Day: December 23, 2016

Russians Used Malware On Android Devices To Track and Target Ukraine Artillery, Says Report

schwit1 quotes a report from Reuters: A hacking group linked to the Russian government and high-profile cyber attacks against Democrats during the U.S. presidential election likely used a malware implant on Android devices to track and target Ukrainian artillery units from late 2014 through 2016, according to a new report released Thursday. The malware was able to retrieve communications and some locational data from infected devices, intelligence that would have likely been used to strike against the artillery in support of pro-Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine, the report from cyber security firm CrowdStrike found. The hacking group, known commonly as Fancy Bear or APT 28, is believed by U.S. intelligence officials to work primarily on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. The implant leveraged a legitimate Android application developed by a Ukrainian artillery officer to process targeting data more quickly, CrowdStrike said. Its deployment “extends Russian cyber capabilities to the front lines of the battlefield, ” the report said, and “could have facilitated anticipatory awareness of Ukrainian artillery force troop movement, thus providing Russian forces with useful strategic planning information.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russians Used Malware On Android Devices To Track and Target Ukraine Artillery, Says Report

2016 MacBook Pro Fails To Receive a Recommendation From Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports has released its evaluation of the new MacBook Pro laptops, and it’s not good. The 2016 MacBook Pro is the first MacBook to fail to receive a recommendation from the nonprofit organization dedicated to unbiased product testing. 9to5Mac reports: In a post breaking down the decision not to recommend the new MacBook Pros, Consumer Reports explains that while the new models held up well in terms of display quality and performance, the battery life issues were too big of an issue to overlook. The organization tested three MacBook Pro variants: a 13-inch Touch Bar model, a 15-inch Touch Bar model, and a 13-inch model without the Touch Bar. The general consensus was that “MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next.” Consumer Reports explains that the 13-inch Touch Bar model saw battery life of 16 hours in one test and 3.75 hours in another, while the non-Touch Bar model maxed out at 19.5 hours, but also lasted just 4.5 hours in another test. The 15-inch model ranged from 18.5 hours to 8 hours. Generally, according to the report, it’s expected for battery life to vary from one trial to another by less than 5 percent, meaning that the battery life variances with the new MacBook Pro are very abnormal. Once that was completed, Consumer Reports experimented by conducting the same test using Chrome and “found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs.” While the organization can’t let that affect its final decision due to its protocol to only use the first-party browser, it’s something users may want to try. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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2016 MacBook Pro Fails To Receive a Recommendation From Consumer Reports

World’s First ‘Solar Panel Road’ Opens In France

The world’s first solar road has officially opened in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France. The road is 1 kilometer long and can generate enough electricity to power the street lights. The Verge reports: That might not sound very impressive for 30, 000 square feet of solar panels — and it kind of isn’t, especially for its $5.2 million price tag. The panels have been covered in a silicon-based resin that allows them to withstand the weight of passing big rigs, and if the road performs as expected, Royal wants to see solar panels installed across 1, 000 kilometers of French highway. There are numerous issues, however. For one, flat solar panels are less effective than the angled panels that are installed on roofs, and they’re also massively more expensive than traditional panels. Colas, the company that installed the road, hopes to reduce the cost of the panels going forward and it has around 100 solar panel road projects in progress around the world. Earlier this year, Solar Roadways partnered with the Missouri Department of Transportation to upgrade a small stretch of the historic Route 66 roadway with solar-powered panels. They too are facing the same seemingly insurmountable cost problems as Colas and the French. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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World’s First ‘Solar Panel Road’ Opens In France

Huge Fire Torches 140 Buildings in Japanese City

A large fire has engulfed scores of houses, shops, and other buildings in the Japanese coastal city of Itoigawa. The blaze, which started mid-morning local time, shows no sign of slowing, and fire crews are frantically working to put out the flames. Read more…

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Huge Fire Torches 140 Buildings in Japanese City

Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an experimental version of its Linux-based Pixel OS for Windows and Mac PCs. The OS, originally designed to run only on the Raspberry Pi hobby board, comes with the Chromium web browser and a suite of productivity and coding tools. “We asked ourselves one simple question: If we like Pixel so much, why ask people to buy Raspberry Pi hardware in order to run it?” founder Eben Upton wrote in a blog post . Built on top of Debian, the OS is light enough to run most old machines, provided you have at least 512MB of RAM. “Because we’re using the venerable i386 architecture variant it should run even on vintage machines like my ThinkPad X40 (above), ” Upton said. It’s easy to try out, but Upton urges you back up machines that may have valuable data. After downloading the image, you burn it either to a DVD or USB stick, then enable booting of those devices. You can normally do that by tweaking your PC’s BIOS or by holding the “C” key down when you boot up a Mac. From there, it’ll run the OS with no need to install anything. If you booted on a USB stick, you’ll get the option to run “with persistence, ” meaning any changes or files will stick for the next session. If you’d rather just play around and start fresh next time, you can run without persistence or reset it. As mentioned, you get a full suite of apps and a browser, but unlike with the Pi version, there’s no Minecraft or Wolfram Mathematica because of licensing issues. There are plenty of lightweight Linux distros for older PCs (including Debian itself), or you could use Neverware , which turns your old laptop into a Chromebook. However, the Pi Foundation supplies a lot of useful Linux apps with Pixel, and aims to make it as easy to use as possible. By porting it to desktop machines, Upton also feels “we can more easily see where [the operating system’s] weak points are and work to fix them [on the Pi].” The group thinks it could be a perfect for schools (where the Raspberry Pi already has a big foothold ) to help students learn programming and various apps. The idea is that they can learn at school, then using the persistent boot option, continue working at home with exactly the same setup. As mentioned, the Pixel OS is still in the experimental stages, and doesn’t run on all machines. On his own modern Mac, Upton said, “the machine fails to identify the image as bootable.” They’ll be releasing more updates going forward, but if you’re interested in giving it a try, you can hit announce post to find it. Source: Raspberry Pi

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Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs