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NVIDIA reveals Volta next-gen GPU platform

We’re here at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, and company CEO Jen Hsun-Huang has just revealed the next step in its GPU roadmap. Called Volta, it’s scheduled to arrive after Maxwell , and will advance GPU technology with a ridiculous amount of memory bandwidth. Volta GPUs will have access to up to 1TB per second of bandwidth by stacking the DRAM on top of the GPU itself, with a silica substrate between them. Then, by cutting a hole through the silicon and connecting each layer it’s possible to move, according to Huang “all of the data from a full Blu-Ray disc through the chip in 1/50th of a second.” We aren’t exactly sure what that means for graphics, but being able to process data that quickly is bound to be a boon for gamers… whenever Volta actually arrives, of course. Filed under: Desktops , Gaming , Laptops Comments

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NVIDIA reveals Volta next-gen GPU platform

The incredible bridge design that could take Portland into the future

What would happen if we designed new urban megastructures using the latest scientific information about green design? Portland architect Bill Badrick has the answer. The new Columbia River Crossing bridge, in Portland, Oregon, should be a double-decker, carbon-neutral engineering marvel — complete with a huge park on top. The best part? It’s all possible with current technology. Read more…

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The incredible bridge design that could take Portland into the future

Google Implements DNSSEC Validation For Public DNS

wiredmikey writes “Google on Tuesday announced that it now fully supports DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on its Google Public DNS resolvers. Previously, the search giant accepted and forwarded DNSSEC-formatted messages but didn’t actually perform validation. ‘With this new security feature, we can better protect people from DNS-based attacks and make DNS more secure overall by identifying and rejecting invalid responses from DNSSEC-protected domains,’ Yunhong Gu, Team Lead, Google Public DNS, wrote in a blog post. According to Gu, about 1/3 of top-level domains have been signed, but most second-level domains remain unsigned. According to NIST, there has been no progress in enabling DNSSEC on 98 percent of all 1,070 industry domains tested as of March 18, 2013. ‘Overall, DNSSEC is still at an early stage and we hope that our support will help expedite its deployment,’ Gu said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Implements DNSSEC Validation For Public DNS

Chameleon botnet steals millions from advertisers with fake mouseclicks

Security researchers have discovered a botnet that is stealing millions of dollars per month from advertisers. The botnet does so by simulating click-throughs on display ads hosted on at least 202 websites. Revealed and dubbed “Chameleon” by the Web analytics firm spider.io because of its ability to fool advertisers’ behavior-tracking algorithms, the botnet is the first found to use display advertisements to generate fraudulent income for its masters. In a blog post today, spider.io reported that the company had been tracking Chameleon since December of 2012. Simulating multiple concurrent browser sessions with websites, each bot is able to interact with Flash and JavaScript based ads. So far, more than 120,000 Windows PCs have been identified—95 percent of them with IP addresses associated with US residential Internet services. The company has issued a blacklist of the 5,000 worst-offending IP addresses for advertisers to use to protect themselves from fraud. While in many respects the botnet simulates human activity on webpages to fool countermeasures to clickfraud, it generates random mouse clicks and mouse pointer traces across pages. This makes it relatively easy for bot-infected systems to be identified over time. The bot is also unstable because of the heavy load it puts on the infected machine, and its frequent crashes can also be used as a signature to identify infected systems. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chameleon botnet steals millions from advertisers with fake mouseclicks

What Earth would look like with its oceans and landmasses swapped

This is the map we’ve all dreamed of seeing. It’s a depiction of Earth in which its primary geological features have been inverted , showcasing a planet with a sprawling landmass that extends across two-thirds of its surface. Read more…

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What Earth would look like with its oceans and landmasses swapped

US regulator: Bitcoin exchanges must comply with money-laundering laws

Zach Copley The federal agency charged with enforcing the nation’s laws against money laundering has issued new guidelines suggesting that several parties in the Bitcoin economy qualify as Money Services Businesses under US law. Money Services Businesses (MSBs) must register with the federal government, collect information about their customers, and take steps to combat money laundering by their customers. The new guidelines do not mention Bitcoin by name, but there’s little doubt which “de-centralized virtual currency” the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had in mind when it drafted the new guidelines. A FinCEN spokesman told Bank Technology News last year that “we are aware of Bitcoin and other similar operations, and we are studying the mechanism behind Bitcoin.” America’s anti-money-laundering laws require financial institutions to collect information on potentially suspicious transactions by their customers and report these to the federal government. Among the institutions subject to these regulatory requirements are “money services businesses,” including “money transmitters.” Until now, it wasn’t clear who in the Bitcoin network qualified as a money transmitter under the law. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US regulator: Bitcoin exchanges must comply with money-laundering laws

Cisco switches to weaker hashing scheme, passwords cracked wide open

Password cracking experts have reversed a secret cryptographic formula recently added to Cisco devices. Ironically, the encryption type 4 algorithm leaves users considerably more susceptible to password cracking than an older alternative, even though the new routine was intended to enhance protections already in place. It turns out that Cisco’s new method for converting passwords into one-way hashes uses a single iteration of the SHA256 function with no cryptographic salt. The revelation came as a shock to many security experts because the technique requires little time and computing resources. As a result, relatively inexpensive computers used by crackers can try a dizzying number of guesses when attempting to guess the corresponding plain-text password. For instance, a system outfitted with two AMD Radeon 6990 graphics cards that run a soon-to-be-released version of the Hashcat password cracking program can cycle through more than 2.8 billion candidate passwords each second. By contrast, the type 5 algorithm the new scheme was intended to replace used 1,000 iterations of the MD5 hash function. The large number of repetitions forces cracking programs to work more slowly and makes the process more costly to attackers. Even more important, the older function added randomly generated cryptographic “salt” to each password, preventing crackers from tackling large numbers of hashes at once. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cisco switches to weaker hashing scheme, passwords cracked wide open

First Ever Cellular-Level Video of a Whole Brain Working

This video is the first time scientists have ever been able to image the whole brain of a vertebrate creature in such a way that you can see individual cells and simultaneously how they’re firing and behaving in real time. This is how the brain really, really works—and it’s amazing. More »

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First Ever Cellular-Level Video of a Whole Brain Working

The 49ers’ plan to build the greatest stadium Wi-Fi network of all time

49ers CTO Kunal Malik (left) and Senior IT director Dan Williams (right) stand in front of Santa Clara Stadium. Jon Brodkin When the San Francisco 49ers’ new stadium opens for the 2014 NFL season, it is quite likely to have the best publicly accessible Wi-Fi network a sports facility in this country has ever known. The 49ers are defending NFC champions, so 68,500 fans will inevitably walk into the stadium for each game. And every single one of them will be able to connect to the wireless network, simultaneously , without any limits on uploads or downloads. Smartphones and tablets will run into the limits of their own hardware long before they hit the limits of the 49ers’ wireless network. A model of Santa Clara Stadium, with a wall painting visible in the background. Jon Brodkin Jon Brodkin Until now, stadium executives have said it’s pretty much impossible to build a network that lets every single fan connect at once. They’ve blamed this on limits in the amount of spectrum available to Wi-Fi, despite their big budgets and the extremely sophisticated networking equipment that largesse allows them to purchase. Even if you build the network perfectly, it would choke if every fan tried to get on at once—at least according to conventional wisdom. Read 69 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The 49ers’ plan to build the greatest stadium Wi-Fi network of all time