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Botched database leaks records for 191 million voters

Did you vote in a US election sometime this century? If so, your personal info may be out in the open. Researcher Chris Vickery has discovered that a badly configured database exposed the voter registration info for 191 million Americans, including addresses, party affiliations and state voter IDs. It’s not clear who originally managed the data, but Vickery and Databreaches.net are reaching out to everyone from online services to Congressional political action committees. The two are also contacting law enforcement in hopes of shutting down the leak, although it’s not certain that officials are taking action. The consequences of this database falling into the wrong hands could be severe, as you might have guessed. Less-than-scrupulous marketers and political campaigns could exploit the data, and criminals could combine it with other info to commit fraud or theft. It’s a particularly big problem for people who need to keep their details secret, such as stalking victims and police. Beyond this, the leak illustrates the need for stricter, consistent security standards around voter data — while states like California and South Dakota have sharp limits on where records go and what they’re used for, other states (including Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado) have no real restrictions. There’s a real possibility that this kind of incident could happen again. [Image credit: Getty Images] Via: CSO , Forbes Source: Databreaches.net

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Botched database leaks records for 191 million voters

HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018

An anonymous reader writes: Unfortunately the hard disk drive industry is not ready to go live with Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The technology is yet not reliable enough for mass production. Over the years, producers of hard drives, platters and recording heads have revealed various possible timeframes for commercial availability of drives with HAMR technology. Their predictions were not accurate. The current goalpost is set to year 2018. While solid state disks based on Flash memory keep seeing rapid improvements as well, HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds. The areal density of HAMR products is predicted to exceed 1.5 Tb per square inch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018

Wearing This Silicon Cooling Cap Reduces Hair Loss During Chemotherapy

While chemotherapy can be an effective way to battle cancer, it’s brutal on the body, and leaves patients with an unwelcome reminder of the ordeal in the form of hair loss. But a company called DigniCap has come up with a clever way to help minimize that side effect. Read more…

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Wearing This Silicon Cooling Cap Reduces Hair Loss During Chemotherapy

Social media led police straight to movie pirates

How can law enforcement agencies track down some of the world’s most (in)famous pirates? The same way that we find out how our school frenemies are doing: stalking them on social media. TorrentFreak has investigated the recent convictions of three of the UK’s biggest file-sharers to learn how exactly they were caught. It turns out that copyright enforcement officials are doing the same sort of armchair-sleuthing that we all do, only that they’ve got a hotline straight to the police. For instance, 22-year-old Reece Baker was more commonly known by his online alias, Baker92. According to the report, his fatal mistake was to include a shout-out to his “baby momzie Ria” in an NFO (info) file. Officials at the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft guessed that Baker92 was a surname/year of birth combination. They then searched Equifax’s credit-rating database to find anyone born in 1992 with that surname and, potentially, a child with a woman named Ria. Similarly, 24-year-old Sahil Rafiq posted torrents under a wide variety of usernames, including memory100, hail_alpha and sohail20. Unfortunately, the sohail20 identity was also used on the customer support website for an online retailer. Rafiq had posted a question concerning his laptop, but signed the piece “Kind Regards, Sahil Rafiq.” With his real name, authorities took very little time in finding his Facebook profile and, from there, were able to alert the police. Facebook was also the petard by which 40-year-old Graeme ‘Reidy’ Reid was hoisted, since he used the same anonymous e-mail account on his profile as he did his piracy. FACT bods simply searched for his Hushmail address and his Facebook page popped up — where he’d obligingly listed his occupation as “encoder.” We’ve not checked, but presumably bank robbers are going to start making similarly honest alternations to their social media pages in the near future. As much as FACT would like you to think twice about sharing illegally-obtained material around the web, there’s another moral here. After all, if enforcement officers were able to find these people with a few well-chosen Google searches, then perhaps the secret is to not be so forthcoming with your personal information. Source: TorrentFreak , FACT

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Social media led police straight to movie pirates

North Korea’s Operating System Analyzed

Bruce66423 points out an analysis at The Guardian of North Korea’s Red Star Linux-based OS, based on a presentation Sunday to the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin : The features of their Fedora based OS include a watermarking system to enable tracking of files — even if unopened. The operating system is not just the pale copy of western ones that many have assumed, said Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess of the German IT security company ERNW, who downloaded the software from a website outside North Korea and explored the code in detail. … This latest version, written around 2013, is based on a version of Linux called Fedora and has eschewed the previous version’s Windows XP feel for Apple’s OS X – perhaps a nod to the country’s leader Kim Jong-un who, like his father, has been photographed near Macs. The OS, unsurprisingly, allowed only tightly fettered access to web sites, using a whitelist approach that gives access to government-controlled or approved sites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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North Korea’s Operating System Analyzed

Comcast switches on the first public gigabit cable modem

Comcast’s gigabit internet access doesn’t officially go live until sometime in 2016, but that isn’t stopping the company from flicking the switch a little early. The cable giant recently activated what it says is the first public-facing DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem in the world — a fortunate customer in Philadelphia now has the kinds of speeds that previously required either a partial fiber optic link or jumping through lots of hoops. There are additional tests running in parts of Atlanta, northern California and Pennsylvania, too. The trial run will seem old hat if you’re using an existing gigabit internet service like Google Fiber or AT&T’s GigaPower . To some extent, Comcast is playing catch up in hopes of preventing its rivals from getting too strong a foothold on the market. Even so, the upgrade is a big deal. However much you might prefer one of the alternatives, DOCSIS 3.1 (whether from Comcast or another cable provider) is more likely to be widely available — cable companies don’t have to overhaul their networks to enable the faster speeds. Ultimately, this deployment is the first step in bringing gigabit-class internet access to the mainstream. [Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images] Via: ZDNet , The Verge Source: Comcast

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Comcast switches on the first public gigabit cable modem

APT Speed For Incremental Updates Gets a Massive Performance Boost

jones_supa writes: Developer Julian Andres Klode has this week made some improvements to significantly increase the speed of incremental updates with Debian GNU/Linux’s APT update system. His optimizations have yielded the apt-get program to suddenly yield 10x performance when compared to the old code. These improvements also make APT with PDiff now faster than the default, non-incremental behavior. Beyond the improvements that landed this week, Julian is still exploring other areas for improving APT update performance. More details via his blog post. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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APT Speed For Incremental Updates Gets a Massive Performance Boost

There’s Finally a Consensus (Sort of) on What We Should Eat

We’ve noted before that there are only three things everybody agrees about when it comes to nutrition . Thanks to a meeting of nutrition researchers, we can add a few more things to that list. Read more…

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There’s Finally a Consensus (Sort of) on What We Should Eat

Pwnd Aethra Routers Used To Brute-Force WordPress Sites

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers found around 8, 000 Aethra routers (with no admin passwords) as part of a botnet that attacked WordPress sites, trying to brute-force admin accounts. Most routers were deployed in enterprise networks in Italy. Each device could have be used to launch DDoS attacks with a capability between 1 to 10 Gbps for each device, based on the company’s bandwidth. Things could be worse, though: Additional investigation also revealed that some of the routers were also susceptible to various reflected XSS and CSRF attacks that would also allow attackers to take control of the device, even if using different login credentials. Using Shodan, a search engine for locating Internet-connected devices, researchers found over 12, 000 of Aethra routers around the world, 10, 866 in Italy alone, and over 8, 000 of these devices were of the model detected in the initial brute-force attack (Aethra Telecommunications PBX series). At that time, 70% of these Aethra routers were still using their default login credentials Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pwnd Aethra Routers Used To Brute-Force WordPress Sites

The Essential Cyberpunk Reading List

It’s now been over three decades since cyberpunk first exploded, and in that time we’ve seen gorgeous movies, read fascinating books, and seen dozens of offshoots like steampunk (and my new favorite, deco punk) develop. Here are the 21 cyberpunk books you absolutely must read. Read more…

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The Essential Cyberpunk Reading List