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8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

dryriver writes: China launched a space laboratory named Tiangong 1 into orbit in 2011. The space laboratory was supposed to become a symbol of China’s ambitious bid to become a space superpower. After two years in space, Tiangong 1 started experiencing technical failure. Last year Chinese officials confirmed that the space laboratory had to be scrapped. The 8.5 ton heavy space laboratory has begun its descent towards Earth and is expected to crash back to Earth within the next few months. Most of the laboratory is expected to burn up in earth’s atmosphere, but experts believe that pieces as heavy as 100 kilograms (220 pounds) may survive re-entry and impact earth’s surface. Nobody will be able to predict with any precision where those chunks of space laboratory will land on Earth until a few hours before re-entry occurs. The chance that anyone would be harmed by Tiangong-1’s debris is considered unlikely. When NASA’s SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 — for littering. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

Here’s how to learn every nook and cranny of Microsoft Excel and Office

  Most jobs don’t demand much in the way of serious technology proficiency, but knowledge of Microsoft Office is all but required for any position that involves a computer. If you’re looking to add a few more in-demand skills to your resume, both eLearnExcel and eLearnOffice are being offered together in the Boing Boing Store to teach you how to use every member of the Microsoft Office Suite. (With a special focus in Excel.) This bundle includes eight courses dedicated to each software in the Suite. With eLearnExcel, you’ll get expert training to help you build spreadsheets the right way. In addition to earning a continuing professional development (CPD) certificate to show off to potential employers, you’ll learn how to craft complex pivot tables, write bulletproof formulas, and compile data into beautiful reports. After immersing yourself in Excel, eLearnOffice will guide you through the lesser-known parts of PowerPoint, Word, OneNote, Outlook, and every other piece of productivity software that comes with an Office365 subscription. To help you become the resident Microsoft guru at your next job, a lifetime subscription to eLearnExcel and eLearnOffice is currently $49 . BUY NOW

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Here’s how to learn every nook and cranny of Microsoft Excel and Office

Over 500 Million PCs Are Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency, Researchers Reveal

Ad blocking firm AdGuard has found that over 500 million people are inadvertently mining cryptocurrencies through their computers after visiting websites that are running background mining software. The company found 220 popular websites with an aggregated audience of half a billion people use so-called crypto-mining scripts when a user opens their main page. Newsweek reports: The mining tool works by hijacking a computer’s central processing unit (CPU), commonly referred to as “the brains” of a computer. Using part of a computer’s CPU to mine bitcoin effects the machine’s overall performance and will slow it down by using up processing power. The researchers found that bitcoin browser mining is mostly found on websites “with a shady reputation” due to the trouble such sites have with earning revenue through advertising. However, in the future it could become a legitimate and ethical way of making money if the website requests the permission of the visitor first. “220 sites may not seem like a lot, ” the researchers wrote in a blogpost detailing their discovery. “But CoinHive was launched less than one month ago on September 14. The growth has been extremely rapid: from nearly zero to 2.2 percent of Alexa’s top 100, 000 websites. “This analysis well illustrates the whole web, so it’s safe to say that one of every forty websites currently mines cryptocurrency (namely Monero) in the browsers their users employ.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Over 500 Million PCs Are Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency, Researchers Reveal

IGN acquires pay-what-you-want game and book retailer Humble Bundle

Media conglomerate IGN has acquired Humble Bundle, the pay-what-you-want gaming, book and software collection retailer that raises money for charitable causes. In a blog post , Humble Bundle cofounder and CEO Jeffrey Rosen noted that his company will “keep our own office, culture, and amazing team with IGN helping us further our plans.” Aside from noting that the retailer will get additional resources and help out of the deal, no details were disclosed. Welcome to the family, @humble ! We can’t wait to help others with you ✌️ https://t.co/MlxUoFi2nk — IGN (@IGN) October 13, 2017 In the post, Humble Bundle noted that the platform has raised $106 million for various charities in the seven years since it launched its first bundle. While the platform could do a lot with funding from a media titan like IGN (owned by J2 Media), there’s obvious concern over potential conflicts of interest between a game-reviewing publication owning a game-selling retailer. (We’ve reached out to both IGN and Humble Bundle for comment and will include their responses when we hear back.) From Humble Bundle’s blog post, it seems IGN will leave it to operate more or less independently. “The idea is just to feed them with the resources they need to keep doing what they’re doing … We want to stick to the fundamentals in the short term. We don’t want to disrupt anything we’re doing right already, ” IGN executive VP Mitch Galbraith told Gamasutra . “Because of the shared vision and overlap of our customer bases, there’s going to be a lot of opportunities.” Via: Gamasutra Source: Humble Bundle (blog)

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IGN acquires pay-what-you-want game and book retailer Humble Bundle

Researcher Turns HDD Into Rudimentary Microphone

An anonymous reader writes from Bleeping Computer: Speaking at a security conference, researcher Alfredo Ortega has revealed that you can use your hard disk drive (HDD) as a rudimentary microphone to pick up nearby sounds. This is possible because of how hard drives are designed to work. Sounds or nearby vibrations are nothing more than mechanical waves that cause HDD platters to vibrate. By design, a hard drive cannot read or write information to an HDD platter that moves under vibrations, so the hard drive must wait for the oscillation to stop before carrying out any actions. Because modern operating systems come with utilities that measure HDD operations up to nanosecond accuracy, Ortega realized that he could use these tools to measure delays in HDD operations. The longer the delay, the louder the sound or the intense the vibration that causes it. These read-write delays allowed the researcher to reconstruct sound or vibration waves picked up by the HDD platters. A video demo is here. “It’s not accurate yet to pick up conversations, ” Ortega told Bleeping Computer in a private conversation. “However, there is research that can recover voice data from very low-quality signals using pattern recognition. I didn’t have time to replicate the pattern-recognition portion of that research into mine. However, it’s certainly applicable.” Furthermore, the researcher also used sound to attack hard drives. Ortega played a 130Hz tone to make an HDD stop responding to commands. “The Linux kernel disconnected it entirely after 120 seconds, ” he said. There’s a video of this demo on YouTube. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researcher Turns HDD Into Rudimentary Microphone

Australian defense firm was hacked and F-35 data stolen, DOD confirms

Enlarge (credit: Royal Australian Air Force) The Australian Cyber Security Centre noted in its just-issued 2017 Threat Report that a small Australian defense company “with contracting links to national security projects” had been the victim of a cyber-espionage attack detected last November. “ACSC analysis confirmed that the adversary had sustained access to the network for an extended period of time and had stolen a significant amount of data,” the ACSC report stated. “The adversary remained active on the network at the time.” More details of the breach were revealed on Wednesday at an IT conference in Sydney. ASD Incident Response Manager Mitchell Clarke said, “The compromise was extensive and extreme.” The attacker behind the breach has been internally referred to at the Australian Signals Directorate as ” APT Alf ” (named for a character in Australia’s long-running television show Home and Away , not the US television furry alien). Alf stole approximately 30 gigabytes of data, including data related to Australia’s involvement in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, as well as data on the P-8 Poseidon patrol plane, planned future Australian Navy ships, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb. The breach began in July of 2016. A spokesperson for the US Department of Defense’s F-35 Joint Program Office confirmed the breach to Defense News , stating that the Office “is aware” of the breach. The spokesperson reiterated that no classified data was exposed. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Australian defense firm was hacked and F-35 data stolen, DOD confirms

WD is developing 40TB hard drives powered by microwaves

Western Digital (WD) may have lost a bid to buy Toshiba’s flash memory technology, but is still hard at work on its bread-and-butter hard drives . The company has unveiled a breakthrough called microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) that will allow ever-higher disk capacities, up to 40TB by the year 2025. “Commercialization of MAMR technology will pave the way to higher recording densities and lower cost per terabyte hard disk drives, ” said VP of research John Rydning in a statement. If you’re wondering what microwaves have to do with hard drives, WD has a developed a new type of drive head called a “spin torque oscillator” that generates a microwave field. That allows data to be written to magnetic media at a lower magnetic field than with conventional disks, making it possible to pack more bits into the same space. “As a result, Western Digital’s MAMR technology is now ready for prime time, and provides a more cost-effective, more reliable solution, ” the company said in a technical brief , adding that “MAMR also has the capability to extend areal density gains up to 4 Terabits per square inch.” As with its current enterprise drives, WD’s MAMR drives will use helium instead of air to reduce internal turbulence. So how “ready for prime time” is it? Western Digital says MAMR-based drives for data centers will appear in the market starting in 2019, and it will produce 40TB 3.5-inch disks by 2025, with “continued expansion beyond that timeframe.” WD didn’t say what capacity early MAMR drives would pack, but it recently released its first 14TB drive via its HGST (formerly Hitachi) subsidiary, so we’d expect the MAMR variants to go beyond that. Mechanical hard disk don’t have nearly the speed or reliability of SSDs, but the cost per gigabyte is multiple times lower. That’s crucial for data centers and cloud storage firms, especially since data-hungry AI software is becoming more and more pervasive. Don’t expect to see MAMR drives in your local media backup (NAS) drives right away, but it should trickle down fairly soon, giving you enough storage for future 8K HDR videos . Source: Western Digital

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WD is developing 40TB hard drives powered by microwaves

Hyatt Hotels Discovers Card Data Breach At 41 Properties Across 11 Countries

Hyatt Hotels has suffered a second card data breach in two years. In the first breach, hackers had gained access to credit card systems at 250 properties in 50 different countries. This time, the breach appears to have impacted 41 properties across 11 countries. Krebs on Security reports: Hyatt said its cyber security team discovered signs of unauthorized access to payment card information from cards manually entered or swiped at the front desk of certain Hyatt-managed locations between March 18, 2017 and July 2, 2017. “Upon discovery, we launched a comprehensive investigation to understand what happened and how this occurred, which included engaging leading third-party experts, payment card networks and authorities, ” the company said in a statement. “Hyatt’s layers of defense and other cybersecurity measures helped to identify and resolve the issue. While this incident affects a small percentage of total payment cards used at the affected hotels during the at-risk dates.” The hotel chain said the incident affected payment card information — cardholder name, card number, expiration date and internal verification code — from cards manually entered or swiped at the front desk of certain Hyatt-managed locations. It added there is no indication that any other information was involved. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hyatt Hotels Discovers Card Data Breach At 41 Properties Across 11 Countries

Sound of mystery attacks in Cuba released. It’s as obnoxious as you’d expect

Enlarge / Personnel gather at the US Embassy in Cuba after the US State Department announced it will cut the embassy’s staff by half in the wake of mysterious health problems. (credit: Getty | Sven Creutzmann/Mambo Photo ) On Thursday, the Associated Press released the first audio recording of the sound that some diplomats say they heard during mystery attacks in Havana, Cuba. Those attacks have so far left 22 Americans with a puzzling range of symptoms, from brain injuries to hearing loss. The sound is high-pitched and grating. You can listen to it here (but beware: it’s unpleasant). The noise is comprised of 20 or more different frequencies, all around about 7,000 kHz and 8,000 kHz. It reportedly came in abrupt pulses of varying lengths. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sound of mystery attacks in Cuba released. It’s as obnoxious as you’d expect

Equifax may have been hacked again (updated)

When Equifax’s interim CEO penned a letter of apology on The Wall Street Journal , he admitted that it will take a lot of effort to regain people’s trust. Unfortunately, the company still seems to be lacking when it comes to security, because according to Ars Technica , it’s been hacked yet again. Independent security analyst Randy Abrams told Ars that he was redirected to hxxp:centerbluray.info and was met with a Flash download when he went to equifax.com to contest a false info on his credit report. The fake Flash installer apparently tricks people into downloading what Symantec identifies as Adware.Eorezo , an adware that inundates Internet Explorer with advertisements. Unfortunately, we can’t replicate the problem, but Abrams said he encountered the issue on three separate visits and captured one of them on video: We reached out to Equifax to ask whether the company has already cleaned up the adware downloader. To be safe, though, don’t click on any random Flash installer that pops up when you visit the agency’s website in the near future. Update: Equifax says its IT and security teams are looking into the issue, but while the investigation is in progress, the page has been taken offline. The company plans to share more information as it becomes available. Source: Ars Technica

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Equifax may have been hacked again (updated)