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Phoenix666 writes:

Behold the future: attackers can already get between brain-waves and hospital kit, and it's just going to get worse according to IOActive senior consultant Alejandro Hernández.

Hernández says the ability to steal, manipulate, and replay brain waves used in electroencephalography (EEG) is already emerging, with consumer-grade kit already able to be hacked and the health care industry taking few precautions to properly protect recorded brain waves.

After decades in labs and hospitals, encephalography is steadily being implemented in lightweight consumer headsets and other devices that as yet remain largely experimental or gimmicky.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Over at Make is a report on the development of an anti-drone "rifle" by the non-profit research organisation Battelle:

In a press release from Battelle, the gun is stated to use "radio control frequency disruption technologies to safely stop drones in the air, before they can pose a threat to military or civilian safety." A video accompanying the post describes that it operates on standard GPS and ISM radio bands, allowing for it to interference [sic] with commercial UAV signals.

The original press release describes the device as the first portable, accurate, rapid-to-use counter-weapon to stop suspicious or hostile drones in flight, providing critical security protection at home and abroad and having a range of 400 meters.

However the legality of such a device is also raised in the Make article, which states that:

According to FCC regulations, federal law prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment
...
Operation of a jammer in the United States may result in substantial monetary penalties, seizure of the unlawful equipment, and criminal sanctions including imprisonment.
...
However, some states are proposing legislation, like in California, that would allow firefighters and authorities to take down drones if they are interfering with an emergency situation like a wildfire. Blocking approach paths to airports, hovering over fires, and flying over freeways could be considered instances where those drones can be shot down. However, whether or not officials would legally be allowed to use a radio jammer like the DroneDefender remains unclear.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But this is precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition from a dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.

New University of Washington research suggests that subsurface warming could be causing more methane gas to bubble up off the Washington and Oregon coast.

The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, shows that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a disproportionate number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of methane hydrates.

"We see an unusually high number of bubble plumes at the depth where methane hydrate would decompose if seawater has warmed," said lead author H. Paul Johnson, a UW professor of oceanography. "So it is not likely to be just emitted from the sediments; this appears to be coming from the decomposition of methane that has been frozen for thousands of years."

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

OpenBSD's source tree just turned 20 years old. The first improvements were for 32-bit sparc. It now supports 16 hardware platforms, with porting efforts on a few more. The project has now accumulated around 322,000 commits with an average of 44 commits/day by a cumulative total of around 356 hackers.

OpenBSD positions itself as a research operating system that takes a 'whole-system' development approach and stays within the POSIX family. Disruptive innovation is encouraged and there are no qualms about removing unused or dangerous code.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Pratt & Whitney's new PurePower Geared Turbofan aircraft engines are impressive beasts. Scheduled to enter commercial service before the end of the year, they burn 16 percent less fuel than today's best jet engines, Pratt says. They pollute less. They have fewer parts, which increases reliability. And they create up to 75 percent less noise on the ground, enabling carriers to pay lower noise fees and travel over some residential areas that are no-fly zones for regular planes.

Airbus, Bombardier, Embraer, Irkut, and Mitsubishi have certified the engines for use on their narrowbody craft. JetBlue, Lufthansa, Air New Zealand, Malaysia's Flymojo, and Japan Airlines are among the engine's 70 buyers in more than 30 countries. To people outside the aircraft business, what may be most remarkable about the engines is that they took almost 30 years to develop.

The PurePower GTF began to take shape in 1988, when Pratt staffers in East Hartford, Conn., including a 28-year-old engineer named Michael McCune, started developing a gizmo to slow the fan—the big rotating blades at the front of the engine that provide most of a jetliner's propulsion. For planes flying at typical speeds, a slow fan that moves large volumes of air at a moderate velocity is more efficient than a fast-spinning fan that accelerates a smaller volume of air. (The slow fan's also quieter.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-15/pratt-s-purepower-gtf-jet-engine-innovation-took-almost-30-years

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Streaming is the future of music - that is now the accepted wisdom. But if that is the case, the music industry is never going to be worth a lot because paying for a streaming service is very much a minority activity.

Now, though, a well-funded British business plans to use simple hardware and software to change that.

The Electric Jukebox, a device you plug into the back of your television, comes with a voice-activated remote control and a year's access to all the music you could possibly want.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Plans are underway to update a putative Geneva convention for cyberwar, put together by experts in international law and backed by an Estonian-based NATO-run military think tank.

The Tallinn Manual 2.0 is on track for publication in the second half of 2016, following a drafting conference of legal experts in the Estonian capital this week. The original manual provided a handbook on how principles of international law could be applied to conflict in cyberspace, which military strategists consider to be the fifth dimension of warfare (land, air, sea and space being the other four).
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Tallinn Manual 2.0 will expand the scope of the original manual to incorporate so-called peacetime international law, addressing incidents that states frequently face, such as human rights law, a particularly tawny subject. "The most difficult material proved to be international human rights law governing activities in cyberspace," said Liis Vihul, managing editor of the Tallinn Manual and legal researcher at the Tallinn-based the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As well as the range of Linux servers it released last week, Big Blue also announced version 7.2 of its venerable AIX operating system.

Still a heavy-hitter in the world of big enterprise workloads, AIX is part of that declining population of Unix-based rather than Linux-based operating systems.

Customers have a fair whack of prep time in front of them, since AIX 6.1 Enterprise Edition doesn't hit end-of-support until April 2017 (and curiously, AIX 7.1 Enterprise breathes its last sooner, in September 2016).

Key features Big Blue trumpets in AIX 7.2 include a live update that can run everything up to and including live kernel updates without rebooting a running system. An interim fix mechanism replaces AIX Hotpatch, again to get rid of reboots.

The OS includes a second-generation virtual network interface card (VNIC), which gives AIX LPAR virtual machines direct access to single-root input-output virtualisation (SRIOV) resources and cuts down on data copying.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It took the hackers less than two hours to take over Patsy Walsh's life.

On a recent Friday, Mrs. Walsh, a grandmother of six, volunteered to allow two hackers to take a crack at hacking her home. How bad could it be?

Mrs. Walsh did not consider herself a digital person. As far as she knew, her home was not equipped with any "smart devices," physical objects like refrigerators and thermometers that transmit information to the Internet. Sure, she has a Facebook account, which she uses to keep up on friends' lives, but rarely does she post about her own.
...
From there, the hackers made their way to the back of Mrs. Walsh's house, where her PC was waiting. With her passwords posted on the nearby router, their task was easy. Within minutes, they had not only broken into Mrs. Walsh's email account, but also that of her daughter — who at some point had allowed the computer's browser to auto-fill her password. (As a courtesy, the hackers made sure to send Mrs. Walsh's daughter an email from her own account with the subject line: "Reminder: Change my password.")

They searched Mrs. Walsh's email for the term "SSN" and within seconds had access to her Social Security number, her PayPal account, her air miles account and her insurance information. They had even gotten their hands on her power of attorney form.

The worst part was the hackers discovered somebody else had been there before them.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The future of wildland firefighting launched Wednesday morning in Idaho.

A Lockheed Martin helicopter capable of flying autonomously with no human control did so as it scooped up water, dropped it on targets and delivered supplies to a distant ridge in a demonstration in front of top federal decision makers 20 miles east of Boise.

"Wildland fires are a huge problem, particularly here in the West," said Mark Bathrick, director of the Interior Department's Office of Aviation Services. "I'm a believer in the technology that could be put on other helicopters, that eventually could be put on fixed-wing aircraft — scoopers and air tankers."

The Lockheed Martin K-MAX put through its paces on Wednesday completed seven tasks in about an hour and a half. A safety pilot was aboard, often holding his hands aloft to indicate to about 200 observers that he wasn't using the controls.

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

AlterNet reports:

Wayne Simmons [...] identified as a CIA outside paramilitary special operations officer. He wasn't. He wrote a book claiming he worked in the CIA for 27 years. He didn't.

Fox News took him at his word. So did the U.S. government. Simmons worked as a subcontractor for the government multiple times, and was even invited to train at an Army facility. He ended up receiving security clearance and served as an intelligence advisor to senior military personnel overseas. So much for background checks.

[...] A federal grand jury [indicted Simmons on October 15 for] numerous counts of fraud and making false statements.

[...] Simmons used his faux-authority to spread ludicrous and jingoist right-wing propaganda. For 13 years, Simmons ceaselessly spewed unsubstantiated opinions on Fox News, under the facade of being a CIA veteran and "national security and terrorism expert".

[...] Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that there are essentially no official standards in the U.S. media by which "counter-terrorism" pundits' purported "expertise" is measured; they must simply ignore facts, blame Muslims, and trumpet U.S. propaganda. Simmons fulfills each of these preconditions and more.

The question everyone should now be asking is how many more Wayne Simmons are out there?

The article includes 11 things that Simmons claimed as truth e.g. "at least 19 paramilitary Muslim training facilities in the United States" or advocated as actions e.g. assassinating democratically elected leaders.

Original Submission

"Hyperturtle" writes:

Is it time to replace that aging 2 year old PC with something more modern?

The executives of a number of tech industries think so.

A new initiative called "PC Does What?" has been released to help try to convince people to replace their aging hardware with something new, something modern, something Windows 10.

http://recode.net/2015/10/14/intel-microsoft-hp-dell-and-lenovo-unite-for-big-pc-advertising-push/

Does anyone here believe they are now more likely to buy a complete desktop/laptop/or tablet/phone replacement after receiving such words of encouragement to ditch the old and start lease payments on the new?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

On October 17, 1985 (by one blog's reckoning; an archived Infoworld article mentions October 1985, but not the day of month), Intel released the 80386 CPU, a 32-bit chip that supported 4 GB address spaces, memory protection, and virtual memory, while retaining the ability to run 16-bit MS-DOS programs in one of two compatibility modes ("real mode" for the original 8086/8088 instruction set; a 16-bit protected mode for the 80286 introduced with the IBM PC-AT). The 32-bit protected mode also supported multiple "virtual 8086" modes, or emulations of 16-bit real mode that each ran as a hardware-protected domain.

The 80386 was certainly not the world's first 32-bit CPU; DEC began selling 32-bit VAX computers in 1977, and many of its competitors in the minicomputer and workstation markets followed suit with their own proprietary 32-bit processors. Even in the personal computer space, the Motorola 68000 that powered Apple's Macintosh (famously introduced during the Super Bowl in January, 1984) was arguably a 32-bit CPU, although it had a 16-bit external data bus.

Intel's new chip should've taken the PC industry by storm, and it eventually did. But MS-DOS, the dominant PC operating system, was based on the original 8086 instruction set which could only make effective use of 1 MB of RAM. A series of hacks developed by engineers throughout the PC industry, including bank-switched "expanded memory" and "extended memory" (switching processor modes on the fly), raised this limit a bit, but these workarounds were far from transparent to application programmers. IBM's response was the OS/2 operating system, co-developed with Microsoft, that could run in either 16-bit (80286) or 32-bit (80386) protected mode, thus taking advantage of additional installed RAM, in addition to the obvious benefits of memory protection. The trouble was that OS/2 couldn't run the complex MS-DOS apps that business and home users were depending on; Bill Gates figured this out, but the IBM executives didn't. And when IBM released its PS/2 line of PCs in 1987, the high-end models equipped with 80386 chips were ridiculously overpriced.

Meanwhile Compaq, one of the vendors who had figured out how to clone and sell an IBM PC for much less than IBM's asking price, hit upon the idea of using the 80386 as a way of distinguishing their product from the competition. Then Microsoft released Windows 3.0 in 1990, with three installation modes corresponding to the different Intel chip architectures (real mode, 80286 mode, and 80386 mode), but it was the 80386 mode, and chip, that moved the market and caused a flurry of hardware and software upgrades.

Intel eventually licensed production rights to the 80386 to several competitors, including AMD, Cyrix, and IBM; Intel finally ended its own production run in 2007 (see Wikipedia article).

Original Submission

sudo rm -rf writes:

The story so far (Wikipedia):

On January 1st 2008, the German Paliament passed a law that any communications data had to be retained for six months. On 2 March 2010, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled the law unconstitutional as a violation of the guarantee of the secrecy of correspondence.

Today (2015-10-16), Deutsche Welle reports:

[More details after the break.]

Phoenix666 writes:

Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in transporting the energy of sunlight from receptors to reaction centers where it can be harnessed—a performance vastly better than even the best solar cells.

One way plants achieve this efficiency is by making use of the exotic effects of quantum mechanics—effects sometimes known as "quantum weirdness." These effects, which include the ability of a particle to exist in more than one place at a time, have now been used by engineers at MIT to achieve a significant efficiency boost in a light-harvesting system.

Surprisingly, the MIT researchers achieved this new approach to solar energy not with high-tech materials or microchips—but by using genetically engineered viruses.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Secret code is everywhere—in elevators, airplanes, medical devices. By refusing to publish the source code for software, companies make it impossible for third parties to inspect, even when that code has enormous effects on society and policy. Secret code risks security flaws that leave us vulnerable to hacks and data leaks. It can threaten privacy by gathering information about us without our knowledge. It may interfere with equal treatment under law if the government relies on it to determine our eligibility for benefits or whether to put us on a no-fly list. And secret code enables cheaters and hides mistakes, as with Volkswagen: The company admitted recently that it used covert software to cheat emissions tests for 11 million diesel cars spewing smog at 40 times the legal limit.

But as shocking as Volkswagen's fraud may be, it only heralds more of its kind. It's time to address one of the most urgent if overlooked tech transparency issues—secret code in the criminal justice system. Today, closed, proprietary software can put you in prison or even on death row. And in most U.S. jurisdictions you still wouldn't have the right to inspect it. In short, prosecutors have a Volkswagen problem.

Interesting article with implications for Open Source.

Original Submission