Month: June 2019

Enlarge (credit: YouTube / Getty / Aurich Lawson)

YouTube today expanded its hate-speech policy to ban more white supremacist videos, such as those that promote Nazi ideology. The site is also banning hoax videos that deny the existence of the Holocaust and other well-documented violent events.

The move will likely result in bans for many white supremacist YouTubers and other people spreading hateful ideologies.

"Today, we're taking another step in our hate-speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation, or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status," YouTube's announcement said. "This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory. Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place."

An astronaut must venture to the edge of our solar system to save the planet in the first trailer for sci-fi drama Ad Astra.

Director James Gray (The Lost City of Z) has said he wanted to make a film that depicted space travel as realistically as possible "and to basically say, 'Space is awfully hostile to us.' It’s kind of a Heart of Darkness story about traveling to the outer edge of our solar system." The official synopsis strikes just the right note of vague grandiosity: "Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his missing father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of our planet. His journey will uncover secrets that challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the cosmos."

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  Brad Pitt stars as astronaut Roy McBride. [credit: YouTube/20th Century Fox ]

The trailer fleshes out a few of the details. The plot concerns something called the LIMA project, which Roy's father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), captained. The mission was meant to hunt for advanced extraterrestrial life, but it disappeared about 16 years in, with the crew all presumed dead. Apparently that might not be the case: Clifford McBride may be very much alive—and responsible for a series of catastrophic power surges on Earth that have killed a lot of people. It's up to Roy to head into space in search of whatever remains of the LIMA project, with orders to destroy it completely if necessary. Since that would also mean destroying his own father, it's no wonder the pre-flight psychological evaluation is so concerned with his emotional state.

(credit: flattop341)

For the past three weeks, security professionals have warned with increasing urgency that a recently patched Windows vulnerability has the potential to trigger attacks not seen since the WannaCry worm that paralyzed much of the world in 2017. A demonstration video circulating on the Internet is the latest evidence to prove those warnings are the real deal.

It was posted Tuesday by Sean Dillon, a senior security researcher and RiskSense. A play-by-play helps to underscore the significance of the feat.

Rough draft MSF module. Still too dangerous to release, lame sorry. Maybe after first mega-worm?

PATCH #BlueKeep CVE-2019-0708

35c2571801b3b6c4297ed362cf901dc4e907ff32a276fb6544a2b9d0f643f207 pic.twitter.com/y0g9R9HNnc

— zǝɹosum0x0🦉 (@zerosum0x0) June 4, 2019

The video shows a module Dillon wrote for the Metasploit exploit framework remotely connecting to a Windows Server 2008 R2 computer that has yet to install a patch Microsoft released in mid May. At about 14 seconds, a Metasploit payload called Meterpreter uses the getuid command to prove that the connection has highly privileged System privileges. In the remaining six seconds, the hacker uses the open source Mimikatz application to obtain the cryptographic hashes of passwords belonging to other computers on the same network the hacked machine is connected to.