here's what's coming up in the category 5 tv newsroom a major release of the is on its way and you can preview it now work is beginning on what is thought to be the world's first major plan to store energy in the form of liquid air hyperloop has carried its first set of passengers microsoft teams users are under active attack and tim berners-lee hopes to improve the privacy of the internet with his new company stick around the full details and this week's crypto corner are coming up this is the category 5 tv newsroom covering the week's top tech stories with a slight linux bias from the newsroom i'm becca ferguson a new development version of the gnu image manipulation program is available for testing and get ready it's a game changer 2.99.2 may be considered unstable but it's a huge step towards the long-anticipated 3.0 release which promises to be the most significant release of the free image editing tool to date 3.0 will be based on the gtk 3ui toolkit which will bring many improvements over the current gtk 2 that currently uses 3.0 and the 2.99.2 preview for that matter include multi-layer selection and support for applying changes to multiple layers at a time it also promises to deliver a faster more responsive user experience leveraging render caching within the interface 2.99.2 is an unstable release that means it's intended for developers bug hunters and enthusiasts only and is not recommended for production use some of the features on the roadmap are a work in progress so there are bound to be many bugs throughout that said you can download 2.99 too now if you'd like to take it for a spin windows users can get it on the developer download page and linux users can grab it through a flat pack on flat hub's better channel there's also a continuous build app image on the official github repository sorry mac users it's not ready for testing on mac os just yet there isn't a firm release date for 3.0 but the devs hope to have it ready for release sometime in 2021 be the world's first major plant to store energy in the form of liquid air it will use surplus electricity from wind farms at night to compress air so hard that it becomes a liquid at -196 celsius then when there is a peak in demand in a day or a month the liquid air will be warmed so it expands the resulting rush of air will drive a turbine to make electricity which can be sold back to the grid the system was devised by peter dearman a self-taught backyard inventor from herbertshire and it has been taken to commercials to commercial scale with a 10 million pound grant from the uk government dr dearman said his inv or mr dearman said his invention was 60 to 70 efficient depending on how it is used that is less efficient than batteries but he said the advantage of liquid air is the low cost of the storage tanks so it can be easily scaled up also unlike batteries liquid air storage does not create a demand for minerals which may become increasingly scarce as the world moves towards power systems based on variable renewable electricity batteries are really great for short-term storage mr dearman said but they are too expensive to do long-term energy storage that's where liquid air comes in mr dearman had been developing a car run on similar principles with liquid hydrogen when he saw the potential for applying the technology to electricity storage he is now a passive shareholder in high view one of the firms building the 50 megawatt plant the 50 megawatt facility near manchester will store enough energy to power around 50 000 homes for up to five hours that is really amazing just to think that a few thousand years ago we were taking buckets of water up a hill to store them and then use that water as energy we were i remember oh yeah i know just back in the day right it's just getting my coffees and everything no but it's it's remarkable in the sense that we're able to use this natural thing that we breathe every day yeah and use that to store energy i think that's absolutely fantastic talking about a green energy source what a clever idea but like how much pressure is this thing under more than me whenever i had work but still oh boy um no but it's it's a remarkable idea and i really like how they really focused on the idea of green energy because again unlike batteries where you have to have all these minerals everything else dug up you're able to use this it's just air it's it's under compression and it's able to store energy yes and thinking of batteries not only do you have to obtain the resources but when those are depleted when they're no longer able to hold exactly the waste everything else yeah yeah that's exactly right one less thing to worry about and it it's just amazing these technologies and i'm curious to see what they think of next i love the idea of an energy source that is able to kind of recycle itself yes and that's kind of what this reminds me of i've thought about and i know it's not practical and i know that it's probably not even possible but um putting like uh you know you know in a water source something that can pump the water because and and generate electricity at the same time there's so many neat ideas out there this is something that's actually coming to pass well that this is the number one thing because with in respect to green technology the big the largest thing that's been lagging behind is definitely being able to store that energy because again we do have these advances in solar power wind power but the issue is where do you store all that where do you put it yeah so this can definitely be one of those solutions that can help us help turn our economy our world into a more greener place cool down the road so this this is a really really cool to hear i can't wait to see what comes of it yeah or here's a bit or smells of it i'm trying to think of air puns but it's not working so we tried virgin hyperloop has trialled its first ever journey with passengers in the desert of nevada the futuristic transport concept involves pods inside vacuum tubes carrying passengers at high speeds in the trial two passengers both company staff traveled the length of a 500 meter test track in 15 seconds reaching 172 kilometers an hour you may recall from our past coverage as far as 2018 that the top speed for the hyperloop is said to be a thousand kilometers an hour and while this is only a fraction of that ambition it's a big step toward hyperloop transportation becoming a reality virgin hyperloop is not the only firm developing the concept but nobody has carried passengers before sarah lucian director of customer experience was one of the two on board and described the experience as exhilarating both psychologically and physically she and chief technology officer josh geigel wore normal clothing rather than flight suits for the event which took place on sunday afternoon outside of las vegas miss lucian said the journey was smooth and not at all like a roller coaster although the acceleration was zippier than it would be with a longer track neither of them felt sick she added she said that their speed was hampered by the length of the track and acceleration required the concept which has spent years in development builds on a proposal by tesla founder elon musk some critics have described it as science fiction it is based on the world's fastest magnetic levitation trains then made faster by placing the train inside vacuum tubes the world record speed for a maglev train was set in 2015 when a japanese train reached 374 miles per hour in a test run near mount fuji the hyperloop has already exceeded that speed but never with passengers critics have pointed out that hyperloop travel systems would involve the considerable undertaking of both getting planning permission and then constructing vast networks of tubes for every travel path miss lucian acknowledges the potential difficulties saying of course there's a lot of infrastructure to be built but i think we've mitigated a lot of risk that people didn't think was possible in speaking about the infrastructure challenges she pointed out that while governments can continue building up yesterday's transport systems people are looking for new solutions the transportation of the future attack and tim berners-lee hopes to improve the privacy of the internet at large with his new company becca has these stories coming up plus robert is here with the crypto corner so don't go anywhere [Music] welcome back to the world of cryptos and welcome back to the crypto corner today we're going to spend some time in ethereum 2.0 i'm going to explain to you in a very simple way what ethereum 2.0 is all about and to start we're going to look at the fees so the fees that you pay when you do a transaction on the ethereum blockchain and this year is 2018. in 2018 the fees were fairly low and then suddenly a project was started called cryptokitties everybody complained about it because the fees went up through the roof now that was 2018 how does that same picture look today if i expand this here to today then here this is the little blip with cryptokitties the fees that we had to pay because of d5 not so long ago were significantly higher and if you consider that we are how many people are we using the ethereum blockchain let's say 100 000 200 000 it won't be much more than that so if 200 000 can already bring the blockchain uh in regards to fees to a halt how would that look like if we have got certainly 20 million people using this chain it will not be feasible any longer and that's why including also some other reasons a long time ago the idea of your theorem 2.0 was started and it taking it's it's taking its time and why because coding and programming is not simple yeah if you have got a company like apple or google where everything is under one roof everything is coordinated in a different way you can have a different type of transparency and and also objectives but if you have got a team of 400 people that are coordinated through something like github yeah so this github is where everything happens in regards to ethereum then it looks very it's very complex and so everything has to be done very meticulously because we're talking about money here in this case money transfer so big mistakes will cost a lot of money as we've seen in defile and we've got over in the ethereum current blockchain we've got over 244 repositories over 500 people programming so you can imagine how complex this whole thing is yeah there are many hundred thousand lines of code that need to be coordinated that's why this thing takes so long now looking at the road map um this is the roadmap of the of eth 2.0 so this is the current chain here so this is 1.0 that's the theorem you and i know and soon we will have the beacon chain which is the start of ethereum 2.0 and this here is like the current chain without proof of work so proof of stake and you will not have any smart contracts in this phase zero from there we will start with the fa with this smart contracts but we'll have shards and charts i like just imagine a very simple way like sub blockchain so you'll have a chain for let's say uh defy you'll have a chain that's that needs to be secured in a special way then you've got a new chain for uh gamers so when something happens like with cryptokitties where suddenly the chain was blocked it will be only that chain that will be blocked at that time and the fees will not go through the roof so there are lots of little improvements coming also along with this 2.0 and the roadmap in detail just the ones that we hear today and we will start soon phase zero uh phase zero means uh moving away from proof of work to proof of stake and that's done by having a deposit contract because you need to secure the network not through miners so people that are mining you need to secure it through value and that for that the deposit contract was now created and the time is running now until the 7th of december where then the beacon chain will be started from there we will then go over to phase 0 and then much later phase 2 and phase three and at this stage you there will be also no more proof of work so the current blockchain that you know is point zero will be more or less switched off that's not possible i know but it it will not continue everything will happen in the new uh ethereum 2.0 and um for the transition from the current status to ethernet uh phase zero they created a very good website launchpad.ethereum.org where when you want to become a validator you can get started here and they'll run you through some questions and so on and they explain to you what that really means um you will get some money so for every theme that you stake so in other words you put up with security you'll get some money as a reward at the beginning it will be of course higher because we're starting but and over the time it will go down and here this is the status of how far people have committed already to this new uh chain where at 10 i guess that around the first of december this thing should be filled more or less because all the big whales will be coming in um into staking because they're get the rewards are not bad at the beginning so this is um ethereum 1.0 explained 2.0 sorry explained in a very simple way and i hope you liked it and i hope you enjoyed it and i thank you very much for watching and i'm looking forward to see you next week again so thank you very much bye-bye thank you robert just a reminder that we're not providing financial advice but only sharing what's happening in the cryptocurrency market always remember that the cryptocurrency market is always changing and always volatile so only invest what you can afford to lose and now here's becca thank you robbie attack in a fake updates malware campaign attackers are using ads for fake microsoft teams updates to deploy back doors which use cobalt strike to infect companies networks with malware microsoft is warning the customers about the so-called fake updates campaigns in a non-public security advisory revealed by bleeping computer the campaign is targeting various types of companies with recent targets in the k-12 education sector where organizations are currently dependent on using apps like teams for video conferencing due to covet 19 restrictions cobalt strike is a commodity attack simulation tool that's used by attackers to spread malware particularly ransomware recently threat actors were seen using cobalt strike in attacks exploiting zero logon a privileged elevation flaw that allows attackers to access a domain controller and completely compromise all active directory identitive identity services in the advisory microsoft said it's seen attackers in the latest fake updates campaign using search engine ads to push top results for team software to a domain controlled by the attackers and used for nefarious activity if victims click on the link it downloads a payload that executes a power shell script which loads malicious content cobalt strike beacons are among the payloads also being distributed by the campaign which give threat actors the capability to move laterally across a network beyond the initial system of infection the link also installs a valid copy of microsoft teams on the system to appear legitimate and avoid alerting victims to the to the attack malware being distributed by the campaign include predator the thief infostealer which pilfers sensitive data such as credentials browser and payment data microsoft also has seen a backdoor and zed loader stealer being distributed by the latest campaigns microsoft is recommending that people use web browsers that can filter and block malicious websites and ensure that local admin passwords are strong and can't easily be guessed admin privileges also should be limited to essential users and avoid domain wine service domain-wide service accounts that have the same permissions as an administrator according to the report they advise organizations to limit their attack surface to keep attackers at bay by blocking executable files that do not meet specific criteria or blocking javascript and vbscript code from downloading executable content well microsoft teams it takes a team to be hacked yeah it's uh you can get independently hacked very easily yeah well no it's it's it's a scary thing really because with it being seen so much not just organizations but if you're an educator if you're a teacher student et cetera um it isn't well think you're talking about teachers and stuff i'm thinking about how these folks have been thrown into having to use microsoft teams with no experience this is something totally new and then all of a sudden you get a little little window that says hey you need to update it's okay right save and you think oh this this is what i'm using for my classroom so i better get that update oh no it's like children make sure you install this update well like we're just talking before the show it really is a form of social engineering absolutely because it's it's so easy to fall into the trap this is where phishing scams have like we think oh well i would never fall for a phishing scam because you know i don't use that service or this service or whatever but it's a it's a like a if i throw enough phishing scams out there that pretend to be the royal bank of canada yeah i will inevitably land in the inbox of some people who bank at the royal bank of canada so if i buy ads that are pretending to be updates for microsoft teams even though i personally robbie ferguson don't use teams somebody out there you might yeah somebody else might and and social engineering they they trick those folks into installing this malware and we're talking ransomware so ransomware is the one that encrypts your files and goes out on the network that you're connected to and encrypts all the files that it can gain access to and as we know from zero logon that is every file on the entire network if you're like like a school network you think oh well we're locked down it's safe no zero login zero logon allows them to have administrator credentials just like just like your it admin so like these are serious exploits and social engineering they're using that to get into these systems that could be a back door into the network well exactly i'm also scared for small businesses right yeah so again everyone's working from home now so again if you have employees who aren't aztec literate or but henry who would target me i'm just uh i'm just a work from home you know person who no nobody would always target me see yeah false send secure security right yeah we become complacent absolutely the fact is is that these are non-targeted attacks these tools are built to find susceptible systems and attack them yeah just a wide net that's all it takes like you said one email spam it out yeah so maybe a pie hole which is an ad blocking dns server suddenly becomes not just something to block your advertising but also something to like your ad blocker becomes something that's going to prevent malware yeah they bought ads on google i mean like come on i've seen it happen on facebook i've been on facebook yeah a java i think it was a flash virus at the time tried to install through an ad well they have like a hundred dollar free like ad credit thing if you sign up for google ads now so they got a real good deal i'm not just kidding that's not sponsored so be really careful when you click on folks be very very careful and almost to the point of skeptical all right it really does show how the world is developing away from ads though like i know this is going to be kind of a little bit off topic now but it just adds being so intrusive hence why you have other platforms like patreon and stuff that you can support sure yes and things like that right because whenever i'm on youtube i'm like yeah i have an ad locker i i rely on ad revenue in order to survive as a as a broadcaster on youtube exactly but it's just like it's a balance now right because it's like is this ad gonna try to sell me or try to affect my try to trick you into getting an infection of ransomware yeah so just like i want to support small businesses and channels and stuff but how do i balance that with safety now it's it's such a hard thing to talk about it's a very good question i don't know that there's an answer immediately sitting there ready to be given so it's really just down to be very cautious be skeptical when you're clicking on stuff online and know that even in somewhere like google maybe the ads contain malware so watch out and be careful inventor of the world wide web tim berners-lee is having another crack at fixing the internet's biggest problems with the launch of a new enterprise the inrupt enterprise solid server is the first product from a company the inventor started two years ago in response to the problem of personal data online where tech giants like facebook and google build vast databases on users profiles and sell them to advertisers to make massive profits inrupt has worked on a series of new standards that allow individuals to store their personal information in pods whose access they control the decentralized approach allows for the free and fast sharing of data but with control in the hands of its owners the project is called solid and after two years of work at mit the team behind it has released an enterprise service the goal being to move the whole idea from concept to reality the enterprise server will allow organizations to build applications using others data pods that can do useful things like draw comparisons across users or build greater context around user data while keeping the user in control of their data for many businesses it will be a chicken and egg conundrum where it won't be worth investing in the solid system until there is sufficient data and users of the system and users won't bother providing their data until there are sufficient companies and applications with new regulations like gdpr and california's privacy law a system like solid would make it significantly easier easier for companies to gather and use data without having the weight of administering it at all and being responsible for constantly updated permissions in a blog post monday berners-lee announced the numbers of big name partners that will run pilots including the bbc nat west bank the national health service and flanders government the pilots are small and the intent is to spark greater awareness of the technology and grow adoption big thanks to roy w nash and our community of viewers for submitting stories to us this week thanks for watching the category 5 tv newsroom don't forget to like and subscribe for all your tech news with a slight linux bias and if you appreciate what we do become a patron at patreon.com category 5. from the category 5 tv newsroom i'm becca ferguson [Applause] you