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Hugh Pickens writes:

Alina Simone writes in the NYT that her mother received a ransom note on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.“Your files are encrypted,” it announced. “To get the key to decrypt files you have to pay 500 USD.” If she failed to pay within a week, the price would go up to $1,000. After that, her decryption key would be destroyed and any chance of accessing the 5,726 files on her PC — all of her data would be lost forever. "By the time my mom called to ask for my help, it was already Day 6 and the clock was ticking," writes Simone. "My father had already spent all week trying to convince her that losing six months of files wasn’t the end of the world (she had last backed up her computer in May). It was pointless to argue with her. She had thought through all of her options; she wanted to pay." Simone found that it appears to be technologically impossible for anyone to decrypt your files once CryptoWall 2.0 has locked them and so she eventually helped her mother through the process of making a cash deposit to the Bitcoin “wallet” provided by her ransomers and she was able to decrypt her files. “From what we can tell, they almost always honor what they say because they want word to get around that they’re trustworthy criminals who’ll give you your files back," says Chester Wisniewski.

The peddlers of ransomware are clearly businesspeople who have skillfully tested the market with prices as low as $100 and as high as $800,000, which the city of Detroit refused to pay. They are appropriating all the tools of e-commerce and their operations are part of “a very mature, well-oiled capitalist machine" says Wisniewski. “I think they like the idea they don’t have to pretend they’re not criminals. By using the fact that they’re criminals to scare you, it’s just a lot easier on them.”

martyb writes:

Did you make a New Year's resolution about getting organized? Of all the places where disorder would seem to reign supreme, restaurants have developed a system for keeping order among the chaos:

The system that makes kitchens go is called mise-en-place, or, literally, "put in place." It's a French phrase that means to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking.

But for many culinary professionals, the phrase connotes something deeper. Some cooks call it their religion. It helps them coordinate vast amounts of labor and material, and transforms the lives of its practitioners through focus and self-discipline.

[...]

At Esca, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan's theater district, sous-chef Greg Barr describes what is perhaps the central tenet of mise-en-place: working clean. "It's like a very ... Zen-like thing," he says. "All my knives are clean. Clean cutting board. Clear space to work. Clear mind."

[...]

Across town at Telepan, chef and owner Bill Telepan explains another principle of mise-en-place: slow down to speed up. "I always say, 'Look, I'd rather you take an extra minute or two and slow up service to get it right.' Because the one minute behind you are now is going to become six minutes behind because we're going to have to redo the plate."

I started my working career in a kitchen where I saw these principles in action. I took these principles to heart and can attest that it makes a world of difference in how I go about my day. When I have things organized and things in their proper place, I can get things done quickly and efficiently — almost effortlessly. It's terribly frustrating for me when I have to deal with co-workers who just drop things wherever-they-feel-like-it. I end up wasting more time cleaning up after them and trying to locate things than the actual task at hand would require.

My greatest challenge is that when I encounter a new situation or thing, it takes me a while to figure out where it should belong — where to fit it in with the rest of the already-organized things. How do you Soylentils keep your things organized? Or if you don't organize things, how do you deal with the chaos?

tonyPick writes:

Over at Hackernews is a link to a discussion on how the Intel Management Engine (ME) is preventing screenshots, by bypassing the host CPU.

This links to a blog posting on the Intel ME in response to Rosyna Keller's twitter posting about being unable to take screenshots from Netflix (The Rosyna of the article title).

The core of the technical detail is taken from Igor Skochinsky's presentation on the ME (PDF Link) . The article raises the questions over the position of the ME in the system and the security implications of the ME subverting the host machine hardware outside of the main processor:

Given that the ME sits in a position where it can configure the chipset and operate on the PCI bus, there are some serious security implications here I wish I could mitigate. Among them is the ability of the ME to run arbitrary code on the host CPU via option ROMs or presenting a disk-drive to boot from. Also among those abilities is the possibility to perform DMA to access host CPU memory. And another one is the ability to configure and use PCI devices present in the system (such as the ethernet card).

"gewg_" writes:

SlashGear reports

Crouton was always the best method for getting a Linux distro on your Chromebook, but required you to swap back and forth between the two [OSes], which is fussy if you just want to do something on a distro like Ubuntu quickly. Now, Crouton is available via an extension, which lets you run two [OSes] side-by-side.

[...]Handy for more demanding multitasking, the side-by-side [OSes] still ask that you have some heftier hardware, so be careful about which Chromebook you try this with. If you've got an older model, this one might slow you down to an unusable state. Google isn't recommending any hardware configuration for the new extension to run with, but it's easy to see where problems may occur.

Again, this is a step for the bold, so unless you're comfortable with running scripts and side-loading a Linux distro, think of this as the future for Chrome OS multitasking.

[...]Via: Google+

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As we head into 2015, it's hard to think of any technical skill set less relevant than Y2K - the identification and fixing of computer systems and applications that used two decimal digits rather than four to store the year component of each date. As you may recall, the discovery of the problem (or perhaps, that the deadline to fix it was finally approaching) in the late '90s led to media hysteria and dire warnings about a world full of computers simultaneously losing their bearings, like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. An artist has assembled a memorial to the crisis, in the form of a web site presenting photos of dozens of books dealing with Y2K from various perspectives.

This site could be seen as mindless diversion, but also as a digest of reaction likely to repeat itself in a subsequent "crisis", albeit with different media next time (blogging, for one, had yet to be invented).

AnonTechie writes:

A group of Swiss artists recently set a bot free on the darknet ( http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/software-bot-darknet-shopping-spree-random-shopper ), allowing it to purchase whatever it could with Bitcoins. Among other weird things it bought were a few ecstasy pills and a fake Hungarian passport. Now an attorney asks whether the artists could be arrested under the law as it currently stands.

University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, who studies the legal implications of robotics, has a piece on Forbes about a thought experiment he did last year on this topic. At the time, he was just musing about what would happen if a robot bought something illegal online and mailed it to its owner as a surprise. ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancalo/2014/12/23/a-robot-really-committed-a-crime-now-what/ )

http://io9.com/if-your-robot-buys-illegal-drugs-have-you-committed-a-1677183776

AnonTechie writes:

Devising a way to one day land astronauts on Mars is a complex problem and NASA scientists think something as simple as a child's toy design may help solve the problem. Safely landing a large spacecraft on the Red Planet is just one of many engineering challenges the agency faces as it eyes an ambitious goal of sending humans into deep space later this century.

At NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, engineers have been working to develop an inflatable heat shield that looks a lot like a super-sized version of a stacking ring of doughnuts that infants play with. The engineers believe a lightweight, inflatable heat shield could be deployed to slow the craft to enter a Martian atmosphere much thinner than Earth's.

Such an inflatable heat shield could help a spacecraft reach the high-altitude southern plains of Mars and other areas that would otherwise be inaccessible under existing technology. The experts note that rockets alone can't be used to land a large craft on Mars as can be done on the atmosphereless moon. Parachutes also won't work for a large spacecraft needed to send humans to Mars, they add.

Thus, the inflatable rings. The rings would be filled with nitrogen and covered with a thermal blanket. Once deployed for landing, the rings would sit atop the spacecraft, somewhat resembling a giant mushroom.

http://phys.org/news/2015-01-nasa-explores-inflatable-spacecraft-technology.html

[Source]: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/Features/HIAD_decelerator_system.html

frojack writes:

Science Mag, a science site that carries a boat load of paywalled science articles, apparently sees no irony in carrying an article about India's Ministry of Science & Technology mandating public access to any funded projects.

Any institution that receives funding from the the Ministry will be required to set up a digital repository that will archive papers. The ministry, in turn, will maintain a “central harvester” linked to each of the institutional repositories; it will allow users to search for papers across the entire system.

Further this is retroactive to 2012, and any institution that receives an annual grant that covers, or partially covers the salary, infrastructure and research requirements of its staff will come under this mandate. The central harvester will be accessible to search engines.

"crutchy" writes:

The latest video of Apple's Campus 2 mega-project shows major progress on both the "spaceship" ring and parking garage, with over a dozen massive cranes now at work on the site. A previous prototype segment has also been removed.

-- submitted from IRC

jbWolf writes:

The BBC has a story that claims For the first time, frogs have been seen giving birth to tadpoles. A few details can be found on Wikipedia or the more detailed version at PLOS One.

Most frogs lay eggs and although some species give birth to froglets, newborn tadpoles are new to science.

Nearly all the world's 6,000 frog species use external fertilisation: the female lays eggs during mating, while the male releases sperm to fertilise them. "But there are lots of weird modifications to this standard mode of mating," Dr McGuire said. "This new frog is one of only 10 or 12 species that has evolved internal fertilization, and of those, it is the only one that gives birth to tadpoles, as opposed to froglets or laying fertilized eggs."

How the male frogs manage to fertilise eggs inside the female remains a mystery, because frogs have no conventional sexual organs to transfer the sperm.

I had not heard of any frog that gives birth to froglets instead of laying eggs before this article. Because this article is dominating the news, I could not find any example of this despite what Dr. McGuire says. Does anyone else know about frogs giving birth to live froglets?

frojack writes:

Linux Magazine has an article showing how one enthusiast built his own aircraft tracking system for $25 and a few open source Linux Applications.

The recent tragedy of AirAsia Flight 8501 brought the usual crescendo of demands from TV talking heads for continuous monitoring of passenger planes and disbelief that such a system does not exist in this day and age.

One such system is in place on large numbers of aircraft in the EU and US, and deployment is expected to be complete in most fleets by 2020. That system is called Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, or ADS-B. It constantly transmits the heading, altitude, speed, GPS position, and flight number on a frequency of 1,090MHz.

Charly Kühnast built a real-time flight mapping systems for these signals from a couple linux packages and a cheap USB digital terrestrial television stick, similar to this one.

Charly even has a live demo up and running at This Link which shows aircraft within range of his home receiver, located in the Netherlands Germany. Sometimes there are none, other times there are multiple aircraft, each of which can be clicked in the list to to highlight the plane's position and track, and show links to official flight status pages. You can zoom in and out to see 25 km concentric range circles. I've seen planes as far away as 50 km on Charly's map.

Presumably it would be a simple matter for a linux user to log each such transmission to provide the last position of each plane.

[Ed's note: Corrected Charly's home receiver location.]

joekiser writes:

From Crackberry:

"Thanksgiving this year was a bad time for Sony Pictures Entertainment, and that's putting it lightly. Hackers known as The Guardians of Peace managed to take over entire portions of their internal systems which led to the theft of a ton of personally identifiable information about Sony Pictures Entertainment employees, movie scripts, information about movie deals, and even full versions of unreleased Sony movies. Because of the hack, Sony had to find new ways to communicate with each other and keep the organization running during that time and as a new report from the WSJ [Subscription required] highlights, they turned to BlackBerry in some cases."

[Ed note: Also see coverage at Marketwatch and CNN Money .]

novak writes:

This is an article that I found to be very interesting, about the dystopian surveillance state we are rapidly headed towards, and especially about a man named Ai Weiwei, imprisoned by the Chinese government. From TFA:

Ai Weiwei has been living in our future. His movements are restricted and he is structurally being watched by the government. He lives in a world without privacy. A world without privacy is a world without freedom.

https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/ai-weiwei-is-living-in-our-future-474e5dd15e4f

AnonTechie writes:

Nearly all of the roughly US$370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by hackers, according to a report in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe.

Of the 650,000 bitcoins unaccounted for — worth about US$208 million today — only about 7,000 appear to have been purloined by hackers, the newspaper reported on New Year's Day, adding that investigators have yet to identify who was responsible.

That conflicts with the explanation by Mt. Gox, which blamed a bug in the Bitcoin system when it filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 28.

"We believe that there is a high probability that these bitcoins were stolen as a result of an abuse of this bug," Mt. Gox said in a statement on its website that day ( https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140228-announcement_eng.pdf ), which suggested "a variety of causes including hacking by third parties."

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2863167/police-blame-fraud-for-most-of-mt-goxs-missing-bitcoins.html

GreatAuntAnesthesia writes:

This vintage half-hour special of the BBC's "Tomorrow's World", first aired in 1987, looks at manned space exploration in the wake of the Challenger disaster, the context of the then still-present Soviet Space program and space race, and of course the technology of the time. Tomorrow's World was a much-loved and respected science and technology television series that ran for almost 40 years, which will be fondly remembered by Brit Soylentils of a certain generation.

Early plans for the ISS (referred to throughout as "the American Space Station") focus on the manufacturing of drugs and microchips in freefall, and political concerns about the militarisation of space. Plans for European and Soviet shuttle-like vehicles are compared. Mention is made of the Challenger investigation and the technical (but not the managerial) failures and solutions. Bold predictions about pre-millenial Mars missions are bandied about and big, chunky mid-80s sweaters are worn. If hindsight makes parts of this video seem politically or technologically naive, that only adds to the fascination of this window into an optimistic, turbulent and pivotal era in manned spaceflight.

[Note: This link is to the BBC iplayer. This may present some not-insurmountable obstacles for those of you who are outside the UK and/or opposed to DRM.]