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Submission + - Stealing ATM PINs with a cheap infrared camera (youtube.com) 1

Submitted by cccc828
cccc828 writes: German tech news website heise.de reports about a video by Mark Rober. It shows how to use a $300 infrared camera for the iPhone to read the residual heat signatures of an ATM. The residual heat signatures allow an attacker to reconstruct the PIN around 80% of the time. While this attack vector is not new, IR cameras used to be both rare and expensive. The best defense against the attack is to simply touch all the keypads keys after making a payment.

Submission + - Hackers brought down Vatican Website.

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Some hackers brought down the Vatican website www.vaticanstate.va

A twitter account named “Lizard Squad” is claiming responsibility for this hacking activity.
Previously they have brought down Sony’s PlayStation Network, which enables gamers to play each other online and access content.
It was hit by a so-called denial of service after it was overwhelmed by hackers driving artificially high traffic to its servers.

And, a flight carrying John Smedley, the president of Sony’s online entertainment unit was diverted for a security issue.

Submission + - What I learned from debating science with trolls (theconversation.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I often like to discuss science online and I’m also rather partial to topics that promote lively discussion, such as climate change. This inevitably brings out the trolls.

“Don’t feed the trolls” is sound advice, but I’ve ignored it on occasion and been rewarded. Not that I’ve changed the minds of any trolls, nor have I expected to.

But I have received an education in the tactics many trolls use. These tactics are common not just to trolls but to bloggers, journalists and politicians who attack science.

Some techniques are comically simple. Emotionally charged, yet evidence-free, accusations of scams, fraud and cover-ups are common. Such accusations may be effective at polarising debate and reducing understanding.

The full article is available at The Conversation.

Submission + - Water splitter runs on an ordinary AAA battery (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the article:

"Although touted as zero-emissions vehicles, most fuel cell vehicle run on hydrogen made from natural gas. Now scientists have developed a low-cost, emissions-free device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to produce hydrogen by water electrolysis. Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts, the electrodes in this device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel and iron."

Submission + - Linus Torvalds is my hero, says 13 years old Zachary DuPont at LinuxCon (themukt.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: His school ran a project asking children to write a letter to their heroes, while most kids wrote to celebrities Zach wrote to the ‘real’ hero Linus Torvalds. As Linus said during LinxCon that since he works from home and doesn’t disclose his address, all letter go to the foundation and are then sent to him after scanning. When the foundation saw this letter, being as generous as they are, invited Zach to come to LinuxCon and meet his hero in real. Here is an interview with Zach....

Submission + - Pwned by Jeff Bezos,Washington Post embeds Amazon Buy It Now buttons midsentence

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Reading a story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-divisive-charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-cover-says-about-books-and-readers/2014/08/15/23163b8a-219a-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html) in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, I saw that the paper had begun embedding Amazon Buy-It-Now links in the middle of story sentences. One such sentence read:

Depp can confirm this: At Politics and Prose, the traditional [BUY IT NOW] version — featuring the iconic eyes floating on a blue background — sold better than the DiCaprio [BUY IT NOW] cover.

The change follows the July news of much larger than expected losses at Amazon and a 10-percent decline in the Amazon's stock value. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/07/24/amazon-sales-soar-but-losses-are-the-biggest-since-2012/)

In related news, the Post reports that the literary executor of George Orwell’s estate has accused Amazon.com of Doublespeak. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/orwell-rep-accuses-amazon-of-doublespeak/2014/08/14/ecda1252-23c5-11e4-8b10-7db129976abb_story.html)

Submission + - Processors and the Limits of Physics (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As our CPU cores have packed more and more transistors into increasingly tiny spaces, we've run into problems with power, heat, and diminishing returns. Chip manufacturers have been working around these problems, but at some point, we're going to run into hard physical limits that we can't sidestep. Igor Markov from the University of Michigan has published a paper in Nature (abstract) laying out the limits we'll soon have to face. "Markov focuses on two issues he sees as the largest limits: energy and communication. The power consumption issue comes from the fact that the amount of energy used by existing circuit technology does not shrink in a way that's proportional to their shrinking physical dimensions. The primary result of this issue has been that lots of effort has been put into making sure that parts of the chip get shut down when they're not in use. But at the rate this is happening, the majority of a chip will have to be kept inactive at any given time, creating what Markov terms 'dark silicon.' Power use is proportional to the chip's operating voltage, and transistors simply cannot operate below a 200 milli-Volt level. ... The energy use issue is related to communication, in that most of the physical volume of a chip, and most of its energy consumption, is spent getting different areas to communicate with each other or with the rest of the computer. Here, we really are pushing physical limits. Even if signals in the chip were moving at the speed of light, a chip running above 5GHz wouldn't be able to transmit information from one side of the chip to the other."

Submission + - Watch a Cat Video, Get Hacked: The Death of Clear-Text

Submitted by onproton
onproton writes: Citizen Lab released new research today on a targeted exploitation technique used by state actors involving "network injection appliances" installed at ISPs. These devices can target and intercept unencrypted YouTube traffic and replace it with malicious code that gives the operator control over the system or installs a surveillance backdoor. One of the researchers writes, "many otherwise well-informed people think they have to do something wrong, or stupid, or insecure to get hacked—like clicking on the wrong attachments, or browsing malicious websites...many of these commonly held beliefs are not necessarily true." This technique is largely designed for targeted attacks, so it's likely most of us will be safe for now — but just one more reminder to use https.

Submission + - Financial services group WCS sues online forum Whirlpool over negative post (smh.com.au)

Submitted by kavzee
kavzee writes: The popular Australian online discussion forum whirlpool is being sued by a financial services group for refusing to remove a negative review about its services. A similar story occurred a number of years ago when another company by the name of 2Clix attempted to sue whirlpool for the same reasons but later withdrew their case.

Submission + - Humans Need Not Apply: A video about the robot revolution and jobs

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: This explanatory compilation video by CGP Grey called "Humans Need Not Apply" on structural unemployment caused by robotics and AI (and other automation) is like the imagery playing in my mind when I think about the topic based on previous videos and charts I've seen.

I saw it first on the econfuture site by Martin Ford, author of "The Lights in the Tunnel". It is being discussed on Reddit, and people there have started mentioning a "basic income" as one possible response.

While I like the basic income idea, I also collect other approaches in an essay called Beyond A Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics. Beyond a basic income for the exchange economy, those possible approaches include gift economy, subsistence production, planned economy, and more — including many unpleasant alternatives like expanding prisons or fighting wars as we are currently doing. Marshall Brain's writings like Robotic Nation and Manna have inspired my own work.

I made my own video version of the concept around 2010, as a parable called "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income". At 1:02 in the video I made, there is a picture of a robot near a sign "Humans Need Not Apply". The text there is: "Soon everyone was out of work. The politicians and their supporters said the solution was to lower takes and cut social benefits to promote business investment. They tried that, but the robots still got all the jobs."

Here is a p2presearch post I made in 2009 pulling together a lot of links to robot videos: "[p2p-research] Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)". It's great to see more informative videos on this topic. CGP Grey's video is awesome in the way he puts it all together. Makes we wish I had done one like that with all those snippets of stuff I've seen over the years.

Submission + - Correcting Killer Architecture (theguardian.com)

Submitted by minstrelmike
minstrelmike writes: In Leeds, England, architects are adding a plethora of baffles and other structures to prevent the channeling of winds from a skyscraper that have pushed baby carriages into the street and caused one pedestrian death by blowing over a truck (lorry). Other architectural mistakes listed in the article include death ray buildings that can melt car bumpers and landscape ponds that blind tenants.

Submission + - Visual cryptography on postage stamps

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Have you heard of personalized postage stamps? You pay the value of the stamps plus a fee and the post office prints official stamps usable for postage which show (almost) anything you can put into a jpeg file. An Austrian Tibet supporter found out what 'almost' means. He submitted a picture of the Dalai Lama with the text 'His Holiness the Dalai Lama', but the Austrian post office refused to produce these stamps. Stampnews and the Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported that this had been due to pressure from the Chinese embassy in Vienna.
Now there is a video showing how visual cryptography has been used to get around this attempt at censorship.

Submission + - New NSA-Funded Code Rolls All Programming Languages Into One (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hey, web developer dudes and dudettes: What's your favorite programming language? Is it CSS? Is it JavaScript? Is it PHP, HTML5, or something else? Why choose? A new programming language developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is all of those and moreâ"one of the world's first "polyglot" programming languages.

Sound cool? It is, except its development is partially funded by the National Security Agency, so let's look at it with a skeptical eye.

It's called Wyvernâ"named after a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of fourâ"and it's supposed to help programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files

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