Millions of accounts associated with video sharing site Dailymotion, one of the biggest video platforms in the world, have been stolen. From a ZDNet report: A hacker extracted 85.2 million unique email addresses and usernames from the company’s systems, but about one-in-five accounts — roughly 18.3 million– had associated passwords, which were scrambled with the bcrypt hashing function, making the passwords difficult to crack. The hack is believed to have been carried out on October 20 by a hacker, whose identity isn’t known, according to LeakedSource, a breach notification service, which obtained the data. Dailymotion launched in 2005, and is currently the 113rd most visited website in the world, according to Alexa rankings. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Day: December 5, 2016
Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs
Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don’t weigh a lot. An anonymous reader shares an article on Slashgear (edited): For streaming content, Netflix largely relies on H.264/AVC to reduce the bandwidth, but for downloading content, it uses VP9 encoding. VP9 can allow better quality videos for the same amount of data needed to download. The challenge is that VP9 isn’t supported by all streaming providers — it is supported on Android devices and via the Chrome browser. So to get around that lack of support on iOS, Netflix is offering downloads in H.264/AVC High whereas streams are encoded in H.264/AVC Main on such devices. Netflix chooses the optimal encoding format for each title on its service after finding, for instance, that animated films are easier to encode than live-action. Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs
Virginia State cops have blown a fortune on useless cellphone spying gear
Muckrock has been sending Freedom of Information requests to state police forces to find out how they’re using “cell-site simulators” (AKA IMSI catchers / Stingrays ), and they hit the motherlode with the Virginia State Police. (more…)
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Virginia State cops have blown a fortune on useless cellphone spying gear
Virgin Galactic returns to flight with its VSS Unity spacecraft
Virgin Galactic It has been a long road back from a fatal 2014 accident for Virgin Galactic, the splashy spaceship company founded by Sir Richard Branson to bring the masses into space. After its VSS Enterprise crashed into the Mojave Desert during a test flight, killing vehicle co-pilot Michael Alsbury, the company has had to redesign some key safety systems and rebuild its spacecraft. It revealed the VSS Unity in February. Since then Virgin Galactic has completed a series of ground tests and mating to the “mothership” aircraft, Eve. Following captive carry tests in September, the company performed its first glide test on Saturday, when VSS Unity was released at an altitude of about 15km. The spacecraft reached a velocity of mach 0.6 during its 10-minute descent back to the ground in California. It then made a safe landing at test facilities in Mojave. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Virgin Galactic returns to flight with its VSS Unity spacecraft
Amazon Go is a grocery store with no checkout lines
It looks like those rumors of Amazon convenience stores were true. The online shopping giant unveiled Amazon Go today , its spin on brick and mortar retail. It uses computer vision and a whole bunch of sensors to let you walk into a store, sign in with your Amazon app and leave without stopping for a checkout line. Amazon is calling it a “Just Walk Out Shopping” experience, a self-descriptive name if there ever was one. The company is starting out with a store in Seattle, but it’s clearly meant to serve as a model for other locations and retail stores. Developing…
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Amazon Go is a grocery store with no checkout lines
Crooks can guess Visa card details in six seconds by querying lots of websites at once
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwvjZGKwKvY In Does The Online Card Payment Landscape Unwittingly Facilitate Fraud? , a new paper in IEEE Security & Privacy , researchers from the University of Newcastle demonstrate a technique for guessing secruity details for credit-card numbers in six seconds — attackers spread their guesses out across many websites at once, so no website gets enough bad guesses to lock the card or trigger a fraud detection system. (more…)
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Crooks can guess Visa card details in six seconds by querying lots of websites at once
Virginia Police Spent $500K For An Ineffective Cellphone Surveillance System
Cell-site simulators can intercept phone calls and even provide locations (using GPS data). But Virginia’s state police force just revealed details about their actual use of the device — and it’s not pretty. Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: In 2014, the Virginia State Police spent $585, 265 on a specially modified Suburban outfitted with the latest and greatest in cell phone surveillance: the DRT 1183C, affectionately known as the DRTbox. But according to logs uncovered by public records website MuckRock, the pricey ride was only used 12 times — and only worked seven of those times. According to Virginia’s ACLU director, “each of the 12 uses cost almost $50, 000, and only 4 of them resulted in an arrest [raising] a significant question whether the more than half million dollars spent on the device and the vehicle…was a wise investment of public funds.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Virginia Police Spent $500K For An Ineffective Cellphone Surveillance System
Canonical Sues Cloud Provider Over ‘Unofficial’ Ubuntu Images
An anonymous reader quotes OStatic’s update on Canonical’s lawsuit against a cloud provider: Canonical posted Thursday that they’ve been in a dispute with “a European cloud provider” over the use of their own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers. Their implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical is worried something bad could happen and it’d reflect badly back on them… They said they’ve spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. Canonical feels they have no choice but to “take legal steps to remove these images.” They’re sure Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn’t be treated like this. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote in his blog post that Ubuntu is “the leading cloud OS, running most workloads in public clouds today, ” whereas these homegrown images “are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways… We hear about these issues all the time, because users assume there is a problem with Ubuntu on that cloud; users expect that ‘all things that claim to be Ubuntu are genuine’, and they have a right to expect that… “To count some of the ways we have seen home-grown images create operational and security nightmares for users: clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine; clouds have made changes that then blocked security updates for over a week… When things like this happen, users are left feeling let down. As the company behind Ubuntu, it falls to Canonical to take action.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Canonical Sues Cloud Provider Over ‘Unofficial’ Ubuntu Images
Brains can recover some ‘lost’ memories
For the longest while, researchers believed that you could only preserve a memory in your brain if the relevant neurons were active. However, it now looks like this isn’t always the case — and that could be a tremendous help to anyone suffering from short-term memory loss. Scientists have discovered that small jolts of electricity to the brain (specifically, a pulse of transcranial magnetic stimulation) can revive recent memories. Your mind can slow near-term memories down to a dormant state where they’re in the background, but remain ready to come back when necessary. You can’t apply this method to long-term memories (you likely need different techniques for that), so don’t expect to revisit your childhood with a zap to your head. However, the findings should improve our understanding of how the brain works — it’s already clear that memory is more complex than we thought. And in the long run, there’s a chance this could lead to treatments for Alzheimer’s and other conditions where regaining short-term memories could greatly improve a patient’s quality of life. Via: Motherboard Source: Science
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Brains can recover some ‘lost’ memories
Lisa From TSA Wants You to Pick Up Your Laptop, Thanks
In October and November, around 70 people left their laptops at a single airport security checkpoint at the Newark Airport. It’s not only the cheap stuff that’s gets abandoned—a fair amount of Macbooks are getting left behind as well. Read more…
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Lisa From TSA Wants You to Pick Up Your Laptop, Thanks