Long-time Slashdot reader trolman scared this scathing editorial by security researcher Brian Krebs: If you are somehow under the impression that you -- the customer -- are in control over the security, privacy and integrity of your mobile phone service, think again. And you'd be forgiven if you assumed the major wireless carriers or federal regulators had their hands firmly on the wheel. No, a series of recent court cases and unfortunate developments highlight the sad reality that the wireless industry today has all but ceded control over this vital national resource to cybercriminals, scammers, corrupt employees and plain old corporate greed... Incessantly annoying and fraudulent robocalls. Corrupt wireless company employees taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to unlock and hijack mobile phone service. Wireless providers selling real-time customer location data, despite repeated promises to the contrary. A noticeable uptick in SIM-swapping attacks that lead to multi-million dollar cyberheists... Is there any hope that lawmakers or regulators will do anything about these persistent problems? Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy, said the answer -- at least in this administration -- is probably a big "no." "The takeaway here is the complete and total abdication of any oversight of the mobile wireless industry," Sohn told KrebsOnSecurity. "Our enforcement agencies aren't doing anything on these topics right now, and we have a complete and total breakdown of oversight of these incredibly powerful and important companies."

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Long-time Slashdot reader Huxley_Dunsany writes: After much work rebuilding and upgrading it, my Macintosh SE/30 from 1989 is now connected via Ethernet to the Web, and is hosting a simple website and old-style "guestbook." The site has been online for a few days (other than semi-frequent reboots of the system when it gets overloaded with requests), and has served nearly 20,000 visitors. For a machine with a 16MHz CPU and 68 megabytes of ram, it's held up remarkably well! I'm basically inviting a "Slashdotting" of my old Mac, but I thought this project might bring a few smiles here. Enjoy! "Awesome," wrote one visitor in the guestbook, adding "You should join a webring!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Huxley_Dunsany writes: After much work rebuilding and upgrading it, my Macintosh SE/30 from 1989 is now connected via Ethernet to the Web, and is hosting a simple website and old-style "guestbook." The site has been online for a few days (other than semi-frequent reboots of the system when it gets overloaded with requests), and has served nearly 20,000 visitors. For a machine with a 16MHz CPU and 68 megabytes of ram, it's held up remarkably well! I'm basically inviting a "Slashdotting" of my old Mac, but I thought this project might bring a few smiles here. Enjoy! "Awesome," wrote one visitor in the guestbook, adding "You should join a webring!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As severe thunderstorms continue to hit parts of Europe, the results can be dramatic.

As severe thunderstorms continue to hit parts of Europe, the results can be dramatic.

"In the 3D content creation space, where are lot of professional 3D software costs anywhere from 2K to 8K Dollars a license, people have always hoped that the free, open source 3D software Blender would some day be up to the job of replacing expensive commercial 3D software packages," writes Slashdot reader dryriver: This never happened, not because Blender didn't have good 3D features technically, but rather because the Blender Foundation simply did not listen to thousands of 3D artists screaming for a "more standard UI design" in Blender. Blender's eccentric GUI with reversed left-click-right-click conventions, keyboard shortcuts that don't match commercial software and other nastiness just didn't work for a lot of people. After years of screaming, Blender finally got a much better and more familiar UI design in release 2.80, which can be downloaded here. Version 2.80 has many powerful features, but the standout feature is that after nearly 10 years of asking, 3D artists finally get a better, more standard, more sensible User Interface. This effectively means that for the first time, Blender can compete directly with expensive commercial 3D software made by industry leaders like Autodesk, Maxon, NewTek and SideFX. Why the Blender Foundation took nearly a decade to revise the software's UI is anybody's guess.

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Funerals take place for the victims of explosion that took place near the eastern town of Morogoro.

Kashmiris queue at government office to use phone amid a week-long clampdown that has seen communication lines cut off.

Beijing warns protesters, saying its patience is wearing thin after many weeks of chaos.

Wartime defence chief vows to prioritise Sri Lanka's national security following Easter Sunday bombings in April.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Researchers from security company Eclypsium have discovered that more than forty drivers from at least twenty different vendors -- including every major BIOS vendor, as well as hardware vendors like ASUS, Toshiba, NVIDIA, and Huawei -- include critical vulnerabilities allowing an escalation of privileges to full system level access. Considering how widespread these drivers are, and the fact that they are digitally signed by Microsoft, they allow an attacker to more successfully penetrate target systems and networks, as well as remain hidden. Also while some of these drivers "are designed to update firmware, the driver is providing not only the necessary privileges, but also the mechanism to make changes" which means the attacker can gain a permanent foothold. Eclypsium has already notified Microsoft about the issues and at least NVIDIA has already released fixed drivers.

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The Washington Post describes a parent whose phone "rings 10 times a day with notifications from the summer camp's facial-recognition service, which alerts him whenever one of his girls is photographed enjoying their newfound independence." Cory Doctorow reports: You can also call your kid if you think they look unhappy or if you are unsatisfied with them in any way and nag them. So kids mob photographers with big, fake smiles and beg to be photographed so their parents won't harass them. The companies have "privacy policies" that grossly overreach, giving them perpetual licenses to distribute all the photos they take forever, for any purpose. They claim to have super-secure data-centers, but won't describe what makes them so sure their data centers are more secure than, say, the NSA's, Equifax, or any of the other "super secure" data centers that have been breached and dumped in recent memory. And while parents enjoy all this looking at their kids while they're away in theory, they also report a kind of free-floating anxiety because they know just enough about their kids' lives at camp to worry, but not enough to assuage their worries. One overseer of two camps tells the Post that more concerned parents call her in two hours than used to call in an entire month. One company adds that their service is now being used by over 160,000 parents -- and for children as young as six. At least one camp takes over 1,000 photos each day -- scanning each one with facial recognition technology -- and the Post reports that facial-recognition technology has now already been deployed at "hundreds" of summer camps all across the United States.

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Sandra Torres, of centrist National Unity of Hope, running up against Alejandro Giammattei, of right-wing Vamos party.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi says Islamabad seeking a diplomatic solution, but warns of potential consequences from India's revoking of Indian-administered Kashmir's autonomy.

"Hearing loss in middle age is associated with higher odds of cognitive decline and dementia in later years," reports Reuters, citing a large study in Taiwan. Researchers tracked more than 16,000 men and women and found that a new diagnosis of hearing loss between ages 45 and 65 more than doubled the odds of a dementia diagnosis in the next dozen years. Even mild levels of hearing loss could be a risk factor, so hearing protection, screening and hearing aids may be important means of reducing cognitive risk as well, the study team writes in JAMA Network Open. "Hearing loss is a potential reversible risk factor for dementia, including Alzheimer's disease," said senior study author Charles Tzu-Chi Lee of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. Past research suggests that about two thirds of the risk for dementia is hereditary or genetic, which means about one third of the risk is from things that are modifiable, Lee noted. Among modifiable risk factors, hearing loss accounts for about 9% of dementia risk, a greater proportion than factors like hypertension, obesity, depression, diabetes and smoking. "The early identification of hearing loss ... and successful hearing rehabilitation can mitigate the negative effects of hearing loss," Lee told Reuters Health by email.

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