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The Near–Ultrasound Invisible Trojan, or NUIT, was developed by a team of researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs as a technique to secretly convey harmful orders to voice assistants on smartphones and smart speakers.

If you watch videos on YouTube on your smart TV, then that television must have a speaker, right? According to Guinevere Chen, associate professor and co-author of the NUIT article, “the sound of NUIT harmful orders will [be] inaudible, and it may attack your mobile phone as well as connect with your Google Assistant or Alexa devices.” “That may also happen in Zooms during meetings. During the meeting, if someone were to unmute themself, they would be able to implant the attack signal that would allow them to hack your phone, which was placed next to your computer.

The attack works by playing sounds close to but not exactly at ultrasonic frequencies, so they may still be replayed by off-the-shelf hardware, using a speaker, either the one already built into the target device or anything nearby. If the first malicious instruction is to mute the device’s answers, then subsequent actions, such as opening a door or disabling an alarm system, may be initiated without warning if the first command was to silence the device in the first place.

The social media behemoth Twitter was recently dealt a significant setback when significant portions of its source code were published online and made public. The corporation proceeded promptly to notify GitHub, an online collaboration platform for software engineers, of a copyright violation in order to get the stolen code removed from the site. It is not known how long the code had been available online, although it seems to have been accessible to the public for a number of months.

Twitter has filed a petition with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California requesting that the court require GitHub to disclose the identity of the individual who is responsible for spreading the code as well as any other users that downloaded it.

According to two sources who have been informed on the internal probe, “Twitter initiated an investigation into the leak, and officials handling the subject have guessed that whomever was involved departed the San Francisco-based firm last year.”

A serious flaw has been found in WooCommerce, a popular plug-in for managing online businesses that are built on the WordPress platform. This flaw might enable cybercriminals to take control of websites. Nevertheless, the WooCommerce team has provided fixes, and attackers are able to reverse-engineer the patch. Technical specifics concerning the vulnerability have not yet been disclosed. There are presently approximately 500,000 active installations of the WooCommerce Payments plug-in, which is the component that includes the vulnerability. The creators of WooCommerce have stated that managed WordPress hosting providers such as WordPress.com, Pressable, and WPVIP have automatically updated websites that are hosted on their platforms. But, if the other websites don’t already have automatic updates turned on, the administrators of those websites should immediately apply the update that is specific to their version.

Any versions of WooCommerce Payments that were created after 4.8.0, which was published at the end of September, are susceptible to the vulnerability. The following updated versions were made available by Automattic: 4.8.2, 4.9.1, 5.0.4, 5.1.3, 5.2.2, 5.3.1, 5.4.1, 5.5.2 and 5.6.2.

As soon as a patched version of WooCommerce has been installed, administrators of websites using WooCommerce should verify their sites for any unusual admin users or postings. The creators of WooCommerce suggest that, in the event that suspicious behavior is discovered on a website, the passwords of all administrative users on the site be changed, in addition to any API credentials for WooCommerce and payment gateways.

On the third day of the Pwn2Own hacking contest, security researchers were awarded $185,000 after demonstrating 5 zero-day exploits targeting Windows 11, Ubuntu Desktop, and the VMware Workstation virtualization software.

The highlight of the day was the Ubuntu Desktop operating system getting hacked three times by three different teams, although one of them was a collision with the exploit being previously known.

The three working Ubuntu zero-day were demoed by Kyle Zeng of ASU SEFCOM (a double free bug), Mingi Cho of Theori (a Use-After-Free vulnerability), and Bien Pham (@bienpnn) of Qrious Security.

Year 2022 😗


WASHINGTON, Nov 30 (Reuters) — In science fiction — think films and TV like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” — wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through space and time for spacecraft to traverse unimaginable distances with ease. If only it were that simple.

Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two miniscule simulated black holes — those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape — in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.

It was a “baby wormhole,” according to Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, a co-author of the research published in the journal Nature. But scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal, she said.

In the current edition of The Lancet Neurology, researchers of the Human Brain Project (HBP) present the novel clinical uses of advanced brain modeling methods. Computational brain modeling techniques that integrate the measured data of a patient have been developed by researchers at AMU Marseille as part of the HBP. The models can be used as predictive tools to virtually test clinical hypotheses and strategies.

To create personalized models, the researchers use a called The Virtual Brain (TVB), which HBP scientist Viktor Jirsa has developed together with collaborators. For each patient, the computational models are created from data of the individually measured anatomy, structural connectivity and brain dynamics.

The approach has been first applied in epilepsy, and a major clinical trial is currently ongoing. The TVB technology enables clinicians to simulate the spread of abnormal activity during in a patient’s brain, helping them to better identify the target areas. In January, the team had presented the detailed methodology of the epilepsy work on the cover of Science Translational Medicine.

In the intensive care unit (ICU), critically ill patients are cared for by a multidisciplinary care team. Compassionate and caring behaviors on the part of the care team result in better outcomes for patients and their families, and care providers entering the demanding field of medicine because they wish to help people and relieve suffering. However, studies have demonstrated deficiencies in delivering compassionate health care. Evidence suggests that physicians may miss up to 90% of opportunities to respond to patients with compassion.

To determine what factors drive and enhance compassionate care behaviors in the ICU setting and which factors drain and negate caring attitudes and behaviors, Shahla Siddiqui, MD, MSc, FCCM, and a colleague conducted an observational, qualitative study of an international panel of intensive and critical . The researcher-clinicians report in PLOS ONE that while ICU physicians and nurses feel a deep moral imperative to deliver the highest level of compassionate care, pressures of capacity strain, lack of staff, lack of compassionate skills training and a heavy emphasis on electronic health record maintenance present significant hurdles to achieving that goal.

“Studies done on physician compassion from a patient perspective emphasize listening and awareness of the patient’s , which not only builds trust within the patient-physician relationship but also enhances resilience amongst the care team and prevents burnout,” said Siddiqui, an anesthesiologist at BIDMC. “Our aim was to describe compassionate behaviors in the ICU, study the factors that enhance and those that drain such behaviors with an aim to enable recommendations for practice and training.”

In 2015, European countries formulated the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which aimed to end TB by 2030. However, in September 2018, global leaders at the first United Nations (UN) General Assembly High-Level Meeting on the Fight Against TB agreed on an ambitious target of eradicating TB by 2022. They strategized that increased access to TB treatment and preventive measures would help achieve their goal quickly. Another measure adopted to progress the TB eradication goal was increasing the funds related to TB research and services.

An uneven progress regarding TB eradication by 2030 was observed in some European regions by the World Health Organization (WHO). Although the majority of Western European countries were on track for TB elimination, Eastern European and Central Asian countries reported a high number of incidences of drug-resistant (DR) TB.

In the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA), TB prevalence is low. Based on the TB surveillance conducted in Europe, out of 30 countries, 24 reported less than 10 TB cases per 100,000 population in 2021. These countries have been encouraged to maintain this low rate and attain the pre-elimination phase of less than 10 TB cases per million population per year. A recent Eurosurveillance journal editorial discussed the progress in the EU/EEA, between 2018 and 2021, towards achieving the 2030 targets for TB elimination.

For vulnerable premature babies, an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a lifesaver, but the consequences can last a lifetime. Many studies have shown that the NICU is a noisy environment and that babies who spend time there have higher rates of hearing impairment, which can lead to delays in language acquisition. Scientists from Vienna, Hamburg, Munich, and Osnabruck set out to investigate the role of the incubator, an underestimated element in the soundscape that surrounds babies during their time in the NICU.

“The motivation of our multidisciplinary research team concerns the question: why many more premature babies suffer hearing impairments,” said Dr. Christoph Reuter from the University of Vienna, corresponding author of the study published in Frontiers in Pediatrics. “We believe that what we have measured in our studies could be a leading cause. However, to understand how to protect from such levels, precise environment information is needed.”

Premature babies experience noise in incubators very differently to the uterus environment. Amniotic fluid muffles from outside the uterus, and most sounds heard in utero will be , with almost no abrupt noises. By contrast, sounds in incubators are much less muffled with many high-frequency components and abrupt noises. Although recommended noise limits have been established, these are often exceeded, especially when incubators are handled or opened.