Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Have you been keeping up with the Pluto Fly-by? How cool is that? The ninth PLANET in our solar system (take THAT Neil Degrasse Tyson!) It looks very strange, very cold, and cool… ta dum dump! New Horizons’ mission rocks!

NASA – “New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.

The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago — mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system — and may still be in the process of building, says Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team leader Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.. That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.

Moore and his colleagues base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene. Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered — unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.

‘This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,’ says Moore.

Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.

‘This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The mountains are probably composed of Pluto’s water-ice ‘bedrock.’

Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks. ‘At Pluto’s temperatures, water-ice behaves more like rock,’ said deputy GGI lead Bill McKinnon of Washington University, St. Louis.

The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet. The image easily resolves structures smaller than a mile across.”

Firefox is blocking Flash, tons of folks are switching to HTML5 (which, of course, they should) and Adobe’s Flash is being hated on by computer geeks everywhere!

Adobe Secures Flash, With Help From Google

eWeek – By: Sean Michael Kerner – “Adobe is under tremendous pressure to do more to secure its Flash Player technology, which has been aggressively exploited in 2015. However, Adobe isn’t alone in its efforts to secure Flash, as a very key ally is contributing significantly to Flash’s defense—none other than Google.

Flash’s weaknesses are numerous, but common ones are use-after-free (UAF) memory vulnerabilities. In the last month, Adobe has patched Flash for 38 different Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), three of which were identified as zero-day exploits that were found in the breached materials of Italian security vendor Hacking Team.

However, the largest single source of Flash exploit discovery so far in July was not a zero-day exploit, but rather it was from Google’s Project Zero security initiative. Adobe credited Google with the discovery of 20 CVEs in its APSB15-16 security bulletin. But as it turns out, Google didn’t just report vulnerabilities in Flash; the company went a step further and is helping Adobe remediate the flaws and prevent them in the first place.

As of the Flash v18.0.0.209 update, which was released on July 14, Flash now includes new attack mitigations, courtesy of Google’s Project Zero security initiative.

Google security engineers Mark Brand and Chris Evans detail the full mitigation in a technical post, but what it really boils down to is protection for a common class of UAF exploits that take advantage of weaknesses in memory. To that end, there are now multiple mitigations integrated in the latest Flash release to reduce the attack surface. One of those mitigations is a technique known as heap partitioning.

‘Heap partitioning is a technique that isolates different types of objects on the heap from one another,’ the Google engineers explain. ‘Chrome uses heap partitioning extensively, and it has become a common defensive technique in multiple browsers. We have now introduced this technology into Flash.’
Another new mitigation that Google is helping Adobe with is improved randomization of the Flash memory heap. The idea of memory randomization is not a new one. On Windows operating systems, address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a well-established technology. Google, however, is specifically improving Flash’s memory in a stronger, more randomized way than what the operating system enables on its own.

The Google security engineers admit that it’s a ‘cat and mouse’ game with attackers, with each new mitigation likely to produce a new counter-mitigation from hackers.

‘We’ll be looking out for attackers’ attempts to adapt, and devising further mitigations based on what we see,’ the Google engineers wrote. ‘Perhaps more importantly, we’re also devising a next level of defenses based on what we expect we might see.’

Google’s efforts in helping to secure Flash make a whole lot of sense given that the Chrome browser directly integrates Flash. As a result, a Flash vulnerability makes all Chrome users vulnerable, and that’s not a good situation for Google.
However, despite the tough month that Adobe has had with Flash security, things are changing. Adobe and its partners are not standing still waiting for the next exploit; rather, they are putting in place proactive techniques to limit future risks.

The challenges of UAF are not limited to Adobe Flash, and Google isn’t the only security vendor that has a few ideas on remediations either. In February, Microsoft awarded Hewlett-Packard researchers $125,000 in awards as part of the Microsoft Mitigation Bypass Bounty and Blue Hat Bonus for Defense Program. HP’s research was focused on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and UAF vulnerabilities. At the time of the award, Brian Gorenc, manager of vulnerability research for HP Security Research, told eWEEK that the UAF protection techniques HP provided to Microsoft are specific to the IE browser, though in the future they might be able to help others. HP plans on publishing a full white paper on its UAF mitigation at the end of the year, according to Gorenc.

Although Adobe’s Flash has been strongly impacted in 2015, UAF is a common scourge of modern Web applications. Even as attackers exploit UAF weaknesses, there are improved defenses in the works to secure the Web—thanks to the work of Adobe, Google and HP.”

Can you say, “It’s because of the movies?”

People Now Spend An Average Of 40 Minutes On YouTube Per Viewing Session

Tech Times – By: Christian de Looper – While at one time, people would have used their smartphones to watch a targeted YouTube video lasting maybe five minutes, the average YouTube viewing session on mobile devices is now reportedly 40 minutes.

This is double what it was last year — highlighting the increasing tendency to watch videos on mobile devices rather than on desktop computers.

Google didn’t reveal what kind of content people were looking at for that long, and while watching some music videos and movie trailers – scattered throughout the day – could certainly add up to a lot of viewing time, the 40-minute figure represents uninterrupted viewing.

Watching videos on YouTube has grown in popularity over the past few years, with apps like Vine and Periscope greatly contributing to video-watching on mobile devices. Of course, these apps are much younger than the likes of YouTube, but they have still become hugely popular in a very small period of time.

YouTube isn’t just stopping at mobile use. A number of key executives at Google have referenced the fact that YouTube is going after more traditional TV, saying that YouTube reaches more people between the ages of 18 and 49 than any cable television network.

‘The number of users coming to YouTube, who start at the YouTube homepage similar to the way they might turn on their TV, is up over three times year-over-year,’ said Omid Kordestani, Google chief business officer, in an interview with Business Insider. ‘Plus, once users are in YouTube, they are spending more time per session watching videos. On mobile, the average viewing session is now more than 40 minutes, up more than 50 percent year-over-year.’

These findings are extremely important for YouTube at this point in its growth. The site is no longer just a place for people to upload their videos; it’s now a place for people to discover new content — both curated and otherwise.

Of course, YouTube still has a ways to go before well and truly replacing traditional TV viewing. In the U.S., people watch traditional ‘linear’ TV for almost five hours per day, while they use their computer and smartphones to go online for about half that time. Not only that, but while YouTube is becoming more valuable for advertisers, TV is still the biggest avenue for advertisers. Last year, global TV spending reached a massive $230 billion, while online video advertising sat at $11 billion.