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Daily Archives: September 12, 2020

Swedish Company Unveils A Wind-Powered Car Carrier Ship That Uses Wings, Not Sails

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KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the maritime consultancy SSPA partnered with shipbuilders Wallenius Marine in Sweden to design a cargo ship capable of reducing the industry’s huge carbon footprint. Around three percent of today’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the shipping industry, a figure that accounts for the 90,000 ships responsible for 90 percent of all trade on the planet, according to the Financial Times. That much carbon dioxide each year rivals the output of some industrialized nations.

The regulatory body International Maritime Organization has set a goal of cutting emissions by 40 percent over the next decade. That’s going to be a tall order, requiring drastic changes in the industry.

Enter Wallenius Marine’s Oceanbird, also known as the wind-Powered Car Carrier.

The ship will run on wind, but not by using conventional sails. Instead, the Oceanbird will use five 80-foot-tall wings, similar in shape to airplane wings, for propulsion. Those huge fins will be able to collapse down like a telescope to 45 feet in order to slip under bridges or when encountering rough seas. The plan is for the Oceanbird to be capable of transporting 7,000 cars across the Atlantic in 12 days, a trip that with current internal combustion engines takes seven or eight days. The ship will also be equipped with a small motor, probably electric, for navigating harbors and tricky areas.

Wallenius says the concept starts with cargo shipping but could be used by cruise lines as well. Of course, the Oceanbird concept won’t be ready for launch until probably 2025, according to SSPA. All the cool, world-changing technology seems to always be a few years away, doesn’t it? Still, Wallenius has been in the shipbuilding and logistics business for 30 years, and it has built 70 ships during that time. Maybe this could actually work. We’ve got to try something.

Source: Swedish Company Unveils A Wind-Powered Car Carrier Ship That Uses Wings, Not Sails

Watchdog accuses Amazon of price gouging during the pandemic

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A new report by the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen accuses Amazon of price gouging during the pandemic. According to the group, Amazon increased the prices of essential items like masks, hand sanitizer, disinfectant spray, paper towels and toilet paper.

According to the report, the cost of a 50-pack of disposable face masks jumped from about $4 on April 1st to $39.99 on August 16th. That’s a 900 percent increase. Toilet paper sold by other retailers for $6.89 sold on Amazon for nearly $37, Public Citizen says. In August, the cost of disinfectant spray reportedly increased from about $7 to $13, a jump of more than 80 percent. Even the prices of flour, sugar and cornstarch varied widely.

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Source: Watchdog accuses Amazon of price gouging during the pandemic | Engadget

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump’s Twitter account days before 2016 US election

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Three “grumpy old hackers” in the Netherlands managed to access Donald Trump’s Twitter account in 2016 by extracting his password from the 2012 Linkedin hack.

The pseudonymous, middle-aged chaps, named only as Edwin, Mattijs and Victor, told reporters they had lifted Trump’s particulars from a database that was being passed about hackers, and tried it on his account.

To their considerable surprise, the password – but not the email address associated with @realdonaldtrump – worked the first time they tried it, with Twitter’s login process confirming the password was correct.

The explosive allegations were made by Vrij Nederland (VN), a Dutch magazine founded during WWII as part of the Dutch resistance to Nazi German occupation.

“A digital treasure chest with 120 million usernames and hashes of passwords. It was the spoil of a 2012 digital break-in,” wrote VN journalist Gerard Janssen, describing the LinkedIn database hack. After the networking website for suits was hacked in 2012 by a Russian miscreant, the database found its way onto the public internet in 2016 when researchers eagerly pored over the hashes. Critically, the leaked database included 6.5 million hashed but unsalted passwords.

Poring through the database, the trio found an entry for Trump as well as the hash for Trump’s password: 07b8938319c267dcdb501665220204bbde87bf1d. Using John the Ripper, a hash-reversing tool, they were able to uncover one of the Orange One’s login credentials. Some considerable searching revealed the correct email address (twitter@donaldjtrump.com – a different one from the one Trump used on LinkedIn and which was revealed in the hack)… only for the “middle aged” hackers to be defeated by Twitter detecting that the man who would become the 45th president of the United States had logged in earlier from New York.

One open proxy server later, they were in.

VN published screenshots supplied by the three showing a browser seemingly logged into Trump’s Twitter account, displaying a tweet dating from 27 October 2016 referring to a speech Trump delivered in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.

The Dutch hackers also alleged that they found Trump’s details in a database hacked from Ashley Madison, a dating website aimed at cheating spouses. Amusingly, just 1.4 per cent of its 31 million users were actual women.

Despite trying to alert American authorities to just how insecure Trump’s account was (no multi-factor authentication, recycled password from an earlier breach) the hackers’ efforts got nowhere, until in desperation they tried Netherland’s National Cyber Security Centrum – which acknowledged receipt of their prepared breach report, which the increasingly concerned men had prepared immediately once they realised their digital trail was not particularly well covered.

“In short, the grumpy old hackers must set a good example. And to do it properly with someone they ‘may not really like’ they think this is a good example of a responsible disclosure, the unsolicited reporting of a security risk,” concluded VN’s Janssen.

Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey added: “It’s password hygiene 101: use a different password for each account. And, if you know a password has been compromised in a previous breach (I think LinkedIn is well known) then for goodness sake, don’t use that one. [This is] a textbook example of credential stuffing.”

Source: Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump’s Twitter account days before 2016 US election • The Register