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Submission + - DIY Explosives Experimenter Blows Self Up, Contaminates Building. (fdlreporter.com)

hey! writes: Benjamin D. Morrison of Beaver Dam Wisconsin was killed on March 5 while synthesizing explosives in his apartment. The compound in question has not been named in news sources, but the accident has left the apartment building so contaminated that it will be demolished in a controlled burn today (Thursday), and residents are not being allowed in to retrieve any of their belongings.

People who knew Morrison say he was unlikely to be a bomb-maker; given his background as a pre-pharmacy major with a chemistry minor he may well have been experimenting with explosives synthesis.

Submission + - Meet the hardware artisans keeping video games alive (fastcompany.com)

harrymcc writes: If you want to play classic Nintendo games, you could buy a vintage Super NES. Or you could use an emulator. Orâ"if youâ(TM)re really seriousâ"you could use floating point gate arrays to design a new console that makes them look great on modern TVs. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman profiles Analogue, the company that did just that, along with some of the other folks using new hardware to preserve the masterworks of the past.

Comment COBOL programmers aren't all old (Score 1) 383

There's a COBOL shop in my small town that contracts for corporations and the government. I know several COBOL specialists in their 30s. It's actually an extremely lucrative field to get into these days, with good pay and job security.

Rewriting all that COBOL code in some other language would be bound to cause major problems.

Submission + - Badlock Vulnerability Falls Flat Against Hype (threatpost.com)

msm1267 writes: Weeks of anxiety and concern over the Badlock vulnerability ended today with an anticlimactic thud.

Badlock was the security boogeyman since the appearance three weeks ago of a website and logo branding the bug as something serious in Samba, an open source implementation of the server message block (SMB) protocol that provides file and print services for Windows clients.

As it turns out, Badlock was hardly the remote code execution monster many anticipated. Instead, it’s a man-in-the-middle and denial-of-service bug, allowing an attacker to elevate privileges or crash a Windows machine running Samba services.

SerNet, a German consultancy behind the discovery of Badlock, fueled the hype at the outset with a number of since-deleted tweets that said any marketing boost as a result of its branding and private disclosure of the bug to Microsoft was a bonus for its business.

For its part, Microsoft refused to join the hype machine and today in MS16-047 issued a security update it rated “Important” for the Windows Security Account Manager (SAM) and Local Security Authority (Domain Policy) (LSAD). The bulletin patches one vulnerability (CVE-2016-0128), an elevation of privilege bug in both SAM and LSAD that could be exploited in a man-in-the-middle attack, forcing a downgrade of the authentication level of both channels, Microsoft said. An attacker could then impersonate an authenticated user.

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One has to look out for engineers -- they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb. -- Marcel Pagnol

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