Under mysterious circumstances, Russia has arrested Ruslan Stoyanov, head of computer incidents investigations unit at the huge cybersecurity firm at Kaspersky. He’s been charged with treason. Read more…
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Russia Arrests Top Kaspersky Hacking Investigator for Treason
As promised , Samsung has revealed the results of its investigation into the spate of Galaxy Note 7s that caught on fire. Read more…
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Samsung Finally Releases Note 7 Disaster Autopsy
In a move that sounds convenient and a little terrifying, international travelers to Australia may not need a passport by 2020. Officials say that the country is implementing a system to replace the standard paper ID with biometric technology that recognizes faces, irises and/or fingerprints. Read more…
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Australia to Replace Passports With Biometric Tech
Billions of robocalls came from two groups selling extended auto warranties, SEO services, and home security systems over the last seven years — many to numbers on the “Do Not Call” list — but this week the Federal Trade Commission took action. Trailrunner7 shares this report from OnTheWire: Continuing its campaign against phone fraud operations, the FTC has dismantled two major robocall organizations… They and many of their co-defendants have agreed to court-ordered bans on robocall activities and financial settlements… The FTC and the FCC both have been cracking down on illegal robocall operations recently. The FCC has formed a robocall strike force with the help of carriers and also has signed an agreement to cooperate with Canadian authorities to address the problem. “The law is clear about robocalls, ” says one FTC executive. “If a telemarketer doesn’t have consumers’ written permission, it’s illegal to make these calls.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: A female shark separated from her long-term mate has developed the ability to have babies on her own. Leonie the zebra shark (Stegostoma fasciatum) met her male partner at an aquarium in Townsville, Australia, in 1999. They had more than two dozen offspring together before he was moved to another tank in 2012. From then on, Leonie did not have any male contact. But in early 2016, she had three baby sharks. Intrigued, Christine Dudgeon at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues began fishing for answers. One possibility was that Leonie had been storing sperm from her ex and using it to fertilize her eggs. But genetic testing showed that the babies only carried DNA from their mum, indicating they had been conceived via asexual reproduction. Some vertebrate species have the ability to reproduce asexually even though they normally reproduce sexually. These include certain sharks, turkeys, Komodo dragons, snakes and rays. However, most reports have been in females who have never had male partners. In sharks, asexual reproduction can occur when a female’s egg is fertilized by an adjacent cell known as a polar body, Dudgeon says. This also contains the female’s genetic material, leading to “extreme inbreeding”, she says. “It’s not a strategy for surviving many generations because it reduces genetic diversity and adaptability.” Nevertheless, it may be necessary at times when males are scarce. “It might be a holding-on mechanism, ” Dudgeon says. “Mum’s genes get passed down from female to female until there are males available to mate with.” It’s possible that the switch from sexual to asexual reproduction is not that unusual; we just haven’t known to look for it, Dudgeon says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Female Shark Learns To Reproduce Without Males After Years Alone
Next-generation 5G mobile internet technology marks the beginning of the “fourth industrial revolution, ” the chief executive of Turkey’s leading telecoms player told CNBC on Thursday. From a report: 5G is viewed as a technology that can support the developing Internet of Things (IOT) market, which refers to millions — or potentially billions — of internet-connected devices that are expected soon to come on to the market. Kaan Terzioglu, the chief executive of Turkcell, which has a market capitalization of $23 billion, touted the potential of the technology, saying that while 4G revolutionized the consumer market, 5G could transform the industrial space. “I think this is the beginning of the fourth generation of the industrial revolution. This will be the platform linking billions of devices together, ” Terzioglu told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Turkcell has been working on 5G technologies since 2013 and this week completed a test in partnership with Ericsson, using the next-generation internet. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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5G Internet is the ‘Beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’
You can purchase a smart lock that you control with your phone easily enough, but it’s much more fun to actually make one yourself. YouTubers Hacker House make one with a Raspberry Pi. Read more…
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Build Your Own Smartphone-Connected Door Lock With a Raspberry Pi
wiredmikey writes: Security researchers have a uncovered a Mac OS based espionage malware they have named “Quimitchin.” The malware is what they consider to be “the first Mac malware of 2017, ” which appears to be a classic espionage tool. While it has some old code and appears to have existed undetected for some time, it works. It was discovered when an IT admin noticed unusual traffic coming from a particular Mac, and has been seen infecting Macs at biomedical facilities. From SecurityWeek.com: “Quimitchin comprises just two files: a .plist file that simply keeps the .client running at all times, and the .client file containing the payload. The latter is a ‘minified and obfuscated’ perl script that is more novel in design. It combines three components, Thomas Reed, director of Mac offerings at Malwarebytes and author of the blog post told SecurityWeek: ‘a Mac binary, another perl script and a Java class tacked on at the end in the __DATA__ section of the main perl script. The script extracts these, writes them to /tmp/ and executes them.’ Its primary purpose seems to be screen captures and webcam access, making it a classic espionage tool. Somewhat surprisingly the code uses antique system calls. ‘These are some truly ancient functions, as far as the tech world is concerned, dating back to pre-OS X days, ‘ he wrote in the blog post. ‘In addition, the binary also includes the open source libjpeg code, which was last updated in 1998.’ The script also contains Linux shell commands. Running the malware on a Linux machine, Malwarebytes ‘found that — with the exception of the Mach-O binary — everything ran just fine.’ It is possible that there is a specific Linux variant of the malware in existence — but the researchers have not been able to find one. It did find two Windows executable files, courtesy of VirusTotal, that communicated with the same CC server. One of them even used the same libjpeg library, which hasn’t been updated since 1998, as that used by Quimitchin.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Malwarebytes Discovers ‘First Mac Malware of 2017’
Photography isn’t as easy as many people assume, but you can learn the basics on your own . And if you need some structured lessons, this 12-module course from Harvard will teach you everything from exposure settings to reading histograms. Read more…
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Take a Free Digital Photography Class From Harvard
Sometimes, owning a smartphone feels pricy. There’s the hefty chunk of change you’ll need to spend on the phone itself, and then the monthly fee you’ll need to fork over to operate it. But for just $400 and the cost of a few old Zack Morris-style brick phones, you can avoid those expenses and build your own damn 1G… Read more…
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It Only Costs $400 to Build Your Own Cell Phone Network