mask.of.sanity writes “A working proof of concept has been developed for a dangerous vulnerability in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The hole stands out because many organizations use RDP to work from home or access cloud computing services. Only days after a patch was released, a bounty was offered for devising an exploit, and later a working proof of concept emerged. Chinese researchers were the first to reveal it, and security professionals have found it causes a blue screen of death in Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 machines. Many organizations won’t apply the patch and many suspect researchers are only days away from weaponizing the code.”

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RDP Proof-of-Concept Exploit Triggers Blue Screen of Death

It’s been a good week for fans of old-school PC RPGs. First, a team led by Interplay’s Brian Fargo found Kickstarter funding for a sequel to post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland. Then, a months-long countdown clock on BaldursGate.com expired to reveal the existence of Enhanced Edition updates for the first two games in the popular Dungeons and Dragons-inspired Baldur’s Gate series.

The new edition is a joint effort between Atari, Wizards of the Coast, and Beamdog, which previously released an HD update for third-person shooter MDK2. Few details are available on how exactly the new editions will change the series’ classic gameplay, but the development team, headed by BioWare veteran Trent Oster and including “original Baldur’s Gate developers,” has promised “to remain true to the spirit of the game.”

Crucial details like planned platforms and a release date are still unknown, but a Beamdog rep tells Joystiq to expect “regular announcements every week” regarding the game’s development. Beamdog’s Cameron Tofer also told GameSpy that a true Baldur’s Gate 3 sequel remains a “long term goal” that might work as a future Kickstarter project, but that such a sequel is definitely not in the works yet. Way to tease us, Tofer!

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Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition to give first two games a modern update

As a security professional who gets paid to hack into high-value networks, Mark Wuergler often gets a boost when his targets use smartphones, especially when the device happens to be an iPhone that regularly connects to Wi-Fi networks.

That’s because the iPhone is the only smartphone he knows of that transmits to anyone within range the unique identifiers of the past three wireless access points the user has logged into. He can then use off-the-shelf hardware to passively retrieve the routers’ MAC (media access control) addresses and look them up in databases such as Google Location Services and the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine. By allowing him to pinpoint the precise location of the wireless network, iPhones give him a quick leg-up when performing reconnaissance on prospective marks.

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Loose-lipped iPhones top the list of smartphones exploited by hacker

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Google is giving its search formula a makeover that’s “among…

Our view of the Universe just grew quite a bit more detailed as NASA JPL released the compendium of results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer orbital telescope. WISE was launched into a 525 km orbit on December 14, 2009 and gathered data until the WISE team ran out of funding on February 17, 2011.

With hardware over 1,000 times more sensitive than prior infrared space surveys, WISE surveyed 99 percent of the sky at 4 different wavelengths. Over 15 terabytes of data and 2.7 million images revealed 560 million stars, galaxies, comets, asteroids, and various other objects too cool or red-shifted to show up in anything but the infrared. Astronomers saw Y-dwarfs for the first time, which are white dwarf stars that have become nearly invisible as they cooled. The first Earth trojan asteroid also revealed itself to WISE—it scouts Earth’s orbit 60 degrees ahead of us around the Sun.

Our view of the solar system also grew quite a bit more detailed, as WISE identified or confirmed over 90 precent of the Near Earth Asteroids. One thing WISE was not able to do was see very much in the Kuiper belt; that task and many others remain for the James Webb Space Telescope now scheduled to be launched in 2018. The JWST will be several times more sensitive yet.

Berkeley University has published many WISE images as they become available, and Cal Tech hosts JPL’s WISE website.

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The sky just swelled to contain over 560 million objects from the new WISE mission catalog

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A guinea pig in Rosyth, Fife, Scotland, named Truffles took a leap into the record books in front of Guinness-appointed witnesses, his 13-year-old owner Chloe Macari, and her scout troop. Truffles jumped for neither fame nor fortune, but for his favorite snack, cucumber. The jump was measured at 30 centimeters, which was 10 centimeters more than the previous record set in 2009. When Macari learned of the 2009 record, she knew her guinea pig could jump further, and petitioned Guinness officials for a chance to prove it. Truffles now goes into the record book, and Macari earned credit toward a community events scout badge. Link -via Arbroath

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World Record Guinea Pig Jump

Illustrator Caldwell Tanner has created some colorful travel posters for locations familiar to lazy people. So, now you can feel like you do all kinds of traveling every day, even though you rarely leave your house!

Who needs fresh air and sunshine when you’ve got the arctic chill of the refrigerator and the rainbow waterfall of infinite pages that is the glorious interwebs?

Link –via Rampaged Reality

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Travel Posters For Lazy People

The TSA has announced a new program rolling out at a few airports that allows selected customers to skip the security lines by checking in at a kiosk and going through a nominal screening, but only after they’ve paid a $100 application fee and been approved through a background check. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Transportation Security Administration is rolling out expedited screening at big airports called “Precheck.” It has special lanes for background-checked travelers, who can keep their shoes, belt and jacket on, leave laptops and liquids in carry-on bags and walk through a metal detector rather than a full-body scan. The process, now at two airlines and nine airports, is much like how screenings worked before the Sept. 11 attacks.

To qualify, frequent fliers must meet undisclosed TSA criteria and get invited in by the airlines. There is also a backdoor in. Approved travelers who are in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s “Global Entry” program can transfer into Precheck using their Global Entry number.

I can’t quite decide whether this is the TSA finally getting their shit together to put things back to normal with some intelligent screening practices that inexplicably can’t be covered by the same budget that bought all those scanners, or if it’s boldly admitting to the world that it’s all been a horrific charade. Let’s see what the TSA blog has to say about it:

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TSA Precheck: $100 application fee to skip the song and dance