Security News
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Communications Commission will run an emergency alert test today to check Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts capabilities nationwide. On consumers' phones, WEA alert messages will read: "This is a test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed."
DARPA's extended-duration unmanned undersea vehicle is having its first aquatic excursion to test if this naval drone has wings, er, fins. The splash test was part of DARPA's Manta Ray program for America's next-generation of undersea power projection, with PacMar Technologies and Northrop Grumman each building their own prototype UUVs.
Google Chrome is set to enhance its user experience on the desktop by adding a "Read aloud" function, currently available for testing in the Canary version. A notable feature of Read Aloud is the adjustable playback speed, allowing users to control the rate at which articles are read aloud.
ImmuniWeb Community Edition: Introducing free email security test. To help companies and organizations to quickly assess their exposure to email-related security, privacy and compliance risks, ImmuniWeb has recently enhanced its Community Edition with a free email security test available online.
YouTube is currently running what it describes as a "Small experiment globally," warning users to toggle off their ad blockers and avoid being limited to only three video views. As first spotted by a Reddit user on Wednesday, YouTube now displays a pop-up that notifies ad blocker users targeted by this test that "Video player will be blocked after 3 videos."
YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos. Upon receiving this notification, users will have two options: either disable their ad blocker to allow YouTube ads or consider subscribing to YouTube Premium to get rid of all advertisements.
Microsoft is testing new ads in the Windows Start menu, or what it describes as "New treatments," for users logged into local accounts as part of a "Badging" expansion. "We are continuing the exploration of badging on the Start menu with several new treatments for users logging in with local user accounts to highlight the benefits of signing in with a Microsoft account," said Microsoft's Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc.
Microsoft will start testing Bing Chat tones, enabling users to switch between receiving answers that are either more creative or more focused on their queries. We are "Going to begin testing an additional option that lets you choose the tone of the Chat from more Precise - which will focus on shorter, more search focused answers - to Balanced, to more Creative - which gives you longer and more chatty answers," the Bing Team said.
Microsoft is testing a new diagnostic tool in Windows 11 that lets you create live kernel memory dumps without disrupting the operation of Windows. A live kernel dump is a snapshot of the kernel's memory at the time of the dump, which is then saved to a file.
CI Fuzz CLI, the open-source Command-Line Interface tool from Code Intelligence, now allows Java developers to easily incorporate fuzz testing into their existing JUnit setup to find functional bugs and security vulnerabilities at scale. CI Fuzz CLI, available on GitHub, leverages genetic and evolutionary algorithms and automated instrumentation to dynamically generate millions of unusual inputs to test Java applications for unexpected behaviors that may lead to crashes, DoS or zero-day exploits.