SoylentNews

chromas writes:

Daniel Regalado of Symantec explores a new variant of ATM malware called Backdoor.Ploutus.B, which allows attackers to remotely control ATMs by text message. An attacker connects a cellphone inside the ATM by way of USB tethering which will cause crafted SMS messages to trigger the malware to eject cash at a money mule. Previous versions required the use of a plugged-in keyboard. Read the blog entry for some colorful graphics.

They also have a video demonstration.

Fluffeh writes:

An important ruling in Florida has made it more difficult for copyright holders to extract cash settlements from alleged BitTorrent pirates. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro dismissed a lawsuit filed by Malibu Media, arguing that the IP-address evidence can't identify the person who actually downloaded the pirated file.

Judge Ungaro was presented with a case brought by Malibu Media, who accused IP-address "174.61.81.171" of sharing one of their films using BitTorrent without their permission. The Judge, however, was reluctant to issue a subpoena, and asked the company to explain how they could identify the actual infringer. "There is nothing that links the IP address location to the identity of the person actually downloading and viewing Plaintiff's videos, and establishing whether that person lives in this district".

gishzida writes:

"According to a Reuters report Supreme Court signals support for corporate religious claims, "The U.S. Supreme Court appeared poised on Tuesday to open the door to companies' religious-based objections to government regulations as justices weighed whether business owners can object to part of President Barack Obama's healthcare law. From the article:

During a 90-minute oral argument, 30 minutes more than usual, a majority of the nine justices appeared ready to rule that certain for-profit entities have the same religious rights to object as individuals do. A ruling along those lines would likely only apply to closely held companies. As in most close cases of late, Justice Anthony Kennedy will likely be the deciding vote. Based on his questions, it was unclear whether the court would ultimately rule that the companies had a right to an exemption from the contraception provision of President Barack Obama's 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

The dozens of companies involved in the litigation do not all oppose every type of birth control. Some object only to emergency contraceptive methods, such as the so-called morning-after pill, which they view as akin to abortion.

The case marks the second time Obamacare has featured prominently before the Supreme Court. In 2012, the court upheld by a 5-4 vote the constitutionality of the act's core feature requiring people to get health insurance. Although the case has no bearing on the overall healthcare law, it features its own volatile mix of religious rights and reproductive rights. A capacity crowd filled the marble courtroom, while outside hundreds of demonstrators, most of them women, protested loudly in an early spring snowstorm.

We already know that the SCOTUS thinks corporations are citizens, do you think the SCOTUS should allow corporations to have religious beliefs too?"

RobotMonster writes:

Not into crypto-currency mining, but want to do something with your spare compute cycles?

Via The Guardian, an international team of climate scientists is looking to recruit 10,000 members of the public to help find out the exact role greenhouse gases played in Australia's record temperatures last year. The Weather@home ANZ project will use people's home computers to run a series of simulations based on the weather experienced in 2013, which has been confirmed as Australia's hottest year on record. A similar project is underway to reveal what role global warming played in the UK's record-breaking wet winter.

Both projects use BOINC, a program that lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and many others. Let your computer be part of the cloud that is simulating clouds!

What would you do with a network of 10,000 slave machines? Compute the ultimate question, of life, the universe and everything?

lhsi writes:

MPs have criticised Britain's leading tax official after HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) used powers meant to catch terrorists to hunt down an employee who exposed a secret multimillion-pound "sweetheart" deal with Goldman Sachs. Lin Homer, the chief executive gave no assurances it wouldn't happen again. From the article:

MPs have criticised Britain's leading tax official after HM Revenue & Customs used powers meant to catch terrorists to hunt down an employee who exposed a secret multimillion-pound "sweetheart" deal with Goldman Sachs. Lin Homer, the chief executive of HMRC, had told the public accounts committee that phone records had been obtained using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to unearth information about Osita Mba, an in-house lawyer.

Margaret Hodge, the chair of the committee, said that HMRC's use of the powers, ostensibly to track down whether Mba had been talking to the Guardian's then investigations editor, David Leigh, had "shocked her to her bones". The MP told Homer she was particularly surprised "that you made a request under Ripa, which is there to deal with terrorism". She asked for assurances that HMRC would "never again use these powers on a whistleblower". However, Homer declined to offer Hodge the desired reassurance, responding: "You know that we cannot offer carte blanche assurances for evermore that we won't use these - I have other duties of care to parliament and other individuals."

Using the Public Interest Disclosure Act, Mba wrote in confidence to the National Audit Office (NAO) and two parliamentary committees in 2011 saying that the then head of tax, Dave Hartnett, had "let off" Goldman Sachs from paying at least £10m in interest.

When HMRC discovered Mba's intervention, his belongings, emails, internet search records, and phone calls along with the phone records of his then wife, Claudia, were examined by investigators.

Phoenix666 writes:

My daughter attends a small public school in Brooklyn that has asked me to help them figure out the best way to get working computers into the hands of more of their students. They are too small to have their own sysadmin or to be allocated budget to simply buy all new laptops for everyone, and they're so small that they fall far down on the Department of Education's list of priorities.

They do have 50 old Dell laptops running XP that are so full of cruft now as to barely work, so I have suggested loading them up with Ubuntu and a light-weight desktop like XFCE. Installing 50 laptops one-by-one, though, is still a lot of work so I have been exploring doing a mass installation with PXE or Clonezilla.

I haven't attempted anything like this before, so I thought perhaps there are Soylentils who have and could give me a heads-up about potential gotchas they have come across in the past, and which aren't so easy to find via Googling. Ideally I'd like to be able to set aside a Saturday to go in, queue up the machines in the library, and get them chunking through the installation in parallel. Thanks, folks!

moylan writes:

An article from the Chicago Tribune discusses people who are changing their smartphone for a dumbphone. From the article:

When Ryan Gleeson punches out a text message or takes a call on his cellphone at parties, he prepares to hear questions from onlookers, and sometimes snickers. That's because the 24-year-old carries a $50 flip phone - the Samsung Gusto 2. There's no touch screen or apps. No Web browsing capabilities. No collection of music to enjoy through earbuds.

"Definitely it's like a black sheep in the room when I pull it out," said Gleeson, a postproduction associate at a documentary production house in Lincoln Park. "I work with a lot of Apple people - creative types. Everyone has an iPhone." Gleeson is among cellphone users who choose to be dialled out of the world of iPhones, BlackBerrys and Androids. In an increasingly connected and accessible culture, these stalwarts have chosen hand-held devices that offer only the basics, despite the social isolation and limitations that may come with them.

For Gleeson, hanging up the iPhone demonstrates no "grand realization about humanity," he said; rather, it's a way to tamp down his compulsive email checking. With the basic phone, "It's a lot easier now to just step away and say, 'I'm not going to work right now,'" he said.

[...a survey] found that 35 percent of U.S. adults carry a cellphone that is not a smartphone.

As someone who got rid of an iphone and android device and replaced them with 2 feature phones I thought I was in the minority. But I have noticed more and more folk around carrying a second dumbphone for when the battery goes on their smartphone. Anyone else doing this?"

[Editor: Yes, me!]

lhsi writes:

Torrentfreak has announced an amusing case of being hoisted by one's own petard:

The Business Software Alliance, a trade group representing Adobe, Apple and Microsoft, has been caught using a "stolen" photo in one of their anti-piracy campaigns. The group is running various Facebook ads to convince people to snitch on pirates, but this effort has backfired terribly.

After being contacted about the use of a photo of a pot of gold by Torrentfreak, the BSA didn't respond and within an hour the advert had mysteriously disappeared.

xyzzyyzzyx writes:

The case, Lexmark_Int'l_v._Static_Control_Components, brought before the U.S. Supreme Court has been handed down as a loss for DMCA encryption and hopefully a further loss for proprietary printer cartridge litigation itself.

Read through the terse unanimous judgement here.

Any day Lexmark loses due to its monopolistic practices is a good one to me.

[Editor's Comment]:

IANAL. The wikipedia link provides a very good summary of the case, but essentially it revolves around Lexmark producing ink cartridges which contain measures intended to ensure that only their cartridges work in their printers. Static Control Components managed to produce cartridges which defeated the Lexmark protection, and Lexmark initiated legal action against them. Having been through, as I understand it, the full range of legal options - and having had previous decisions overturned - the final outcome is that Static Control Components is judged to have not committed an offence under the DMCA and it also shows that in the court's view, preventing the use of alternative ink cartridges is not a thing that is in the customer's best interests and is therefore frowned upon . However, if anyone with a better understanding of the US legal system or who is able to decipher all the implications of the judgement wishes to correct my assessment then I would welcome their input to the debate.

MarcoLinuxBR writes:

"Brazil's net neutrality survives. Changes come only after specific court order, according to the new internet law. One of the pillars of the project, net neutrality, has undergone some changes in the text, but was kept.

By this principle, providers can not offer different connections, eg for access only to emails, videos, or social networks. The main obstacle was the regulation of the principle by the Executive, especially in relation to exceptions to the norm. (google translated)"

chromas writes:

Scientists from CERN's Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab's Tevatron have combined their data to more precisely define the mass of the top quark, which is 173.34 +/- 0.76 GeV/c². The data is the result of a collaboration of over 6,000 scientists from more than fifty countries. Check out the UCR Today article from almost a week ago.

deif writes:

A recent Windows 8 update detects other OS installs as a "security problem", erases non-windows bootloaders and enables UEFI Secure Boot, all without user intervention.

From a posting on reddit:

I contacted MS by chat (in Dutch, so of no use to you) and asked them about this. They vehemently denied this was possible at all. Multiple times, in no uncertain terms. Same results were acquired by phone: denial, denial, denial.

I pointed out that it did actually happen, and that it wan't the first time such a thing had happened in the history of MS updates -so "impossible" was BS, to put it shortly.

Then came a chat reply which amounted to "MS updates makes sure W8 functions fine, it does not look at other OS's integrity". This is, in my opinion, a de-facto admission that yes, the update had changed the bootloader back to the W8 version that ignores other OS's, and yes, it had set the UEFI setting back to "secure boot."

Fluffeh writes:

A new paper published in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology shows that the number of DMCA notices received by Google increased 711,887 percent in four years. The increase can be credited to a few copyright holders and industry groups such as the RIAA, who started an avalanche of takedown requests after the SOPA and PIPA bills died in Congress.

New research by Stanford Law School's Daniel Seng reveals that online services such as Google and Twitter have seen a surge in takedown requests in recent years. In fact, drawing on data from ChillingEffects.org, Seng finds that the number of DMCA notices processed by Google increased 711,887 percent in four years, from 62 in 2008 to 441,370 in 2012.

The most active copyright holders up until 2012 were the RIAA, Froytal and Microsoft, each listing more than five million notices. Seng's paper doesn't include the most recent data, but Google's Transparency Report shows that these numbers more than doubled again in 2013.

gishzida writes:

Reuters reports, "Wading into a murky tax question for the digital age, the Internal Revenue Service said on Tuesday that virtual currencies such as Bitcoin are to be treated as property for tax purposes. General tax principles that apply to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency," the IRS said in a statement."

Better put that BTC wallet in a mattress.

Papas Fritas writes:

The Washington Post reports that a group of evolutionary biologists have looked at the science of bump and grind, and say they have figured out exactly which dance movements catch a woman's eye. Researchers set up the experiment as follows: they recruited 30 men to dance to a core drum beat for 30 seconds. The dancers were given no specific instructions on how to dance beforehand, and their movements were recorded via a sophisticated motion-capture system. Each dancer's 30-second routine was then used to animate a "featureless, gender-neutral" computer-generated avatar. Researchers then asked 37 women to view each of the dancing avatars and rate their performance on a seven-point scale.

The results: Women rated dancers higher when they showed larger and more variable movements of the head, neck and torso (PDF). Speed of leg movements mattered too, particularly bending and twisting of the right knee. Going beyond the dance floor, these findings could demonstrate that men's dance moves could carry "honest signals of traits such as health, fitness, genetic quality and developmental history." No word yet on whether similar findings hold true for men's assessments of women's dancing ability as an indication of their genetic quality and fitness.

Lagg and Uncle_Al both wrote in about this surprising source release.

Lagg writes:

Today a technet article was posted by a Microsoft employee announcing that they are releasing to the Computer History Museum and the public at large the source code to v1.1 and 2.0 of MS-DOS as well as v1.1a of Word. All obvious jokes aside this could be good for projects such as DOSBox. Note also that said employee considers 300kb to be small for source code. Seems rather large to me, even now. But in any case this will be an interesting thing to dig into. To save the trouble of link chasing here are the relevant links:

Computer history article for MS-DOS (direct link to source)

Computer history article for Word (direct link to source)

Angry Jesus writes:

There is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. A few years ago the pseudonymous NwAvGuy decided to do something about it. Not content to just criticize the hucksters, he designed a $130 headphone amp that competes with $1000 models. NwAvGuy released the design under the Creative Commons CC BY-ND license (attribution, no derivatives) and freely collaborated on revising it with multiple manufacturers looking to build and sell the amp. All he wanted was credit and to see that no one would take his design and degrade it with inferior modifications.

Then he disappeared. "In July 2012, NwAvGuy went silent. E-mails weren't returned, and blog posting ceased. 'He had gone quiet before -- for a month or so,' says Boudreau. But no one has heard a peep from NwAvGuy in more than a year and a half."

Since then some of the parts used in the last revision have been discontinued and one of the best values in high fidelity audio can't be manufactured anymore because NwAvGuy is no longer around to approve any changes.

Paul Vebber, a gameplay instructor in the navy, says that in the past decade the government has started using strategy board games much more often. They do not help predict outcomes. For that, the Pentagon has forecasting software, which it feeds with data on thousands of variables such as weather and weaponry, supply lines, training and morale. The software is pretty accurate for "tight, sterile" battles, such as those involving tanks in deserts, says an intelligence official. Board games are useful in a different way. They foster the critical but creative thinking needed to win (or avoid) a complex battle or campaign, he says.

The article goes on to explain that board games are advantageous over computer-based games for what is essentially a simulation:

...you can constantly tweak the rules to take account of new insights, says Timothy Wilkie of the National Defence University in Washington, DC. With computer games, this is much harder. Board games can also illuminate the most complex conflicts.

Sir Garlon writes:

According to the New York Times,

The Obama administration is preparing to unveil a legislative proposal for a far-reaching overhaul of the National Security Agency's once-secret bulk phone records program in a way that ... would end its systematic collection of data about Americans' calling habits. The bulk records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the N.S.A. could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order.

The Times' characterization of this as a "far-reaching overhaul" seems overstated, as the details of the proposal involve moving custody of the phone records from the NSA to the phone companies, and shortens retention time from five years to 18 months. The EPIC, ACLU, and EFF spokespersons quoted in the article reacted with guarded approval.

If submitted as planned, the bill would still need to pass the US House of Representatives and Senate.

According to EPIC, the NSA phone-records surveillance program is scheduled to end (in its current form) this Friday, though the Times article says President Obama plans to extend that deadline.

Fluffeh writes:

A recent article by The Intercept showed how US and UK intelligence agencies have been impersonating the servers of companies like Facebook. In November, Der Spiegel noted that agencies created "bogus versions" of sites like Slashdot and LinkedIn to plant malware in targets' machines.

Copyright claims brought against the government must be filed in the US Court of Federal Claims, and the subject matter in question must have previously been registered with the Copyright Office-something companies don't typically do for their Web interfaces.

In contrast, under the Lanham Act, the government is expressly liable. The law clearly states, "As used in this paragraph, the term 'any person' includes the United States, all agencies and instrumentalities thereof, and all individuals, firms, corporations, or other persons acting for the United States and with the authorization and consent of the United States."

Several community members have commented on Facebook's purchase of Oculus VR...

Techwolf writes, "There is news spreading all over the net about Facebook buying up Occulus Rift. Some cheer, some are jeering as kickstarters backers felt betrayed along with open source folks."

Ethanol-fueled writes:

Some of you may have already heard of the Oculus Rift, the kickstarted VR headset platform associated with John Carmack. Earlier today, social networking giant Facebook purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion in cash and stock (chump change compared to the $19 billion it paid for WhatsApp) with plans not so much for VR-gaming, but for VR-real-life...

Boxzy writes:

The Spokespersons for the NSA are attempting to imply that revealing secrets that harm nobody specific are generally harmful in the same way that drunk driving is harmful. From the article:

But Litt's analogy did not go over well with the other members of the panel on Friday. New Yorker editor David Remnick fired back, incredulously: "Is journalism drunk driving??"

Remnick said that by Litt's logic, any reporting on leaked material would cause damage. "Your balance is we do nothing," he said. Perhaps we should be suggesting that spying on everyone is harmful in exactly the same way. Their actions harm the rightful clandestine actions of a trustworthy nation.

Remember, drunk secrecy endangers everyone.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

This miniature Arduino that includes an OLED display called the MicroView is an interesting development. It is available from Kickstarter and has already been funded over $250,000 (10 times the goal). I hadn't previously heard about their earlier project Ninja Blocks, but it's evidence the team knows how to bring a product to market already. From the article:

You basically get a micro controller and a lot of inputs and you can drive the display via software, allowing you to build wacky little projects with various sensors, motors, and I/O devices.

The Microview can be programmed and powered from multiple sources although the guys who made it, Geek Ammo, are offering a little serial-to-USB programmer for $10 extra. It seems like it works great for wearables and for creating tiny brains for robots and sensor systems. It can also be used as a small ambient data display for cars, computers, and other tools.

mendax writes:

The New York Times published an article on a new device that can be implanted which can stop epileptic attacks in their tracks.

Just approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the long-awaited device, called the RNS System, aims to reduce seizures and to improve the lives of an estimated 400,000 Americans whose epilepsy cannot be treated with drugs or brain surgery.

The device, which requires a battery change every two to three years, works only for people whose seizures start in one or two places in their brain. Electrical stimulation delivered through thin wires placed precisely at those places helps prevent an incipient seizure from spreading.