Planting a flag on the moon

With virtually no atmosphere on the moon – and, therefore, no wind – flags that fly freely on Earth would hang like limp cloth in the lunar environment. So Apollo 11 engineers had to rethink flagpole design entirely. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/planting-flag-on-moon-apollo11…

Microsoft Stirs Suspicions By Adding Telemetry Files To Security-Only Update

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: As expected, Windows Update dropped off several packages of security and reliability fixes for Windows 7 earlier this week, part of the normal Patch Tuesday delivery cycle for every version of Windows. But some hawk-eyed observers noted a surprise in one of those Windows 7 packages. What was surprising about this month’s Security-only…

Unidentified Sonic Phenomenon Causing ‘Hangover’ Symptoms in Brooklyn

I’m a sucker for unidentified sonic phenomena. The latest weird noise to pop up in the news comes by way of the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, where residents say a mysterious and unidentified noise has been causing painful side-effects and curious medical conditions for months. Oddly enough, some of the symptoms seem eerily… Read more » Source: https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/07/unidentified-sonic-phenomenon-causing-hangover-symptoms-in-brooklyn/…

Tor Project To Fix Bug Used For DDoS Attacks On Onion Sites For Years

An anonymous reader writes: “The Tor Project is preparing a fix for a bug that has been abused for the past years to launch DDoS attacks against dark web (.onion) websites,” reports ZDNet. “Barring any unforeseen problems, the fix is scheduled for the upcoming Tor protocol 0.4.2 release.” The bug has been known to Tor developers for years, and has been…

‘Motorola Has Let Me Down For the Last Time’

Jerry Hildenbrand, writing for AndroidCentral: If you’re ever in the mood to think about a “how the mighty have fallen” story, you need to look no further than Motorola. The company used to be at the forefront of technology in everything digital, but buyouts, restructuring, and eventually becoming another OEM nameplate has left Motorola little more than a memory that old…

New Mac Malware Abuses Recently Disclosed Gatekeeper Zero-Day

puddingebola writes: In May, security researcher Filippo Cavallarin made public a vulnerability in macOS’s Gatekeeper. The vulnerability can allow an attacker to use a symlink and an NFS server to bypass Gatekeepers authentication and run malicious code. The malware has been named OSX/Linker and has been tied to the same group that operates the OSX/Surfbuyer adware. All macOS versions are affected,…

Millions of Dell PCs Vulnerable To Flaw In Pre-Installed Software

secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: Millions of PCs made by Dell and other OEMs are vulnerable to a flaw stemming from a component in pre-installed SupportAssist software. The flaw could enable a remote attacker to completely takeover affected devices. The high-severity vulnerability (CVE-2019-12280) stems from a component in SupportAssist, a proactive monitoring software pre-installed on PCs with automatic failure detection…

Oracle Issues Emergency Update To Patch Actively Exploited WebLogic Law

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oracle on Tuesday published an out-of-band update patching a critical code-execution vulnerability in its WebLogic server after researchers warned that the flaw was being actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2729, allows an attacker to run malicious code on the WebLogic server without any need for authentication. That capability…

Vim and Neo Editors Vulnerable To High-Severity Bug

JustAnotherOldGuy quotes Threatpost: A high-severity bug impacting two popular command-line text editing applications, Vim and Neovim, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands. Security researcher Armin Razmjou warned that exploiting the bug is as easy as tricking a target into clicking on a specially crafted text file in either editor. Razmjou outlined his research and created a proof-of-concept (PoC) attack…

The undark nights of summer

Guy Ottewell lives in England. His illustrations of 3-dimensional space are illuminating. Long summer twilights, explained. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/the-undark-nights-of-summer-guy-ottewell…