Month: December 2020

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

As many as 3 million people have been infected by Chrome and Edge browser extensions that steal personal data and redirect users to ad or phishing sites, a security firm said on Wednesday.

In all, researchers from Prague-based Avast said they found 28 extensions for the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers that contained malware. The add-ons billed themselves as a way to download pictures, videos, or other content from sites including Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, and Spotify. At the time this post went live, some, but not all, of the malicious extensions remained available for download from Google and Microsoft.

Avast researchers found malicious code in the JavaScript-based extensions that allows them to download malware onto an infected computer. In a post, the researchers wrote:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

Forty Jane Does who say they were victims of GirlsDoPorn sued Pornhub yesterday for at least $2 million each, alleging that Pornhub hosted videos despite knowing that "GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking venture."

The lawsuit was filed against Pornhub and Pornhub owner MindGeek in US District Court for the Southern District of California. The complaint asks for "compensatory damages in an amount that exceeds one million dollars for each plaintiff," plus another $1 million or more, each, in punitive damages.

While they were separate businesses, many of the videos produced by GirlsDoPorn were uploaded to and hosted on Pornhub. The lawsuit alleges that "as early as 2009, and definitely by fall 2016, MindGeek knew GirlsDoPorn was trafficking its victims by using fraud, coercion, and intimidation as part of its customary business practices to get the women to film the videos."

Enlarge / Gmail's logo. It still looks like this. Get used to it. (credit: Google)

Google has been having a rough time this week with service outages. It has now had two days, maybe even three days depending on who you ask, of major downtime.

On Monday, Google's authentication system went down for about an hour, taking down Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Docs, and most other Google services. Google blamed the outage on "an internal storage quota issue," which sounds a lot like Google ran out of storage space.

On Tuesday, Gmail started having problems again, which Google's status dashboard described as "a significant subset of users... seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior." Many reports, like this one from TechCrunch, said emails were instantly bouncing. Rival email service ProtonMail even says some emails sent to Gmail have been "permanently lost" and will need to be sent again.

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  Rocket 3.2 takes off on Tuesday afternoon. [credit: John Kraus for Astra ]

If we're being honest, Astra's first orbital launch attempt in September was just not all that impressive. Within 10 or 15 seconds of launching, Rocket 3.1 began to veer off course, and it had to be commanded to shut down before it flew out of its safety corridor.

After the flight, Astra's leaders put a brave face on the short mission, saying they were "pretty pleased" with the rocket's performance, and they thought they were dealing with a software problem rather than a hardware one. Even so, it did not exactly instill confidence in the four-year-old company. The COVID-19 pandemic was starting to flare back up across the world, fundraising was tight in the industry, and it seemed like Astra may still have a very long way to go before getting into space.

Amid these dark times, however, Astra's team of about 100 employees put their heads down and their masks on and plowed forward. In doing so, they worked something of a miracle, readying Rocket 3.2 and getting it to the company's launch site in Alaska in fewer than three months.