Author: Pedro Domínguez

There are only a few days left to see the green comet streaking across the skies. Between February 1 and 2 we will have the opportunity to contemplate comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), which will “skim” our planet at almost 42 million kilometers from our atmosphere and allow us to see with our own eyes its particular green halo (if you can’t see it, you can always follow its trajectory with the Sky Map app).

Although it is a comet, not an asteroid, the fact that one of the thousands of atmospheric objects that surround us passes so close to us will surely alert more than one person and make them wonder what would happen if an asteroid were to impact our planet. Something that also worries the scientific community that, in order to prevent future catastrophes, would be studying these asteroids while they are still flying over space.

According to NCYT Amazings, a group of scientists studying the composition of the Itokawa asteroid would have completed an investigation of 3 tiny dust particles collected from the celestial body by the Habayusa 1 space probe.

The study confirms that Itokawa would be a “debris pile” (a group of stones and rocks grouped together) very resistant to collisions and difficult to destroy, forming a kind of “space cushion” that would absorb the blows it takes on its space travels.

Due to its estimated age (at least 4.2 billion years old), scientists think that many of the asteroids that populate the Solar System may be of this type, so that if any of them should at some point precipitate against the Earth, we would have the necessary data to divert its course. Something that, for the moment, will not happen with our beloved comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF).

How can I see the comet, and do I have to worry about the brightness?

Next February 1 will be the day when the comet will be at its closest point to the Earth. This will occur around 19:11 pm in Spain (peninsular time).

As for the brightness of the comet, there is no need to worry. NASA has reported that the star can be observed with the naked eye without the use of other devices. When we have chosen a spot to see the comet, it is advisable to wait for half an hour for our eyes to adapt to the light.

To get the best possible view of the comet, you will first need to have binoculars or a small telescope. Keep in mind that the best time to see it will be at dusk. The comet will leave behind an unmistakable green halo, which will help you to identify it easily.

A black Monday for the acting world. This morning the death of actress Lisa Loring was announced at the age of 64. The actress who gave life to the character of Wednesday Addams in the Addams Family series of the 60s was connected to life support for several days after suffering a stroke.

Her friend Laure Jacobson communicated the news in a Facebook post: “It is with great sadness that I report the death of our friend Lisa Loring. 4 days ago she suffered a massive stroke caused by smoking and hypertension. She had been on life support for 3 days. Yesterday, her family made the difficult decision to remove her and she passed away last night.”

With a long acting career, Loring’s work became known recently after the great success of Wednesday, the Netflix series where Jenna Ortega plays the character for which she would be recognized in later years. The Addams Family series, broadcast between 1964 and 1966, was the first live-action adaptation to be made of this peculiar family created by American cartoonist Charles Addams.

After the end of the series, which only ran for two seasons, the actress appeared in several TV shows and series, such as The Pruitts of Southampton, The Phyllis Diller Show, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Fantasy Island, Barnaby Jones and As the World Turns. She returned once again in the role of Wednesday for the film Halloween with the Addams Family in 1977, and her last role was in 2015, in the film Doctor Spine.

A death that joins that of Annie Wersching, who gave life to the character of Tess in the video game The Last of Us, at the age of 45. The actress left us last night after failing to overcome a cancer she was diagnosed with in 2020, and her family has enabled a GoFoundMe to cover the medical costs she will have to bear.

Last November, thousands of fans who had been saving to buy tickets for “Eras Tour”, the next tour of the singer Taylor Swift, they got an unpleasant surprise. While they were in a virtual queue that lasted for hours, many witnessed how the website crashed and removed the tickets from their carts, even expelling them from the queue.

In addition to the large fees that some of the lucky ones who were able to buy them had to pay, there was also the serious problem of resale. On various websites, tour tickets began to sell for thousands and thousands of dollars, prohibitive prices for many fans, who were also unable to buy them later in the general sale due to the cancellation of the sale by the TicketMaster website. The incident was so serious that the U.S. Senate decided to take up the case at a hearing on Tuesday.

“Blame it on the bots”

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday dealt with the questionable merger between the companies Live Nation and Ticketmaster, two large companies dedicated to the sale of concert tickets. Following the merger, parent company Live Nation Entertainment was formed, which was responsible for ticket distribution for Swift’s new tour.

In a hearing where the popular singer was not present, the president of Live Nation Entertainment, Joe Berchtold, defended himself against the fiasco in ticket sales, denying that his company was in charge of setting the ticket prices and alluding to the intervention of cybercriminals using bots.

“Major ticketing companies, including Ticketmaster, do not set ticket prices, decide how many go on sale or when, and set no service fees. Pricing and distribution strategies are set by artists and their teams”said the manager. “We knew that the bots would attack the sale and we anticipated it accordingly. We received three times the amount of traffic from bots than ever before and for the first time ever they went after our verified follower passcode servers”.

These bots, dedicated to buying tickets in large quantities and then reselling them, did not achieve their goals of buying tickets and compromising their systems, but they did force web administrators to “slow down and even interrupt sales“, something that led to “terrible experience” that Swift’s fans lived through.

After his statement, Berchtold apologized for everything that happened before the Judiciary Committee, as well as to the rest of the legislators present at the hearing: “As we said after the sale, and I reiterate today, we apologize to the many disappointed fans and to Ms. Swift”.

Twitter continues to accumulate controversies. If already last year several voices commented on the great lack of protections in the social network to ensure the privacy of its users, a new accusation claims that the company would not have put any kind of solution even with Elon Musk in charge.

Twitter DOWNLOAD

In a hearing before the United States Congress, where members of the Federal Trade Commission were also present, a former employee of the social network declared that Twitter still has an internal tool, known as “GodMode”, which would allow tweeting from any account.

A program that already brought headaches

The Washington Post has echoed this accusation thanks to an employee of the US Congress, who shared with the media a complaint filed last October by Whistleblower, a non-profit law firm that is responsible for representing former employees from Twitter and other big companies.

GodMode was precisely the internal program that in 2020 starred in one of the most controversial moments in the history of the platform. On July 15 of that year, several highly relevant accounts with a large number of followers, including Barack Obama and Elon Musk himself, spread a cryptocurrency scam against their will after a hack that allowed criminals use said tool for internal use.

After this incident, the managers of Twitter announced the repair of said failure in the system, something that the current complainant questions: “After the 2020 hack in which several teens were able to tweet as any account, Twitter publicly stated that the issues had been fixed”affirms his complaint. “However, the existence of GodMode is yet another example that Twitter’s public statements to users and investors were false and/or misleading“.

The anonymous whistleblower, who also spoke with TWP, states that the social network’s engineers only changed the name of the program after the incident, renamed “privileged mode”. A tool that would serve, according to his words, so that Twitter could tweet on behalf of advertisers in the event that they could not on their own.

Cybersecurity is an issue that concerns (and affects) more and more companies around the world, and on which our most private data often depends. Despite the large (and ever-increasing) investment being made by companies to safeguard their users’ information, cybercriminals are finding ways to achieve their goals.

In the last two months, two hacks have taken place on websites of great relevance in the technological world: LastPass and PayPal. Malicious accesses that put the accounts of thousands of people around the world at risk, with the implicit possibility that the attackers (or those to whom they sold the stolen data) could access both their passwords on other websites and their digital wallets.

Internet cybercriminals are going for it

Between December 6 and December 8 last year, cybercriminals accessed 34,942 PayPal user accounts. The company said that no transactions were made on any of these accounts from the time the malicious accesses began until PayPal “removed the unauthorized third-party access” on December 8, although it is unknown whether their personal data may have been collected in the process.

A case of cyberattack that could not be classified as “hacking”, since the criminals accessed the affected accounts through a tactic known as “credential stuffing“, which consists of using stolen credentials from websites to try to access others. All the more reason to remind everyone never to use one password on more than one site.

However, this security measure reveals another problem: we must be able to remember multiple passwords (which, in addition, must be combinations of numbers, letters and symbols). Faced with this situation, many people turn to password managers such as LastPass, where they can keep them safe, and then continue with their lives. And everything is going well… until LastPass is hacked.

The company suffered a cyberattack on November 30 that affected a number of users that LastPass’ parent company, Goto, has not disclosed at this time. At the moment, it is only known that this cyberattack affected several of its products, including its Central business communications tool. The company has also not given any recommendations to those affected by the incident.

A series of hacks are becoming more and more frequent and affect companies of all kinds. Riot Games, the company behind the League of Legends and Valorant video games, announced last Friday that it was hacked by cybercriminals. A highly serious incident, as the attackers were able to access the source code of the League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics games, as well as that of its internal anti-cheat system.