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+ - Shades of Jack Ryan: altering text in eBooks to track pirates->

Submitted by wwphx
wwphx writes "German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they’ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.

Seems like I recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secrets to the Russians. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book."
Link to Original Source

+ - Trolling LinkedIn for spooks!->

Submitted by pegr
pegr writes "Over at TechDirt, we learn that, apparently, the rules of OpSec do not apply to LinkedIn. Using your favorite NSA spying project codename, search LinkedIn for analysts with specific experience with that project! The bonus is that you may very well learn the codenames of more projects. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Oh, and if the person you find didn't share their contact list, LinkedIn will help you find more by showing you "those that viewed this profile also viewed these:" Say what you will regarding the recent NSA revelations, but shouldn't there be a policy with regard to exposing intelligence projects and personnel on public forums? Do we really need to make it this easy for counter-intel of opposing nations?"
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+ - The Security of WordPress Plugins

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Checkmarx’s research lab identified that more than 20% of the 50 most popular WordPress plugins are vulnerable to common Web attacks, such as SQL Injection. Furthermore, a concentrated research into e-commerce plugins revealed that 7 out of the 10 most popular e-commerce plugins contain vulnerabilities. This is the first time that such a comprehensive survey was prepared to test the state of security of the leading plugins. In total, 8 million vulnerable WordPress plugins were downloaded."

+ - LLVM 3.3 officially released->

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes "LLVM 3.3, which was running behind its schedule, has finally been released officially. Version 3.3 is a hefty release and packs some rather interesting features such as support for 64-bit ARM, new vectorizer, new micro-architecture enhancements, integration of the AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end, and Clang frontend is now C++ 11 feature complete among others."
Link to Original Source

+ - House to Propose SHIELD ACT to Protect Electricity Grid Against EMP Event->

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes "The House is preparing to unveil and plan that would harden the nation's electricity grid against the ravages of either a solar flare or an electromagnetic pulse cause by the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

An EMP event can be caused by the sudden onset of charged particles that are accelerated either by a solar flare event or the explosion of a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere. The results could be devastating. ". A wave of EMP creates three chaotic effects. First, the electromagnetic shock can disrupt electrical devices. The second effect is similar to lightning-a power surge that would burn circuits and immobilize electronic components and systems. The third is a pulse effect that flows through electricity transmission lines, damaging distribution centers and fusing power lines. Any of these can cause irreversible damage to an electronic system." In other worlds the United States could be sent back in an eye blink to the 18th Century."
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+ - Intel Announces New Enterprise Xeons, More Powerful Xeon Phi Cards->

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes "Intel announced a set of new enterprise products today aimed at furthering its strengths in the TOP500 supercomputing market. As of today, the Chinese Tiahne-2 supercomputer (aka Milky Way 2) is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet at roughly ~54PFLOPs. Intel is putting its own major push behind heterogeneous computing with the Tianhe-2. Each node contains two Ivy Bridge sockets and three Xeon Phi cards. Each node, therefore, contains 422.4GFLOP/s in Ivy Bridge performance — but 3.43TFLOPs/s worth of Xeon Phi. In addition, we'll see new Xeons based on this technology later this year, in the 22nm E5-2600 V2 family, with up to 12 cores. The new chips will be built on Ivy Bridge technology and will offer up to 12 cores / 24 threads. The new Xeons, however, aren't really the interesting part of the story. Today, Intel is adding cards to the current Xeon Phi lineup — the 7120P, 3120P, 3120A, and 5120D. The 3120P and 3120A are the same card — the "P" is passively cooled, while the "A" integrates a fan. Both of these solutions have 57 CPUs and 6GB of RAM. Intel states that they offer ~1TFLOP of performance, which puts them on par with the 5110P that launched last year, but with slightly less memory and presumably a lower price point. At the top of the line, Intel is introducing the 7120P and 7120X — the 7120P comes with an integrated heat spreader, the 7120X doesn't. Clock speeds are higher on this card, it has 61 cores instead of 60, 16GB of GDDR5, and 352GBps of memory bandwidth. Customers who need lots of cores and not much RAM can opt for one of the cheaper 3100 cards, while the 7100 family allows for much greater data sets."
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+ - Japanese artist makes better art in Execl than others can do with Photoshop-> 3

Submitted by cute_orc
cute_orc writes "MS Excel is notorious for being a boring spreadsheet applications. But 73 years old Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi makes amazing art using autoshape tool of Excel. He makes free-form shapes spanning multiple cells and join them together in into a huge image. His artwork is really amazing and beautiful."
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+ - Google Adds Its VP9 Video Codec To Chromium Ahead Of Chrome And YouTube

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, Google revealed that it was planning to finish defining its VP9 video codec on June 17 (today), after which it will start using the next-generation compression technology in Chrome and on YouTube. The company is wasting no time: it has already enabled the free video compression standard by default in the latest Chromium build."

+ - Scores of vulnerable SAP deployments uncovered->

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes "Hundreds of organisations have been detected running dangerously vulnerable versions of SAP that were more than seven years old and thousands more have placed their critical data at risk by exposing SAP applications to the public internet.

The new research found the SAP services were inadvertently made accessible thanks to a common misconception that SAP systems were not publicly-facing and remotely-accessible. The SAP services contained dangerous vulnerabilities which were since patched by the vendor but had not been applied."
Link to Original Source

+ - TiVo Series 5 coming this fall->

Submitted by WebGangsta
WebGangsta writes "The rumor mill continues to grow closer and closer to reality, as The Verge is reporting the upcoming SERIES 5 TiVo will have 6 tuners, support OTA recording (an old TiVo feature being brought back), storage beyond the 2TB limit, and more.

While some would say that TiVo today is nothing more than a Patent Holder (albeit a successful one), there's still a market for a cable box that doubles as a streaming player. Is hardware the future of TiVo, or should they go and just license their software to all? And don't get us started on those "TiVo Buying Hulu" or "Apple/Google buying TiVo" rumors... that's a different Slashdot story for a different day,."
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1 Mole = 007 Secret Agents

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