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AnonTechie writes:

From Computer World:

New banking Trojan 'Zberp' offers the worst of Zeus and Carberp. The malware, targets customers of 450 financial institutions, security researchers from Trusteer said.

The new threat, dubbed Zberp by security researchers from IBM subsidiary Trusteer, has a wide range of features. It can gather information about infected computers including their IP addresses and names; take screen shots and upload them to a remote server; steal FTP and POP3 credentials, SSL certificates and information inputted into Web forms; hijack browsing sessions and insert rogue content into opened websites, and initiate rogue remote desktop connections using the VNC and RDP protocols.

The Trusteer researchers consider Zberp a variant of ZeusVM, a recent modification of the widely used Zeus Trojan program whose source code was leaked on underground forums in 2011. ZeusVM was discovered in February and stands out from other Zeus-based malware through its authors' use of steganography to hide configuration data inside images.

More information can be found at SecurityIntelligence.com from Dana Tamir, Director of Enterprise Security at Trusteer.

Fluffeh writes:

A day after the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit in the UK got the domain name of Torrentz.eu suspended, the leading torrent search engine is back in action. The site's Polish registrar restored the domain name's DNS entries after Torrentz' legal team pointed out that the suspension was unlawful. The Poland-based company Nazwa, had suspended the Torrentz.eu domain. This drastic step was taken after they received a letter from the UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

In a long letter the lawyer explained that the domain can't simply be held hostage based on a third-party request. Among other things, this argument is based on an earlier decision by ICANN's Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy panel which concluded that a court order is required to take such drastic action. While the registrar has not yet replied to the letter, the fact that the old DNS entries have been restored suggests that they admit that the suspension was in error.

jbWolf writes:

A lost audio recording of J.R.R. Tolkien giving a speech from the March 28th, 1958 "Hobbit Dinner" in Rotterdam is being restored and will be released later this year. Noble Smith claims to have heard the recording and gives more background details and hints at more secrets to be revealed.

According to Smith, we will get to hear Tolkien himself reading a poem in Elvish and then again in English. The recording was actually found over 20 years ago by Rene van Rossenberg (who knew what he had) but kept it hidden from the world during that time. Why? "Like Smaug I am guarding my treasure, hissing at any collector who comes near." A brief teaser can be heard in a YouTube video found on both sites.

The Smith blog also claims that Tolkien's meaning of Lord of the Rings is also revealed in the recording, but gives no details as to what this means.

AnonTechie writes:

El Reg reports:

The dispute between China and the USA over backdoor-riddled information technology equipment has just heated up, with Bloomberg reporting Chinese authorities are wondering whether the time has come for local banks to ditch their IBM servers.

The newswire's report mentions "high-end" servers and suggests Chinese authorities "are reviewing whether Chinese commercial banks' reliance on the IBM servers compromises the country's financial security."

Might China therefore be taking aim at an American icon? IBM's hardware division is not in rude health. Even the mere suggestion Big Blue is in cahoots with US authorities won't make it any easier to shift boxes, making life harder for IBM at a time it needs to be fighting off spookware allegations like it needs a hole in the head.

broggyr writes:

It happened again. This time, those at Spotify are asking some users to change their passwords after detecting unauthorized access to internal systems and data.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/27/us-spotify-cybercrime-idUSKBN0E723520140527

kaszz writes:

A new supercapacitor battery has been built with wafers that consist of silicon electrodes that have been chemically treated to have nanoscale pores on their inner surfaces and coated with a protective ultra-thin graphene-like layer of carbon. Sandwiched between the two electrodes is a polymer film that acts as a reservoir of charged ions, similar to the role of the electrolyte paste in a battery. Supercapacitors store 0,1x less energy than current lithium-ion batteries but can last 1000x times longer. From the article:

The new device that Pint and Westover has developed is a supercapacitor that stores electricity by assembling electrically charged ions on the surface of a porous material, instead of storing it in chemical reactions the way batteries do. As a result, supercaps can charge and discharge in minutes, instead of hours, and operate for millions of cycles, instead of thousands of cycles like batteries.

In a paper appearing online May 19 in the journal Nano Letters, Pint and Westover report that their new structural supercapacitor operates flawlessly in storing and releasing electrical charge while subject to stresses or pressures up to 44 psi and vibrational accelerations over 80 g (significantly greater than those acting on turbine blades in a jet engine). Furthermore, the mechanical robustness of the device doesn't compromise its energy storage capability.

'In an unpackaged, structurally integrated state our supercapacitor can store more energy and operate at higher voltages than a packaged, off-the-shelf commercial supercapacitor, even under intense dynamic and static forces,' Pint said.

Angry Jesus writes:

A common survival tactic in the natural world is for an organism to mimic the appearance of something else in order to fool predators. Leafy-looking insects are one example, but for the Hemeroplanes triptolemus moth, survival of its caterpillar form means disguising itself as a snake. The photographs are incredible.

lhsi writes:

Torrent downloaders have reacted to a huge game torrent. A large part of the torrent is uncompressed graphics. Some would-be downloaders decided it would be quicker to just buy the game than wait for it to finish downloading. From the article:

AnonTechie writes:

The B-52 bomber gets first full IT upgrade since 1960s, and it's now LAN party ready. Digital facelift and networks give the Stratofortress a new lease of life.

The US Air Force's 10th Flight Test Squadron recently took delivery of the first B-52H Stratofortress to complete a refit through the Combat Network Communications Technology (CONECT) program. It's an effort to bring the Cold War era heavy bomber into the 21st century way of warfare-or at least up to the 1990s, technology-wise. While the aircraft received piecemeal upgrades over the past 50 years of flying, CONECT is the first major information technology overhaul for the Air Force's B-52H fleet since the airplanes started entering service in 1961. A total of 30 B-52s are due for the CONECT upgrade, at least based on the funding allotted for this fiscal year. The most visible part of the upgrade is the crew's workstations. New "multi-functional color displays" (MFCDs) replace the analog instruments and monochrome displays previously used by aircrew.

Anonymous Coward writes:

Japan intends to move forward with an ambitious plan to freeze the ground around its damaged Fukushima nuclear plant, creating a so-called underground ice wall to prevent water that's been contaminated with radioactive materials from escaping and entering the broader water supply. Japan adopted the plan in September of last year, and the AFP reports that its nuclear regulator has now approved it, with construction scheduled to start next month.

Angry Jesus writes:

Over at Medium, Quinn Norton writes that computers and computing are fundamentally broken. Her article is a no-holds-barred discourse on software vulnerabilities, and how susceptible we really are to cyber attacks. She cites an example where an anonymous hacker infiltrated nearly half a million devices and accrued 10 terabytes of data, all without being detected. "If that malware had actually been malicious, we would have been done."

janrinok writes:

Apple is looking to ban the sale of Samsung gadgets yet again.

The company filed papers Friday related to the patent-infringement trial that was brought to a close in California early this month. In a mixed verdict, the jury found that Samsung had violated three of Apple's patents and that Apple had infringed one of Samsung's. Apple is asking that the Samsung gadgets found to violate its "quick links," "slide to unlock," and/or "automatic word correction" patents be prohibited from being sold. Those devices are the Admire, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S II, Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy S II Skyrocket, Galaxy S III, and Stratosphere phones.

Newer Samsung gadgets weren't part of the trail, but Apple's attorneys address them, as well as future devices, in Friday's filing, saying the ban should also apply to any "software or code capable of implementing any Infringing Feature, and/or any feature not more than colorably different" from the infringed Apple features.

Apple attorneys said the company would "suffer irreparable harm" if Samsung were allowed to continue using the patented features and that "monetary damages cannot adequately compensate Apple for this resulting irreparable harm." In the case, the jury awarded Apple only $119.6 million for Samsung's infringement, much less than the $2.2 billion it had requested. It awarded Samsung $158,400 for Apple's use of its patented method of photo and video organization in folders.

kaszz writes:

Twitter made a public stance in 2011 to remain a platform for free speech, having helped fuel movements such as the Arab Spring. This past week, however, Twitter is shown to have complied with Russian government demands to block a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed from reaching Russian citizens, with Turkish government demands that it remove content that the Turkish government wants removed, and with a Pakistani bureaucrat's request that content he considers blasphemous and unethical be censored in Pakistan. Given Twitter's role in the democratic uprisings of the past few years, perhaps these capitulations just show that centralized control of information is inherently flawed. Any network under the control of a few individuals may be compromised by non-technical means. Examples like I2P-Messenger may be a necessity.

janrinok writes:

A group of crowd-funded amateurs, students, and NASA retirees are on the cusp of resurrecting and possibly taking control of a disused NASA spacecraft that has been coasting around the solar system since the days of disco.

On 21 May, NASA said it would allow the group to contact the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), which studied space weather after its launch in 1978 and went on to study two comets. NASA stopped operating the spacecraft in 1997, but through the years the plucky probe has kept broadcasting a carrier signal.

The group, called the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, is installing a radio amplifier at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Sometime in the next few days, some of its members will use the powerful radio dish to try and exchange "tones" with the spacecraft. That handshake would be a first step toward regaining control of the spacecraft. In the subsequent weeks, the group would check the spacecraft's vital signs and attempt to move it into a new orbit.

Mission control would be from an abandoned McDonald's at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, says Keith Cowing, a co-director of the project and the editor of the website NASA Watch. Cowing says that the project shows how there can still be value left in projects that NASA deems worthy of discarding. "They left gas in the gas tank and the keys in the ignition," he says. NASA is not paying for any part of the project, and the group has crowd-funded its effort. By May 23, the project had raised more than $150,000. Cowing says that the money pays for radio transmission equipment, rental time on radio telescope networks to track the spacecraft, and travel for team members.

If it all works, it will be a vindication for Robert Farquhar, the 81-year-old who was the mission's original flight director. He has been advocating to revive ISEE-3 for years and notes that it still has plenty of fuel left. He believes that most of the spacecraft's 13 instruments should still be working. Farquhar wants to use the remaining fuel, along with a lunar swing-by in August, to redirect the spacecraft to an encounter with comet 46P/Wirtanen in 2018. "I think there's definite value," he says.

quitte writes:

The IBM Trackpoint was patented in 1996 (US Patents 5570111, 5521596, and 5489900). At least in Europe the maximum duration of a patent is 20 years. When I had a Thinkpad I loved the Trackpoint. In fact I've been considering buying a clicky keyboard with integrated trackpoint from Unisys. But, combined with import tax and shipping, their already steep prices become something hard to justify to pay for a keyboard.

Considering that these patents are runnning out soon -- does this mean we are going to see a wider adoption of trackpoint technology? Do people actually like their trackpads?

Personally I'd like to see Trackpoints become the default mouse replacement instead of trackpads. But I have a feeling this is not going to happen. Why not? How can we let manufacturers know that we want Trackpoints in the full range of products, when a Trackpoint right now is a premium product feature?