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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Australian man who claimed to have invented cryptocurrency bitcoin has been ordered to hand over half of his alleged bitcoin holdings, reported to be worth up to $5bn.

The IT security consultant Craig Wright, 49, was sued by the estate of David Kleiman, a programmer who died in 2013, for a share of Wright’s bitcoin haul over the pair’s involvement in the inception of the cryptocurrency from 2009 to 2013.

Kleiman’s estate alleges Wright and Kleiman were partners, and therefore his family is entitled to a share of the bitcoin that was mined by the pair in that time. Wright denies there was a partnership.

A US district court in Florida on Tuesday ruled that half of the bitcoin mined and half of the intellectual property held by Wright from that time belongs to Kleiman.

One issue is it is not known exactly how much bitcoin Wright holds. It has been claimed that the Kleiman estate could get anywhere between 410,000 and 500,000 bitcoin, putting the value at between A$6.1bn and A$7.4bn as of Wednesday.

Wright claimed to the court that he couldn’t access the bitcoin because he doesn’t have a list of the public addresses of that bitcoin. He claimed in 2011, after seeing the cryptocurrency had begun to be associated with drug dealers and human traffickers, he put the bitcoin he mined in 2009 and 2010 into an encrypted file and into a blind trust. The encrypted key was divided into multiple key slices, and the key slices were given to Kleiman who distributed them to people through the trust.

[...] In the judgment, Judge Bruce Reinhart said Wright had not proved he could not comply and obtain the bitcoin. He said Wright made inconsistent statements and the whole story was “inconceivable” that he’d had a Dr Frankenstein-like revelation when his creation “turned to evil”.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

In a growing number of online activities, bots are the main means of interaction. Online shopping is increasingly one of those areas. Vice has an interview with someone who built their own bot in order to compete against the other bots when buying online, just to have a chance at making a purchase for sought after items.

A tool for beating others to buying the items you want consists of three main components, finalphoenix explained. A monitoring bot, which scouts the target websites for new items; an account creation part, which will make a load of accounts on the site so you have a higher chance of pushing through the crowd as you control more of it; and a purchase bot, the part that actually orders and pays for your item. Users will also need to get some server space to run their bots.

Hiding from the clothes websites that you're using a bot is a bit more complicated; companies will likely ban you if they suspect you're scraping their website. Here, buyers need to use different accounts, proxies to route their traffic, and other technical means as workarounds.

Earlier on SN:
Facebook and CMU's AI Poker Bot Beat Five Pros at Once
TrickBot Malware Learns How to Spam -- Ensnares 250M Email Addresses
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique for measuring speed and distance in indoor environments, which could be used to improve navigation technologies for robots, drones -- or pedestrians trying to find their way around an airport. The technique uses a novel combination of Wi-Fi signals and accelerometer technology to track devices in near-real time.

"We call our approach Wi-Fi-assisted Inertial Odometry (WIO)," says Raghav Venkatnarayan, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State. "WIO uses Wi-Fi as a velocity sensor to accurately track how far something has moved. Think of it as sonar, but using radio waves, rather than sound waves."

"We created WIO to work in conjunction with a device's IMU^*, correcting any errors and improving the accuracy of speed and distance calculations," says Muhammad Shahzad, co-corresponding author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State. "This improvement in accuracy should also improve the calculations regarding a device's precise location in any indoor environment where there is a Wi-Fi signal."

[...] "We envision WIO as having applications in everything from indoor navigational tools to fitness tracking to interactive gaming," Venkatnarayan says.

"We are currently working with Sony to further improve WIO's accuracy, with an eye toward incorporating the software into off-the-shelf technologies," says Shahzad.

^*Inertial Measurement Units

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Antivirus maker Avast and the French National Gendarmerie announced today that they've taken down the backend infrastructure of the Retadup malware gang.

Furthermore, as a result of gaining access to this infrastructure, Avast and French authorities used the criminal gang's command and control (C&C) servers to instruct the Retadup malware to delete itself from infected computers, effectively disinfecting over 850,000 Windows systems without users having to do anything.

The antivirus maker said that all of this was possible after its malware analysts began looking into the malware with a fine comb back in March.

Avast researchers discovered a design flaw in the C&C server communications protocol that could allow them to instruct the malware to delete itself.

Since the Retadup malware's C&C servers were located in France, Avast approached French authorities, who agreed to help, and seized the crooks' servers.

Once Avast and French officials had the Retadup servers in their hands, they replaced the malicious ones with copies that instructed any infected host which connected to the server to delete itself.

[...] No arrests have been made in this case; however, Avast believes they've tracked the malware's creator to a Twitter account who bragged about Retadup when the first reports emerged online about its activity back in 2017.

[...] French authorities also received help from the FBI after Avast found that some parts of the Retadup infrastructure was also hosted in the US. Those servers have also been taken down and Avast said the Retadup creators lost complete control over their botnet on July 8, after the FBI intervened.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX's Starhopper has successfully completed a 150-meter test hop. Due to two orbital prototypes of Starship already nearing completion, Starhopper will not fly again, and will instead be converted into a vertical test stand for Raptor engine static fire tests:

SpaceX's Starhopper test vehicle – after finally gaining the required Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) permit for its highest hop yet – successfully carried out its test on Tuesday. The approval was required to pave the way for the 150 meter jump out of Boca Chica, Texas. Monday's attempt was scrubbed at T-0 due to an issue relating to the ignitor system on the SN6 Raptor, moving the next attempt to Tuesday which was successful.

[...] Currently, SpaceX has two full-scale prototypes nearing completion which are designated Starship Mk 1 and Starship Mk 2 respectively. The Mk 1 prototype is being built at the Boca Chica launch site while Mk 2 is being constructed in Cocoa, Florida.

Construction of both prototypes is progressing well, with the primary structures of the two vehicles nearing completion.

According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the two major sections of the vehicles (fairing and tanks) will soon be stacked together. From there, technicians will install the control fins, Raptor engines, and landing gear.

A presentation revealing new details about Starship has been tentatively rescheduled for mid-September.

Also at Ars Technica and Teslarati.

A video of the flight is available on YouTube.

Previously: SpaceX Launches CRS-18 Using Twice-Flown Booster, Starhopper Finally Flies
SpaceX 'Starhopper' Highest-Ever Test Flight Early Next Week
SpaceX's Starhopper 150-Meter Test... Scrubbed for Monday; Try Again Tuesday at Same Time [Updated]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own.

Scores of people born through artificial insemination have learned from DNA tests that their biological fathers were the doctors who performed the procedure.

Growing up in Nacogdoches, Tex., Eve Wiley learned at age 16 that she had been conceived through artificial insemination with donor sperm.

Her mother, Margo Williams, now 65, had sought help from Dr. Kim McMorries, telling him that her husband was infertile. She asked the doctor to locate a sperm donor. He told Mrs. Williams that he had found one through a sperm bank in California.

Mrs. Williams gave birth to a daughter, Eve. Now 32, Ms. Wiley is a stay-at-home mother in Dallas. In 2017 and 2018, like tens of millions of Americans, she took consumer DNA tests.

The results? Her biological father was not a sperm donor in California, as she had been told — Dr. McMorries was. The news left Ms. Wiley reeling.

"You build your whole life on your genetic identity, and that's the foundation," Ms. Wiley said. "But when those bottom bricks have been removed or altered, it can be devastating."

Through his attorney and the staff at his office, Dr. McMorries declined to comment.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Hostinger Data Breach Affects Almost 14 Million Customers

Hosting provider Hostinger today[8/25 -ed] announced that it reset the login passwords of 14 million of its customers following a recent security breach that enabled unauthorized access to a client database.

The incident occurred on August 23 and a third party was able to access usernames, hashed passwords, emails, first names, and IP addresses.

Hostinger offered more details about the incident in a blog post today, saying that an unauthorized party accessed one of their servers and was then able to obtain further access to customer information.

This was possible because the server had an authorization token that allowed access and privilege escalation to a RESTful API used for queries about customers and their accounts, including phone numbers and home address or business address.

"The API database, which includes our Client usernames, emails, hashed passwords, first names and IP addresses have been accessed by an unauthorized third party. The respective database table that holds client data, has information about 14 million Hostinger users."

The password reset action is a precautionary measure and Hostinger clients received the notification and details on how to regain access to their account.

Financial data and websites have not been impacted in any way, the company says. Payment for Hostinger services is done through a third-party provider and an internal investigation found that data regarding websites, domains, hosted emails "remained untouched and unaffected."

[...] One security feature that Hostinger plans to add in the near future is support for two-factor authentication (2FA). This would ensure that the username and password alone are not enough to gain access to an account.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Police to sell hacker's $1.1 million Bitcoin stash to compensate victims

UK police have seized over £920,000 ($1.1 million) worth of Bitcoin from a convicted hacker, which they plan to sell and compensate past victims.

The hacker, named Grant West, was arrested back in September 2017, and he pleaded guilty three months later in December. Earlier this year, a UK court sentenced West to 10 years and eight months in prison for multiple hacking and drug-related crimes.

Authorities said West used a tool called Sentry MBR to launch brute-force attacks against 17 companies, where he gained access to user accounts, which he later hijacked and resold on the dark web to other criminals.

London police said the list of victims included some high profile names such as Uber, Groupon, T Mobile, Just Eat, Asda, and Sainsburys; but also the likes of Ladbrokes, Argos, Nectar, AO.com, Coral Betting, Vitality, RS Feva Class Association 2017, the British Cardiovascular Society, Mighty Deals Limited, and M R Porter.

Authorities said West, who used the moniker of "Courvoisier," started trading stolen accounts on the dark web in March 2015, and made more than 47,000 sales before his arrest.

[...] He was arrested in the Ashcroft Caravan Park in Minster on the Isle of Sheppey following a years-long investigation authorities codenamed "Operation Draba." After his arrest and subsequent search of his trailer, authorities said they found £25,000 ($30,000), the drugs he was selling online, but also "a significant amount of bitcoins."

Now, Met Police have disclosed the Bitcoin sum they found, along with plans to use it to compensate victims.

Initially, West didn't want to give up his Bitcoin. However, the judge told him he'd spend an additional four years in prison if he didn't, according to a report from The Guardian.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3196

Tesla's latest wiring patent application: Things get faster and more redundant - Roadshow

Having an electronic component on your car break is generally pretty damned annoying. Not only do you have a nonfunctioning feature on your vehicle, but you have to either spend way too much time diagnosing the problem yourself or paying someone else to do it.

That problem becomes more severe if your car is driving itself and something happens to, say, one of its sensors. Current automotive wiring architectures don't really have provisions for redundancy, and the way that most manufacturers construct their wiring harnesses is pretty complicated.

Tesla thinks it's found a new way to do things with more redundancy without dramatically increasing complexity and has filed a patent application to prove it. What's even cooler is that Tesla's system would also boost the speed at which data is transferred throughout the vehicle, in theory at least, according to a report published Monday by Electrek.

[...] This isn't the first wiring architecture patent application that we've seen from the Big T recently. It filed an application earlier this year for a more modular wiring system that would simplify vehicle construction by using more modular subharnesses -- for example a wiring harness for all the components of a door with one connector going to the main body harness, rather than a bunch of discrete connectors.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

Protocol used by 630,000 devices can be abused for devastating DDoS attacks

Security researchers are sounding the alarm about the Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WS-DD, WSD, or WS-Discovery) protocol, which they say can be abused to launch pretty massive DDoS attacks.

ZDNet first learned that this protocol was being used to launch DDoS attacks back in May, but we decided not to publish anything about it, to avoid bringing unnecessary attention to a protocol that was ripe for abuse but was still flying under the radar.

However, during the recent month, multiple threat groups have started abusing the protocol, and WS-Discovery-based DDoS attacks have now become a weekly occurrence.

WS-Discovery is a multicast protocol that can be used on local networks to "discover" other nearby devices that communicate via a particular protocol or interface.

Most notably, the protocol is used to support inter-device discovery and communications via the SOAP messaging format, using UDP packets -- hence why it's sometimes referred to as SOAP-over-UDP.

WS-Discovery is not a common or well-known protocol, but it's been adopted by ONVIF, an industry group that promotes standardized interfaces for interoperability of networked products.

ONVIF members include Axis, Sony, Bosch, and others, who use ONVIF standards as the basis for their products. Since the mid-2010s, the group's standard has recommended the WS-Discovery protocol for device discovery as part of plug-and-play interoperability [page 9].

As part of this sustained standardization effort, the protocol has made it into a slew of products that include anything from IP cameras to printers, and from home appliances to DVRs. Currently, according to internet search engine BinaryEdge, there are now nearly 630,000 ONVIF-based devices that support the WS-Discovery protocol and are ripe for abuse.

Anonymous dude? writes:

https://www.thetechie.xyz/2019/08/datadog-files-to-go-public.html

Datadog, a New York-based cloud monitoring and analytics startup last valued at $640 million [Pitchbook data], has filed for an initial public offering (IPO). Datadog just unveiled its S-1 filing, joining the likes of WeWork, Cloudflare and SmileDirectClub, which also recently did the same. Datadog's S-1 filing shows $198 million 2018 revenues, up 96% from $101 million in 2017. For the first half of this year (ended June 30), Datadog recorded $153 million in revenue.

However, Datadog is not profitable, with losses of $2.6 million and $11 million in 2017 and 2018 respectively. In the first half of this year, Datadog recorded $13.4 million in losses.

[...] Datadog was founded in 2010, and launched its cloud infrastructure monitoring service two years after. The New York-based startup surpassed 100 customers in 2013, 1,000 in 2015 and 5,000 in 2017. Datadog estimates its total market opportunity to be $35 billion, according to its S-1 filing.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Water is everywhere on Earth, but maybe that just gives it more space to hide its secrets. Its latest surprise, Stanford researchers report Aug. 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that microscopic droplets of water spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide.

The discovery could pave the way for greener ways to produce the molecule, a common bleaching agent and disinfectant, said Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a professor of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

"Water is one of the most commonly found materials, and it's been studied for years and years and you would think that there was nothing more to learn about this molecule. But here's yet another surprise," said Zare, who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X.

The discovery was made serendipitously while Zare and his lab were studying a new, more efficient way to create gold nanostructures in tiny water droplets known as microdroplets. To make those structures, the team added an additional molecule called a reducing agent. As a control test, Zare suggested seeing if they could create gold nanostructures without the reducing agent. Theoretically that should have been impossible, but it worked anyway—hinting at an as yet undiscovered feature of microdroplet chemistry.

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-chemists-microdroplets-spontaneously-hydrogen-peroxide.html

First astrology and now homeopathy are starting to make sense after all.

Jae Kyoo Lee el al., "Spontaneous generation of hydrogen peroxide from aqueous microdroplets", PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911883116

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Brazil Says It Will Reject Millions in Amazon Aid Pledged at G7

Hours after leaders of some of the world's wealthiest countries pledged more than $22 million to help combat fires in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil's government angrily rejected the offer, in effect telling the other nations to mind their own business — only to later lay out potential terms for the aid's acceptance.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil expressed his ire in a series of Twitter posts on Monday, and specifically criticized and taunted President Emmanuel Macron of France, who had announced the aid package at the Group of 7 summit meeting. Their comments extended a verbal feud between the two leaders.

But early the next day, Mr. Bolsonaro offered possible terms for the acceptance of the aid package when he spoke to reporters in the capital, Brasília.

He said that if Mr. Macron withdrew "insults made to my person," and what Mr. Bolsonaro interpreted as insinuations that Brazil does not have sovereignty over the Amazon, he would reconsider.

[...][Mr. Bolsonaro later rejected the aid package offered by Group of 7 nations, citing Mr. Macron's remarks.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship

Under the heading, "Diversity Matters!" the website for the PHP Central Europe developer conference (PHP.CE) says, "PHP Central Europe Conference is committed to creating a conference that is as inclusive as possible."

Over the weekend, organizers of the conference, which had been scheduled for October 4-6 in Dresden, Germany, ended the event evermore after two scheduled speakers issued public statements that they would not be attending this year, citing concerns about the lack of diversity.

PHP.CE on Saturday posted a note on its website, stating "The conference has been cancelled and won't be continued*. Sorry for the inconvenience."

The asterisk points to three online posts as the reason for the decision. The first, a July 17 Tweet from Karl Hughes, CTO of educational consultancy The Graide Network, chastises the conference for a speaker list made up entirely of white men.

You can see how it was in 2018, including the list of speakers, presentation schedule, and a 9m41s "after-movie".

Original Submission

"Chocolate" writes:

Due to popular demand Blizzard has brought a new version of World of Warcraft online that closely resembles the original version: WoW Classic. Some players already have access, and the rest of the world can go queue.

Original Submission