57157977
submission
coondoggie writes:
The Federal Trade Commission today issued its annual look at what consumers in the United States are complaining about the most. And for the 14th consecutive year the winner, or loser really, for 2013 was identity theft, receiving over 290,000 or 14% of the agency’s 2 million overall complaints. Thirty percent of these incidents were tax- or wage-related, which continues to be the largest category within identity theft complaints, the FTC stated.
57123915
submission
coondoggie writes:
How bad can cyberattacks get? How about burning the internal components of a machine, whether PC or Mac, to a crisp so there's no thought of it being recoverable? That's what security vendor CrowdStrike showed could be done to an Apple Mac OS X today at the RSA Conference. “We can actually set the machine on fire,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike....
57108957
submission
coondoggie writes:
Three principal US national labs today affirmed they will team-up to build supercomputers that operate about 10 times faster than today's most powerful high performance computing (HPC) systems. The project, known as the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Livermore (CORAL) national labs will build 200 peak petaflops (quadrillions of floating point operations per second) systems for each of the labs, at a cost of about $125 million each, in the 2017-2018 timeframe, the group stated.
57062953
submission
coondoggie writes:
The International Space Station recently took a snapshot of the Korean peninsula that explicitly details the night-time power consumption of North and South Korea — North Korea is almost completely dark.
57025459
submission
coondoggie writes:
Few things can mess up a highly technical system and threaten lives like a counterfeit electronic component, yet the use of such bogus gear is said to be widespread. A new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program will target these phony products and develop a tool to "verify, without disrupting or harming the system, the trustworthiness of a protected electronic component."
56928683
submission
coondoggie writes:
Gaining significant knowledge from the growing tons of information available about big picture topics such as biology, economics, astronomy, health or climate is a challenge beyond most human minds and computer programs. But the scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to change that with a program called Big Mechanisms they say could gather all exiting data about a particular topic, keep it up-to-date and develop new conclusions or research directions.
56916409
submission
coondoggie writes:
Everybody wants your money – the IRS too, but at least they will take it legally. The IRS however doesn't want your money taken by scamsters who use tax season to celebrate Christmastime for dirtbags. The list of nastyscams sounds familiar – with identity theft and phone fraud leading the way as they have for the past few years.
56892375
submission
coondoggie writes:
The European Space Agency this week said it was putting together a new space telescope that would take aim at discovering habitable exoplanets in our solar system. By integrating 34 separate small telescopes and cameras, the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, or PLATO, will be parked about 1.5 million km beyond Earth and monitor what the ESA called "relatively nearby stars, searching for tiny, regular dips in brightness as their planets transit in front of them, temporarily blocking out a small fraction of the starlight. "
56885823
submission
coondoggie writes:
Microsoft's Lync communications platform gathers enough readily analyzable data to let corporations spy on their employees like the NSA can on U.S. citizens, and it's based on the same type of information — call details. At Microsoft’s Lync 2014 conference, software developer Event Zero detailed just how easy it would be, for instance, to figure out who is dating whom within the company and pinpoint people looking for another job.
56880953
submission
coondoggie writes:
There has been much discussion about how NASA and others could protect Earth from the threat of asteroids catastrophically striking the planet. This month NASA issued a report on the conclusions reached by a group of experts on the best ways to find, track and possibly deflect asteroids headed for Earth. Here we take a look at some of the key findings as well as other asteroid detection projects.
56614155
submission
coondoggie writes:
Using lasers to communicate quickly through the long distances of space has generally been the purview of science fiction. But researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are out to change that notion with a prototype array that can read more information — and allow much higher data rates than conventional systems — than usual from single particles of light. Lasers can transmit only very low light levels across vast distances, so signals need to contain as much information as possible, NASA said.
56571491
submission
coondoggie writes:
Here's a good idea: The FBI today said it launched a targeted 60 day program that will offer up to a $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of anyone who intentionally aims a laser at an aircraft. The FBI said the laser pointing scourge continues to grow at an alarming rate. Since the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration began tracking laser strikes in 2005, there has been ridiculous 1,000% increase in the number of laser pointing/aircraft incidents. Last year, 3,960 laser strikes against aircraft were reported-an average of almost 11 incidents per day.
56537231
submission
coondoggie writes:
The scientists at DARPA say the current methods of searching the Internet for all manner of information just won't cut it in the future. Today the agency announced a program that would aim to totally revamp Internet search and "revolutionize the discovery, organization and presentation of search results."Specifically, the goal of DARPA's Memex program is to develop software that will enable domain-specific indexing of public web content and domain-specific search capabilities. According to the agency the technologies developed in the program will also provide the mechanisms for content discovery, information extraction, information retrieval, user collaboration, and other areas needed to address distributed aggregation, analysis, and presentation of web content.
56448187
submission
coondoggie writes:
You don't hear about this often enough — the FBI today said the last in a group of seven men was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in a conspiracy to steal copper from two dozen First Energy Corp. and or Cleveland Public Power substations in Northeast Ohio. The FBI said that the group of seven men took part in 25 copper thefts and five attempted thefts between January and May 2013. Court documents also list 53 instances where at least some of the defendants sold stolen copper to area scrap yards between January and April 2013. The defendants collectively sold the stolen copper for more than $15,000. They have collectively been ordered to pay $242,626 to First Energy Corp. for the cost of repairs to the substations.
56379043
submission
coondoggie writes:
NASA today said it was looking into developing two new Centennial Challenge competitions that would let the public design, build and deliver small satellites known as Cubesats capable of operations and experiments near the moon and beyond. The first challenge will focus on finding innovative ways to allow deep space communications with small spacecraft, while the second focuses on primary propulsion for small spacecraft.
