Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - New Study Detects Ringing of the Global Atmosphere (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound. A recent study, just published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Hawai'i at Mnoa, shows that the Earth's entire atmosphere vibrates in an analogous manner, in a striking confirmation of theories developed by physicists over the last two centuries. In the case of the atmosphere, the "music" comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east. Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell.

Now in a new study by Takatoshi Sakazaki, an assistant professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Science, and Kevin Hamilton, an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa, the authors present a detailed analysis of observed atmospheric pressure over the globe every hour for 38 years. The results clearly revealed the presence of dozens of the predicted wave modes. The study focused particularly on waves with periods between 2 hours and 33 hours which travel horizontally through the atmosphere, moving around the globe at great speeds (exceeding 700 miles per hour). This sets up a characteristic "chequerboard" pattern of high and low pressure associated with these waves as they propagate.
User Journal

Journal Journal: COVID Research Dumping Ground 1

Journal by Thelasko
Slashdot is full of very smart people. I'm sure most have been reading up on all of the latest research on COVID-19. What interesting information have you found?

Submission + - Over 100 Wi-Fi routers fail major security test — protect yourself now (tomsguide.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Using its own analytical software, the institute tested the most recently available firmware for 117 home Wi-Fi models currently sold in Europe, including routers from ASUS, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link, Zyxel and the small German brand AVM. The models themselves were not physically tested.

Almost all home Wi-Fi routers tested in a mass study by Germany's renowned Fraunhofer Institute had serious security vulnerabilities that could easily be fixed by router makers, a recently released report states.

"Nearly all were found to have security flaws, some of them very severe," the Fraunhofer Institute said in a press release. "The problems range from missing security updates to easily decrypted, hard-coded passwords and known vulnerabilities that should have been patched long ago."

Submission + - Mozilla suspends Firefox Send service while it addresses malware abuse (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has temporarily suspended the Firefox Send file-sharing service as the organization investigates reports of abuse from malware operators and while it adds a "Report abuse" button. The browser maker took down the service today after ZDNet reached out to inquire about Firefox Send's increasing prevalence in current malware operations.

Since last year, several malware operations have hosted payloads on the service. This includes ransomware gangs like REvil/Sodinokibi, financial crime crews like FIN7, the Zloader and Ursnif banking trojans operations, and government surveillance groups targeting human rights defenders. Reasons include the fact that Firefox Send doesn't have an Report Abuse mechanism, all file uploads are encrypted (useful to dodge malware scanners), and the Firefox URL is whitelisted in most orgs (useful for bypassing email filters).

Submission + - Final Terry Pratchett Stories To Be Published In September (theguardian.com)

Submitted by sjritt00
sjritt00 writes: The Guardian reports that a final collection of Terry Pratchett's early stories will be published in September
as The Time-travelling Caveman. These stories appeared in the Bucks Free Press and Western Daily Press in the 60s and early 70s and introduce many of the themes which later power his Discworld series.

Submission + - New Mac Ransomware Is Even More Sinister Than It Appears (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: THE THREAT OF ransomware may seem ubiquitous, but there haven't been too many strains tailored specifically to infect Apple's Mac computers since the first full-fledged Mac ransomware surfaced only four years ago. So when Dinesh Devadoss, a malware researcher at the firm K7 Lab, published findings on Tuesday about a new example of Mac ransomware, that fact alone was significant. It turns out, though, that the malware, which researchers are now calling ThiefQuest, gets more interesting from there. In addition to ransomware, ThiefQuest has a whole other set of spyware capabilities that allow it to exfiltrate files from an infected computer, search the system for passwords and cryptocurrency wallet data, and run a robust keylogger to grab passwords, credit card numbers, or other financial information as a user types it in. The spyware component also lurks persistently as a backdoor on infected devices, meaning it sticks around even after a computer reboots, and could be used as a launchpad for additional, or "second stage," attacks. Given that ransomware is so rare on Macs to begin with, this one-two punch is especially noteworthy.

Though ThiefQuest is packed with menacing features, it's unlikely to infect your Mac anytime soon unless you download pirated, unvetted software. Thomas Reed, director of Mac and mobile platforms at the security firm Malwarebytes, found that ThiefQuest is being distributed on torrent sites bundled with name-brand software, like the security application Little Snitch, DJ software Mixed In Key, and music production platform Ableton. K7's Devadoss notes that the malware itself is designed to look like a "Google Software Update program." So far, though, the researchers say that it doesn't seem to have a significant number of downloads, and no one has paid a ransom to the Bitcoin address the attackers provide. [...] Given that the malware is being distributed through torrents, seems to focus on stealing money, and still has some kinks, the researchers say it was likely created by criminal hackers rather than nation state spies looking to conduct espionage.

Submission + - Governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from US (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.

Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided the database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies.

Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine.

Submission + - Kali Linux 2016.2 Is the Most Advanced Penetration Testing Distribution

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: What's Kali Linux 2016.2? Well, it's an updated Live ISO image of the popular GNU/Linux distribution designed for ethical hackers and security professionals who want to harden the security of their networks, which contains the latest software versions and enhancements for those who want to deploy the OS on new systems. It's been quite some time since the last update to the official Kali Linux Live ISOs and new software releases are announced each day, which means that the packages included in the previous Kali Linux images are very old, and bugs and improvements are always implemented in the most recent versions of the respective security tools. Best of all, the new Kali Linux 2016.2 release comes in KDE, MATE, Xfce, LXDE, and Enlightenment E17 flavors.
Data Storage

ZFS Hits an Important Milestone, Version 0.6.1 Released 99

Posted by samzenpus from the brand-new dept.
sfcrazy writes "ZFS on Linux has reached what Brian Behlendorf calls an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release. Version 0.6.1 not only brings the usual bug fixes but also introduces a new property called 'snapdev.' Brian explains, 'The snapdev property was introduced to control the visibility of zvol snapshot devices and may be set to either visible or hidden. When set to hidden, which is the default, zvol snapshot devices will not be created under /dev/. To gain access to these devices the property must be set to visible. This behavior is analogous to the existing snapdir property.'"
Power

Solar Impulse Airplane To Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America 89

Posted by samzenpus from the guided-by-the-light dept.
First time accepted submitter markboyer writes "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The 'Across America' tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."

Slashdot Top Deals

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. -- George Orwell

Close