Lifeboat Foundation

Multiple one-click vulnerabilities have been discovered across a variety of popular software applications, allowing an attacker to potentially execute arbitrary code on target systems.

The issues were discovered by Positive Security researchers Fabian Bräunlein and Lukas Euler and affect apps like Telegram, Nextcloud, VLC, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Bitcoin/Dogecoin Wallets, Wireshark, and Mumble.

“Desktop applications which pass user supplied URLs to be opened by the operating system are frequently vulnerable to code execution with user interaction,” the researchers said. “Code execution can be achieved either when a URL pointing to a malicious executable (.desktop,.jar,.exe, …) hosted on an internet accessible file share (nfs, webdav, smb, …) is opened, or an additional vulnerability in the opened application’s URI handler is exploited.”

A “self-portrait” by humanoid robot Sophia, who “interpreted” a depiction of her own face, has sold at auction for over $688000.

A hand-painted “self-portrait” by the world-famous humanoid robot, Sophia, has sold at auction for over $688000.

The work, which saw Sophia “interpret” a depiction of her own face, was offered as a non-fungible token, or NFT, an encrypted digital signature that has revolutionized the art market in recent months.

Continue reading “Sophia the Robot ‘self-portrait’ NFT sells for almost $700K” »

Bitcoin as payment hasn’t taken off in the decade-plus existence of the digital currency.

The bitcoin market now exceeds $1 trillion with its price rising tenfold in a year, but focus is shifting towards the massive power requirements needed to sustain the online currency.

Here are some questions and answers about bitcoin:

Impressive value.

According to data, bitcoin’s market cap is currently over $1 trillion. The digital coin went from zero to $1 trillion in network value 3.6 times faster than Microsoft.

Bitcoin also achieved a higher valuation than the world’s three biggest banks combined, when it hit an all-time high of $61700 last week, as its market cap approached roughly $1.15 trillion. The combined market cap of JPMorgan, Bank of America and The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is $1.08 trillion.

A team of researchers has created software to detect illegal mining of cryptocurrency on computers.

Chinese bitcoin miners have long dominated the global processing power that runs the bitcoin network with sophisticated equipment and access to cheap electricity. But now, a group of U.S. miners with deep pockets wants to conquer a greater share of the industry. Photo illustration: Clément Bürge.

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Continue reading “U.S. vs China: The Battle for Bitcoin Mining Supremacy | WSJ” »

Bitcoin mining is mainly driven by renewable energy — hydro (by far the largest component), solar, wind and geothermal. Period.

In fact, we’ve estimated the lower bound of renewables penetration in the bitcoin mining energy mix to be 77.6%.

From 2018, but it’s likely gotten better since then.

Continue reading “Beware of Lazy Bitcoin Research | Insights” »

Billionaire CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday the price of bitcoin and ethereum seemed high, at a time when the cryptocurrencies have hit record highs, with bitcoin crossing the $1 trillion market-capitalization threshold.