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Submission + - He didn't give police his iPhone pass code, so he got 180 days in jail (miamiherald.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A Hollywood(FLA) man must serve 180 days in jail for refusing to give up his iPhone password to police, a Broward judge ruled Tuesday — the latest salvo in intensifying legal battles over law-enforcement access to smart phones.

Wesley Victor, and his girlfriend had been ordered by a judge to produce a pass code to phones suspected of containing text messages showing their collusion in an extortion plot.

Victor claimed he didn’t remember the number. He prevailed.

On Tuesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Charles Johnson ruled that there was no way to prove that Victor actually remembered his pass code, more than 10 months after his initial arrest. Johnson declined to hold the man in contempt of court.

Submission + - Older Workers Adapt To New Technology Just Fine, Survey Finds (cio.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Those older workers in your office, you know, the one ones you think can't handle dealing with new technology? Turns out, they struggle less with technology than their millennial colleagues. A survey by London-based market research firm Ipsos Mori, sponsored by Dropbox, found that older workers are less likely to find using technology in the workplace stressful and experience less trouble working with multiple devices than the younger cohort. The reason for this might lie in all the clunky old technologies older workers have had to master over the decades. Digital Natives don't know how good they've got it.

Submission + - FAA Confirms: Shooting Down a Drone is a Federal Felony 1

Submitted by PvtVoid
PvtVoid writes: [The FAA is] unequivocally confirming that it’s a federal crime to shoot down a drone, as John Goglia reports in Forbes. Goglia explains the FAA offered this ruling in response to his questions on the topic, citing 18 USC. 32, which “makes it a felony to damage or destroy an aircraft.”

Not linking to Forbes, because, well, Forbes. Here's the Slate.

Submission + - Backdoor in MVPower DVR Firmware Sends CCTV Stills to an Email Address in China (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An IoT security research company has discovered that a DVR model manufactured by MVPower includes a backdoor-like feature in its code that takes a screenshot of your CCTV feed and sends it to an email address hosted somewhere in China. The device's firmware is based on an open source project from GitHub that was pulled by its developer when someone confronted him about the backdoor.

Submission + - ICANN's Ex CEO fronts Chinese inititive on running the Internet

Submitted by Earthquake Retrofit
Earthquake Retrofit writes: The Register reports that on the last day of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, the conference organizers unexpectedly announced they had set up a new "high-level advisory committee" that would guide the agenda of future conferences and "contribute ideas for the development of the Internet."

The committee has already had its first meeting, the organizers stated, naming ICANN's Fadi Chehade and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma as its founders and noting that it had "invited 31 leading Internet figures from governments, enterprises, academic institutions, and technological communities to be members of the first high-level advisory committee." Those "figures" have not been named but we understand they include government representatives from a number of authoritarian governments, including Russia, and do not include lead names from the internet community.

Submission + - Europe and Russia are headed back to the moon together (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Russia is turning its attention to the moon again for the first time in about 40 years. The first Russian mission to the moon since long before the end of the Cold War will be Luna 27, a robot lander that will touch down on the edge of the lunar South Pole as early as 2020. Russia is looking for international partners to help make Luna 27 a reality and may have found one in the European Space Agency, according to a story on the BBC.

Submission + - How Flight Tracking Works: A Global Network Of Volunteers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If a website can show the flight path and all those little yellow planes in real time, how can they not know where Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went down? Answering that involves understanding a little about how flight-tracking sites work, where they get their data, and the limitations of existing technologies. It also involves appreciating a relatively new approach that the two large flight-tracking companies, Texas-based FlightAware and Sweden-based Flightradar24 are rushing to expand, a global sensor system known as ADS-B, which broadcasts updates of aircraft GPS data in real time. ADS-B is slowly superseding the ground-based radar systems that have been used for decades, becoming central not only to flight tracking but also to the future of flight safety. And it's powered, in part, by thousands of dedicated aviation hobbyists around the globe.

Submission + - NASA's Abandoned Launch Facilities

Submitted by trazom28
trazom28 writes: I ran across an interesting slideshow of NASA's abandoned launch facilities. Interesting piece of scientific history. It is described as images from "photographer Roland Miller's upcoming book, 'Abandoned in Place, titled' "Abandoned Space Graveyard Photos". ‘Abandoned in Place’ is a visual study of the deactivated launch and research facilities that played an essential role in early American space exploration."

Submission + - Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Submission + - New multi-core Raspberry Pi board launches. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by MicroHex
MicroHex writes: Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. I'm sure there will be more info available on Monday.

Submission + - Computer chess created in 487 bytes, breaks 32-year-old record (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The record for smallest computer implementation of chess on any platform was held by 1K ZX Chess, which saw a release back in 1983 for the Sinclair ZX81. It uses just 672 bytes of memory, and includes most chess rules as well as a computer component to play against.

The record held by 1K ZX Chess for the past 32 years has just been beaten this week by the demoscene group Red Sector Inc. They have implemented a fully-playable version of chess called BootChess in just 487 bytes.

Submission + - Sloppy File Permissions Make Red Star Vulnerable

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Red Star OS Desktop 3.0, the official Linux distro of North Korea, which recently found its way onto torrents and various download sites in form of an ISO image, is interesting for a number of reasons, including its attempt to look like commercial operating systems (currently OS X, earlier versions mimicked the Windows GUI). Hackers are also poking Red Star for security vulnerabilities. An pseudonymous researcher noted in a post to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) mailing list, that the OS has one significant security hole: Red Star 3.0 ships with a world-writeable udev rule file /etc/udev/rules.d/85-hplj10xx.rules (originally designed for HP LaserJet 1000 series printers) which can be modified to include RUN+= arguments executing arbitrary commands as root by Udev. In the post he also mentions how the older Red Star 2.0 shipped with another schoolboy mistake: /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit was world-writeable.

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