This library provides a generic NetscapeBookmarkParser class that is able of parsing Netscape bookmarks as exported by common Web browsers and bookmarking services.

Transplant is "compassionate use" rather than part of a clinical trial.

On Monday, the University of Maryland School of Medicine announced that its staff had completed the first transplant of a pig's heart into a human. The patient who received the heart had end-stage heart disease and was too sick to qualify for the standard transplant list. Three days after the procedure, the patient was still alive.

The idea of using non-human organs as replacements for damaged human ones—called xenotransplantation—has a long history, inspired by the fact that there are more people on organ waiting lists than there are donors. And in recent years, our ability to do targeted gene editing has motivated researchers to start genetically modifying pigs in order to make them better donors. But the recent surgery wasn't part of a clinical trial, so it shouldn't be viewed as an indication that this approach is ready for widespread safety and efficacy testing.

Instead, the surgery was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration under its "compassionate use" access program, which allows patients facing life-threatening illnesses to receive investigational treatments that haven't gone through rigorous clinical testing yet.

The heart used for this transplant did come from a genetically modified line that was specifically engineered to reduce the chance of rejection by the human immune system. //

I hope he gets his pilot's license.

Sooo... who gets the donor's bacon?

Glad a pig was able to save this guy's bacon!

Q:

As far as I know, current versions of Mozilla Firefox store the saved passwords (encrypted with 3DES) to the logins.json file meanwhile the keys are stored in key4.db (or key3.db in older versions).

If one hasn't set up a Master Key for the passwords, the key database file can then be accessed. In the database, I've encountered an entry that does indeed look like the keys.

So, why possibly are there two 3DES keys in the database? Are they really encryption keys? How can I use them to decrypt the logins.json data? Which keying option is being used?

A:

In the data structure, item1 is the global salt, and item2 contains (in DER encoding) the entry salt and the encrypted key. This key is used to encrypt the rest of the data (per username and password).

The encryption of the master key is done with 3DES-CBC, with a key (and IV) derived from the master password, a global salt and a "per entry" salt. By default, the master password is the empty string. The password's entropy is bounded to 160 bits by sha1, which is further bounded to 112 bits by 3DES. The password is not hardened using multiple iterations of an hash.

The encryption of items (usernames and passwords) is done using 3DES-CBC, with an IV included in the metadata of each item. How IV is generated cannot be guessed from this source of the algorithm.

Unless the IVs are poorly generated, the small amount of data encrypted means that the best attack on 3DES is brute-forcing the master key or the user's password. The upper bound of 112 bits means that is this algorithm is considered weak by today standards: a big organization with huge resources might be able to brute-force the key in a few decades. Quantum computers might break them faster.

In practice, this means that a good, long passphrase must be used as the master password.

FHRs have the potential to safely and reliably generate large quantities of power at lower cost than any other nuclear reactor class. The United States has attempted to develop non-light-water-cooled reactors since the 1950s. None have succeeded on a sustained basis in the commercial market despite long-term, substantial government funding. Light-water-cooled reactors (LWRs) are a reliable, mature reactor technology with an established cost and performance basis. Even LWRs, however, supply only ~20% of US electricity and only ~8% of total US energy. The most significant issue inhibiting the growth of nuclear energy in the United States is the high cost of available LWR reactor options (compared to the current cost of natural gas) combined with an output temperature considerably lower than that needed to support many industrial process heat uses.

Jacki Kotkiewicz
@jackikotkiewicz
This is the HIGHEST inflation we've seen in OVER 39 YEARS #Bidenflation

Gas: +49.6% since last year
Bacon: +18.6%
Eggs: +11.1%
Chicken: +10.4%
Fresh Fish: +10.2%
Shoes: +6%
Dresses: +8%
Cigarettes: +9.6%
Furniture: +13.8%
Used Cars & Trucks: +37.3%
Car & Truck Rentals: +36%
8:47 AM · Jan 12, 2022

Lastly, it should be mentioned that the Biden administration actually changed the calculation for inflation. In other words, it’s likely that 7 percent number is watered down, making the comparison to 1982 apples to oranges. That’s how bad things are.

How on Earth do you patch the software on a computer orbiting the Moon? Very carefully.

FRANK O’BRIEN - 1/30/2020, 12:30 PM

In the afternoon of January 31, 1971, the flight thundered away from the Kennedy Space Center on its Saturn V launch vehicle after only a brief 40 minute hold for weather. After restarting the S-IVB third stage for trans-lunar injection (TLI), the command module Kitty Hawk and her crew were on their way to the Moon. //

However, less than four hours before the scheduled landing, controllers noticed that according to the indications on their consoles in Mission Control, the LM's Abort pushbutton appeared to have been pressed. When asked via radio, Shepard confirmed that no one on board Antares had pressed the Abort button—which meant there was a short-circuit or other electrical issue somewhere inside the LM's complicated guts.

This was potentially a mission-ending problem: if the button was pressed and the engine was firing, the LM would immediately begin its abort procedure as soon as the lunar descent started, making a landing impossible.

Under hard time pressure, the ground had to quickly figure out what was wrong and devise a workaround. What they came up with was the most brilliant computer hack of the entire Apollo program, and possibly in the entire history of electronic computing.

To explain exactly what the hack was, how it functioned, and the issues facing the developers during its creation, we need to dig deep into how the Apollo Guidance Computer worked. Hold onto your hats, Ars readers—we're going in. //

Once again the LM’s orbit carried it behind the Moon and out of communications, leaving the crew with just a smattering of procedures and few options. The normal work of finishing the system configurations continued, and the crew maneuvered to the descent attitude, tidied up the cabin, and put on their helmets and gloves. In the meantime, Don Eyles’ team was feverishly working to find a better solution to the Abort bit issue.

Working the problem involved unraveling a complex, daisy-chained series of events. The main landing program, P63, does not perform all of the landing computations itself. Rather, it orchestrates a large number of Jobs and Waitlist Tasks, each performing a necessary part of the effort. Another Job running concurrently was the SERVICER, which sampled attitudes and accelerations that fed into the guidance equations. SERVICER, in turn, scheduled Routine R11 as a Waitlist Task, running every 0.25 seconds. R11 first checked whether aborts are enabled (via the LETABBIT flag), and if so, it then checked the status of the Abort bit. With aborts allowed, and the abort signal set (presumably because the crew pressed the Abort pushbutton), P63 is terminated, the AGC's Major Mode switches to P70, and the abort process begins. //

This was the breakthrough. If R11 could be spoofed into believing that an abort was already in progress, then it didn’t matter if the Abort button was pressed or not—the button's state would be ignored.

But how did R11 actually inform itself about whether or not an abort was executing? The answer was in plain sight on the DSKY: The Major Mode display, under the label “PROG”. //

In less than two minutes after the descent to the Moon had started, the Abort pushbutton had been successfully disabled and the computer was happily managing the descent. All indications were that the next lunar landing would be successfully accomplished in eight more minutes. //

As Antares passed through 32,000 feet (about 9,700 meters), Mitchell became concerned and informed controllers that the radar hadn’t locked on. Houston replied with a suggestion to pull the circuit breaker for the radar, and then power the system back on, which did the trick. Solid radar data began flowing into the computer, and the crew quickly agreed to accept it. Just a few minutes later, Shepard made a smooth and on-target touchdown at the Fra Mauro highlands.

After the mission, when asked if he would have attempted to land without the radar, the notoriously hard-charging Shepard reportedly replied, “You’ll never know.” In Gene Kranz’s Failure is Not an Option autobio, Kranz recounts that Flight Director Jerry Griffin was convinced that Shepard would indeed make an attempt to land without radar, and would just as certainly have had to abort when fuel ran out. //

The idea that a single errant switch could derail a lunar landing attempt was unacceptable. After the mission, a new variable in the AGC code was introduced that allowed the crew to "mask out" (that is, to ignore) the Abort and Abort Stage pushbuttons. The scenario assumed that a failing switch would be recognized well before the descent began, and commands could be entered in time to prevent an inadvertent abort. Like the fix used for Apollo 14, this would make initiating an abort through a pushbutton impossible, and any urgent situation would have to be performed on the Abort Guidance System. //

The recovery from Apollo 14’s Abort switch failure can only be described as brilliant and heroic. But the most important enabler of this effort was that the software, while fiendishly complex, could be understood by a small team of developers. Modern hardware and software, with its extensive protection schemes, virtualization and dynamic program management simply would make such a simple hack impossible. Faced with a comparable problem today, even if the fix were trivial, the solution likely would require large amounts of code to be recompiled, tested and uploaded to the spacecraft. This may not be possible given the short timeframe necessary to save the mission.

In the end, Apollo 14’s fix truly represented the “Spirit of Apollo," where talented teams made the impossible happen.

What's really striking is how these videos underscore the onslaught of stuff, the acquisition and disposable nature of stuff, and the fact that sometimes just getting a bunch of stuff that's so cheaply made it's not worth trying to resell piece by piece makes these YouTubers feel like they're getting away with something. (I also think that in effect, these people have discovered the dollar store and could get a similar effect by going into a dollar store with their eyes closed and just taking home the first 50 things they ran into.) //

There was a guy who summed this up in one video so perfectly that I wrote down his comment immediately. He had just found, among his "tech" stuff, a package of 100 interoffice mail envelopes. Just ... interoffice mail envelopes, in there with the doggie camera and the filthy earbuds. He didn't need them, didn't want them, knew immediately he would throw them away, but he was still really impressed that he'd gotten such great value. He said: "No use for these, unfortunately, but damn!"

Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, who is also a doctor, who went there on the DARPA report. First, Marshall notes that there were more deaths under Joe Biden than under President Donald Trump. That’s the chart you see behind him in the following video. But then he tells Fauci that 59 percent of Americans didn’t trust him. Fauci replies that that was a real “distortion of reality.”

Next, Marshall hones in on the gain of function research lie. He noted how DARPA rejected a proposal but the NIAID didn’t reject it under Fauci. Marshall asks why had Fauci previously said that they hadn’t funded gain of function research when the report indicated that they had. He also asks if Fauci would commit to providing all the documents on this subject — unredacted — to Congress by the end of this week.

Fauci denies that they had funded the grant, but Marshall says they would have all the supporting information available. Fauci’s response to that is crazy, claiming that Marshall was “backing down from this,” which didn’t match what Marshall had said. Fauci just keeps saying that Marshall is incorrect, so Marshall challenges him to provide all the unredacted information.

For user convenience, web browsers store the account and password entered into the login form when the user visits a website and provide the feature to enter them automatically upon revisiting. The password management feature is enabled by default on Chromium-based web browsers (Edge, Chrome).

Figure. Chrome pop-up suggesting to save password
The information entered when logging in is saved to the Login Data file via the password management feature.

Chrome C:\Users\<User name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Login Data
Edge C:\Users\<User name>\AppData\Local\MicrosoftEdge\User\Default\Login Data

Login Data is an SQLite database file, and the account and password information are saved to the logins table. In addition to accounts and passwords, the time saved, URL of the login site, and the number of times of access is saved to the logins table.

If the user refuses to save account and password information of a site, in order to remember this, the blacklisted_by_user field will be set as 1, the username_value and password_value fields will not have accounts or passwords, and only the origin_url information is saved to the logins table. //

– Collecting and stealing information saved to browsers
– Login account and password
– Cookies
– Autofill
– Credit card information
– Browsers targeted for attack
– All Chromium-based browsers
– All Gecko-based browsers
– Cryptocurrency wallet information
– Seed file saved to the system