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chicksdaddy writes "A presentation at the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway (slides), has moved the goalposts on password cracking yet again. Speaking on Monday, researcher Jeremi Gosney (a.k.a epixoip) demonstrated a rig that leveraged the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework and a technology known as Virtual Open Cluster (VCL) to run the HashCat password cracking program across a cluster of five, 4U servers equipped with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs communicating at 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps over Infiniband switched fabric. Gosney's system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft's LM and NTLM, obsolete. In a test, the researcher's system was able to generate 348 billion NTLM password hash checks per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using LM for example, would fall in just six minutes, said Per Thorsheim, organizer of the Passwords^12 Conference. For some context: In June, Poul-Henning Kamp, creator of the md5crypt() function used by FreeBSD and other, Linux-based operating systems, was forced to acknowledge that the hashing function is no longer suitable for production use — a victim of GPU-powered systems that could perform 'close to 1 million checks per second on COTS (commercial off the shelf) GPU hardware,' he wrote. Gosney's cluster cranks out more than 77 million brute force attempts per second against MD5crypt." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows Phone 8 is a roaring success! That is if you ask the platform's Senior Director, Todd Brix, who tweeted today that developer revenues and downloads have doubled since its launch in November. While this sounds all good, what does it really mean? Back in June, the former Windows Phone Marketplace surpassed 100,000 published apps . To further gauge the platform's progress, Nokia recently announced that the Windows Phone Store now has over 120,000 apps, with 46 of the top 50 iOS and Android applications being available for WP8. While today's vague declaration of success didn't reveal any specific numbers, a 20 percent software increase in under six months is definitely something to smile about. As much as we'd like to slap Microsoft a high-five, we'll have to save our jubilation until we get a little something more concrete -- hopefully a set of official statistics will Surface sooner than later. Filed under: Software , Mobile , Microsoft Comments Source: Todd Brix (Twitter) , Nokia

xclr8r writes "A technique to use fiber optics to adjust microscopic particles has been developed. 'Rather than an actual physical device that wraps around a cell or other microscopic particle to apply rotational force, the spanner (the British term for a wrench) is created when two laser beams — emitted by a pair of optical fibers — strike opposite sides of the microscopic object, trapping and holding it in place. By slightly offsetting the fibers, the beams can impart a small twisting force, causing the object to rotate in place. It is possible to create rotation along any axis and in any direction, depending on the positioning of the fibers.' Applications of this technology can be used in a number of ways, including cancer research. This technology could be used to actually manipulate DNA. Associate Professor of Physics Samarendra Mohanty states that macroscale applications are a possibility, including 'direct conversion of solar energy to mechanical energy,' or possibly using it to 'simulate an environment in which photons radiated from the sun could propel the reflective motors in solar sails, a promising future technology for deep-space travel.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A week or so ago I decide to relearn hiragana and katakana (Japanese syllabaries), which I'd completely forgotten. I loaded a hiragana flashcard set onto iAnki (read Gary Wolf's excellent Wired article about the guy who invented the memory technique that iAnki employs) and went to work. Progress was brutally slow. I looked around the iTunes store and came across Dr. Moku's Hiragana Mnemonics . It presents each character as an appealing and memorable cartoon - a rabbit eyeing a carrot, a dude with food, a farting cow. Each flashcard is a different color (to "refresh your brain" with each new character). Thirty minutes later I had memorized all 46 hiragana. Now my 9-year-old is learning them, and having a lot of fun. (of course, learning to write hiragana is going to take much more time). Now it's time for Dr. Moku's Katakana Mnemonics .

Way back at AU 2009, Zebra Imaging's holographic prints blew us (and you, judging by the hit counts) away. Here in 2012 they're using Autodesk's 123D Catch to capture footage for their jaw-dropping technology, like the nutty 3D family portrait you'll see in this video: (more...)

MrSeb writes "In its continuing mission to build a 'Wiki Weapon,' Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 and tested it to failure. The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that's quite impressive. And hey, it's a plastic gun. Slashdot first covered 3D-printed guns back in July. The Defense Distributed group sprung up soon after, with the purpose of creating an open-source gun — a Wiki Weapon — that can be downloaded from the internet and printed out. The Defense Distributed manifesto mainly quotes a bunch of historical figures who supported the right to bear arms. DefDist (its nickname) is seeking a gun manufacturing license from the ATF, but so far the feds haven't responded. Unperturbed, DefDist started down the road by renting an advanced 3D printing machine from Stratasys — but when the company found out what its machine was being used for, it was repossessed. DefDist has now obtained a 3D printer from Objet, which seemingly has a more libertarian mindset. The group then downloaded HaveBlue's original AR-15 lower receiver from Thingiverse, printed it out on the Objet printer using ABS-like Digital Material, screwed it into an AR-57 upper receiver, loaded up some FN 5.7x28mm ammo, and headed to the range. The DefDist team will now make various modifications to HaveBlue's design, such as making it more rugged and improving the trigger guard, and then upload the new design to Thingiverse." Sensible ammo choice; 5.7x28mm produces less recoil than the AR-15's conventional 5.56mm. I wonder how many of the upper's components, too, can one day be readily replaced with home-printable parts — for AR-15 style rifles, the upper assembly is where the gun's barrel lives, while the lower assembly (the part printed and tested here) is the legally controlled part of the firearm. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Besides greater capacities, faster transfer speeds, and novel designs, there hasn't been much recent innovation with USB flash drives. Which is why the Paketta from King Jim is such a welcome break. With built-in Wi-Fi B, G, N hardware it can wirelessly broadcast its contents to PCs and mobile devices. More »

Enlarge Net Marketshare November saw Firefox climb back up above 20 percent, Internet Explorer grow further still, and Chrome apparently suffer a surprisingly sharp drop. Enlarge Net Marketshare Enlarge Net Marketshare Internet Explorer was up 0.63 points at 54.76 percent, its highest level since October 2011. Firefox was up 0.45 points to 20.44 percent, all but erasing the last six month's losses. Chrome, surprisingly, was down a whopping 1.31 points to 17.24 percent, its lowest level since September 2011. We've asked Net Applications, the source we use for browser market share data, if it has made any change in its data collection that might account for this large Chrome drop. The company attributed this in part to the exclusion of Chrome's pre-rendering data. It estimates that 11.1 percent of all Chrome pageviews are a result of pre-rendering (where Chrome renders pages that aren't currently visible just in case the user wants to see them) and accordingly excluded this from its figures. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Long hailed as one of the safest car producers in the world, Volvo hopes to retain that reputation by introducing vehicles that can avoid passenger injuries on their own by the year 2020. Its plans hinge on eliminating the largest cause of road accidents -- the drivers themselves. The head of development for the program is convinced that driver-less cars are the future and that Volvo will be the first one there. The main technology underpinning Volvo's autonomous automobiles is wireless internet, which would enable each car to be assigned a certain point on the road and give different vehicles the ability to interact with each other. The company is preparing to release an initial batch of autonomous vehicles, capable of speeds of up to 31 miles per hour, in 2014. We know from the SARTRE project that the automaker has been able to achieve autonomous speeds of 53 miles per hour in traffic for long distances, though they aren't disclosing when those higher-speed prototypes would be publicly available. Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: Autopia (Wired) Source: Driver's Seat (WSJ)

New submitter Nemo the Magnificent writes "Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore's Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn't happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a 'large project at Microsoft' have written 'several million lines of code' testing out the resulting 'safe parallelism.'" The paper is a good read if you're into compilers and functional programming. The key to operation is adding permissions to reference types allowing you to declare normal references, read-only references to mutable objects, references to globally immutable objects, and references to isolated clusters of objects. With that information, the compiler is able to prove that chunks of code can safely be run in parallel. Unlike many other approaches, it doesn't require that your program be purely functional either. Read more of this story at Slashdot.