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Comment Could be true, that (Score 3, Interesting) 448

Submission + - The Robots That Will Put Coders Out of Work

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Researchers warn that a glut of code is coming that will depress wages and turn coders into Uber drivers, InfoWorld reports. 'The researchers — Boston University's Seth Benzell, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Guillermo LaGarda, and Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs — aren't predicting some silly, Terminator-like robot apocalypse. What they are saying is that our economy is entering a new type of boom-and-bust cycle that accelerates the production of new products and new code so rapidly that supply outstrips demand. The solution to that shortage will be to figure out how not to need those hard-to-find human experts. In fact, it's already happening in some areas.'

Submission + - Lenovo to wipe Superfish off PCs (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lenovo officials are starting to come around to something most people in security circles are saying in an almost unanimous voice—the pre-installation of a fake HTTPS certificate on consumer laptops puts banking passwords and other sensitive information at risk of theft by man-in-the-middle hackers.

"We agree that this was not something we want to have on the system, and we realized we needed to do more," Lenovo CTO Peter Hortensius said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, referring to adware from a company called Superfish. "Obviously in this case we didn't do enough."

Submission + - NSA malware hidden in hard drives for nearly 20 years (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russian security software vendor Kaspersky Lab, which this week released a report revealing that thousands of hard drives from 30 nations have been infected by U.S.-government sanctioned malware in existence for nearly 20 years, today said there's no way of knowing if your computer is infected and intelligence agencies are surveilling it.

Once a hard drive or SSD gets infected with this malicious payload, it's impossible to scan its firmware. To put it simply: For most hard drives, there are functions to write into the hardware's firmware area, but there are no functions to read it back. "It means that we are practically blind, and cannot detect hard drives that have been infected by this malware," said Igor Soumenkov, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. The drives in PCs and Macs that were infected by the malware represented more than a dozen major HDD and SSD makers. Kaspersky all but said it was the NSA that created and used the spyware.

Reuters also cited a former NSA employee as having confirmed the latter. Two of the largest drive makers, Western Digital and Seagate, said prior to the report, they had no idea their drives had been targeted. A WD spokesman said the company has not participated in or supported the development or deployment of cyberespionage technology by government entities, adding that "Western Digital has not provided its source code to government agencies." Seagate said its self encrypting drives are supposed to thwart reverse engineering of its firmware. "This is an astonishing technical accomplishment and is testament to the group's abilities," Kaspersky's report stated."

Submission + - World most dangerous toy 'Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab' goes on display at museum (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab — dubbed as the world's most dangerous toy — has gone on display at the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland. The toy has earned the title of most dangerous toy because it includes four types of uranium ore, three sources of radiation, and a Geiger counter that enables parents to measure just how contaminated their child had become. The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab was only available between 1951 and 1952 and was the most elaborate atomic energy educational kit ever produced. The toy was one of the most costly toy of the time retailing at $50 — said to be equivalent to $400 today.

Submission + - Restaurant tests drone servers in Singapore

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: Autonomous drone waiters have been unveiled this week in Singapore. The robotic staff members carry dishes and drinks back and forth from the kitchen to the customers to lessen plate-laden legwork.

Designed and built by Singapore-based startup Infinium Robotics, the drones have taken over music bar and restaurant Timbre @ The Substation. According to the robot maker, the drones’ appearance this week is an experiment before a larger roll-out of the flying machines towards the end of the year.

The drones have not been created to replace human waiters, carrying the dishes with serving staff still on hand to attend to the restaurant’s diners. The robots do not deliver directly to the customers’ tables, but instead from the kitchen to a drop-off point where the human waiters will pick up the orders and serve them at the correct table.

Submission + - Has Anonymous Hacked Google? Wikipedia? Both? Neither?

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: An Anonymous anomaly: ‘This site may be hacked’ — and the site is Wikipedia.

If you perform a Google search for ‘Anonymous’ today, you’ll see that Google has appended the warning ‘This site may be hacked’ to the Wikipedia entry for the Anonymous group in the search results. I have no idea how long the warning has been there, but I first noticed it two days ago.

What I’m wondering is this: has the group managed to perform a particularly difficult hack against Wikipedia — or even Google? Or both?

The message is strange partly because it reads ambiguously – is it a warning from Google or a boast from Anonymous? But it is primarily strange because it appears in no other Wikipedia-related search results that I can find.

Are Anonymous having some obscure fun with Wikipedia and/or Google – or is some other group, illicit or otherwise, discouraging views of the group’s Wikipedia entry via strange means?

And finally, if you visit that Wiki page, do you think you might be infected by Anonymous?

Submission + - Inside the Chinese Bitcoin Mine That's Making $1.5M a Month (vice.com)

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: The mine we visited is just one of six sites owned by a secretive group of four people, part of a colossal mining operation that, as of our visit, cumulatively generated 4,050 bitcoins a month, equivalent to a monthly gross of $1.5 million.

Despite its dystopian appearance, the group’s six mining farms encompass eight petahashes per second of computing power, whose brute force, as of October, accounted for 3 percent of the entire Bitcoin network.

If you’ve bought or sold or conducted any Bitcoin transaction recently, these are some of the folks you have to thank.

Strangely, the mine’s workers actually live inside the facility itself, returning home just four or five days a month.

Submission + - The last two satellites in Russia's missile warning constellation have failed

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In January the last two satellites in Russia’s ballistic missile warning system shut down, with the first of the next generation replacement constellation not scheduled to launch until June.

“Oko-1 was part of Russia’s missile warning system. The system employed six satellites on geostationary and highly elliptical orbits. The last geostationary satellite got out of order in April last year. The two remaining satellites on highly elliptical orbits could operate only several hours a day. In the beginning of January, they also went out of order,” Kommersant said.

The new generation early warning satellite Tundra was planned to be launched in 2013. However, the launch was postponed several times as the apparatus was not ready to be put into operation, sources in the aerospace industry told the daily.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the bloated, inefficient, and poorly managed. The communist nation was definitely a threat, as they got a lot accomplished through sheer brute force and determination. Their long term problem was that it was an amazingly inefficient system, guaranteed to eventually fall apart

Submission + - Hedge fund shorts biotechs, then sues those same biotechs to drop share price (biospace.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: A hedge fund is shorting biotechs, then suing those same biotechs over patent disputes The hedge fund is betting that the lawsuits will cause the biotech share price to drop. This is being done in the name of lowing drug prices for the public good.

Part of that push is a desire to lower drug prices, said the Texan, but it could also be a significant money maker for Bass, whose shorting strategy only makes money if companies fail. "This will change the way pharma companies [manage] their BS patents," Bass said. "The beautiful thing is this will lower drug prices for everyone."

Submission + - Anonymous seems to have hacked its Google search results (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Whilst everyone waits for hacking group Anonymous to publish its much-publicised list of high-level paedophiles today, a more obscure hack seems to be in evidence: the Wikipedia page for the Anonymous group is marked in Google search results with the warning 'This site may be hacked'. Yet no other Google search results for the Wikipedia domain display the warning. Google does not issue warnings about malware or hacking on a per-page basis, but appends them to any results across the entire domain, until the problem is fixed. If the anomaly is a hack — by Anonymous or any other group — it seems to be a hack that affects either Google or Wikipedia.

Submission + - 16 Million Mobile Devices Infected By Malware

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Alcatel-Lucent's Motive Security Labs estimates 16 million mobile devices worldwide have been infected by malware — used by cybercriminals for corporate and personal espionage, information theft, Denial of Service attacks on businesses and governments, and banking and advertising scams. Malware infections in mobile devices increased 25% in 2014, compared to a 20% increase in 2013. Android devices have now caught up with Windows laptops, which had been the primary workhorse of cybercrime, with infection rates between Android and Windows devices split 50/50 in 2014.

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