Tag: brides-cond

Cops: Lottery terminal hack allowed suspects to print more winning tickets

Six people have been charged in what prosecutors say was a scheme to hack Connecticut state lottery terminals so they produced more winning tickets and fewer losing ones. At least two of the suspects have been charged with felonies, including first-degree larceny, first-degree computer crimes, and rigging a game, according to an article published by The Hartford Courant . The suspects allegedly owned or worked at retail stores that produced winning tickets in numbers that were much higher than the state average. Of tickets generated at one liquor store, for instance, 76 percent were instant winners in one sample and 59 percent in another sample. The state-wide average, meanwhile, was just 24 percent. After manipulating the terminals, the suspects cashed the tickets and took the proceeds, prosecutors alleged. The charges come several months after lottery officials suspended a game called the 5 Card Cash after they noticed it was generating more winning tickets than its parameters should have allowed. The game remains suspended. Investigators say more arrests may be made in the future. Almost a year ago, prosecutors in Iowa presented evidence indicating the former head of computer security for the state’s lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops: Lottery terminal hack allowed suspects to print more winning tickets

After Verizon breach, 1.5 million customer records put up for sale

Verizon Enterprise offers security services, but it is dealing with a breach of its own this week. (credit: Verizon ) After a data breach at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, a customer database and information about Verizon security flaws were reportedly put up for sale by criminals this week. According to KrebsOnSecurity , “a prominent member of a closely guarded underground cybercrime forum posted a new thread advertising the sale of a database containing the contact information on some 1.5 million customers of Verizon Enterprise.” The entire database was priced at $100,000, or $10,000 for each set of 100,000 customer records. “Buyers also were offered the option to purchase information about security vulnerabilities in Verizon’s Web site,” security journalist Brian Krebs reported. Verizon Enterprise is itself a seller of security products and services , often helping Fortune 500 businesses clean up after data breaches. Verizon Enterprise also sells Internet service to large businesses, along with a variety of other networking products. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After Verizon breach, 1.5 million customer records put up for sale

Minimalist genome—only 473 genes—synthesized and used to boot up a cell

The bacteria that acted as the raw material for this experiment. Life is a rather difficult thing to define, but there are a few aspects that most biologists would agree on: it has to maintain genetic material and be able to make copies of itself. Both of these require energy, so it also must host some sort of minimal metabolism. In large, complex cells, each of these requirements takes hundreds of genes. Even in the simplified genomes of some bacteria, the numbers are still over a hundred. But does this represent the minimum number of genes that life can get away with? About a decade ago, researchers started to develop the technology to synthesize a genome from scratch and then put it in charge of a living cell. Now, five years after their initial successes, researchers used this model to try to figure out the genetic minimum for life itself. At first, the project seemed to be progressing well. In 2008, the team described the tools it had developed that could build the entire genome of a bacterium. (The team used a parasitic bacteria called Mycoplasma genitalium that started with only 525 genes.) Two years after that, they managed to get a genome synthesized using this method to boot up bacteria , taking the place of the normal genome. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Minimalist genome—only 473 genes—synthesized and used to boot up a cell

Report: “YouTube Connect” will be a livestreaming Periscope competitor

VentureBeat  has the scoop on another YouTube service: YouTube Connect. Connect would be a livestreaming service which would take on “spur-of-the-moment” live video services like Facebook Live and Twitter’s Periscope. The report says the service would include apps on Android and iOS with “much of the same functionality” as Periscope and Facebook Live. Streaming would be immediate and paired with chat and “tagging” features. There is supposedly even a “news feed” that would list videos from friends and your YouTube subscriptions. Live broadcasts would be saved for later on-demand viewing and would show up on the content creator’s YouTube channel. The new service would be yet another expansion of the YouTube brand and app lineup. Including Connect, YouTube’s video empire would be spread across a whopping seven apps: the regular YouTube app, YouTube Gaming, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, YouTube Creator Studio, and YouTube Capture. There is also the umbrella subscription service YouTube Red. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: “YouTube Connect” will be a livestreaming Periscope competitor

London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

An artist’s conception of the Boom aircraft at London’s Heathrow Airport. (credit: Boom) After more than a decade of dormancy commercial supersonic flight may soon return to the skies. The Soviet Tupolev supersonic aircraft flew just a few dozen flights back in 1977, and the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after a fatal accident three years earlier that compounded economic problems. But now Richard Branson and his Virgin empire are ready to try it again. According to   The Guardian , Branson has signed a deal with an American firm to bring commercial supersonic travel to the airways, beginning with trans-Atlantic flights between London and New York City. The agreement brings Branson’s Virgin Galactic into a partnership with Colorado-based Boom, founded by Amazon executive Blake Scholl. Virgin Galactic, according to a company spokeswoman, will provide engineering, design, operations, and manufacturing services, along with flight tests at Virgin’s base in Mojave, Calif. It will then have an option to buy the first 10 airframes from Boom. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

Intel’s high-end quad-core NUC ships in May for $650

Enlarge / The “Skull Canyon” Core i7 NUC. (credit: Intel) Intel talked a little about its new high-end Core i7 NUC mini PC at CES earlier this year , but today at GDC the company revealed what the final model will look like along with its specs, release date, and cost. The new NUC6i7KYK, codenamed “Skull Canyon,” includes a 2.6GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) 45W quad-core Core i7-6770HQ —not the fastest Skylake laptop chip that Intel can sell you, but definitely one of the fastest. The other main draws are the Iris Pro 580 GPU, which includes 78 of Intel’s graphics execution units and a 128MB eDRAM cache (compared to 48EUs and 64MB of eDRAM in the standard Core i5 NUC we just reviewed ), and the Thunderbolt 3 port which also supports full USB 3.1 gen 2 transfer speeds of 10Mbps. It takes DDR4 memory, M.2 SATA and PCI Express SSDs, and comes with a built-in Intel 8260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, just like the Core i5 NUC. It’s got a good port selection, including a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, a mini DisplayPort 1.2 output, four USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, a gigabit LAN port, and an IR sensor for use with remote controls. The HDMI 2.0 port ought to make some HTPC fans happy, since the standard NUCs are still stuck on version 1.4 and can’t view HDCP 2.2-protected content. And this is all in addition to the aforementioned Thunderbolt 3 port; this will be the first NUC since the original to support Thunderbolt, which opens up possibilities for external graphics cards down the line. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s high-end quad-core NUC ships in May for $650

16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II

No rest for the weary. These days, you’re lucky if some titles from certain big publishers get a year or two of post-launch online support for their games before they’re unceremoniously dropped . And then there’s Diablo II . Blizzard issued a new version 1.14 patch for the nearly 16-year-old game Thursday, five years after the game was last officially updated (not to mention, four years since the game’s sequel launched with its own attendant post-release problems and patches ) The new Diablo II patch doesn’t add any new gameplay features, balance tweaks, or anything like that. Instead, Blizzard has added compatibility with modern operating systems like Windows 10 and OS X. But Blizzard says it’s working on improvements to the game’s “cheat-detection and hack-prevention capabilities” and hints at more improvements to come. “There is still a large Diablo II community around the world, and we thank you for continuing to play and slay with us,” Blizzard writes . “This journey starts by making Diablo II run on modern platforms, but it does not end there. See you in Sanctuary, adventurers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II

New DisplayPort 1.4 standard can drive 8K monitors over a USB Type-C cable

(credit: VESA) Today, most new computers with DisplayPort or USB Type-C connectors support the DisplayPort 1.2 standard, which provides enough bandwidth to drive a 4K display at 60Hz over a single cable. In late 2014, VESA published the DisplayPort 1.3 standard, which increased the available bandwidth enough to drive 60Hz 5K displays or 30Hz 8K displays over a single cable. And today, VESA has finalized and released the DisplayPort 1.4 spec , which can drive 60Hz 8K displays and supports HDR color modes at 5K and 8K. The physical interface used to carry DisplayPort data—High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3), which provides 8.1Gbps of bandwidth per lane—is still the same as it was in DisplayPort 1.3. The new standard drives higher-resolution displays with better color support using Display Stream Compression (DSC), a “visually lossless” form of compression that VESA says “enables up to [a] 3:1 compression ratio.” This data compression, among other things, allows DisplayPort 1.4 to drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays with HDR “deep color” over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C cables. USB Type-C cables can provide a USB 3.0 data connection, too. The standard includes a few other features, most of which are targeted at home theater buffs: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New DisplayPort 1.4 standard can drive 8K monitors over a USB Type-C cable

Largely undetected Mac malware suggests disgraced HackingTeam has returned

Enlarge (credit: Patrick Wardle ) Researchers have uncovered what appears to be newly developed Mac malware from HackingTeam, a discovery that’s prompting speculation that the disgraced malware-as-a-service provider has reemerged since last July’s hack that spilled gigabytes worth of the group’s private e-mail and source code . The sample was uploaded on February 4 to the Google-owned VirusTotal scanning service , which at the time showed it wasn’t detected by any of the major antivirus programs. (Ahead of this report on Monday, it was detected by 10 of 56 AV services.) A technical analysis published Monday morning by SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça showed that the installer was last updated in October or November, and an embedded encryption key is dated October 16, three months after the HackingTeam compromise. The sample installs a copy of HackingTeam’s signature Remote Code Systems compromise platform, leading Vilaça to conclude that the outfit’s comeback mostly relies on old, largely unexceptional source code, despite the group vowing in July that it would return with new code. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Largely undetected Mac malware suggests disgraced HackingTeam has returned

OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11

Enlarge / An errant update may have disabled your Mac’s Ethernet port recently. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) If you’re having problems with your Mac’s Ethernet port this morning, the culprit may be an errant automatic update that Apple published over the weekend. Luckily, the damage isn’t permanent: an Apple support article posted yesterday will walk you through diagnosing and fixing the problem, which involves connecting to your network via Wi-Fi and running a software update command in the Terminal. If you’re reading this and your Ethernet port is working fine, odds are good that you’ve already installed the follow-up update released to fix the problem. The culprit is an update for the System Integrity Protection feature for OS X, the El Capitan feature that protects some system folders and keeps unsigned or incorrectly signed kernel extensions (or “kexts,” roughly analogous to drivers in a Windows or Linux machine) from loading. In this case, the kext used to enable the Ethernet port on Macs was blacklisted—if you restarted your Mac after applying this update but before your computer had a chance to download the quickly issued fix, you’ll find yourself without an Ethernet connection. This blacklist isn’t updated through the Mac App Store like purchased apps or OS X itself. Rather, it uses a seamless auto-update mechanism that executes in the background even if you haven’t enabled normal automatic updates. Apple uses a similar mechanism to update OS X’s anti-malware blacklist, a rudimentary security feature introduced in 2011 following the high-profile Mac Defender malware infection and occasionally used to push other critical software updates . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11