Author: kenmay

IRS Warns Of 400% Flood In Phishing and Malware This Tax Year Alone

coondoggie writes: There has been a 400% surge in phishing and malware incidents in this tax season alone, the Internal Revenue Service warned this week. According to the IRS, there have been thousands of phony emails aimed at fooling taxpayers into thinking these are official communications from the IRS or others in the tax industry, including from many tax software companies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IRS Warns Of 400% Flood In Phishing and Malware This Tax Year Alone

McAfee will break iPhone crypto for FBI in 3 weeks or eat shoe on live TV

Enlarge / John McAfee and Ars Technica deep cover operative Sean Gallagher at an unnamed location that looks suspiciously like Las Vegas. (credit: Sean Gallagher) In an op-ed for Business Insider titled ” I’ll decrypt the San Bernardino phone free of charge so Apple doesn’t need to place a back door on its product ,” libertarian presidential candidate and former antivirus developer John McAfee waded into the ongoing battle of words between Apple and the FBI with some choice words of his own. Never one to bring a knife to a verbal gunfight, McAfee unleashes a howitzer of invective, blasting the United States government for undermining the country’s “already ancient cybersecurity and cyberdefense systems.” It takes only four short paragraphs for McAfee to start talking about Nazis and Hitler. Two paragraphs later—not counting blockquotes—McAfee proclaims that by pressing Apple to “back door” (his words) the iPhone and bypass or defeat the mechanisms keeping its data secure, the government is seeking to bring about the end of the world (as we know it). This is heavy stuff. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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McAfee will break iPhone crypto for FBI in 3 weeks or eat shoe on live TV

New Research Suggests Zika Can Cross the Placental Barrier

Angelica Pereira feeds her baby Luiza, who was born with microcephaly in Brazil on 6-February 2016. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana) Researchers in Brazil have detected traces of the Zika virus in the amniotic fluid of two fetuses with microcephaly, further bolstering the connection between the two. However, questions still remain. Read more…

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New Research Suggests Zika Can Cross the Placental Barrier

Remains at a Swedish fort tell a story of bloody Iron Age warfare

A Roman coin found at the site of Sandby Borg, whose inhabitants probably included a number of unemployed Roman soldiers. (credit: Max Jahrehorn Oxides) On Öland, an icy island off the coast of Sweden, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 1,500-year-old fort whose inhabitants were brutalized in such an extreme way that legends about it persist to this day. As researchers piece together the fort’s final days, it sounds like they’re telling a horror story. Possibly hundreds of people sheltering behind the fort’s defenses were executed and abandoned, their bodies left to rot in place without burial. Their wounds were indicative of execution. And some of their mouths were stuffed with goat and sheep teeth, possibly a dark reference to the Roman tradition of burying warriors with coins in their mouths. None of their considerable wealth was looted, which is highly unusual. Researchers have found barely hidden valuables in every house they’ve excavated. Even the livestock was left behind after the slaughter, locked up to die of starvation. This is even more bizarre than the lack of looting. On an island with scarce resources, it would have been considered a waste for victors (or neighbors) to leave healthy horses and sheep behind after battle. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Remains at a Swedish fort tell a story of bloody Iron Age warfare

Scan of original 1977 35mm print of Star Wars released online

A restored high-definition digital scan, taken from 35mm prints of the original, unmolested version of Star Wars, is now available online to those who are looking. May the celluloid will be with you. Always. While this isn’t the first time that attempts have been made to restore Star Wars to its original theatrical version—that’s the one without the much-maligned CGI effects and edits of later “special” editions—it is the first to have been based entirely on a single 35mm print of the film, rather than cut together from various sources. Here’s a post from the team who located prints and restored the film : Despite having access to the original source, and to all the cleaned footage as the project progressed, I was still completely blown away by the final version. I had no idea it could look so good! Honestly! Way back at the start I had created a comparison clip with the 2006 Bonus DVD on top and the raw scan of LPP on the bottom, in order to see which frames (if any) were missing from the print, and I remember being rather alarmed that it made the GOUT look good!: Creator George Lucas said, in disowning his original work, that all the copies of it were destroyed. “The only issue with Team Negative 1’s version of the film,” reports Mark Walton, “is that it isn’t exactly legal.” Here it is, compared to the official Blu-Ray: https://youtu.be/mo24gFFk7WM https://youtu.be/pFp9bSp-fro https://youtu.be/3Wjx01CuqDs

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Scan of original 1977 35mm print of Star Wars released online

Stealing Keys From a Laptop In Another Room — and Offline

Motherboard carries a report that with equipment valued at about $3, 000, a group of Israeli researchers have been able to extract cryptographic keys from a laptop that is not only separated by a physical wall, but protected by an air gap. This, they say, “is the first time such an approach has been used specifically against elliptic curve cryptography running on a PC.” From the article: The method is a so-called side-channel attack: an attack that doesn’t tackle an encryption implementation head on, such as through brute force or by exploiting a weakness in the underlying algorithm, but through some other means. In this case, the attack relies on the electromagnetic outputs of the laptop that are emitted during the decryption process, which can then be used to work out the target’s key. Specifically, the researchers obtained the private key from a laptop running GnuPG, a popular implementation of OpenPGP. (The developers of GnuPG have since released countermeasures to the method. Tromer said that the changes make GnuPG âoemore resistant to side-channel attack since the sequence of high-level arithmetic operations does not depend on the secret key.â) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Stealing Keys From a Laptop In Another Room — and Offline

Intel and Micron Partnership Soon To Launch 10TB SSD For Enterprise Market

MojoKid writes: Intel and Micron have been tag-teaming various storage and memory technologies and word on the web is that the fruits of that partnership is a 10-terebyte SSD that’s right around the corner. The largest SSD in Intel’s stable at the moment is 4TB, which itself is pretty large. However, both Micron and Intel are of the opinion that typical planar NAND flash memory has gone about as far as it can go, and that 3D stacked Flash memory is the future. They’ve also developed a “floating gate cell” design – a first for 3D stacked memory – resulting in 256Gb multi-level cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit inside of a standard package. The two companies are targeting gumstick-sized SSDs reaching 3.5TB and regular 2.5-inch SSDs hitting (and even surpassing) 10TB. Apparently that’s about to become a reality. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel and Micron Partnership Soon To Launch 10TB SSD For Enterprise Market

Hospital Pays $17,000 Ransom to Reclaim Its Files

Ransomware is one of the nastiest forms of malware around: once it’s downloaded onto a computer network, it runs around encrypting all your files, before charging a Bitcoin ransom to give up the encryption key: bad if it’s your holiday photos at stake, disastrous for hospitals and patient data. Read more…

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Hospital Pays $17,000 Ransom to Reclaim Its Files

The World’s Most Slender Tower Is 13 Feet Wide But 531 Feet Tall

You can keep your super-tall towers: How about the physical challenge of building the world’s most slender instead? That’s what engineers have done in Brighton, UK, with the i360 tower. Read more…

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The World’s Most Slender Tower Is 13 Feet Wide But 531 Feet Tall

Outlook Gets a Redesign, Adds In Tons of Third-Party Integration

Microsoft is rolling out a big update to Outlook.com that includes an overhaul to the interface alongside integration with a bunch of services that add in additional features. Read more…

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Outlook Gets a Redesign, Adds In Tons of Third-Party Integration