An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows 7's five years of extended support will expire on January 14, 2020 -- exactly one year from today. After this date, security fixes will no longer be freely available for the operating system that's still widely used. As always, the end of free support does not mean the end of support entirely. Microsoft has long offered paid support options for its operating systems beyond their normal lifetime, and Windows 7 is no different. What is different is the way that paid support will be offered. For previous versions of Windows, companies had to enter into a support contract of some kind to continue to receive patches. For Windows 7, however, the extra patches will simply be an optional extra that can be added to an existing volume license subscription -- no separate support contract needed -- on a per-device basis. These Extended Security Updates (ESU) will be available for three years after the 2020 cut-off, with prices escalating each year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite the lagging exports, China announced it had recorded a trade surplus with the United States of $323bn in 2018.

Jake Patterson is charged with homicide and the kidnapping of 13-year-old Jayme Closs who was found alive last week.

Scuffles broke out as Israeli policeman attempted to enter Dome of the Rock without taking off his kippah.

A security researcher has found, reported and now disclosed a dozen bugs that made it easy to steal sensitive information or take over any customer's account from some of the largest web hosting companies on the internet. From a news report: In some cases, clicking on a simple link would have been enough for Paulos Yibelo, a well-known and respected bug hunter, to take over the accounts of anyone using five large hosting providers -- Bluehost, DreamHost, Hostgator, OVH and iPage. "All five had at least one serious vulnerability allowing a user account hijack," he told TechCrunch, with which he shared his findings before going public. The results of his vulnerability testing likely wouldn't fill customers with much confidence. The bugs, now fixed -- according to Yibelo's writeup -- represent cases of aging infrastructure, complicated and sprawling web-based back-end systems and companies each with a massive user base -- with the potential to go easily wrong. In all, the bugs could have been used to target any number of the collective two million domains under Endurance-owned Bluehost, Hostgator and iPage, DreamHost's one million domains and OVH's four million domains -- totaling some seven million domains.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A California judge has ruled that American cops can't force people to unlock a mobile phone with their face or finger. The ruling goes further to protect people's private lives from government searches than any before and is being hailed as a potentially landmark decision. From a report: Previously, U.S. judges had ruled that police were allowed to force unlock devices like Apple's iPhone with biometrics, such as fingerprints, faces or irises. That was despite the fact feds weren't permitted to force a suspect to divulge a passcode. But according to a ruling uncovered by Forbes, all logins are equal. The order came from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in the denial of a search warrant for an unspecified property in Oakland. The warrant was filed as part of an investigation into a Facebook extortion crime, in which a victim was asked to pay up or have an "embarassing" video of them publicly released. The cops had some suspects in mind and wanted to raid their property. In doing so, the feds also wanted to open up any phone on the premises via facial recognition, a fingerprint or an iris.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump sends his Secretary of State to the Middle East to drum up support against Iran.

Opioid overdose has become the fifth most probable reason for preventable death, according to a new report.

Trump stressed on safety of its Kurdish allies as the two leaders agree on setting up of secure zone in northern Syria.

French President's letter to the public criticised for ruling out discussion of reforms such as the wealth tax scrap.

Dual citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to protest for 72 hours over lack of access to medical treatment, husband says.

Zorro shares a report: Commuters inching through rush-hour traffic in the Holland Tunnel between Lower Manhattan and New Jersey don't know it, but a technology likely to be the future of communication is being tested right outside their car windows. Running through the tunnel is a fiber-optic cable that harnesses the power of quantum mechanics to protect critical banking data from potential spies. The cable's trick is a technology called quantum key distribution, or QKD. Any half-decent intelligence agency can physically tap normal fiber optics and intercept whatever messages the networks are carrying: They bend the cable with a small clamp, then use a specialized piece of hardware to split the beam of light that carries digital ones and zeros through the line. The people communicating have no way of knowing someone is eavesdropping, because they're still getting their messages without any perceptible delay. QKD solves this problem by taking advantage of the quantum physics notion that light -- normally thought of as a wave -- can also behave like a particle. At each end of the fiber-optic line, QKD systems, which from the outside look like the generic black-box servers you might find in any data center, use lasers to fire data in weak pulses of light, each just a little bigger than a single photon. If any of the pulses' paths are interrupted and they don't arrive at the endpoint at the expected nanosecond, the sender and receiver know their communication has been compromised.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Android Studio 3.3 is now available to download through stable channel, Google said Monday. The top new features of Android Studio 3.3 include a navigation editor, profiler tracking options, improvements on the build system, and lazy task configuration. However, the big focus with the new version was on "refinement and quality," the company said. Further reading: VentureBeat.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video arcades -- those recreational arenas of illuminated screens and 8-bit soundtracks -- have been fading from the cultural landscape since the end of the Donkey Kong '80s. The advent of home video game consoles, hand-held gaming devices and smartphones has all but rendered them relics of a Gen X childhood. Yet somehow, Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center lives on. From a report: The cramped downtown institution is among the last of the city's old-school arcades, often filled with gamers too young to remember Street Fighter IV a decade ago, let alone Missile Command in the Reagan years. "Chinatown Fair should have closed years ago, along with all the other arcades in the city, due to rising rent and the shift to online gaming," said Kurt Vincent, who directed "The Lost Arcade," a 2016 documentary about the arcade's enduring legacy in the city. "But it's still there on Mott Street after all these years because young people need a place to come together." Say this about Chinatown Fair: It has been defying the odds for decades. The place opened in the 1940s as an "amusement arcade" in an era when Skee-Ball represented the apex of arcade fun. As youth tastes changed in the ensuing years, so too did Chinatown Fair. The arcade survived the rise and fall of pinball, the rise and fall of Pac-Man, the rise and fall of Super Nintendo, and perhaps most unimaginably, the rise, and rise some more, of Manhattan real estate prices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Look at how AOC links reform in politics with reform in journalism. You don't see this kind of certainty coming out of Tow or Shorenstein. But she's right, and people are listening. Journalism must respond. I want to be part of that response. Think about how an Indivisible for journalism might work. We have the tools, we just need the will.