Separate remote code execution vulnerability in unupdated versions of RocketMQ, a Chinese-developed messaging/streaming server, in the case of the infection described in the article. It's possible that there are a few other RCE vulns it can make use of, but 20000 of them seems unlikely.

You consider school shootings to be be progress? (Seriously, that's a topic that should never be brought up with respect to the presence or absence of cell phones in schools. Fix your damned gun control laws, or rather the lack thereof.)

I have mixed feelings about the necessity of this.

On the one hand, I know they don't really need the cell phones, because they didn't exist when I was in school.

On the other hand, the kids who are paying attention to their cell phone rather than the teacher probably wouldn't listen to the teacher if the cell phone wasn't present, either, and some of them would be far more disruptive toward other students who are trying to listen.

On the third hand, expecting the kids to pay attention all the time even if they've already mastered the subject and are bored out of their skulls by the repetition needed for the kids below the class median to have a chance of understanding too is a problem in and of itself.

Fortunately, I am not a teacher, a student, or the parent of a student, so I have no horse in this race and am not required to make a decision on whether the bans are useful or just obnoxious.

There's also a buried reference to using a several-years-patched gpac bug to gain root access before this thing can do most of its stealth stuff.

Basically, it needs your system to already have a known, unpatched RCE bug before it can get a foothold, and if you've got one of those you have problems that go way beyond stealth crypto miners stealing electricity.

It's kind of an iffy assertion. That's maybe the number of files it scans looking for misconfigurations it can exploit, but I'd bet there's a lot of overlap in the potential contents of those files (either because of cascading configurations, or because they're looking for the same file in slightly different places to mitigate distro differences). So the number of possible exploits is likely far fewer.

If we get the unnecessary middle-class commuter vehicles off the streets, the drop in congestion will make it easier for those people who do need to drive to do so, and make increasing the road capacity unnecessary. A solution doesn't have to work for everyone to be useful, and yes, I agree that this one is obviously not practical or useful for someone who works construction, or retail, or in a warehouse or a garage or a restaurant or a lab or a factory or any other job that requires you to be on-site.

I'm not anti-car. I own one. I drive. My physical condition and the location I live in pretty much require it. What I'm against is car trips that increase congestion and pollution without serving a practical purpose, and the constant increase in the number of overpriced lanes of asphalt around Toronto when vital transportation infrastructure in the rest of the province is falling apart. There's a road a couple of hours' drive north of here that gets a decent amount of traffic that they're talking about downgrading to gravel because the municipalities that the province dumped it on can't afford to repave it—it would literally cost several times the annual budget of the smaller town to repave their section. The railways are decaying to the point that the speed limits on the lines still in service are lower than 30km/h in some areas. The major east-west highway corridors through the province are riddled with potholes and disintegrating asphalt. And Ford wants to waste money on a Toronto commuter tunnel that we should not need. Diminishing the amount of traffic on the 401 would hopefully get him to move on to the next hare-braned wasteful idea. Eliminating all traffic on the 401 is obviously impractical (and not really necessary to avoid this particular piece of idiocy, since the road is already there).

Making return-to-office mandates illegal would take a bite out of traffic congestion without putting people out of work or requiring any kind of monetary investment. Ford would never do that, however. I expect his friend-circle includes people who own office buildings in Toronto.

And if the panic button is going to call the police, how is that any different from the passenger using their phone to contact police? Seems like extra steps of middlemen and confusion when the passenger could just call once they feel the need.

Think of it as a backup for the phone in the case where, say, there's an adult and a kid in the car, the kid has no phone of their own, and the adult loses consciousness with their phone locked. Or the car is being actively jostled by a group of people (say it drove into the middle of an embryonic riot), causing the passenger to drop their phone, whereupon it slides under the seat. Or the phone just runs out of charge or doesn't survive getting dropped into the passenger's triple-extra-large fast-food coffee. It won't be needed 99% of the time, but the other 1% might save someone's life, and (presuming the car already has a cell modem it in) the cost of adding the feature should be minimal.

And even in cases where introducing a bias is desirable, you have to be very careful when doing it. There has been at least one case where introducing a bias towards diversity has caused problems when the algorithm is asked for images of historical people, who were often not diverse at all.

Ultimately, the police are compounding mistakes made by Grogan, who apparently trusted his business partner so much that it took him more than four years to actually check the books and report anything stolen. Since the cars were goods for sale and not of any sentimental value to him, and he doesn't need the money or he would have kept a closer eye on the business, the moral thing for him to do would be to leave the vehicles in the hands of their new owners and go after his former business partner for the money he effectively embezzled from the sales. That might not be legally feasible, though.

The actual relevant source document appears to be this: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2024/2024-121.htm. Judging from that, some of the money will go to funds that subsidize the production of local news programs in any medium (including radio), and there's a small amount earmarked for community radio. It's supposed to encourage the stations to create and broadcast content that's beneficial to the general public but not as profitable as what they might otherwise air in its place. If you consider that to be "helping" radio stations, then fine, I concede, but to be honest, the specific details of where the money ends up aren't the major point here, and will probably change over time.

I expect domestic radio stations pay into many of the same funds, although to be honest I've never checked. If we actually had a Canadian-owned streaming service that was willing to produce news programs or one of the other categories the government wants to encourage, they might get some money too. Including some of what's coming from the radio stations, because no one is making an attempt to keep the revenue streams coming from different sources separate . . . and really, why should they? It's extra administrative overhead to no real benefit.

I'm pretty sure that Ford would be overjoyed if everyone north of Parry Sound vanished spontaneously so that he no longer had to pretend to take us into account. He doesn't understand the North (or anything much outside of Toronto), and doesn't want to.

Not sure where you're getting that from—this isn't about anyone helping radio stations. The idea is that the government would impose laws and taxes on large streaming services operating in Canada that are somewhat similar to those currently imposed on radio stations in Canada.

Yeah, if that's what the footage shows then she appears to be at fault here, and a liar to boot. "Assault with a weapon" may be a little too heavy to stick, but hopefully some lesser charge will.

It would be pointless with my mother, anything involving technology developed after the 1980s goes were in one ear and out the other.

I just told mine, "If someone calls claiming to be me and says that 'I' am in trouble and need money, ask them [about thing from my pre-Internet childhood], and if they get the answer wrong, hang up, because it's someone else imitating my voice." No tech understanding required.

Unfortunately, it's rare that we can control what hashing algorithm is being used to secure the passwords we enter. I merely pray that any account that also holds my credit card data or other important information isn't using MD5. Some companies still don't take cybersecurity seriously.

intelligent regex

That would be much, much worse than what we actually have. Complex regex are positively Lovecraftian. You'd be chanting "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu ftaghn!" before you knew it.

Cracking an 8-char on an ordinary desktop or laptop PC can still take quite a while depending on the details. Unfortunately, the existence of specialized crypto-coin-mining rigs designed to spit out hashes at high speed, plus the ability to farm things out into the cloud, means that the threat we're facing is no longer the lone hacker cracking things on his own PC.

Only problem is that you wouldn't be able to visit most sites, because Mosaic only supports HTTP 1.0. You could go for Lynx, though. Just remember to disable the cookie support.

Open up the back of the device and check inside. If you see something that looks like a lump of modeling clay with wires sticking out of it crammed into the corner, your device has been compromised, and you should maybe try to remember whether you bought said device during a visit to Lebanon. After you put it in the middle of an empty driveway with a wall of sandbags around it and call the bomb squad, that is.

(Trying to associate literal exploding pagers with hacking borders on the surreal.)