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 So that flamethrower that Elon Musk teased The Boring Company would start selling after it ran out of its 50, 000 hats? Yeah, it’s real – and you can pre-order one now if you want need a ridiculous way to spend $500. Musk revealed the flamethrower on Saturday, after some digging tipped its existence late last week. The Boring Company Flamethrower is functional, too, as you can see… Read More

Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck just made history, and not in a good way. It has lost around $534 million worth of NEM tokens, one of the lesser-known cryptocurrencies, after its network was hacked on January 25th, 12:57pm EST. The attackers remained undetected for eight hours, giving them enough time to steal 523 million tokens kept in a "hot wallet, " a type of storage that's connected to the internet for easy spending. While the exact value of the stolen coins are unclear due to the ever-changing nature of cryptocurrency -- it's $400 million at the very least -- Coincheck might have already lost more than what Mt. Gox did a few years ago. Mt. Gox, which was also based in Shibuya like Coincheck, was the victim of another massive cryptocurrency theft back in 2014. It lost between $400 and $480 million from the heist, prompting Japan's legislators to pass a law to regulate bitcoin exchanges. Despite the comparable figures, Coincheck's hack didn't quite affect the market the way Mt. Gox did. Mt. Gox, after all, handled around 80 percent of Bitcoins back in the day when there weren't a lot of exchanges yet. Also, affected Mt. Gox users didn't get their money back. Coincheck suspended its trading and withdrawal for all cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, but the company promised not to run from its customers. It said it will use its own money to reimburse all 260, 000 affected users, though it didn't specify when it will start disbursing funds. Source: CoinDesk , BBC , Bloomberg

schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: In his hunt to locate Zuma, an amateur astronomer has discovered that a long-dead NASA satellite, designed to study the magnetosphere, has come back to life. IMAGE went dead in 2005, and though NASA thought it might come back to life after experiencing a total eclipse in 2007 that would force a reboot, no evidence of life was seen then. It now appears that the satellite came to life sometime between then and 2018, and was chattering away at Earth waiting for a response. NASA is now looking at what it must do to take control of the spacecraft and resume science operations. Zuma is the secret U.S. government payload that was launched by SpaceX earlier this month and reportedly lost. As for why Scott Tilley -- the amateur radio astronomer -- decided to have a look for the present of secret military satellites, Ars Technica reports that he apparently does this semi-regularly as a hobby and, in this case, was inspired by the Zuma satellite. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: A group of cyber-criminals created 28 fake ad agencies and bought over 1 billion ad views in 2017, which they used to deliver malicious ads that redirected unsuspecting users to tech support scams or sneaky pages peddling malware-laden software updates or software installers. The entire operation -- codenamed Zirconium -- appears to have started in February 2017, when the group started creating the fake ad agencies which later bought ad views from larger ad platforms. These fake ad agencies each had individual websites and even LinkedIn profiles for their fake CEOs. Their sole purpose was to interface with larger advertising platforms, appearing as legitimate businesses. Ad security company Confiant, the one who discovered this entire operation, says ads bought by this group reached 62% of ad-monetized websites on a weekly basis. All in all, Confiant believes that about 2.5 million users who've encountered Zirconium's malicious ads were redirected to a malicious site, with 95% of the victims being based in the U.S. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last December, Boring Company CEO Elon Musk promised to sell a Boring Company-branded flamethrower after selling 50, 000 Boring Company hats. Well, sure enough, 50, 000 hats were sold and Musk is delivering on his promise. The Verge reports: Mark this down as one of the promises Elon delivers on, apparently, because it looks like the Boring Company flamethrower is here. Redditors in a few SpaceX, Boring Company, and Musk-related subreddits noticed earlier this week that the URL "boringcompany.com/flamethrower" started redirecting to a page with a password box. And at least one user was able to guess the original password, too: "flame." (It's since been changed.) Behind that password was a shop page that looks just like the one for The Boring Company's hat. But instead of a $20 cap, they found a preorder prompt for a $600 flamethrower. "Prototype pictured above, " the listing reads. "Final production flamethrower will be better." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube was recently caught displaying ads that covertly leach off visitors' CPUs and electricity to generate digital currency on behalf of anonymous attackers, it was widely reported. From a report: Word of the abusive ads started no later than Tuesday, as people took to social media sites to complain their antivirus programs were detecting cryptocurrency mining code when they visited YouTube. The warnings came even when people changed the browser they were using, and the warnings seemed to be limited to times when users were on YouTube. On Friday, researchers with antivirus provider Trend Micro said the ads helped drive a more than three-fold spike in Web miner detections. They said the attackers behind the ads were abusing Google's DoubleClick ad platform to display them to YouTube visitors in select countries, including Japan, France, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain. The ads contain JavaScript that mines the digital coin known as Monero. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The announcement is more than a year old, but Dan Brown, of The Da Vinci Code fame, is paying €300,000 to have Amsterdam's Ritman Library digitize thousands of books about "alchemy, astrology, magic and theosophy." One particularly important text that will be digitized is the first English translation of the works of Jakob Böhme, a 17th-century German mystic. Says Esther Ritman, the library’s director and librarian, “When I show this book in the library, it’s like traveling in an entire new world.” Once the work is available online, she says, “We can take everyone along the journey of this book digitally.” The last update was a while back, though, with no updates. Previously: New documentary is a magic portal into a weird and wonderful library

A common misconception is that bitcoin transactions are anonymous. The truth is, unless you are very careful about covering your tracks, your bitcoin transactions can be connected to you. And the transaction records on bitcoin's public database (the blockchain) can never be changed or deleted, meaning they will forever be searchable by authorities or anyone else. Andy Greenberg of Wired reports that researchers were able to "connect someone's bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person's public account." [T]he Qatari researchers first collected dozens of bitcoin addresses used for donations and dealmaking by websites protected by the anonymity software Tor, run by everyone from WikiLeaks to the now-defunct Silk Road. Then they scraped thousands of more widely visible bitcoin addresses from the public accounts of users on Twitter and the popular bitcoin forum Bitcoin Talk. By merely searching for direct links between those two sets of addresses in the blockchain, they found more than 125 transactions made to those dark web sites' accounts — very likely with the intention of preserving the senders' anonymity — that they could easily link to public accounts. Among those, 46 were donations to WikiLeaks. More disturbingly, 22 were payments to the Silk Road. Though they don't reveal many personal details of those 22 individuals, the researchers say that some had publicly revealed their locations, ages, genders, email addresses, or even full names. (One user who fully identified himself was only a teenager at the time of the transactions.) And the 18 people whose Silk Road transactions were linked to Bitcoin Talk may be particularly vulnerable, since that forum has previously responded to subpoeanas demanding that it unmask a user's registration details or private messages. "You have irrefutable evidence mapping this profile to this hidden service," says Yazan Boshmaf, another of the study's authors.

The Roland TR-808 and TR-909 are iconic drum machines that powered a ton of the music from the '80s and '90s. While both hardware units were recently revived as the TR-08 and TR-09 , they haven't been officially emulated in software yet. That changes now as Roland announces VST and AU plugins for both of the iconic rhythm modules (along with a new SRX Orchestra virtual instrument set) as part of the company's Roland Cloud service. The TR-808 and TR-909 virtual instruments are full reproductions of the original hardware, according to Roland. The SRX Orchestra is the first one of the SRX series Expansion Library (from the 2000s) available as a software instrument. Roland Cloud will be a suite of high-resolution software synths and sampled instruments that musicians will be able to pull from while creating their own musical works. It sounds similar to what Adobe has done with its own photo and graphics-based Adobe Cloud . All three new additions are headed as updates to the Roland Cloud service starting in February of this year. Via: Fact Mag Source: Roland

Locke2005 shares a report from CNBC: Hackers stole several hundred million dollars' worth of a lesser-known cryptocurrency from a major Japanese exchange Friday. Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange's NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translate of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share on CryptoCompare. The stolen NEM coins were worth about 58 billion yen at the time of detection, or roughly $534.8 million, according to the exchange. Coincheck subsequently restricted withdrawals of all currencies, including yen, and trading of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin. Locke2005 adds, "That, my friends, is the prime reason why speculating in cryptocurrency is a bad idea!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.