Troy Hunt, a security researcher who maintains the data breach awareness portal Have I Been Pwned, recently obtained a copy of the stolen data set. Hunt told Motherboard that the data contained 65,469,298 unique emails and passwords.
Source: Hackers Stole 65 Million Passwords From Tumblr, New Analysis Reveals | Motherboard
Source: #825394 – systemd kill background processes after user logs out – Debian Bug report logs
And amazingly defends their choice with a “we are wiser than thou, you don’t know what you need” argument whilst telling world + dog how system administration should be done. Idiots. Nobody expects programs on a server to be killed for them and nobody uses Debian for a desktop.
Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego did an experiment to see what could be learned from just the information many cars are already recording. The result was that the way people drove was as identifiable as a fingerprint. […] When it was given data from all 16 sensors for the whole drive, the match was made 100 percent of the time. When it was given data from five sensors, three sensors, and even just the brake pedal, the match was made 100 percent of the time.
On just 15 minutes of data and all 16 sensors, the match was made 100 percent of the time. Just the brake pedal was 87 percent accurate.
This research reveals just how much data your car is actually collecting—and that turning over all that data through apps or insurance company dongles may be revealing more about yourself than you realize. Tesla, with its auto-uploading feature, probably knows a lot about its drivers.
Source: You Can Absolutely Be Identified Just By How You Drive
Redmond assumes closing nagware dialog means ‘yes’, says that’s by design […] Redmond recently created a new Windows 10 nagware reminder that presented a dialog asking you to install the OS. But if users clicked the red “X” to close the dialog – standard behaviour for dispelling a dialog without agreeing to do anything – Microsoft took that as permission for the upgrade.
Source: Microsoft won’t back down from Windows 10 nagware ‘trick’
Fuckers, we don’t want your Windows 10 spyware!
A study into abusive tweets sent from UK Twitter accounts suggests large-scale misogyny, with women responsible for half of such tweets.
Source: Twitter abuse – ‘50% of misogynistic tweets from women’ – BBC News
And men for the other half.
Open access means that scientific publications on the results of research supported by public and public-private funds must be freely accessible to everyone. That is not yet the case. The results of publicly funded research are currently not accessible to people outside universities and knowledge institutions. As a result, teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs do not have access to the latest scientific insights that are so relevant to their work, and universities have to take out expensive subscriptions with publishers to gain access to publications.
Source: All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020
The world’s largest maker of TVs by shipments added new tile ads to the main menu bar of its premium TVs in the U.S. in June 2015 and is planning to expand the program to Europe in coming months, people familiar with the matter said. […] according to one of these people, and by using software updates to retroactively activate tile ads on older smart TV models.
Samsung Adds More Ads to Its TVs – WSJ
http://www.wsj.com/articles/samsung-adds-more-ads-to-its-tvs-1464600977
Because really, people are going to buy hardware that forces unwanted ads down your throats! You don’t buy a TV as a service, you buy an item. Stay off it! The excuse that they are not growing in the TV business is farcical: they sell 50 million TVs per year and make $24.8 billion in revenue from that with slim profit margins – 3 to 5%. Poor Samsung, poor shareholders! I’d say they are indeed in deep shit but instead of pissing off their customers they could give me the industry instead. I wouldn’t complain about the paltry income from it.
A court or police officer could legally compel you to press your finger onto your smartphone to unlock it, but if your phone is locked with a passcode, no one can legally compel you to open it, says William J. Cook, an attorney and partner at law firm Reed Smith in Chicago, who specializes in information technology, privacy, and data security. Cook explains that the difference between a password and a biometric identifier is great under the law–you have a right not to reveal the contents of your mind, which includes things like a password, but your fingerprints are a part of who you are and you expose them to the public every day. This is why when a person gets arrested, he or she must consent to fingerprinted while retaining the right to remain silent. Thoughts are protected, biometric identifiers (fingerprints, face, hair) are not.
Source: Here’s Why Lawyers Suggest You Stop Using Your Finger to Unlock Your Phone
Once the magic card is inserted, the malware is ready to interact with two different types of cards, each with different functions:
1.Card type 1 – request commands through the interface
2.Card type 2 – execute the command hardcoded in the Track2
After the card is ejected, the user will be presented with a form, asking them to insert the session key in less than 60 seconds. Now the user is authenticated, and the malware will accept 21 different codes for setting its activity. These codes should be entered from the pin pad.
Below is a list of the most important features:
1.Show installation details;
2.Dispense money – 40 notes from the specified cassette;
3.Start collecting the details of inserted cards;
4.Print collected card details;
5.Self delete;
6.Debug mode;
7.Update (the updated malware code is embedded on the card).
During its activity, the malware also creates the following files or NTFS streams (depending on the file system type). These files are used by the malware at different stages of its activity, such as storing the configuration, storing skimmed card data and logging its activity:
Play Oculus exclusive games on the HTC Vive
Github
TOKYO (Kyodo) — A total of 1.4 billion yen ($12.7 million) in cash has been stolen from some 1,400 automated teller machines in convenience stores across Japan in the space of two hours earlier this month, investigative sources said Sunday.
Police suspect that the cash was withdrawn at ATMs using counterfeit credit cards containing account information leaked from a South African bank.
Japanese police will work with South African authorities through the International Criminal Police Organization to look into the major theft, including how credit card information was leaked, the sources said.
The theft at convenience store ATMs took place in the morning of May 15 in Tokyo and 16 prefectures across the country, and police believe over 100 people might have coordinated in the unlawful withdrawal.
In each of the approximately 14,000 transactions, the maximum amount of 100,000 yen was withdrawn from Seven Bank ATMs using the fake credit cards, according to the sources.
Get it on Github have fun resolving dependencies 🙂
An excellent howto on gsm gprs listening and setting up your own 4g / 2g base
to intercept traffic
As recently as 5 months ago, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was promising his customers that they could play the software they bought from the Oculus store on “whatever they want,” guaranteeing that the company wouldn’t shut down apps that let customers move their purchased software to non-Oculus hardware.
But now, Oculus has changed its DRM to exclude Revive, a “proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK [software development kit] and OpenVR,” that let players buy software in the Oculus store and run it on competing hardware.
The company billed the update as an anti-piracy measure, but Revive’s developer, who calls themself “Libre VR,” points out that the DRM only prevents piracy using non-Oculus hardware, and allows for unlimited piracy by Oculus owners.
Source: Oculus breaks promise, uses DRM to kill app that let you switch VR systems
There you go – DRM being thrown in again. It’ll get broken, but still it becomes an annoyance to the users. So another reason (apart from the price) to go to a competitor.
IBM Quantum Experience represents the birth of quantum cloud computing, offering hands-on access to IBM’s experimental cloud-enabled quantum computing platform, and allowing users to run algorithms and experiments, work with quantum bits (qubits), and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing[…]
The IBM Quantum Experience is a virtual lab where you can design and run your own algorithms through the cloud on real quantum processors located in the IBM Quantum Lab at the Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.
Source: IBM Research Quantum Experience
Adam Frank from the University of Rochester and Woodruff Sullivan from the University of Washington based their new equation on the Drake equation, used for calculating the probability of extraterrestrial civilisation, written by astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake in 1961.
Source: Are we alone in the universe? Not likely, according to math
n the project video, a finger swipes and pokes at skin like it’s a touchscreen. As the finger navigates a hairy forearm, a cursor reacts to the movement on the smartwatch screen. There’s no projection and little lag between the finger’s movement and movement on the screen.[…] the researchers developed a ring that sends a high-frequency alternating-current signal into your finger. When your finger touches or hovers above your arm, that signal propagates outward along your skin to a wristband embedded with electrodes. By measuring something called phase difference, which this technology does by comparing the times at which the oscillating signal arrives at two pairs of electrodes, SkinTrack can determine the position of your finger with impressive accuracy.
Source: SkinTrack Turns Your Arm Into a Touchpad. Here’s How It Works
Better-than-binary multi-level memory
Source: Magnetic memory boffins unveil six-state storage design
They arrange three magnetic ellipses in a very small space. They are calling it MRAM.
Open Source reimplementation of Westwood Studios’ 2D Command and Conquer games
OpenRA is a project that recreates and modernizes the classic Command & Conquer real time strategy games. We have developed a flexible open source game engine (the OpenRA engine) that provides a common platform for rebuilding and reimagining classic 2D and 2.5D RTS games (the OpenRA mods).
This means that OpenRA is not restricted by the technical limitations of the original closed-source games: it includes native support for modern operating systems and screen resolutions (including Windows 10, Mac OS X, and most Linux distros) without relying on emulation or binary hacks, and features integrated online multiplayer.
While we love the classic RTS gameplay, multiplayer game design has evolved significantly since the early 1990’s. The OpenRA mods include new features and gameplay improvements that bring them into the modern era:
A choice between “right click” and classic “left click” control schemes
Overhauled sidebar interfaces for managing production
Support for game replays and an observer interface designed for streaming games online
The “fog of war” that obscures the battlefield outside your units’ line of sight
Civilian structures that can be captured to provide benefits
Units gain experience as they fight and improve when they earn new ranksOpenRA is 100% free, and comes bundled with three distinct mods. When you run a mod for the first time the game can automatically download the original game assets, or you can use the original game disks.
Source: OpenRA
The ability to pattern planar and freestanding 3D metallic architectures at the microscale would enable myriad applications, including flexible electronics, displays, sensors, and electrically small antennas. A 3D printing method is introduced that combines direct ink writing with a focused laser that locally anneals printed metallic features “on-the-fly.” To optimize the nozzle-to-laser separation distance, the heat transfer along the printed silver wire is modeled as a function of printing speed, laser intensity, and pulse duration. Laser-assisted direct ink writing is used to pattern highly conductive, ductile metallic interconnects, springs, and freestanding spiral architectures on flexible and rigid substrates.
Source: Laser-assisted direct ink writing of planar and 3D metal architectures
In a study published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers demonstrated how they used publicly available sources—like Google searches and the paid background-check service Intelius—to identify “the overwhelming majority” of their 823 volunteers based only on their anonymized call and SMS metadata.
Using data collected through a special Android app, the Stanford researchers determined that they could easily identify people based on their call and message logs.
The results cast doubt on claims by senior intelligence officials that telephone and Internet “metadata”—information about communications, but not the content of those communications—should be subjected to a lower privacy threshold because it is less sensitive.
Contrary to those claims, the researchers wrote, “telephone metadata is densely interconnected, susceptible to reidentification, and enables highly sensitive inferences.” Study shows phone metadata is much more sensitive than top spies admit
Backblaze has released new data from its hard drive reliability survey. Seagate has recovered dramatically since BB pulled their 3TB drives, but HGST leads the pack in minimum failure rates.
Source: Backblaze releases billion-hour hard drive reliability report | ExtremeTech
Until recently, the human species has been unable to take advantage of this fundamental biological technique, for we didn’t evolve the ability to swarm. Enter Unanimous A.I., a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur and researcher Dr. Louis Rosenberg. The core question Rosenberg set out to answer was: Can humans swarm, and if so can we amplify our intelligence beyond the ability of individuals? The answer appears to be a resounding yes.
Unanimous spent the last two years building a swarm intelligence platform called UNU that enables groups to get together as online swarms — combining their thoughts, opinions, and intuitions in real-time to answer questions, make predictions, reach decisions, and even play games as a unified collective intelligence. To quantify how smart these UNU swarms really are, researchers at Unanimous regularly convene swarms and ask them to make predictions on high profile events, testing whether or not many minds are truly better than one.
UNU has made headlines in recent months by predicting the Oscars better than the experts, even besting the renowned forecasters at FiveThirtyEight. UNU also surprised the sports world by predicting the NCAA college bowl games with 70% accuracy against the spread, earning +34% return on Vegas odds. But still, the fact that average people could use UNU to amplify their collective intelligence so dramatically was met with cautious resistance.
Enter Hope Reese, a reporter from TechRepublic. Two weeks ago, she challenged Unanimous A.I. to use UNU to predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby.
Following on last year’s bold announcement that they will attempt to migrate from proprietary Microsoft Office products to an open-source alternative like LibreOffice, Italy’s Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro with this move.
We said it before, and we’ll say it again, this is the smartest choice a government institution can do. And to back up this statement, the Italian Ministry of Defense announced that they expect to save between 26 and 29 million Euro over the next few years by migrating to the LibreOffice open-source software for productivity and adopting the Open Document Format (ODF).
“Taking into account the deadlines set by our current Microsoft Office licenses, we will have 75,000 (70%) LibreOffice users by 2017, and an additional 25,000 by 2020,” said General Camillo Sileo, Deputy Chief of Department VI, Systems Department C4I, for the Transformation of Defence and General Staff, for ISA (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations).
“5,000 workstations have been migrated until now”In the initial report, they said that the entire transition process from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice is expected to be completed by the end of the year 2016, and now the Italian Ministry of Defense brags about the fact that they’ve successfully migrated a total of 5,000 workstations, and they’re now working with LibreItalia on an e-learning course to teach the military staff how to use the LibreOffice office suite.
Source: Italian Military to Save Up to 29 Million Euro by Migrating to LibreOffice
Unfortunately, the guys at LibreOffice won’t see any of these savings go to their pockets. They will continue to slave away underpaid at their beautiful product with nothing to show for it. This is because the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) community is so hard core in their principles that they allow companies to wander all over them. What a world we live in, eh.
