FTP (file transfer protocol) celebrated its 50th anniversary this week. Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares an article commemorating a half-century of FTP: Over the years, the FTP protocol got refined with 16 different revisions(*1) adding support with TCP/IP, a secure extension also known as FTPS which is leveraging the same tech as HTTPS and more recent addition like IPv6 support. Fifty years after its inception, FTP is still going very strong with millions of FTP server still being exposed on the internet which is fairly amazing considering the bad press it gets...

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"Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing," reports the Guardian: The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico and much of Latin America. "There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook," said Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within the company's "integrity" organization to combat inauthentic behavior. "The cost isn't borne by Facebook. It's borne by the broader world as a whole."

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"Two satellites from the fast-growing constellations of OneWeb and SpaceX's Starlink dodged a dangerously close approach with one another in orbit," reports The Verge, citing representatives from both OneWeb and the U.S. Space Force. On March 30th, five days after OneWeb launched its latest batch of 36 satellites from Russia, the company received several "red alerts" from the US Space Force's 18th Space Control Squadron warning of a possible collision with a Starlink satellite. Because OneWeb's constellation operates in higher orbits around Earth, the company's satellites must pass through SpaceX's mesh of Starlink satellites, which orbit at an altitude of roughly 550 km. One Space Force alert indicated a collision probability of 1.3 percent, with the two satellites coming as close as 190 feet — a dangerously close proximity for satellites in orbit. If satellites collide in orbit, it could cause a cascading disaster that could generate hundreds of pieces of debris and send them on crash courses with other satellites nearby... Space Force's urgent alerts sent OneWeb engineers scrambling to email SpaceX's Starlink team to coordinate maneuvers that would put the two satellites at safer distances from one another. While coordinating with OneWeb, SpaceX disabled its automated AI-powered collision avoidance system to allow OneWeb to steer its satellite out of the way, according to OneWeb's government affairs chief Chris McLaughlin... SpaceX's automated system for avoiding satellite collisions has sparked controversy, raising concerns from other satellite operators who say they have no way of knowing which way the system will move a Starlink satellite in the event of a close approach.

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"Sydney university student Pablo Bonilla, 21, had his first academic paper published overnight and it might just change the shape of computing forever," writes Australia's national public broadcaster ABC: As a second-year physics student at the University of Sydney, Mr Bonilla was given some coding exercises as extra homework and what he returned with has helped to solve one of the most common problems in quantum computing. His code spiked the interest of researchers at Yale and Duke in the United States and the multi-billion-dollar tech giant Amazon plans to use it in the quantum computer it is trying to build for its cloud platform Amazon Web Services.... Assistant professor Shruti Puri of Yale's quantum research program said the new code solved a problem that had persisted for 20 years. "What amazes me about this new code is its sheer elegance," she said. "Its remarkable error-correcting properties are coming from a simple modification to a code that has been studied extensively for almost two decades...." Co-author of the paper, the University of Sydney's Ben Brown, said the brilliance of Pablo Bonilla's code was in its simplicity... "We just made the smallest of changes to a chip that everybody is building, and all of a sudden it started doing a lot better. It's quite amazing to me that nobody spotted it in the 20-or-so years that people have been working on that model."

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"Sydney university student Pablo Bonilla, 21, had his first academic paper published overnight and it might just change the shape of computing forever," writes Australia's national public broadcaster ABC: As a second-year physics student at the University of Sydney, Mr Bonilla was given some coding exercises as extra homework and what he returned with has helped to solve one of the most common problems in quantum computing. His code spiked the interest of researchers at Yale and Duke in the United States and the multi-billion-dollar tech giant Amazon plans to use it in the quantum computer it is trying to build for its cloud platform Amazon Web Services.... Assistant professor Shruti Puri of Yale's quantum research program said the new code solved a problem that had persisted for 20 years. "What amazes me about this new code is its sheer elegance," she said. "Its remarkable error-correcting properties are coming from a simple modification to a code that has been studied extensively for almost two decades...." Co-author of the paper, the University of Sydney's Ben Brown, said the brilliance of Pablo Bonilla's code was in its simplicity... "We just made the smallest of changes to a chip that everybody is building, and all of a sudden it started doing a lot better. It's quite amazing to me that nobody spotted it in the 20-or-so years that people have been working on that model."

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Google's Android team supports Rust for developing the Android operating system. Now they're also helping evaluate Rust for Linux kernel development. Their hopes, among other things, are that "New code written in Rust has a reduced risk of memory safety bugs, data races and logic bugs overall," that "abstractions that are easier to reason about," and "More people get involved overall in developing the kernel, thanks to the usage of a modern language." Linus Torvalds responded in a new interview with IT Wire (shared by Slashdot reader juul_advocate): The first patches for Rust support in the Linux kernel have been posted and the man behind the kernel says the fact that these are being discussed is much more important than a long post by Google about the language. Linus Torvalds told iTWire in response to queries that Rust support was "not there yet", adding that things were "getting to the point where maybe it might be mergeable for 5.14 or something like that..." Torvalds said that it was still early days for Rust support, "but at least it's in a 'this kind of works, there's an example, we can build on it'." Asked about a suggestion by a commenter on the Linux Weekly News website, who said, during a discussion on the Google post, "The solution here is simple: just use C++ instead of Rust", Torvalds could not restrain himself from chortling. "LOL," was his response. "C++ solves _none_ of the C issues, and only makes things worse. It really is a crap language. "For people who don't like C, go to a language that actually offers you something worthwhile. Like languages with memory safety and [which] can avoid some of the dangers of C, or languages that have internal GC [garbage collection] support and make memory management easier. C++ solves all the wrong problems, and anybody who says 'rewrite the kernel in C++' is too ignorant to even know that." He said that when one spoke of the dangers of C, one was also speaking about part of what made C so powerful, "and allows you to implement all those low-level things efficiently". Torvalds added that, while garbage collection is "a very good thing in most other situations," it's "generally not necessarily something you can do in a low-level system programming."

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A U.S. advocacy group called The Repair Association is urging Americans to demand protections for their right to repair from the country's consumer protection agency. "Tell the FTC: People just want to fix their stuff!" argues a page urging concerned U.S. citizens to sign an online petition (shared by long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K). The petition asks the FTC to... Enforce the law against companies who use illegal tying arrangements to force consumers to purchase connected repair services. Enforce the law against companies who violate the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act by voiding warranties when a consumer fixes something themselves or uses third-party parts or repair services. Enforce the law against companies who refuse to sell replacement parts, diagnostic and repair tools, or service information to independent repair providers. Publish new guidance on unfair, deceptive, and abusive terms in end user license agreements (EULAs) that: restrict independent or self repair; restrict access to parts and software; prohibit the transfer of user licenses; that and that purport to void warranties for independent or self repair. Issue new rules prohibiting exclusivity arrangements with suppliers, customers, and repair providers that exclude independent repair providers and suppress competition in the market for repair services. Issue new rules prohibiting companies from deceiving customers by selling products which cannot be repaired without destroying the device or cannot be repaired outside of the company's own service network, without disclosing that fact at the point of sale.

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EW reports: Felix Silla's friend and former Buck Rogers in the 25th Century costar Gil Gerard reported on Twitter that Silla died Friday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Coming in at just under 4 feet tall and only 70 pounds, Silla was the perfect choice for the mumbling Cousin Itt on The Addams Family. For years, audiences didn't see his face, the character covered in a full-length hairpiece, sporting sunglasses and a bowler hat... Silla did not provide the distinct mumbling voice of Cousin Itt. That was added by sound engineer Tony Magro in production... He first came to the United States in 1955 and began his career touring with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for seven years. He worked as a trapeze artist, tumbler, and bareback horse rider. Eventually, he settled in Hollywood in 1962, where he became a stuntman. He went on to work in movies like A Ticklish Fair, TV shows like Bonanza, and appeared in the first pilot for Star Trek, "The Cage." His small stature often helped him find work, including as Cousin Itt, robot sidekick Twiki on the NBC series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and even as a hang-gliding Ewok in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi... He also excelled as a stand in, double, and stuntman working on projects such as Planet of the Apes, Demon Seed, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Towering Inferno, The Hindenburg, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, The Golden Child, Howard the Duck, and Batman Returns. In 2018 one Las Vegas blog spotted Silla with Gil Gerard, posting a picture of the two side by side -- just as they'd posed decades earlier on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. While for that show Mel Blanc had provided the voice for Twiki the robot, the blog notes that Silla himself supplied the voice of Mortimer Goth in the Sims 2 videogame.

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Today I learned that the jQuery attr function, if you pass it a function, it calls the function. This. Is. A. Bug. It blew my mind when I figured out what was going on. Phewwww. That's the sound of my mind being blown. Back to work Davey.

America's top law enforcement agency "obtained a court order that allowed it to remove a backdoor program from hundreds of private Microsoft Exchange servers that were hacked through zero-day vulnerabilities earlier this year," reports CSO. (Thanks to detritus. (Slashdot reader #46,421) for sharing the news...) Earlier this week, the Department of Justice announced that the FBI was granted a search and seizure warrant by a Texas court that allows the agency to copy and remove web shells from hundreds of on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers owned by private organizations. A web shell is a type of program that hackers install on hacked web servers to grant them backdoor access and remote command execution capabilities on those servers through a web-based interface. In this case, the warrant targeted web shells installed by a cyberespionage group dubbed Hafnium that is believed to have ties to the Chinese government. In early March, Microsoft reported that Hafnium has been exploiting previously unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange to compromise servers. At the same time, the company released patches for those vulnerabilities, as well as indicators of compromise and other detection tools, but this didn't prevent other groups of attackers from exploiting the vulnerabilities after they became public. In its warrant application, dated April 13, the FBI argues that despite the public awareness campaigns by Microsoft, CISA and the FBI itself, many servers remained infected with the web shell deployed by Hafnium. While the exact number has been redacted from the unsealed warrant, the DOJ said in a press release that it was "hundreds." The FBI asked for, and received court approval, to access the malicious web shells through the passwords set by the original attackers and then use that access against the malware itself by executing a command that will delete the web shell, which is essentially an .aspx script deployed on the server. The FBI was also allowed to make a copy of the web shells first because they could constitute evidence. The warrant states that it "does not authorize the seizure of any tangible property" or the copying or alteration of any content from the servers aside from the web shell themselves, which are identified in the warrant by their unique file paths. This means the FBI was not granted permission to patch the vulnerabilities to protect the servers from future exploitation or to remove any additional malware or tools that hackers might have already deployed... The FBI sent an email message from an official email account, including a copy of the warrant, to the email addresses associated with the domain names of the infected servers. An official statement from the Department of Justice is already using the past tense, announcing that U.S. authorities "have executed a court-authorized operation to copy and remove malicious web shells from hundreds of vulnerable computers in the United States. They were running on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server software used to provide enterprise-level email service."

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America's top law enforcement agency "obtained a court order that allowed it to remove a backdoor program from hundreds of private Microsoft Exchange servers that were hacked through zero-day vulnerabilities earlier this year," reports CSO. (Thanks to detritus. (Slashdot reader #46,421) for sharing the news...) Earlier this week, the Department of Justice announced that the FBI was granted a search and seizure warrant by a Texas court that allows the agency to copy and remove web shells from hundreds of on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers owned by private organizations. A web shell is a type of program that hackers install on hacked web servers to grant them backdoor access and remote command execution capabilities on those servers through a web-based interface. In this case, the warrant targeted web shells installed by a cyberespionage group dubbed Hafnium that is believed to have ties to the Chinese government. In early March, Microsoft reported that Hafnium has been exploiting previously unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange to compromise servers. At the same time, the company released patches for those vulnerabilities, as well as indicators of compromise and other detection tools, but this didn't prevent other groups of attackers from exploiting the vulnerabilities after they became public. In its warrant application, dated April 13, the FBI argues that despite the public awareness campaigns by Microsoft, CISA and the FBI itself, many servers remained infected with the web shell deployed by Hafnium. While the exact number has been redacted from the unsealed warrant, the DOJ said in a press release that it was "hundreds." The FBI asked for, and received court approval, to access the malicious web shells through the passwords set by the original attackers and then use that access against the malware itself by executing a command that will delete the web shell, which is essentially an .aspx script deployed on the server. The FBI was also allowed to make a copy of the web shells first because they could constitute evidence. The warrant states that it "does not authorize the seizure of any tangible property" or the copying or alteration of any content from the servers aside from the web shell themselves, which are identified in the warrant by their unique file paths. This means the FBI was not granted permission to patch the vulnerabilities to protect the servers from future exploitation or to remove any additional malware or tools that hackers might have already deployed... The FBI sent an email message from an official email account, including a copy of the warrant, to the email addresses associated with the domain names of the infected servers. An official statement from the Department of Justice is already using the past tense, announcing that U.S. authorities "have executed a court-authorized operation to copy and remove malicious web shells from hundreds of vulnerable computers in the United States. They were running on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server software used to provide enterprise-level email service."

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BTW, there is a hair trimming product called Electric Outliner. It's screwing up my search for mentions of my Electric Outliner outside this blog.

BTW, it's not exactly true that no outliner I've shipped has had a Bookmarks menu. "Electric Outliner" has one. But I haven't exactly promoted it. I use it to write my blog, in fact I'm using it right now to write this. It has had a Bookmarks menu for years, and I've been able to manage lots of complex projects more easily because of it. EO is an Electron-based outliner that runs on the desktop. There will be a desktop version of Drummer, using lots of what's in EO, hopefully. It's possible we did a bookmarks feature for Frontier too. My memory sucks. Sorry.

Drummer has a feature that LO2 doesn't have -- Bookmarks. Here's how they work. There's a Bookmarks menu. When you choose the first command, Add Bookmark, a dialog confirms that you want to bookmark the current outline. If you click OK, the bookmarks file opens in a tab, and a link to the file you had open appears at the top of the menu. You can move the link where ever you like, and change the text. If you look in the Bookmarks menu, the changes are reflected. The menu can be hierarchic. As you have probably guessed by now the file is an outline. Like any other outline. But it has this special UI. There are a number of other features like this. Anyway, Bookmarks are tricky because of the way asynchronous code works in JavaScript. If bookmarks.opml isn't open, you have to wait until it is open to create the bookmark link. If you don't very weird things can happen. Now that I've changed how tabs work internally, this feature is broken. It drives me crazy because I depend on Bookmarks, and I'm starting to use Drummer for real work now. So today I must get this problem solved. I'm not getting up until it works.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IGN: In its first five months on the market, The PlayStation 5 has become the fastest-selling console in U.S. history in both unit and dollar sales. As revealed by The NPD Group's Mat Piscatella, this news arrives one month after the PS5 became the fastest-selling console in U.S. history in dollar sales. Despite that new record, the Nintendo Switch has continued its reign as the best selling hardware platform in both units and dollars during March 2021. However, the PS5 did rank first in hardware dollar sales in Q1 2021.

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