Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and CEO of the King Center, speaks during the Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Commemorative Service at Ebenezer Baptist Church on January 21, 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. (credit: Getty Images | Paras Griffin )

As a case involving Comcast and an African American-owned TV network operator heads to the US Supreme Court, a daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. has accused Comcast of trying to "dismantle" the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

Bernice King, MLK's daughter and CEO of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, wrote an open letter to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts on Friday. She wrote that Comcast's argument at the Supreme Court would change the law to let businesses discriminate based on race.

"To alter the Act to accommodate discrimination against people based on race would reverse precarious progress in the freedom struggle, which my father was assassinated for leading and which my mother continued to join others in leading until her death," King wrote. She also told Roberts that "Comcast's ongoing pursuit to effectively dismantle a fundamental America[n] anti-discrimination law may be the legacy history forever associates [with] the company and your legacy of leadership."

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  A Tesla Model 3 made in China's new factory. [credit: Tesla ]

Tesla is famous for missing deadlines, but the company's Shanghai factory, dubbed Gigafactory 3, seems to be almost on schedule. Tesla broke ground on the facility in January, aiming to complete work by October. Now media reports indicate that work is just about finished, and the company is weeks away from beginning large-scale manufacturing.

According to Bloomberg, Tesla chairman Robyn Denholm said last week that Tesla is waiting for manufacturing certification from local government. The company hopes that will happen before the end of the year.

Tesla recently posted images of some of the first Chinese-made Model 3s on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to Twitter. Tesla allowed Chinese reporters to take additional photos of the vehicle. There are a couple of obvious differences from the American model.

Enlarge (credit: hdaniel)

Recent in-the-wild attacks on the critical Bluekeep vulnerability in many versions of Windows aren’t just affecting unpatched machines. It turns out the exploits—which repurpose the September release from the Metasploit framework—are also causing many patched machines to crash.

Late last week, Windows users learned why: a separate patch Microsoft released 20 months ago for the Meltdown vulnerability in Intel CPUs. Word of the crashes first emerged five days ago, when researcher Kevin Beaumont discovered a malicious, in-the-wild Bluekeep exploit caused one of his honeypots to crash four times overnight. Metasploit developer Sean Dillon initially blamed the crashes on “mystical reptilian forces that control everything.” Then he read a Twitter post from researcher Worawit Wang:

From call stack, seems target has kva shadow patch. Original eternalblue kernel shellcode cannot be used on kva shadow patch target. So the exploit failed while running kernel shellcode

— Worawit Wang (@sleepya_) November 4, 2019

In a post published on Thursday, Dillon wrote:

Enlarge / A Twitter logo displayed on a smartphone. (credit: Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images/LightRocket | Getty Images)

A lie has always been able to travel faster than the truth, and that goes double on Twitter, where a combination of bad human choices and bad-faith bots amplifies false messaging almost instantly around the world. So what should a social media platform do about it?

The question is not rhetorical. Twitter is trying to come up with a policy for handling "synthetic and manipulated media," the company said in a blog post today and it wants your input.

That's Twitter's term for what most of us would call fakes, deep- or otherwise. "We propose defining synthetic and manipulated media as any photo, audio, or video that has been significantly altered or fabricated in a way that intends to mislead people or changes its original meaning," Twitter trust and safety VP Del Harvey wrote.