Scientists have detected new types of organic compounds in the plumes that have been erupting from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Space.com reports: NASA's Cassini spacecraft collected invaluable data and images of Saturn and its moons over the approximately 20 years that the mission took place. While the mission ended on Sept. 15, 2017, with the craft diving toward the planet in a "Grand Finale," scientists continue to study the wealth of data that they gathered during the mission. In one new study, scientists looked at the material that Enceladus ejects from its core using hydrothermal vents. The material mixes with water in the moon's subsurface ocean and is then emitted as water vapor and icy grains.

In studying these ejections, the team found organic molecules that are condensed onto these grains and which contain oxygen and nitrogen. This comes after the first discovery of organics on the moon in 2018. Similar compounds on Earth take part in the chemical reactions that form amino acids, which are the organic compounds that combine to form proteins and are essential to life as we know it. On Earth, energy, or heat, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor helps to fuel these amino acid-producing reactions. With these findings, scientists have suggested that perhaps something similar is happening on Enceladus and the hydrothermal vents under its subsurface ocean are aiding in the creation of amino acids on the moon. "If the conditions are right, these molecules coming from the deep ocean of Enceladus could be on the same reaction pathway as we see here on Earth. We don't yet know if amino acids are needed for life beyond Earth, but finding the molecules that form amino acids is an important piece of the puzzle," Nozair Khawaja, who led the research team from the Free University of Berlin, said in a statement.

Security researchers at IBM have found evidence that hackers have been working on creating malicious scripts they can deploy on commercial-grade "Layer 7" routers to steal payment card details. From a report: This discovery is a game-changer in what researchers call Magecart attacks, also known as web skimming. These are attacks where hackers plant malicious code on an online store that records and steals payment card details. Until now, Magecart-specific code was only delivered at the website level, hidden inside JavaScript or PHP files. However, this new discovery is an escalation of Magecart attacks to a new level, where the malicious code is injected at the router level, rather than being added by hackers on outdated websites.

Layer 7, or L7, routers are a type of commercial, heavy-duty router that's usually installed on large networks, such as hotels, malls, airports, casinos, government networks, public spaces, and others. They work like any other router, except with the added benefit of being able to manipulate traffic at the seventh layer (application level) of the OSI networking model -- meaning they can react to traffic based on more than just IP addresses, such as cookies, domain names, browser types, and more. In a report published today, researchers with the IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) team said they found evidence that a well-known hacker group has been testing Magecart scripts to deploy on L7 routers.

"The US military has been forced to apologise for tweeting that it would use stealth-bombers on 'millenials' who try to storm Area 51," reports Yahoo News UK: More than two million people signed up to a Facebook event recently which encouraged atendees to visit the top secret base in Nevada. But only a few thousand UFO enthusiasts turned up on Friday to the facility, which is rumoured to contain secrets about aliens. As hordes of enthusiasts turned up the PR arm of the US military, called the Defence Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), tweeted: "The last thing #Millennials will see if they attempt the #area51raid today" with a picture of military officers in front of a stealth bomber.

Shortly afterwards the tweet was deleted and the unit apologised saying it "in no way" reflects their stance... "It was inappropriate and we apologize for this mistake."

Around 1,000 people visited the facility's gates on Friday and at least six were arrested by police.

The Storm Area 51 invitation spawned festivals in the tiny nearby towns of Rachel and Hiko, more than two hours' drive from Las Vegas. Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee estimated late on Thursday that about 1,500 people had gathered at the festival sites, and more than 150 made the trip several additional miles on bone-rattling dirt roads to get within selfie distance of the gates.... "It's public land," the sheriff said. "They're allowed to go to the gate as long as they don't cross the boundary."
Most of the arrests were for "misdemeanor trespassing on base property," which carries a $1,000 fine, according to the article. "In the end, no one actually 'stormed' Area 51, although deputies in rural Nye County resorted to 'heated warnings' to disperse as many as 200 people," reports the Associated Press.

In another article the news service also quotes Lincoln County emergency services chief Eric Holt as saying resources had been mustered to handle up to 30,000 people and calling the low turnout a "best-case" scenario... Although there were two car crashes involving cows. "The cows died, but motorists weren't hurt."

The main festival apparently drew 3,000 attendees, while the rival "Area 51 Basecamp" festival sold just 500 tickets for their Friday concert, prompting them to cancel their Saturday concert altogether. Its promoter told the Associated Press, "It was a gamble financially. We lost."

"Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian," reports Phoronix: Stemming from elogind being blocked from transitioning to testing and the lack of clarity into that, Hartman was pulled in to try to help mediate the matter and get to the bottom of the situation with a lack of cooperation between the elogind and systemd maintainers for Debian as well as the release team. Elogind is used by some distributions as an implementation of systemd's logind, well, outside of systemd as a standalone daemon. Elogind is one of the pieces to the puzzle for trying to maintain a modern, systemd-free Linux distribution.

Various issues were raised that are trying to be worked through albeit many Debian developers face time limitations and other factors like emotional exhaustion. Hartman noted in his August notes, "I think we may be approaching a point where we need to poll the project -- to have a GR and ask ourselves how committed we are to the different parts of this init diversity discussion. Reaffirming our support for sysvinit and elogind would be one of the options in any such GR. If that option passed, we'd expect all the maintainers involved to work together or to appoint and empower people who could work on this issue. It would be fine for maintainers not to be involved so long as they did not block progress. And of course we would hold the discussions to the highest standards of respect."

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from Phoronix, detailing a new set of systemd capabilities shown off by lead developer Lennart Poettering at the annual All Systems Go conference: Improving the Linux handling of user home directories is the next ambition for systemd. Among the goals are allowing more easily migratable home directories, ensuring all data for users is self-contained to the home directories, UID assignments being handled to the local system, unified user password and encryption key handling, better data encryption handling in general, and other modernization efforts. Among the items being explored by systemd-homed are JSON-based user records, encrypted LUKS home directories in loop-back files, and other next-gen features to offering secure yet portable home directories. Systemd-homed is currently being developed in Lennart's Git tree but hopes to see it merged for either systemd 244 (the current cycle) or systemd 245.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Physicists have set a new limit on the mass of nature's lightest particle of matter. The neutrino can weigh no more than 1.1 electron volts (eV) -- less than one-500,000th the mass of an electron -- say experimenters with the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Reported on September 13 at a meeting in Toyama, Japan, the new result halves the previous limit of 2 eV.

Physicists have tried to measure the neutrino's mass for decades. However, the particle barely interacts with ordinary matter. So to deduce its mass, researchers study the radioactive "[Beta] decay" of tritium, in which a nucleus spits out an electron and a neutrino. By precisely measuring the maximum energy of the ejected electrons, physicists can infer the mass of the unobserved neutrinos. KATRIN (above) takes this classic approach to the ultimate limit, employing a 23-meter-long blimplike spectrometer to measure the electron from tritium with unprecedented precision. Cosmological measurements already suggest the neutrino cannot weigh more than about 0.1 eV, but that estimate is based on several assumptions. So KATRIN physicists argue that their better, directly measured limit on neutrino mass is likely to make cosmology models more reliable.

A reporter for SFGate describes what happened when he tried out for the quidditch team at the University of California at Berkeley: The person throwing me what's called a "quaffle" (actually a slightly deflated volleyball) looked at me to make sure I'm ready. I gave them a head nod and grip my "broom" (a PVC pipe), ready to run. "GO!" I run 20 feet and turn back to catch the ball. Success!

But as I take my next step, I get decked by team captain Dara Gaeuman, fall to the ground, drop the quaffle, re-grab the quaffle, get back up, run over to the hoop and score. It's a triumphant moment for my post-healthy, 33-year-old self, regardless of the fact that this a drill. On the first day of practice. Of a sport I'm playing for the first time. With people who likely weren't born when the first Harry Potter book came out....

[I]n 2005, a pair of students at Middlebury College -- Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe -- translated quidditch into a non-flying sport. The game used to be played on wooden brooms until a few years ago when the game got too rough. There are still chasers (offensive players), beaters (defenders), seekers, keepers (like a goalie in hockey or soccer) and quaffles (again the balls, stay with me here) and bludgers (slightly deflated dodgeballs). But here the snitch is actually a person with sock-like pouch attached to their lower back that has to be snatched by the seekers, while the snitch tries to evade them... Almost 15 years after its inception, real-world quidditch has grown into a global phenomenon, with an International Quidditch Association (IQA) that has a World Cup every two years, a couple of semi-pro leagues, several regional and national leagues and more than 150 colleges and universities with club teams.

During practice, Chanun Ong, a sophomore returning for his second year on the team, tells a freshman, "I wasn't a big Harry Potter fan, but this sport is pretty legit."
There's a short video of the quidditch practice, and the the article's author remembers some crucial advice he received from one of the players. "Scrunch your body down if someone is about to throw a bludger at you, so you're a harder target to hit."

Although he also acknowledges that most of the people watching the two-hour practice "were passersby trying to figure out what the hell is going on."

For the better part of a year, Twitter has been trying to rebrand itself as a safe place for healthy conversations -- rather than a social network rife with bullying and racism. But its latest advertising campaign, one that involves stenciling city sidewalks with users' tweets, might brand the site as a scofflaw instead. From a report: Earlier this week, Twitter users started posting pictures of the stencils popping up around the downtown corridor, part of the campaign running in San Francisco and New York through early October. Some were strategically placed. "Twitter is like running up the down escalator," said one, neatly sprayed in front of an escalator leading to a BART station. "Twitter is garbage and I am a raccoon," said another near a trash can.

Apt or not, the stencils, created using a spray-paint-like chalk, are illegal, according to Rachel Gordon, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works. "That's not the use of the sidewalks," she said. "We can go and document them. If they don't remove them immediately, we'll send a crew to remove them and charge them."

Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of GNOME 3.34, bringing many performance improvements and better Wayland support. Phoronix reports: Making GNOME 3.34 particularly exciting is the plethora of optimizations/fixes in tow with this six-month update. Equally exciting are a ton of improvements and additions around the Wayland support to ensure its performance and feature parity to X11. GNOME 3.34 also brings other improvements like sandboxed browsing with Epiphany, GNOME Music enhancements, GNOME Software improvements, and a ton of other refinements throughout GNOME Shell, Mutter, and the many GNOME applications. More details can be found via release announcement and release notes.

Longtime Slashdot reader Merovech shares a report from ZDNet: Thousands of web servers have been infected and had their files encrypted by a new strain of ransomware named Lilocked (or Lilu). Infections have been happening since mid-July, and have intensified in the past two weeks, ZDNet has learned. Based on current evidence, the Lilocked ransomware appears to target Linux-based systems only. The way the Lilocked gang breaches servers and encrypts their content is currently unknown. A thread on a Russian-speaking forum puts forward the theory that crooks might be targeting systems running outdated Exim (email) software. It also mentions that the ransomware managed to get root access to servers by unknown means.

Lilocked doesn't encrypt system files, but only a small subset of file extensions, such as HTML, SHTML, JS, CSS, PHP, INI, and various image file formats. This means infected servers continue to run normally. According to French security researcher Benkow, Lilocked has encrypted more than 6,700 servers, many of which have been indexed and cached in Google search results. However, the number of victims is suspected to be much much higher. Not all Linux systems run web servers, and there are many other infected systems that haven't been indexed in Google search results. Why it should scare you:
- affects Linux servers
- so far the vector of infection / vulnerability is unknown
- you can craft a Google search to watch it spread!

necro81 writes: The Aptera 2e was a head-turning 3-wheeled electric vehicle when it debuted a decade ago. With a body more like an aircraft than a car, it was designed for maximum efficiency. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt and liquidated before it hit production. Now IEEE Spectrum reports the founders are having another crack at it, taking advantage of a decade of improvement in batteries, computation, and EV component supply chains. By utilizing sandwich composite body panels, lightweight 3D-printed metal components, and speedier fluid dynamics simulations, their aim is a maximum efficiency, low-volume production vehicle that, with its largest battery configuration, could achieve a range of 1000 miles (1600 km).

An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS/Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction. We were tipped off Friday that AMD's Head of Platform Firmware, Edward Benyukhis, publicly posted on LinkedIn that he is "looking to hire someone with solid Coreboot and UEFI background." If you have Coreboot experience or know someone who is, see LinkedIn for contacting Benyukhis.

That's exciting itself and certainly noteworthy, but also notable is AMD is now sponsoring next week's Open-Source Firmware Conference. AMD has joined the likes of Amazon AWS, Arm, System76, TrustedFirmware.org, and other companies in sponsoring this conference about Coreboot, LinuxBoot, and related open-source firmware projects.

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: The IBrowse Team announced the commercial release of IBrowse 2.5 for AmigaOS 3.x (68k) and an improved PPC native AmigaOS 4.x version.

IBrowse was the most popular Amiga web browser of the 1990s when it pioneered advanced features such as tabbed web browsing.
"After many years in the making, development has been on a roller coaster since IBrowse 2.4, with challenging personal, technical and commercial issues complicating the release schedule," reads the announcement on the iBrowse site.

"However, we are extremely happy to finally make this new version available to all the valued users who have been waiting so patiently."

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: On PHPday in Verona (Italy) Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, gave an enlightening talk on PHP and its history. 25 years of PHP (video of the talk) is ripe with details on PHP, the design choices behind the web's favorite server-side templating language and with explanations on why what you may think of as an inconsistent mess actually makes perfect sense just the way it is. Very insightful, fun, interesting and a must-watch for PHP lovers and haters alike.
Introducing one slide, Lerdorf remembers that in the 1990s, "the web looked like this -- CGI bins written in C."

But he also shows his first computers from the 1980s at the beginning of the talk, before moving on to screenshots of Gopher, and then of the Mosaic browser. "This changed everything. And not just for me, for everybody...

"Everybody around at the time, playing with this stuff, and having had UUCP addresses and playing with Usenet and bulletin boards -- it was very easy to see that this was going to change the world."

A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city's voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it. Ars Technica reports: Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on. Connexion is only available in a small portion of the city right now.

"The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years. "Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont," another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today. The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000. The two residential internet packages that Connexion is offering are the $59.95 gigabit plan and 10Gbps plan for $299.95 a month. Shanley told Ars that "there are no taxes and fees on internet service," aside from the optional $15 charge to use city-provided Wi-Fi hardware instead of a customer-purchase router.

The broadband service also offers a gigabit Internet and phone service bundle for $74.90 a month. "Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month," adds Ars. "When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85."

Tablizer shares a report from SFGate: Visitors to Disney's new Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge attraction, can choose from more than 1,000 unique items to take home as souvenirs. But if they plan on flying home, they'll have to leave at least one behind -- a specially designed "thermal detonator" Coca-Cola bottle the company made especially for the new attraction. TSA has told fans that the bottle, which retails for $5, looks too much like a replica explosive and therefore won't be allowed in carry-on or checked baggage. Fans, not surprisingly are not pleased with the decision. I hope they don't take away my lightsaber.

Slashdot reader sfcrazy writes: The Linux Foundation hosted the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, Deb Goodkin, at the Open Source Summit in San Diego. In this episode of Let's Talk, we sat down with Goodkin to talk about the FreeBSD project and the foundation.
"How did they let you in?" jokes their interviewer.

"They didn't realize that FreeBSD was not a Linux distribution," the executive director replies. "No, but seriously, they've been very welcoming to the FreeBSD community and wanting to include our voice in conversations about open source." FreeBSD is about five and a half million lines of code, versus 35 million for Linux, so "If you want to learn, it's a great way to learn... Someone said they believed that they were a great Linux sys-admin because of knowing FreeBSD."

Founded in 2000 in Boulder, Colorado, the FreeBSD project is a 501(c)(3) -- a public charity -- where the Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) -- a trade association. They have 400 committers, and "We're known for excellent documentation," the executive director says in the interview, describing how the community works to welcome new-comers and mentor new contributors. "We actually descended from the original Berkeley Unix. Some of those original people who worked on Berkeley Unix are still involved in the FreeBSD project. They're very approachable. So these young people go to conferences, and here you have Kirk McKusick, who developed UFS and still works on file systems, and he's there, and he's telling stories about back in the day, when he was at Berkeley working with Bill Joy, and he is really interested in helping these new people contribute."

Companies using FreeBSD include Netflix and Apple -- and according to Phoronix, the number of FreeBSD ports has increased to nearly 37,000 packages.

The world's oldest continuously working webcam is being switched off after 25 years. The BBC reports: The Fogcam was set up in 1994 to watch how the weather changed on the San Francisco State University campus. has broadcast almost continuously since then barring regular maintenance and the occasional need for it to be re-sited to maintain its view. Its creators said it was being shut down because there were now no good places to put the webcam. Jeff Schwartz, who with Dan Wong set up the webcam, said it would go offline on 30 August. "We felt it was time to let it go," Mr Schwartz told the SFGate newspaper, adding that it was getting harder to find secure locations to put the camera so it had a good view of Holloway Avenue.

Mr Schwartz said he was inspired to set up the camera by what is believed to be the first-ever live webcam which was set up at Cambridge University in 1993 to watch a communal coffee pot.

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

America's Defense Department "is looking to build tools that can quickly detect deepfakes and other manipulated media amid the growing threat of 'large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,'" reports Nextgov: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on Tuesday announced it would host a proposers day for an upcoming initiative focused on curbing the spread of malicious deepfakes, shockingly realistic but forged images, audio and videos generated by artificial intelligence. Under the Semantic Forensics program, or SemaFor, researchers aim to help computers use common sense and logical reasoning to detect manipulated media.

As global adversaries enhance their technological capabilities, deepfakes and other advanced disinformation tactics are becoming a top concern for the national security community... Industry has started developing tech that use statistical methods to determine if a video or image has been manipulated, but existing tools "are quickly becoming insufficient" as manipulation techniques continue to advance, according to DARPA. "Detection techniques that rely on statistical fingerprints can often be fooled with limited additional resources," officials said in a post on FedBizOpps...

Beyond simply detecting errors, officials also want the tools to attribute the media to different groups and determine whether the content was manipulated for nefarious purposes. Using that information, the tech would flag posts for human review. "A comprehensive suite of semantic inconsistency detectors would dramatically increase the burden on media falsifiers, requiring the creators of falsified media to get every semantic detail correct, while defenders only need to find one, or a very few, inconsistencies," DARPA officials said.

But that's easier said than done. Today, even the most advanced machine intelligence platforms have a tough time understanding the world beyond their training data.