sciencehabit writes: If you’re a caterpillar, you do not want to meet a parasitic wasp. The winged insect will inject you full of eggs, which will grow inside your body, develop into larvae, and hatch from your corpse. But a new study reveals that wasps have given caterpillars something beneficial during these attacks as well: pieces of viral DNA that become part of the caterpillar genome, protecting them against an entirely different lethal virus. In essence, the wasps have turned caterpillars into genetically modified organisms. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Linux 4.3 Bringing Stable Intel Skylake Support, Reworked NVIDIA Driver
An anonymous reader writes: Mr. Torvalds has released Linux 4.3-rc1 this weekend. He characterized the release as “not particularly small — pretty average in size, in fact. Everything looks fairly normal, in fact, with about 70% of the changes being drivers, 10% architecture updates, and the remaining 20% are spread out.” There are a number of new user-facing features including stabilized Intel “Skylake” processor support, initial AMD R9 Fury graphics support, SMP scheduler optimizations, file-system fixes, a reworked open-source NVIDIA driver, and many Linux hardware driver updates. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Linux 4.3 Bringing Stable Intel Skylake Support, Reworked NVIDIA Driver
Huge Communities of Crayfish Are Living Right Underneath The Prairies
If you ever spend a humid night walking around the American prairie, you might run into one of these. It’s a prairie crayfish, and it and all of its friends have been living under your feet. Read more…
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Huge Communities of Crayfish Are Living Right Underneath The Prairies
Open Source Router Firmware OpenWRT 15.05 Released
aglider writes: The newest stable iteration of the famous and glorious OpenWRT has just been released in the wild for all the supported architectures. The latest version is 15.05, codenamed “Chaos Calmer” after a cocktail drink, just like all previous ones. Major changes from the official announcements: “Linux kernel updated to version 3.18. Improved Security Features. Rewritten package signing architecture based on ed25519. Added support for jails. Added support for hardened builds. Improved Networking Support. Platform and Driver Support.” For the full details you are welcome on the forums while the firmware itself and extra packages are available from the distribution servers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Open Source Router Firmware OpenWRT 15.05 Released
GM Performs Stealth Update To Fix Security Bug In OnStar
An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2010, long before the Jeep Cherokee thing, some university researchers demonstrated remote car takeover via cellular (old story here). A new Wired article reveals that this was actually a complete exploit of the OnStar system (and was the same one used in that 60 Minutes car hacking episode last year). Moreover, these cars stayed vulnerable for years — until 2014, when GM created a remote update capability and secretly started pushing updates to all the affected cars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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GM Performs Stealth Update To Fix Security Bug In OnStar
Neocities Becomes the First Major Site To Implement the Distributed Web
An anonymous reader writes: HTTP has served us well for a long time, but will we continue to use HTTP forever? Since Brewster Kahle called for a distributed web, more people have been experimenting with what is being called the Permanent Web: Web sites that can be federated instantly, and served from trustless peers. Popular web hosting site Neocities has announced that they are the first major site to implement IPFS, which is the leading distributed web protocol, and they published the announcement using IPFS itself. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Neocities Becomes the First Major Site To Implement the Distributed Web
Ice-Age Fossils Unearthed At Construction Site In California
An anonymous reader writes: Constructions workers in Carlsbad, CA. have recently discovered Ice Age mammoth and prehistoric bison fossils during an excavation. The fossils were taken to the San Diego Museum of Natural History for examination and storage. “The bison fossil, which includes a skull and partial skeleton, is the most unusual and probably the most complete of the larger animals found at the project site. These are big animals, much larger than modern plains bison, ” said curator of paleontology at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, Tom Deméré. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ice-Age Fossils Unearthed At Construction Site In California
Why AltaVista Lost Ground To Google Sooner Than Expected
techtsp writes: Marcia J. Bates, UCLA Professor Emerita of Information Studies recently explained why Google’s birth led to the downfall of AltaVista. According to Bates, early search engines including AltaVista adapted the classical IR methods. At the other hand, Google founders started off with a completely different approach in mind. Google successfully recognized the potential of URLs, which could be added to the algorithms for the sake of information indexing altogether. Google’s modern age techniques were a huge boost to those older techniques. Whatever other business and company management issues AltaVista faced, it was the last of the old style information retrieval engines. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Why AltaVista Lost Ground To Google Sooner Than Expected
Bugzilla Breached, Private Vulnerability Data Stolen
darthcamaro writes: Mozilla today publicly announced that secured areas of bugzilla, where non-public zero days are stored, were accessed by an attacker. The attacker got access to as many as 185 security bugs before they were made public. They say, “We believe they used that information to attack Firefox users.” The whole hack raises the issue of Mozilla’s own security, since it was a user password that was stolen and the bugzilla accounts weren’t using two-factor authentication. According to Mozilla’s FAQ about the breach (PDF), “The earliest confirmed instance of unauthorized access dates to September 2014. There are some indications that the attacker may have had access since September 2013.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bugzilla Breached, Private Vulnerability Data Stolen
20+ Chinese Android Smartphones Models Come With Pre-Installed Malware
An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers from G DATA have published research (PDF) into Android phones produced in China, which found that a large number of devices ship with pre-installed malware and spyware. Affected models include the Xiaomi MI3, Huawei G510, Lenovo S860, Alps A24, Alps 809T, Alps H9001, Alps 2206, Alps PrimuxZeta, Alps N3, Alps ZP100, Alps 709, Alps GQ2002, Alps N9389, Android P8, ConCorde SmartPhone6500, DJC touchtalk, ITOUCH, NoName S806i, SESONN N9500, SESONN P8, Xido X1111, Star N9500, Star N8000 and IceFox Razor. The researchers do not believe the manufacturers are responsible for the malware; rather, they suspect middlemen within distribution channels. “According to G DATA, the contamination of these smartphones is done by hiding malware as add-on code in legitimate apps. Since users don’t usually interact with the malware and the add-on runs in the app’s background, unless using a mobile antivirus solution, these infections are rarely discovered.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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20+ Chinese Android Smartphones Models Come With Pre-Installed Malware