Tag: british

Dutch Utility Plans Massive Wind Farm Island In North Sea

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Britain’s homes could be lit and powered by wind farms surrounding an artificial island deep out in the North Sea, under advanced plans by a Dutch energy network. The radical proposal envisages an island being built to act as a hub for vast offshore wind farms that would eclipse today’s facilities in scale. Dogger Bank, 125km (78 miles) off the East Yorkshire coast, has been identified as a potentially windy and shallow site. The power hub would send electricity over a long-distance cable to the UK and Netherlands, and possibly later to Belgium, Germany, and Denmark. TenneT, the project’s backer and Dutch equivalent of the UK’s National Grid, recently shared early findings of a study that said its plan could be billions of euros cheaper than conventional wind farms and international power cables. The sci-fi-sounding proposal is sold as an innovative answer to industry’s challenge of continuing to make offshore wind cheaper, as turbines are pushed ever further off the coast to more expensive sites as the best spots closer to land fill up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dutch Utility Plans Massive Wind Farm Island In North Sea

One of Australia’s Richest Men Lost $1 Million To Email Scam

Kaye Wiggins, reporting for Bloomberg: The multi-millionaire founder of Twynam Agricultural Group lost $1 million in an email fraud, a London court heard Thursday. The British man who facilitated the theft says he’s a victim too. John Kahlbetzer, who is on the Forbes list of the 50 richest Australians, lost the money when fraudsters tricked the administrator of his personal finances into transferring it to them, his court papers say. Fraudsters emailed Christine Campbell, pretending to be the 87-year-old and asking her to pay $1 million to an account held by a British man, David Aldridge, which she did. Kahlbetzer is suing Aldridge to recover the funds, but Aldridge says he was being “unwittingly used” and was himself the victim of a fraud involving a woman he met online and believed he was in a loving relationship with. Email frauds where companies’ staff are tricked into transferring money are a growing problem. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics show “business email compromise” cases, where criminals ask company officials to transfer funds, have cost more than $3 billion since 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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One of Australia’s Richest Men Lost $1 Million To Email Scam

This Guy Is Digitizing the VHS History of Video Games

An anonymous reader shares a report: UK-based gaming journalist and blogger Chris Scullion is on a mission to preserve his collection — and maybe your collection, too — of these old video game VHS tapes. In the 80s and 90s, video game companies and trade magazines made these tapes to accompany popular titles or new issues with bonus material or promotional footage, giving a glimpse into how marketing for games was done in the industry’s early days. Scullion has 18 tapes to upload so far, and plans to provide accompanying commentary as well as the raw video as they go up on his YouTube channel. Scullion’s first upload is a promotional tape for Super Mario All-Stars, given away by Nintendo UK in 1993. It’s hosted by Craig Charles, who played Lister in the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. Digitizing his collection keeps that sweet nostalgia content safe from degradation of the magnetic tape, which starts to go downhill within 10 to 25 years. He’s capturing them in HD using a 1080p upscaler, at a full 50fps frame rate by converting to HDMI before grabbing — a higher frame rate than many standard commercial digitizing devices that capture at 30fps — so that no frames are missed. Some of the tapes he’s planning to digitize have already been converted and uploaded to YouTube by other people, he says, but most are either poor quality or captured with less-advanced grabbing devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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This Guy Is Digitizing the VHS History of Video Games

Mind-Altering Cat Parasite Linked To a Whole Lot of Neurological Disorders

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: The brain-dwelling parasite Toxoplasma gondii is estimated to be hosted by at least 2 billion people around the world, and new evidence suggests the lodger could be more dangerous than we think. While the protozoan invader poses the greatest risk to developing fetuses infected in the womb, new research suggests the parasite could alter and amplify a range of neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, and also cancer. “This study is a paradigm shifter, ” says one of the team, neuroscientist Dennis Steindler from Tufts University. “We now have to insert infectious disease into the equation of neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy, and neural cancers.” The findings are part of an emerging field of research looking into how T. gondii, which is usually transmitted to humans via contact with cat faeces (or by eating uncooked meat), produces proteins that alter and manipulate the brain chemistry of their infected hosts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mind-Altering Cat Parasite Linked To a Whole Lot of Neurological Disorders

Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe

On September 7th, an extraordinarily powerful radio telescope in Canada has begun listening to the sounds of the universe. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME will help scientists learn more about the history of the cosmos, radio bursts from pulsars and gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime whose existence were finally confirmed by scientists in 2016. CHIME looks like a collection of four 100-meter-long skateboarding halfpipes, but they weren’t made for anybody to skate on. They were built over the past seven years to hear very weak signals from the universe and to gather one terabyte of information per second all day, every day. That means it’s constantly creating and updating a massive 3D map of space. When the 50 Canadian scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McGill University and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) started conceptualizing the project, there was no system that could handle that amount of information. Thanks to advances in video game hardware, the system now exists. Since 1 TB per second is pretty insane, CHIME compresses the info it gathers by a factor of 100, 000 first before saving files on disks. Now that it’s up and working, CHIME is ready to work towards achieving its primary goal: measuring the acceleration of the universe’s expansion. An accurate measurement of the expansion will help scientists figure out what causes it, whether it’s actually the mysterious form of energy that’s believed to be permeating space called ” dark energy ” or something else. By extension, the telescope’s data could one day confirm if dark energy truly exists. University of British Columbia’s Dr. Mark Halpern explains: “With the CHIME telescope we will measure the expansion history of the universe and we expect to further our understanding of the mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion ever faster. This is a fundamental part of physics that we don’t understand and it’s a deep mystery. This is about better understanding how the universe began and what lies ahead.” Source: CHIME

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Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe

The internet has finally killed off the Yellow Pages

If you’re after a plumber you look on Checkatrade, if you need a cab you fire up the Uber app , and if you’re craving pizza you simply ask Alexa to order one . With all the conveniences the internet affords, it was inevitable the local listings tome that is the Yellow Pages would go the way of the dodo eventually. Yell has announced that the large paper doorstop is indeed approaching its final hour. After distributing a penultimate edition in Kingston in January next year, Yell will officially say goodbye to the Yellow Pages in January 2019, when the last ever copies will hit doorsteps in Brighton — back where it all began in 1966. Yell embraced online many moons ago, of course, with a listings site and mobile apps, but this will mark “the company’s full transition to a purely digital business.” The Yellow Pages is a British institution, but even icons have to roll with the times. Take telephone boxes, for example, which are being ripped out and replaced left, right and centre on account of them being obsolete in the mobile age. The internet has had a particularly broad impact on publishing, causing the closure or moving online of various print publications over the years. Playboy even scrapped nudity because of all the nakedness available online — well, for a year at least. Via: BBC , Gizmodo Source: Yell

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The internet has finally killed off the Yellow Pages

MalwareTech’s legal defense fund bombarded with fraudulent donations

Enlarge / Marcus Hutchins. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images) Marcus Hutchins, the popular British security researcher, has a new legal headache beyond the criminal charges against him. Hutchins, AKA “MalwareTech,” pleaded not guilty two weeks ago to criminal charges in Wisconsin that accuse him of creating and distributing the Kronos malware that steals banking credentials. Now comes word that his legal defense fund was riddled with illicit donations. At least $150,000 in donations originated from stolen credit cards or fake credit card numbers, according to Tor Ekeland, a  criminal defense attorney who is not on Hutchins’ defense team. Ekeland, who became popular in hacking circles for successfully defending Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, had started a legal fund on Hutchins’ behalf. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MalwareTech’s legal defense fund bombarded with fraudulent donations

Horror adventure ‘The Black Mirror’ revived for modern gamers

Despite being released long after the point-and-click game genre’s heyday, 2003’s The Black Mirror became a gothic horror hit long before the unrelated British sci-fi anthology show. THQ Nordic tapped German developer King Art Games to revive the original game into modern adventure title, which is due for release on November 28th for Xbox One, PS4 and PC. The game puts you in the shoes of protagonist David Gordon as he explores his spooky family manor, Black Mirror, soon after the death of his father. It’s not the first time King has taken a stab at the franchise: In 2009, they created concept art for a full sequel, The Black Mirror II , which set the look for a third game released the following year that closed out the trilogy. It’s not THQ Nordic’s first rodeo with gothic darkness, either, given its experience with the Darksiders franchise. The last few years have seen a steady resurgence of interest in point-and-click legends. The old LucasArts game Full Throttle recently made it to iOS, the latest in a line of Tim Schafer reduxes. But more broadly, players are gobbling up remade versions of decades-old titles, from the relatively recent Modern Warfare Remastered to the resurrected PS2 cult classic Phantom Dust . If Crash Bandicoot can ride the redux train, then nostalgia is truly selling well.

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Horror adventure ‘The Black Mirror’ revived for modern gamers

FBI arrests UK security researcher who stopped WannaCry outbreak (Updated)

Marcus Hutchins, the 23-year-old security researcher who is credited with halting the spread of the WannaCry malware program earlier this year has been arrested by the FBI while attending the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas, Motherboard reports . This is a developing story and details remain scarce as of the publication of this post, however The Telegraph states that “UK law enforcement and security agencies confirmed a British citizen has been arrested” as part of an ongoing FBI investigation. I can confirm @MalwareTechBlog was detained yesterday and FBI/US Marshalls won’t tell me where he is. https://t.co/lV5SxZjsRi — Andrew Mabbitt (@MabbsSec) August 3, 2017 Hutchins was hailed as a hero in May when he found the killswitch to the WannaCry virus, a malware program that had infected vulnerable targets across Europe and Asia, including the UK’s National Health Service and a Spanish telecommunications company. Hutchins, who works for Kryptos Logic, halted the virus’ spread by registering a web domain that the program’s code relied on. Motherboard reports that as of early Thursday morning Hutchins was being held in the Henderson Detention Center in Nevada, however he was later moved to an undisclosed location. “I’ve spoken to the US Marshals again and they say they have no record of Marcus being in the system. At this point we’ve been trying to get in contact with Marcus for 18 hours and nobody knows where he’s been taken, ” an unnamed friend of Hutchins told Motherboard . “We still don’t know why Marcus has been arrested and now we have no idea where in the US he’s been taken to and we’re extremely concerned for his welfare.” Engadget has reached out to Kryptos Logic and the FBI for comment. This story will be updated as they reply. Update (2:29 pm EDT): Hutchins has reportedly been located and is being held at the FBI’s Las Vegas field office. Finally located @MalwareTechBlog , he’s in the Las Vegas FBI field office. Can anyone provide legal representation? — Andrew Mabbitt (@MabbsSec) August 3, 2017 Update: (2:45 pm EDT) : The Department of Justice has just announced that Hutchins is in custody not for his role in the Wannary event but for “his role in creating and distributing the Kronos banking Trojan.” According to the DoJ, between July 2014 and July 2015 Hutchins developed the malware and shared it online. Source: Telegraph UK , Motherboard

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FBI arrests UK security researcher who stopped WannaCry outbreak (Updated)

Electronic music superhero Aphex Twin unearths massive, free music vault

Enlarge / Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, is careful about his likeness being photographed, but Warp Records swears that this is him. (credit: Warp Records) Many of the modern era’s greatest electronic musicians also happen to be legitimate computer and technology geeks. Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, is no exception. The 46-year-old British musician has spent decades making music with an incredible range of analog and digital synthesizers (more details here ), and one of his most impressive albums, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments , was made by programming robots to play live instruments to his exact specifications. I can go on about James’ nerd cred (including his decision to initially announce his 2014 “comeback” record Syro via deep-web links ), but his lengthy, diverse, and weird collection of music does the talking—and now you have an easier way to access it than ever. A month-long countdown at the official Aphex Twin site concluded on Thursday, and with it came a near-complete vault of James’ recording output since 1991 . It includes a full store where fans can buy uncompressed FLAC and compressed MP3 versions of his albums, EPs, and even myriad side projects recorded under weird aliases (AFX, Polygon Window, The Tuss, etc). “CIRKLON3,” a 2016 Aphex Twin single. It’s a good starting point for anybody new to his sound, as it strikes a decent balance between his early ’90s ambient output, his later “dancier” output, and his knack for weirdness. Should you be short on cash, James still lets you use the site’s embedded streaming audio player for unlimited listening to his entire catalog. This is notable for a few reasons, but the biggest is that James’ new shop includes  hours of previously unreleased material from pretty much every phase of his career. His breakout 1995 album …I Care Because You Do has been bolstered with a whopping seven new, lengthy tracks (and they’re quite good), while most of his albums, EPs, and singles now include additional demo recordings and isolated-element remixes. (The original template for his single “Windowlicker” is a fascinating newbie, for example, though certainly not as weird as its eventual version—which received a bizarre music video ( probably NSFW ) with James’ face slapped onto bikini-clad, water-soaked models.) Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Electronic music superhero Aphex Twin unearths massive, free music vault