Crypto and Payments Firm MobileCoin Launches Stablecoin — ‘Electronic Dollars’

Privacy-focused cryptocurrency and payments firm MobileCoin, in collaboration with stablecoin platform Reserve, has launched a stablecoin dubbed “Electronic Dollars” (eUSD). CoinDesk reports: According to MobileCoin, eUSD is backed by a basket of other stablecoins, namely, USD coin (USDC), Pax dollar (USDP) and trueUSD (TUSD). Each transaction is said to be encrypted using end-to-end zero-knowledge encryption. In other words, only the transacting parties can see their own transactional data, thanks to encryption that uses zero knowledge proofs (a way of proving something without revealing sensitive information). The stablecoin eUSD is built on the MobileCoin blockchain, which, according to MobileCoin, is optimized for mobile devices. Apparently, MobileCoin was originally designed for integration with encrypted mobile messaging app, Signal. Consequently, eUSD will inherit the features of MobileCoin’s native cryptocurrency, MOB, although eUSD users will pay transaction fees (a flat $0.0026 per transaction) in eUSD and not MOB.

The eUSD relies on what seems to be a centralized governance structure where the MobileCoin Foundation acts as the primary governing body. The foundation elects “governors” who are authorized to mint and burn eUSD. The stablecoin’s collateral is held in a popular Ethereum multisignature (multisig) wallet called Safe (formerly “Gnosis Safe”). New eUSD is only minted after governors confirm an equivalent amount of collateral has been transferred to the Safe wallet. “Anybody can inspect the contract holding this basket [of collateral], to see what the current balances are. It’s a Gnosis safe, which is also one of the most highly regarded contracts on Ethereum for holding assets,” Henry Holtzman, MobileCoin’s chief innovation officer explained during an interview with CoinDesk.

Similarly, if a user redeems eUSD, the token is “verifiably burned” and governors release the corresponding collateral. Verifiable burning is when burned eUSD is sent to a “burn address” that renders it “visible” for transparency purposes, “but unspendable.” However, everyday users won’t typically engage in burning and minting. An individual seeking eUSD would simply purchase it on an exchange. Approved liquidity providers (LPs) would be the ones minting large amounts of eUSD. To our knowledge, no project has created a native stablecoin with privacy properties, which is a first-class citizen in the ecosystem, and which never requires the use of ‘non-private’ transaction technologies to use normally. In short, no one has yet actually created a private digital dollar,” MobileCoin stated in the eUSD white paper.

Holtzman said that eUSD uses a “reserve-auditor” program that “connects to the Safe wallet via an application programming interface (API) and verifies that each newly minted eUSD has a corresponding amount of collateral in the wallet.” Holtzman added: “We’ll release it all open source. So if you want to run your own copy [of the reserve auditor], you can. You can examine it to make sure we really are backed exactly as we claim,” Holtzman told CoinDesk.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Doom Runs At 60 FPS In Notepad

Game developer Sam Chiet has found another use for Microsoft Notepad. The ingenious creator has gotten Doom (1993) to run at 60 FPS through the boring text editor in Windows. Tom’s Hardware reports: Chiet highlighted that he didn’t have to modify the Notepad application. Dubbed “NotepadDOOM,” the project is fully playable. Although Chiet didn’t explain how the mod works, has committed to launching NotepadDOOM for other Doom fans to try out. Chiet said in a subsequent tweet that “it’ll take some work to polish NotepadDOOM into something releasable, but it’ll almost certainly happen over the next couple days.” John Romero, one of Doom’s creators, was impressed and replied to Chiet in a tweet that the mod was “incredible.”

You can see the iconic 1993 shooter running in its full glory on Chiet’s YouTube channel. It’s Notepad, so obviously, Chiet replaced the graphics with characters and numbers. The gameplay looks pretty smooth, although we did catch some screen tearing. However, that could be because Notepad can’t write the text fast enough on screen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel Confirms Alder Lake BIOS Source Code Leaked

Tom’s Hardware reports:

We recently broke the news that Intel’s Alder Lake BIOS source code had been leaked to 4chan and Github, with the 6GB file containing tools and code for building and optimizing BIOS/UEFI images. We reported the leak within hours of the initial occurrence, so we didn’t yet have confirmation from Intel that the leak was genuine. Intel has now issued a statement to Tom’s Hardware confirming the incident:

“Our proprietary UEFI code appears to have been leaked by a third party. We do not believe this exposes any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure. This code is covered under our bug bounty program within the Project Circuit Breaker campaign, and we encourage any researchers who may identify potential vulnerabilities to bring them our attention through this program….”

The BIOS/UEFI of a computer initializes the hardware before the operating system has loaded, so among its many responsibilities, is establishing connections to certain security mechanisms, like the TPM (Trusted Platform Module). Now that the BIOS/UEFI code is in the wild and Intel has confirmed it as legitimate, both nefarious actors and security researchers alike will undoubtedly probe it to search for potential backdoors and security vulnerabilities….

Intel hasn’t confirmed who leaked the code or where and how it was exfiltrated. However, we do know that the GitHub repository, now taken down but already replicated widely, was created by an apparent LC Future Center employee, a China-based ODM that manufactures laptops for several OEMs, including Lenovo.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Protestors Hack Iran’s State-Run TV

“Iran’s state-run broadcaster was apparently hacked on air Saturday,” reports the BBC, “with a news bulletin interrupted by a protest against the country’s leader.”

While such incidents are “historically rare,” they add that more recently,this incident follows “widespread open dissent”

It comes after at least three people were shot dead when protesters clashed with security forces in new unrest over the death of Mahsa Amini. s Amini was detained in Tehran by morality police for allegedly not covering her hair properly. The 22-year-old Iranian Kurd died in custody on 16 September, three days after her arrest. Her death has sparked an unprecedented wave of protest across the country.

Saturday’s TV news bulletin at 21:00 (17:30 GMT) was interrupted with images which included Iran’s supreme leader with a target on his head, photos of Ms Amini and three other women killed in recent protests. e of the captions read “join us and rise up”, whilst another said “our youths’ blood is dripping off your paws”.

The interruption lasted only a few seconds before being cut off.

Thanks to Nodsnarb and ttyler (long-time Slashdot reader #20,687) for sharing the story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FBI Warns About Counterfeit Batteries

“Scammers are leveraging the vulnerabilities in the global supply chain, as well as the public’s continuing need for new batteries, to sell a wide variety of counterfeits or unauthorized replicas online,” warns America’s FBI.

“Do not fall victim to online fraudsters or unauthorized dealers or manufacturers.”

Counterfeit batteries do not go through the same standardized testing as original equipment manufacturer batteries and can adversely impact the safety and health of the consumer….

Avoid aftermarket batteries when possible because they may be dangerous…. Consumers should avoid all third-party purchases of batteries, as they can appear to be legitimate OEM batteries but are likely counterfeit…. [B]atteries sold at deep discounts or at significantly lower-than-average prices are likely counterfeit.
The FBI warns you should always avoid batteries that:

are not properly packaged;
have misprinted or misspelled labels;
have labels that peel off; or
do not have official manufacturer batch numbers.

“The FBI’s warning is not specific to laptops or smartphones,” notes ZDNet, “which makes sense given that batteries are now found in everything from cars, scooters, e-bikes, e-cigarettes and trains to drones and more.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 To Avoid Potentially Damaging The Display

Basic Rust Support Merged For Upcoming Linux 6.1

“This Monday, the first set of patches to enable Rust support and tooling was merged for Linux 6.1,” writes Slashdot reader sabian2008, sharing an update from longtime kernel developer Kees Cook: The tree has a recent base, but has fundamentally been in linux-next for a year and a half. It’s been updated based on feedback from the Kernel Maintainer’s Summit, and to gain recent Reviewed-by: tags. Miguel is the primary maintainer, with me helping where needed/wanted. Our plan is for the tree to switch to the standard non-rebasing
practice once this initial infrastructure series lands. The contents are the absolute minimum to get Rust code building in the
kernel, with many more interfaces[2] (and drivers — NVMe[3], 9p[4], M1 GPU[5]) on the way.

The initial support of Rust-for-Linux comes in roughly 4 areas:

– Kernel internals (kallsyms expansion for Rust symbols, %pA format)

– Kbuild infrastructure (Rust build rules and support scripts)

– Rust crates and bindings for initial minimum viable build

– Rust kernel documentation and samples Further reading: Linux 6.0 Arrives With Support For Newer Chips, Core Fixes, and Oddities

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux 6.0 Arrives With Support For Newer Chips, Core Fixes, and Oddities

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A stable version of Linux 6.0 is out, with 15,000 non-merge commits and a notable version number for the kernel. And while major Linux releases only happen when the prior number’s dot numbers start looking too big — there is literally no other reason” — there are a lot of notable things rolled into this release besides a marking in time. Most notable among them could be a patch that prevents a nearly two-decade slowdown for AMD chips, based on workaround code for power management in the early 2000s that hung around for far too long. […]

Intel’s new Arc GPUs are supported in their discrete laptop form in 6.0 (though still experimental). Linux blog Phoronix notes that Intel’s ARC GPUs all seem to run on open source upstream drivers, so support should show up for future Intel cards and chipsets as they arrive on the market. Linux 6.0 includes several hardware drivers of note: fourth-generation Intel Xeon server chips, the not-quite-out 13th-generation Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake chips, AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs, Threadripper CPUs, EPYC systems, and audio drivers for a number of newer AMD systems. One small, quirky addition points to larger things happening inside Linux. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13s, based on an ARM-powered Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, get some early support in 6.0. ARM support is something Linux founder Linus Torvalds is eager to see […].

Among other changes you can find in Linux 6.0, as compiled by LWN.net (in part one and part two): – ACPI and power management improvements for Sapphire Rapids CPUs – Support for SMB3 file transfer inside Samba, while SMB1 is further deprecated – More work on RISC-V, OpenRISC, and LoongArch technologies – Intel Habana Labs Gaudi2 support, allowing hardware acceleration for machine-learning libraries – A “guest vCPU stall detector” that can tell a host when a virtual client is frozen Ars’ Kevin Purdy notes that in 2022, “there are patches in Linux 6.0 to help Atari’s Falcon computers from the early 1990s (or their emulated descendants) better handle VGA modes, color, and other issues.”

Not included in this release are Rust improvements, but they “are likely coming in the next point release, 6.1,” writes Purdy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Windows 11 Insider Build Supports Third-Party Widgets, Slick New Teams Video Feature

Microsoft is rolling out support for third-party widget development and new video calling functions for Chat from Microsoft Teams in its latest developer build of Windows 11. The new features in Preview Build 25217 are available for folks enrolled in the Windows Insider program. The Verge reports: Now, developers can create and test widgets that can be added to the Windows 11 widgets panel. New third-party widgets can only be tested locally on the latest Insider Preview build for now, but can later appear in the Microsoft Store for the shipping version of their apps once the build is formally released to the public. Microsoft says that Widgets can only be created for packaged Win32 apps at this time, but support for Progressive Web App (PWA) Widgets is planned as part of Microsoft Edge 108.

The Insider preview also includes a sneak peek (for a limited group of Insiders) at a new video calling experience for Chat from Microsoft Teams on Windows 11. When you open Chat from the taskbar, you’ll soon be able to see a preview of your own video feed, allowing you to fix your appearance or spot any background issues before starting a call. Microsoft hopes to make this experience more broadly available in the coming months, but a ‘small subset of users’ will already have access to the feature as part of a sneak preview release. You can launch Chat from your Windows 11 taskbar yourself to check if you’re one of the lucky few selected.

The Insider Preview Build 25217 also contains a few other feature updates, including improved cloud suggestions and integrated search suggestions for Simplified Chinese, and some design changes to the Microsoft Store. Now, the store makes it clearer if a game is included as part of Game Pass to spare you from accidentally purchasing a game you may have free access to. The Game Pass library is also getting a performance boost and some more simplified options.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.