Tag: article

Over 9,000 PCs In Australia Infected By TorrentLocker Ransomware

First time accepted submitter River Tam writes Cybercriminals behind the TorrenLocker malware may have earned as much as $585, 000 over several months from 39, 000 PC infections worldwide, of which over 9, 000 were from Australia. If you’re a Windows user in Australia who’s had their files encrypted by hackers after visiting a bogus Australia Post website, chances are you were infected by TorrentLocker and may have contributed to the tens of thousands of dollars likely to have come from Australia due to this digital shakedown racket. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Over 9,000 PCs In Australia Infected By TorrentLocker Ransomware

Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

MojoKid writes Seagate’s just-announced a new ‘Archive’ HDD series, one that offers densities of 5TB, 6TB, and 8TB. That’s right, 8 Terabytes of storage on a single drive and for only $260 at that. Back in 2007, Seagate was one of the first to release a hard drive based on perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that was required to help us break past the roadblock of achieving more than 250GB per platter. Since then, PMR has evolved to allow the release of drives as large as 10TB, but to go beyond that, something new was needed. That “something new” is shingled magnetic recording. As its name suggests, SMR aligns drive tracks in a singled pattern, much like shingles on a roof. With this design, Seagate is able to cram much more storage into the same physical area. It should be noted that Seagate isn’t the first out the door with an 8TB model, however, as HGST released one earlier this year. In lieu of a design like SMR, HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

BGP Hijacking Continues, Despite the Ability To Prevent It

An anonymous reader writes: BGPMon reports on a recent route hijacking event by Syria. These events continue, despite the ability to detect and prevent improper route origination: Resource Public Key Infrastructure. RPKI is technology that allows an operator to validate the proper relationship between an IP prefix and an Autonomous System. That is, assuming you can collect the certificates. ARIN requires operators accept something called the Relying Party Agreement. But the provider community seems unhappy with the agreement, and is choosing not to implement it, just to avoid the RPA, leaving the the Internet as a whole less secure. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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BGP Hijacking Continues, Despite the Ability To Prevent It

Study of Massive Preprint Archive Hints At the Geography of Plagiarism

sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science Insider: New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences — and geography — of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited much. The system attempts to rule out certain kinds of innocent copying: “It’s a fairly sophisticated machine learning logistic classifier, ” says arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University. “It has special ways of detecting block quotes, italicized text, text in quotation marks, as well statements of mathematical theorems, to avoid false positives.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Study of Massive Preprint Archive Hints At the Geography of Plagiarism

How High-Tech Temporary Tattoos Will Hack Your Skin

Molly McHugh writes with this story about sensors that can be attached to temporary tattoos to monitor various medical information. “The Center for Wearable Sensors at the University of California San Diego has been experimenting with attaching sensors to temporary tattoos in order to extract data from the body. The tattoos are worn exactly as a regular temporary tattoo would be worn. The sensors simply sit atop the skin without penetrating it and interact with Bluetooth or other wireless devices with a signal in order to send the data….A biofuel battery applied as a temporary tattoo converts sweat into energy, and a startup within the center has developed a strip that extracts data from sweat to explain how your body is reacting to certain types of exercise. Amay Bandodkar, a fourth year PhD student at UCSD, explains that the sensors are programmed to react to the amount of lactate the body produces.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How High-Tech Temporary Tattoos Will Hack Your Skin

You’re Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South

HughPickens.com writes In the U.S., a new solar project is installed every 3.2 minutes and the number of cumulative installations now stands at more than 500, 000. For years, homeowners who bought solar panels were advised to mount them on the roof facing south to capture the most solar energy over the course of the day. Now Matthew L. Wald writes in the NYT that panels should be pointed west so that peak power comes in the afternoon when the electricity is more valuable. In late afternoon, homeowners are more likely to watch TV, turn on the lights or run the dishwasher. Electricity prices are also higher at that period of peak demand. “The predominance of south-facing panels may reflect a severe misalignment in energy supply and demand, ” say the authors of the study, Barry Fischer and Ben Harack. Pointing panels to the west means that in the hour beginning at 5 p.m., they produce 55 percent of their peak output. But point them to the south to maximize total output, and when the electric grid needs it most, they are producing only 15 percent of peak. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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You’re Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South

Conglomerate Rock From Mars: (Much) More Precious Than Gold

An anonymous reader writes It’s the oldest rock on Earth–and it’s from Mars. A 4.4-billion-year-old martian meteorite, found in a dozen pieces in the western Sahara, has ignited a frenzy among collectors and scientists; prices have reached $10, 000 a gram, and museums and universities are vying for slivers of it. It is the only known martian meteorite made of sediment, a conglomerate of pebbles and other clumps of minerals from when the planet was warm, wet, and possibly habitable. The story of the discovery of the rock and its significance is fascinating, as well as the details presented about the economics of rare space materials. Apropos, this older story about missing moon rocks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Conglomerate Rock From Mars: (Much) More Precious Than Gold

How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive

itwbennett writes: For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB. That seems to be ending. In September, Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive. And during an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Meanwhile, hard drive technology has hit the wall in many ways. They can’t really spin the drives faster than 7, 200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. All hard drives have now is the capacity argument; speed is all gone. Oh, and price. We’ll have to wait and see on that. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive

Doubling Saturated Fat In Diet Does Not Increase It In Blood

An anonymous reader writes: A new study by researchers at Ohio State University found that dramatically increasing the amount of saturated fat in a person’s diet did not increase the amount of saturated fat found in their blood. Professor Jeff Volek, the study’s senior author, said it “challenges the conventional wisdom that has demonized saturated fat and extends our knowledge of why dietary saturated fat doesn’t correlate with disease.” The study also showed that increasing carbohydrates in the diet led to an increase in a particular fatty acid previous studies have linked to heart disease. Volek continued, “People believe ‘you are what you eat, ‘ but in reality, you are what you save from what you eat. The point is you don’t necessarily save the saturated fat that you eat. And the primary regulator of what you save in terms of fat is the carbohydrate in your diet. Since more than half of Americans show some signs of carb intolerance, it makes more sense to focus on carb restriction than fat restriction.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Doubling Saturated Fat In Diet Does Not Increase It In Blood