Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Justin Tallis | Getty Images)

The EU is poised to unveil a landmark law on Friday that will force Big Tech to police their platforms more aggressively over illegal content, marking the latest move by regulators to curb the power of large technology groups.

The controversial practice of targeting users online based on their religion, gender or sexual preferences will be banned under the Digital Services Act, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions.

The DSA is a legislative package that sets for the first time the rules on how Big Tech should keep users safe online. It comes a month after the EU passed the Digital Markets Act, as it pushes ahead with the biggest overhaul of the laws governing the world’s biggest technology companies in more than two decades.

Enlarge (credit: Nicholas Skopal)

Hundreds of huge stone jars lie partially buried on hillsides and ridges in northeastern India. A recent survey found 65 jars at four previously undocumented sites, and the survey’s leaders say there are probably many more sites still hidden in the area’s mountainous forests. The jars are part of a whole landscape of megaliths carved by an ancient Indian culture which—so far—archaeologists know little about.

Enormous burial urns

Sometime in India’s ancient past, people carved giant jars, some up to two meters wide and three meters tall, from solid sandstone blocks. They transported the jars to hillsides and ridges and lined them up carefully, with a good view of the lowlands. Today, hundreds of those jars are in various states of disrepair, spread across a 300 square kilometer swath of Assam, a state in northeast India.

Archaeologists say the jars are probably massive burial urns, but almost nothing is known about the people who made them. It’s not even clear exactly how old the jars are, because the types of dating that could provide that information haven’t been done yet. “We still don’t know who made the giant jars or where they lived,” said Australian National University archaeologist Nicholas Skopal, a co-author of the recent paper, in a statement. “It seems as though there aren’t any living ethnic groups in India associated with the jars.”

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at gigafactory opening party in Austin, Texas, on April 7, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Suzanne Cordeiro)

On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk urged a judge to reject a request for a gag order that would prevent him from continuing to publicly claim that his infamous “Funding secured” tweet was accurate.

The motion for a temporary restraining order “asks this Court to trample on Elon Musk’s First Amendment rights by barring him from publicly discussing this case or its underlying facts. Plaintiff’s motion cannot be reconciled with the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech and should be denied,” Musk’s lawyer wrote in a court filing Wednesday.

Musk and Tesla face a class action lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California over Musk’s August 2018 claim that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. Musk and Tesla previously agreed to pay $20 million each in penalties and impose controls on Musk’s social media statements to settle a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which said that “Musk’s misleading tweets” about taking Tesla private caused the stock price to jump “and led to significant market disruption.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Organizations using newer versions of Oracle’s Java framework woke up on Wednesday to a disquieting advisory: A critical vulnerability can make it easy for adversaries to forge TLS certificates and signatures, two-factor authentication messages, and authorization credentials generated by a range of widely used open standards.

The vulnerability, which Oracle patched on Tuesday, affects the company’s implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm in Java versions 15 and above. ECDSA is an algorithm that uses the principles of elliptic curve cryptography to authenticate messages digitally. A key advantage of ECDSA is the smaller size of the keys it generates, compared to RSA or other crypto algorithms, making it ideal for use in standards including FIDO-based 2FA, the Security Assertion Markup Language, OpenID, and JSON.

Doctor Who and the psychic paper

Neil Madden, the researcher at security firm ForgeRock who discovered the vulnerability, likened it to the blank identity cards that make regular appearances in the sci-fi show Doctor Who. The psychic paper the cards are made of causes the person looking at it to see whatever the protagonist wants them to see.