Today, Dropbox announced that it will allow for collaborative editing in Microsoft Office. While not as seamless as editing a Google doc, it will help users avoid overwriting each others changes and sync those changes more quickly. Read more…
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Dropbox Adds Collaborative Editing for Microsoft Office
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: “The U.S. Navy’s new railgun technology, developed by General Atomics, uses the Lorentz force in a type of linear, electric motor to hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7 — in excess of 5, 000 mph. The weapon has a range of 100 miles and doesn’t require explosive warheads. ‘The electromagnetic railgun represents an incredible new offensive capability for the U.S. Navy, ‘ says Rear Adm. Bryant Fuller, the Navy’s chief engineer. ‘This capability will allow us to effectively counter a wide range of threats at a relatively low cost, while keeping our ships and sailors safer by removing the need to carry as many high-explosive weapons.’ Sea trials begin aboard an experimental Navy catamaran, the USNS Millinocket, in 2016.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Navy Debuts New Railgun That Launches Shells at Mach 7
A whitehat hacker from the Baltimore suburbs went too far in his effort to drive home a point about a security vulnerability he reported to a client. Now he’s unemployed and telling all on reddit . David Helkowski was working for Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software consulting firm on a project for the University of Maryland (UMD), when he claims he found malware on the university’s servers that could be used to gain access to personal data of students and faculty. But he says his employer and the university failed to take action on the report, and the vulnerability remained in place even after a data breach exposed more than 300,000 students’ and former students’ Social Security numbers. As Helkowski said to a co-worker in Steam chat, “I got tired of being ignored, so I forced their hand.” He penetrated the university’s network from home, working over multiple VPNs, and downloaded the personal data of members of the university’s security task force. He then posted the data to Pastebin and e-mailed the members of the task force anonymously on March 15. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Whitehat hacker goes too far, gets raided by FBI, tells all
Last week, a small crowdfunded project called the Healbe GoBe made news, as backers and journalists questioned the company’s claims that it could measure caloric intake using a wearable device. While the claims do sound wild at best, the company is sticking to its story — and Indiegogo is sticking by the project. Read More
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The Risk And Rush Of Supporting A Crowdfunding Project
Who wants to steal crappy old cars better suited for the junkyard than the road? Car thieves with a fine understanding of New York law, of course. While car thefts have gone way down in New York, thefts of junky old cars has gone up—all because a quirk in the state’s laws makes it easier to turn junk into profit. Read more…
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The Obscure Loophole That Explains Why Thieves Prefer Old, Junky Cars
DNA robots crawl across a surface made of DNA. Harvard DNA-based nanotechnology has been around for more than 30 years, but it really took off in 2006, when DNA origami was featured on the cover of Nature . This form of origami, the folding of DNA into 2D and 3D shapes, was more of an art form back then, but scientists are now using the approach to construct nanoscale robots. The basic principle of DNA origami is that a long, single-stranded DNA molecule will fold into a predefined shape through the base-pairing of short segments called staples. All that’s required is to ensure that each staple can find a complementary match to base-pair with at the right location elsewhere in the molecule. This approach can be used to create both 2D and 3D structures. The idea behind the new work is that a DNA origami robot can be programmed to have a specific function based on a key, which can be a protein, a drug, or even another robot. Once the right key and the right robot find each other, the key drives a conformational (structural) change in the robot. The new shape causes the robot to perform a programmed function, such as releasing a drug. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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DNA-based logic gates operate inside cockroach cells
guthrieinator There’s good news, bad news, and worse news regarding the “Heartbleed” bug that affected nearly two-thirds of the Internet’s servers dependent on SSL encryption. The good news is that many of those servers (well, about a third) have already been patched. And according to analysis by Robert Graham of Errata Security, the bug won’t expose the private encryption key for servers “in most software” (though others have said several web server distributions are vulnerable to giving up the key under certain circumstances.) The bad news is that about 600,000 servers are still vulnerable to attacks exploiting the bug. The worse news is that malicious “bot” software may have been attacking servers with the vulnerability for some time—in at least one case, traces of the attack have been found in audit logs dating back to last November. Attacks based on the exploit could date back even further. Security expert Bruce Schneier calls Heartbleed a catastrophic vulnerability. “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he said in a blog post today. The bug affects how OpenSSL, the most widely used cryptographic library for Apache and nginx Web servers, handles a service of Transport Layer Security called Heartbeat—an extension added to TLS in 2012. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Heartbleed vulnerability may have been exploited months before patch
Distribution of the Windows 8.1 Update, Microsoft’s hefty patch for Windows 8.1 that updates the user interface for desktop and mouse users , has been temporarily suspended for some enterprise users after the company discovered that patched systems are no longer able to receive future updates from Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) servers. The problem occurs when clients connect to WSUS with HTTPS enabled, but without TLS 1.2. Windows 8.1 machines with the KB 2919355 update installed will no longer be able to receive future updates from those servers. Microsoft describes it primarily as an issue for WSUS 3.0 Service Pack 2, also known as WSUS 3.2, when run on Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, 2008, and 2008 R2; this version does not have HTTPS or TLS 1.2 enabled by default, but HTTPS is part of the recommended configuration. WSUS 4 on Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 is also technically affected, as the bug is client-side, but Windows Server enables TLS 1.2 by default, so issues are unlikely to arise in practice. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Windows 8.1 Update halted to some enterprise users amid WSUS issues
When you see and touch the massive furniture of David Kiss , you feel something sensational, something deeply ancient and radiantly modern at the same time. I recently joined the Hungarian product designer and sculptor for a day, to watch his process—which verges on alchemy. Read more…
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Casting Molten Metal On Wood With a Hungarian Design Master
Your music library is precious. It’s full of hard-to-find tracks, ripped CDs, and rare downloads. It might also be a mess. It can be easier to look up those songs on Spotify than enjoy the high-quality audio files you own. Luckily, there are some great free tools to clean it up and make sure that never happens again. Let’s check out the best. Read more…
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The Best Apps for Automatically Cleaning Up Your Music Library