deals – Page 160

Bitcoin Exchange Bitfinex Says It Was Hacked, Roughly $60M Stolen

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Hong Kong-based digital currency exchange Bitfinex said late on Tuesday it has suspended trading on its exchange after it discovered a security breach, according to a company statement on its website. The company said it has also suspended deposits and withdrawals of digital currencies from the exchange. “We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen, ” the company said. “We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up.” The company said it has reported the theft to law enforcement. It said it has not yet determined the value of digital currencies stolen from customer accounts. CoinDesk reports that the company confirmed roughly 120, 000 BTC (more than $60 million) has been stolen via social media. “In response, bitcoin prices fell to $560.16 by 19:30 UTC, $530 by 23:30 and $480 at press time, CoinDesk USD Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) data reveals, ” reports CoinDesk. “This price was roughly 20% lower than the day’s opening of $607.37 and 27% below the high of $658.28 reached on Saturday, July 30th, when the digital currency began pushing lower.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Exchange Bitfinex Says It Was Hacked, Roughly $60M Stolen

Olympic Swimmers ‘Certain’ To Pick Up Virus From Three Teaspoons of Rio Water

An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Independent: The Associated Press has released a 16-month-long study that shows just days before the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro begin, the waterways in the city are teeming with dangerous viruses and bacteria. The report says both athletes and tourists are at risk of getting ill from the contaminated water. “The first results of the study published over a year ago showed viral levels at up to 1.7 million times what would be considered worrisome in the United States or Europe, ” reports The Independent. “At those concentrations, swimmers and athletes who ingest just three teaspoons of water are almost certain to be infected with viruses that can cause stomach and respiratory illnesses and, more rarely, heart and brain inflammation — although whether they actually fall ill depends on a series of factors including the strength of the individual’s immune system.” Many of the athletes have been taking antibiotics, bleaching oars and donning plastic suits and gloves to prevent illnesses, but antibiotics combat bacterial infections, not viruses. The AP investigation found that infectious adenovirus readings turned up at nearly 90 percent of the test sites over 16 months of testing. What’s more is that “the beaches often have levels of bacterial markers for sewage pollution that would be cause for concern abroad — and sometimes even exceed Rio state’s lax water safety standards, ” reports The Independent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Olympic Swimmers ‘Certain’ To Pick Up Virus From Three Teaspoons of Rio Water

Uber Reportedly Will Invest $500 Million Into Mapping the World

Earlier this month, satellite imaging technology company DigitalGlobe announced it was partnering with Uber to “leverage DigitalGlobe’s industry leading constellation of sensors to access imagery and location intelligence to help identify and improve pick-up and drop-off locations.” Last week, Uber posted a press release to announce that Brian McClendon, the former head of Google Maps who left the company for Uber last year, would be leading Uber’s global mapping initiative. McClendon wrote that the company is “doubling down” on its mapping investment but didn’t say how much it would spend. Read more…

Android Stagefright Bug Required 115 Patches, Millions Still At Risk

eWeek reports that “hundreds of millions of users remain at risk” one year after Joshua Drake discovered the Stagefright Android flaw. Slashdot reader darthcamaro writes: A year ago, on July 27, 2015 news about the Android Stagefright flaw was first revealed with the initial reports claiming widespread impact with a billion users at risk. As it turns out, the impact of Stagefright has been more pervasive…over the last 12 months, Google has patched no less than 115 flaws in Stagefright and related Android media libraries. Joshua Drake, the researcher who first discovered the Stagefright flaw never expected it to go this far. “I expected shoring up the larger problem to take an extended and large effort, but I didn’t expect it to be ongoing a year later.” Drake believes targeted attacks use Stagefright vulnerabilities on unpatched systems, but adds that Android’s bug bounty program appears to be working, paying out $550, 000 in its first year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android Stagefright Bug Required 115 Patches, Millions Still At Risk

You Can Still Get Windows 10 For Free If You Use Assistive Technologies

Microsoft’s free Windows 10 upgrade offer officially ended yesterday . However, the company has left a loophole. If you need to use assistive technologies, you can still upgrade for free. Microsoft also isn’t verifying if you do. Read more…

Open Source Gardening Robot ‘FarmBot’ Raises $560,000

Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes: FarmBot is an open-source gantry-crane-style outdoor robot for tending a garden bed. The project is crowdfunding a first production run and has raised US$561, 486 of their US$100, 000 goal — with one day left to go… The onboard control system is based around a Raspberry Pi 3 computer and an Arduino Mega 2560 Microcontroller. Many of the parts are 3D printable. Two years ago Slashdot covered the genesis of this project, describing its goal as simply “to increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Open Source Gardening Robot ‘FarmBot’ Raises $560,000

Malvertising Campaign Infected Thousands of Users Per Day For More Than a Year

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: Since the summer of 2015, users that surfed 113 major, legitimate websites were subjected to one of the most advanced malvertising campaigns ever discovered, with signs that this might have actually been happening since 2013. Infecting a whopping 22 advertising platforms, the criminal gang behind this campaign used complicated traffic filtering systems to select users ripe for infection, usually with banking trojans. The campaign constantly pulled between 1 and 5 million users per day, infecting thousands, and netting the crooks millions each month. The malicious ads, according to this list, were shown on sites like The New York Times, Le Figaro, The Verge, PCMag, IBTimes, Ars Technica, Daily Mail, Telegraaf, La Gazetta dello Sport, CBS Sports, Top Gear, Urban Dictionary, Playboy, Answers.com, Sky.com, and more. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Malvertising Campaign Infected Thousands of Users Per Day For More Than a Year

Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features

New submitter Miche67 writes: As part of the July 2016 update to Office 365, Microsoft is adding several features across the board to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Word, however, is getting the biggest new features — Researcher and Editor — to improve your writing. “As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document, ” reports Network World. “[Editor] builds on the already-existing spellchecker and thesaurus to offer suggestions on how to improve your overall writing. In addition to the wavy red line under a misspelled word and the wavy blue line under bad grammar, there will be a gold line for writing style.” The new features are expected to be available later this year. In addition to the two new features added to PowerPoint last year — Designer and Morph, Microsoft is offering Zoom, a feature that lets you easily create “interactive, non-linear presentations.” “Instead of the 1-2-3-4 linear method of presenting slides, forcing you to place them all in the order you wish to display, presenters will be able to show their slides in any order they want at any time, ” reports Network World. “This way you can change your presentation order as needed without having to stop PowerPoint or interrupt the display.” As for Outlook, Focused Inbox is coming to Office 365. Focused Inbox separates your inbox into two tabs. The “Focused” tab is where all of your high-priority emails will be found, while everything else will be in the “Other” tab. Outlook will learn from your behavior over time and sort your mail accordingly. In addition, @mentions are coming to Outlook 365 and Outlook for PC and Mac, “making it easy to identify emails that need your attention, as well as flag actions for others.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features

Vine’s Source Code Was Accidentally Made Public For Five Minutes

An anonymous reader writes from The Register: Vine, the six-second-video-loop app acquired by Twitter in 2012, had its source code made publicly available by a bounty-hunter for everyone to see. The Register reports: “According to this post by @avicoder (Vjex at GitHub), Vine’s source code was for a while available on what was supposed to be a private Docker registry. While docker.vineapp.com, hosted at Amazon, wasn’t meant to be available, @avicoder found he was able to download images with a simple pull request. After that it’s all too easy: the docker pull https://docker.vineapp.com:443/library/vinewww request loaded the code, and he could then open the Docker image and run it. ‘I was able to see the entire source code of Vine, its API keys and third party keys and secrets. Even running the image without any parameter, [it] was letting me host a replica of Vine locally.’ The code included ‘API keys, third party keys and secrets, ‘ he writes. Twitter’s bounty program paid out — $10, 080 — and the problem was fixed in March (within five minutes of him demonstrating the issue).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Vine’s Source Code Was Accidentally Made Public For Five Minutes

Facebook Admits Blocking WikiLeaks’ DNC Email Links, But Won’t Say Why

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has admitted it blocked links to WikiLeaks’ DNC email dump, but the company has yet to explain why. WikiLeaks has responded to the censorship via Twitter, writing: “For those facing censorship on Facebook etc when trying to post links directly to WikiLeaks #DNCLeak try using archive.is.” When SwiftOnSecurity tweeted, “Facebook has an automated system for detecting spam/malicious links, that sometimes have false positives. /cc, ” Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos replied with, “It’s been fixed.” As for why there was a problem in the first place, we don’t know. Nate Swanner from The Next Web writes, “It’s possible its algorithm incorrectly identified them as malicious, but it’s another negative mark on the company’s record nonetheless. WikiLeaks is a known entity, not some torrent dumping ground. The WikiLeaks link issue has reportedly been fixed, which is great — but also not really the point. The fact links to the archive was blocked at all suggests there’s a very tight reign on what’s allowed on Facebook across the board, and that’s a problem.” A Facebook representative provided a statement to Gizmodo: “Like other services, our anti-spam systems briefly flagged links to these documents as unsafe. We quickly corrected this error on Saturday evening.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

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