Microsoft is trying to prevent the outbreak of a computer worm by urging those running older Windows systems to patch their machines.

Redmond has discovered a serious flaw in Windows 7, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 and 2008 systems, which can be exploited to create malware capable of automatically spreading from one vulnerable machine to another.

“While we have observed no exploitation of this vulnerability, it is highly likely that malicious actors will write an exploit for this vulnerability and incorporate it into their malware,” Microsoft said.

The vulnerability deals with the Remote Desktop Services function in Windows, which can allow a user to take control of the machine over a network. Enterprises often choose to activate the feature on PCs and servers as a way to control them remotely.

Normally, the access requires a correct username and password. However, Microsoft discovered that an “unauthenticated attacker” can install malware on a Windows machine through the Remote Desktop Services function by sending specially crafted data packets.

“An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights,” Microsoft said in its vulnerability advisory.

The bug also requires no interaction from the owner of the affected Windows machine. So theoretically, an attacker could scan the internet to find additional machines to target. An estimated 3 million Remote Desktop Protocol endpoints are currently exposed to the internet, according to security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who cites data from device search engine Shodan.

Fortunately, Windows 10 and Windows 8 are immune from the threat. The attack also won’t work on machines with Remote Desktop Services disabled, according to Microsoft. So the problem is probably less of a threat to consumers than to corporations, which tend to manage large fleets of older Windows machines.

However, the newly discovered vulnerability is so serious that Microsoft is warning it could pave the way for another attack similar to WannaCry, which took over hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs across the world in 2017. As a result, the company has issued patches for Windows Server 2003 and XP, which it no longer supports.

Microsoft is also applying the patches to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 systems that have automatic updates switched on.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with comment from Microsoft about how disabling the Remote Desktop Protocol will prevent the threat.

This article originally published at PCMag
here

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold might be ready to rise again.

According to Yonhap News (via CNET), the Korean electronics giant has reportedly solved the problems that led to review units breaking ahead of the $2,000 foldable phone’s launch in April.

SEE ALSO: Samsung Galaxy Fold teardown reveals multiple design flaws

Per the report, Samsung has reportedly addressed at least two major flaws that broke devices and forced the company to delay the Fold indefinitely.

The first issue relates to the “polymer adhesive” covering the plastic foldable display. On initial review units, the layer resembled a pre-installed screen protector. As a result, some reviewers peeled off the the layer only to find it destroyed the Fold’s display.

To prevent consumers from accidentally peeling off the protective layer, Samsung’s reportedly extended it to cover the entire foldable screen instead of stopping near the edges of the bezel.

The second issue Samsung has reportedly fixed involves blocking debris from getting trapped underneath the display. According to iFixit’s teardown of the Fold, the device’s hinge was susceptible to allowing particles to get inside and then underneath the screen, which would then create abnormal bulges in it.

Yonhap News claims Samsung has improved the hinge design by reducing the gap on revised versions of the Fold so that debris can’t get in as easily.

Both of these fixes look promising for the Galaxy Fold and will likely put the device back on track for  release soon. The only holdup now seems to be getting the device re-certified for sale on mobile networks. 

Samsung’s head of mobile, DJ Koh, said earlier this month the company had “reviewed the defect caused from substances (that entered the device)” and the phone’s launch would “not be too late.” Though Samsung hasn’t confirmed the date, but AT&T emailed customers with a new June 13 tentative ship date. Fingers crossed the Fold comes out before Huawei’s own foldable phone, the Mate X, does.

Mashable reached out to Samsung, but a U.S. spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Discarded cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, and useless plastic water bottles have piled up on the Cocos Islands’ white sand beaches, a balmy tourist destination surrounded by aquamarine waters.

Marine scientist Jennifer Lavers and her research team traveled to this tropical paradise, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, for a couple weeks in 2017. They knew many beaches were littered with plastic trash, but after giving the coast proper scientific scrutiny, discovered the human-debris problem to be substantially worse than anyone knew. Their research, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, found an estimated 414 million pieces of trash — much of which were the broken apart scraps and shards of plastics, deteriorating as they drifted through the oceans, before finally coming to rest on the white Cocos’ sand. 

Although the piles of worthless single-use bottles — which are manufactured with the intention of promptly becoming waste — are unsightly, it’s the smaller plastics that pose the greatest pollution problem. 

“It doesn’t break down,” emphasized Lavers, a research scientist at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. “It breaks up into hundreds, or thousands, or millions of microplastic particles.”

This plastic then becomes impossible to clean up. Sea creatures often eat it up, filling their stomachs. 

Not all plastics, of course, are the problem. They’re necessary in hospitals, airplanes, and make our vehicles lighter and more efficient. It’s the worthless plastic — the single-use plastics — that compose this mounting mess and is piling up on beaches. Lavers wants us to see where much of it goes. “If we can’t see our responsibility in creating the problem, then we’re unwilling to change,” she said. 

In some places — notably in front of resorts or coastal cities — plastics are regularly raked off the beach, often by large beach-combing tractors. But on many beaches the plastic isn’t ever cleaned up, and the true consequences of humanity’s single-use plastic addiction are made conspicuous.

“There’s this image of a desert island that’s pristine,” said Elizabeth Mendenhall, an assistant professor of international government ordinance and marine affairs at the University of Rhode Island. “To realize that there are not places left like that in the world is unfortunate.”

“It’s just a lot plastic,” Mendenhall, who had no role in the study, added after reading the study.

The Cocos Islands, of course, aren’t an exception. Islands around the world are the graveyards of plastics. Previously, Lavers documented the uninhabited Henderson Island in the South Pacific Ocean. There, she found 37.7 million pieces of plastic. 

But unlike Henderson, the Cocos are both inhabited and visited by people. The plastic isn’t some remote afterthought.

SEE ALSO: Fearless TV weather forecasters air the planet’s soaring carbon levels

In both the Henderson and the Cocos, Lavers and her team set out randomly placed transects, or research zones, on the islands from which to count plastics. “It was extremely time-consuming,” said Lavers. From these areas, Lavers and her team estimated the total number of plastic pollution on the islands.

“They’re inundated with the worst waste,” she said. This plastic waste might get smaller, but it won’t ever go away. 

Ending the plastics scourge

Solving modern civilization’s plastic scourge will require “an unprecedented scale of effort.” But there is a path forward, no matter the (tall) hurdles. 

1. Clearly, society must slash demand for worthless, single-use plastics.

“There are so many things we can do,” said Richard Gross, a chemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who researches innovative ways to make markedly more sustainable, recyclable plastics.

“Why don’t we carry around bags that we can use over and over again?” asked Gross, who had no role in the study. “Why don’t we carry around some utensils that are reusable and washable? People need to understand how serious the current situation is.”

Shunning single-use plastics doesn’t require being a “hippy” or left-leaning liberal, added Lavers. “I look like your average, everyday person…I don’t sacrifice major things, I just make different decisions.”

“It just so achievable,” Lavers added.

2. The necessity of plastic laws

While individual efforts to avoid single-use plastics are important, no one thinks such an ingrained, pervasive, and global scourge can be solved without committed international rules. For example, experts want rules requiring countries to ensure that plastics don’t travel from landfills and cities into the seas.

“I think that international action is necessary,” said Mendenhall.

“We need to put together an international coalition,” agreed Gross. “If we don’t do that we’re going to be in bad shape. The plastics are fragmenting. They’re going to be the micro and nano particles that we’re not going to retrieve.”

Already, 157 nations have signed onto the United Nations Law of the Sea. This requires coastal countries to prevent, reduce, and control land-based pollution, explained Mendenhall.

But, like the international laws that outlaw killing whales, the Law of the Sea has no teeth — there’s on enforcement of these rules. “Just putting words on a page is not nearly enough,” said Mendenhall.

The problem is worse than we think

We can expect more plastics to fill the seas. 

The UN — already grappling with accelerating climate change and public health crises like AIDS — certainly isn’t pushing for international action on plastic pollution. Because of that, industries will continue to produce billions of plastic bottles each year, many of which will find their way into the oceans. 

“It’s multinational corporations that are producing and disseminating the majority of these plastics,” said Mendenhall, noting that it’s cheap to pump out single-use plastics. They’re not built to last; they’re designed to be trash. 

Both corporations and nations simply don’t have an economic incentive to solve the problem. But they do have the power to make a massive dent in the plastics problem. “Amazon is so powerful,” said Mendenhall. “Getting a company like that to change its practices could have a big impact.”

Today, fish are eating a lot of the plastic that we put in the oceans, and we eat this fish. It’s still unknown how ingesting plastics affects human health, noted Mendenhall. But what is known is that plastic use has quadrupled in the last 40 years, and if these trends continue, by 2050 the global plastics industry will emit prodigious amounts of carbon into the already carbon-saturated skies. 

Plastic bottles and plastic bags, then, are remarkably unsustainable from a number of perspectives. So far, recycling efforts haven’t made a big enough dent. In 2015, just 9 percent of plastic waste in the U.S. was recycled. 

“It’s horrific. We’re failing at every end here,” said Gross, who’s developing chemical technologies to make plastics that can naturally biodegrade. 

The reality is grim. But Lavers doesn’t want to promote hopelessness in the face of an industrial barrage of single-use plastics. “I want people to feel inspired,” she said. That means doing something, anything — like picking up trash from the beach before it enters the ocean and breaks up into thousands of microplastic bits.

Take a hard look at that plastic fork, or plastic water bottle, before using it. 

“We lived happily without plastic literally for centuries,” said Lavers.

May is National Masturbation Month, and we’re celebrating with Feeling Yourself, a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure.

For a kid, there are few things more awkward than sitting in a sex ed class and learning about masturbation. For a queer or transgender kid, the experience can be simultaneously uncomfortable and painful. 

That’s because, as some sex educators argue, sex education often fails to address masturbation in an inclusive way. In fact, it may not even be discussed at all. Less than half of American high schools and only one fifth of middle schools teach all 16 sex ed topics from the Center for Disease Control’s recommended list. Masturbation isn’t even on that list, much less inclusive masturbation education.

“Talking about self-pleasure doesn’t happen that much in sex ed,” says Andrew Townsend, teen program coordinator for Planned Parenthood Toronto.

SEE ALSO: Teen YouTubers who faked a pregnancy apologize — and offer bad sex ed advice

By ignoring masturbation and not addressing it in a way that speaks to everyone, sex ed fails our youth. Inclusive sex ed should be a critical component of education, and masturbation should be a core topic. Regardless of gender identity or sexuality, the practice is an essential part of an individual’s sexual pleasure.

In general, sex education fails LGBTQ youth

According to a joint report from a number of sexual health and civil rights organizations, LGBTQ youth are less likely to report using contraception and more likely to start having sex at an early age, have multiple partners compared to their heterosexual peers, and have sex while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. 

Despite that, inclusive sex education is rare. “We found that only 6.7 percent of middle and high school students received LGBTQ-inclusive sex education,” says Becca Mui, education manager at GLSEN, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ youth.

Mui points to “no promo homo” laws, currently on the books in six states, which prohibit sex education teachers from positively talking about — or even sometimes including — lesbian, gay, and bisexual topics. 

For example, teachers in South Carolina are not permitted to discuss homosexuality except in reference to sexually transmitted diseases. In Alabama, sex ed teachers are mandated to teach, in certain lessons, that homosexuality is not an acceptable “lifestyle.”

These laws have very real consequences. “What we found in our research is that when a state has a no promo law, it really spills out into the educational culture,” Mui says. “It’s harder to have an inclusive Gay Straight Alliance in those places … and there’s an understanding that young people are more likely to embrace and hold queer identities, genderfluid identities, and transgender identities when adults are teaching this curriculum.” 

On the other hand, the lack of a curriculum could come with risks. Mui is particularly concerned that LGBTQ youth who don’t receive accurate sexual health information won’t make healthy decisions. For example, sex educators who don’t discuss anal sex between gay men miss educating them about the risk of HIV and STDs.

It’s clear that many queer and trans youth aren’t getting the sex education they need.

Masturbation education, when it exists, can be heteronormative and trans-exclusionary

For Sarah Connell, sex educator and host of the podcast Queer Sex Ed, the heteronormative nature of sex ed extends into conversations about masturbation. “We talk about girls using dildos or vibrators or a man stroking a penis,” she explains. 

Both of these acts imitate the act of penetration, but that’s reductive. Connell wants youth to know that pleasure can be found in different parts of the body, and that they should feel free to fantasize about things other than heterosexual penetration.

Sex education about masturbation can be particularly fraught for trans youth, Connell says. Sex educators often see genitals, sex, and gender as the same thing. That language can feel exclusionary for trans people, for whom genitals, sex, and gender are often different.

For Connell, referring to male masturbation only in terms of penises, female masturbation only in terms of vulvas, and leaving non-binary students out of the equation altogether, teachers can stigmatize trans youth.

“There are trans boys who have vulvas. There are girls who have penises. There are non-binary people with any [kind of] genitals,” Connell explains. 

Townsend similarly worries that sex educators who only see masturbation through a heteronormative and cissexist lens (which implies feelings of superiority towards trans people) risk alienating both queer and trans youth who may not derive masturbatory pleasure from the opposite sex or who don’t identify with their assigned genitalia. They also risk hurting straight and cis youth, who may become queer or trans later in life. 

“Your body is going to look different throughout your life,” Townsend stresses.

Every student — queer, trans, cis, and straight — could stand to benefit from an inclusive masturbation education.

Here’s how to fix the problem

Thankfully, there are ways educators can better — and more inclusively — address and teach their queer and trans students. Connell has three recommendations:

First, she urges educators to say what they mean. They shouldn’t refer to boys’ penises or girls’ vaginas. Educators should simply refer to penises and vaginas, or consider using a more general term like genitals. Trans girls, for example, may have a penis, may refer to their “girl penis,” or may have a vulva. Students may refer to their genitals in completely non-gendered terms altogether.

Second, Connell recommends that educators not treat queer sexuality and transgender identity like the plague. There shouldn’t just be a single day where educators talk about trans issues. Sex educators should normalize conversations about these identities and about masturbation.

Third, Connell encourages sex educators to be confident that the youth they are teaching are mature enough to handle the conversation. Many young people are already having conversations about sex with each other or online, Connell says. They’re prepared to handle “adult” conversations about masturbation, but they may not have have accurate information about it.

“Inaction or avoiding the subject is a choice … You’re harming people by not giving them the right tools to be aware of their bodies,” Connell says.

The benefits of direct, inclusive masturbation education are clear. In general, LGBTQ youth who see themselves represented in inclusive curricula report feeling safer in school and having higher levels of self-esteem, Mui explains.

Townsend is similarly optimistic about inclusive masturbation education. By opening up space for students to talk about this issue, he believes it can help remove some of the stigma surrounding self-pleasure for queer and trans youth.

Connell, for her part, holds that inclusive masturbation education could be an empowering educational experience for trans youth. “When I think about sex ed and masturbation especially, it can be really powerful for trans people to reclaim our bodies through masturbation,” Connell says.  

Connell, who is trans herself, cites her own experience. While she was going through hormone replacement therapy, Connell experienced pleasure in different parts of her body and from different sources. Connell wants trans students who are going through the process to know that their experience of desire, and what drives them to masturbate, may change.

“It’s really hard to tell what someone’s reaction will be to hormone replacement therapy …. but there are a general set of changes,” Connell says. “You just don’t know what you’re going to enjoy.” 

Educators can learn how to talk about masturbation with queer, trans, cis, and straight students equally. Inclusive masturbation sex education is possible, Connell stresses. Educators just need to be brave enough — and educated enough — to talk about it.

Sure, the spaceships and aliens and photon blasts are cool. But for my money, the most impressive special effect in Captain Marvel is Nick Fury. 

The Fury of Captain Marvel is a good 25-30 years younger than Jackson in real life, which meant the VFX team had their work cut out for them. Not only did they have to shave decades off his face in around 800(!) shots while avoiding uncanny valley territory, they had to match our own memories of what Jackson looked like in the mid-’90s. 

Amazingly, they pulled it off. The work is both drastic and subtle: Jackson is noticeably younger, but the de-aging VFX is so precise that someone who’d never seen Jackson before would assume the look was entirely natural. Now that’s a transformation worthy of a superhero.

Captain Marvel is available on digital starting May 28, and hits Blu-ray June 11.