Over the past 11 months, the processors running our computers, and in some cases phones, have succumbed to a host of attacks. Bearing names such as Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope, TLBleed, and Foreshadow, the exploits threaten to siphon some of our most sensitive secrets—say passwords or cryptographic keys—out of the silicon microarchitecture in ways that can’t be detected or stopped by traditi

The research for this post is now public. See this post for details. A less drastic safeguard is to ensure HTML is disabled in the email client, although the researchers have warned that future exfiltration attacks may work even then. For the truly paranoid, disabling plugins that decrypt messages in the email client is the safest measure. In such scenarios, people can still encrypt and decrypt me

For the first time, researchers have discovered strains of a deadly, multidrug-resistant bacterium that uses a cryptic method to also evade colistin, an antibiotic used as a last-resort treatment. That’s according to a study of US patients published this week by Emory University researchers in the open-access microbiology journal mBio. The wily and dangerous bacteria involved are carbapenem-resist

Enlarge / Keyloggers like this one surreptitiously store passwords and other confidential data entered into a computer. HP is selling more than two dozen models of laptops and tablets that covertly monitor every keystroke a user makes, security researchers warned Thursday. The devices then store the key presses in an unencrypted file on the hard drive. The keylogger is included in a device driver

Enlarge / Unity 8, an option in the Ubuntu 16.10 desktop, will never become the default. Six years after making Unity the default user interface on Ubuntu desktops, Canonical is giving up on the project and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME next year. Canonical is also ending development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablets, spelling doom for the goal of creating a converge

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams noted that “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars, and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than m

Shadow Brokers—the name used by a person or group that created seismic waves in August when it published some of the National Security Agency's most elite hacking tools—is back with a new leak that the group says reveals hundreds of organizations targeted by the NSA over more than a decade. "TheShadowBrokers is having special trick or treat for Amerikanskis tonight," said the Monday morning post,

The Linux kernel today faces an unprecedented safety crisis. Much like when Ralph Nader famously told the American public that their cars were "unsafe at any speed" back in 1965, numerous security developers told the 2016 Linux Security Summit in Toronto that the operating system needs a total rethink to keep it fit for purpose. No longer the niche concern of years past, Linux today underpins the

Imagine a futuristic society in which robots are deployed to everybody's house, fulfilling a mission to scan the inside of each and every residence. Does that mental image look far-off and futuristic? Well, this week's Yahoo e-mail surveillance revelations perhaps prove this intrusive robot scenario has already arrived in the digital world. Days ago, Reuters cited anonymous sources and reported th

The Cambrian “explosion” of life around 540 million years ago is one heck of a story, in which a huge variety of animal body plans first appear in the fossil record. But the harder we look, the more interesting and incredible the Cambrian prequels become. Now, there's a report of organisms big enough to be easily visible yet dating back to more than 1.5 billion years ago. The fuse to the Cambrian

The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that application programming interfaces (APIs) and other functional characteristics of computer software are not eligible for copyright protection. Users have the right to examine computer software in order to clone its functionality—and vendors cannot override these user rights with a license agreement, the court said. The case focuses on the popul

Neil Jacobs, chief atmospheric scientist with Panasonic Weather Solutions, talks about his global weather model. For a long time, weather forecasting was largely the domain of governments, with the National Weather Service leading the way in the United States. During the last two decades, however, the private weather forecasting industry—which includes well-known companies such as AccuWeather and

Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution project, has died at the age of 42. His death, announced in a blog post by Docker CEO Ben Golub, came after an apparent encounter with police and a statement posted on Murdock's Twitter feed that he was going to commit suicide, though no cause of his death has been given. Paul Tagliamonte, a Debian developer and member of the Debian FTP Tea

Reality is mutable, vulnerable to interpretation and interference. It’s an idea that permeates through Philip K. Dick’s writing, one of the most influential forces in pop culture. Even if you don’t recognise his work by name, chances are you’ve experienced its impact. Minority Report, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall—these are all films that owe life to the acclaimed science fiction au

A 14-year-old Texas high school freshman was arrested and suspended for three days after arriving to class with a homemade clock that police and school officials feared was a bomb. It wasn't an explosive device. But the boy's arrest was, indeed, a sign of the times. Ahmed Mohamed wanted to impress his engineering teacher with his creation that took him 20 minutes to build at his Irving home. Local

Oracle's chief security officer is tired of customers performing their own security tests on Oracle software, and she's not going to take it anymore. That was the message of a post she made to her corporate blog on August 10—a post that has since been taken down. Perhaps thinking that all the security researchers in the world were busy recovering from Black Hat and DEF CON and would be somehow mor

Since its launch in 2009, the $600 million Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning the cosmos in search of exoplanets—planets outside our Solar System. To date, the planet-hunting telescope has identified over 4,000 potential planets, of which nearly 1,000 have been confirmed. Faulty reaction wheels (used to maintain the telescope’s orientation in space) resulted in the termination of Kepler’s pr

A federal appeals court on Friday reversed a federal judge's ruling that Oracle's Java API's were not protected by copyright. The debacle started when Google copied certain elements—names, declaration, and header lines—of the Java APIs in Android, and Oracle sued. A judge largely sided with Google in 2012, saying that the code in question could not be copyrighted. "Because we conclude that the dec