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A daily dose of today's top news, in brief.
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Google to distrust all WoSign and StartCom certificates
Google has announced it will distrust all certificates issued by Chinese company WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom upon the release of Chrome 61. According to Chrome security engineer Devon O'Brien, the decision is due to "several incidents" where certificates WoSign issued were not meeting the "high standards expected of CAs." Google has already begun phasing out WoSign certificates by only trusting certificates issued prior to October 21, 2016, but the company has now decided to distrust all certificates from both certificate authorities.
"The move to begin blacklisting the CA authority occurred last year," ZDNet writes. "In August 2016, WoSign was caught issuing fake HTTPS certificates for GitHub domains, which are a severe security risk as attackers could use the certificate to impersonate GitHub domains to compromise user communications."
In response to the issues, Google and Mozilla launched a joint investigation and uncovered other instances when unauthorized certificates were issued. Apple has also decided to follow suit, and plans to distrust several WoSign and StartCom certificates, though will do so on a case by case basis.
Ubuntu is now available in the Windows Store
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that several popular Linux distributions would be making their way to the Windows Store, and today Ubuntu became available for download. One of the world's most popular distributions, Ubuntu "runs in a sandbox alongside Windows 10, and offers regular command-line utilities as a standalone installation, with shared access to files and hardware with Windows 10," The Verge writes.
To run Ubuntu in Windows 10, users will need to navigate to Control Panel and select "Turn windows features on or off", followed by toggling the option "Windows Subsystem for Linux." Following a reboot, Ubuntu will be functional.
Microsoft's decision to allow Linux distributions into the Windows Store was met with widespread praise, with other popular distros including SUSE Linux and Fedora soon to follow.
W3C proceeds in recommending DRM standard for HTML
W3C now officially recommends a system providing DRM protection to Web-based content, a controversial decision providing developers with a tool to encrypt and protect audio and video content. Dubbed Encrypted Media Extensions, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed the tool to standardize DRM within HTML-5 and JavaScript web applications.
"The decision to bless the EME specification as a W3C standard was made last week in spite of substantial opposition from organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)," Ars Technica writes. "Many opponents of this regard any attempt to impose such technical restrictions as an affront to the open Web."
The decision was green-lit by HTML's inventor and W3C's director, Tim Berners-Lee, after he concluded the objections to EME did not justify blocking the technology. Many proponents of EME believe the standard will allow developers to impose more effective and less invasive protections on content.
There are still many that are principally opposed to DRM, and the widespread opposition of EME will likely meet steadfast resolve at W3C, as the organization made it clear it did not see good reason to prevent the development of EME from moving forward.
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But there's more going on in the world than that.
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Trump to roll back Obama-era "International Entrepreneur Rule"
Implementation of the "International Entrepreneur Rule" has been delayed following a decision by the Department of Homeland Security to review the policy. The DHS has publicly stated it intends to overturn the Obama-era policy, which would allowed more foreigners to start businesses in the US. Official notice of the delay is set to be published tomorrow, pushing the effective date of the regulation to March 2018.
"The International Entrepreneur Rule is a kind of stunted version of the 'startup visa' that tech companies have long favored," Ars Technica writes. "It would have allowed foreign entrepreneurs an 'initial parole stay' of 30 months in the US, which could have been extended by another 30 months."
The visa would have been restricted to entrepreneurs that have lined up at least $250,000 of investment capital from reputable investors. When the policy was announced, it met criticism from many proponents of immigration reform, as it didn't provide a path to permanent residency following the parole period extension.
The DHS will be taking public comments on the issue between now and March 2018. Comments can be submitted online at www.regulations.gov, referencing Docket No. USCIS-2015-0006.
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And you can't not know this.
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Tiny fossils hint at what happened to birds following dino extinction
The fossils of a tiny bird discovered in New Mexico suggest a massive surge of bird population and diversity following the extinction of dinosaurs. The 62-million-year-old mousebird fossil "may well be the best example of how an unremarkable fossil of an unremarkable species can have enormously remarkable implications," Larry Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University told Science Magazine.
The fossils were described online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing a collection of fossil fragments rather than an entire skeleton. But certain telltale characteristics of the find suggest the creature is a mousebird, an ancestor of mousebirds still found today in sub-Saharan Africa.
What makes the find remarkable is the age of the fossil. It dates back to just a few million years after an asteroid struck Earth and wiped out the planet's dinosaur population. While scientists believe many other species made rapid recoveries, including mammals and frogs, they know very little about what happened to birds — until now.
Witmer believes the discovery gives paleontologists new footing to scrutinize existing museum collections for signs of other representative bird groups. "This little fossil mousebird signals that those groups must have been there — we just need to find them."
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