Top News of the Week from the IT World [26.11.2017-03.12.2017]

Hello. I've decided to start a new section where I'll be publishing news from the IT world that have interested me the most.

So, let's begin:

First place:

In Russia, anonymous use of mobile messengers will be prohibited from January 1, 2018.

Russia's Attorney General, Yuri Chaika, announced that starting from January 1, 2018, anonymous use of mobile messengers will be prohibited. To use messengers, you will need to enter into some kind of agreement and obtain a subscriber number.

It's not clear yet how Roskomnadzor, or whoever will be responsible for this, will carry out the control, especially if users are using something truly secure, like Jabber on their own servers. Well, we'll see how it goes.

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Second place:

A flaw in MacOS allows anyone to easily gain root access to the system.

In MacOS, they found, I don't even know what to call it – probably not so much a system flaw or bug as a configuration error. In short, to gain superuser access to the system on the mentioned OS, all you have to do is enter "root" as the username in the login window and leave the password blank.

And that's it, you have full access to the system. To avoid waiting for an update from Apple that fixes this embarrassing oversight, you can manually set a password for root.

So much for highly secure technology! :D. In general, it's quite strange, not only that there's no password set for the superuser but also that it's allowed to log in with root privileges in the graphical interface. I think even people who are not very knowledgeable about information security understand that a user with such privileges in the GUI has nothing to do.

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Third place:

Microsoft has released Edge for iOS and Android.

In general, no comments needed here. Two questions arise, though:

1) Have they finally turned their browser into something stable, flying, etc. for Windows?

2) It's very interesting who will use this creation on the operating systems for which it was released?

Remembered:

- Do you use Internet Explorer?
- Yes, of course.
- Why?
- To download a proper browser.

Although my opinion on this matter is biased, maybe some people will use it.

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Fourth place:

The cost of Bitcoin has surpassed $10,000 for the first time.

Bitcoin has appeared in the news several times this week regarding broken records, but $10,000 per unit is probably somewhat of a psychological threshold, just like $1,000. By the way, it eventually rose above $11,000.

It's very interesting what people who got into Bitcoin at the dawn of its existence, ordering pizzas and other stuff for a few tens or even hundreds of bitcoins, feel when they read such news.

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Fifth place:

The HDMI 2.1 specification is ready, which will support Dynamic HDR and resolutions up to 10K.

According to the new specification, the bandwidth will be 48Gbps. For reference, HDMI 1.4 has a speed of 1.4Gbps, and HDMI 2.0 has 18Gbps.

Thanks to the increased maximum data transfer rate, the new standard will support monitor resolutions up to 10K. It also adds support for Dynamic HDR.

If you switch to HDMI 2.1, you will need to purchase new cables.

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