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Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere

William Herkewitz, reports for Popular Mechanics: A newly discovered star is unlike any ever found. With an outermost layer of 99.9 percent pure oxygen, its atmosphere is the most oxygen-rich in the known universe. Heck, it makes Earth’s meager 21 percent look downright suffocating. The strange stellar oddity is a radically new type of white dwarf star, and was discovered by a team of Brazilian astronomers led by Kepler de Souza Oliveira at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. The star is unique in the known pool of 32, 000 white dwarf stars, and is the only known star of any kind with an almost pure oxygen atmosphere. The new white dwarf has a mouthful of a name — SDSSJ124043.01+671034.68 — but has been nicknamed ‘Dox’ (pronounced Dee-Awks) by Kepler’s team. The discovery was reported today in a paper in the journal Science. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere

Patch Out For ‘Ridiculous’ Trend Micro Command Execution Vulnerability

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register: A bug in its software meant that Trend Micro accidentally left a remote debugging server running on customer machines. The flaw, discovered by Google’s Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, opened the door to command execution of vulnerable systems (running either Trend Micro Maximum Security, Trend Micro Premium Security or Trend Micro Password Manager). Ormandy — who previously discovered a somewhat similar flaw in Trend Micro’s technology — described the latest flaw as ‘ridiculous’. Trend Micro issued a patch for the flaw, a little over a week after Ormandy reported the bug to it on 22 March. The patch is not complete but does address the most critical issues at hand, according to the security firm. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Patch Out For ‘Ridiculous’ Trend Micro Command Execution Vulnerability

Confirmed: Microsoft and Canonical Partner To Bring Ubuntu To Windows 10

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports for ZDNet: According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, and Microsoft, you’ll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10. This will be more than just running the Bash shell on Windows 10. After all, thanks to programs such as Cygwin or MSYS utilities, hardcore Unix users have long been able to run the popular Bash command line interface (CLI) on Windows. With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10. Microsoft and Canonical will not, however, sources say, be integrating Linux per se into Windows. Instead, Ubuntu will primarily run on a foundation of native Windows libraries. Update: 03/30 16:16 GMT by M : At its developer conference Build 2016, Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed that it is bringing native support for Bash on Windows 10. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux 4.6 Brings NVIDIA GTX 900 Support, OrangeFS, Better Power Management

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.6-rc1 kernel has been released. New to the Linux 4.6 kernel are a significant number of new features including NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 open-source 3D support when using the closed-source firmware files, Dell XPS 13 Skylake laptop support, a fix for laptops that were limiting their own performance due to incorrectly thinking they were overheating, AHCI runtime power management support, Intel graphics power management features enabled by default, a new file-system (OrangeFS), and a range of other improvements. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Petya Ransomware Uses DOS-Level Lock Screen, Prevents OS Boot Up

An anonymous reader writes: A new type of ransomware was discovered that crashes your PC into a BSOD, restarts your computer, and then prevents your OS from starting by altering the hard drive’s master boot record (MBR). This keeps the user locked in a DOS screen that doubles as the ransomware’s ransom note. The ransomware’s name is Petya, and was currently seen only targeting HR departments in Germany. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Indicts 7 Iranians Accused of Hacking U.S. Financial Institutions

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted seven Iranians with intelligence links over a series of crippling cyberattacks against 46 U.S. financial institutions between 2011 and 2013. The indictment, which was unsealed Thursday, also accuses one of the Iranians of remotely accessing the control system of a small dam in Rye, N.Y, during the same period. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the indictment is meant to send a message: “That we will not allow any individual, group, or nation to sabotage American financial institutions or undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market.” According to the indictment, the seven men worked for two Iran-based computer security companies that have done work for the Iranian government, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The men allegedly carried out large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a server with communications in order to disable it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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U.S. Indicts 7 Iranians Accused of Hacking U.S. Financial Institutions

Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing Loopholes in Zero Rating

Reader Jason Koebler quotes a Motherboard article: Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their respective websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have taken to hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and are also sharing links to these files on Facebook, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive. It’s undeniably a creative use of two services that were designed to give people in the developing world some access to the internet. But now that Angolans are causing headaches for Wikipedia editors and the Wikimedia Foundation, no one is sure what to do about it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Radio Attack Lets Hackers Steal 24 Different Car Models

An anonymous reader writes from a Wired article: A group of German vehicle security researchers has released new findings about the extent of a wireless key hack, and their work ought to convince hundreds of thousands of drivers to keep their car keys next to their Pudding Pops. The Munich-based automobile club ADAC recently made public a study it had performed on dozens of cars to test a radio ‘amplification attack’ that silently extends the range of unwitting drivers’ wireless key fobs to open cars and even start their ignitions (in German). The ADAC researchers say that 24 different vehicles from 19 different manufacturers were all vulnerable, allowing them to not only reliably unlock the target vehicles but also immediately drive them away. “This clear vulnerability in [wireless] keys facilitates the work of thieves immensely, ” reads the post. “The radio connection between keys and car can easily be extended over several hundred meters, regardless of whether the original key is, for example, at home or in the pocket of the owner.” Here’s the full list of vulnerable vehicles from their findings, which focused on European models: the Audi A3, A4 and A6, BMW’s 730d, Citroen’s DS4 CrossBack, Ford’s Galaxy and Eco-Sport, Honda’s HR-V, Hyundai’s Santa Fe CRDi, KIA’s Optima, Lexus’s RX 450h, Mazda’s CX-5, MINI’s Clubman, Mitsubishi’s Outlander, Nissan’s Qashqai and Leaf, Opel’s Ampera, Range Rover’s Evoque, Renault’s Traffic, Ssangyong’s Tivoli XDi, Subaru’s Levorg, Toyota’s RAV4, and Volkswagen’s Golf GTD and Touran 5T. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Radio Attack Lets Hackers Steal 24 Different Car Models

Facebook’s Messenger Bot Store Could Be Most Important Launch Since App Store

An anonymous reader writes from an opinionated article on TechCrunch by Tom Hadfield: If Facebook announces the “Messenger Bot Store” at F8, as many predict, it would be arguably the most consequential event for the tech industry since Apple announced the App Store and iPhone SDK in March 2008. Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users — more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. In January, TechCrunch first reported rumors of Facebook’s secret Chat SDK for building Messenger bots. If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Over the summer, The Information broke the news that AI-powered Facebook M would enable Messenger users to make purchases, restaurant reservations, and travel bookings within the messaging interface. A Messenger Bot Store would have far-reaching consequences not only for entrepreneurs and investors, but also developers and designers. Sam Lessin, the CEO of Fin, says the rise of chat-based user interfaces will mark “a fundamental shift that is going to change the types of applications that get developed and the style of service development.” For a time, bots were perceived to be plain-text exchanges and as such were often described as “invisible apps.” As Jonathan Libov at USV points out, “just because the container is a messenger doesn’t mean that all the apps inside are text-based.” Tomaz Stolfa says there is “unexplored potential in blending conversational interfaces with rich graphical UI elements.” If 800 million Facebook users start discovering bots in Messenger after F8, it will vindicate those who have been saying bots are the new apps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook’s Messenger Bot Store Could Be Most Important Launch Since App Store

5 Major Hospital Hacks: Horror Stories From the Cybersecurity Frontlines

the_newsbeagle writes: We don’t often get insider accounts of hacks against major institutions like hospitals because they immediately go into damage control mode. But at a SXSW talk, a couple of experts told tales out of school. The experts, [John Halamka, CIO of the Boston hospital Beth Israel Deaconness, and Kevin Fu, a University of Michigan engineering professor, recounted incidents in which hackers downloaded patient X-rays to China, took down entire networks, fooled Harvard doctors, and more. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

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