Your daily round-up of some of the other security stories in the news
Nevada leaks details of medical marijuana vendors
More than 11,000 Nevada people who have applied to sell medical marijuana have had the personal details from the extensive applications they have to complete leaked thanks to a vulnerability in the website, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed.
There’s a lot of information in those applications: they’re eight pages long and not only include details such as the applicant’s social security and driving licence information, but also their home address, height, weight, eye colour and race.
The online portal for vendors is down at the moment – but the personal information of some 11,700 people is out there now.
Amazon plans airship warehouses
Not content with pulling off the first delivery by drone recently, Amazon has filed a patent for an “airborne fulfillment center”, aerial warehouses attached to huge zeppelins that could float above the altitudes used by commercial aircraft.
The general idea is that when a customer makes an order, the item would be loaded on to an onboard drone that could then zoom down and drop off the order.
For all the futuristic vision of the concept, the airships detailed in the application look decidedly retro: they sport the design and styling of the stately airships of the early 20th century – and of course, it gives a whole new meaning to “cloud services”.
Firefox to wind down support for Vista and XP
Diehard users of Windows Vista or even XP who’ve been relying on the Firefox browser to get online reasonably safely have been warned that their days of regular security updates for the browser are numbered.
Mozilla, the developers of the open-source browser, said in a blog post that the version of Firefox that’s compatible with Vista and XP would be moved to Firefox Extended Support Release in March, and that Mozilla would assess the number of people using it and announce an end date in September.
Windows Vista is in its dying days of support from Microsoft, which said earlier this year that it would end support for the venerable OS in April 2017, while XP hasn’t been supported since April 2014 – though that hasn’t stopped some NHS trusts from continuing to use the OS.
Catch up with all of today’s stories on Naked Security