50 armed men in camou flak jackets driving armored cars cordoned off the roads leading to a transportation company’s office in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay (a “smugglers’ haven in the border region with Brazil and Argentina”), blew the entire face of the building up with demolition equipment, stole an estimated $40M and escaped by motorboat up the Panama River. (more…)
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In Paraguay, the "heist of the century" is blamed on a notorious Brazilian prison-gang
Remember Ron Arad’s bicycle designed with sprung-steel wheels ? Arad’s crazy idea worked, though no bicycle manufacturer pursued the concept. In the years since, however, non-pneumatic tire designs have slowly become a reality for ATV s and John Deere mowers , and now Bridgestone reckons they might work for bicycles too. Previously Bridgestone had developed non-pneumatic tire concepts for four-wheeled vehicles, but this month they’ve announced they’re porting their ” Air Free Concept ” over to two-wheelers. The “Air Free Concept” is a technology that eliminates the need for tires to be inflated with air to support the weight, using a unique structure of spokes stretching along the inner sides of tires. In addition, the resins that are used in the spokes and rubbers help realize more efficient use of resources. Bridgestone Corporation and Bridgestone Cycle adapted the “Air Free Concept” to develop bicycle tires without punctures. The high flexibility for design granted by resin has also enabled proposals of next-generation bicycles which have never been seen before. Regarding that last sentence, we’re curious to see what these proposals are, but the company has opted not to include any information on them. If you were designing a bicycle meant to incorporate these tires, what would you do differently? Lastly I’ll say: Vandalism still being a problem here in New York, if you had one of these in Manhattan I think you’d never not find someone had stuffed garbage in between those spokes. The bright orange is just crying out for someone to mess with it.
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Bridgestone’s Non-Pneumatic Bicycle Tires
Chain mail was an essential tool for medieval warriors hoping to avoid a quick (or slow) death by a sword. But NASA engineers hope a similar material , with a few modern upgrades, could prove to be just as useful for spacecraft and astronauts looking to survive the rigors of outer space. Read more…
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NASA Is Developing 3D-Printed Chain Mail to Protect Ships and Astronauts
Enlarge (credit: Enesse Bhé ) Antivirus provider Webroot is causing a world of trouble for customers. A signature update just nuked hundreds of benign files needed to run Microsoft Windows, as well as apps that run on top of the operating system. Social media sites ignited on late Monday afternoon with customers reporting that servers and computers alike stopped working as a result of the mishap. The admin and security pundit who goes by the Twitter handle SwiftOnSecurity told Ars that, at the company he or she worked for, the false positive quarantined “several hundred” files used by Windows Insider Preview. Hundreds of “line of business” apps, such as those that track patient appointments or manage office equipment, suffered the same fate. Webroot was also flagging Facebook as a phishing site. As this post was going live, Webroot’s cloud-based system for issuing commands to clients was unable to revert the quarantined files. Officials have yet to confirm they would be able to revert all the bad determinations. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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AV provider Webroot melts down as update nukes hundreds of legit files
Today, Hipchat alerted its users that someone broke into one of its servers through a vulnerability in a third-party library. The chat service saw no evidence that other Atlassian systems or products like Jira or Trello were affected, but they’re forcing every user to reset their HipChat-connected account password as a precaution. According to the service’s blog post , the attacker might have gotten access to user information (including name, email and hashed password) of anyone using HipChat.com. There’s been no sign that over 99 percent of users’ messages or room content was compromised, though the attacker could have accessed that portion’s metadata. A small fraction (.05 percent) of instances might have been wide open to the hacker, who would have been able to see correspondence and content. Fortunately, no evidence has suggested that the attacker has accessed anyone’s financial or credit card information. “While HipChat Server uses the same third-party library, it is typically deployed in a way that minimizes the risk of this type of attack, ” the blog post said, but the service will roll a security update out for Hipchat Server just to be sure. Source: HipChat
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HipChat resets all passwords after hackers break in
Enlarge (credit: BoatingWithTR.com ) BrickerBot, the botnet that permanently incapacitates poorly secured Internet of Things devices before they can be conscripted into Internet-crippling denial-of-service armies, is back with a new squadron of foot soldiers armed with a meaner arsenal of weapons. Pascal Geenens, the researcher who first documented what he calls the permanent denial-of-service botnet, has dubbed the fiercest new instance BrickerBot.3. It appeared out of nowhere on April 20, exactly one month after BrickerBot.1 first surfaced. Not only did BrickerBot.3 mount a much quicker number of attacks—with 1,295 attacks coming in just 15 hours—it used a modified attack script that added several “fork bomb” commands designed to more completely shock and awe its targets. BrickerBot.1, by comparison, fired 1,895 volleys during the four days it was active, and the still-active BrickerBot.2 has spit out close to 12 attacks per day. “Just like BrickerBot.1, this attack was a short but intense burst,” Geenens told Ars. “Shorter than the four days BrickerBot.1 lasted, but even more intense. The attacks from BrickerBot.3 came in on a different honeypot than the one that recorded BrickerBot.1. There is, however, no correlation between the devices used in the previous attack versus the ones in this attack.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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BrickerBot, the permanent denial-of-service botnet, is back with a vengeance
Disney is taking scary clown makeup to the next level. It’s using a new projection system to transform the appearance of actors during live performances, tracking facial expressions and “painting” them with light, rather than physical makeup. Called Makeup Lamps, the system was developed by a team at Disney Research, and it could potentially change the way stage makeup is used in future theater productions. Makeup Lamps tracks an actor’s movements without using the facial markers common in motion capture, then it displays any color or texture the actor wants by adjusting the lighting. It can make someone appear older by creating “wrinkles” on their face, for example, or it can paint their face in creepy clown makeup, à la Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight . And all of it is done in real-time. A similar technology was used earlier this year during Lady Gaga’s performance at the Superbowl. Nobumichi Asai, creative director of Japanese visual studio WOW, was brought in to create a red lightning bolt on Gaga’s face during her David Bowie tribute. The attention that performance received has helped the technology become more mainstream. Latency — the time between generating an image that matches the actor’s pose and when the image is displayed — is a big challenge to live augmentation, of course. Large amounts of it will cause the projection and the actor’s face to appear out of sync. Disney’s research team combated this problem by limiting the complexity of its algorithms and employing a method called Kalman filtering, which uses measurements over time to make predictions and minor adjustments. “We’ve seen astounding advances in recent years in capturing facial performances of actors and transferring those expressions to virtual characters, ” said Markus Gross, vice president at Disney Research. “Leveraging these technologies to augment the appearance of live actors is the next step and could result in amazing transformations before our eyes of stage actors in theaters or other venues.” Source: EurekAlert
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Disney’s projection tech turns actors’ faces into nightmare fuel
Harvard researchers have discovered a parchment manuscript of the Declaration of Independence at a small archive office in the United Kingdom. Only the second parchment copy known to exist, it contains several features that mark it as distinct from the original. Read more…
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Second Handwritten Copy of the Declaration of Independence Discovered in England
It isn’t only the junk processor that makes a really cheap computer slow. Or the memory or the video card (or lack of video card). The primary reason your cheap laptop loudly chugs along at glacial speeds is because of the hard drive. Cheap laptops use cheap hard disk drives, which are much slower than the solid state… Read more…
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Intel’s Optane Memory Makes Cheap Hard Drives as Fast as Expensive SSDs
FossBytes reports: The whistleblower website Wikileaks has published another set of hacking tools belonging to the American intelligence agency CIA. The latest revelation includes a user guide for CIA’s “Weeping Angel” tool… derived from another tool called “Extending” which belongs to UK’s intelligence agency MI5/BTSS, according to Wikileaks. Extending takes control of Samsung F Series Smart TV. The highly detailed user guide describes it as an implant “designed to record audio from the built-in microphone and egress or store the data.” According to the user guide, the malware can be deployed on a TV via a USB stick after configuring it on a Linux system. It is possible to transfer the recorded audio files through the USB stick or by setting up a WiFi hotspot near the TV. Also, a Live Liston Tool, running on a Windows OS, can be used to listen to audio exfiltration in real-time. Wikileaks mentioned that the two agencies, CIA and MI5/BTSS made collaborative efforts to create Weeping Angel during their Joint Development Workshops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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WikiLeaks Releases New CIA Secret: Tapping Microphones On Some Samsung TVs