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Submission + - The MTA website lets you track subway riders' location/figure out their schedule (404media.co)

Submitted by Slash_Account_Dot
Slash_Account_Dot writes: In the mid-afternoon one Saturday earlier this month, the target got on the New York subway. I knew what station they entered the subway at and at what specific time. They then entered another station a few hours later. If I had kept monitoring this person, I would have figured out the subway station they often start a journey at, which is near where they live. I would also know what specific time this person may go to the subway each day.
During all this monitoring, I wasn’t anywhere near the rider. I didn’t even need to see them with my own eyes. Instead, I was sitting inside an apartment, following their movements through a feature on a Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) website, which runs the New York City subway system.
With their consent, I had entered the rider’s credit card information—data that is often easy to buy from criminal marketplaces, or which might be trivial for an abusive partner to obtain—and punched that into the MTA site for OMNY, the subway’s contactless payments system. After a few seconds, the site churned out the rider’s travel history for the past 7 days, no other verification required.

Submission + - Google 'Glass' to be banned while driving (stuff.tv)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: "Stuff" magazine, a "gadget" oriented mag, is reporting that the UK's Department for Transport is planning to ban drivers from using Google "Glass", using the same law (1988 Road Traffic Act) that is used to ban drivers from using hand-held mobile phones.

While there are obvious parallels between the distraction potential of the mobile phone and of "Glass", there are arguments in the other direction that the speech-control aspects of "Glass" could make it less distracting than, say, a touch-screen SatNav. So, to ban "Glass" driving or not?

Typical fines for using a mobile phone while driving are £60 cash plus three penalty points on the driving license ; the points expire 3 years after the offence and if you accumulate 12 points then you've lost your license. Repeat offenders may experience higher fines and/ or more points. Around a million people have received the penalty since the mobile phone ban was introduced in 2003.

Submission + - Slingatron to hurl payloads into orbit (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: People have been shooting things into space since the 1940s, but in every case this has involved using rockets. This works, but it’s incredibly expensive with the cheapest launch costs hovering around US$2,000 per pound. This is in part because almost every bit of the rocket is either destroyed or rendered unusable once it has put the payload into orbit. Reusable launch vehicles like the SpaceX Grasshopper offer one way to bring costs down, but another approach is to dump the rockets altogether and hurl payloads into orbit. That's what HyperV Technologies Corp. of Chantilly, Virginia is hoping to achieve with a “mechanical hypervelocity mass accelerator” called the slingatron.

Submission + - Inside the Electronic Frontier Foundation (tuxradar.com)

Submitted by qwerdf
qwerdf writes: Airstrip One wasn’t built in a day, nor will a total police state suddenly appear overnight. But times are changing, the threats to our freedom are coming from every direction, and fighting this battle demands a great deal of persistence and determination. One group firmly on our side is the EFF. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s goal is “defending your rights in the digital world”, and its activities span the full gamut of freedom fighting: providing help with court cases; issuing white papers that explain current threats; running campaigns to spread awareness of various issues; and developing technologies that make our online activities safer from prying eyes. It’s a non-profit, donation-supported organisation based in San Francisco with an impressive staff roster (see www.eff.org/about/staff), including attorneys, analysts and activists – and generally with a strong pro-free software and pro-GNU/Linux culture.

Read on to find out how the EFF came together, what it has done so far, and how it’s preparing for upcoming battles.

Submission + - Scientists Develop New Method to Improve Passwords (arxiv.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at Max-Planck-Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany have developed a novel method to improve password security. A strong long password is split in two parts. The first part is memorized by a human. The second part is stored as a CAPTCHA-like image of a chaotic lattice system.

Submission + - New quantum record: 14 bits! (nanowerk.com)

Submitted by Tx-0
Tx-0 writes: Quantum physicists from the University of Innsbruck have set another world record: They have achieved controlled entanglement of 14 quantum bits (qubits) and, thus, realized the largest quantum register that has ever been produced. With this experiment the scientists have not only come closer to the realization of a quantum computer but they also show surprising results for the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement.
By now the Innsbruck experimental physicists have succeeded in confining up to 64 particles in an ion trap. "We are not able to entangle this high number of ions yet," says Thomas Monz. "However, our current findings provide us with a better understanding about the behavior of many entangled particles." And this knowledge may soon enable them to entangle even more atoms.
Android

Submission + - Pirated Android App Shames Freeloaders (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "A pirated version of an Android app is actually a Trojan that shames someone who installs it by sending an SMS message to all his/her contacts telling them of his/her piracy. The original app is called Walk and Text, and costs $2.10 in the Android Market. The app uses the camera on the back of a smartphone to show a user a visual of his upcoming surroundings, which will supposedly prevent the user from running into the street or across a set of train tracks. The pirated version is available from unofficial Android app markets, and once installed redirects the pirate to the legitimate app in the Android Market, while also sending the SMS message to the phone's entire contact list."
Security

No JavaScript Needed For New Adobe Exploits 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-will-end-badly dept.
bl8n8r writes "More woes for Adobe as a security firm creates a proof-of-concept attack that injects malicious code as part of the update process. The user only needs to click a dialog box to execute the code and no JavaScript is needed to launch the exploit. The exploit affects Foxit as well as Adobe Acrobat software. This exploit is made possible through the host software allowing execution of system binaries. Not clear if it's multi-platform, but seems plausible."
Image

Man Threatened Spam Attack In $200,000 Extortion Plot 77

Posted by samzenpus from the can't-believe-this-didn't-work dept.
52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.
Bug

LHC Will Be Shut Down In 2011 Because of "Mistake" 183

Posted by CmdrTaco from the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dept.
astroengine follows up to a story about the LHC shutting down that seems to have hit all the news replicators today. "It's to be expected when pushing the frontiers of physics, but the LHC's epic 'will it or won't it' saga continues. Due to an unforeseen construction mistake, the LHC will cease experiments for a year (starting around late-2011) so repairs and upgrades can be carried out. For now, accelerated particles will have a maximum energy of 7TeV (half the power of the LHC's design maximum), which is ample for at least 18 months of experiments before shutdown."

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