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TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Users' Pushes

GitHub's website remains broken after a data storage system failed roughly four hours ago.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from EurekAlert: Air pollution in the U.S. has decreased since about 1990, and a new study conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill now shows that this air quality improvement has brought substantial public health benefits. The study, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, found that deaths related to air pollution were nearly halved between 1990 and 2010. The team's analyses showed that deaths related to air pollution exposure in the U.S. decreased by about 47 percent, dropping from about 135,000 deaths in 1990 to 71,000 in 2010. These improvements in air quality and public health in the U.S. coincided with increased federal air quality regulations, and have taken place despite increases in population, energy and electricity use, and vehicle miles traveled between 1990 and 2010. [...] Still, despite clear improvements, air pollution remains an important public health issue in the U.S. The estimated 71,000 deaths in 2010 translates to 1 of every 35 deaths in the U.S. -- that's as many deaths as we see from all traffic accidents and all gun shootings combined.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Github engineers are trying to repair the data storage system underpinning the code hosting website, which has been presenting users with a "What!?" error for much of the Sunday. From a report: Depending on where you are, you may have been working on some Sunday evening programming, or getting up to speed with work on a Monday morning, using resources on GitHub.com -- and possibly failing miserably as a result of the outage. From about 4pm US West Coast time on Sunday, the website has been stuttering and spluttering. Specifically, the site is still up and serving pages -- it's just intermittently serving out-of-date files, and ignoring submitted Gists, bug reports, and posts. Sometimes, it appears to be serving a read-only cache or older backup of itself, although some fresh code pushes are coming through onto the site. From the status page, it appears a data storage system died, forcing the platform's engineers to move the dot-com's files over to another box. In the meantime, some older versions of files and repos are being served to visitors and users. "We're continuing to work on migrating a data storage system in order to restore access to GitHub.com," the team said just after 5pm PT, adding in the past few minutes: "We are continuing to repair a data storage system for GitHub.com. You may see inconsistent results during this process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been spotted in the LIVE555 media streaming library used by popular media players such as VLC and MPlayer. "Maintained by the company Live Networks, the library works with RTP / RTCP, RTSP or SIP protocols, with the ability to process video and audio formats such as MPEG, H.265, H.264, H.263 +, VP8, DV, JPEG, MPEG, AAC, AMR, AC-3, and Vorbis," reports Hackread. From the report: These findings (CVE-2018-4013) have left millions of users of media players vulnerable to cyber attacks, according to Lilith Wyatt, a researcher at the Cisco Talos Intelligence Group. In this case, the flaw lies in the HTTP packet parsing functionality, which analyzes HTTP headers for RTSP tunneling over HTTP, explains. An update has already been issued to address the vulnerability. Therefore, if you are using any of the vulnerable media players make sure they are updated to the latest version.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steeds vaker ligt ons lot in handen van grote bergen data en snelle rekenmethodes. Ze beïnvloeden welke premie je betaalt voor je verzekering, welke advertenties je te zien krijgt en of je staande wordt gehouden door de politie. Kunnen we in tijden van big data blind vertrouwen op cijfers? Spoiler alert: nee.

Matthew Paul Argall has added a photo to the pool:

Camera used: Kodak KB10
Film used: Kodak Ultramax 400

Location: Ferntree Gully, Victoria, Australia.

Facebook heeft naar verluidt meerdere beveiligingsbedrijven benaderd voor een overname. Het bedrijf rondt mogelijk nog voor het einde van het jaar een overname van een 'groot' beveiligingsbedrijf af.

Het Chinese Oppo probeert voet aan wal te krijgen in Europa met deze Find X. Het bijzondere eraan is het uitschuifbare deel waarin de camera's en gezichtsherkenning zitten.