SoylentNews

Don't panic: Microsoft Mistakenly Posted a 'Test' Windows Update Patch

inertnet writes:

Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that a suspicious-looking update pushed out to Windows machines globally in the early hours was nothing more than a test gone errant.

A spokesperson said that the company had "incorrectly published a test update" and is in the process of removing it.

It follows an hour or two of brewing concern on social media, forums, and news-sharing sites that the Windows Update service had been compromised in some way. The "important"-rated patch, appeared on Wednesday as a supplemental language update, rather than a security fix. The patch was 4.3MB in size, according to a thread on Microsoft's support forums, and contained gibberish text for its name, description, and strange and inaccessible links in the "more information" and "help and support" part.

More than 17,200 people have viewed the thread so far, while others have taken to Twitter and message boards like Hacker News and Reddit to complain. The patch is thought to have been pushed through consumer machines running Windows 7. Enterprise users running Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) don't seem to be affected. In most cases, the patch failed to install. In one case, a user said after the successful installation, his laptop was "screwed," describing frequent crashes and that it "killed my system and compromised my gear."

It's not immediately clear what was inside the patch, or whether it modified any Windows files. In any case, the Windows Update system is a core and vital part of keeping computers around the world up-to-date. Shaking confidence in that system is going to have a lasting effect, especially in a day and age of almost daily hacks and ongoing government surveillance.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-accidentally-issued-a-test-windows-update-patch/

Nerves Rattled by Highly Suspicious Windows Update Delivered Worldwide [updated]

Phoenix666 writes:

Microsoft said a highly suspicious Windows update that was delivered to customers around the world was the result of a test that wasn't correctly implemented.

"We incorrectly published a test update and are in the process of removing it," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to Ars. The message included no other information.

The explanation came more than 12 hours after people around the world began receiving the software bulletin through the official Windows Update, raising widespread speculation that Microsoft's automatic patching mechanism was broken or, worse, had been compromised to attack end users. Fortunately, now that Microsoft has finally weighed in, that worst-case scenario can be ruled out. What follows is the remainder of this post as it appeared before the company issued its explanation.

This Web search, which queries the random-appearing string included in the payload, suggests that it's being delivered to people in multiple regions. The same unexplained and almost certainly unauthorized patch is being reported in a variety of online posts, including this one hosted by Microsoft. The updates appear to be coming directly from servers that are cryptographically certified to be part of Microsoft's Windows Update system.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Virginia Tech and University of Bristol scientists have determined the color of long-dead fossil specimens by analyzing melanosomes, organelles that manufacture pigment within a cell:

In recent years, though, science has come closer and closer to figuring out how to discover the colors of long-dead species. In 2008, a team at Yale University identified melanosomes, the organelles that manufacture the pigment melanin within a cell, in a fossilized feather. Because melanosomes differ by shape according to the type of melanin they produce—eumelanin, for example, can be black or brown depending on concentration, while pheomelanin is red—the researchers hypothesized that the appearance of a melanosome could be used to infer the color of the animal it belonged to.

But even better than inferring is knowing for sure. In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Virginia Tech and the University of Bristol analyzed the chemical structure of melasonomes from several different fossilized species, confirming the correlation between shape and shade—and, they believe, putting lingering doubts about the method to rest.

"People had questioned whether you could use the shape of the melanosome to tell anything about the color, because it's been through a lot. Millions of years in the ground is obviously going to take a toll," said Caitlin Colleary, a Ph.D. candidate in geological sciences at Virginia Tech University and the study's lead author. "So by finding traces of the chemical melanin in association with these structures, we've basically confirmed that you can use the shapes of the melanosomes themselves to tell what color something was."

Chemical, experimental, and morphological evidence for diagenetically altered melanin in exceptionally preserved fossils [abstract]

Original Submission

Graphene is a topic that features in many stories nowadays; here are 3 different stories about the 'wonder material':

Physicists Map the Strain in Wonder Material Graphene

Phoenix666 writes:

This week, an international group of scientists is reporting a breakthrough in the effort to characterize the properties of graphene noninvasively while acquiring information about its response to structural strain.

Using Raman spectroscopy and statistical analysis, the group succeeded in taking nanoscale measurements of the strain present at each pixel on the material's surface. The researchers also obtained a high-resolution view of the chemical properties of the graphene surface.

The results, says Slava V. Rotkin, professor of physics and also of materials science and engineering at Lehigh University, could potentially enable scientists to monitor levels of strain quickly and accurately as graphene is being fabricated. This in turn could help prevent the formation of defects that are caused by strain.

There have been recent findings that intentionally introducing "defects" in graphene can help with conductivity and induce other desired effects. This could help that process.

Graphene Quickly and Cheaply

Pav writes:

An old workmate (Mohan Jacob) has been busy at the local university - James Cook University Australia. He and his team have discovered a process allowing production of almost defect free graphene sheets in seconds, without catalysts and at relatively low temperatures, and from a novel and abundant feedstock - tea tree oil. There's a decent writeup at phys.org.

If any North Queensland nerds are lurking, he's also the founder of the JCU Robotics Club (see Facebook).

Disappearing Carbon Circuits On Graphene Could Have Security, Biomedical Uses

Phoenix666 writes:

Using carbon atoms deposited on graphene with a focused electron beam process, Fedorov and collaborators have demonstrated a technique for creating dynamic patterns on graphene surfaces. The patterns could be used to make reconfigurable electronic circuits, which evolve over a period of hours before ultimately disappearing into a new electronic state of the graphene. Graphene is also made up of carbon atoms, but in a highly-ordered form.

Reported in the journal Nanoscale, the research was primarily supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and involved collaboration with researchers from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Beyond allowing fabrication of disappearing circuits, the technology could be used as a form of timed release in which the dissipation of the carbon patterns could control other processes, such as the release of biomolecules.

"We will now be able to draw electronic circuits that evolve over time," said Andrei Fedorov, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. "You could design a circuit that operates one way now, but after waiting a day for the carbon to diffuse over the graphene surface, you would no longer have an electronic device. Today the device would do one thing; tomorrow it would do something entirely different."

Lost Psychlo technology.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3 

Phoenix666 writes:

About 20 million years ago a single flea became entombed in amber with tiny bacteria attached to it, providing what researchers believe may be the oldest evidence on Earth of a dreaded and historic killer -- an ancient strain of the bubonic plague.

If indeed the fossil bacteria are related to plague bacteria, Yersinia pestis, the discovery would show that this scourge, which killed more than half the population of Europe in the 14th century, actually had been around for millions of years before that, traveled around much of the world, and predates the human race.

Findings on this extraordinary amber fossil have been published in the Journal of Medical Entomology by George Poinar, Jr., an entomology researcher in the College of Science at Oregon State University, and a leading expert on plant and animal life forms found preserved in this semi-precious stone.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to a story in the Daily Dot, the Office of Inspector General of the US Department of Justice (DOJ-OIG) is looking into the use of telephone metadata (call detail records) collected in bulk by the NSA (under its interpretation of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act). The DOJ-OIG is also checking into possible use of parallel construction at the DEA, which was alleged in 2013 by anonymous sources.

Parallel construction is false testimony about how evidence or investigative leads were obtained. It is used to make it falsely appear that evidence is admissible in court, or to conceal the origin of the information.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Thanks largely to Docker, containers are now ubiquitous in Linux server and even desktop environments, and more recently on other operating systems including MacOS, Windows, and BSD, as a low overhead alternative to traditional virtual machine technology. While there are no shortage of both freely available and book-length tutorials on Docker, I've noticed that many seem to give short shrift to the high-level overview, apart from telling us how great Docker is, the history of the project, etc.; they launch forthwith into the nuts and bolts, the script-level details.

Blogging on developer.com, Bob Reselman attempts to provide the missing overview on what containers are and how they work.

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

TechDirt notes

If you don't want to see display/banner ads on Techdirt any more, you don't need to. Just go to your preferences page (whether you have an account or are just browsing without a login) and click the button saying you want to disable ads. And, that's it. No more network display ads.

This isn't one of those "pay us to remove ads" deals. It's up to you. That said, obviously if you disable ads we're likely to make less money. So if you choose to do that, we'd appreciate it if you supported us in other ways, such as via our Insider Shop, where you can buy a membership that gets you certain perks, or through our Deals Store, where you can support Techdirt while buying some cool products and services. But, again, this is not a requirement. If you don't like ads on the site, turn them off.

[...] It's important to note that this is an experiment, though we have no plans to suddenly pull it back (that would be ridiculous). For now, it only applies to network display ads--or what most people think of as "banner ads." In the future, we may (or may not!) experiment with further ability to customize what you see and what you don't see on the site.

Mike mentions malvertisement and, of course, doesn't pass up the opportunity to show his scorn for the folks who want to sue adblock users. So, what do you think?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The United States Mission to the European Union has responded to the opinion by the Court of Justice of the European Union's Advocate General Yves Bot that the current Safe Harbour scheme may be illegal because of NSA spying. It claims that the US "does not and has not engaged in indiscriminate surveillance of anyone, including ordinary European citizens." As reported by Ars last week, the ability of companies to transfer the personal data of EU citizens to the US is under threat because Bot believes that the Safe Harbour's privacy safeguards are inadequate. In particular, Bot was concerned about what he called the the "mass, indiscriminate surveillance" of EU citizens under the PRISM programme, which is believed to give the NSA direct access to all personal data held by Facebook and other US companies in their databases.

In a statement issued yesteday, The United States Mission to the European Union—effectively, the US embassy to the EU—desperately tries to refute the Advocate General's logic. That's because US companies will be unable to rely on the Safe Harbour framework, and their data transfers across the Atlantic will be illegal under EU law, if the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) follows his arguments, as usually happens. The US Mission writes: "The Advocate General's opinion notes that it was required to accept the facts as found by the Irish High Court. There was, however, no actual fact-finding in this case; instead, the Irish High Court concluded, on the basis of exhibits to plaintiff's affidavits that the accuracy of his allegations regarding U.S. intelligence practices 'is not in dispute.' But that is simply not the case."

"The US 'does not and has not engaged in indiscriminate surveillance of anyone, including ordinary European citizens.'" Whopper of the week.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Consider the plastic foam cup. Every year, Americans throw away 2.5 billion of them. And yet, that waste is just a fraction of the 33 million tons of plastic Americans discard every year. Less than 10 percent of that total gets recycled, and the remainder presents challenges ranging from water contamination to animal poisoning.

Enter the mighty mealworm. The tiny worm, which is the larvae form of the darkling beetle, can subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene, according to two companion studies co-authored by Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. Microorganisms in the worms' guts biodegrade the plastic in the process – a surprising and hopeful finding.

"Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem," Wu said.

The papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, are the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal's gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.

Awesome. Then people can eat the mealworms.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Tesla's Model X—one of the only all-electric SUVs on the market—was officially unveiled Tuesday night near the company's California factory. SUVs were delivered to the first six buyers.

CEO Elon Musk says the Model X sets a new bar for automotive engineering, with unique features like rear falcon-wing doors, which open upward, and a driver's door that opens on approach and closes itself when the driver is inside.
...
The Model X is the third vehicle from 12-year-old Tesla, after the Roadster—which was discontinued in 2012—and the Model S sedan. It should attract new customers—particularly women—to the brand, and it goes on sale as the market for luxury SUVs is booming. U.S. luxury SUV sales were up 17 percent through August, five times better than the industry as a whole.
...
The Model X shares a platform and motor with the Model S, which is made at the same factory. But unlike the S, which has several battery options, the X only has a 90 kilowatt-hour battery and only comes with all-wheel drive. The 90D version will go 257 miles on a full charge, while the P90D performance version will go 250 miles. Tesla's high-speed "ludicrous mode" is offered on the P90D; it goes from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds.

"A fully loaded performance model is $142,000." Pricey.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Forty years ago, a New York University graduate student named Arieh Aviram opened his Ph.D. dissertation with a bold suggestion: "Taking a clue from nature, [which] utilizes molecules for the carrying out of many physical phenomena, it may be possible to miniaturize electronic components down to molecular size." What Aviram was proposing was revolutionary: leapfrogging the ongoing miniaturization trend of Moore's Law by substituting single organic molecules for silicon transistors and diodes.
...
Aviram and Ratner's bold idea sank into obscurity.
...
Bulk ensembles of molecular electronics have made their way into commercial displays, and recent high-profile breakthroughs include single-molecule light-emitting diodes and carbon nanotube transistors coupled to silicon in a monolithic integrated circuit. Other, less flashy but more technically relevant results have come, for example, from Danny Porath and his colleagues at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who have measured electrical transport in wires made of DNA; such wires are a self-assembled alternative to copper interconnects. Latha Venkataraman's group at Columbia University has measured single-molecule diodes to a rectification ratio of more than 200 times—a critical step for maintaining a high signal gain as devices shrink. And Christian Nijhuis and his coworkers at the National University of Singapore were able to measure the rectification changes that occurred when they replaced an individual functional group—just a handful of atoms—in a nanometer-size molecule. This is exactly the type of control dreamed of by Aviram and Ratner.

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Original Submission

Jack Conte, CEO and co-founder of Patreon, has announced that the site has been hacked:

There was unauthorized access to registered names, email addresses, posts, and some shipping addresses. Additionally, some billing addresses that were added prior to 2014 were also accessed. We do not store full credit card numbers on our servers and no credit card numbers were compromised. Although accessed, all passwords, social security numbers and tax form information remain safely encrypted with a 2048-bit RSA key. No specific action is required of our users, but as a precaution I recommend that all users update their passwords on Patreon.

Here are some technical details of the incident:

• The unauthorized access was confirmed to have taken place on September 28th via a debug version of our website that was visible to the public. Once we identified this, we shut down the server and moved all of our non-production servers behind our firewall.
• [...] We protect our users' passwords with a hashing scheme called 'bcrypt' and randomly salt each individual password. Bcrypt is non-reversible, so passwords cannot be "decrypted." We do not store plaintext passwords anywhere.

Patreon is a crowdfunding site that allows content creators to obtain funding from patrons on a recurring basis.

In adjacent news, Kmart Australia's online store has been breached.

c0lo writes in with a bit of political correctness gone to extremes from the Telegraph:

A university's students union has banned students from getting free sombreros claiming they are "racist".

Students were being given free sombreros by a local Tex-Mex restaurant in a bid to drum up business with a smile, before uni chiefs ordered them to stop - because it violates strict cultural appropriation rules.

The University of East Anglia student union officials even took the big floppy hats from students at the Freshers' Fair, because non-Mexicans wearing the traditional item of headwear could be seen as offensive, according to a new initiative.

The Union has stated that the handing out of sombreros breached a key advertising policy which was sent to all stallholders before the event, prohibiting any use of stereotypical imagery in advertising.

It read: "Discriminatory or stereotypical language or imagery aimed towards to any group or individual based on characteristics will not be permitted as part of our advertising."

Also covered by The Daily Star and The Express

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It was a neighborhood Costas Tsalikidis knew well. He lived at No. 18 Euclid Street, a loft apartment just down the hall from his parents. Slim and dark-haired, with a strong chin and a sly smile, he was born in Athens 38 years earlier to a middle-class family in the construction business. Talented in math and physics from an early age, he earned a degree in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, considered the most prestigious college in Greece, where he specialized in telecommunications, and later obtained his master's in computer science in England. Putting his skills to good use, for the last 11 years he had worked for Vodafone-Panafon, also known as Vodafone Greece, the country's largest cell phone company, and was promoted in 2001 to network-planning manager at the company's headquarters in the trendy Halandri section of Athens.

On March 9, 2005, Costas' brother, Panagiotis, dropped by the apartment. He thought he'd have a coffee before a business meeting scheduled for that morning. But as he entered the building, he found his mother, Georgia, running up and down the corridor yelling for help.

"Cut him down!" she was saying. "Cut him down!"

Panagiotis had no idea what she was talking about until he went inside his brother's apartment and saw Costas hanging from a rope tied to pipes above the lintel of his bathroom door, an old wooden chair nearby. He and his mother cut the rope and laid Costas down on the bed.

The day before his death, Costas' boss at Vodafone had ordered that a newly discovered code — a powerful and sophisticated bug — be deactivated and removed from its systems. The wiretap, placed by persons unknown, targeted more than 100 top officials, including then Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis and his wife, Natassa; the mayor of Athens; members of the Ministerial Cabinet; as well as journalists, capturing not only the country's highest secrets, but also its most intimate conversations. The question was, who did it?

Original Submission

HughPickens.com and AnonTechie both submitted this article from TechnologyReview.com:

Discussions of income inequality typically focus on how information technology raises the return to skilled labour, or on the rise of global trade, or perhaps on the way that politics skews power toward the rich and well-connected. But there's another fundamental driver of income inequality: the improved measurement of worker performance. As we get better at measuring who produces what, the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows.

Tyler Cohen writes in MIT Technology Review: Insofar as workers type at a computer, everything they do is logged, recorded, and measured. Surveillance of workers continues to increase, and statistical analysis of large data sets makes it increasingly easy to evaluate individual productivity, even if the employer has a fairly noisy data set about what is going on in the workplace. Consider journalism. In the "good old days," no one knew how many people were reading an article, or an individual columnist. Today a digital media company knows exactly how many people are reading which articles for how long, and also whether they click through to other links. The result is that many journalists turn out to be not so valuable at all. Their wages fall or they lose their jobs, while the superstar journalists attract more Web traffic and become their own global brands.

According to Cohen the upside is that measuring value tends to boost productivity, as has been the case since the very beginning of management science. We're simply able to do it much better now, and so employers can assign the most productive workers to the most suitable tasks. The downsides are several. Individuals don't in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. "Life under a meritocracy can be a little tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps "second chances" will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of electronic data," concludes Cohen. That said, measurement of worker value isn't going away anytime soon. "The real question is not whether we want it or not, but how to make it better rather than worse."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Kim Dotcom's oft-delayed extradition hearing began on Monday 21 Sep, nearly three years and 10 months since the infamous raid of Dotcom's New Zealand mansion. Over that time span, Dotcom's legal team has managed to drag out the affair through 10 extradition hearing delays and various other legal maneuvering. And according to some number crunching from the New Zealand Herald (confirmed by the Crown Law Office, the NZ prosecutors representing the US there), Dotcom's trials and tribulations have cost NZ taxpayers nearly NZ$5.8 million in legal fees (or approximately $3.7 million).

The total cost is just one of the eye-dropping[sic] Dotcom-related numbers the Herald outlined this weekend. To start, it's been 1337 total days since the raid. And in total, 29,344 hours of legal work has been made possible through taxpayer investments; two-thirds of those hours have gone specifically towards the extradition request according to the paper. With the base rate for Crown solicitors set at NZ$198/hour, the Herald puts the current cost at the NZ$5.8 million figure above. Dotcom took to Twitter to note that such a calculation means NZ has spent almost the equivalent of half of its 2014 budget for Crown prosecutions on Dotcom alone. (In contrast, the Herald reports Dotcom has spent an estimated NZ$10 million, roughly $6.4M, on his defense.)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Cooling fans and other system-level solutions are reaching their limits as circuit densities continue to grow. It's no wonder then that graphene's remarkable heat conductivity has led to a lot of research into using it to for thermal management in electronics.
...
In research published in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists demonstrated that the electrostatic interactions between electrically charged particles—known as Coulomb interactions—in different layers of multi-layered graphene offers a key mechanism for dispersing heat. This occurs despite the fact that all electronic states are strongly confined within individual 2D layers.
...
When the negative charges repel each other, the electrons take on an effective size that extends between the layers. When the electrons come in contact with each other in this way, the hotter electrons transfer heat to the colder ones. This transfer of heat eventually channels down through the graphene towards the layer that is closest to the silicon carbide substrate the researchers used in these experiments. Once it gets to the final layer of graphene, the heat transfers into the silicon carbide.

Original Submission