BadUSB is bad news: malware that targets the firmware in your USB port’s embedded system, bypassing the OS, antivirus software and other countermeasures. (more…)
More:
USG: an open source anti-BadUSB hardware firewall for your USB port
Fifty years ago, American Airlines’ flight from New York to Los Angeles took 5 hours and 43 minutes. The same flight is 6 hours and 27 minutes today. Wendover Productions examines why planes don’t fly faster in this interesting video. (more…)
Read more here:
Fifty years later, the same flight takes longer. Why?
The healthcare industry is a well-known information security dumpster fire, from the entire hospitals hijacked by ransomware to the useless security on medical devices to the terrifying world of shitty state security for medical implants — all made worse by the cack-handed security measures that hospital workers have to bypass to get on with saving our lives (and it’s about to get worse, thanks to the Internet of Things > ). (more…)
Continue Reading:
Healthcare facilities widely compromised by Medjack, malware that infects medical devices to steal your information
schwit1 quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Researchers have developed a technique that allows them to rapidly thaw cryopreserved human and pig samples without damaging the tissue — a development that could help get rid of organ transplant waiting lists. Cryopreservation is the ability to preserve tissues at liquid nitrogen temperatures for long periods of time and bring them back without damage, and it’s something scientists have been dreaming about achieving with large tissue samples and organs for decades. Instead of using convection, the team used nanoparticles to heat tissues at the same rate all at once, which means ice crystals can’t form, so they don’t get damaged. To do this, the researchers mixed silica-coated iron oxide nanoparticles into a solution and generated uniform heat by applying an external magnetic field. They then warmed up several human and pig tissue samples ranging between 1 and 50 mL, using either their new nanowarming technique and traditional slow warming over ice. Each time, the tissues warmed up with nanoparticles displayed no signs of harm, unlike the control samples. Afterwards, they were able to successfully wash the nanoparticles away from the sample after thawing. The team also tested out the heating in an 80 mL system — without tissue this time — and showed that it achieved the same critical warming rates as in the smaller sample sizes, suggesting that the technique is scalable. You can view a video of tissue being thawed out in less than a minute here. The research has been published in Science Translational Medicine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More:
Scientists Have Found a Way To Rapidly Thaw Cryopreserved Tissue Without Damage
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: In a new study published in the journal Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable. Erlich and his colleague Dina Zielinski, an associate scientist at NYGC, chose six files to encode, or write, into DNA: a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, “Arrival of a train at La Ciotat, ” a $50 Amazon gift card, a computer virus, a Pioneer plaque and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon. They compressed the files into a master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code made up of ones and zeros. Using an erasure-correcting algorithm called fountain codes, they randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, and mapped the ones and zeros in each droplet to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C and T. The algorithm deleted letter combinations known to create errors, and added a barcode to each droplet to help reassemble the files later. In all, they generated a digital list of 72, 000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long, and sent it in a text file to a San Francisco DNA-synthesis startup, Twist Bioscience, that specializes in turning digital data into biological data. Two weeks later, they received a vial holding a speck of DNA molecules. To retrieve their files, they used modern sequencing technology to read the DNA strands, followed by software to translate the genetic code back into binary. They recovered their files with zero errors, the study reports. The study also notes that “a virtually unlimited number of copies of the files could be created with their coding technique by multiplying their DNA sample through polymerase chain reaction (PCR).” The researchers also “show that their coding strategy packs 215 petabytes of data on a single gram of DNA.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taken from:
Researchers Store Computer OS, Short Movie On DNA
SAN FRANCISCO—A few months ago, Microsoft announced that its upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update ( currently in testing ) would include a new ” Game Mode ” that improves the performance of interactive titles running under Windows by at least a few percentage points . At the Game Developers Conference this week, Eric Walston from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group explained a bit about how exactly that Game Mode will “focus the existing hardware on providing the best possible gaming experience.” Currently, on the Windows OS level, a game is just another process among many running simultaneously. With Game Mode, though, Windows will isolate CPU resources to be devoted exclusively to that game process and optimize the GPU to give the game as much attention as possible as well. On the CPU side, Game Mode allocates a majority of the CPU’s cores to be devoted exclusively to the target game, so an eight-core system might get six gaming-dedicated cores when running in Game Mode (depending on what other processes are running). The system then moves threads devoted to other processes off of those gaming-focused cores, reducing thread contention among the various gaming process threads and improving performance. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View original post here:
How “Game Mode” will make games run better on Windows
Amazon is apologizing for the disruptions to its S3 storage service that knocked down and — in some cases affected — dozens of websites earlier this week. The company also outlined what caused the issue — the event was triggered by human error. The company said an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended, ” the company said in a press statement Thursday. It adds: The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems. One of these subsystems, the index subsystem, manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region. This subsystem is necessary to serve all GET, LIST, PUT, and DELETE requests. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate. The placement subsystem is used during PUT requests to allocate storage for new objects. Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart. While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests. Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Continue reading here:
An Incorrect Command Entered By Employee Triggered Disruptions To S3 Storage Service, Knocking Down Dozens of Websites, Amazon Says
The idea that a bit of gross mold would be worth $14, 617 seems absurd until you realize it may be the most important mold to that was ever grown. Read more…
As capable as Chromebooks have become , there are times when you might need to load up Photoshop, iTunes or something else that relies on Windows or macOS. Not only can Chrome OS do this, it’s not that difficult to set up…if you know the right plug-ins to use. Here’s how to get started. Read more…
More here:
How to Get Windows and macOS Apps on Your Chromebook
An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: Annoying pauses in your streaming movies are going to become less common, thanks to a new trick Netflix is rolling out. It’s using artificial intelligence techniques to analyze each shot in a video and compress it without affecting the image quality, thus reducing the amount of data it uses. The new encoding method is aimed at the growing contingent of viewers in emerging economies who watch video on phones and tablets. “We’re allergic to rebuffering, ” said Todd Yellin, a vice president of innovation at Netflix. “No one wants to be interrupted in the middle of Bojack Horseman or Stranger Things.” Yellin hopes the new system, called Dynamic Optimizer, will keep those Netflix binges free of interruption when it’s introduced sometime in the next “couple of months.” He was demonstrating the system’s results at “Netflix House, ” a mansion in the hills overlooking Barcelona that the company has outfitted for the Mobile World Congress trade show. In one case, the image quality from a 555 kilobits per second (kbps) stream looked identical to one on a data link with half the bandwidth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More:
Netflix Uses AI in Its New Codec To Compress Video Scene By Scene