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"exec" writes:

Hackers Program Bank ATMs to Spew Cash

After crimes in Taiwan and Thailand, the FBI warns of similar potential attacks in U.S.

Cybercriminals who once earned millions by breaking into individual online bank accounts are now targeting the banks' own computers, with often-dramatic results.

In Taiwan and Thailand earlier this year, the criminals programmed bank ATMs to spew cash. Gang members stood in front of the machines at the appointed hour and collected millions of dollars.

Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned U.S. banks of the potential for similar attacks. The FBI said in a bulletin that it is "monitoring emerging reports indicating that well-resourced and organized malicious cyber actors have intentions to target the U.S. financial sector."

[... In Taiwan ...] By July 11, criminals had collected more than 83 million New Taiwan dollars (US$2.6 million) in cash—without using ATM cards. Twenty-two people, most from Eastern Europe, waited by ATMs to remove the money. Three suspects were later arrested and over NT$77 million recovered.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

n1 writes:

Donald Trump says he will issue an executive action on his first day in office to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In a video updating Americans on the White House transition, the President-elect described TPP as a "potential disaster for our country".

[...] Mr Trump said his administration instead intends to generate "fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores".

Sky Correspondent Greg Milam said: "Donald Trump has been very critical of what trade deals have done for American workers and the damage that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) did in the 1990s - particularly to low-income workers in the Midwest, who it turns out voted for Mr Trump in huge numbers."

Source: Sky News

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Phoenix666 writes in with news of this story about the morality of programming:

Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."

In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.

He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.

By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

If you're tired of robotic responses from Comcast's customer service department, Trim has introduced a great new way to retaliate with a free automated bot tool to deal with Comcast while you do something else.

The Chrome browser extension interacts with Comcast's online chat support to negotiate a lower bill for you when your internet service slows to a crawl, there is a service outage, or if you just need a better deal.

"Our bot is best for checking for discounts and seeing if you can get a customer service credit," Thomas Smyth, co-founder & CEO of Trim tells Stop the Cap!

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Amazon.com looks like it is about to wade deeper into competition with Netflix, by making at least one of its new self-produced programs available for viewing around the world.

At about the 45-second mark of the video below, James May of new "Amazon Original" The Grand Tour says "In December we will be launching the show globally which means you will be able to watch ... in over 200 countries around the world."

The Grand Tour retains most of the talent from the BBC's global hit Top Gear and has become Amazon's flagship as it seeks to create a global entertainment business. But at the time of writing, Amazon's video service only operates in a handful of countries.

Announcing that The Grand Tour is ready to roll through 200 nations suggests that Amazon has made the necessary investments to offer streamed video around the world. And even though Amazon.com is rather close to a provider of the necessary infrastructure - sibling Amazon Web Services - it is hard to imagine it would go to all the trouble of global rollout just so that customers can enjoy Clarkson & Co.

There can be only one.

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes in with an article from Science Alert :

After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published [open, DOI: 10.2514/1.B36120] [DX]. And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work. The NASA Eagleworks Laboratory team even put forward a hypothesis for how the EM Drive could produce thrust – something that seems impossible according to our current understanding of the laws of physics.

In case you've missed the hype, the EM Drive, or Electromagnetic Drive, is a propulsion system first proposed by British inventor Roger Shawyer back in 1999. Instead of using heavy, inefficient rocket fuel, it bounces microwaves back and forth inside a cone-shaped metal cavity to generate thrust. According to Shawyer's calculations, the EM Drive could be so efficient that it could power us to Mars in just 70 days.

takyon: Some have previously dismissed EmDrive as a photon rocket. This is addressed in the paper along with other possible sources of error:

The eighth [error:] photon rocket force, RF leakage from test article generating a net force due to photon emission. The performance of a photon rocket is several orders of magnitude lower than the observed thrust. Further, as noted in the above discussion on RF interaction, all leaking fields are managed closely to result in a high quality RF resonance system. This is not a viable source of the observed thrust.

[...] The 1.2  mN/kW performance parameter is over two orders of magnitude higher than other forms of "zero-propellant" propulsion, such as light sails, laser propulsion, and photon rockets having thrust-to-power levels in the 3.33–6.67  μN/kW (or 0.0033–0.0067  mN/kW) range.

Previously: NASA Validates "Impossible" Space Drive's Thrust
"Reactionless" Thruster Tested Again, This Time in a Vacuum
Explanation may be on the way for the "Impossible" EmDrive
Finnish Physicist Says EmDrive Device Does Have an Exhaust
EmDrive Peer-Reviewed Paper Coming in December; Theseus Planning a Cannae Thruster Cubesat

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Okayama University have identified the gene mutation and the enzyme it encodes to determine whether the dormancy of barley is long (better for food crops) or short (better for beer-making).

The authors of this paper note that, "The wild barley's long dormancy means that, initially, the grain will not germinate in response to transient moisture availability and will therefore survive hot, dry summers". As a result seeds like wild-type barley that undergo a long state of "dormancy" at maturity – during which they will not germinate –are favoured for food crops. In contrast a short dormancy is more efficient and preferable for beer making.

Kazuhiro Sato and colleagues – a collaboration of Okayama University and the Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Japan and the University of Adelaide in Australia - compared DNA sequences of Haruna Nijo – a type of barley known to have short dormancy – with wild barley H602, known to have long dormancy. After studying over 5000 plants, they identified the section of the barley's DNA that varies with expression of long or short dormancy - AK372829.

The gene AK372829 codes the enzyme alanine aminotransferase (AlaAT), which is known to play a pivotal role in nitrogen and carbon pathways and protein synthesis, and has been implicated in stress responses to low oxygen and nitrogen availability. Further experiments investigated variations in the nucleotide – that is, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – as well as the structure and diversity of the protein associated with short dormancy.

In a strange omission, Charley Mopps was not cited in the paper.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

My ad-supported Kindle's buttons are dying, so I'm in the market for a new eBook reader. I figured the upcoming sales would be a good time to buy one. To my surprise, eBook readers seem to be regressing rather than advancing. My hard requirements are:

1. e-Ink display
2. Text-to-speech
3. Don't need company's software to transfer books

And my preferred features include:

1. Good PDF support (so a larger display with the same aspect ratio of a piece of paper). I want to read technical books on it, something I can't do with the Kindle.
2. Stable software
3. Doesn't spy on everything you do (Kindles track absolutely everything)
4. Support for multiple voices. The same voice gets annoying after a few books.

I'm unable to find anything which fulfills all those conditions. Any recommendations? Before you say smartphone, it needs an e-Ink display. Are smartphones and tablets killing eBook readers?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Linux overlord Linus Torvalds is both worried and chilled about the progress of Linux 4.9. Or maybe he isn't: his weekly message about the latest release candidate has a bet each way.

"We're getting further in the rc series, and while things have stayed pretty calm, I'm not sure if we're quite there yet," he posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List on Sunday evening. But in the next sentence, he calms down, saying "This may be one of those releases that have an rc8, which considering the size of 4.9 is perhaps not that unusual."

In the next paragraph of his post he again expresses both worry and calm.

"That said, nothing particular is bothering me all that much, but we've had some of the VMALLOC_STACK fixups continue to trickle in, so I worry that we're not quite done there yet."

He does it again in the next paragraph, first saying ""The fact that rc6 is bigger than rc5 was is not a particularly great sign" before then saying the situation is probably "just the usual timing fluctuation: rc6 had networking updates, rc5 didn't, for example."

"There are also some rdma updates etc that stand out. Nothing that looks particularly worrisome."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes in with a story from sciencealert:

In December 1952, a dense fog fell over London that lasted roughly four days, dropping visibility and making it hard to breathe. At the time, residents paid little attention to the strange event, writing it off as just another natural fog, but once it lifted, people started dying.

The event – referred to as the Great Smog – led to the death of roughly 12,000 people, and the hospitalisation of up to 150,000. But how could something like this happen? 

[...] Nw [sic], over 60 years later, an international team of researchers might have finally figured it out, as part of an investigation into China's modern air pollution issues.

The answer is actually pretty terrifying – it turns out people were breathing in the fog equivalent of acid rain.

Original Submission

iwoloschin writes:

Oracle has bought Dyn, from Oracle's press release:

Oracle today [11/21/16] announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Dyn, the leading cloud-based Internet Performance and DNS provider that monitors, controls, and optimizes Internet applications and cloud services to deliver faster access, reduced page load times, and higher end-user satisfaction.

TechCrunch reports:

Oracle and Dyn didn't disclose the price of the deal but we are trying to find out. Dan Primack reports that it's north of $600 million. We've also asked for a comment from Oracle about Dyn's recent breach, and whether the wheels were set in motion for this deal before or after the Mirai botnet attack in October, but our guess is that it was likely before. [..] Dyn is Oracle's 114th acquisition, according to CrunchBase. Other recent acquisitions to fill out its enterprise cloud services, coincidentally, included a security startup, Palerra; and NetSuite for $9.3 billion.

Original Submission

Gaaark writes:

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/world/japan-earthquake-east-coast-1.3861065

A powerful earthquake rocked northern Japan early on Tuesday, briefly disrupting cooling functions at a nuclear plant and generating a small tsunami that hit the same Fukushima region devastated by a 2011 quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

The magnitude 7.4 earthquake, which was felt in Tokyo, sent thousands of residents fleeing for higher ground as dawn broke along the northeastern coast.

[...] There were no reports of deaths or serious injuries several hours after the quake hit at 5:59 a.m. local time. It was centred off the coast of Fukushima prefecture at a depth of about 10 kilometres, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said.

Gaaark writes:

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the history of computers/hardware

The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the 20th century, most calculations were done by humans. Early mechanical tools to help humans with digital calculations, such as the abacus, were called "calculating machines", by proprietary names, or even as they are now, calculators. The machine operator was called the computer.

The first aids to computation were purely mechanical devices which required the operator to set up the initial values of an elementary arithmetic operation, then manipulate the device to obtain the result. Later, computers represented numbers in a continuous form, for instance distance along a scale, rotation of a shaft, or a voltage. Numbers could also be represented in the form of digits, automatically manipulated by a mechanical mechanism. Although this approach generally required more complex mechanisms, it greatly increased the precision of results. A series of breakthroughs, such as miniaturized transistor computers, and the integrated circuit, caused digital computers to largely replace analog computers.

I remember my dad talking about punching cards to Program the huge computer at Queens university. In high school, I was filling in the cards with a pencil. My young (at the time) brother-in-law won a vic-20 and was typing his commands.

My first personal computer was an Acorn Atom... I could only dream of the 64k that Bill Gates said was enough for anyone. I could never get the cassette tape to record my carefully typed and debugged programs.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A campaign to pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden, launched in combination with a fawning Oliver Stone film about him, hasn't made any headway. The request spurred the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and 9 Democrats, to send a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. "He is a criminal," they stated flatly.

Obama weighed in on the matter on Friday. During his European tour, he was interviewed by Der Spiegel—the largest newspaper in Germany, a country where Snowden is particularly popular. After discussing a wide range of issues, he was asked: Are you going to pardon Edward Snowden?

Obama replied: "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves, so that's not something that I would comment on at this point."

Will the NSA's spying and Snowden's actions come to define Obama's legacy?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Not every demo at security cons goes off without a hitch: Badass hackers Ryan and Jeremy electrocuted themselves when building what could have been the first device capable of wirelessly exploiting door-opening push buttons.

The pair demonstrated the trial and terror process of building the box at the Kiwicon hacking event in New Zealand last Friday.

Before its insides dissolved due to extreme heat, the device was capable of activating the push buttons that open doors to allow egress from secure buildings - but from the outside of that building.

Ryan and Jeremy's beefed-up electromagnet is the latest in a niche line of research which would allow attackers to enter buildings by using the devices to unlock the push-button door controls.

"I guess they really are touch-to-enter buttons," Jeremy told the 2,000 laughing hackers at the Michael Fowler centre, Wellington.

Original Submission