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+ - Yahoo! Japan: 22 million user IDs probably stolen->

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes "Unauthorized access attempt of Yahoo! Japan portal may have led to theft of up to 22 million user IDs, Yahoo has revealed. There has been no information about leaks of such a massive database of user IDs as yet and according to Yahoo, the information that was stolen didn’t have passwords or any other information that would allow unauthorized users to carry out user identity verification. Yahoo hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a leak though considering the volume of traffic it noticed flowing from its servers to external entities."
Link to Original Source

+ - Skype backdoor confirmed ..->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I was disappointed the rumoured skype backdoor is claimed to be real, and
that they have evidence. The method by which they confirmed is kind of odd
- not only is skype eavesdropping but its doing head requests on SSL sites
that have urls pasted in the skype chat!

Now I've worked with a few of the german security outfits before, though not
Heise, and they are usually top-notch, so if they say its confirmed, you
generally are advised to believe them."
Link to Original Source

+ - Welcome to Google Island

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "Google fan fiction, anyone? The last thing Wired's Mat Honan remembered before awaking on the self-driving boat that dropped him on the island was sitting through a four-hour Google I/O keynote in Moscone Center and hearing Google CEO Larry Page promote a vision of a utopia where society could be free to innovate and experiment, unencumbered by government regulations or social norms. "Welcome to Google Island," a naked-save-for-a-pair-of-eyeglasses Larry Page tells Honan. "As soon as you hit Google's territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws-or lack thereof-apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn't speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.""

+ - Accountability / bug submission for services providers? 3

Submitted by crankyspice
crankyspice writes "Thinking on the topic of consumer frustration and our increasing reliance on tech. Currently brainstorming a solution to corporations providing IaaS/SaaS/PaaS type services with no way to bring technical issues to their developers' attention (customer support drones reading from scripts who don't even know what an RFC is — not the solution). (In the past, when your POTS line went out, Ma Bell rolled a truck; when your cable went out, Time Warner rolled a truck... What do you do when you've "cut the cord" and suddenly Hulu stops working with your WiFi-equipped Panasonic DVD player?)

Thinking something akin to a DMCA Registered Agent system, where if a tech company provides an email address that at least ties in to their bug tracking system, they get a safe harbor for interoperability liability or something... (At the moment, one-sided terms of service provisions mandate ~$10,000 arbitration, limit damages to what was spent on the service ($8/month?), and eliminate the ability to bring class action suits, so the service providers have basically immunized themselves from liability anyway; not sure how to handle that...)

As our world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, accountability and reliability are becoming more and more critical. It's soon going to be essential that there be a mechanism where the providers of services can at least be made aware that their stuff is broken...

Two situations I've had recently highlighted this (and caused hair pulling); both ultimately minor in the grand scheme of things, but both point to harrowing futures:
  1. Sending a PDF to fax via email was failing from my iPad. TrustFax.com (an eFax service) just wasn't seeing the attachments. The script-reading customer service drones kept saying (once I got past the stock answers about how I had to send a message to @trustfax.com, etc., which I was obviously doing since their system was reporting back to me a specific issue — no attachments found) they didn't support Apple, didn't support the iPad, etc., but I knew it had to be a problem on their end, as I'd sent PDFs from Pages on my iPad before and they'd been picked up and sent successfully by that service. Turns out the issue was with a longer filename; Pages and/or Mail on the iPad uses RFC 2231 sect. 3 multi-line encoding for parameter values, and TrustFax's email-to-fax system evidently wasn't written to support that standard. A relatively simple fix, once / if the developers are aware of it, but how to get it to their attention?
  2. My AppleTV won't play Netflix. Just reports "Netflix is currently unavailable." Apple says it's a Netflix problem. Netflix, after swearing up and down it was because my Apple TV "couldn't connect to Netflix" (demonstrably not true) finally pointed the finger at Apple. Finally I ran 'tcpdump' on my DD-WRT router and fed the results into Wireshark to see what was going on: api.netflix.com (actually an Amazon AWS instance) is reporting "X-Neftlix-Error-Cause: Error from API Backend." Seems like a Netflix problem to me, but it could be that Netflix isn't properly handling bad input from the Apple-supplied application. Customer support drones on both sides are useless, so how do I get this into the hands of someone who can look at it, see what's broken, and put it in for a bug fix?

If you were going to design simple, effective legislation to address this lack of accountability / access to developers' attention, what would it look like? (From a consumer's perspective, and/or from the other side of the corporate firewall.) Is legislation the answer? Can corporations be shamed/spotlighted into voluntarily agreeing to some sort of industry-specified "best practices" when it comes to these issues?

I'm ready to agitate, but I don't want to go off half-cocked without considering, well, those aspects I haven't yet considered! Hence, I'm Asking Slashdot... :)"

+ - A Computer-based Smart Rifle with Incredible Accuracy, Now On Sale->

Submitted by WheezyJoe
WheezyJoe writes "A story on NPR reports that the TrackingPoint rifle went on sale today, and can enable a "novice" to hit a target 500 yards away on the first try. "The rifle's scope features a sophisticated color graphics display. The shooter locks a laser on the target by pushing a small button by the trigger... But here's where it's different: You pull the trigger but the gun decides when to shoot. It fires only when the weapon has been pointed in exactly the right place, taking into account dozens of variables, including wind, shake and distance to the target. The rifle has a built-in laser range finder, a ballistics computer and a Wi-Fi transmitter to stream live video and audio to a nearby iPad. Every shot is recorded so it can be replayed, or posted to YouTube or Facebook."
Link to Original Source

+ - Carnivorous Plant Ejects Junk DNA->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "The carnivorous humped bladderwort, found on all continents except Antarctica, is a model of ruthless genetic efficiency. Only 3% of this aquatic plant's DNA is not part of a known gene, new research shows. In contrast, only 2% of human DNA is part of a gene. The bladderwort, named for its water-filled bladders that suck in unsuspecting prey, is a relative of the tomato. The finding overturns the notion that this repetitive, non-coding DNA, popularly called "junk" DNA, is necessary for life."
Link to Original Source

+ - Thousands protesters in Beijing street, Chinese media and websites in lockdown

Submitted by centralcommittee
centralcommittee writes "Thousands of people, mostly migrant workers from Anhui province, held protest today (5/8/2013) on the 2nd Ring Road of Beijing, south of Temple of Heaven. The protest is in response to Beijing police's mishandling of the death of a girl from Anhui province, who was alleged to be gang-raped by shopping mall security guards and fell to her death last Friday. The government has deployed hundreds of police plus helicopters against the protesters, traffic near the protest site was blocked for miles. Currently the name of the shopping mall "Jingwen" has become a restricted word in major Chinese websites, user cannot post anything containing this word. The Chinese search engine Baidu also refuses to display any result for this word while Google returns more than 800,000 results for this word."

+ - Google And Adobe Beautify Fonts On Linux, iOS->

Submitted by alancronin
alancronin writes "Users of Android, Chrome OS, Linux, and iOS devices may not realize it, but FreeType open source software is used to render fonts on more than a billion such devices. Not only that, but the FreeType project this week got a significant update from none other than Adobe and Google. Specifically, Google and Adobe on Wednesday released into beta the Adobe CFF engine, an advanced Compact Font Format (CFF) rasterizer that “paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences,” as Google put it in an online announcement on the Google Open Source Blog. The new rasterizer is now included in FreeType version 2.4.12. Though it's currently off by default, the technology is “vastly superior” to the old CFF engine and will replace it in the next FreeType release, the project says."
Link to Original Source

+ - Researchers Link Roundup® Herbicide to Cancer, Autism, Parkinsonism 2

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes "The journal Entropy has published a peer-reviewed paper by authors Anthony Samsel, an independent scientist and consultant, and Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT, that contradicts Monsanto's claims that its widely-used herbicide glyphosate (a.k.a. Roundup®) is safe and non-toxic. From the paper: 'Glyphosate, the active ingredient, is the most popular herbicide used worldwide. The industry asserts it is minimally toxic to humans, but here we argue otherwise. Residues are found in the main foods of the Western diet, comprised primarily of sugar, corn, soy and wheat. Glyphosate's inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify xenobiotics. Thus, glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins.' tl:dr Dude it wrecks ya gut so whacked shizzle happens down there real easier."

+ - Cause of LED Efficiency Droop Finally Revealed-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from University of California, Santa Barbara in collaboration with colleagues at the École Polytechnique in France have been able to prove the theory behind LED “droop”. LED droop is when LEDs have more power pushed through them, they emit less light. With the the understanding of what Causes this, we should now start to see research go into the production of LEDs with technology to circumvent LED Droop."
Link to Original Source

+ - Dutch cable technicians discover street cabinet full of spy equipment-> 2

Submitted by thygate
thygate writes "Last week cable technicians discovered a cabinet that looked identical to the district cabinets Ziggo (ISP) uses in the Hague Schilderswijk.
After opening it with their skeleton key, they discovered it was full of recording and listening devices. The equipment looks professional and includes amongst other things a camera and an UMTS modem. The cabinet later mysteriously disappeared. Local experts believe the equipment belongs to the government, but there is no official acknowledgement. It is believed to be related to recruitment of jihadi combatants for Syria, that had been signaled in the area the previous week. Last week there were also large scale raids all over Belgium to stop recruitment of youth by radicals for the Syrian war."
Link to Original Source

+ - Parasite Inspires Surgical Patch->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "By mimicking a technique used by an intestinal parasite of fish, researchers have developed a flexible patch studded with microneedles that holds skin grafts in place more strongly than surgical staples do. After burrowing into the walls of a fish's intestines, the spiny-headed worm Pomphorhynchus laevis inflates its proboscis to better embed itself in the soft tissue. In the new patch, the stiff polystyrene core of the 700-micrometer-tall needles penetrates the tissue; then a thin hydrogel coating on the tip of each needle—a coating based on the material in disposable diapers that expands when it gets wet—swells to help anchor the patch in place. In tests using skin grafts, adhesion strength of the patch was more than three times higher than surgical staples. Because the patch doesn't depend on chemical adhesives for its gripping power, there's less chance for patients to have an allergic reaction. And because the microneedles are about one-quarter the length of typical surgical staples, the patches cause less tissue damage when they're removed. Besides holding grafts in place, the patch could be used to hold the sides of a wound or an incision together—even, in theory, ones inside the body if a slowly dissolving version of the patch can be developed. Moreover, the researchers say, the hydrogel coating holds promise as a way to deliver proteins, drugs, or other therapeutic substances to patients."
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+ - Windows 8.1 to boot to desktop-> 3

Submitted by geekoid
geekoid writes "According to the Verge, Windows 8.1 will have an option to boot directly to the desktop. In light of recent reporting about the general distaste and design flaws of windows 8 user interface, will MS's updates be dynamic enough to stop the current MS Exodus?"
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+ - ZDNet proclaims "Windows: It's over" 1

Submitted by plastick
plastick writes ""You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end."

ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past. ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains "The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved.""

"I don't think so," said Ren'e Descartes. Just then, he vanished.

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