digest – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Windows 10 roadmap: Control everything remotely

As Microsoft continues to court businesses and encourage them to upgrade to Windows 10, the company has taken the novel step of publishing a roadmap of Windows 10 features . This roadmap describes business-oriented features that are coming to Windows 10. Some, such as biometric authentication in the Edge browser, have already been announced as part of the forthcoming Anniversary Update and are currently available in the Insider Preview . But others are not. While some are so vague as to tell us nothing—the Passport API used for biometric authentication is being “enhanced” to improve enterprise functionality—other features are rather more concrete. Microsoft plans to add device-based PC unlocking, wherein Windows and Android phones can be used to store authentication credentials, and the feature can be used to both unlock the PC and authenticate apps and services that use Windows Hello and the Passport API. The same is also being enabled for what Microsoft calls “Companion devices” that integrate with a new API called the “Companion Device Framework.” The Microsoft Band 2 fitness device will plug into this framework, and third-party devices will also be able to join in. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 roadmap: Control everything remotely

Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines

A botnet that enslaved about 4,000 Linux computers and caused them to blast the Internet with spam for more than a year has finally been shut down. Known as Mumblehard, the botnet was the product of highly skilled developers . It used a custom “packer” to conceal the Perl-based source code that made it run, a backdoor that gave attackers persistent access, and a mail daemon that was able to send large volumes of spam. Command servers that coordinated the compromised machines’ operations could also send messages to Spamhaus requesting the delisting of any Mumblehard-based IP addresses that sneaked into the real-time composite blocking list , or CBL, maintained by the anti-spam service. “There was a script automatically monitoring the CBL for the IP addresses of all the spam-bots,” researchers from security firm Eset wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “If one was found to be blacklisted, this script requested the delisting of the IP address. Such requests are protected with a CAPTCHA to avoid automation, but OCR (or an external service if OCR didn’t work) was used to break the protection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Amazon cloud has 1 million users and is near $10 billion in annual sales

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (credit: Dan Farber ) Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become a $10 billion business this year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders this week. While Amazon as a whole “became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales” in 2015, Amazon Web Services will hit the $10 billion mark “at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone,” Bezos wrote. AWS is used by more than 1 million people from “organizations of every size across nearly every industry,” he wrote. AWS launched in March 2006 with the Simple Storage Service (S3). It expanded with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a few months later, letting customers rent virtual machines over the Internet. The service allowed developers to obtain computing capacity on demand without having to operate their own servers, and over the years, many startups have built online businesses with Amazon’s data centers and services providing the back-end infrastructure. It’s not just small companies relying on Amazon, though, as big names like Adobe, Capital One, GE, MLB Advanced Media, Netflix , and Pinterest use the online platform. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

All-bacterial battery makes a nutrient when charged, eats it to discharge

Diagram of a microbial fuel cell that runs on acetate, one half of the bacterial battery described here. (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab ) The chemical that powers most of our cellular processes is produced through something called the electron transport chain. As its name suggests, this system shuffles electrons through a series of chemicals that leaves them at a lower energy, all while harvesting some of the energy difference to produce ATP. But the ultimate destination of this electron transport chain doesn’t have to be a chemical. There are a variety of bacteria that ultimately send the electrons off into the environment instead. And researchers have figured out how to turn these into a fuel cell, harvesting the electrons to do something useful. While some of these designs were closer to a battery than others, all of them consumed some sort of material in harvesting the electrons. A team of researchers in the Netherlands figured out how to close the loop and create an actual bacterial battery. One half of the battery behaves like a bacterial fuel cell. But the second half takes the electrons and uses them to synthesize a small organic molecule that the first can eat. Its charging cycle is painfully slow and its energy density is atrocious, but the fact that it works at all seems rather noteworthy. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again

Aaron Swartz would be proud of Alexandra Elbakyan. The 27-year-old is at the center of a lawsuit brought by a leading science publisher that is labeling her a hacker and infringer. (credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Elbakyan) Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world’s best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It’s time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker. This, of course, describes the tale of the late Aaron Swartz . His situation captured the Internet’s collective attention as the data crusader attacked research paywalls. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he tragically committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013. But suddenly in 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research’s Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who’s living in Russia). Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like “hacker” and “criminal.” Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again

Maryland hospital group hit by ransomware

Baltimore’s Union Memorial is one of the hopitals hit by Samsam, an autonomous ransomware strain spread by exploiting JBoss servers. (credit: MedStar) Baltimore’s Union Memorial Hospital is the epicenter of a malware attack upon its parent organization, MedStar. Data at Union Memorial and other MedStar hospitals in Maryland have been encrypted by ransomware spread across the network, and the operators of the malware are offering a bulk deal: 45 bitcoins (about $18,500) for the keys to unlock all the affected systems. Reuters reports that the FBI issued a confidential urgent “Flash” message to the industry about the threat of Samsam on March 25, seeking assistance in fighting the ransomware and pleading, “We need your help!” The FBI’s cyber center also shared signature data for Samsam activity to help organizations screen for infections. But the number of potential targets remains vast, and the FBI was concerned that entire networks could fall victim to the ransomware. According to sources who spoke to the Baltimore Sun , the malware involved in MedStar’s outages is Samsam, also known as Samas and MSIL. The subject of a recent confidential FBI cyber-alert, Samsam is form of malware that uses well-known exploits in the JBoss application server and other Java-based application platforms. As Ars reported on Monday, Samsam uses exploits published as part of JexBoss , an open-source security and penetration testing tool for checking JBoss servers for misconfiguration. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Maryland hospital group hit by ransomware

Rare example of lost language found on stone hidden 2500 years ago

Mugello Valley Project The ancient Etruscan stele was recycled 2500 years ago for use inside the foundation of a temple, which suggests that it is quite old. The stone is about 4 feet tall, and would once have stood as part of a sacred display. 3 more images in gallery The ancient Etruscan civilization, whose great cities dotted the west coast of Italy between 2800 and 2400 years ago, was in many ways the model for ancient Greece and Rome. Etruscans lived in city states with sumptuous palaces, beautiful art, and a complicated social structure. But we know almost nothing about their daily lives, in part because most of their writing was recorded on perishable objects like cloth or wax tablets. For that reason, a new discovery made by the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project could be revolutionary. At a dig outside Florence, a group of researchers have unearthed a massive stone tablet, known as a stele, covered in Etruscan writing. The 500-pound stone is 4 feet high and was once part of a sacred temple display. But 2500 years ago it was torn down and used as a foundation stone in a much larger temple. Hidden away for thousands of years, the sandstone stab has been preserved remarkably well. Though it’s chipped, and possibly burned on one side, the stele contains 70 legible letters and punctuation marks. That makes it one of the longest examples of Etruscan writing known in the modern world. Scientists believe it will be full of words and concepts they’ve never encountered before. Almost all the writing we have from Etruscan civilization is from necropolises, massive tombs that the wealthy elites used to bury their dynastic families for generations. So a lot of the vocabulary we’ve gleaned comes from what are essentially gravestones, covered in rote phrases and praise for the dead. This new stele could reveal a lot about Etruscan religion, and possibly the names of the god or goddesses worshipped at the city. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rare example of lost language found on stone hidden 2500 years ago

Cops: Lottery terminal hack allowed suspects to print more winning tickets

Six people have been charged in what prosecutors say was a scheme to hack Connecticut state lottery terminals so they produced more winning tickets and fewer losing ones. At least two of the suspects have been charged with felonies, including first-degree larceny, first-degree computer crimes, and rigging a game, according to an article published by The Hartford Courant . The suspects allegedly owned or worked at retail stores that produced winning tickets in numbers that were much higher than the state average. Of tickets generated at one liquor store, for instance, 76 percent were instant winners in one sample and 59 percent in another sample. The state-wide average, meanwhile, was just 24 percent. After manipulating the terminals, the suspects cashed the tickets and took the proceeds, prosecutors alleged. The charges come several months after lottery officials suspended a game called the 5 Card Cash after they noticed it was generating more winning tickets than its parameters should have allowed. The game remains suspended. Investigators say more arrests may be made in the future. Almost a year ago, prosecutors in Iowa presented evidence indicating the former head of computer security for the state’s lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops: Lottery terminal hack allowed suspects to print more winning tickets

Rage-quit: Coder unpublished 17 lines of JavaScript and “broke the Internet”

(credit: Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson) It all started with a request from the developers of a messaging application to an open-source developer to change the name of a library. It ended with JavaScript developers around the world crying out in frustration as hundreds of projects suddenly stopped working—their code failing because of broken dependencies on modules that a developer removed from the repository over a policy dispute. At the center of it all is npm, Inc. , the Oakland startup behind the largest registry and repository of JavaScript tools and modules. Isaac Schlueter, npm’s creator, said that the way the whole thing shook out was a testament to how well open source works—the missing link was replaced by another developer quickly. But many developers are less than elated by the fact that code they’ve become dependent on can be pulled out from under them without any notice. The disruption caused by the wholesale unpublishing of code modules by their author, Azer Koçulu, was repaired in two hours, Schlueter told Ars, as other developers filled in the holes in the repository. The incident is, however, prompting Schlueter and the team at nmp Inc. to take a look at how to prevent one developer from causing so much collateral damage. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rage-quit: Coder unpublished 17 lines of JavaScript and “broke the Internet”

Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain

Littermates were injected with either a control virus (right) or a virus that knocked out O-GlcNAcTransferase (OGT) (left) in a subpopulation of cells in the hypothalamus in the brain. OGT knock out made the mouse eat twice as much as its sibling. This photo was taken about five weeks after virus injection. (credit: Olof Lagerlof ) After tediously tracking calories and willfully shunning cravings, many a dieter has likely dreamt of simple switch that, when thrown, could shut down hunger and melt away pounds—and scientists may have just found it. When researchers knocked down a single enzyme in the brains of mice, the rodents seemed to lose the ability to tell when they were full. They ate more than twice their usual amount of food at meal times and tripled their body fat within three weeks. And—most strikingly—when the researchers reversed the experiment, the mice just quickly stopped eating so much . Data on the enzymatic switch, published Thursday in Science , suggests a possible target for future drugs to treat obesity in humans. The enzyme is O-GlcNAc transferase, or OGT, which is known to work in a chemical pathway controlled by nutrients and metabolic hormones, particularly insulin. That pathway has long been linked with obesity. But researchers knew almost nothing about the how the pathway linked to the metabolic disorder or OGT’s specific role. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain