Security researchers have discovered a flaw with nearly all modern computers that allow potential hackers to steal sensitive information from your locked devices. CNET adds: The attack only takes about five minutes to pull off, if the hacker has physical access to the computer, F-Secure principal security consultant Olle Segerdahl said in a statement Thursday. Cold boot attacks can steal data on a computer's RAM, where sensitive information is briefly stored after a forced reboot. These attacks have been known since 2008, and most computers today have a safety measure where it removes the data stored on RAM to prevent hackers from stealing sensitive information. It's also not a common threat for the average person, since both access to the computer and special tools -- like a program on a USB stick -- are needed to carry out the attack. But Segerdahl and researchers from F-Secure said they've found a way to disable that safety measure and extract data using cold boot attacks. [Further reading: ZDNet] "It takes some extra steps compared to the classic cold boot attack, but it's effective against all the modern laptops we've tested," he said in a statement. Per F-Secure, there is no patch to address the new vulnerability just yet. For now, the firm recommends that you make tweaks to your system settings so that your computer automatically shuts down or hibernates instead of entering sleep mode when you close your screen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Troops and tanks amassing along the border with Syria in anticipation of a major offensive and ensuing refugee crisis.

Allegations of rules being breached trigger Article 7 of EU treaty in unprecedented move.

Muhammad Shafee Abdullah was arrested and brought to court as police widen investigation into corruption scandal.

Vladimir Putin vows to beef up army saying Russia needs to strengthen its military capabilities to defend sovereignty.

Nearly 13,000 families were apprehended while crossing the border in August, up from about 9,000 in July.

The government favours technological solutions, but workers say collective action is essential to stopping abuse.

The UN Security Council said conditions for nation-wide polls were not ripe, extends its mission to Libya for one year.

Facebook is trying to speed up the time it takes to roll out new software updates and debug any issues in them with a new tool called SapFix that its engineers are building. From a report: SapFix, which is still under development, is designed to generate fixes automatically for specific bugs before sending them to human engineers for approval. Facebook, which announced the tool today ahead of its Scale conference in San Jose, California, for developers building large-scale systems and applications, calls SapFix an "AI hybrid tool." It uses artificial intelligence to automate the creation of fixes for bugs that have been identified by its software testing tool Sapienz, which is already being used in production. SapFix will eventually be able to operate independently from Sapienz, but for now it's still a proof-of-concept that relies on the latter tool to pinpoint bugs first of all. SapFix can fix bugs in a number of ways, depending on how complex they are, Facebook engineers Yue Jia, Ke Mao and Mark Harman wrote in a blog post announcing the tools. For simpler bugs, SapFix creates patches that revert the code submission that introduced them. In the case of more complicated bugs, SapFix uses a collection of "templated fixes" that were created by human engineers based on previous bug fixes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RoccamOccam writes: WebRender, an experimental GPU-based renderer for web content, written in Rust, is now enabled by default for Firefox Nightly users on desktop Windows 10 with Nvidia GPUs. The announcement was made on the mailing list. Lin Clark provides an excellent overview of WebRender and, states, "with WebRender, we want apps to run at a silky smooth 60 frames per second (FPS) or better no matter how big the display is or how much of the page is changing from frame to frame. And it works. Pages that chug along at 15 FPS in Chrome or today's Firefox run at 60 FPS with WebRender. In describing the WebRender approach Clark, asks, "what if we removed this boundary between painting and compositing and just went back to painting every pixel on every frame? This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but it actually has some precedent. Modern day video games repaint every pixel, and they maintain 60 frames per second more reliably than browsers do. And they do it in an unexpected way instead of creating these invalidation rectangles and layers to minimize what they need to paint, they just repaint the whole screen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I voted.

Nearly 1,000 Saudi women apply for co-pilot jobs with Flynas in 24 hours as the landmark recruitment drive begins.

Tokyo considers ending the 33-year-old ban, saying most species have rebounded, but it's facing opposition from the IWC.

More than 1.5 million Algerians died during the 1954-62 war of independence against colonial-ruler France.

A senior Google research scientist has quit the company in protest over its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. The Intercept: Jack Poulson worked for Google's research and machine intelligence department, where he was focused on improving the accuracy of the company's search systems. In early August, Poulson raised concerns with his managers at Google after The Intercept revealed that the internet giant was secretly developing a Chinese search app for Android devices. The search system, code-named Dragonfly, was designed to remove content that China's authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. After entering into discussions with his bosses, Poulson decided in mid-August that he could no longer work for Google. He tendered his resignation and his last day at the company was August 31. He told The Intercept in an interview that he believes he is one of about five of the company's employees to resign over Dragonfly. He felt it was his "ethical responsibility to resign in protest of the forfeiture of our public human rights commitments," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.