Uptycs Threat Research Team has discovered malware that not only hijacks vulnerable *nix-based servers and uses them to mine cryptocurrency but actually modifies their CPU configurations in a bid to increase mining performance at the cost of performance in other applications. Tom's Hardware reports: Perpetrators use a Golang-based worm to exploit known vulnerabilities like CVE-2020-14882 (Oracle WebLogic) and CVE-2017-11610 (Supervisord) to gain access to Linux systems, reports The Record. Once they hijack a machine, they use model-specific registers (MSR) to disable the hardware prefetcher, a unit that fetches data and instructions from the memory into the L2 cache before they are needed. Prefetching has been used for years and can boost performance in various tasks. However, disabling it can increase mining performance in XMRig, the mining software the perpetrators use, by 15%. But disabling the hardware prefetcher lowers performance in legitimate applications. In turn, server operators either have to buy additional machines to meet their performance requirements or increase power limits for existing hardware. In either case, they increase power consumption and spend additional money. The botnet has been reportedly used since at least December 2020 and targeted vulnerabilities in MySQL, Tomcat, Oracle WebLogic, and Jenkins.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samsung Group's leader, Jay Y. Lee, is out of jail on parole today. Lee was serving a 30-month sentence for his role in "Choi-gate," a major 2016 South Korean political scandal that brought down South Korean then-President Park Geun-hye. In 2017, Lee was originally sentenced to five years in jail after being found guilty of bribery, embezzlement, capital flight, and perjury. An appeal and retrial cut Lee's five-year prison sentence down to 30 months after suspending the charges for bribery and embezzlement. Lee served 18 months of that sentence, and now he's out on parole. Upon his release, Lee told reporters, "I've caused much concern for the people. I deeply apologize. I am listening to the concerns, criticisms, worries, and high expectations for me. I will work hard." Lee's release from prison is controversial. The pro-business side of South Korean politics wants to see Lee back on the streets because Samsung is a massive part of South Korea's economy, and jailing the leader has delayed major strategic decisions at the company. Civic groups say South Korea's business elite get a different set of rules from everyone else and that Lee's parole is the latest sign of that reality. Samsung makes up anywhere from 10-20 percent of South Korea's GDP, depending on how the latest quarter is going. As the top dog at Samsung, Lee has the final say on major investments and acquisitions, and one of the big decisions he needs to make is where to build a $17 billion chip factory in the US. The plant could be operational as soon as October 2022, and with the world currently in the middle of a global chip shortage, there's pressure to get everything started. US businesses have even been lobbying South Korea to pardon Lee in the hopes that the deal would go through. Lee reportedly left prison to head to Samsung headquarters, but he still has more legal issues to deal with. In October, he will face another trial relating to the Samsung C&T merger, this time for accounting fraud and stock price manipulation.

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Seen in a Woodstock store window today.

When the pandemic freed employees from having to report to the office, some saw an opportunity to double their salary on the sly. From a report: They were bored. Or worried about layoffs. Or tired of working hard for a meager raise every year. They got another job offer. Now they have a secret. A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay: Work two full-time remote jobs, don't tell anyone and, for the most part, don't do too much work, either. Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play "Tetris" with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off -- in some cases, unlimited -- to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don't work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don't apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them. [...] Gig work and outsourcing have been on the rise for years. Inflation is now ticking up, chipping away at spending power. Some employees in white-collar fields wonder why they should bother spending time building a career. "The harder that you work, it seems like the less you get," one of the workers with two jobs says. "People depend on you more. My paycheck is the same." Overemployed says it has a solution. "There's no implied lifetime employment anymore, not even at IBM," writes one of the website's co-founders, a 38-year-old who works for two tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. The site serves up tips on setting low expectations with bosses, staying visible at meetings and keeping LinkedIn profiles free of red flags. (A "social-media cleanse" is a solid excuse for an outdated LinkedIn profile, it says.) In a chat on the messaging platform Discord, people from around the world swap advice about employment checks and downtime at various brand-name companies.

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I went for a walk in the noon heat and was wiped out.

Listened to today's lame Daily podcast.

The climate crisis is a lot worse than they were willing to say, obviously, based on facts they cited.

Then they got all weepy about how it's the fault of boomers.

Here's the story they should have reported.

1. We have not yet started to turn our carbon emissions down, in fact it's still going up.
2. Even if we never emitted another ton of carbon into the atmosphere, the next 30 years are going to be an escalating climate catastrophe. What we're seeing now is nothing compared to what we are certain to see in 5 years, ten years, all the way up to 30 years.
3. Then in 30 years it will level off. The climate will still be horrific but it won't get any worse. But only if we turn our carbon emissions down to zero, now.
4. See #1.
5. So the boomers are to blame, say the host and the guest. The guest is a boomer, the host is younger. This is where their version of the story ends.
6. Here's the crazy part. They're doing exactly what the boomer supposedly did and feels so guilty about. Not owning the truth of now. Softening it. Shifting to blame instead of what to do. Now, even if we got our shit together, which we aren't and won't, we're still fucked.
7. If the new generations are so cool, why are they doing the same thing?
8. I know the answer. Here it is. It's a myth that anyone has any ability to turn the ship around, or even that all of us acting collectively could turn the ship around.
9. The true story that I've yet to hear the NYT say, and today they had the perfect opportunity to say it is that we're already over the cliff. The planet is ruined for human life. It's done. Nothing to worry about. It's over.

Here's the true true version of the story, an excerpt from The Newsroom.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: July 2021 has earned the unenviable distinction as the world's hottest month ever recorded, according to new global data released today by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. "In this case, first place is the worst place to be," said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. "July is typically the world's warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded. This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe." The combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 1.67 degrees F (0.93 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees F (15.8 degrees C), making it the hottest July since records began 142 years ago. It was 0.02 of a degree F (0.01 of a degree C) higher than the previous record set in July 2016, which was then tied in 2019 and 2020. The Northern Hemisphere: the land-surface only temperature was the highest ever recorded for July, at an unprecedented 2.77 degrees F (1.54 degrees C) above average, surpassing the previous record set in 2012. Regional records: Asia had its hottest July on record, besting the previous record set in 2010; Europe had its second-hottest July on record -- tying with July 2010 and trailing behind July 2018; and North America, South America, Africa and Oceania all had a top-10 warmest July.

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Apple has warned retail and online sales staff to be ready to field questions from consumers about the company's upcoming features for limiting the spread of child pornography. From a report: In a memo to employees this week, the company asked staff to review a frequently asked questions document about the new safeguards, which are meant to detect sexually explicit images of children. The tech giant also said it will address privacy concerns by having an independent auditor review the system. Earlier this month, the company announced a trio of new features meant to fight child pornography: support in Siri for reporting child abuse and accessing resources related to fighting CSAM, or child sexual abuse material; a feature in Messages that will scan devices operated by children for incoming or outgoing explicit images; and a new feature for iCloud Photos that will analyze a user's library for explicit images of children. Further reading: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks.

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Ezra Klein, writing at The New York Times: Think about it this way: The internet we have allows for the easy transfer of information. We costlessly swap copies of news articles, music files, video games, pornography, GIFs, tweets and much more. The internet is, famously, good at making information nearly free. But for precisely that reason, it is terrible at making information expensive, which it sometimes needs to be. What the internet is missing, in particular, are ways to verify identity, ownership and authenticity -- the exact things that make it possible for creators to get paid for their work (for more on this, I highly recommend Steven Johnson's article "Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble"). That's one reason the riches of the web haven't been more widely shared: You get rich selling access to the internet or by building companies that add convenience and features to the internet. So Facebook got rich by building a proprietary infrastructure for identity, and Spotify created a service in which artists could eke out payment from works that were otherwise just being pirated. The actual creators who make the internet worth visiting are forced to accept the exploitative, ever-changing terms of digital middlemen. This is the problem that the technology behind crypto solves, at least in theory: If the original internet let you easily copy information, the next internet will let you easily trade ownership of digital goods. Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce, which increases their value; it lets you prove ownership, which allows you to buy and sell them; and it makes digital identities verifiable, as that's merely information you own. Together, they unlock the potential for a true economy for digital goods, where creators actually get rewarded for what they make. I will admit to some skepticism that this is how it'll play out, because many of the financiers funding crypto also founded and sit on the boards of the companies that set the terms of today's internet, but we'll see.

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Researchers at AlgorithmWatch say they were forced to abandon their research project monitoring the Instagram algorithm after legal threats from Facebook. From a report: The Berlin-based project went public with the conflict in a post published Friday morning, citing the platform's recent ban of the NYU Ad Observatory. "There are probably more cases of bullying that we do not know about," the post reads. "We hope that by coming forward, more organizations will speak up about their experiences." Launched in March 2020, AlgorithmWatch provided a browser plug-in that would allow users to collect data from their Instagram feeds, providing insight into how the platform prioritizes pictures and videos. The project published findings regularly, showing that the algorithm encouraged photos that showed bare skin and that photos showing faces are ranked higher than screenshots of text. Facebook disputed the methodology but did not otherwise take action against AlgorithmWatch for the first year of the project.

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After months of rumors and speculation, Kotaku has learned from sources that Rockstar Games may be remastering three classic Grand Theft Auto games. Currently, it appears these games will be released later this fall for a multitude of platforms, including the portable Nintendo Switch. From a report: For the past year, rumors have swirled on Twitter, Reddit, and various message boards that Rockstar is working on remakes or remasters of classic, PS2-era Grand Theft Auto titles. These rumors only grew in popularity as Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, used DMCA takedowns to remove classic GTA mods from the internet while announcing that the publisher had three remastered games in development. While Kotaku can't confirm what all of those teased remastered titles specifically are, we can confirm via corroborating details from three sources that GTA remasters are currently in the final stages of development.

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House Judiciary lawmakers on Friday introduced legislation meant to boost competition in app stores by setting rules for how companies like Google and Apple control their marketplaces. From a report: The bipartisan bill is the House companion to Senate legislation introduced earlier this week, showing the appetite from both chambers of Congress to take on the app store battle. House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee ranking member Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) say the Open App Markets Act will allow app developers to tell consumers about lower prices and open up more competition for third-party app stores and payment services.

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Watching the Taliban crush the Afghan government so quickly makes quite an impression. I think bringing our military home was probably a good idea. While we were protecting Afghanistan from their Taliban, we've been growing our own fundamentalist terrorism culture here. Where they want to return their country to the 5th century, our Taliban wasn't go back to before the Civil War.

Sonos became a favorite with audiophiles by selling sleek, wireless speakers for streaming music long before technology titans such as Alphabet''s Google entered the market with cheaper, internet-connected models. Now Sonos is hoping a U.S. trade judge finds Friday that its partner turned foe, Google, infringed its patents for multiroom audio systems. From a report: Sonos is asking U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Charles Bullock to support its bid to block imports of Google's Home and Chromecast systems and Pixel phones and laptops, which are made in China. "Google has thrown everything at us in this case, but we believe that the evidence before the ITC demonstrates Google to be a serial infringer of Sonos' valid patents and that the ITC case represents just the tip of the iceberg," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in an earnings call Wednesday. The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful. Sonos officials urged politicians to beef up antitrust laws and enforcement against companies like Google and Amazon.com. Sonos and Google have each accused the other of bad behavior, and suits have been filed in California, Texas, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children." Sonos is fighting over what CEO Patrick Spence says is the "Golden Age of Audio." Buoyed by consumers who buy more audiobooks, streaming music and podcasts and are looking for "theater-like" sound while watching movies from home, the focus on home sound systems is likely to survive even after the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-home orders end.

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Graphics processor company Nvidia showcased its prowess at computer animation by sneaking a virtual replica of its CEO into a keynote speech. From a report: On Wednesday, Nvidia revealed in a blog post that its CEO Jensen Huang did not do the keynote presentation at the company's GTC conference in April. At least part of it was actually led by a virtual replica of Huang, created by digitizing Huang with a truck full of DSLR cameras, and then animating him with the help of an AI, according to the company. Huang's kitchen, which has become Nvidia's venue for speaking to customers and investors since the beginning of the pandemic, was also entirely computer generated. It's not clear exactly which part of the keynote speech features CGI Huang (which is what makes the replica so impressive), but if you jump to this part of the presentation you can see Huang magically disappear and his kitchen explode into multiple different 3D models.

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A senior Apple executive defended the company's new software to fight child pornography after the plans raised concerns about an erosion of privacy on the iPhone, revealing greater detail about safeguards to protect from abuse. From a report: Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, in an interview emphasized that the new system will be auditable. He conceded that the tech giant stumbled in last week's unveiling of two new tools. One is aimed at identifying known sexually explicit images of children stored in the company's cloud storage service and the second will allow parents to better monitor what images are being shared with and by their children through text messages. "It's really clear a lot of messages got jumbled pretty badly in terms of how things were understood," Mr. Federighi said. "We wish that this would've come out a little more clearly for everyone because we feel very positive and strongly about what we're doing." The Cupertino, Calif., iPhone maker has built a reputation for defending user privacy and the company has framed the new tools as a way to continue that effort while also protecting children. Apple and other tech companies have faced pressure from governments around the world to provide better access to user data to root out illegal child pornography. While Apple's new efforts have drawn praise from some, the company has also received criticism. An executive at Facebook's WhatsApp messaging service and others, including Edward Snowden, have called Apple's approach bad for privacy. The overarching concern is whether Apple can use software that identifies illegal material without the system being taken advantage of by others, such as governments, pushing for more private information -- a suggestion Apple strongly denies and Mr. Federighi said will be protected against by "multiple levels of auditability." "We, who consider ourselves absolutely leading on privacy, see what we are doing here as an advancement of the state of the art in privacy, as enabling a more private world," Mr. Federighi said.

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