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Hackers Stole $41M of Bitcoin on One of World's Largest Crypto Exchanges
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/hackers-stole-41-million-bitcoin-worlds-largest-crypto-exchange
Binance, one of the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, announced it has been a victim of a massive security breach.
The exchange said late Tuesday that hackers have run off with over 7,000 bitcoin worth an estimated $41 million after they used a "variety of techniques, including phishing and viruses," to tab into its systems.
Bitcoin Stolen in Binance Hack Moved to Seven Addresses
Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser
Bitcoin Stolen in Binance Hack Moved to Seven Addresses
Proceedings from yesterday’s hack of cryptocurrency exchangeBinance have been moved to seven addresses, crypto news outlet The Block reports on May 9.
The breach resulted in about 7,074 bitcoins (BTC) — worth nearly $42.8 million at press time — being stolen from the exchange’s hot wallet. The transaction had 44 outputs, 21 of which were native Segregated Witness addresses, and those addresses received 99.97% of the funds.
According to The Block, the funds from those 44 addresses have been reportedly since moved to seven addresses, six of which hold 1,060.6 BTC, while one holds 707.1 BTC. Previously, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing firm Confirm had reported that its analysis showed how 1,227 BTC were moved to two new addresses, one holding 707 coins, while the other one 520.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhaodevoted his live AMA on Twitter yesterday to address community concerns in the wake of the hack, also discussing the idea of a Bitcoin chain reorganization.
As Cointelegraph reported yesterday, eight people have been arrested in Spain for allegedly operating a money laundering scheme involving cryptocurrencies.
Earlier this week, famous American economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz reiterated his negative stance on cryptocurrencies, stating that he thinks “we should shut down the cryptocurrencies.”
Eric Rescorla has a blog post over at Mozilla about the technical details on the recent Firefox add-on outage. He covers the background of how they use certificates, how they tried to mitigate the damage from the outage, how they worked to solve the problem without breaking more things, deployment of the replacement certificate, and why it took so long to fix.
Recently, Firefox had an incident in which most add-ons stopped working. This was due to an error on our end: we let one of the certificates used to sign add-ons expire which had the effect of disabling the vast majority of add-ons. Now that we've fixed the problem for most users and most people's add-ons are restored, I wanted to walk through the details of what happened, why, and how we repaired it.
There were a lot of work arounds discussed here and elsewhere, some of them quite stupid so, lastly, remember to undo any temporary work-arounds that might have been deployed last weekend.
Earlier on SN: In Firefox All Extensions Disabled Due to Expiration of Intermediate Signing Cert
Traces of five drugs found on 1000-year-old South American ritual kit
A 1000-year-old collection of drug paraphernalia found in a rock shelter in Bolivia features traces of five psychoactive chemicals, including cocaine and components of ayahuasca. This is the largest number of psychoactive compounds detected in a single archaeological find in South America, the researchers say. The plants they come from aren't native to the highland area where they were found, so they may have been brought there by trading networks or travelling shamans.
[...] Radiocarbon dating puts the date of the bag at AD 905 to 1170, roughly coinciding with the collapse of the Tiwanaku state, a once-powerful Andean civilisation that endured for around five centuries. Drugs are thought to have played an important role in Tiwanaku culture, possibly in healing ceremonies and religious rituals believed to enable contact with the dead.
Melanie Miller at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and her colleagues used mass spectrometry to analyse samples from the pouch and plant stems. They detected five psychoactive compounds: cocaine, benzoylecgonine (BZE), bufotenine, harmine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
Also at Berkeley News, Science Magazine, National Geographic, and ScienceAlert.
Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1902174116) (DX)
From APA
Anger may be more harmful to an older person's physical health than sadness, potentially increasing inflammation, which is associated with such chronic illnesses as heart disease, arthritis and cancer, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
"As most people age, they simply cannot do the activities they once did, or they may experience the loss of a spouse or a decline in their physical mobility and they can become angry," said Meaghan A. Barlow, MA, of Concordia University, lead author of the study, which was published in Psychology and Aging. "Our study showed that anger can lead to the development of chronic illnesses, whereas sadness did not."
Barlow and her co-authors examined whether anger and sadness contributed to inflammation, an immune response by the body to perceived threats, such as infection or tissue damage. While inflammation in general helps protect the body and assists in healing, long-lasting inflammation can lead to chronic illnesses in old age, according to the authors.
[...] "If we better understand which negative emotions are harmful, not harmful or even beneficial to older people, we can teach them how to cope with loss in a healthy way," said Barlow. "This may help them let go of their anger."
"Is Anger, but Not Sadness, Associated With Chronic Inflammation and Illness in Older Adulthood?" by Meaghan A. Barlow, MA, Carsten Wrosch, PhD, Jean-Philippe Gouin, PhD, Concordia University, and Ute Kunzmann, PhD, University of Leipzig. Psychology and Aging. Published May 9, 2019.
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956_
Red faces after discovery $2.3bn worth of currency has a misprint of the word responsibility in banknote's 'micro-text'
46 million of Australia's new $50 notes have been printed with a typo, the Reserve Bank has confirmed.
The "new and improved" $50 banknote was rolled out in October last year, with a host of new technologies designed to improve accessibility and prevent counterfeiting.
But the yellow note also contains a typo that misspells the word "responsibility".
The note features the Indigenous writer and inventor David Unaipon on one side, and Edith Cowan, Australia's first female member of parliament, on the other – as it has since 1995.
The RBA has printed "micro-text" on the note with excerpts of Unaipon's book, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, and Cowan's first speech to parliament.
The small error occurred on Cowan's side, in the text of her speech.
"It is a great responsibilty [sic] to be the only woman here, and I want to emphasise the necessity which exists for other women being here," it says.
Also at Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and The New York Times.
Coca-Cola struck agreements to fund health studies at several public universities that gave the beverage maker the ability to review and kill studies it didn't like, according to a new report from the University of Cambridge.
Cambridge's Department of Politics and International Studies discovered Coke's demands while examining research funding agreements between private corporations and public institutions. It reviewed some 87,000 documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Its report, released Tuesday, said Coke retained the right to "quash studies progressing unfavorably" or "pressure researchers using the threat of termination" in at least five agreements with various academic institutions between 2015 and 2016.
"It's a playbook from Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. We looked to see if this is something that can happen with Big Food," said Dr. Sarah Steele, a policy researcher from Cambridge and lead author of the study, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Health Policy.
Submitted via IRC for AzumaHazuki
The Earthworm Jim franchise is coming back from the dead. Four games starring the cartoonish earthworm were released in the 1990s, but if you don’t count HD remakes, it’s been two decades since a new title was added.
Now the original team behind Earthworm Jim is back together and working on a new title.
The only catch? You won’t be able to play it on a PC, PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch. It’ll be an Intellivision Amico exclusive.
Wait… a what?
The Intellivision Amico is a new game console expected to hit the streets in late 2020 for a price somewhere between $150 and $180.
First unannounced last year, the new console is an unusual take on the retro gaming craze. While Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and SNK are all releasing cheap, tiny replicas of their classic game systems with a bundle of games pre-loaded, the Amico comes from a startup that now owns the rights to the Intellivision name. And while you’ll be able to play some classic games on the system, the developers have also promised to offer new titles and updated versions of classics.
We knew that there would be new versions of Lode Runner, Pong, and ToeJam and Earl. Now it looks like we can add a brand new Earthworm Jim game to the list.
Games are expected to sell for between $3 and $8, be family-friendly, and… lack 3D graphics. The Intellivision Amico is a 2D-only console, which makes platformers like Earthworm Jim a good fit.
From ieee
Female IEEE members say they face significant discrimination in the workplace, including demeaning comments, inappropriate job-interview questions, and exclusion from networking events and important business meetings.
Those were among the most common negative experiences reported by more than 4,500 members—associate member grade and above—from around the world who answered a survey IEEE conducted in 2017. The results were released last year.
Almost half of those surveyed worked in academia, and about 30 percent were from private industry. The rest worked for governmental or nonprofit institutions, or were graduate students or self-employed. The majority of respondents (65 percent) lived outside the United States.
Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser
SpaceX hits new Falcon 9 reusability milestone, retracts all four landing legs
SpaceX appears to have selected Falcon 9 B1056 to become the first booster to have all four landing legs retracted and stowed. While relatively minor in the scope full Falcon 9 booster reuse, in-situ leg retraction could save SpaceX days of recovery and preflight work, a big help for truly rapid reusability.
A handful of prior retraction attempts have been made on Block 5 boosters but unknown issues prevented the process from taking hold. With some modifications to the legs and their deployment/retraction mechanisms, SpaceX seems to have solved those issues and is ready to graduate to a new level of rapid and easy rocket reusability. Teslarati photographer Tom Cross was on site in Port Canaveral, Florida when SpaceX began its first operational leg retractions and was able to capture photos and videos of the process.
The crux of the need for a relatively complex crane-and-jig method of leg retraction rests on SpaceX's landing leg design. Put simply, after rapidly deploying with a combination of gravity and hydraulics, Falcon 9 landing legs have no built-in way to return to their stowed state. Each of the four legs are quite large, weighing around 600 kg (1300 lb) and stretching about 10m (33 ft) from hinge to tip. They use an intricate telescoping carbon fiber deployment mechanism to give the legs enough strength to stand up to the forces of Falcon 9 booster landings.
Combined, the legs' size and telescoping mechanism makes the addition of an onboard retraction mechanism impractical. All the needed hardware would struggle to find a good place for installation and would quite literally be dead weight during launches and landings, stealing from Falcon 9/Heavy payload capacity and generally serving no purpose until a booster has been lifted off the ground with a giant crane.
Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser
FBI has seized Deep Dot Web and arrested its administrators – TechCrunch
FBI has seized Deep Dot Web and arrested its administrators Zack Whittaker@zackwhittaker / 2 days
The FBI have arrested several people suspected of involvement in running Deep Dot Web, a website for facilitating access to dark web sites and marketplaces.
Two suspects were arrested in Tel Aviv and Ashdod, according to Israel’s Tel Aviv Police, which confirmed the arrests in a statement earlier in the day. Local media first reported the arrests.
Arrests were also made in France, Germany and the Netherlands. A source familiar with the operation said a site administrator was arrested in Brazil.
Deep Dot Web is said to have made millions of dollars in commission by offering referral links to dark web marketplaces, accessible only at .onion domains over the Tor Network. Tor bounces internet traffic through a series of random relay servers dotted across the world, making it near-impossible to trace the user.
Its .onion site displayed a seized notice by the FBI, citing U.S. money laundering laws. Its clear web domain no longer loads.
Feds Seize DeepDotWeb for Taking Money From Black Market Sites
foxnews.com/tech/feds-seize-deepdotweb-for-taking-money-from-black-market-sites
DeepDotWeb was a popular resource to find underground websites, which can often only be visited via the Tor browser. The site itself also indexed the top black market platforms. But on Tuesday, DeepDotWeb's main page was replaced with a notice claiming the FBI had seized the site.
[...] It's not illegal to post a link to a black market site, even though they deal in goods such as drugs, stolen data, and child pornography. However, DeepDotWeb may have done more than simply function as a resource to help visitors navigate the dark web. Allegedly, the owners received bitcoin from black market sites in exchange for publishing links to them. According to Israeli police, the owners of DeepDotWeb had been raking in millions through their "affiliate marketing" business.
[Ed. Note - 5/10/19 14:24 UTC - I updated this story to fix a bad merge of two unrelated stories. My apologies. - Fnord666]
His barrel was made of resin-coated plywood, built by two French barrel makers. The measurements worked out to 10 feet long and 6.8 feet across. Savin hoped his new home would prove sturdy enough to handle orca attacks.
The Frenchman got an assist from JCOMMOPS, an international marine observatory, which provided him with markers to drop off at various parts of the sea to help study ocean currents.
Though his voyage lasted 128 days, it was mostly unremarkable. He posted updates on Facebook and told a French news site near the end of his journey that he had had just eight difficult nights in total, including a rough sea that forced him to leave the barrel and navigate difficult waters from outside his cozy confines. He also rarely encountered other humans.
That's one way to get away from it all.
See also: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/barrel-atlantic-crossing-arrival-scli-intl/index.html
IMDEA Nanoscience and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid has found for the first time experimental evidence that one-dimensional lattices with nanoscale periodicity can interact with the electrons from a bidimensional gas by spatially separating their different wavelengths by means of a physical phenomenon known as Bragg diffraction. This phenomenon is well-known for wave propagation in general and is responsible for the iridescent color observed upon illumination of a CD surface. Due to the wave-particle duality proposed by De Broglie in 1924, electrons also present a wave-like behavior and, thus, diffraction phenomena. Actually, the observation that low-energy free electrons undergo diffraction processes upon interaction with well-ordered atomic lattices on solid surfaces was the first experimental confirmation of the wave-particle duality. Bidimensional electrons bonded to solid surfaces, of course, also present wave-like behavior which could be directly visualized in the 90s by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy. However, the observation of Bragg diffraction in such systems had remained hitherto elusive.
In this new work, published in Physical Review Letters, the group headed by Roberto Otero built a diffraction grating with nanometer periodicity by self-assembly of organic molecules on a copper surface. Via low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, the researchers observed the stationary waves caused by the interference between electrons arriving at the diffraction grating and those reflected by it, which allowed the researchers to find experimental evidence for Bragg diffraction. Moreover, the authors found that their results not only reflect diffraction phenomena, but also that electrons prefer to interact with the lattice such that their incidence direction is reverted.
Broccoli sprout compound may restore brain chemistry imbalance linked to schizophrenia
In a series of recently published studies using animals and people, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have further characterized a set of chemical imbalances in the brains of people with schizophrenia related to the chemical glutamate. And they figured out how to tweak the level using a compound derived from broccoli sprouts.
They say the results advance the hope that supplementing with broccoli sprout extract, which contains high levels of the chemical sulforaphane, may someday provide a way to lower the doses of traditional antipsychotic medicines needed to manage schizophrenia symptoms, thus reducing unwanted side effects of the medicines.
Scizophrenia affects about 21 million people worldwide and the scientists indicate further research is needed to determine dosing, efficacy and safety of sulforaphane. They also cautioned against using this to infer benefit from unregulated over the counter sulforaphane supplements sold in health food stores.
NHS[*] Digital, the body responsible for NHS’s critical IT infrastructure, has made VMware Cloud on AWS available across the NHS.
NHS Digital can now essentially drag and drop its VMWare workloads and applications to the cloud, and combine them with AWS services without staff having to manage them any differently.
The public body said it has already started migrating workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS, and that it will eventually migrate “most” of its services from its data centres to AWS and Azure as part of a multicloud strategy.
Source: https://techerati.com/news-hub/vmware-nhs-hybrid-multicloud-cloud-aws/
[*] NHS: England's National Health Service.
"We are coming to a point in our history in which we need to start looking for more space," Han Admiraal, a civil engineer with over two decades of experience in underground space, told AFP on the sidelines of this year's World Tunnel Congress.
...
"Underground spaces could easily be used for growing crops," he said, as he toured the cavernous Bourbon Tunnel, dug deep under the Italian city of Naples as a potential escape route for King Ferdinand II of Bourbon after the 1848 riots.Scientific developments in areas like aquaponics—where vegetables and fish are farmed together—could help relieve the pressure on the food supply chain, and dramatically cut transport costs if such new farms were situated under cities.
Isn't excavation expensive?