kalalau_kane - Slashdot User

Submission + - Grooveshark co-founder Josh Greenberg dead at 28 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg on Monday July 20, 2015 @04:20PM

alphadogg writes: The tech startup world has been shaken today by news that 28-year-old Josh Greenberg, co-founder of recently defunct music sharing service Grooveshark, was found dead on Sunday in the Florida apartment he shared with his girlfriend. No foul play is suspected, but the local medical examiner is conducting an autopsy, according to the Gainesville Sun. Grooveshark was shut down in April after the company was threatened with legal action and possibly hundreds of millions in damages by several big music labels.

Submission + - SpaceX Flight Brought Down By Weak Strut (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Thelasko on Monday July 20, 2015 @04:16PM

Thelasko writes: News is coming out that a weak steel strut holding a liquid helium tank failed, causing the loss of CRS-7. Elon Musk is also pledging software changes that would allow the payload to be recovered if such a failure were to occur again.

Netragard Ends Exploit Acquisition Program After Hacking Team Breach 48

Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 20, 2015 @02:43PM from the Netragard-Ends-Exploit-Acquisition-Program dept.

Trailrunner7 writes: After the fallout from the HackingTeam breach, Netragard, a company that buys and sells exploits, has decided to shut down its exploit acquisition program. Leaked documents show that Natragard was selling exploits to the Italian maker of intrusion and surveillance software. In addition, documents further showed that the company sold its products to a variety of oppressive regimes, including Egypt and Ethiopia. A company statement reads in part: "We’ve decided to terminate our Exploit Acquisition Program (again). Our motivation for termination revolves around ethics, politics, and our primary business focus. The HackingTeam breach proved that we could not sufficiently vet the ethics and intentions of new buyers. HackingTeam unbeknownst to us until after their breach was clearly selling their technology to questionable parties, including but not limited to parties known for human rights violations. While it is not a vendors responsibility to control what a buyer does with the acquired product, HackingTeam’s exposed customer list is unacceptable to us. The ethics of that are appalling and we want nothing to do with it."

Submission + - Cuban traffic has shifted from satellite to undersea cable

Submitted by lpress on Monday July 20, 2015 @12:38PM

lpress writes: Nearly all of Cuba's international traffic is now routed over the ALBA-1 undersea cable, which connects Cuba and Venezula. The cable landing is at the east end of the island, so there must be a backbone connecting major cities to it. Huawei is installing home DSL and WiFi hotspotsi in Cuba — have they also installed an inter-province backbone?

Submission + - Japan Develops Single Passenger Silent Mini Electric Helicopters, Travels at 100 (rocketnews24.com)

Submitted by exoticcamote on Friday July 17, 2015 @10:32AM

exoticcamote writes: Every once in a while a story comes along about a flying car or helicopter that fits in a briefcase, but they always disappear into the ether never coming to fruition. It’s understandable since everyone having their own mass produced flying machine would be a safety and law enforcement nightmare.

This time, however, Hirobo in Hiroshima Prefecture may be rolling out a personal helicopter that will actually get off the ground.

Submission + - What It's Like to Be Clinically Nocturnal (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne on Thursday July 16, 2015 @10:55AM

citadrianne writes: A few years later, in high school, Julia got a full diagnosis: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, which the DSM-5 defines as a subset of Circadian Rhythm Sleep-Wake Disorder and Wikipedia defines as “a dysregulation of a person's circadian rhythm (biological clock), compared to the general population and relative to societal norms.”

Basically, the sun makes Julia tired. If the 9 to 5 workday didn’t force everyone to keep the same hours, Julia would go to bed just before dawn and sleep until noon. In other words, she is clinically nocturnal.

The new doctor gave her Ritalin to complement the Ambien.

Submission + - Gun-firing drone video causes controversy (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16, 2015 @10:25AM

An anonymous reader writes: A video posted on YouTube showing a drone firing a gun in a wooded area has caused some controversy today [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/16/drone-firing-handgun-video-youtube]. The short video shows a four-rotored custom drone with a special rig containing a handgun. The handgun proceeds to fire four shots, handling the recoil better than might be expected. The user who posted the video also submitted it to Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/3cyd67/], where a commenter noted that the apparent use of a solenoid trigger would class the device as an automatic weapon under ATF rules.

Submission + - MasterCard Releases Open API Declaration

Submitted by rjmarvin on Tuesday July 14, 2015 @09:59AM

rjmarvin writes: MasterCard has released an Open API Declaration http://sdtimes.com/mastercard-... filled with promises from MasterCard to developers using its APIs. Sebastien Taveau, chief developer evangelist at MasterCard, said that building APIs requires openness and dialogue with the developers who will be consuming it. The MasterCard Open API Declaration includes a quote from the company’s CEO, Ajay Banga, who wrote in the declaration that MasterCard is “bringing together developers and entrepreneurs using MasterCard APIs to create new applications to drive a new generation of commerce through our products, solutions and services.” The declaration https://developer.mastercard.c... contains promises such as “When a developer requests a technology feature or reports a problem, the Open API Team won’t just listen. We’ll act" and offers a road map for the MasterCard APIs and toolsets out to 2020.

Submission + - Mozilla Disables Flash in Firefox by Default

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Tuesday July 14, 2015 @09:54AM

Trailrunner7 writes: As the zero days in Adobe Flash continue to pile up, Mozilla has taken the unusual step of disabling by default all versions of Flash in Firefox.

The move is a temporary one as Adobe prepares to patch two vulnerabilities in Flash that were discovered as a result of the HackingTeam document dump last week. Both vulnerabilities are use-after-free bugs that can be used to gain remote code execution. One of the flaws is in Action Script 3 while the other is in the BitMapData component of Flash.

Exploits for these vulnerabilities were found in the data taken from HackingTeam in the attack disclosed last week. An exploit for one of the Flash vulnerabilities, the one in ActionScript 3, has been integrated into the Angler exploit kit already and there’s a module for it in the Metasploit Framework, as well.

Submission + - Elektra One is First Solar-Electric Aircraft to Cross Alps in Both Directions (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Tuesday July 14, 2015 @09:53AM

Zothecula writes: It's been quite a month for electric aircraft. First, the Solar Impulse 2 broke distance and duration records when it flew from Japan to Hawaii. Then, two competing teams both claimed to have made the world's first electric flight across the English Channel. Now, Germany's PC-Aero says that its Elektra One Solar has become the first solar-electric plane to cross the Alps in both directions.

Submission + - As Cloud Growth Booms, Server Farms Get Super-Sized (datacenterfrontier.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck on Tuesday July 14, 2015 @09:43AM

1sockchuck writes: Internet titans are concentrating massive amounts of computing power in regional cloud campuses housing multiple data centers. These huge data hubs, often in rural communities, enable companies to rapidly add server capacity and electric power amid rapid growth of cloud hosting and social sharing. As this growth continues, we'll see more of these cloud campuses, and they’ll be bigger than the ones we see today. Some examples from this month: Google filed plans for a mammoth 800,000 square foot data center near Atlanta, Equinix announced 1 million square feet of new data centers on its campus in Silicon Valley, and Facebook began work on a $1 billion server farm in Texas that will span 750,000 square feet.

65,000+ Land Rovers Recalled Due To Software Bug 97

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 14, 2015 @08:55AM from the at-least-they're-not-in-space dept.

An anonymous reader writes with word that owners of Range Rover and Range Rover Sport SUVs (model year 2013 and newer) will need to get their cars' software updated, which means a visit to a dealer. The update will fix a bug in the cars' locking system, which occasionally resulted in car doors randomly unlocking and opening themselves (in one instance, when the car was moving). This is not the first time that a car manufacturer asked customers to contact dealers for a security update. In July, Ford has recalled over 430,000 cars in North America because of a bug that prevented the engine from shutting down even after the ignition key was put into the "off" position and removed.

Submission + - Old MS Office feature can be exploited to deliver, execute malware (net-security.org)

Submitted by Errorcod3 on Monday July 06, 2015 @04:20PM

Errorcod3 writes: A Microsoft Office functionality that has been in use since the early 1990s can be exploited to deliver malicious, executable files to users without triggering widely used security software, claims security researcher Kevin Beaumont.

The feature in question is the OLE Packager, which allows content (even executable content such as .exe or .js files) to be embedded in Office documents.

Beaumont says he contacted Microsoft about this in March and shared with them that threat actors were experimenting with it in the wild (he doesn't say how he found that out).

"At the time they asked me not to post information about the problem online. They have not addressed the problem, and believe it is a feature of Office," he noted, and presumably finally decided to disclose the existence of the problem with the wider public.

He also provided several PoC document files that take advantage of the feature to perform actions like locking the users' Windows workstation and swaping their mouse button functions.

"These documents are clean for all antivirus providers, and tested to pass Messagelabs, etc (other cloud based email security providers are available). I have also tested these documents on Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit and a leading behavioral endpoint product (under NDA so cannot name) — both fail to spot it," he claims.

"Additionally, it is not flagged by Cuckoo Sandbox or Palo-Alto Wildfire sandbox. Through months of testing it has become clear that security solutions simply do not touch this issue."

The OLE Packager cannot be disabled, he says. "If you have Microsoft EMET already deployed, add a rule for Excel, Winword (sic) and Powerpoint — it needs to be an ASR rule which denies packager.dll. Because you cannot control this on a document-by-document basis, you may break legitimate OLE Packager usage (e.g. embedding Excel documents in PowerPoint)," he advised.

Beaumont notes that Microsoft has tried to mitigate the issue in the past by making warning messages popping up when users opened risky file types, but that it hasn't kept the list updated over the years. Also, he noted, the warning messages can be clicked through, and this is what most users usually do.

Submission + - Extreme Reduction Gearing Device Offers an Amazing Gear Ratio of 11 Million to 1 (3dprint.com)

Submitted by ErnieKey on Monday July 06, 2015 @02:28PM

ErnieKey writes: The 3D printed extreme reduction gearing device, created by long-time puzzle maker M. Oskar van Deventer, may leave you puzzled for its obvious applications, but the coaxial cranking mechanism offers potential in a variety of real-world applications with multi-colored gears that move in opposite directions at a ratio of 11,373,076 : 1. This 3D printed reduction gearing device is compact and multi-colored, and looks deceivingly simple at first glance. Developed through a complex algorithm, it could possibly offer potential as parts for machines like 3D printers, aerospace and automotive components, as well as perhaps robotics and a variety of motors.

Japanese and US Piloted Robots To Brawl For National Pride 107

Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 06, 2015 @01:52PM from the robot-jox dept.

jfruh writes: Japan may have just lost the Women's World Cup to the U.S., but the country is hoping for a comeback in another competition: a battle between giant robots. Suidobashi Heavy Industry has agreed to a challenge from Boston-based MegaBots that would involve titanic armored robots developed by each startup, the first of its kind involving piloted machines that are roughly 4 meters tall. "We can't let another country win this," Kogoro Kurata, who is CEO of Suidobashi, said in a video posted to YouTube. "Giant robots are Japanese culture."

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