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The US Federal Bureau of Investigation may have seized the Silk Road and sold off its horde of ill-gotten Bitcoin , but the case isn't over yet -- the dark web site's creator still has to face trial. The defense of Ross Ulbricht, the man allegedly behind the Silk Road, is doing its best to discredit the FBI's evidence; specifically, its accusing the bureau of sniffing out Silk Road server's location through illegal means. The FBI says that couldn't be further from the truth. In a court rebuttal, the FBI claims that the IP address of the server was "'leaking' from the site due to an apparent misconfiguration of the user login interface by the site administrator." Basically, FBI officials exploited a glitch to get the server to cough up its hidden location. Officials found that the login page could be coaxed into producing an IP address that didn't match TOR standards. When this address was used in a non-TOR browser, it produced an element of the login page, confirming that it represented the server's true location. If this rebuttal is accepted, it will dismiss the defense's accusations that the FBI used the NSA to illegally hack into the server to find its location. This would ensure that most of the FBI's evidence is admissible and possibly seal Ulbricht's fate. Check out the FBI's full rebuttal in the court document below. Silk Road Prosecution 4th Amendment Rebuttall Comments Source: Wired

Betamax: the punchline for over a decades-worth of VHS-center comedy bits and most format wars . However, Sony's Beta cassettes can still be bought in Japan. Just about. Sony's announced that it's finally, finally, finally stop selling the cassettes. No need to rush to Tokyo just yet, as you still have until next March to buy-up all the Betamax supplies you'll never need -- including a cleaning tape. It's also dropping its MicroMV camcorder tapes In a bid to... make space in the warehouse, we guess. Image credit: SSPL via Getty Images Source: Sony (Japanese)

Have you been stockpiling bitcoin to go on a Steam shopping spree ? You'll need to change your plans. Valve has stopped accepting bitcoin due to a combination of high transaction costs (up from 20 cents in the beginning to $20) and "volatility" in the cryptocurrency's value. While the virtual cash has never been especially stable, its worth has taken a roller coaster ride over the past few months. Its value has been skyrocketing lately (one bitcoin is worth $13, 300 US as of this writing), but it has also crashed hard -- Valve cited a 25 percent drop "over a period of days" as an example. That fluctuation creates a huge problem if you make a purchase and it doesn't complete before the usual bitcoin price guarantee elapses, as you may have to pay an outstanding balance and a second transaction fee. Valve isn't completely ruling out a return to bitcoin in the future, although it's clear that won't happen unless bitcoin settles down. There's no mention of opening the door to Ethereum and other digital currencies, either. And no matter what, this underscores a very real problem for cryptocurrency no matter the format. Retailers need predictable costs and payments to run their businesses, and they may be loathe to support technology like bitcoin if it leads to unpaid debts and unhappy customers. Via: Polygon Source: Steam Blog

Long before Nokia took up residence at Microsoft and became enamored with Windows Phone, the company had another Mobile OS to care for: Symbian . For awhile, it was the most widely used smartphone OS in the world, and according to a Finnish TV station, being its custodian was no easy task: in 2007 Nokia apparently paid several million euros to keep its encryption key private. MTV News (no, not that MTV ) reports that criminals threatened to release the encryption key into the wild, potentially opening the OS to attacks and malware by unsavory programmers. Naturally, Nokia contacted the police, hoping to catch the crooks when they attempted to collect their ransom in a Tampere parking lot. Sadly, something went wrong: after the criminals collected the untold millions, Police somehow lost track of them. The suspects, their encryption code and Nokia's bag of money were gone. MTV News and Reuters both indecently verified the blackmail with Finnish police, which is still considered an open case. These days, Symbian is a bit more open source -- but remember: once it was a big enough driving force in the mobile market to be held for ransom. Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , Nokia Comments Source: MTV News , Reuters

Enlarge / From the Department of Energy: "This photo shows the construction phase of a 16.5 MW DC solar farm built in Oxford, MA. This 130-acre property was previously known as the largest piggery in Massachusetts." (credit: Lucas Faria/ US Department of Energy ) On Tuesday, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that utility-grade solar panels have hit cost targets set for 2020 , three years ahead of schedule. Those targets reflect around $1 per watt and 6¢ per kilowatt-hour in Kansas City, the department’s mid-range yardstick for solar panel cost per unit of energy produced (New York is considered the high-cost end, and Phoenix, Arizona, which has much more sunlight than most other major cities in the country, reflects the low-cost end). Those prices don’t include an Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which makes solar panels even cheaper. The Energy Department said that the cost per watt was assessed in terms of total installed system costs for developers. That means the number is based on "the sales price paid to the installer; therefore, it includes profit in the cost of the hardware," according to a department presentation  (PDF). The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a DOE-funded lab that assesses solar panel cost, wrote that, compared to the first quarter in 2016 , the first quarter in 2017 saw a 29-percent decline in installed cost for utility-scale solar, which was attributed to lower photovoltaic module and inverter prices, better panel efficiency, and reduced labor costs. Despite the plummeting costs for utility-scale solar, costs for commercial and residential solar panels have not fallen quite as quickly—just 15 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Photographer Benny Lam spent several years documenting grim living conditions in Hong Kong where people live inside tiny "coffin cubicles" within illegally divided apartments. The images are grim glimpses of life in the city with the most expensive housing market in the world. The photo series is titled "Trapped." From National Geographic : Pushed out by soaring rents, tens of thousands of people have no other option than to inhabit squatter huts, sub-divided units where the kitchen and toilet merge, coffin cubicles, and cage homes, which are rooms measuring as small as 6’ x 2.5’ traditionally made of wire mesh. “From cooking to sleeping, all activities take place in these tiny spaces,” says Lam. To create the coffin cubicles a 400 square flat will be illegally divided by its owner to accommodate 20 double-decker beds, each costing about HK$2000 (over $250 USD) per month in rent. The space is too small to stand up in.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is planning to take on UPS and FedEx with a new shipping service named "Shipping with Amazon" (SWA). The new service will reportedly roll out in Los Angeles in the coming weeks. Ars Technica reports: Aside from first starting in LA, SWA will first serve third-party merchants that already sell on Amazon. The company plans to send drivers to pick up shipments from these businesses and deliver the packages for them. While shipping and delivery will mostly go through Amazon, anything outside of the retailer's reach will be given to the USPS and other shipping services for the "last mile" portion of the delivery. In the future, Amazon reportedly wants to open up SWA to businesses that aren't affiliated with the site -- meaning Amazon could ship and deliver packages from companies of all sizes. Amazon also believes it can compete with UPS and FedEx by making SWA more affordable for business customers, but its pricing structure hasn't been revealed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers in the UK and the US have taken human eggs in their most early stage and developed them to maturity in a lab for the first time. It's a big achievement that could open up new avenues for infertility treatment and give scientists a better understanding of how the egg development process works and how it can go wrong. While this has been done before in mice, experiments of which have resulted in live offspring, this is the first time it has been done with human eggs. The research team had previously developed a protocol wherein they could take eggs in later stages of development and bring them to maturity, and they expanded that protocol in an attempt to develop eggs from start to finish in the lab. They took samples of ovarian tissue from 10 women while they were undergoing caesarean section surgery and cultured sections of that tissue that have the ability to release an egg, structures known as follicles. The follicles were cultured in a multi-step procedure that allowed for eggs to develop. At the end of each step, follicles, and eventually eggs, that had successfully matured further were moved to the following step. The team initially isolated 87 follicles and by the end of the 21-day procedure, nine eggs reached a stage of maturity that would in theory allow them to be fertilized with sperm and develop into an embryo. While only 37 percent of the early-stage follicles resulted in a fully grown egg and only 10 percent achieved levels of maturity that could allow for reproduction, it's still an important step in the study of egg development, or oogenesis. Ali Abbara, an endocrinology senior lecturer at the Imperial College of London who wasn't involved with the study, told Reuters , "The technology remains at an early stage, and much more work is needed to make sure that the technique is safe and optimized before we ascertain whether these eggs remain normal during the process, and can be fertilized to form embryos that could lead to healthy babies." Evelyn Telfer, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the leader of the study, told Reuters that the team is now working on optimizing this process and evaluating how healthy the resulting eggs are. One next step is to try to fertilize the eggs with sperm to see if they can result in a viable embryo -- work that requires a licence that the team doesn't yet have. This work could help improve IVF treatments in the future and could particularly help girls with cancer. They typically have pieces of their ovaries removed and preserved prior to receiving cancer treatments that might damage their follicles. However, if there's a chance that the tissue has cancer cells, it can't be reimplanted later on. If doctors could mature those eggs outside of her body, those eggs could still be used without introducing risk to the woman. Additionally, in cases where women have a condition that prevents the development of their eggs, this type of research could help scientists understand why that happens. "There are several conditions in which women lose their eggs much earlier in life, or they don't grow, " Telfer told New Scientist . "If we could understand the process...we could develop treatments for that." The research was published in Molecular Human Reproduction . Via: Reuters Source: Molecular Human Reproduction

János Pálinkás Forums software maker vBulletin has been breached by hackers who got access to customer password data and other personal information, in a compromise that has heightened speculation there may be a critical vulnerability in the widely used program that threatens websites that use it. "Very recently, our security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of forum user information, possibly including your password," vBulletin Technical Support Lead Wayne Luke wrote in a post published Friday evening . "Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We have taken the precaution of resetting your account password." The warning came three days after user forums for MacRumors—itself a user of vBulletin—suffered a security breach that exposed cryptographically hashed passwords for more than 860,000 users . When describing the attack, MacRumors Editorial Director Arnold Kim said the compromise in many ways resembled the July hack of the Ubuntu user forums , which also ran on vBulletin. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

darthcamaro writes: Apparently YouTube isn't the only site that is draining CPU power with unauthorized cryptocurrency miners. A water utility provider in Europe is literally being drained of its CPU power via an cryptojacking attack that was undetected for three weeks. eWeek reports: "At this point, Radiflow's (the security firm that discovered the cryptocurrency mining malware) investigation indicates that the cryptocurrency mining malware was likely downloaded from a malicious advertising site. As such, the theory that Radiflow CTO Yehonatan Kfir has is that an operator at the water utility was able to open a web browser and clicked on an advertising link that led the mining code being installed on the system. The actual system that first got infected is what is known as a Human Machine Interface (HMI) to the SCADA network and it was running the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. Radiflow's CEO, Ilan Barda, noted that many SCADA environments still have Windows XP systems deployed as operators tend to be very slow to update their operating systems." Radiflow doesn't know how much Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency was mined by the malware, but a recent report from Cisco's Talos research group revealed that some of the top un-authorized cryptocurrency campaigns generate over a million dollars per year. The average system would generate nearly $200, 000 per year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.