Long-time Slashdot reader Ammalgam writes: If you're planning to install Windows 11, you should make sure you download it from official sources. This is because, people who are using pirated or fake methods to get Windows 11 are also downloading malware along with it, according to Kaspersky.

The particular file referenced is called 86307_windows 11 build 21996.1 x64 + activator.exe. While it sounds like it includes Windows 11 build 21996.1, and an installer that will automatically activate Windows for you there are some red flags. First, it's only 1.75GB, so while people who want to install Windows 11 might think that's a large file that could be Windows, a real Windows 11 ISO is about 4.87GB...
"The 1.75 GB file looks legitimate. But most of this space consists of one DLL file that contains a lot of useless information," explains Mint.

And Kaspersky adds that "it even comes with a license agreement (which few people read) calling it a 'download manager for 86307_windows 11 build 21996.1 x64 + activator' and noting that it would also install some sponsored software. If you accept the agreement, a variety of malicious programs will be installed on your machine."

A post on Mozilla's security blog calls FTP "by now one of the oldest protocols still in use" — and it's suffering from "a number of serious security issues." The biggest security risk is that FTP transfers data in cleartext, allowing attackers to steal, spoof and even modify the data transmitted. To date, many malware distribution campaigns launch their attacks by compromising FTP servers and downloading malware on an end user's device using the FTP protocol.

Aligning with our intent to deprecate non-secure HTTP and increase the percentage of secure connections, we, as well as other major web browsers, decided to discontinue support of the FTP protocol. Removing FTP brings us closer to a fully-secure web which is on a path to becoming HTTPS only and any modern automated upgrading mechanisms such as HSTS or also Firefox's HTTPS-Only Mode, which automatically upgrade any connection to become secure and encrypted do not apply to FTP.

The FTP protocol itself has been disabled by default since version 88 and now the time has come to end an era and discontinue the support for this outdated and insecure protocol — Firefox 90 will no longer support the FTP protocol.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GameSpot: Amazon [...] is now bricking high-end graphics cards with a beta for its MMO, New World, according to players. Amazon has now responded to downplay the incident but says it plans to implement a frame rate cap on the game's menus. According to users on Twitter and Reddit, New World has been frying extremely high-end graphics cards, namely Nvidia's RTX 3090. It's worth noting that while the RTX 3090 has an MSRP of $1,500, it's often selling for much more due to scarcity and scalpers, so players could easily be losing upwards of $2,000 if their card stops working.

Specifically, it seems that one model of the RTX 3090 is being consistently fried by New World. On Reddit, a lengthy thread of over 600 posts includes multiple users claiming that their EVGA 3090 graphics cards are now little more than expensive paperweights after playing the New World beta. The "red light of death," an indicator that something is disastrously wrong with your EVGA 3090, doesn't pop up consistently for players though. Some report their screen going black after a cutscene in the game while others have said that simply using the brightness calibration screen was enough to brick their card. Amazon Games says a patch is on the way to prevent further issues. "Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played. We've received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World," said Amazon Games in an official statement.

"New World makes standard DirectX calls as provided by the Windows API. We have seen no indication of widespread issues with 3090s, either in the beta or during our many months of alpha testing. The New World Closed Beta is safe to play. In order to further reassure players, we will implement a patch today that caps frames per second on our menu screen. We're grateful for the support New World is receiving from players around the world, and will keep listening to their feedback throughout Beta and beyond."

New World is currently set to launch for PC on August 31.

Facebook shared some details about its experimental Passthrough API to enable new kinds of mixed reality apps for Oculus Quest 2. UploadVR reports: The feature may also serve as the foundation for the company's long-term efforts in augmented reality, effectively turning Quest 2 into a $299 AR developer kit. When asked if the feature is coming to the original Oculus Quest, a Facebook representative replied "today, this is only available for Quest 2." The new feature will be available to Unity developers in an upcoming software development kit release "with support for other development platforms coming in the future." Facebook says apps using the API "cannot access, view, or store images or videos of your physical environment from the Oculus Quest 2 sensors" and raw images from the four on-board cameras "are processed on-device."

The following capabilities will be available with the passthrough API, according to Facebook: "Composition: You can composite Passthrough layers with other VR layers via existing blending techniques like hole punching and alpha blending. Styling: You'll be able to apply styles and tint to layers from a predefined list, including applying a color overlay to the feed, rendering edges, customizing opacity, and posterizing. Custom Geometry: You can render Passthrough images to a custom mesh instead of relying on the default style mesh -- for example, to project Passthrough on a planar surface."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: During the depths of the U.S. coronavirus pandemic, cars sat idly in driveways, city streets were deserted, onetime commuters worked from bed -- and it was much, much easier to find a parking spot. All of which was devastating news for the small cadre of tech startups dedicated to helping people find and reserve places to park. For SpotHero, which makes an app that helps drivers locate parking spaces, business was down 90% in April 2020 compared with February. The company laid off half its employees. "It was a really hard time for us," Chief Executive Officer Mark Lawrence says. Now, at last, drivers are back, and so is the familiar American pastime of hunting for a parking spot. In the U.S., traffic was up 55% in April from a year earlier, according to the Federal Highway Administration. And although urban roads were slower to refill than their suburban counterparts, traffic in such cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., finally touched pre-pandemic levels again in June, according to Inrix, which analyzes mobility data.

The result has been a wave of new customers for SpotHero and companies like it. SpotHero bookings started to come back in January, then accelerated. "It was slowly, then suddenly," Lawrence says. Now the startup is profitable for the first time in 10 years, he says, thanks in part to a surge in car ownership spurred by people avoiding public transit. At FlashParking, which makes two spot-finding apps and helps event companies and garages coordinate availability, demand is higher than it was before the pandemic in some cities. Meanwhile, SpotAngels, which uses crowd input to create maps of nearby open spaces, says monthly revenue since its previous high in February 2020 had tripled by May 2021. "It's interesting to see how dark it was, and can get," SpotHero's Lawrence says, "and then have such optimism now."

Before the pandemic, the industry was in crisis, says Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking. The rise of such ride-sharing services as Uber and Lyft had meant that many parking garages at stadiums and the like were forced to retrofit their spaces for other uses, such as mini-distribution centers for packages. Post-pandemic, though, parking companies are benefiting from a renewed love of personal space. "I do think right now there's a little bit of a psychological issue with taking public transit or taking Uber," Ben-Joseph says. He also thinks parking apps in particular may be benefiting from the lack of desire to touch kiosk screens or hand over cash to an attendant.

In a post titled "What Wear OS 3 means for you," Google provides a few more details about its upcoming Wear OS update plans, which will be the first major Wear OS update since Wear OS 2 in 2018. Unfortunately, as Ars Technica points out, the list of devices receiving the new update are limited to some of Mobvoi's TicWatch devices and Fossil Group's new generation of devices launching later this year. Older Wear OS devices featuring the Wear 3100 SoC, which makes up almost all the current Wear OS devices, will not support the new update. From the report: We still have next to no information about Wear OS 3, but there are a few tidbits in the upgrade announcement indicating that things will be very different. One line in the announcement lays out the requirement for a mandatory factory reset for any Wear 4100 devices upgrading from Wear OS 2 to version 3. Wear OS 3 is apparently so different that user data can't be ported over, and all local data will need to be wiped. We've certainly heard Google and Samsung talk about how Wear OS 3 will combine the "best of Wear OS and Tizen," indicating that even the base OS might be rebuilt.

Google also vaguely tells 4100 upgraders that "in some limited cases, the user experience will also be impacted." Is this a reference to the 4100 performance or the app selection and features compared to Wear OS 2? It's hard to say. Because Wear OS 3 will be so different, Google says it won't force the upgrade on 4100 users: "We expect that for these reasons, some of you will prefer to keep your current Wear OS experience. Therefore, we will offer the system upgrade on an opt-in basis for eligible devices. We will provide more details in advance of the update so you can make an informed decision. We expect our partners to be able to roll out the system update starting in mid to second half of 2022."

The Samsung Watch with Wear OS 3 is expected to ship sometime in August 2021, so the partner time of "2H 2022" -- potentially a year after Samsung's release -- is surprisingly late. Android has typically been very good at letting partners get early access to code, so (at least the ones that care) can be ready for launch, but this suggests Samsung is getting a huge head start. Google's message that upcoming Fossil watches, launching later this year, will be "eligible for upgrade" to Wear OS 3 also suggests that we might see Wear OS 2 devices launch from other companies after Samsung launches Wear OS 3 next month.

The CEO of NSO Group, whose spyware tools have reportedly been used to target journalists and activists, says that people who aren't criminals shouldn't be afraid of being surveilled AppleInsider reports: Shalev Hulio, 39, recently spoke to Forbes after investigations indicated that NSO Group's Pegasus spyware was used by authoritarian governments to hack and surveil the mobile devices of world leaders, high-profile journalists, and activists. NSO Group says that it sells its tools to governments to help them catch serious criminals like terrorists or gangsters. However, Hulio admitted that it can't control what governments ultimately do with the tools. "We are selling our products to governments. We have no way to monitor what those governments do," he said.

Hulio did note that NSO Group has mechanisms in place to detect when abuse happens so that the company can "shut them down." He says that NSO Group has "done it before and will continue to do so. On the other hand, he said that NSO Group shouldn't be responsible for government misuse. Additionally, Hulio said that the average smartphone has nothing to worry about. While NSO Group's spyware can break into the latest iPhones running up-to-date software, often without any action from the user, it's only aimed at criminals. "The people that are not criminals, not the Bin Ladens of the world -- there's nothing to be afraid of. They can absolutely trust on the security and privacy of their Google and Apple devices," Hulio said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SpaceX can keep launching broadband satellites despite a lawsuit filed by Viasat, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. Viasat sued the Federal Communications Commission in May and asked judges for a stay that would halt SpaceX's ongoing launches of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that power Starlink Internet service. To get a stay, Viasat had to show that it is likely to win its lawsuit alleging that the FCC improperly approved the satellite launches. A three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was not persuaded, saying in a short order that "Viasat has not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review." The judges did grant a motion to expedite the appeal, however, so the case should move faster than normal.

You can now block people in Google Drive. From a report: A notification pops up on your phone: "Click here for hot XXX action!" It's Google Drive again. Someone shared a document containing that title, and now your phone is begging you to look at it. Even if you ban Google Drive from generating phone notifications, you'll still get emails. If you block the emails, you'll have to see the spam when you click on the "shared" section of Google Drive. The problem is that Drive document sharing was built with no spam-management tools. Anyone who gets a hold of your email is considered to be an important sharer of valid documents, and there has been nothing you can do about it -- until now.

Google officially acknowledged the problem back in 2019, and the company said it was making spam controls "a priority." Now, more than two years later, Google is finally rolling out the most basic of spam tools to Google Drive sharing -- you can block individual email addresses! The company announced this feature in May, but the tool is rolling out to users over the next 15 days. Soon, once the spam arrives in your Google Drive, you'll be able to click the menu button next to the item and choose "block user." Drive sharing works just like email spam. Anyone can share a drive file with you if they know your address. Documents that have been shared with you still automatically show up in your Drive collection without your consent. There's no way to turn off sharing, to limit sharing to approved users, or to limit it to existing contacts. It's a free-for-all.

Could a flexible processor stuck on your produce track the freshness of your cantaloupe? That's the idea behind the latest processor from UK computer chip designer Arm, which says such a device could be manufactured for pennies by printing circuits directly onto paper, cardboard or cloth. From a report: The technology could give trillions of everyday items such as clothes and food containers the ability to collect, process and transmit data across the internet -- something that could be as convenient for retailers as it is concerning for privacy advocates.

In recent decades, processors have reduced in size and price to the point that they are now commonly used in everything from televisions to washing machines and watches. But almost all chips manufactured today are rigid devices created on silicon wafers in highly specialised and costly factories where dozens of complex chemical and mechanical processes take up to eight weeks from start to finish. Now, Arm has developed a 32-bit processor called PlasticARM with circuits and components that are printed onto a plastic substrate, just as a printer deposits ink on paper. James Myers at Arm says the processor can run a variety of programs, although it currently uses read-only memory so is only able to execute the code it was built with. Future versions will use fully programmable and flexible memory.

New submitter SofiaWW writes: A few days ago, at Microsoft Inspire, it was announced that Windows 11 would ship with dark mode activated by default. This was not a case of rumor or speculation, this was an announcement made at an official Microsoft event by a Microsoft employee. But now it transpires that the statement was not correct. Microsoft has now clarified that it "will ship Windows 11 SKUs in light mode on by default." No explanation for the miscommunications has yet been given.

Hardcore porn was embedded all over several regular websites late Thursday because a porn company has purchased the domain of a popular, defunct video hosting site. From a report: As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed.

Facebook's acquisition of U.S. customer service startup Kustomer is set to trigger a full-scale EU antitrust investigation next month, Reuters reported Friday, citing three people familiar with the matter. From the report: The world's largest social network, which announced the deal in November, is looking to the deal to scale up its instant messaging app WhatsApp, whose usage has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic. The European Commission will conclude its preliminary review of the deal on Aug. 2 after which it will begin an in-depth 90-day investigation, the people said. Facebook has until July 26 to offer concessions to stave off the investigation but is unlikely to do so because of the difficulty of finding the right remedies to address competition concerns, the people said on condition of anonymity.

China is considering asking companies that offer tutoring on the school curriculum to go non-profit, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, as part of a sweeping set of constraints that could decimate the country's $100 billion education tech industry. Shares sank. From a report: In rules currently being mulled, the platforms will likely no longer be allowed to raise capital or go public, the people said, asking to not be identified because the information is not public. Listed firms will also probably no longer be allowed to invest in or acquire education firms teaching school subjects while foreign capital will also be barred from the sector, one of the people said. Local regulators will stop approving new after-school education firms seeking to offer tutoring on China's compulsory syllabus and require extra scrutiny of existing online platforms, the people said. Vacation and weekend tutoring on school subjects will also be banned, they said. Changes may still occur as the rules haven't been published.

Snapchat is growing faster than it has since 2017, the year it went public. The Verge reports: On Thursday, the camera-based messaging app said it added 13 million daily users during the second quarter, a 23 percent increase from the year-ago period. That means 293 million people use Snapchat every day around the world, up from 173 million this time four years ago. (Twitter reported 206 million daily users in the second quarter, by comparison.) Snap's revenue also soared 116 percent to $982 million, making it a faster growing business than Twitter or Facebook.

The new numbers solidify one of the most impressive turnaround stories in tech. They also reflect how tech companies have benefited throughout the pandemic as people increasingly spend more time online. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has said he expects the app's user base to actually grow faster as pandemic lockdowns end, since Snapchat is designed to be used out and about with friends.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just one week after Google's DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure -- a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In the very near future, all of these structures will be released under a Creative Commons license via the European Bioinformatics Institute, which already hosts a major database of protein structures. In a press conference associated with the paper's release, DeepMind's Demis Hassabis made clear that the company isn't stopping there. In addition to the work described in the paper, the company will release structural predictions for the genomes of 20 major research organisms, from yeast to fruit flies to mice. In total, the database launch will include roughly 350,000 protein structures.
[...]
At some point in the near future (possibly by the time you read this), all this data will be available on a dedicated website hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute, a European Union-funded organization that describes itself in part as follows: "We make the world's public biological data freely available to the scientific community via a range of services and tools." The AlphaFold data will be no exception; once the above link is live, anyone can use it to download information on the human protein of their choice. Or, as mentioned above, the mouse, yeast, or fruit fly version. The 20 organisms that will see their data released are also just a start. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said that over the next few months, the team will target every gene sequence available in DNA databases. By the time this work is done, over 100 million proteins should have predicted structures. Hassabis wrapped up his part of the announcement by saying, "We think this is the most significant contribution AI has made to science to date." It would be difficult to argue otherwise. Further reading: Google details its protein-folding software, academics offer an alternative (Ars Technica)

Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler plans to invest more than 40 billion euros, or $47 billion, between 2022 and 2030 to develop battery-electric vehicles, and be ready for an all-electric car market by 2030. NBC News reports: Outlining its strategy for an electric future, the German luxury carmaker said on Thursday it would, with partners, build eight battery plants as it ramps up EV production, and that from 2025 all new vehicle platforms would only make electric cars. "We really want to go for it ... and be dominantly, if not all electric, by the end of the decade," Chief Executive Ola Kallenius told Reuters, adding that spending on traditional combustion-engine technology would be "close to zero" by 2025. However, Daimler stopped short of giving a hard deadline for ending sales of fossil-fuel cars.

Daimler said that as of 2025, it expects electric and hybrid electric cars to make up 50 percent of sales, earlier than its previous forecast that this would happen by 2030. The carmaker will unveil three electric platforms -- one to cover its range of passenger cars and SUVs, one for vans and one for high-performance vehicles -- that will be launched in 2025. Four of its new battery plants will be in Europe and one in the United States. Daimler said it would announce new European partners for its battery production plans soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: MITRE has shared this year's top 25 list of most common and dangerous weaknesses plaguing software throughout the previous two years. MITRE developed the top 25 list using Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) data from 2019 and 2020 obtained from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) (roughly 27,000 CVEs). "A scoring formula is used to calculate a ranked order of weaknesses that combines the frequency that a CWE is the root cause of a vulnerability with the projected severity of its exploitation," MITRE explained. "This approach provides an objective look at what vulnerabilities are currently seen in the real world, creates a foundation of analytical rigor built on publicly reported vulnerabilities instead of subjective surveys and opinions, and makes the process easily repeatable."

MITRE's 2021 top 25 bugs are dangerous because they are usually easy to discover, have a high impact, and are prevalent in software released during the last two years. They can also be abused by attackers to potentially take complete control of vulnerable systems, steal targets' sensitive data, or trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) following successful exploitation. The list [here] provides insight to the community at large into the most critical and current software security weaknesses.

Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would strip away the liability shield that social media platforms hold dear when those companies are found to have boosted anti-vaccine conspiracies and other kinds of health misinformation. From a report: The Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), would create a new carve-out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold platforms liable for algorithmically-promoted health misinformation and conspiracies. Platforms rely on Section 230 to protect them from legal liability for the vast amount of user-created content they host.

"For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans," Klobuchar said. "These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation." The bill would specifically alter Section 230's language to revoke liability protections in the case of "health misinformation that is created or developed through the interactive computer service" if that misinformation is amplified through an algorithm. The proposed exception would only kick in during a declared national public health crisis, like the advent of Covid-19, and wouldn't apply in normal times.

India's central bank is considering launching a digital currency, according to a top executive, giving a clear indication of its intentions for the first time after previously stating that it was studying the idea. From a report: T Rabi Sankar, the deputy governor of Reserve Bank of India, said at a conference today that the central bank is considering introducing the nation's digital currency in a "phased" manner while legal changes are made to the South Asian nation's foreign-exchange rules and IT laws. The digital currency, which will be backed by sovereign, will lower the economy's reliance on cash, enable cheaper and smoother international settlements, and protect people from the volatility of privacy cryptocurrencies, he said. "Every idea has to wait for its time, and the time for CBDC [central bank digital currency] is near. We have carefully evaluated the risks," he told an audience at a conference held by think-tank Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.