Here are a few of the stories that caught my eye over the last couple days.
Microsoft Announces Viva, a New Employee Platform
Microsoft is betting big that we will never return to working the way we did in The Before Times, and one of the new initiatives from the company is Viva, what it calls an “Employee Experience Platform.” Viva is kind of a mix of an Intranet and HR system all in one, and designed to be used in environments where employees of companies are not always working in the same physical location.
There are plenty of companies that do some of this kind of work, but I think Microsoft is the first to try to bring it all under one product umbrella. It is an interesting concept and I think will appeal to a lot of smaller companies who use other Microsoft services.
Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok Band Together to Combat OGUsers Hacking
There is a huge black market for special or unique usernames on social platforms. Think accounts that have single words as their names, or even just one or two characters. There is a group called OGUsers which has illegally obtained access to some of these accounts and then sold them, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars. Today, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok banned hundreds of accounts that had been obtained through illegal means connected to the OGUsers community, as well as accounts connected to OGUsers. The social media companies are trying to shut down these black markets, and discouraging others from trying. The banned accounts are rendered useless and never able to be used again, which the companies hope will dissuade people from trying to do this again
Popular Google Chrome Extension Removed Because It Contained Malware
So, this one hits me because I was using this extension. The Great Suspender was a chrome extension that would kill browser tabs in Google Chrome if they were inactive. This was useful if you keep dozens of tabs open, as that can be a big system hog. Apparently in mid 2020 the developers behind The Great Suspender sold it to another entity, which then modified the code to contain malware. Google isn’t saying what the malware was, but it was likely attempting to scrape personal information. Google warned the company late in 2020 to remove the malware, or it would take down the extension, and today Google has removed it. Not only can users no longer download the extension but Google is disabling the extension on all active computers.
This isn’t the first time that this has happened to a popular Chrome extension, and it makes me wonder if Google has any way to mitigate this situation in the future. They had better try….
https://www.androidcentral.com/great-suspender-flagged-malware-taken-chrome-webstore
SolarWinds Patches Three Severe Vulnerabilities as it Attempts to Recover From Hack
SolarWinds has a long road ahead to get back on its feet after the massive hacks involving its Orion product last year. Today the company has pushed out patches for 3 vulnerabilities, all of them pretty severe, and it shows just how lax the company had been.
At a very high level, there were several relatively trivial avenues that hackers could exploit to gain complete control of Orion, or a host operating system. This is obviously quite bad, and shows just how poor SolarWinds security was. These have now been patched, and anyone who is using SolarWinds products should update immediately
We Now Know How Far Alan Shepard Hit a Golf Ball On The Moon
Just a fun one to close things out tonight. Thanks to modern technology, images taken during Apollo 14 have been cleaned up to the point where we are able to measure just how far Alan Shepard hit those golf balls on the moon. Even with that bulky space suit and low gravity making it hard to stay planted, the furthest ball traevlled roughly 40 yards.
I mean, I’ve hit my driver less than 40 yards on a bad day, so I’d say that’s pretty good.