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Submission + - Explosion Was Recorded Where Argentine Submarine Went Missing (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Argentine Navy said on Thursday that a catastrophic explosion was recorded in the area where a submarine went missing on Nov. 15, immediately raising fears that the 44-member crew had perished.

The nature of the explosion, which was described as an “anomalous, short, violent” event, was not immediately clear, but the disclosure dampened the hopes of a multinational team of rescuers who have been searching for the vessel, and immediately revived concerns about the worst outcome.

Sounds similar to the Kursk incident.

Submission + - Horcrux Is a Password Manager That Inserts Dummy Credentials Into Your Forms (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two researchers from the University of Virginia have developed a new password manager prototype that works very differently from existing password manager clients, by means oftwo new features. The first is that Horcrux, the name of this new password manager, works by inserting dummy credentials in login fields, so malicious JS cannot intercept any of the user's credentials. When the user submits his form, the dummy credentials are still there, but Horcrux will intercept the form submit operation (HTTP POST request) and replace the dummy credentials with the user's real username and password combo. Second is that Horcrux doesn't trust one single password store but spreads user credentials across multiple servers. This means that if an attacker manages to gain access to one of the servers, he won't gain access to all of the user's passwords, limiting the damage of any security incident.

The new Horcrux password manager is currently available only as a Firefox add-on that can be compiled from this open-source GitHub repo. The downside is that users have to host their own password-storing servers in order to use Horcrux, something that many users can't afford. Nonetheless, the license permits companies that run password managers to take their design or code and use it for their own professional solutions. More details about the Horcrux design and implementation are available in the research team's paper, entitled "Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids."

Submission + - He didn't give police his iPhone pass code, so he got 180 days in jail (miamiherald.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A Hollywood(FLA) man must serve 180 days in jail for refusing to give up his iPhone password to police, a Broward judge ruled Tuesday — the latest salvo in intensifying legal battles over law-enforcement access to smart phones.

Wesley Victor, and his girlfriend had been ordered by a judge to produce a pass code to phones suspected of containing text messages showing their collusion in an extortion plot.

Victor claimed he didn’t remember the number. He prevailed.

On Tuesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Charles Johnson ruled that there was no way to prove that Victor actually remembered his pass code, more than 10 months after his initial arrest. Johnson declined to hold the man in contempt of court.

Submission + - Spike of radioactive Iodine levels is detected in Europe (theaviationist.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Iodine-131 (131I), a radionuclide of anthropogenic origin, has recently been detected in tiny amounts in the ground-level atmosphere in Europe. The preliminary report states it was first found during week 2 of January 2017 in northern Norway. Iodine-131 was also detected in Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain, until the end of January.

However, no one seems to know the reason behind the released Iodine-131. Along with nuclear power plants, the isotope is also widely used in medicine and its presence in the air could be the effect of several different incidents.

Or, as someone speculates, it could have been the side effect of a test of a new nuclear warhead in Russia: an unlikely (considered the ability to detect nuke tests through satellites and seismic detectors) violation of Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Submission + - Study shows humans slow to take over when cars call for help (autoblog.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: At this stage in autonomous car development, a human being always needs to be there to step in just in case the computer can't handle a situation. The question is, how long will it take for a human to react to a prompt, and in turn, how soon would the driver have to be prompted to ensure a safe hand-off? The University of Southampton in the UK recently published a study examining this issue, and found that the reaction time can vary wildly, and times get worse when a driver is preoccupied with another task.

The university's study used 26 subjects, both men and women aged between 20- and 52-years-old. The subjects were asked to drive an autonomous vehicle in a simulator at 70 mph, and the autonomous drive mode would randomly require the subjects to take back control of the vehicle. Each subject did the test either when only focusing on driving, or while also reading a newspaper. In the end, the study revealed that it could take people between roughly 2 and 26 seconds to take the wheel after being prompted while paying attention to the drive, and between approximately 3 and 21 seconds while doing something else. The median reaction times for the two categories were 4.56 seconds and 6.06 seconds respectively. At 70 mph, every second equals 102 feet of travel. That means it took at least one driver about half a mile to react to the prompt.

Submission + - Zuckerberg sues hundreds of Hawaiians to force property sales to him. (msn.com)

Submitted by mmell
mmell writes: Apparently, owning 700 acres of land in Hawaii isn't enough — Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has filed suit to force owners of several small parcels of land to sell to the highest bidder. The reason? These property owners are completely surrounded by Zuckerberg's land holdings and therefore have lawful easement to cross his property in order to get to theirs.

Many of these land owners have held their land for generations, but seemingly Mr. Zuckerberg can not tolerate their presence so close to his private little slice of paradise. Landowners such as these came to own their land when their ancestors were "given" the land as Hawaiian natives.

If successful in his "quiet title" court action, Mr. Zuckerberg will finally have his slice of Hawaii's beaches and tropical lands without having to deal with the pesky presence of neighbors who were on his land before he owned it. Who knew that Hawaiians were just another kind of Native Americans?

Submission + - Older Workers Adapt To New Technology Just Fine, Survey Finds (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Those older workers in your office, you know, the one ones you think can't handle dealing with new technology? Turns out, they struggle less with technology than their millennial colleagues. A survey by London-based market research firm Ipsos Mori, sponsored by Dropbox, found that older workers are less likely to find using technology in the workplace stressful and experience less trouble working with multiple devices than the younger cohort. The reason for this might lie in all the clunky old technologies older workers have had to master over the decades. Digital Natives don't know how good they've got it.

Submission + - FAA Confirms: Shooting Down a Drone is a Federal Felony 1

Submitted by PvtVoid
PvtVoid writes: [The FAA is] unequivocally confirming that it’s a federal crime to shoot down a drone, as John Goglia reports in Forbes. Goglia explains the FAA offered this ruling in response to his questions on the topic, citing 18 USC. 32, which “makes it a felony to damage or destroy an aircraft.”

Not linking to Forbes, because, well, Forbes. Here's the Slate.

Submission + - When Google's Chrome Security Warnings Can Do More Harm Than Good (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: We begin with a stipulation. Google has world class privacy and security teams. I know many of the Googlers on those teams. There just ain't no better this side of Alpha Centauri. They want what they feel is best for Google's users.

That said, one of Google's institutional weaknesses — improving but still very much present — is (in my opinion) a recurring lack of clarity when it comes to understanding the impacts that some of their design decisions have on ordinary, non-techie users with busy lives that don't necessarily revolve around the nuts and bolts intricacies of these systems.

Last June, in "When Google Thinks They're Your Mommy" — http://lauren.vortex.com/archi... — I noted some concerns regarding how particular aspects of the Chrome browser security model can negatively impact ordinary users.

Today let's look at a specific interesting and current related example ...

Submission + - Backdoor in MVPower DVR Firmware Sends CCTV Stills to an Email Address in China (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An IoT security research company has discovered that a DVR model manufactured by MVPower includes a backdoor-like feature in its code that takes a screenshot of your CCTV feed and sends it to an email address hosted somewhere in China. The device's firmware is based on an open source project from GitHub that was pulled by its developer when someone confronted him about the backdoor.

Submission + - ICANN's Ex CEO fronts Chinese inititive on running the Internet

Submitted by Earthquake Retrofit
Earthquake Retrofit writes: The Register reports that on the last day of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, the conference organizers unexpectedly announced they had set up a new "high-level advisory committee" that would guide the agenda of future conferences and "contribute ideas for the development of the Internet."

The committee has already had its first meeting, the organizers stated, naming ICANN's Fadi Chehade and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma as its founders and noting that it had "invited 31 leading Internet figures from governments, enterprises, academic institutions, and technological communities to be members of the first high-level advisory committee." Those "figures" have not been named but we understand they include government representatives from a number of authoritarian governments, including Russia, and do not include lead names from the internet community.

Submission + - Europe and Russia are headed back to the moon together (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Russia is turning its attention to the moon again for the first time in about 40 years. The first Russian mission to the moon since long before the end of the Cold War will be Luna 27, a robot lander that will touch down on the edge of the lunar South Pole as early as 2020. Russia is looking for international partners to help make Luna 27 a reality and may have found one in the European Space Agency, according to a story on the BBC.

Submission + - Refreshing the Amiga 1200 With New Plastic

Submitted by Ichijo
Ichijo writes: Several years ago, the Amiga community developed a way to restore old, yellowed ABS plastic to like-new condition, and put the recipe for the gel, dubbed Retr0bright , into the public domain. But then it was discovered that the effect of the Retr0bright gel is only temporary, and plastic treated with the gel soon reverts to its original yellowed state.

Now, Amiga enthusiast Philippe Lang has started a new Kickstarter campaign to create new, improved molds for Amiga 1200 housings and do a licensed production run using anti-UV ASA plastic in the original color plus black, transparent, and 9 other colors. His team is also investigating the feasibility of producing new Amiga 1200 keyboards if this campaign succeeds. This follows a successful production run by Commodore 64 enthusiasts of new C64c housings using the original injection molds and new C64 motherboards designed with modern ASICs and DC-DC converter technology.

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