Earlier this year, researchers from security firm Avast spotted a newer FudModule variant that bypassed key Windows defenses such as Endpoint Detection and Response, and Protected Process Light. Microsoft took six months after Avast privately reported the vulnerability to fix it, a delay that allowed Lazarus to continue exploiting it.
Dammit Microsoft, you only had one job!
There are multiple causes to its demise.
The big one was security (or lack thereof) as attackers would abuse plug-ins through NPAPI. I remember a time when every month had new 0-days exploiting a vulnerability in Flash.
The second one in my opinion, is the desire to standardize features in the browser. For example, reading DRM-protected content required Silverlight, which wasn’t supported on Linux. Most interactive games and some websites required Flash which had terrible performance issues. So it felt natural to provide these features directly in the browser without lock-in.
Which leads to your second question: I don’t think we will ever see the return to NPAPI or something similar. The browser ecosystem is vibrant and the W3C is keen to standardize newly needed features. The first example that comes to mind is WebAuthn: it has been integrated directly in the browsers when 10 years ago it would have been supported through NPAPI.
I think the “upgrade bugs” mentioned in the article are bugs happening when upgrading from previous LTS versions of Ubuntu, as usually the . 1
release is the first one to be suggested for upgrade to these installs.
24.04 was released in April, as usual. Here we’re talking about 24.04.1, which could be seen as a “Service Pack” as it includes every patches released since then.
I meant add support to new robots other than Dreame. On Telegram he explicitly said he won’t support any new Roborock nor Ecovacs
AFAIK Hypfer (Valetudo maintainer) has no intention to support new robots other than Dreame
As a note, Dennis Giese —who is the co-author of the Defcon talk mentioned in the article— is also the author of Dustcloud, which is used as the basis of Valetudo. Though I’m not aware that Valetudo will ever support Ecovacs robots.
Oh yes, if it ends up replacing concrete that would definitely be a win. It never was my intention to dunk on the invention, I just felt that the title was misleading and had an urge to correct it.
Carbon-negative is a long stretch, it’s just using waste material that is usually used as fuel. It’s at best low-carbon compared to concrete, which honestly is already a good thing.
At around the same time, Meyer learned about the large amount of waste lignin that is produced every year, primarily from pulp and paper processes, which is also expected to be produced from biorefineries in the future.
[…] During the production of pulp and paper products, roughly 100 million tons of lignin are produced annually as a waste byproduct and subsequently burned as low-value fuel.
Meyer saw lignin as a polymer that could be used as a material instead of a fuel and sought to crosslink it like an epoxy resin. Using lignin allowed Meyer to sequester CO2 captured from the air in the form of biomass that would otherwise be burned.
(Emphasis mine)
I’m pretty sure the EU Commission will have something to say about this
Ah yes, classic tech solutionism.
“No need to be frugal, the tech will evolve and fix the causes of climate change!”
We need a solution right now, not in a decade, dumb ass. So frugality is the answer.
It does for a few versions now, and even before there was at least one extension adding this feature.