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Online platforms: Economic and societal effects

Online platforms such as #Google, #Amazon, and #Facebook play an increasingly central role in the economy and society. They operate as digital intermediaries across interconnected sectors and markets subject to network effects. These firms have grown to an unprecedented scale, propelled by data-driven business models. Online platforms have a massive impact on individual users and businesses, and are recasting the relationships between customers, advertisers, workers and employers.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/656336/EPRS_STU(2021)656336_EN.pdf

#online #platforms #study #pdf
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