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Comment Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score 2) 292

by Zocalo (#48652013) Attached to: Amazon "Suppresses" Book With Too Many Hyphens
Not with any consistency it seems. They are apparently fine with Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby which doesn't even include the letter "e" once in the main text (there's a nice bit of humour/irony in there being an ebook version though), with all the readabilty issues you might expect that to bring. The works of James Joyce also still seem to be listed, come to that, so I'm somewhat curious as to just how this "readability filter" get applied. I sure hope it's not just based on reader comments, because if it is a group like Anonymous or /b/ is about to have a book censoring field day.

On the otherhand, if they can start with some of the religious dogma out there...

Submission + - USBdriveby: The $20 Device That Installs a Backdoor in a Second

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Samy Kamkar has a special talent for turning seemingly innocuous things into rather terrifying attack tools. First it was an inexpensive drone that Kamkar turned into a flying hacking platform with his Skyjack research, and now it’s a $20 USB microcontroller that Kamkar has loaded with code that can install a backdoor on a target machine in a few seconds and hand control of it to the attacker.

Kamkar has been working on the new project for some time, looking for a way to install the backdoor without needing to use the mouse and keyboard. The solution he came up with is elegant, fast and effective. By using code that can emulate the keyboard and the mouse and evade the security protections such as local firewalls, Kamkar found a method to install his backdoor in just a couple of seconds and keep it hidden on the machine. He loaded the code onto an inexpensive Teensy USB microcontroller.

Kamkar’s USBdriveby attack can be executed in a matter of seconds and would be quite difficult for a typical user to detect once it’s executed. In a demo video, Kamkar runs the attack on OS X, but he said the code, which he’s released on GitHub, can be modified easily to run on Windows or Linux machine. The attack inserts a backdoor on the target machine and also overwrites the DNS settings so that the attacker can then spoof various destinations, such as Facebook or an online banking site, and collect usernames and passwords. The backdoor also goes into the cron queue, so that it runs at specified intervals.

Submission + - New Zeus Variant Targets Users Of 150 Banks

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new variant of the infamous Zeus banking and information-stealing Trojan has been created to target the users of over 150 different banks and 20 payment systems in 15 countries, including the UK, the US, Russia, Spain and Japan. Chthonic, as the variant has been named by Kaspersky Lab researchers, shares a lot of similarities with previous Zeus variants. The malware is capable of collecting system information, stealing saved passwords, logging keystrokes, recording video and sound via the computer's webcam and microphone, grabbing the contents of online forms, injecting web pages and fake windows, and allows criminals to connect to the infected computer remotely and use it to carry out transactions.

Submission + - Hector the Stick Insect-Inspired Robot Takes its First Steps (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Hector, the stick insect-inspired robot built by a research team at Bielefeld University in Germany that was first announced in 2011, could be forgiven for feeling lonely as the only one of its kind in world, but has lately been too busy learning to walk to worry on its unique status. It is hoped that Hector, which stands for Hexapod Cognitive autonomously Operating Robot, will benefit not only roboticists but also biologists interested in animal movement.

Submission + - Quantum physics just got less complicated (phys.org)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: From phys.org:
Here's a nice surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than we thought. An international team of researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. The result is published 19 December in Nature Communications.
Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner made the breakthrough while at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. They found that 'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum 'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one.

Submission + - Nicholas Negroponte on the Future of Learning: Nanobots Will Hack the Brain (hacked.com)

Submitted by giulioprisco
giulioprisco writes: Nicholas Negroponte describes future nanobots hacking our neurons to make us learn faster and better. Able to communicate wirelessly with each other and with the external world, the nanobots would hack the brain like read/write computer memory. Negroponte says: '[I]n theory you could load Shakespeare into your bloodstream and as the little robots get to the various part of the brain they deposit little pieces of Shakespeare or the little pieces of French if you want to learn how to speak French. So in theory you can ingest information.'

Submission + - Boston Uber driver accused of raping and kidnapping passenger (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As Uber treads through fierce global scrutiny amid numerous sexual assault cases involving its ‘amateur taxi-drivers’, the car-hailing service faces another damaging blow following an alleged rape of a young woman in Boston. The district attorney’s office for Massachusetts’ Middlesex County announced this week that Alejandro Done, 46, had been charged with rape, assault to rape, kidnapping and two counts of assault and battery after reportedly attacking a woman in an Uber-registered vehicle on 6th December. Allegedly the young woman had hailed an Uber via the smartphone app, and the driver had insisted that she pay in cash for the ride. Done drove the young woman to a secluded area, pulled over and proceeded to attack her, said the attorney’s office.

Submission + - Tribler Makes BitTorrent Completely Anonymous and Impossible to Compromise (hacked.com)

Submitted by giulioprisco
giulioprisco writes: A group of researchers from the Delft University of Technology are about to do something never done before: make BitTorrent completely anonymous and impossible to shut down. Utilizing a dedicated Tor-like network, Tribler allows users to search and download torrents without risking any of their personal information or being tracked down, the researchers claim. Prior to The Pirate Bay being taken down, the creator Peter Sunde mentioned that he wished it would have died quicker so others could improve and innovate the technology. It looks like Sunde got his wish after all.

Submission + - Researchers discover SS7 flaw, allowing total access to ANY cell phone anywhere. (www.zeit.de)

Submitted by krakman
krakman writes: Researchers discovered security flaws in SS7 that allow listening to private phone calls and intercepting text messages on a potentially massive scale – even when cellular networks are using the most advanced encryption now available.

The flaws, to be reported at a hacker conference in Hamburg this month, are actually functions built into SS7 for other purposes – such as keeping calls connected as users speed down highways, switching from cell tower to cell tower – that hackers can repurpose for surveillance because of the lax security on the network. It is thought that these flaws were used for bugging Chancellor Merkels phone earlier.

Those skilled at the housekeeping functions built into SS7 can locate callers anywhere in the world, listen to calls as they happen or record hundreds of encrypted calls and texts at a time for later decryption. There also is potential to defraud users and cellular carriers by using SS7 functions, the researchers say.

Another result of Security being thought of after the fact, as opposed to part of the initial design.

Submission + - Lockheed Martin's 100 MW Compact Fusion Nuclear Reactor (globalspec.com)

Submitted by Roger Pink
Roger Pink writes: When I first heard the announcement regarding Lockheed Martin's plan to produce a compact fusion reactor (CFR) in five years, I was pretty skeptical. Then a lot of skeptical articles were written and I felt my first instinct was validated. The only problem is I think I was wrong. Having researched this story for an article I've written, I'm pretty much convinced this is actually happening.

This isn't cold fusion. Back in the late eighties a couple chemists thought they had fusion and rushed to publish out of fear of having the credit stolen. It was a complete failure of the scientific process and it set fusion back two decades. This time is different. The project leader has over a decade of experience studying and modeling fusion. The institution has a history of novel technologies and absolutely no reason to risk their credibility.

In short, it really seams like it's more likely there will be a CFR in the next ten years then not. Here's an article for a little background why:

http://insights.globalspec.com...

Submission + - Scientists Discover That Exercise Changes Your DNA

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The human genome is astonishingly complex and dynamic, with genes constantly turning on or off, depending on what biochemical signals they receive from the body. Scientists have known that certain genes become active or quieter as a result of exercise but they hadn’t understood how those genes knew how to respond to exercise. Now the NYT reports that scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have completed a study where they recruited 23 young and healthy men and women, brought them to the lab for a series of physical performance and medical tests, including a muscle biopsy, and then asked them to exercise half of their lower bodies for three months. The volunteers pedaled one-legged at a moderate pace for 45 minutes, four times per week for three months. Then the scientists repeated the muscle biopsies and other tests with each volunteer. Not surprisingly, the volunteers’ exercised leg was more powerful now than the other, showing that the exercise had resulted in physical improvements. But there were also changes within the exercised muscle cells’ DNA. Using technology that analyses 480,000 positions throughout the genome, they could see that new methylation patterns had taken place in 7,000 genes (an individual has 20–25,000 genes).

In a process known as DNA methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body. In the exercised portions of the bodies, many of the methylation changes were on portions of the genome known as enhancers that can amplify the expression of proteins by genes. And gene expression was noticeably increased or changed in thousands of the muscle-cell genes that the researchers studied. Most of the genes in question are known to play a role in energy metabolism, insulin response and inflammation within muscles. In other words, they affect how healthy and fit our muscles — and bodies — become. Many mysteries still remain but the message of the study is unambiguous. “Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money,” says Sara Lindholm, “we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life.”

Submission + - ICANN Hacked Including Root DNS Systems (darknet.org.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Attackers sent staff spoofed emails appearing to coming from icann.org. The organization notes it was a “spear phishing” attack, suggesting employees clicked on a link in the messages, and then typed their usernames and passwords into a bogus webpage, providing hackers with the keys to their accounts.

“The attack resulted in the compromise of the email credentials of several ICANN staff members,” the announcement reads, noting that the attack happened in late November and was discovered a week later.

With those details, the hackers then managed to access a number of systems within ICANN, including the Centralized Zone Data System (CZDS), the wiki pages of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), the domain registration Whois portal, and the organization’s blog.

Submission + - Critical Git security vulnerability announced

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Github has announced a security vulnerability and has encourage users to update their Git clients as soon as possible. The blog post reads in part: "A critical Git security vulnerability has been announced today, affecting all versions of the official Git client and all related software that interacts with Git repositories, including GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac. Because this is a client-side only vulnerability, github.com and GitHub Enterprise are not directly affected. The vulnerability concerns Git and Git-compatible clients that access Git repositories in a case-insensitive or case-normalizing filesystem. An attacker can craft a malicious Git tree that will cause Git to overwrite its own .git/config file when cloning or checking out a repository, leading to arbitrary command execution in the client machine. Git clients running on OS X (HFS+) or any version of Microsoft Windows (NTFS, FAT) are exploitable through this vulnerability. Linux clients are not affected if they run in a case-sensitive filesystem....Updated versions of GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac are available for immediate download, and both contain the security fix on the Desktop application itself and on the bundled version of the Git command-line client."

Submission + - Kepler Makes First Exoplanet Discovery After Mission Reboot (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: NASA’s Kepler space telescope has detected its first new extrasolar planet after mission engineers were able to save the mission from a premature death after two of the exoplanet hunter’s four stabilizing reaction wheels failed last year. Called “K2, the extended mission arose from an “innovative idea” that appears to have given the prolific telescope a new lease on life. “Last summer, the possibility of a scientifically productive mission for Kepler after its reaction wheel failure in its extended mission was not part of the conversation,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s astrophysics division director at the agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C. “Today, thanks to an innovative idea and lots of hard work by the NASA and Ball Aerospace team, Kepler may well deliver the first candidates for follow-up study by the James Webb Space Telescope to characterize the atmospheres of distant worlds and search for signatures of life.”

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