Category: reader

Site that sold access to 3.1 billion passwords vanishes after reported raid

Enlarge LeakedSource, a legally and ethically questionable website that sold access to a database of more than 3.1 billion compromised account passwords, has disappeared amid an unconfirmed report its operator was raided by law enforcement officers. “Leakedsource is down forever and won’t be coming back,” a person using the handle LTD wrote Thursday in an online forum . “Owner raided early this morning. Wasn’t arrested, but all [solid state drives] got taken, and Leakedsource servers got subpoenaed and placed under federal investigation. If somehow he recovers from this and launches LS again, then I’ll be wrong. But I am not wrong.” Attempts to reach LeakedSource operators for comment weren’t successful. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
Site that sold access to 3.1 billion passwords vanishes after reported raid

This Is Quite Possibly the Ugliest Bug Ever Found Trapped in Amber

Say hello to Aethiocarenus burmanicus , an ancient insect so strange—and so god awfully ugly—its discoverers had to create an entirely new scientific classification to catalogue it. Read more…

Visit link:
This Is Quite Possibly the Ugliest Bug Ever Found Trapped in Amber

Researchers create first viable hybrid human-pig embryo

Researchers have created a viable hybrid part-human, part-pig embryo for the first time in history. According to a study published in the journal Cell Thursday, researchers were able to successfully inject human stem cells into a pig embryo and grow tissue that would form the early stages of human organs like the heart, liver and neurons. Although it’s in the very early stages, experts believe the human-pig chimera could one day be used to grow transplantable human organs in farm animals. Adding to the promising scientific breakthroughs, a separate study published in the journal Nature earlier this week details how an international team of researchers successfully performed an interspecies organ transplant using a similar method to create a hybrid mouse-rat embryo. In that study, researchers grew a mouse pancreas inside a rat embryo, which was then transplanted into diabetic mice. As the Washington Post reports , the new pancreatic tissue cured the mice’s diabetes without being rejected by the host. The mice only required a few days of recovery and immunosuppressive treatments before they were able to resume normal, healthy lives. While the technology is moving forward, the ethics of harvesting human organs from animals — or even creating human-animal chimeras in general — is still a touchy subject. Aside from the symbolic and philosophical questions that come from mixing human and animal genetics, there is a fear that stem cells could one day be used to create an animal with a human brain. For now, however, the authors of the Cell study point out that the system is “highly inefficient, ” but the two papers together show the possible benefits of this sort of controversial research. Via: Washington Post Source: Cell , Nature

See the original post:
Researchers create first viable hybrid human-pig embryo

Amazon is now managing its own ocean freight

Amazon has been working for a while now to build out its shipping and distribution network. Now the online retailer has started coordinating its own shipments from Chinese merchants to its warehouses in the US via ocean freighters. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company doesn’t own any ships, but it’s working as a freight forwarder and logistics provider. These are the companies that reserve space on freighters and handle trucking shipments from port to a warehouse. WSJ says that Amazon has coordinated shipment of 150 containers from China since October. News of Amazon’s intent to get into shipping freight across the ocean first broke last year when the company gained approval from the Federal Maritime Commission to act as a Ocean Transportation Intermediary. During the 2015 holiday season, the retailer bought extra trailers to beef up its shipping capacity at the busiest time of the year. Earlier in 2015, Amazon began leasing planes for the so-called Prime Air that gave it more control over shipping logistics here in the US. Source: The Wall Street Journal

Continued here:
Amazon is now managing its own ocean freight

HP Recalls Over 100,000 Laptop Batteries, Here’s How to Check Yours

HP is recalling batteries used in a variety of the company’s laptops because of fire concerns. The affected models include the HP ProBook, HP ENVY, Compaq Presario, and HP Pavillion laptops sold between March 2013 and October 2016. Read more…

See the original post:
HP Recalls Over 100,000 Laptop Batteries, Here’s How to Check Yours

Gmail will start blocking JavaScript attachments in February

If you want to email a .js file to somebody for any reason, you only have a few more days to do so through Gmail . The service will start blocking JavaScript file attachments starting on February 13th, adding it to its list of restricted file types, which includes .exe, .msc and .bat. If you try to attach a .js file on or after the 13th, you’ll get a notification that says it’s blocked “because its content presents a potential security issue.” JavaScript files aren’t inherently bad, but people could attach them to emails so that when you click on one, it acts as a downloader for a ransomware or other types of malware. Gmail can detect .js files even if they’re sent as a .zip, a .tgz, a .gz or a .bz2. In case you really have to send one to a friend or a co-worker, the big G recommends uploading it to Google Drive instead. Source: G Suite updates

Read More:
Gmail will start blocking JavaScript attachments in February

New York approves a 90 MW wind farm off the coast of Long Island

The Long Island coastline. (credit: Stanley Zimney ) On Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state had approved a 90 MW offshore wind farm to be installed off the coast of Long Island. That would make what will be called the South Fork Wind Farm the biggest offshore wind farm in the US. The announcement comes just a month after Block Island, a facility off the coast of Rhode Island , became the first ever commercial offshore wind farm in the US to transmit electricity in late 2016. Deepwater Wind, the company that installed the turbines off Block Island, will also be supplying the turbines for South Fork. In a press release, the New York governor’s office wrote that the turbines will be placed 30 miles southeast of Montauk and “out of sight from Long Island’s beaches.” The press release added that South Fork will provide electricity for 50,000 Long Island homes. Two weeks ago, Governor Cuomo announced that New York would commit to installing 2.4 GW of offshore wind by 2030. That comes just as the state announced that Indian Point, a 2 GW nuclear energy facility just north of New York City, would close by 2021 . The state of New York celebrated the closure of Indian Point, claiming that the plant was unsafe and too close to a major metropolitan area. But critics of the move said it would be difficult for New York to replace all of that greenhouse-gas-free energy with renewable energy. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
New York approves a 90 MW wind farm off the coast of Long Island

Apple Seemingly Censors UltraFine 5K Monitor Reviews After Poor Feedback

It appears Apple is filtering and censoring bad reviews of the LG’s UltraFine 5K display. From a report on The Next Web: The deletion was first spotted by a Reddit user four days ago. Though it’s possible the reviews were removed for some other reason, at first glance, it looks like censorship. It’s not a good look for the company. Apple said it was getting out of the monitor business, and instead chose to work more closely with third-party partners, heavily featuring LG’s 5K and 4K UltraFine displays at its recent MacBook Pro unveiling. But then the monitor received multiple negative reviews from users who were experiencing issues such as the screen failing to wake up from sleep. The Reddit post also points out that: “In many cases, attempts to fix the problem through physical reconnection[sic] of the monitor, or manual restarts, have caused the attached Mac to crash, become otherwise unresponsive, or develop problems with the touch bar (where equipped).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original post:
Apple Seemingly Censors UltraFine 5K Monitor Reviews After Poor Feedback

US Intelligence seeks a universal translator for text search in any language

Enlarge / “Domain: space. Subject: female energy clouds.” (credit: Paramount) The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the US Intelligence Community’s own science and technology research arm, has announced it is seeking contenders for a program to develop what amounts to the ultimate Google Translator. IARPA’s Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) program intends to provide researchers and analysts with a tool to search for documents in their field of concern in any of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. The specific goal, according to IARPA’s announcement, is an “‘English-in, English-out’ information retrieval system that, given a domain-sensitive English query, will retrieve relevant data from a large multilingual repository and display the retrieved information in English as query-biased summaries.” Users would be able to search vast numbers of documents with a two-part query: the first giving the “domain” of the search in terms of what sort of information they are seeking (for example, “Government,” “Science,” or “Health”) and the second an English word or phrase describing the information sought (the examples given in the announcement were “zika virus” and “Asperger’s syndrome”). So-called “low resource” languages have been an area of concern for the intelligence and defense communities for years. In 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) launched its Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) project , an attempt to build a system that lets the military quickly collect critical data—such as “topics, names, events, sentiment, and relationships”—from sources in any language on short notice. The system would be used in situations like natural disasters or military interventions in remote locations where the military has little or no local language expertise. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read this article:
US Intelligence seeks a universal translator for text search in any language

The first Ultra HD Blu-ray PC drive ships next month

More and more, we’re getting our movies and TV via streaming services instead of on disc . But a certain DIY crowd still appreciates support for physical media piped through a home theater PC, and that’s the group the first Ultra HD Blu-ray drive is made for. Pioneer Japan announced two disc drives, the BDR-S11J-BK and the BDR-S11J-X that it will release in late February, ready to read the triple-layer 4K-ready discs. Both drives come bundled with a copy of Cyberlink’s PowerDVD software that is ready to play back 4K movies from disc. However, you’ll also need a PC running Windows 10 as well as a 7th-generation Core i7 or i5 Intel processor (Kaby Lake) and an HDMI 2.0a connection that’s HDCP 2.2 capable (just like 4K Netflix on the PC) . Once you get past the demands of HEVC compression and the DRM wrapping, it should be all set. Still, we have seen some growing pains with the first Ultra HD Blu-ray players and it’s possible a software update or two will be needed for every movie to work just right. Both drives are capable of reading and writing (read-only for Ultra HD Blu-ray), and are basically identical although the J-X has some extra tweaks for CDs, whether you’re listening or just ripping. There’s no word yet on price or exact release date, but we’ll probably see drives in the US soon. As Myce (f.k.a CDFreaks) notes, both Pioneer and Hitachi-LG are licensed to make the drives, so whatever arrives will probably come from one of those two. Via: AV Watch Source: Myce , Cyberlink , Pioneer Japan

View post:
The first Ultra HD Blu-ray PC drive ships next month