An elite Intel team is still fighting Meltdown and Spectre, two security vulnerabilities that affected millions of devices.

Throughout 2018, researchers inside and outside Intel continued to find exploitable weaknesses related to this class of “speculative execution” vulnerabilities. Fixing many of them takes not just software patches, but conceptually rethinking how processors are made.

I recommend reading Wired’s article, it’s an interesting look into Intel and how serious the two flaws still are.

Hackers warned thousands of Chromecast users of a security flaw…by hijacking their devices. They were the latest people to work out how to force the Chromecast to play any YouTube video they want. For good measure, the hackers, who go by the names Hacker Giraffe and J3ws3r, encouraged users to subscribe to controversial YouTube personality PewDePie’s channel. Techcrunch spoke to researchers concerned that the vulnerability could leave exposed devices vulnerable to more damaging attacks.

The bug, dubbed CastHack, exploits a weakness in both Chromecast and the router it connects to. Some home routers have enabled Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a networking standard that can be exploited in many ways. UPnP forwards ports from the internal network to the internet, making Chromecasts and other devices viewable and accessible from anywhere on the internet.

It has been a pretty exciting time for space technology recently. SpaceX completed its first mission for the U.S. military on December 23, 2018. On Wednesday, scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission shared the first close-up images of an object in the distant Kuiper Belt that is not Pluto or one of its moons. On Thursday, just over 50 years since man first went to the Far Side of the Moon in Apollo 8, a Chinese robot spacecraft become the first to actually land there. BBC News Online provided a fantastic rundown of what happened in this historic mission.

Previous Moon missions have landed on the Earth-facing side, but this is the first time any craft has landed successfully on the unexplored and rugged far side. Some spacecraft have crashed into the far side, either after system failures, or after they had completed their mission.Ye Quanzhi, an astronomer at Caltech, told the BBC this was the first time China had “attempted something that other space powers have not attempted before”

On December 26, Brian X. Chen wrote for the New York Times: “Personal technology was so awful this year [2018] that nobody would think you were paranoid if you dug a hole and buried your computer, phone and smart speaker under six feet of earth.” However, some things did get better. Author Chen provides a list and his observations.