Diogo Patrão's Alley Cat remake for MSX2 will be available for sale soon.

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I recently wrote that Facebook should be regulated like a utility, but maybe social media is more like an addictive, harmful drug than a utility. The companies that push social media on us are like drug dealers. Given my libertarian sympathies, adults should generally be free to use the drugs they want, but society should regulate promotion and distribution of the substance and protect children from being preyed upon by the dealers.

The real problem with Facebook's behavior is the revelation of its rampant institutional lying. In the XCheck story, we learned that after Facebook spent more than $130 million to create an Independent Oversight Board to oversee its content-moderation decisions, Facebook executives routinely lied to that board. Facebook told the Oversight Board that XCheck was only used in "a small number of decisions," even though the program had grown to include 5.8 million users in 2020.

"We're not actually doing what we say we do publicly," and the company's actions constitute a "breach of trust," reads a confidential internal review done by Facebook.
We also learned -- shockingly -- that the CEO and COO of the trillion-dollar behemoth are regularly involved in decisions of what posts to remove when such posts are made by certain people who are exempted from Facebook's community guidelines and content-moderation procedures. This is all while Facebook asserted that it applied the same standards to everyone.

Apparently, XCheck was created to mitigate "p.r. fires" or negative media attentions when Facebook takes the wrong action against a high-profile VIP. Even worse than the existence of the XCheck program was Facebook's dishonesty about it, reflecting the state of mind of a company that knew it was doing something wrong -- and still did it anyway.

These revelations strengthen the case that Facebook likely serves increasingly as the censorship arm of the US government, just as it does for other governments around the world.

That last sentence gets to the heart of the matter, and explains why collective action against social media dealers has been so slow: the elite class wants to control our speech, and is happy to use social media dealers to do it.

Facebook is soma.

What is soma in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? In the context of the novel, soma is a recreational drug that several of the main characters take throughout the story. The government in Brave New World strongly encourages individuals to take soma as a way to increase the happiness and complacency of the population. Soma can be taken as a pill or as a powder and can also be released as an aerosol. It is freely available to everyone in the novel. Its inclusion in the text is central to the novel's themes of complacency and resistance in society as well as the theme of escapism.

This is fantastic news that will hopefully turn into a treatment for people with spinal cord injuries and other nerve injuries.

A self-assembling gel injected at the site of spinal cord injuries in paralysed mice has enabled them to walk again after four weeks.

The gel mimics the matrix that is normally found around cells, providing a scaffold that helps cells to grow. It also provides signals that stimulate nerve regeneration.

Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University in Chicago and his colleagues created a material made of protein units, called monomers, that self-assemble into long chains, called supramolecular fibrils, in water.

When they were injected into the spinal cords of mice that were paralysed in the hind legs, these fibrils formed a gel at the injury site.

The researchers injected 76 paralysed mice with either the fibrils or a sham treatment made of salt solution, a day after the initial injury. They found that the gel enabled paralysed mice to walk by four weeks after the injection, whereas mice given the placebo didn't regain the ability to walk.

The team found that the gel helped regenerate the severed ends of neurons and reduced the amount of scar tissue at the injury site, which usually forms a barrier to regeneration. The gel also enhanced blood vessel growth, which provided more nutrients to the spinal cord cells.

What else needs to be said? Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia gets straight to the point. When there is no fear of God, everything is permitted.

Ross Douthat says that this fact is the heart of the abortion issue, and I agree. Our tolerance, acceptance, and promotion of at-will abortion is a shame and humiliation for our generation and civilization. Our descendants will look back on this era with horror and disgust, much like we view slavery and the Holocaust. They will ask, how could any people kill a million of their own children every year? How did they talk themselves into accepting the slaughter of the weakest and most vulnerable among them? How did they dehumanize the unborn, to be exterminated like insect infestations?

As is often the case, the solution to abortion -- and the general mistreatment of children and other vulnerable people -- won't be found in laws or courts. The solution is for each of us to honor the divine spark in each other. To recognize that we are each made in God's image, and each uniquely valuable because of that likeness.

Deuteronomy 27:19 -- 'Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.' And all the people shall say, 'Amen.'

Exodus 22:22 -- You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry.

Psalm 68:5 -- Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.

Self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives among Harvard faculty by 82-1.

More than 80 percent of Harvard faculty respondents characterized their political leanings as "liberal" or "very liberal," according to The Crimson's annual survey of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in April.

A little over 37 percent of faculty respondents identified as "very liberal"-- a nearly 8 percent jump from last year. Only 1 percent of respondents stated they are "conservative," and no respondents identified as "very conservative."

Academics usually explain this uniformity by asserting that liberals are smarter than conservatives and thus better suited for faculty positions in higher education -- particularly in self-identified elite universities. This explanation is relatively simple to assess by considering whether or not these same academics would entertain a similar explanation for a lack of sex or racial diversity in other institutions, such as corporate leadership or government. If one were to claim that "there are more male CEOs because men are smarter than women" that claim would be rightly dismissed.

(HT: Campus Reform and Instapundit.)

Italy's new prime minister Giorgia Meloni explains why so many people are afraid of her victory. American newspapers categorize her as "far-right", but Italian newspapers call her "center-right". Let's see what she does.

The new Prime Minister of Italy.

Wow. pic.twitter.com/fkKTM8I9Fs

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) September 26, 2022

Many people say that the Republican infighting over Kevin McCarthy's election as Speaker of the House is embarrassing and demonstrates a lack of governing ability. I say: more squabbling please!

The House should be raucous. Why should everything be politely settled behind closed doors? No! We need more public fighting among our elected officials, not less. Americans have major disagreements with each other, and the best way to sort them out is through politics. Let's have them yell and scream and argue with each other in public until someone wins.

(I posted this to the DnD subreddit also: link.)

The Open Gaming License fiasco with Dungeons & Dragons producer Wizards of the Coast is a symptom of a larger problem: our insane Intellectual Property system that currently protects material for the life of the author plus 70 years. As a comparison, patents generally only protect inventions for 20 years.

The purpose of intellectual property laws is to balance public and private interests. IP law is an agreement between society and creators: the creator is guaranteed an exclusive right to their creation for a period of time, and in exchange the public gets rights to the creation afterwards. It's intended to be a balance of interests, but the balance has gotten completely out of whack thanks to (obviously) lobbying throughout the 20th century by major copyright holders like Disney.

In my opinion, the current copyright term, life of the author plus 70 years, is grossly unfair to the public. I believe that the internet era has demonstrated that creators would be incentivized to create even without such a long period of exclusivity. Think about it: would you create less stuff if your great-grandkids didn't get exclusive rights? I doubt it.

Listen: creators should be able to make money from their work. I don't think copyright should go to zero, but why not bring it in line with patent protection with a 20-year term?

Disney, DnD, and many other creations are part of our generation's cultural legacy, part of a 10,000+ year inheritance that has been handed down through time to our grandparents, our parents, and now us. It's morally wrong for our ancestors and corporations to lock our inheritance away from us.

Copyright protections must be re-balanced to protect both creators and the public. This problem with WotC shouldn't be just about a license, it should be about the IP laws that grant them exclusive rights to creations that are over 50 years old. Our generation should re-open these negotiations and come up with a fair copyright term.

I've been wondering for a long time why we haven't seen anything like this: X PRIZE Healthspan.

The XPRIZE Foundation is proud to announce its newest competition, XPRIZE Healthspan. XPRIZE Healthspan is a 7-year, $101 million global competition to revolutionize the way we approach human aging.

Modern medicine focuses on treating symptoms of injury, illness, or disease once they develop. This reactive system extends life, but doesn't proactively improve health, leaving millions grappling with poor quality of life and related economic challenges in their later years.

Success from XPRIZE Healthspan would profoundly change our approach to aging and positively affect quality-of-life and healthcare costs. Working across all sectors, we can democratize health and create a future where aging is full of potential.

The thing is... if I found a way to reverse aging I could probably make more than $101m selling it.

League tables revealing failing NHS trusts and cancelled pay rises or dismissal for managers who don't turn things around are part of plans to improve the health service.

Keir Starmer's arrival at COP29, with a promise to drastically cut the UK's carbon emissions by 81%, will be a small ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy start to the climate talks.

Headlights illuminate a group of soldiers smoking and drinking steaming cups of coffee on the side of a road in northeastern Ukraine.

A serving Gloucestershire police officer has been arrested on suspicion of a terrorism offence.

A 29-year-old man has been jailed for more than three years for loading illicit TV streaming services onto Amazon Fire Sticks.

British author Samantha Harvey has won this year's Booker Prize with her book Orbital.

Fines of £10,000 for social media bosses who don't remove illegal knife adverts are being considered by the government.

The billionaire will partner with biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy to "dismantle" bureaucracy, Trump says.

Tweaking the routes of a small number of planes could reduce the warming effect of contrails by half and cost less than €4 per ticket, according to a study.

P&O Ferries spent more than £47m summarily sacking hundreds of seafarers in 2022, helping it cut losses by more than £125m and putting it on a path to profitability, according to accounts due to be published in the coming days.

The Post Office has announced that more than a hundred larger crown branches - those owned by the company directly - could close with the possible loss of hundreds of jobs.

Some people in Spain appear to have covered their cars in plastic wrap ahead of another approaching storm.

A human head has been found washed up on a beach in Florida, according to police.

Sara Sharif's murder-accused father has told jurors he "takes full responsibility" for the death of his daughter.

A picnic cottage enjoyed by Queen Victoria during her visits to Balmoral has been restored to its former glory by the National Trust for Scotland.

Actor Timothy West has died peacefully in his sleep aged 90, "with his friends and family at the end".

It’s the start of the work week, so for the IT administrators among us, I have another great article by friend of the website, Stefano Marinelli. This article covers migrating a Proxmox-based setup to FreeBSD with bhyve. The load is not particularly high, and the machines have good performance. Suddenly, however, I received a notification: one of the NVMe drives died abruptly, and the server rebooted. ZFS did its job, and everything remained sufficiently secure, but since it’s a leased server and already several years old, I spoke with the client and proposed getting more recent hardware and redoing the setup based on a FreeBSD host. ↫ Stefano Marinelli If you’re interested in moving one of your own setups, or one of your clients’ setups, from Linux to FreeBSD, this is a great place to start and get some ideas, tips, and tricks. Like I said, it’s Monday, and you need to get to work.

NetBSD is an open-source, Unix-like operating system known for its portability, lightweight design, and robustness across a wide array of hardware platforms. Initially released in 1993, NetBSD was one of the first open-source operating systems based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) lineage, alongside FreeBSD and OpenBSD. NetBSD’s development has been led by a collaborative community and is particularly recognized for its “clean” and well-documented codebase, a factor that has made it a popular choice among users interested in systems programming and cross-platform compatibility. ↫ André Machado I’m not really sure what to make of this article, since it mostly reads like an advertisement for NetBSD, but considering NetBSD is one of the lesser-talked about variants of an operating system family that already sadly plays second fiddle to the Linux behemoth, I don’t think giving it some additional attention is really hurting anybody. The article is still gives a solid overview of the history and strengths of NetBSD, which makes it a good introduction. I have personally never tried NetBSD, but it’s on my list of systems to try out on my PA-RISC workstation since from what I’ve heard it’s the only BSD which can possibly load up X11 on the Visualize FX10pro graphics card it has (OpenBSD can only boot to a console on this GPU). While I could probably coax some cobbled-together Linux installation into booting X11 on it, where’s the fun in that? Do any of you lovely readers use NetBSD for anything? FreeBSD and even OpenBSD are quite well represented as general purpose operating systems in the kinds of circles we all frequent, but I rarely hear about people using NetBSD other than explicitly because it supports some outdated, arcane architecture in 2024.

A long, long time ago, back when running BeOS as my main operating system had finally become impossible, I had a short stint running QNX as my one and only operating system. In 2004, before I joined OSNews and became its managing editor, I also wrote and published an article about QNX on OSNews, which is cringe-inducing to read over two decades later (although I was only 20 when I wrote that – I should be kind to my young self). Sadly, the included screenshots have not survived the several transitions OSNews has gone through since 2004. Anyway, back in those days, it was entirely possible to use QNX as a general purpose desktop operating system, mostly because of two things. First, the incredible Photon MicroGUI, an excellent and unique graphical environment that was a joy to use, and two, because of a small but dedicated community of enthousiasts, some of which QNX employees, who ported a ton of open source applications, from basic open source tools to behemoths like Thunderbird, the Mozilla Suite, and Firefox, to QNX. It even came with an easy-to-use package manager and associated GUI to install all of these applications without much hassle. Using QNX like this was a joy. It really felt like a tightly controlled, carefully crafted user experience, despite desktop use being so low on the priority list for the company that it might as well have not been on there at all. Not long after, I think a few of the people inside QNX involved with the QNX desktop community left the company, and the entire thing just fizzled out afterwards when the company was acquired by Harman Kardon. Not long after, it became clear the company lost all interest, a feeling only solidified once Blackberry acquired the company. Somewhere in between the company released some of its code under some not-quite-open-source license, accompanied by a rather lacklustre push to get the community interested again. This, too, fizzled out. Well, it seems the company is trying to reverse course, and has started courting the enthusiast community once again. This time, it’s called QNX Everywhere, and it involves making QNX available for non-commercial use for anyone who wants it. No, it’s not open source, and yes, it requires some hoops to jump through still, but it’s better than nothing. In addition, QNX also put a bunch of open source demos, applications, frameworks, and libraries on GitLab. One of the most welcome new efforts is a bootable QNX image for the Raspberry Pi 4 (and only the 4, sadly, which I don’t own). It comes with a basic set of demo application you can run from the command line, including a graphical web browser, but sadly, it does not seem to come with Photon microGUI or any modern equivalent. I’m guessing Photon hasn’t seen a ton of work since its golden days two decades ago, which might explain why it’s not here. There’s also a list of current open source ports, which includes chunks of toolkits like GTK and Qt, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Honestly, as cool as this is, it seems it’s mostly aimed at embedded developers instead of weird people who want to use QNX as a general purpose operating system, which makes total sense from QNX’ perspective. I hope Photon microGUI will make a return at some point, and it would be awesome – but I expect unlikely – if QNX could be released as open source, so that it would be more likely a community of enthusiasts could spring up around it. For now, without much for a non-developer like me to do with it, it’s not making me run out to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 just yet.

The current version of Windows on ARM contains Prism, Microsoft’s emulator that allows x86-64 code to run on ARM processors. While it was already relatively decent on the recent Snapdragon X platform, it could still be very hit-or-miss with what applications it would run, and especially games seemed to be problematic. As such, Microsoft has pushed out a major update to Prism that adds support for a whole bunch of extensions to the x86 architecture. This new support in Prism is already in limited use today in the retail version of Windows 11, version 24H2, where it enables the ability to run Adobe Premiere Pro 25 on Arm. Starting with Build 27744, the support is being opened to any x64 application under emulation. You may find some games or creative apps that were blocked due to CPU requirements before will be able to run using Prism on this build of Windows. At a technical level, the virtual CPU used by x64 emulated applications through Prism will now have support for additional extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture. These extensions include AVX and AVX2, as well as BMI, FMA, F16C, and others, that are not required to run Windows but have become sufficiently commonplace that some apps expect them to be present. You can see some of the new features in the output of a tool like Coreinfo64.exe. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc on the Windows Blog Hopefully this makes running existing x86 applications that don’t yet have an ARM version a more reliable affair for Windows on ARM users.

Earlier this year, a proposal was made to replace the primary edition of Fedora from the GNOME variant to the KDE variant. This proposal, while serious, was mostly intended to stir up discussion about the position of the Fedora KDE spin within the larger Fedora community, and it seems this has had its intended effect. A different, but related proposal, to make Fedora KDE equal in status to the Fedora GNOME variant, has been accepted. The original proposal read: After a few months of being live, the proposal has now been unanimously accepted, which means that starting with Fedora 42, the GNOME and KDE versions will have equal status, and thus will receive equal marketing and positioning on the website. Considering how many people really enjoy Fedora KDE, this is a great outcome, and probably the fairest way to handle the situation for a distribution as popular as Fedora. I use Fedora KDE on all my machines, so for me, this is great news.

More bad news from Mozilla. The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.” Announcing the layoffs in an email to all employees on October 30, the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director Nabiha Syed confirmed that two of the foundation’s major divisions — advocacy and global programs — are “no longer a part of our structure.” ↫ Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch This means Mozilla will no longer be advocating for an open web, privacy, and related ideals, which fits right in with the organisation’s steady decline into an ad-driven effort that also happens to be making a web browser used by, I’m sorry to say, effectively nobody. I just don’t know how many more signs people need to see before realising that the future of Firefox is very much at stake, and that we’re probably only a few years away from losing the only non-big tech browser out there. This should be a much bigger concern than it seems to be to especially the Linux and BSD world, who rely heavily on Firefox, without a valid alternative to shift to once the browser’s no longer compatible with the various open source requirements enforced by Linux distributions and the BSDs. What this could also signal is that the sword of Damocles dangling above Mozilla’s head is about to come down, and that the people involved know more than we do. Google is effectively bankrolling Mozilla – for about 80% of its revenue – but that deal has come under increasing scrutiny from regulars, and Google itself, too, must be wondering why they’re wasting money supporting a browser nobody’s using. We’re very close to a web ruled by Google and Apple. If that prospect doesn’t utterly terrify you, I honestly wonder what you’re doing here, reading this.

Steam has finally stopped working on several older Windows operating systems, following a warning from Valve that it planned to drop support earlier this year. With little fanfare, Windows 7 and Windows 8 gaming on Steam is no longer possible following the most recent Steam client update on November 5. ↫ Ben Stockton at PCGamesN It’s honestly wild that Valve supported Windows 7 and 8 for this long for Steam in the first place. They’ve been out of support for a long time, and at this point in time, less than 0.3% of Steam users were using Windows 7 or 8. Investing any resources in continuing to support them would be financially irresponsible, while also aiding a tiny bit in allowing people to use such unsupported, insecure systems to this day. I’m sure at least one of you is still rocking Windows 7 or 8 as your daily driver operating system, so I’m sorry if you don’t want to hear this, but it’s really, really time to move on. Buying a Windows 10 or 11 license on eBay or whatever costs a few euros at most – if you’re not eligible for one the free upgrade programs Microsoft ran – and especially Windows 10 should run just fine on pretty much anything Windows 7 or 8 runs on. Do note that with Windows 10, though, you’ll be back in the same boat next year.

Przestępcy przeszukują portale z ogłoszeniami, aby znaleźć potencjalne ofiary oszustwa. Oszust informuje, że jest chętny na zakup przedmiotu i że już za niego zapłacił, a sprzedający musi tylko odebrać środki na własne konto poprzez specjalną stronę. Oszut wysyła link do fałszywej bramki płatności. Podając na niej dane ofiara daje dostęp do konta przestępcom.

Głównym celem tego oszustwa jest zachęcenie potencjalnej ofiary do podania danych logowania do swojego konta bankowości internetowej, aby następnie wyłudzić przechowywane pieniądze.

Celem tego oszustwa jest nakłonienie ofiary do sparowania aplikacji obsługującej wiadomości SMS z urządzeniem sprawcy poprzez zeskanowanie kodu QR. Następnie dochodzi do obciążenia rachunku ofiary, a w niektórych przypadkach również do próby szantażu.

Fortinet opublikował informację o krytycznej podatności CVE-2022-42475 pozwalającej na zdalne wykonanie kodu bez uwierzytelniania w module SSL-VPN (sslvpnd) dla FortiOS. Podatność była aktywnie wykorzystywana w atakach jeszcze zanim jej istnienie zostało ujawnione.

Zespół CERT Polska zaobserwował nowy wariant oszustwa, w którym przestępcy wykorzystują wizerunek Ministerstwa Finansów. Celem tego oszustwa jest zachęcenie potencjalnej ofiary do udostępnienia swoich danych uwierzytelniających do bankowości internetowej.

Ostrzegamy przed kampanią phishingową ukierunkowaną na klientów serwisu Netflix. Celem przestępców jest wyłudzenie danych dostępowych do konta oraz poufnych informacji związanych z kartą płatniczą.

Microsoft opublikował informację o krytycznej podatności CVE-2023-23397 w aplikacji Outlook na systemie Windows. Może ona prowadzić do zdalnego przejęcia hasła domenowego, bez interakcji użytkownika. Podatność była aktywnie używana w atakach przez jedną z rosyjskich grup APT od kwietnia 2022 roku, w tym w Polsce. Rekomendujemy podjęcie natychmiastowych działań we wszystkich organizacjach, których użytkownicy korzystają z poczty poprzez klienta Microsoft Outlook.

W tym tygodniu doszło do publikacji dużego zbioru danych wykorzystywanych do logowania przez polskich użytkowników. W ramach tego wycieku udostępniono ponad milion unikalnych rekordów z loginem oraz hasłem do różnych stron. W związku z tym jednostki odpowiedzialne za cyberbezpieczeństwo w Polsce, w tym CERT Polska, podjęły odpowiednie działania w celu ograniczenia skutków tej sytuacji.

Od początku sierpnia CERT Polska jako jedyna instytucja w kraju i jeden z 7 CERT-ów w Europie może nadawać numery CVE, które służą identyfikacji i katalogowaniu publicznie ujawnionych podatności.

Firma Cisco opublikowała informację o krytycznej podatności CVE-2023-20198 w funkcjonalności Web User Interface oprogramowania Cisco IOS XE. Luka umożliwia nieautoryzowanemu złośliwemu użytkownikowi utworzenie konta administratora z poziomu interfejsu użytkownika i przejęcie kontroli nad urządzeniem docelowym.

Zespół CERT Polska oraz Służba Kontrwywiadu Wojskowego wraz z zagranicznymi partnerami wykryły, że Rosyjska Służba Wywiadu Zagranicznego (SVR) wykorzystuje podatność CVE-2023-42793 (w JetBrains TeamCity) do szeroko zakrojonych działań, skierowanych przeciwko podmiotom wytwarzającym oprogramowanie.

W oprogramowaniu PrestaShop Google Integrator firmy PrestaShow wykryto podatność typu SQL injection (CVE-2023-6921).

W ostatnich tygodniach zespół CERT Polska obserwuje wzmożoną kampanię ataków z użyciem szkodliwego oprogramowania Balada Injector, które infekuje strony oparte na WordPressie korzystając z podatności w niektórych popularnych wtyczkach.

We wtyczce Apaczka do platformy PrestaShop wykryto podatność typu Files or Directories Accessible to External Parties (CVE-2024-2759).

Nowoczesne technologie w obszarze cyberbezpieczeństwa są dla nas tylko narzędziem wspierającym nasze codzienne działania. To ludzie, którzy ich używają naprawdę dokonują zmian. W CERT Polska mamy takich ludzi, a 2023 rok przyniósł nam wiele istotnych zmian, o których opowiadamy w tej publikacji.

W oprogramowaniu Kioware for Windows wykryto 3 podatności różnego typu (CVE-2024-3459, CVE-2024-3460 oraz CVE-2024-3461).

Wybory do parlamentu europejskiego już w ten weekend, ale to wcale nie znaczy, że 10 czerwca ten tekst przestanie być aktualny. I to nawet nie dlatego, że w 2025 roku czekają nas wybory prezydenckie.