Wikimedia Hundreds of thousands of websites could be endangered by publicly available attack code exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Plesk control panel . This particular vulnerability gives hackers control of the server it runs on according to security researchers. The code-execution vulnerability affects default versions 8.6, 9.0, 9.2, 9.3, and 9.5.4 of Plesk running on the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, a configuration used by more than 360,000 websites . Plesk running on Windows and other types of Unix haven’t been tested to see if those configurations are vulnerable as well. The exploit code was released Wednesday on the Full-Disclosure mailing list by “kingcope,” a pseudonymous security researcher who has frequented the forum for years. He has a proven track record for developing reliable exploits. “This vulnerability has a high severity rating,” kingcope wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “An attacker can use this exploit to get a command line shell remotely with the privileges of the configured Apache user.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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More than 360,000 Apache websites imperiled by critical Plesk vulnerability
David M. Patrick has accidentally re-invented the wheel. The California-based inventor was toying around with six short, curved lengths of cable that he had connected into a sort of helical loop–and then he accidentally dropped it. What he observed next was surprising: The loop began to roll… and roll… and roll. It was a self-balancing wheel. Even stranger was that no one expected it to roll; Patrick’s loop actually looks square when it is rolling. A lifelong skater, Patrick then prototyped a skateboard wheel based on his design, this one comprised of side-by-side helical coils. He call it the Shark Wheel : (more…) 
Etherwalk writes “Huang Chengqing, China’s top internet security official, alleged that cyberattacks on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China on the U.S. ‘We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it’s not helpful in solving the problem.’ Huang, however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington should extend the same courtesy. ‘They advocated cases that they never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of thought to solve problems.’ In response to the recent theft of U.S. military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is worthy of Captain Hammer: ‘Even following the general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked to the Internet.'” A few experts think China’s more cooperative attitude has come about precisely because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Pandora, one of our favorite streaming music services , unveiled a new browser-based interface for TVs , starting with the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Both consoles will get semi-native apps with streaming, rating, and station search. You can get it for your console here . [via TechCrunch ] Read more… 
