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Network

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Continues to Avoid ISP Blockade (batblue.com)

Submitted by
JohnBert
JohnBert writes: "British, Dutch, Finnish and Belgian judges and governments have been forcing ISPs to block The Pirate Bay and drop thepiratebay.org from their DNS servers. To avoid the blockade, The Pirate Bay has now enabled IPv6 and obtained a /32 block. This enables The Pirate Bay to simply change their IP address, which they can do another 18 quintillion times to avoid being blocked. It can be assumed that, at some point, ISPs and governments will give up trying to block The Pirate Bay."
Network

Submission + - India Bolsters Their Cyber Security To Prevent Stuxnet-Like Attacks (batblue.com) 1

Submitted by
JohnBert
JohnBert writes: "India is beefing up their cyber security capabilities to protect their national infrastructure from a Stuxnet-like attack. Prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is finalizing plans to give the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) the authorization to commit undisclosed offensive operations. Although not deliberate and no revealed serious damage was caused, India has already been hit by Stuxnet. This added initiative will increase security for the country that has been criticized in the past for having slow responses to DoS and web defacement attacks."
Advertising

Submission + - The Billions In Mobile Ad Money Nobody Can Grab (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Here's a pressing mystery: despite users spending an increasing amount on their mobile phones, mobiile advertising only produces 20% of the revenues per page that web advertising does. This seems like a big opportunity for somebody, but a whole complex of reasons might mean that it isn't just a matter of someone being smart enough to do mobile ads right. The whole advertising industry, which in many ways still resembles the Mad Men-era old boy's network, simply may not be equipped to cope."
Network

Submission + - MariaDB and MySQL Authentication Bypass Exploit (batblue.com)

Submitted by
JohnBert
JohnBert writes: "A security bug in MariaDB and MySQL has been revealed, allowing a known username and password to access the master user table of a MySQL server and dump it into a locally-stored file. By using a tool like John the Ripper, this file can be easily cracked to reveal text passwords that can provide further access. By committing a threaded brute-force module that abuses the authentication bypass flaw to automatically dump the password database, you can access the database using the cracked password hashes even if the authentication bypass vulnerability is fixed."
Censorship

Submission + - BT Blocks Disabled Rights Site? (techweekeurope.co.uk) 2

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "BT has blocked access to the Black Triangle disabled rights website according to activists. BT has confirmed there is a problem, but won't give any details on why it is not available to any BT subscribers. Black Triangle is campaigning against Atos Healthcare which is applying government rules on entitlement to disability benefits — and which has previously shut down critical websites and forums."
Science

Submission + - Wind Map project brings Americas hidden winds into view (tech-stew.com)

Submitted by
techfun89
techfun89 writes: "They say seeing is believing and that is just what the Wind Map does. The Wind Map is an art project found on hint.fm that was founded by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg who also lead Google's "Big Picture" visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Wind Map shows the winds as they flow across the United States. Surface wind data is taken from the National Digital Forecast Database. The data is revised once per hour. This effectively makes what you see a live portrait."
Google

Submission + - Meebo To Be Shutting Down Next Month (lazytechguys.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Meebo, which began in 2005 as a browser based instant messaging program, will now cease most of its services by next month. The IM service supported various IM platforms such as Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, CafeMom and others. The announcement comes after Google’s acquisition of Meebo for $100 million – which was made just less than a week ago.
The Military

Submission + - DARPA is pushing big data on the military (patexia.com)

Submitted by
sarfralogy
sarfralogy writes: "Armed with a 1.8 gigapixel camera rig, A U.S. Army Hummingbird copters over Afghanistan looking for suspicious insurgent activity. On board, a robo cameraman called ARGUS pulls focus on 36 square miles and shoots six petabytes of video – all in a day’s work. Somewhere in that ocean of media, a military spy mission is accomplished. Somewhere on the ground, a bleary-eyed analyst stares at six petabytes of what the military calls Death TV. It’s not a wrap. And there will be a mountain more tomorrow, generated by other drones, blimps, spy planes and covert cameras patrolling the Afghan countryside, looking for the perfect shot. Air Force, Army – and even Homeland Security – now boast Hollywood technology, but can’t scale qualified personnel fast enough to view, process and communicate the montage of surveillance footage piling up in the name of freedom.
The U.S. Military has a big data problem. And DARPA, the neo-Frankenstein brains behind national security, has been trying to fix it through the Mind’s Eye, a brainy collective tasked to develop machine-based visual intelligence. And, as part of President Obama’s “Big Data Initiative,” DARPA has a new project called XDATA in March, a DoD related program focused on developing computational techniques and software tools for processing and analyzing large volumes of mission-oriented data collected by federal agencies. If they can build a flying humvee, maybe DARPA has enough imagination to transform big data into a strategic differentiator."
Android

Submission + - Fact or Fiction? 4 Mobile Development Myths Busted (insurancetech.com)

Submitted by
Cara_Latham
Cara_Latham writes: "It may be hard to recall what life was like before the iPhone, but the first-generation of Apple's now seemingly ubiquitous mobile device was released just five years ago, on June 29, 2007. With sales of that mobile device, as well as handsets running Google's Android operating system, growing exponentially every year, it's safe to say the mobile channel — or perhaps more specifically, the smartphone channel — is here to stay.

The world of smartphones, however, is marked by rapid change that keeps business technologists on their toes. Leading organizations, including insurance companies, have to implement mobile development strategies that are nimble enough to adapt to the latest-breaking application, handset or operating system, while delivering the established functionality that policyholders demand.

What have technologists discovered as their mobile development strategies have evolved to deliver superior speed to market, functionality, customer experience and ROI?"
EU

Submission + - European ISPs Ask ITU To Limit Net Neutrality (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "The UN telecoms body, the ITU is busy writing new regulations for international telecoms — and European service providers, through their body ETNO have urged ITU to enshrine a two-tier Internet by defining a right for service providers to charge more for end-to-end quality of service, as opposed to best efforts connection. The two-tier Internet is opposed by Net Neutrality advocates, and has been outlawed in the Netherlands."
Robotics

Submission + - GTRI Develops Prototype Chicken-Deboning Robot (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Chickens have another reason to lose sleep thanks to roboticists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s (GTRI) Intelligent Cutting and Deboning System. Using 3D imaging technology, this robot can debone an entire chicken with the skill of a human butcher and has the potential of saving the poultry industry millions of dollars by reducing costs and waste.
Security

Submission + - Researchers Say Common Code Shows Same Team Wrote Flame and Stuxnet (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin.

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab say that a critical module that the Flame worm used to spread is identical to a module used by Stuxnet.a, an early variant of the Stuxnet worm that began circulating in 2009, more than a year before a later variant of the worm was discovered by antivirus researchers at the Belarussian firm VirusBlokAda. The claims are the most direct, to date, that link the Flame malware, which attacked Iranian oil facilities, with Stuxnet, which is believed to have targeted Iran's uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz. If true, they suggest a widespread and multi-year campaign of offensive cyber attacks against multiple targets within that country.
Google

Submission + - Famous Judge calls U.S. patent system "dysfunctional" (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by AC-x
AC-x writes: Famous U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner calls patent system "dysfunctional", wants to have the trial between Apple and Google-owned Motorola Mobility over smartphone patents dismissed with prejudice because "it was apparent that neither side could show they had been harmed by the other’s patent infringement".

His involvement and his anti-patent blog posts could prove to be a watershed moment for a U.S. patent system that is regarded as spiralling out of control.
United Kingdom

Submission + - London Tube Not Getting Full Mobile Coverage (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "Alcatel-Lucent claimed this morning to be in talks to provide mobile coverage throughout the London Underground. That would trump Virgin's provision of Wi-Fi at certain Tube stations, and be good PR during the Olympics — though at this stage, it obviously wouldn't be delivered till after the Games. Alcatel also claimed mobiles in the Tube would make Britain £1.1 billion. Unfortunately, it's not true. Transport for London has issued a denial, saying there are no talks. It's widely believed that mobile coverage is not planned ever in the Tube, owing to fears of terrorists using mobile signals to ignite bombs."
Security

Submission + - Lessons Learned From Cracking 2M LinkedIn Passwords (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Qualys researcher Francois Pesce used open source password cracker John the Ripper to try to crack SHA-1 hashes of leaked LinkedIn passwords. He ran the John the Ripper default command on a small default password dictionary of less than 4,000 words. The program then switched to incremental mode based on statistical analysis of known password structures, which generated more probable passwords. The results? After 4 hours, approximately 900,000 passwords had been cracked. Francois then ran numerous iterations, incorporating older dictionaries to uncover less common passwords and ended up cracking a total of 2,000,000 passwords.
Encryption

Submission + - Enigma machine used at Cheltenham Science Festival (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: An original World War II Enigma machine is to be used to encrypt messages that will be decoded at Bletchley Park, as part of Cheltenham Science Festival.

The recreation of the code-breaking process is part of celebrations to mark the centenary of Alan Turing's birth.

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