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Japan

Yokohama Accidentally Tweets That NK Missile Is Inbound 131

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the just-a-drill dept.
ForgedArtificer writes "Earlier today, the Crisis Management Office Affairs Bureau for the city of Yokohama, Japan had some startling news for its followers; to wit, a North Korean missile was on its way to Japan. The tweet stayed up for about 20 minutes before being removed and replaced with an apology. The city reports that a pre-written tweet was released due to a malfunction in the 'mechanism' that would have released the tweet at the appropriate time."
Networking

Cyberoam Packet Inspection Devices Open Traffic To Third Parties 29

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the security-through-oh-screw-it dept.
New submitter jetcityorange tipped us to a nasty security flaw in Cyberoam packet inspection devices. The devices are used by employers and despotic governments alike to intercept communications; in the case of employers probably for relatively mundane purposes (no torrenting at work). However, the CA key used to issue fake certificates so that the device can intercept SSL traffic is the same on every device, allowing every Cyberoam device to intercept traffic that passed through any other one. But that's not all: "It is therefore possible to intercept traffic from any victim of a Cyberoam device with any other Cyberoam device - or, indeed, to extract the key from the device and import it into other DPI devices, and use those for interception. Perhaps ones from more competent vendors."

Comment: Re:Found at 125 GeV (Score 4, Informative) 396

by zygotic mitosis (#40541239) Attached to: LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson
What the hell, people??? Parent has binding energy right. The particles alone are heavier. This goes for chemistry, as well as nuclear chemistry, as well as nuclear physics. For example, helium: Wolfram Alpha tells me that 2n + 2p = 6.695E-24 g

The mass of helium is 4.002602 g/mol. Divide by Avogdro's number, and a single atom of helium weighs 6.646E-24 g. The difference in mass is what powers the sun. Parent is simply making the same argument on the scale of a proton split into its parts.

(disclaimer: I know, blabla deuterium, not protons and neutrons. However, see the definition of a state function.)

Comment: Troll headline? (Score 3, Informative) 300

by zygotic mitosis (#37023366) Attached to: Drought-Stricken Texas Town Taps Urine For Water
Urine? Well, yes, but also the feces and the nasty water from industry. As someone has pointed out already, if your WTP collects from the river, you are already drinking treated sewage water.

At our plant, we have a water reclamation facility at the end of our process, the same type of facility used at the water treatment plant upstream. A WRF is common, iirc, in CA, but is, afaik, the first of its kind here in MN. It is far more common to discharge without the additional filtering and contaminant removal provided by a WRF.

The water we discharge is tested biweekly for ammonia and phosphorus and daily for total coliforms and biological oxygen demand. Ammonia and coliforms are non-detectable ~99% of the time. We are doing a very good job turning sewage into drinking water for the next town on the river.

/lab intern at a WWTP
Communications

Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees 220

Posted by samzenpus
from the fine-print-on-the-fine-print dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN reports that a one-year study by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee shows about $2 billion a year in 'mystery fees' show up on the landline phone bills of Americans. Known as cramming, the extra charges include:long distance service, subscriptions for Internet-related services, access to restricted websites, entertainment services with a 900 area code, collect calls, and club memberships. The Commerce Committee's report says phone companies receive a small fee — often just a dollar or two — for allowing charges from third-party vendors to appear on their bills but due to the large number of customers the charges eventually add up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the panel people are unaware their phone numbers can be charged almost like a credit card and her investigations indicate customers are not even getting services in return. 'My office has yet to see a legitimate third-party charge on a bill,' says Madigan, who added most customers don't detect the charges on their bills. Senator Jay Rockefeller says Congress needs to pass legislation to protect customers from unauthorized third-party charges on their phone bills because the telephone industry has failed to prevent the practice. 'It's pretty obvious at this point that voluntary guidelines aren't solving this problem,' says Rockefeller. 'It's time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all.'"
Hardware

Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 290

Posted by timothy
from the double-secret-reverse-engineering dept.
trebonian writes "For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 (used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES), the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: 'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) "transistor circuit" simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org.'"
Sony

Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good 534

Posted by samzenpus
from the forever-is-a-long-time dept.
ReportedlyWorking writes "It appears that Sony's PS3 has been fatally compromised. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a team named 'fail0verflow' revealed that they had calculated the Private Keys, which would let them or anyone else generate signed software for the PS3. Additionally, they also claim to have a method of jailbreaking the PS3 without the use of a Dongle, which is the current method. If all these statements are true, this opens the door to custom firmware, and homebrew software. Assuming that Sony doesn't take radical action and invalidate their private keys, this could mean that Jailbreaking is viable on all PS3, regardless of their firmware! From the article: 'Approximately a half hour in, the team revealed their new PS3 secrets, the moment we all were waiting for. One of the major highlights here was, dongle-less jailbreaking by overflowing the bootup NOR flash, giving complete control over the system. The other major feat, was calculating the public private keys (due to botched security), giving users the ability to sign their own SELFs. Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!'"
Hardware

Microchips Now In Tombstones, Toilets, & Fish Lures 83

Posted by Soulskill
from the snake-oil-the-next-generation dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Johnson writes in the Mercury News that microchips are going into a staggering array of once decidedly low-tech items — from gravestone markers and running shoes to fish lures and writing pens. In the future, 'where won't we find chips?' asks analyst Jordan Selburn. 'The answer is pretty close to nowhere.' For example, one company sells a coin-size, stainless steel-encased microchip for gravestone markers that tells the dead person's story in text, photos, video or audio histories, which visitors can access by pointing their Internet-enabled cell phones at it. The company says it has sold thousands of 'Memory Medallions.' There's AquaOne Technologies, who sell a toilet containing chips that automatically shut off the water when it springs a leak or starts to overflow, but Japanese company Toto goes one better with an intelligent toilet that gathers health-related data from the user's urine. Pro-Troll puts a chip in its fish lures that 'duplicates the electrical nerve discharge of a wounded bait fish,' prompting other fish to bite it."

Comment: Re:Error in TFS (Score 1) 160

by zygotic mitosis (#34426774) Attached to: Stable Roentgenium Claimed Found In Gold
As a chemistry undergrad currently studying physical chemistry...

He holds the liquid gold at 1127C. It would take an approximate pressure of 2.1 * 10^-7 atm for liquid gold to boil at 1127C. Now, it strikes me as very unlikely that he is using a close-to-perfect vacuum for this, especially since running any vacuum at all will encourage evaporation, but without further data, who knows, right?

Deprive a mirror of its silver and even the Czar won't see his face.

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