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Businesses

Interviews: Ask Martin Shkreli a Question 410

Martin Shkreli has agreed to answer your questions. Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge fund MSMB Capital Management, the co-founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of the biotechnology firm Retrophin, and the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Shkreli has been active on Twitter about a wide range of topics, including the 2016 presidential election. Most recently, he expressed interest in buying 4chan.

Ask him your questions here, and we'll post the full interview with Shkreli's answers in the near future.
Technology

Airport Queuing Time Measured With Bluetooth 38

jones_supa writes "Helsinki-Vantaa airport has established a new method of monitoring security control queue times, utilizing phones with Bluetooth enabled. When a passenger passes through security control, the system calculates the time taken to queue and be served based on time stamps registered by the sensors. The plan is to eventually display all queuing times, which will allow busy passengers to decide whether it would be better to move to another checkpoint."
Sony

Submission + - Sony Canned Security Staff Just Before Data Breach (thinq.co.uk)

Stoobalou writes: A lawsuit filed this week suggests that Sony sacked a group of employees from its network security division just two weeks before the company's servers were hacked and its customers' credit card details were leaked.

The suit, which seeks class action status, is being brought by victims of the massive data breach that took place in April.

Security

Two Unpatched Flaws Show Up In Apple iOS 171

Trailrunner7 writes "The technique that the Jailbreakme.com Web site is using to bypass the iPhone's security mechanisms and enable users to run unapproved apps on their phones involves exploiting two separate vulnerabilities. One of the vulnerabilities is a memory-corruption flaw that affects the way that Apple's mobile devices, including the iPad and iPod Touch, display PDFs. The second weakness is a problem in the Apple iOS kernel that gives an attacker higher privileges once his code is on a targeted device, enabling him to break out of the iOS sandbox. The combination of the two vulnerabilities — both of which are unpatched at the moment — gives an attacker the ability to run remote code on the device and evade the security protections on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The technique became public earlier this week when the Jailbreakme.com site began hosting a set of specially crafted PDF files designed to help users jailbreak their Apple devices and load apps other than the ones approved by Apple and offered in its official App Store."
Hardware Hacking

Home-Built Turing Machine 123

stronghawk writes "The creator of the Nickel-O-Matic is back at it and has now built a Turing Machine from a Parallax Propeller chip-based controller, motors, a dry-erase marker and a non-infinite supply of shiny 35mm leader film. From his FAQ: 'While thinking about Turing machines I found that no one had ever actually built one, at least not one that looked like Turing's original concept (if someone does know of one, please let me know). There have been a few other physical Turing machines like the Logo of Doom, but none were immediately recognizable as Turing machines. As I am always looking for a new challenge, I set out to build what you see here.'"
Robotics

AMARSi Project Aims To Have Robots Learn Jobs From Co-workers 87

Lanxon writes "Robots of the future will be capable of learning more complex behaviors than ever before if a new, pan-European research project succeeds in its goal of developing the world's first architecture for advanced robotic motor skills, reports Wired. If successful, the four-year AMARSi (Adaptive Modular Architecture for Rich Motor Skills) project could see a manufacturing world filled with autonomous, intelligent humanoid worker bots that can learn new skills by interacting with their co-workers."
Medicine

Psychopaths Have Brain Structure Abnormality 438

mmmscience writes "A group of scientists has identified a structure in the brain of psychopaths that is abnormal when compared with controls. The change is found in the uncinate fasciculus, a bridge of white matter that connects the amygdala (emotion/aggression brain region) and the orbitofrontal cortex (decision making region). Interestingly, the greater the abnormality in the region, the more severe the levels of sociopathy in a subject. The results were published as 'Altered connections on the road to psychopathy' in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. A researcher on the team suggests the finding could have considerable implications in the world of criminal justice, where such scans could one day be presented as evidence in a trial." The study's results have not yet been replicated by other researchers.
Encryption

Submission + - SHA-3 Second Round Candidates Released

Jeremy A. Hansen writes: "NIST just announced their selections for algorithms going to the second round of the SHA-3 competition:

NIST received 64 SHA-3 candidate hash function submissions and accepted 51 first round candidates as meeting our minimum acceptance criteria. We have now selected 14 second round candidates to continue in the competition. Information about the second round candidate algorithms will be available here.

We were pleased by the amount and quality of the cryptanalysis we received on the first round candidates, and more than a little amazed by the ingenuity of some of the attacks. We thank all the submitters, those who provided analysis, those who provided valuable implementation performance data (particularly e-Bash, and the papers dealing with the effects of the AES round instruction, FPGA implementations, and working store requirements of the algorithms). We were also pleased and grateful (although not surprised) for the graceful and forthright manner with which several of the submitters took bad news, and confirmed attacks, or recognized the shortcomings of their submission. In selecting this set of second round candidates we tried to include only algorithms that we thought had a chance of being selected as SHA-3. We were willing to extrapolate higher performance for conservative designs with apparently large safety factors, but comparatively unforgiving of aggressive designs that were broken, or nearly broken during the course of the review. We were more willing to accept disquieting properties of the hash function if the designer had apparently anticipated them, than if they were discovered during the review period, even if there were apparent fixes. We were generally alarmed by attacks on compression functions that seemed unanticipated by the submitters.

There are still some details of a few of the second round candidates that concern us. We will shortly post a statement describing each of the second round candidates, the factors that we liked about the submission and identifying any lingering concerns that we have. Submitters of the second round candidates are invited to tweak their submissions to improve them if they wish, fix any inconsistencies, problems or shortcomings in the specification or source code, and submit them to us by Sept. 15, 2009."
Medicine

The Dangers of Being Really, Really Tired 469

Sleepy Dog Millionare writes "Brian Palmer, writing for Slate, asks 'Can you die from lack of sleep?' and shockingly, the answer may very well be Yes, you can. Palmer points to 'ground breaking experiments' in the area of sleep research. It turns out that sleep deprivation can actually be deadly in rats. The obvious conclusion is that it is probably deadly in all mammals. So the next time you think you need to pull multiple all-night hack-a-thons, ask yourself if it's worth risking your life for."
The Internet

Developers Looking to Set Up Alternatives To Apple's App Store 192

TechDirt is reporting that in response to the frustrations with Apple's app store dictatorship, a few developers are looking to set up their own alternative app stores. Alternate app stores would only work on jailbroken phones, making their adoption scope limited, so the question is whether Apple will go after these start ups on the legal battlefield. "Apple, which collects a 30% commission from sellers on its store, doesn't break out the site's revenue. Brokerage firm Piper Jaffray estimates the site generated about $150 million in sales last year and projects total sales will grow to $800 million this year. Apple did not respond to requests for comment. But it has said in the past that with the iPhone it was trying to strike a balance between a closed device like the iPod and an open device like the PC."
Space

ISS To Become Second Brightest-Object In the Sky 243

Matt_dk writes "Move over, Morning Star. Once Canadarm2 helps install the fourth and final set of solar array wings to the International Space Station later this month, the Station will surpass Venus as the brightest object in the night sky, second only to the Moon. The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to deliver the power-generating solar panels and Starboard 6 (S6) truss segment to the ISS on the 125th mission in the Shuttle program, known as STS-119/15A (slated for launch on March 11)."

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