Investigators are still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong in with the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo . While the National Transportation Safety Board has been looking into an issue with the braking system , the agency has released details from surviving pilot Peter Siebold about how he managed to escape the exploding spacecraft. Read more…
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SpaceShipTwo’s Surviving Pilot Ejected Into -70 Degree Air at 50,000 Feet
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie . Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. Read more…
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Why Are ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption?
That shampoo you’re lathering into your hair may claim that it’s packed with “all-natural ingredients, ” but the label tells a different story. DMDM hydantoin? Ammonium lauryl sulphate? What is this stuff anyhow? Read more…
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What the Ingredients On Your Shampoo Bottle Actually Mean
Microsoft’s Lync communications server is to be rebranded. The next version, due to be released next year, will be named instead Skype for Business . It will retain Lync’s infrastructure—the ability to use on-premises servers, optional federation with external communications networks, and so on and so forth—but the branding and client design will closely match those of Microsoft’s consumer communication platform. The Skype and Lync development teams have been working together since shortly after Microsoft bought the popular Skype platform for $8.5 billion in 2011. Skype for Business will further improve interoperability with regular Skype. While voice and instant messaging are already interoperable between Lync and Skype, the next version will add video messaging and access to the Skype user directory. This will mean that, should administrators choose to enable it, the Skype for Business client software will serve as a fairly fully featured Skype client, too. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Lync rebranded as “Skype for Business” in 2015 release
As scary as Heartbleed was this past Spring, it looks like virtually every Microsoft Windows user is in for a little deja vu. Microsoft just released a critical patch for a huge server vulnerability —one that affects every current version of Windows out there. Read more…
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All Current Versions of Windows Have a Huge Vulnerabilty, Get the Patch Now
Samsung definitely isn’t taking NVIDIA’s first patent lawsuit lying down. The Korean tech firm has countersued NVIDIA not just for allegedly infringing on six patents, but for leading buyers astray with benchmarks for the Shield Tablet . NVIDIA is supposedly trying to “confuse customers” by claiming that the slate’s Tegra K1 processor outpaces the Exynos 5433 chip in the Galaxy Note 4 ; regular benchmarks show that’s not true, Samsung claims. The suit also accuses PC vendor Velocity Micro of violating two additional patents (for a total of eight), since NVIDIA’s graphics cards play a heavy role in its lineup. NVIDIA tells Engadget that it’s still examining the complaint, but it’s already rejecting allegations that it misled gamers with its Shield tests. Both devices were using their stock, fresh-from-the-box software loadouts, the company insists. Whether or not that’s true, the lawsuit comes across as the pot calling the kettle black. After all, it was the revelation that Samsung inflated benchmark scores which led many to question the honesty of mobile device makers. Really, the assertion of dodgy benchmarking is as much about corporate pride as anything else — if successful, it would force NVIDIA to eat humble pie. Filed under: Gaming , Tablets , Mobile , Samsung , NVIDIA Comments Source: Law360 (registration required)
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Samsung lawsuit claims that NVIDIA’s benchmarks are misleading
Atlas is back . While the robot itself may be from Google-owned Boston Dynamics, the balance algorithm is from IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition) who’s worked with the robotics company to get the six foot two biped walking better. IHMC has a strong track record in DARPA’s Robotics Challenge , coming first in computer simulations and second in real-life field trials. The next challenge comes in 2015, with more advanced trials in the summer. Turn down your speakers, then jump after the break to se a pile of motors and metal balance atop a few cinder blocks and flap its arms. There may be a beauty to its motions, but it certainly ain’t a quiet beauty. Again: mute the sound. Filed under: Robots , Google Comments Source: IHMC
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Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot weighs 330 pounds, but it can now balance on one leg
HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that Denmark is pursuing the world’s most ambitious policy against climate change, aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well. The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed, as more of these types of power sources push their way onto the electric grid, they cause power prices to crash at what used to be the most profitable times of day. Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run. Yet those plants are needed to supply backup power for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. With their prime assets throwing off less cash, electricity suppliers in Germany and Denmark have applied to shut down a slew of newly unprofitable power plants, but nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter’s night with little wind. “We are really worried about this situation, ” says Anders Stouge, the deputy director general of the Danish Energy Association. “If we don’t do something, we will in the future face higher and higher risks of blackouts.” Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Denmark Faces a Tricky Transition To 100 Percent Renewable Energy
mpicpp sends news of research at the University of Michigan in which a self-assembling chain of particles can be used as tiny, electrically-activated muscles. The team started with particles similar to those found in paint, with diameters of about a hundredth the width of a strand of hair. They stretched these particles into football shapes and coated one side of each football with gold. The gilded halves attracted one another in slightly salty water—ideally about half the salt concentration in the sports drink Powerade. The more salt in the water, the stronger the attraction. Left to their own devices, the particles formed short chains of overlapping pairs, averaging around 50 or 60 particles to a chain. When exposed to an alternating electric field, the chains seemed to add new particles indefinitely. But the real excitement was in the way that the chains stretched. … While the force generated by the fibers is about 1, 000 times weaker than human muscle tissue per unit area, it may be enough for microbots. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Demonstrate Electrically Activated Micro-Muscles
DeviantArt user: Tincho555 Researchers have uncovered a seven-year-old malware operation that combines advanced cryptographic attacks, zero-day exploits, and well-developed keyloggers to target elite executives staying in luxury hotels during business trips. The attackers behind “DarkHotel,” as the advanced persistent threat has been dubbed, appear to know in advance when a targeted exec will check in and check out of a hotel. Victims are infected through a variety of methods, including bogus software updates for Adobe Flash, Google Toolbar, or other trusted software that are presented when the exec uses the hotel’s Wi-Fi or wired Internet access. In many cases, the attack code is signed with a trusted digital certificate that the attackers were able to clone by factoring the underlying 512-bit private key. While factoring weak 512-bit keys has been practical for several years, the crypto attack nonetheless is an “advanced” capability, particularly a few years ago. Taken together, the characteristics are an indication the operators have some sophistication, said researchers from Kaspersky Lab, the Russia-based security firm that disclosed the campaign. “The fact that most of the time the victims are top executives indicates the attackers have knowledge of their victims whereabouts, including name and place of stay,” the researchers wrote in a report published Monday . “This paints a dark, dangerous web in which unsuspecting travelers can easily fall. While the exact reason why some hotels function as an attacker vector are unknown, certain suspicions exist, indicating possibly a much larger compromise. We are still investigating this aspect of the operation and will publish more information in the future.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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“DarkHotel” uses bogus crypto certificates to snare Wi-Fi-connected execs