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Submission + - UNDER U.S. PRESSURE, PAYPAL NUKES MEGA FOR ENCRYPTING FILES (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by seoras
seoras writes: After coming under intense pressure PayPal has closed the account of cloud-storage service Mega. According to the company, SOPA proponent Senator Patrick Leahy personally pressured Visa and Mastercard who in turn called on PayPal to terminate the account. Bizarrely, Mega's encryption is being cited as a key problem.... ... What makes the situation more unusual is that PayPal reportedly apologized to Mega for its withdrawal while acknowledging that company’s business is indeed legitimate.
However, PayPal also advised that Mega’s unique selling point – it’s end-to-end-encryption – was a key concern for the processor."

Submission + - Research Suggests That Saunas Help You Live Longer

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A study of Finnish men suggests that frequent sauna baths may help you live longer. Previous research has suggested that saunas might improve blood vessel function and exercise capacity, or even lower blood pressure in patients with hypertension. The new study links long, hot sauna baths with more benefits, including fewer deaths from heart attacks, strokes, various heart-related conditions and other causes. The study tracked 2315 Finnish men for nearly 20 years on average. Most participants used saunas at least once weekly. Those who used them four to seven times weekly received the greatest benefits. The study published in JAMA Internal Medicine wraps up by saying that further studies are warranted to establish the potential mechanism that links sauna bathing and the aforementioned cardiovascular benefits.

Submission + - Apple loses patent suit to the tune of $532 million (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Harlequin80
Harlequin80 writes: Apple has lost a patent law suit in the US District Court, Eastern District of Texas. Smartflash brought a suit against Apple in 2013 in relation to its payment system tied to the iTunes account. Smartflash appears to be a patent holding company with no actual products themselves.

from the article "SMARTFLASH said that the patents cover a portable data carrier for storing data and managing access to it through payment information rules."

Apple have indicated that they plan to appeal.

Submission + - Our Inevitable Earth Overpopulation: Just How Doomed Are We?

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: How Mice Turned Their Private Paradise Into A Terrifying Dystopia

In 1972, animal behaviorist John Calhoun built a rat paradise with beautiful buildings and limitless food. He introduced eight mice to the population. Two years later, the mice had created their own apocalypse.

Universe 25 was a giant box designed to be a rodent utopia.

Universe 25 started out with eight mice, four males and four females. By day 560, the mouse population reached 2,200, and then steadily declined back down to unrecoverable extinction.

At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice.

Here's why overpopulation caused their extinction. And more importantly, are we doomed to a similar fate?

Submission + - The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site' (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

        Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
        Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
        Shackling for prolonged periods.
        Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
        Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

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.

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