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Bitcoin Price Hits Fresh Record High Above $2,200

An anonymous reader writes: Monday marks the seven-year anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day — the moment a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10, 000 bitcoin on two Papa John’s pizzas. More important than the episode being widely recognized as the first transaction using the cryptocurrency is what it tells us about the bitcoin rally that saw it break through the $2, 100 mark on Monday. Bitcoin was trading as high as $2, 185.89 in the early hours of Monday morning, hitting a fresh record high, after first powering through the $2, 000 barrier over the weekend, according to CoinDesk data. Throughout the weekend, the value of cryptocurrency was looming around $2, 000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Price Hits Fresh Record High Above $2,200

New OS/2 Warp Operating System ‘ArcaOS’ 5.0 Released

The long-awaited modern OS/2 distribution from Arca Noae was released Monday. martiniturbide writes: ArcaOS 5.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM’s discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. ArcaOS offers a new set of drivers for ACPI, network, USB, video and mouse to run OS/2 in newer hardware. It also includes a new OS installer and open source software like Samba, Libc libraries, SDL, Qt, Firefox and OpenOffice… It’s available in two editions, Personal ($129 with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days [and six months of support and maintenance updates]) and Commercial ($239 with one year of support and maintenance). The OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell. By Tuesday Arca Noae was reporting “excessive traffic on the server which is impacting our ordering and delivery process, ” though the actual downloads of the OS were unaffected, the server load issues were soon mitigated, and they thanked OS/2 enthusiasts for a “truly overwhelming response.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New OS/2 Warp Operating System ‘ArcaOS’ 5.0 Released

New SMB Worm Uses Seven NSA Hacking Tools. WannaCry Used Just Two

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have detected a new worm that is spreading via SMB, but unlike the worm component of the WannaCry ransomware, this one is using seven NSA tools instead of two. Named EternalRocks, the worm seems to be in a phase where it is infecting victims and building its botnet, but not delivering any malware payload. EternalRocks is far more complex than WannaCry’s SMB worm. For starters, it uses a delayed installation process that waits 24 hours before completing the install, as a way to evade sandbox environments. Further, the worm also uses the exact same filenames as WannaCry in an attempt to fool researchers of its true origin, a reason why the worm has evaded researchers almost all week, despite the attention WannaCry payloads have received. Last but not least, the worm does not have a killswitch domain, which means the worm can’t be stopped unless its author desires so. Because of the way it was designed, it is trivial for the worm’s owner to deliver any type of malware to any of the infected computers. Unfortunately, because of the way he used the DOUBLEPULSAR implant, one of the seven NSA hacking tools, other attackers can hijack its botnet and deliver their own malware as well. IOCs are available in a GitHub repo. Ars Technica quotes security researchers who say “there are at least three different groups that have been leveraging the NSA exploit to infect enterprise networks since late April… These attacks demonstrate that many endpoints may still be compromised despite having installed the latest security patch.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New SMB Worm Uses Seven NSA Hacking Tools. WannaCry Used Just Two

Microsoft’s true holographic display fits in your glasses

A lot of the technology billed as holographic, well, isn’t. Not even HoloLens . Real holography requires a laser-generated 3D image, and it’s no mean feat to stuff that into something you can comfortably wear. Microsoft just made some important progress, however. Its researchers have developed a true, near-eye holographic whose optics can fit inside a regular pair of glasses. The mirrors and the liquid crystal on silicon needed to achieve the effect sit inside the frame — it’s only the electronics that have to stay outside. While this extra-compact size would normally result in an unusable picture, corrections in the holographic projector make it easy to read details down to individual pixels. The tech giant has also tackled some problems with generating those holograms. Its team took advantage of eye-tracked rendering (that is, providing the most visual detail where you’re looking) and GPU-boosted algorithms to generate high-detail holograms in real time, complete with realistic focus and vision correction. You wouldn’t necessarily need a set of corrective eyewear to compensate for astigmatism or other eyesight issues. Microsoft is quick to point out that this doesn’t necessarily hint at its hardware plans. It’s just as well — the tech still faces some serious limitations. Besides the necessity of external electronics, the glasses only produce a monoscopic picture. A stereoscopic image is another challenge altogether. If everything comes together, though, you could have a real holographic display that’s comfortable to wear all day long. Whether you’re a doctor , designer or gamer , you could plunge yourself into augmented reality without a bulky headset weighing you down. Source: Microsoft Research

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Microsoft’s true holographic display fits in your glasses

Windows XP PCs infected by WCry can be decrypted without paying ransom

Enlarge (credit: Adrien Guinet ) Owners of some Windows XP computers infected by the WCry ransomware may be able to decrypt their data without making the $300 to $600 payment demand, a researcher said Thursday. Adrien Guinet, a researcher with France-based Quarkslab, has released software that he said allowed him to recover the secret decryption key required to restore an infected XP computer in his lab. The software has not yet been tested to see if it works reliably on a large variety of XP computers, and even when it does work, there are limitations. The recovery technique is also of limited value because Windows XP computers weren’t affected by last week’s major outbreak of WCry. Still, it may be helpful to XP users hit in other campaigns. “This software has only been tested and known to work under Windows XP,” he wrote in a readme note accompanying his app , which he calls Wannakey. “In order to work, your computer must not have been rebooted after being infected. Please also note that you need some luck for this to work (see below), and so it might not work in every case!” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows XP PCs infected by WCry can be decrypted without paying ransom

Language App Duolingo Finally Added Japanese and It’s Great

Duolingo is one of the best free ways to get started learning a new language, and they’re finally answering the pleas of wannabe polyglots everywhere by adding Japanese to their curriculum. Sugoi! Read more…

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Language App Duolingo Finally Added Japanese and It’s Great

Translate between Charles Babbage’s computing jargon and modern terminology

If you’re intending to build an analytical engine with a six-sided prism to run Charles Babbage’s weird cardboard vaporware program , you will need some help with Babbage’s notes, as old Charles was inventing a whole technical vocab from scratch. (more…)

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Translate between Charles Babbage’s computing jargon and modern terminology

First Star Trek: Discovery trailer goes where many Treks have gone before

The first real trailer for Star Trek: Discovery . If you’ve been waiting patiently for  Star Trek: Discovery , we have some good news and some bad news (and, I guess, some in-between news). The good news is that the series will make its debut on CBS All Access this fall, and that its order has been expanded to 15 episodes from the originally promised 13 episodes . The neither-good-nor-bad news is that it will be accompanied by a  Talking Dead -style post-show discussion show called  Talking Trek , which you can watch if you like that sort of thing or ignore if you don’t. And the bad news is that, well, the trailer falls a little flat, especially knowing what we do about the behind-the-camera turmoil (Bryan Fuller, its original showrunner, dropped out of the process partway , and the show was originally supposed to launch this past January ). Though the new show canonically takes place in the same fictional universe as the original series,  The Next Generation , and most of the other pre-JJ Abrams  Trek shows and movies, the show’s look has a lot more in common with Abrams’  Trek than with any of the older entries. Everything, including the uniforms and the bridge, is shiny and slick. And while later episodes of  Deep Space Nine ,  Voyager , and  Enterprise made extensive use of computer-generated effects, decades of advancements in the field are going to mean much bigger and flashier effects than anything that has been possible in older series. As a lifelong fan my impulse is to be pretty forgiving of  Trek , but the trailer doesn’t do much for me. In some ways, it’s  Trek -by-numbers: warp signatures are detected, crewmembers are beamed up, (newly redesigned and honestly sort of off-putting) Klingons are engaged, computers are spoken to, objects are viewed onscreen, frontiers are explored. But a few wooden performances and editing that leaps wildly from scene to obviously unrelated scene does the trailer no favors. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First Star Trek: Discovery trailer goes where many Treks have gone before

Popular Torrent Site ExtraTorrent Permanently Shuts Down

ExtraTorrent, the world’s second largest torrent index, on Wednesday said it is permanently shutting its doors. The site, which launched in 2006, had steadily climbed the ranks in the piracy world to become the second most popular torrent site, observing millions of daily views. TorrentFreak adds: “ExtraTorrent with all mirrors goes offline.. We permanently erase all data. Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones. Thx to all ET supporters and torrent community. ET was a place to beâ¦.” TorrentFreak reached out to ExtraTorrent operator SaM who confirmed that this is indeed the end of the road for the site. “It’s time we say goodbye, ” he said, without providing more details. ExtraTorrent is the latest in a series of BitTorrent giants to fall in recent months. Previously, sites including KickassTorrents, Torrentz.eu, TorrentHound and What.cd went offline. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Popular Torrent Site ExtraTorrent Permanently Shuts Down