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Submission + - Cyber-attack platform that can control GSM networks discovered

Submitted by dennison_uy
dennison_uy writes: Reign is a new type of malicious, cyber-attack system capable of penetrating and taking control of GSM networks to spy on a user's activity and perform offensive activities. This gives the controller, among others, "access to information about which calls are processed by a particular cell, redirect these calls to other cells, activate neighbor cells and perform other offensive activities."

Because it is the first of its kind it managed operate undetected for years without arousing suspicion.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to make a gaming PC 'wife friendly' for living room use. 3

Submitted by shadeshope
shadeshope writes: Having just gotten married I find that for some inexplicable reason my wife doesn't like my huge, noisy, 'ugly' gaming pc being the living room. I have tried hiding it in a tv cabinet, still too noisy. I have placed in in another room and run hdmi and usb cables but the propagation delay caused horrible tearing and lag when playing games. Have any other slash dotters encountered this problem? I don't want to buy a console(steam sales let me game so cheaply), or mess with water cooling. Ideally I would just hide it in the attic, is there some wireless technology that would be fast enough for gaming use? I have become quite attached to 'behemoth'. I have been upgrading him for years and he is the centre of my digital life. I run plex home theatre, media centre, steam, iTunes and air server. Will I have to do my gaming in the spare room? Once I have sorted this small problem going to try and make a case for the efficacy of a projector to replace the television..... it takes up less space, motorised screen could be hidden when not in use etc.

Submission + - Australia elaborates a new Drift model to find MH370

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared on Saturday, 8 March 2014, while flying from Malaysia to Beijing with 239 people on board. And 8 months later, after millions of dollars invested in a gigantic search operation, there is still no sign of the aircraft. Now, Australia is developing a new model to predict where the debris of the missing MH370 could wash up. Authorities had initially predicted that the plane’s wreckage could drift and come ashore on Indonesia’s West Sumatra island after about 4 months of Flight MH370’s disappearance. “We are currently working... to see if we can get an updated drift model for a much wider area where there might be possibilities of debris washing ashore,” search co-ordinator Peter Foley told reporters in Perth.
The teams initially agreed an area about 600 kilometres long by 90km wide west of Perth was most likely. A new report released last month specified two high-priority areas further to the south. All five groups (Boeing, France's Thales, US investigator, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation) agree that MH370's final resting place is near the “7th arc” — a curve that stretches from about 1 000km off Exmouth, Western Australia, to a point about 2 000km south-west of Perth.

Submission + - Bitcoin is not anonymous after all (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Researchers from the University of Luxembourg have demonstrated that it is possible to figure out the IP address and therefore the identity of individuals who pay for transactions anonymously online using bitcoins

In an open-access paper entitled Deanonymisation of clients in Bitcoin P2P network — http://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10... — the researchers explain bitcoins do not protect the IP addresses of users, and these can be linked to the user's transactions in real time, even if the client uses different pseudonyms for each transaction

The researchers say a hacker could discover the identity of a bitcoin user by using several computers and spending just under €1,500 (£1,190, $1,871) on such a deanonymisation attack

There are several ways for a hacker to generate a malformed message and pretend it has been sent by a user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network, even if the message has been sent from one of Tor's exit nodes

For example, say there are 1,008 Tor exit nodes. The hacker just needs to establish 1,008 connections and send a few megabytes of data to all connections from the Tor exit nodes to Bitcoin servers

Once the attacker knows what all the servers are and the bitcoin users have been banned from accessing these servers using Tor, they will then have to access the servers the normal way

"It shows that the level of network anonymity provided by Bitcoin is quite low. Several features of the Bitcoin protocol makes the attack possible. In particular, we emphasise that the stable set of only eight entry nodes is too small, as the majority of these nodes' connections can be captured by an attacker"

Every time the user's client makes a connection to an entry node of the bitcoin server, its address (perhaps an IP address associated with a major internet service provider) will be advertised

Once the hacker knows this address, he can trick the bitcoin server into revealing the IP address of the user

"The crucial idea of our attack is to identify each client by an octet of outgoing connections it establishes. This octet of Bitcoin peers [entry nodes] serves as a unique identifier of a client for the whole duration of a user session and will differentiate even those users who share the same NAT IP address," the authors stress

"As soon as the attacker receives the transaction from just two to three entry nodes he can with very high probability link the transaction to a specific client"

Submission + - Drupal Flaw Compromised Millions of Websites (fortuneinnovations.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today, about 38% of websites are using one of the top-ten content management systems (CMS). The most popular, WordPress is being used by 61% of websites, Joomla by 8% and Drupal by 5%, according to a web technology tracking firm. Drupal 7, the recent version of Drupal is used by nearly a million websites.
More: http://chicago.fortuneinnovati...

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Biometric Authentcation 2

Submitted by kwelch007
kwelch007 writes: I run a network for a company that does manufacturing primarily in a clean-room. We have many systems in place that track countless aspects of every step. However, we do not have systems in place to identify the specific user performing the step. I could do this easily, but asking users to input their AD login every time they perform a task is a time-waster (we have "shared" workstations throughout.) My question is, what technologies are people actually using successfully for said rapid authentication? I've thought about fingerprint scanners, but they don't work because in the CR we have to wear gloves. So, I'm thinking either face-recognition or retinal scans...but am open to other ideas if they are commercially viable. Ideas?

Submission + - Carly Fiorina considering run for US President (Seriously!) (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Fired HP CEO (http://it.slashdot.org/story/05/02/09/1352218/hp-ceo-carly-fiorina-to-step-down) and failed Republican Senate candidate ((http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2010/11/fiorina-concedes-defeat-in-senate-race-.html) Carly Fiorina "is actively exploring a 2016 presidential run. Fiorina has been talking privately with potential donors, recruiting campaign staffers, courting grass-roots activists in early caucus and primary states and planning trips to Iowa and New Hampshire starting next week." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/carly-fiorina-actively-explores-2016-presidential-run-but-faces-gop-critics/2014/11/25/b317b1a2-74b3-11e4-bd1b-03009bd3e984_story.html)

Submission + - Home Depot Spent $43 Million On Data Breach In Just One Quarter (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Dealing with the fallout of one of the largest ever data breaches, Home Depot spent $43 million in its third quarter on investigations, providing identity theft protection services to consumers, increased call center staffing and other legal and professional services. The retailer said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that it expects $15 million of that cost will be reimbursed by a $100 million network security and privacy liability insurance policy.

Submission + - DragonFly BSD 4.0 released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the release page: Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices.

Submission + - Sony to offer partial refunds for gaming console (chron.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Hundreds of thousands of people who bought the handheld gaming console PlayStation Vita are in line for a partial refund from Sony because of questionable claims in its advertising.

The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it had reached a settlement with Sony Computer Entertainment America, the U.S.-based arm of the PlayStation business, over advertising claims that the government contended were misleading.

As part of the proposed settlement, Sony will provide refunds to those who bought the PS Vita console before June 1, 2012. They'll be eligible for either a $25 cash or credit refund — or a $50 merchandise voucher from Sony. The company will contact consumers about the refunds or vouchers via email.

The advertising claims at issue — Sony highlighted "game changing" technology features of the PS Vita — were made during the U.S. launch of the product in early 2012. The console sold for about $250.

Comment Re:For all the reliability worriers (Score 1) 438

by YrWrstNtmr (#48463759) Attached to: How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive
You only wrote 7TB in 2 years to your 120GB ssd? ;-)

Oops...TB, not GB. But yes. It is the OS (currently 8.1 Pro) and just about all applications. Things that do not need that SSD speed (music, movies, etc) live on spinning drives or PC's. My playlist is not going to switch from one track to the next by virtue of being on the SSD.
Things that DO matter, OS+applications (1 SSD), and working files (second SSD), live on SSD's.
Total writes between the 2 SSD's is ~11TB.

7TB is still tiny in relative terms.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Is the Power Grid So Crummy In So Many Places? (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I live in a relatively large college town that's within easy driving distance of several major metropolitan centers. In many ways, the infrastructure around here is top-notch. The major exception is the electrical grid. Lightning storm? Power outage. Heavy winds? Power outage. Lots of rain? Power outage. Some areas around town are immune to this — like around the hospital, for obvious reasons. But others seem to lose power at the drop of hat. Why is this? If it were a tiny village or in the middle of nowhere, it would make sense to me. What problems do the utility companies face that they can't keep service steady? Do you face similar problems where you live? I'm not sure if it's just an investment issue or a technological one. It hasn't gotten better in the decade I've lived here, and I can imagine it will only get worse as the infrastructure ages.

Submission + - New Snowden Docs: GCHQ ties to Telcos gave Spies Global Surveillance Reach (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: According to a report in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless—now a subsidiary of Vodafone—“actively shaped and provided the most data to GCHQ surveillance programs and received millions of pounds in compensation.” The relationship was so extensive that a GCHQ employee was assigned to work full time at Cable & Wireless (referred to by the code name “Gerontic” in NSA documents) to manage cable-tap projects in February of 2009. By July of 2009, Cable & Wireless provided access to 29 out of the 63 cables on the list, accounting for nearly 70 percent of the data capacity available to surveillance programs.

Submission + - LHC's 'Heart' Starts Pumping Protons Before Restart (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: While on its long road to restart, yet another milestone was reached at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the weekend. Protons were generated by the LHC’s source and blasted through a ‘daisy-chain’ of smaller accelerators before being intentionally smashed into a metaphorical brick wall. The particle beam didn’t reach the LHC’s famous 17 mile (27 kilometer) accelerator ring, they were stopped just short, but the event was used to begin calibration efforts of the massive experiment’s detectors before the whole system is powered back up again early next year. “These initial tests are a milestone for the whole accelerator chain,” said the LHC’s chief engineer Reyes Alemany Fernandez. “Not only was this the first time the injection lines have seen beams in over a year, it was also our first opportunity to test the LHC’s operation system. We successfully commissioned the LHC’s injection and ejection magnets, all without beam in the machine itself.”

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