that's right you know what time it is a fact I'm going to rely on as I do not
have a watch but I trust you a serious security back door and a widely used
compression utility for Linux has come to light after being discovered and
flagged by developer Andres Frey who works for Microsoft by day and maintains
postgress SQL by night just like Batman
Ry only noticed because he was making the best of his Easter Long Weekend by
doing some micro benchmarking when he noticed that encrypted logins to part of
the exed compression Library were using a ton of CPU which led him to discover
the back door in xed utils God you're saying Zed did we say Zed in Canada I'll
I'll stop now I'll say it normal had it not come to light when it did it could
have been potentially disastrous XZ there you go utils is available for
almost every distribution of Linux but luckily the malicious code was spotted
before it could be added into the production release of a major drro it
was however founded beta releases for Fedora Rawhide and and Debian as well as
a stable release of Arch Linux and the arch users will inform you of that the
back door apparently works by injecting coat during SSH authentication thereby
allowing unauthorized remote access bizarrely this malicious code seems to
have been introduced by one of XZ utils two primary developers giaan AKA GIA
t75 one of the earlier Terminators who had been contributing to the XZ project
regularly since 2021 while it's possible that their system was compromised G t75
is account engaged in suspicious activity over the course of several
weeks including repeatedly contacting others about their new fixes several
notable contributors to the project have therefore theorized the G t75 is
involvement in XZ has been part of a long con intended to get more and more
invasive permissions through both genuine code contributions and a
pressure campaign conducted through sock puppets against its original developer
Lassie Colin for faster development so far researchers have yet to find any
evidence that gean exists Beyond his presence in open- Source circles which
honestly isn't all that different from other Linux users stop browsing the web
using a text editor and go outside your family misses you you have to see your
family to tell them you use Arch Amazon is abandoning its
cashierless checkout system at its chain of fresh grocery stores in part because
it wasn't really cashierless and instead relied on a small army of over a
thousand overseas workers monitoring and reviewing footage from these
transactions the program launched in 2016 under the name just walk out the
empowering slogan of absent fathers everywhere just walk out involves a
series of cameras and sensors throughout the store which track customers after
they scan in at the door and automatically charge them for the items they take when they leave 27 of Amazon's
44 fresh stores have just walk out available and while Amazon gave the
impression that the system was fully automated an estimated 70% of just
walkout sales required a human review as of 2022 according to information from
the information they love that stuff they do love information Amazon disputes
this number and claims that these reviewers primary purpose was to
annotate videos for improved machine learning if accurate however this would
seem to indicate that the company wasn't actually replacing human cashiers it was
just Outsourcing them most likely by having an underpaid office worker in
India watch you while you shop this might explain why Shoppers at Fresh
stores sometimes found it would take hours to receive a receipt for their
purchase Amazon hasn't given up on the cashier lless experience though and its
stores will instead increasingly rely on dash carts essentially a combination of
shopping cart and self checkout which tallies up items as they're added to the
cart although maybe there's actually just a tiny little man hiding behind the
screen who uses a peephole to look inside your cart and see what you're buying who knows as part of a settlement
to a class action lawsuit Google has agreed to delete a massive store of web
data that it collects Ed while users browsed using Chrome's purportedly
private incognito mode Google has likewise agreed to update their privacy
policy as well as the incognito mode landing page to explicitly notify users
that the company continues to collect data from third party sites and apps
regardless of what mode their browser is in Google originally argued to have the
case dismissed under the logic that users had implicitly consented to have
their data collected even in incognito mode because it warned them that their
activity might still be visible to websites they visit which is a bit like
saying that your wife consented to your affair because you told her there might
be other women at the company Christmas party you know how these parties Go I
mean I mean you put some scotch in me and I put myself in
women in a silver lining for Google the agreement will spare the company from a
potential $5 billion penalty which is good because they need that money to
invest in their next project preventing other people from stealing your browser
data I don't steal their brand Google is
testing to Vice bound session credentials to block malicious actors
from accessing sensitive accounts by stealing and cloning a person's session
credentials a form of encryption that ties authentication cookies to the
user's PC something we here at LMG have
intimate intimate experience with now
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half past Tech news also known as quick bit of clock just some fun Studio lingo
we all say it it's what we call it yeah I totally didn't make that up Qualcomm
has released new benchmarks showing their upcoming ARM powerered Snapdragon
X Elite laptop processors embarrassing Intel's recently released meteor Lake
core Ultra chips compared to Intel's core Ultra 9 185h and core Ultra
755h really cool names the elite performed around 50% faster in geekbench
at around half the power consumption also beating out AMD's ryzen 9 7940 HS
and even Apple's M3 qualcomm's regularly
been bragging about how great the X Elite is since October and with the
month to go until they finally arrive on the new Microsoft Surface lineup I think
it's time to chill for a bit you didn't see apple chasing people around on the
street with PowerPoint presentations about how the M1 is going to
revolutionize the industry please please they left it to the boardrooms all of
them last year Google warned that the Google podcast service would soon Google
perish and for sooth it has now come to
Google pass how do they know users outside of the US will still be able to
listen to podcasts until June 24th but after that everyone will have to get
their fix somewhere else like on app that Google hasn't killed yet YouTube
music hopefully you don't go looking on that app for Google's Z made by Google
podcast though because YouTube music doesn't have it Google if if you're
going to kill so many apps it would be nice to have more of a plan than the
Star Wars sequels no why did don't
mention it oh it hurts tsmc has
announced that workers are already returning to factories less than 24
hours after Taiwan was hit by its strongest earthquake in 25 years as a
reporting the Quake killed nine and injured more than 1,000 people 70% of
tsmc's chipm operations had recovered
within 10 hours of the earthquake and that is unfortunately important because
Taiwan is responsible for 80 to 90% of
the world's high-end chips but I think I speak for the world when I say hey tsmc
come here new chips are nice and all but so is taking a single day off after your
country was devastated by an earthquake having said that um thanks for
preventing a domino effect that would inflate the price of basically everything on Earth even further so back
to work Australia is turning to Virtual fences after mult mulle car companies
have tried and failed to calibrate their onboard large animal detection systems
to kangaroos they already had large animal detection systems Volvo for
example has had a system that detects pedestrians cyclists and various sunry
Beasts of the forest since 2016 but kangaroos have proven a bit of a problem
in part because the average pedestrian can't run at 44 mph or launch themselves
10 ft into the air not with that attitude according to Volvo Australia's
Tech technical lead David picket kangaroos tend to move unpredictably and
when it's Airborne you lose the point of reference for where it actually is
terrifying instead Australia will be experimenting with virtual fences which
are activated by approaching headlights and use flashing lights and high-pitched
alarms to scare animals away from roadsides installation is unfortunately
expensive but on the other hand a kangaroo hitting your windshield is both
expensive and bad for the kangaroo does that mean that driving down a highway in
Australia will sound like a piece of metal discarded from the
International Space Station apparently ripped through the roof and two floors
of a home in Naples Florida and if you felt relieved after I specified which
Naples it was you're a bad person the 2B
piece of cylindrical metal that hit the home of Alejandro Otero is alleged to be
part of a 2.9 ton cargo pallet containing nine batteries tossed from
the ISS 3 years ago apparently Japan may
be liable for the damages since their space agency sent the now discarded
structure into space so congratulations to whoever had Florida man Su Japan
after extraterrestrial attack on their 2024 bingo card but if you've got more
Tech news on your bingo card just come back on Friday when we post the next
episode if you don't play Bingo very simple you should instead come back on
Friday when we post the next episode don't do the other one don't mix them up