california – Page 35

Israel’s electric grid hit by “severe” hack attack

Israel experienced a serious hack attack on its electrical grid that officials are still working to repel, the head of the country’s energy minister said Tuesday. “The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it,” Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz told attendees of a computer security conference in Tel Aviv, according to this article published Tuesday by The Times of Israel . “We had to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli Electricity Authority. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over … but as of now, computer systems are still not working as they should.” The “severe” attack was detected on Monday as temperatures in Jerusalem dipped to below freezing, creating two days of record-breaking electricity consumption, according to The Jerusalem Post . Steinitz said it was one of the biggest computer-based attacks Israel’s power infrastructure has experienced, and that it was responded to by members of his ministry and the country’s National Cyber Bureau. The energy minister didn’t identify any suspects behind the attack or provide details about how it was carried out. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Why the calorie is broken

(credit: Getty Images) Calories consumed minus calories burned—it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain, but dieters often find that it doesn’t work. Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of Gastropod investigate for Mosaic science , where this story first appeared . It’s republished here under a Creative Commons license. “For me, a calorie is a unit of measurement that’s a real pain in the rear.” Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. He has a wife and child. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs—which means he is classed as obese. Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why the calorie is broken

Doctor Who gets lengthy sabbatical as showrunner Steven Moffat quits

Doctor Who fans prepare to be bitterly disappointed: you won’t be getting your timey-wimey fix this year, because season 10 won’t hit our screens until 2017, the BBC has confirmed. The reason? Long-running showrunner Steven Moffat has run out of puff. He will pass the baton (OK, Sonic Screwdriver) to Chris Chibnall—the creator of ITV’s gripping whodunnit, Broadchurch —who will take over the iconic British sci-fi drama at the start of season 11. The BBC, which fiendishly buried this news late on Friday night in the hope that no-one would notice, has promised a Christmas Day special, but that will be the first and only time a new episode of the much-loved show will appear on the TV this year. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Doctor Who gets lengthy sabbatical as showrunner Steven Moffat quits

After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

(credit: Andrew ) In 2015, the FBI seized a Tor-hidden child-porn website known as Playpen and allowed it to run for 13 days so that the FBI could deploy malware in order to identify and prosecute the website’s users. That malware, known in FBI-speak as a “network investigative technique,” was authorized by a federal court in Virginia in February 2015. In a new revelation, Vice Motherboard has now determined that this operation had much wider berth. The FBI’s Playpen operation was effectively transformed into a global one, reaching Turkey, Colombia, and Greece, among others. Motherboard’s Joseph Cox wrote on Twitter on Friday that he was able to find a document describing this infiltration as something called “Operation Pacifier” by using creative “Google-fu.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

(credit: AMX) A company that supplies audio-visual and building control equipment to the US Army, the White House, and other security-conscious organizations built a deliberately concealed backdoor into dozens of its products that could possibly be used to hack or spy on users, security researchers said. Members of Australia-based security firm SEC Consult said they discovered the backdoor after analyzing the AMX NX-1200 , a programmable device used to control AV and building systems. The researchers first became suspicious after encountering a function called “setUpSubtleUserAccount” that added an highly privileged account with a hard-coded password to the list of users authorized to log in. Unlike most other accounts, this one had the ability to capture data packets flowing between the device and the network it’s connected to. “Someone with knowledge of the backdoor could completely reconfigure and take over the device and due to the highest privileges also start sniffing attacks within the network segment,” SEC Consult researcher Johannes Greil told Ars. “We did not see any personal data on the device itself, besides other user accounts which could be cracked for further attacks.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

7 Autonomous Vehicle Ideas That Need to Happen Now

Last week, President Obama announced plans to earmark a whopping $4 billion for autonomous vehicle research . These funds will be dispersed to pilot programs all over the country during the next decade—but where and how the money is spent will determine just how big a step forward Obama’s plan really is. Read more…

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California lawmaker wants to ban phone encryption in 2017

California lawmaker, State Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Elk Grove), has introduced a bill that would effectively ban the sale of mobile devices that have encryption on by default beginning in 2017. The bill, AB 1681 , demands that any phone sold after January 1, 2017 be “capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider.” Should this bill become law, manufacturers found in violation would be subject to fines of $2, 500 per phone. Cooper’s reasoning puts a novel spin on the same, tired “The police can’t do their jobs unless tech companies do it for them” argument. This time, he used human trafficking as the boogeyman that needs defeating and which can only be accomplished if the government has unfettered, disk-level access to its citizens’ cell phones. “If you’re a bad guy [we] can get a search record for your bank, for your house, you can get a search warrant for just about anything, ” Cooper told ArsTechnica . “For the industry to say it’s privacy, it really doesn’t hold any water. We’re going after human traffickers and people who are doing bad and evil things. Human trafficking trumps privacy, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.” Apparently human trafficking also trumps the 4th Amendment as well. Via: The Next Web Source: Ars Technica

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California lawmaker wants to ban phone encryption in 2017

A California Reservoir Infamously Depleted By Drought Rises 20 Feet in 10 Days

A series of big storms sending much-needed rain and snow to Northern California has dramatically replenished a drought-stricken reservoir that was on the brink of disaster. Thanks, El Niño! Read more…

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A California Reservoir Infamously Depleted By Drought Rises 20 Feet in 10 Days

Apple releases OS X 10.11.3 with fixes for bugs and security [Updated]

(credit: Andrew Cunningham) Today Apple released OS X 10.11.3, the third major update for El Capitan since the operating system was released to the public in September. You can grab it now through the Update tab of the Mac App Store, or you can manually download and install the Combo Update version from Apple’s support site. As with the iOS 9.2.1 update, Apple’s release notes are unusually light, and the more detailed release notes aren’t available on Apple’s support site as of this writing (they will be posted here when they’re ready). The security release notes detail a handful of fixes for El Capitan and one for the still-supported Mavericks and Yosemite, most of which have been resolved thanks to memory handling improvements. Update : The general release notes are live. 10.11.3 fixes a pair of edge cases: One where a Mac connected to a 4K display wouldn’t wake from sleep, and one where “third-party .pkg file receipts stored in /var/db/receipts are now retained when upgrading from OS X Yosemite.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases OS X 10.11.3 with fixes for bugs and security [Updated]

Much more than Mario Kart: The history of kart racers

No video game genre divides and unifies us like the kart racer. For every Mario Kart there are a dozen by-the-numbers cash-ins, and even that hallowed series receives regular criticism as too derivative. But while we all breathe a collective sigh of disappointment with each kid-friendly license that predictably goes the generic kart-racing route, it’s hard not to get excited by that rare entry that feels fresh and new. A great kart racer is a joyous thing. It’s accessible yet deep, fun yet primed for oh-so-serious competition between friends, and full of colorful, wacky charm. It is a game for everyone. So in keeping with the spirit of the genre—and as the latest edition in our gaming genre history series that includes city builders , graphic adventures , and simulation games —it’s time to ride through the ups and downs of kart racing. (Before we start, a quick note: I’ve omitted go-kart racing sims such as Open Kart and Michael Schumacher Racing World Kart because they are essentially conventional racing games and not what we normally think of as kart racers.) Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Much more than Mario Kart: The history of kart racers

Ken May

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