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Next Generation of Wireless — 5G — Is All Hype

Many people have promised us that 5G will be here very soon. And it will be the best thing ever. To quote Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, 5G is “wireless fiber, ” and to quote SK Telecom, thanks to 5G we will soon be able to “transfer holograms” because the upcoming standard is “100 times faster” than our current communications system 4G LTE. But if we were to quote Science, the distant future isn’t nearly as lofty as the one promised by executives. Backchannel explains: “5G” is a marketing term. There is no 5G standard — yet. The International Telecommunications Union plans to have standards ready by 2020. So for the moment “5G” refers to a handful of different kinds of technologies that are predicted, but not guaranteed, to emerge at some point in the next 3 to 7 years. (3GPP, a carrier consortium that will be contributing to the ITU process, said last year that until an actual standard exists, ‘”5G’ will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit.” At least they’re candid.) At the moment, advertising something as “5G” carries no greater significance than saying it’s “blazing fast” or “next generation” — nut because “5G” sounds technical, it’s good for sales. We are a long way away from actual deployment. Second, this “wireless fiber” will never happen unless we have… more fiber. Real fiber, in the form of fiber optic cables reaching businesses and homes. (This is the “last mile” problem; fiber already runs between cities.) It’s just plain physics. In order to work, 99% of any “5G” wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business. The high-frequency spectrum the carriers are planning to use wobbles billions of times a second but travels incredibly short distances and gets interfered with easily. So it’s great at carrying loads of information — every wobble can be imprinted with data — but can’t go very far at all. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Next Generation of Wireless — 5G — Is All Hype

Linux Trojan Mines For Cryptocurrency Using Misconfigured Redis Servers

An anonymous reader writes: In another installment of “Linux has malware too, ” security researchers have discovered a new trojan that targets Linux servers running Redis, where the trojan installs a cryptocurrency miner. The odd fact about this trojan is that it includes a wormable feature that allows it to spread on its own. The trojan, named Linux.Lady, will look for Redis servers that don’t have an admin account password, access the database, and then download itself on the new target. The trojan mines for the Monero crypto-currency, the same one used by another worm called PhotoMiner, which targets vulnerable FTP servers. According to a recent Risk Based Security report from last month, there are over 30, 000 Redis servers available online without a password, of which 6, 000 have already been compromised by various threat actors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Trojan Mines For Cryptocurrency Using Misconfigured Redis Servers

Popular Sex Toy Caught Sending Intimate Data To Manufacturer

In a world where thermostats, and smart locks can be hacked, and companies covertly record information, why should sex toys remain unaffected. Fusion is reporting that the We-Vibe 4 Plus, a popular vibrator sends a range of intimate data to its manufacturer. The sex toy uses a smartphone app, which lets a use control the vibration among other things. From the report: When the device is in use, the We-Vibe 4 Plus uses its internet connectivity to regularly send information back to its manufacturer, Standard Innovations Corporation. It sends the device’s temperature every minute, and lets the manufacturer know each time a user changes the device’s vibration level. The company could easily figure out some seriously intimate personal information like when you get off, how long it takes, and with what combinations of vibes. This was revealed on Friday at hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas by two security researchers, who wish to be called only by their handles @gOldfisk and @rancidbacon. The two examined the app’s code and the information being sent by the device over Bluetooth. In a statement sent by email, Standard Innovation Corporation’s president Frank Ferrari confirmed that the company collects this information. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Popular Sex Toy Caught Sending Intimate Data To Manufacturer

Seagate Reveals ‘World’s Largest’ 60TB SSD

An anonymous reader writes: While Samsung has the world’s largest commercially available SSD coming in at 15.36TB, Seagate officially has the world’s largest SSD for the enterprise. ZDNet reports: “[While Samsung’s PM1633a has a 2.5-inch form factor, ] Seagate’s 60TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD on the other hand opts for the familiar HDD 3.5-inch form factor. The company says that its drive has “twice the density and four times the capacity” of Samsung’s PM1633a, and is capable of holding up to 400 million photos or 12, 000 movies. Seagate thinks the 3.5-inch form factor will be useful for managing changing storage requirements in data centers since it removes the need to support separate form factors for hot and cold data. The company says it could also scale up capacity to 100TB in the same form factor. Seagate says the 60TB SSD is currently only a ‘demonstration technology’ though it could release the product commercially as early as next year. It hasn’t revealed the price of the unit but says it will offer ‘the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Seagate Reveals ‘World’s Largest’ 60TB SSD

Hackers Make the First-Ever Ransomware For Smart Thermostats

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Motherboard: One day, your thermostat will get hacked by some cybercriminal hundreds of miles away who will lock it with malware and demand a ransom to get it back to normal, leaving you literally in the cold until you pay up a few hundred dollars. This has been a scenario that security experts have touted as one of the theoretical dangers of the rise of the Internet of Things, internet-connected devices that are often insecure. On Saturday, what sounds like a Mr. Robot plot line came one step closer to being reality, when two white hat hackers showed off the first-ever ransomware that works against a “smart” device, in this case, a thermostat. Luckily, Andrew Tierney and Ken Munro, the two security researchers who created the ransomware, actually have no ill intention. They just wanted to make a point: some Internet of Things devices fail to take simple security precautions, leaving users in danger. “We don’t have any control over our devices, and don’t really know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, ” Tierney told Motherboard. “And if they start doing something you don’t understand, you don’t really have a way of dealing with it.” Tierney and Munro, who both work UK-based security firm Pen Test Partners, demonstrated their thermostat ransomware proof-of-concept at the hacking conference Def Con on Saturday, fulfilling the pessimistic predictions of some people in security world. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Make the First-Ever Ransomware For Smart Thermostats

You Can Boot a Raspberry Pi 3 From a Hard Drive or Over Ethernet

The big news about the Raspberry Pi 3 was built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi , but it turns out there was another set of new tricks: new boot options. This feature’s still in beta, but over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, they outline how to boot from a mass storage device or over ethernet. Read more…

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You Can Boot a Raspberry Pi 3 From a Hard Drive or Over Ethernet

Linux Kernel 4.8 Adds Microsoft Surface 3 Support

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews:If you are a Windows user, and want a really great computer, you should consider Microsoft’s Surface line. Not only do they serve as wonderful tablets, but with the keyboard attachment, they can be solid laptops too. While many Linux users dislike Microsoft, some of them undoubtedly envy Windows hardware. While it is possible to run Linux distros on some Surface tablets, not everything will work flawlessly. Today, release candidate 1 of Linux Kernel 4.8 is announced, and it seems a particularly interesting driver has been added — the Surface 3 touchscreen controller. “This seems to be building up to be one of the bigger releases lately, but let’s see how it all ends up. The merge window has been fairly normal, although the patch itself looks somewhat unusual: over 20 percent of the patch is documentation updates, due to conversion of the drm and media documentation from docbook to the Sphinx doc format. There are other doc updates, but that’s the big bulk of it, ” says Linus Torvalds, Linux creator. Will Microsoft’s lower-priced (starting at $499) hybrid computer become the ultimate mobile Linux machine? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.8 Adds Microsoft Surface 3 Support

This is What The Site of Britain’s Largest Non-Nuclear Explosion Looks Like 70 Years Later

On Nov. 27, 1944, 4, 000 tons of bombs went off at RAF Fauld, a munitions facility in the English countryside near Hanbury, Burton. The explosion was so great that it caused a mushroom cloud and could be felt as far as Morocco. Read more…

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This is What The Site of Britain’s Largest Non-Nuclear Explosion Looks Like 70 Years Later

New Attack Steals SSNs, E-mail Addresses, and More From HTTPS Pages

Security researchers at KU Leuven have discovered an attack technique, dubbed HEIST (HTTP Encrypted Information can be Stolen Through TCP-Windows), which can exploit an encrypted website using only a JavaScript file hidden in a maliciously crafted ad or page. ArsTechnica reports: Once attackers know the size of an encrypted response, they are free to use one of two previously devised exploits to ferret out the plaintext contained inside it. Both the BREACH and the CRIME exploits are able to decrypt payloads by manipulating the file compression that sites use to make pages load more quickly. HEIST will be demonstrated for the first time on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. “HEIST makes a number of attacks much easier to execute, ” Tom Van Goethem, one of the researchers who devised the technique, told Ars. “Before, the attacker needed to be in a Man-in-the-Middle position to perform attacks such as CRIME and BREACH. Now, by simply visiting a website owned by a malicious party, you are placing your online security at risk.” Using HEIST in combination with BREACH allows attackers to pluck out and decrypt e-mail addresses, social security numbers, and other small pieces of data included in an encrypted response. BREACH achieves this feat by including intelligent guesses — say, @gmail.com, in the case of an e-mail address — in an HTTPS request that gets echoed in the response. Because the compression used by just about every website works by eliminating repetitions of text strings, correct guesses result in no appreciable increase in data size while incorrect guesses cause the response to grow larger. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Attack Steals SSNs, E-mail Addresses, and More From HTTPS Pages

LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia: LibreOffice 5.2 is finally here, after it has been in development for the past four months, during which the development team behind one of the best free office suites have managed to implement dozens of new features and improvements to most of the application’s components. Key features include more UI refinements to make it flexible for anyone, standards-based document classification, forecasting functions in Calc, the spreadsheet editor, as well as lots of Writer and Impress enhancements. A series of videos are provided to see what landed in the LibreOffice 5.2 office suite, which is now available for download for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released