kenmay

Infected ATMs Give Away Millions of Dollars Without Credit Cards

An anonymous reader writes: Kaspersky Lab performed a forensic investigation into cybercriminal attacks targeting multiple ATMs around the world. During the course of this investigation, researchers discovered the Tyupkin malware used to infect ATMs and allow attackers to remove money via direct manipulation, stealing millions of dollars. The criminals work in two stages. First, they gain physical access to the ATMs and insert a bootable CD to install the Tyupkin malware. After they reboot the system, the infected ATM is now under their control and the malware runs in an infinite loop waiting for a command. To make the scam harder to spot, the Tyupkin malware only accepts commands at specific times on Sunday and Monday nights. During those hours, the attackers are able to steal money from the infected machine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continued here:
Infected ATMs Give Away Millions of Dollars Without Credit Cards

Tesla Is Starting a Certified Preowned Program

cartechboy writes Most luxury automakers have a Certified Previously Owned (CPO) program. Tesla isn’t like a normal luxury automakers, in fact, it’s not really like any automaker out there. It doesn’t have franchises and it sells its own vehicles through its network of galleries. Now, it plans to create its own CPO program. There are a great deal of Model S sedans out there currently under lease contracts. When those cars are ready to come back, Tesla has guaranteed that it will purchase them for a figure that falls somewhere between 43 and 50 percent of the original purchase price. This is exactly how Tesla’s going to create its CPO fleet. Tesla seems to do everything in an unconventional manner, so we’ll have to see if its CPO program behaves like every other automaker’s, or if it’s different somehow as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Borked Belkin routers leave many unable to get online

Owners of Belkin routers around the world are finding themselves unable to get online today. Outages appear to be affecting many different models of Belkin router, and they’re hitting customers on any ISP, with Time Warner Cable and Comcast among those affected. ISPs, inundated with support calls by unhappy users, are directing complaints to Belkin’s support line, which appears to have gone into meltdown in response. The reason for the massive outages is currently unknown. Initial speculation was that Belkin pushed a buggy firmware update overnight, but on a reddit thread about the problem, even users who claim to have disabled automatic updates have found their Internet connectivity disrupted. Others suggest that there is some kind of DNS problem at work. Although the routers are correctly picking up their DNS settings from DHCP, they’re apparently unable to resolve domain names correctly. Connecting to the Internet using IP addresses alone does, in fact, appear to work, but with most of us dependent on DNS, this is of little value. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View the original here:
Borked Belkin routers leave many unable to get online

Laboratory-grown penises will be available in five years, say researchers

No snark here, dear readers: We sincerely hope you never lose a body part, especially not one of your reproductive organs. In the event that do you suffer a terrible accident, or if you were born with some kind of abnormality, there’s a team of researchers dedicated to making sure patients not only recover these organs, but go on to live normal lives. That group comes from Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where scientists there are not only working on lab-grown vaginas , but also testing laboratory-made penises. If all goes according to plan, they should be ready for use in about five years. That’s an optimistic claim, that it could take just five years for this technique to reach real-world patients. Incredibly enough, too, the scientists’ research is based on studies of rabbits, of all things. In their trials, the researchers cleansed the donor penis in detergent to remove all the living cells, leaving behind a collagen frame where scientists then seed penile cells harvested from the patient himself. These include smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells, which are necessary for erectile function. The entire process took several weeks, but in tests, the rabbits who received transplants were later able to mate and even reproduce. Now, after years of testing , the team is ready to try this procedure on humans. If successful, this would mean a higher quality of life for men unfortunate to be born with an abnormal penis, or to suffer a catastrophic injury. As Vice notes, penile replacement surgeries currently involve encasing a prosthetic with skin taken from the patient’s arm or thigh. Only with this new procedure would men be able to regain erectile function. It’s worth noting, however, that precisely because this method requires the use of the patient’s own penile cells, it won’t be of use to transgendered female-to-male patients hoping to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Image credit: UIG via Getty Images Filed under: Wearables , Science Comments Via: Vice Source: The Guardian , Wake Forest School of Medicine

Details of iOS and Android Device Encryption

swillden writes: There’s been a lot of discussion of what, exactly, is meant by the Apple announcement about iOS8 device encryption, and the subsequent announcement by Google that Android L will enable encryption by default. Two security researchers tackled these questions in blog posts: Matthew Green tackled iOS encryption, concluding that the change really boils down to applying the existing iOS encryption methods to more data. He also reviews the iOS approach, which uses Apple’s “Secure Enclave” chip as the basis for the encryption and guesses at how it is that Apple can say it’s unable to decrypt the devices. He concludes, with some clarification from a commenter, that Apple really can’t (unless you use a weak password which can be brute-forced, and even then it’s hard). Nikolay Elenkov looks into the preview release of Android “L.” He finds that not only has Google turned encryption on by default, but appears to have incorporated hardware-based security as well, to make it impossible (or at least much more difficult) to perform brute force password searches off-device. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View the original here:
Details of iOS and Android Device Encryption

Google has added some extra sites to the News section of its search listings, including–brace yours

Google has added some extra sites to the News section of its search listings, including—brace yourself—Reddit! We though we’d seen more kittens in the news recently. Read more…

See the article here:
Google has added some extra sites to the News section of its search listings, including–brace yours

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M: A Graphical Leap For Gaming Laptops

The dirty little secret of GPU marketing is that laptop graphics chips are never as powerful as you’d think. Think you’re going to run a game maxed out at 2K resolution with the GeForce GTX 880M in your laptop? Think again—even if it’s no trouble for a desktop-grade GTX 780. Read more…

Read this article:
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M: A Graphical Leap For Gaming Laptops

NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture brings desktop-class performance and improved battery life to notebooks

Read through NVIDIA’s Maxwell desktop GPU announcement , and you might think you were looking at a feature set designed for laptops: lower power consumption, new anti-aliasing technology and a downsampling feature that can force any monitor to display 4K content. It sounds almost like a dream feature set for a portable gaming machine and, well NVIDIA agrees — today it’s officially launching the GeForce GTX 980M and 970M GPUs. If you didn’t read up on the company’s flagship GPU announcement, let us break it down for you: NVIDIA’s Maxwell GPUs are all about power efficiency with a hint of overkill graphics performance on the side. This is a combination of lower performance per watt, and implementing new technologies like Multi-Frame Sample Anti-Aliasing , the aforementioned technology that promises to boost performance by as much as 30-percent with no visual concessions. NVIDIA says it’s also made significant gains with its BatteryBoost feature, which limits in-game framerates and balances system performance to boost on-battery play time by 20 to 30-percent. As for that side of performance, well, not only do the new GPUs promise to perform better without being plugged into a wall outlet, but Maxwell’s new Dynamic Super Resolution (NVIDIA’s branded and optimized downsampling solution) is designed to put 4K-quality content on lower resolution screens. It’s kind of like lying to your computer’s monitor: the game is rendering itself at a 4K resolution and is filtered down to your laptop’s native 1080p display. NVIDIA’s new chips (and new GPU features) will be available in NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M and 970M-equipped laptops, starting today. Machines rocking the new hardware can be had from all the usual suspects: MSI’s GT72 and GS60 will have it, for instance, as well as the ASUS G751, Gigabyte Aorus X7 and the Clevo P150 (which will likely be rebranded under Origin PC or Maingear flags). How do these machines perform in practice? We’ll let you know as soon as one crosses our review desk. Filed under: Gaming , Laptops , NVIDIA Comments

Read the original post:
NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture brings desktop-class performance and improved battery life to notebooks

This Supercard Wants to Replace All of Your Credit Cards and Then Some

Remember Coin, the card that promised to put all your credit cards on one handy chunk of plastic , and then suffered from substantial setbacks that may make it useless by the time it comes out ? Well now it has a competitor. This is Plastc , another upcoming supercard with some seriously big promises that will be even harder to keep. Read more…

Continue reading here:
This Supercard Wants to Replace All of Your Credit Cards and Then Some

OLED Wallpaper Could Be the Future of Lighting

It’s the Star Trek -inspired future we were promised—walls that glow and change color, perhaps with just a gentle voice command. And it’s finally (almost) possible thanks to a series of advances in OLED sheets. This new lighting solution also uses half as much energy than existing fluorescent lights. It is, however, pretty expensive. Read more…

Ken May

Author: kenmay