Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Is this wide, miniature peripheral the future of ergonomic mice? (credit: ConceptPix/Kickstarter)

A strong ergonomic PC peripheral makes usage feel as natural as possible. That means avoiding strain and unnecessary pressure, lots of support, minimal movement, and, if you're at a desk, helping to maintain 90-degree angles in the arms and legs. Vertical mice, for example, make the palm face more sideways, resulting in less forearm pronation and accommodating a 90-degree angle with the rest of the arm. But what about a horizontal mouse?

On Sunday, the ConceptPix Horizontal Mouse launched on Kickstarter. Like any crowdfunding project, I won't get my hopes up for this product hitting the market. I might even have less hope here than with some other crowdfunding projects, as ConceptPix hasn't launched anything else on Kickstarter (at least not under the ConceptPix name). Other red flags include: the ConceptPix brand lacks much of an Internet presence, and its profile is private on Kickstarter; the project creator is listed to be in Hong Kong, but ConceptPix's bio claims Miami Beach, Florida; and the crowdfunding goal is an absurdly low $119.

Still, less likely products have been born of crowdfunding. And the creators at least shared a video on the Kickstarter showing a supposed working prototype. Regardless, a horizontal mouse is intriguing to anyone who's used a vertical mouse or seeks a more comfortable or less painful alternative to traditional mice.

Enlarge / A child arrives at an elementary school vaccination site for children ages 5 to 11 in Miami in November 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

At least 75 percent of US children have now been infected with the pandemic coronavirus, up from roughly 44 percent before the omicron wave, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Children in the age groups of 0 to 11 and 12 to 17 have the highest infection rates and saw the most significant increases during the omicron wave compared with any other age group. About a third of all children in the country were newly infected during the omicron wave. Together, the data showcase just how poorly the country has done at shielding children—including those not yet eligible for vaccination—from the pandemic virus.

The new data dovetails with a study published by the CDC in February, which found that the peak rate of pediatric hospitalizations during the omicron wave was four times higher than the peak seen during the delta wave last fall. The largest increase was seen in children ages 0 to 4, who had a peak hospitalization rate five times higher than the peak amid delta.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Vulnerabilities recently discovered by Microsoft make it easy for people with a toehold on many Linux desktop systems to quickly gain root system rights— the latest elevation of privileges flaw to come to light in the open source OS.

As operating systems have been hardened to withstand compromises in recent years, elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities have become a crucial ingredient for most successful hacks. They can be exploited in concert with other vulnerabilities that on their own are often considered less severe, with the latter giving what’s called local access and the former escalating the root access. From there, adversaries with physical access or limited system rights can deploy backdoors or execute code of their choice.

Nimbuspwn, as Microsoft has named the EoP threat, is two vulnerabilities that reside in the networkd-dispatcher, a component in many Linux distributions that dispatch network status changes and can run various scripts to respond to a new status. When a machine boots, networkd-dispatcher runs as root.