Once again, scientists are looking inward to explore the next frontier. Researchers at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) announced this week that an excavation is planned in which the team will attempt to successfully drill all the way through Earth’s crust for the first time in history. Read more…
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Japan’s Scientists Believe They’ll Be the First to Reach Earth’s Mantle
“I had the displeasure of being awoken at midnight to the sounds of civil-defense/air-raid sirens, ” writes very-long-time Slashdot reader SigIO, blaming “some schmuck with a twisted sense of humor.” The Dallas News reports: Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas’ Office of Emergency Management, said that all 156 of the city’s sirens were activated more than a dozen times… Dallas officials blame computer hacking for setting off emergency sirens throughout the city early Saturday… It took until about 1:20 a.m. to silence them for good because the emergency system had to be deactivated. The system remained shut down Saturday while crews safeguarded it from another hack. The city has figured out how the emergency system was compromised and is working to prevent it from happening again, he said… The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday. City officials reported 4, 400 calls to their 9-1-1 emergency phone number in the first four hours of Saturday morning, with over 800 occurring in that first 15 minutes when all 156 sirens started going off simultaneously. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Hacker Sets Off 156 Sirens At Midnight
Kaspersky Labs reports that an unnamed large Brazilian financial institution with $27B in assets was compromised by hackers who took over its DNS — by hijacking its NIC.br account — and for 5 hours were able to impersonate the bank to all its online customers (and possibly to control its ATMs) in order to plunder their accounts and steal their credit card details. (more…)
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Hackers hijacked a bank’s DNS and spent 5 hours raiding its customers’ accounts
Adult female worm of Angiostrongylus cantonensis recovered from rat lungs with characteristic barber-pole appearance (anterior end of worm is to the top). Scale bar = 1 mm. (credit: Lindo et al. ) There have been six cases of a rare parasitic infection called “rat lungworm” in Maui in the last three months, health officials reported this week. The number is small, but it’s a dramatic jump from the normal number of cases. In the decade before this period, the island had only seen two other cases. The surprising uptick has health officials and residents alike worried about the rise of the worm, which can invade the human brain. In infected people, the infection may be symptomless and resolve on its own. But for others, rat lungworm moves into the brain and can cause inflammation, pain, and other neurological problems such as tremors. In those cases, it can be fatal. In all cases, rat lungworm is very difficult to diagnose, and there is no treatment. So far, at least three of the six cases have been confirmed by the state. There’s also a seventh possible case. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Concern growing for brain-invading worms, spread by slugs and rats
The U.S. Department of Labor is accusing Google of discriminating against its female employees and violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women. “We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce, ” Janette Wipper, a Department of Labor regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday. The Guardian reports: Google strongly denied the accusations of inequities, claiming it did not have a gender pay gap. The allegations emerged at a hearing in federal court as part of a lawsuit the DoL filed against Google in January, seeking to compel the company to provide salary data and documents to the government. Google is a federal contractor, which means it is required to allow the DoL to inspect and copy records and information about its its compliance with equal opportunity laws. Last year, the department’s office of federal contract compliance programs requested job and salary history for Google employees, along with names and contact information, as part of the compliance review. Google, however, repeatedly refused to hand over the data, which was a violation of its contractual obligations with the federal government, according to the DoL’s lawsuit. Labor officials detailed the government’s discrimination claims against Google at the Friday hearing while making the case for why the company should be forced to comply with the DoL’s requests for documents. Wipper said the department found pay disparities in a 2015 snapshot of salaries and said officials needed earlier compensation data to evaluate the root of the problem and needed to be able to confidentially interview employees. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Accused of ‘Extreme’ Gender Pay Discrimination By US Labor Department
Restaurant meals cost a lot more than meals you make at home—you know this. But what you might not realize is those add-ons, like that oh-so-delicious guac on your burrito, can be some of the most costly offenders. Read more…
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The Restaurant Meal Add-Ons With the Highest Markups
Earlier today, NASA announced funding for 22 projects as part of its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. From a planet hopping laser-driven sail and a solar powered Venusian weather balloon to an autonomous rover on Pluto, the future of space exploration looks incredibly bright. Read more…
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These Are the Wildly Advanced Space Exploration Concepts Being Considered by NASA
Rensenware’s warning screen asks for a high score, rather than the usual pay off, to decrypt your files. At this point, Ars readers have heard countless tales of computer users being forced to pay significant sums to unlock files encrypted with malicious ransomware . So we were a bit surprised when word started to trickle out about a new bit of ransomware that doesn’t ask for money. Instead, “Rensenware” forces players to get a high score in a difficult PC shoot-em-up to decrypt their files. As Malware Hunter Team noted yesterday , users on systems infected with Rensenware are faced with the usual ransomware-style warning that “your precious data like documents, musics, pictures, and some kinda project files” have been “encrypted with highly strong encryption algorithm.” The only way to break the encryption lock, according to the warning, is to “score 0.2 billion in LUNATIC level” on TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object . That’s easier said than done, as this gameplay video of the “bullet hell” style Japanese shooter shows. Gameplay from TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object on Lunatic difficulty. Players needed to get 200 million points to unlock the “Rensenware” malware. As you may have guessed from the specifics here, the Rensenware bug was created more in the spirit of fun than maliciousness. After Rensenware was publicized on Twitter, its creator, who goes by Tvple Eraser on Twitter and often posts in Korean, released an apology for releasing what he admitted was “a kind of highly-fatal malware.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Do you want to play a game? Ransomware asks for high score instead of money
Following a head injury, patients typically undergo a CT scan to rule out brain bleeding. A new head worn device that scans the brain’s electrical patterns has shown tremendous promise in clinical trials, presenting an inexpensive way for physicians to make a potentially life-saving diagnosis. Read more…
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This Tricorder-Like Device Can Tell if Your Brain Is Bleeding
Jason Koebler, reporting for Motherboard: Apple has taken new and extreme measures to make the iPhone unrepairable. The company is now using software locks to prevent independent repair of specific parts of the phone. Specifically, the home buttons of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are not user replaceable, raising questions about both the future repairability of Apple products and the future of the thriving independent repair industry. The iPhone 7 home button will only work with the original home button that it was shipped with; if it breaks and needs to be replaced, a new one will only work if it is “recalibrated” in an Apple Store. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The iPhone 7 Has Arbitrary Software Locks That Prevent Repair