Tag: entertainment

Chicagoan Arrested For Using Cell-phone Jammer To Make Subway Commute Tolerable

McGruber writes with this story from the Chicago Tribune: Last Fall, certified public accountant Dennis Nicholl boarded a Chicago subway train while carrying a plastic bag of Old Style beer. Nicholl popped open a beer and looked around the car, scowling as he saw another rider talking on a cellphone. He pulled out a black device from his pocket and switched it on. Commuters who had been talking on their phones went silent, checking their screens for the source of their dropped calls. On Tuesday, undercover officers arrested Nicholl. Cook County prosecutors and Chicago police allege he created his own personal ‘quiet car’ on the subway by using an illegal device he imported from China. He was charged with unlawful interference with a public utility, a felony. This is not the first time Nicholl has been charged with jamming cell calls. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in June 2009, according to court records. He was placed under court supervision for a year, and his equipment was confiscated and destroyed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chicagoan Arrested For Using Cell-phone Jammer To Make Subway Commute Tolerable

Software Bug in F-35 Radar Causes Mid-Flight System Reboot

Reader Lisandro writes: The F-35 Fighter jet can’t seem to catch a break. An advanced AN/APG-81 AESA F35 radar system has been found riddled with a software bug that causes it to degrade and stop working. The solution? Rebooting the system while in the air. Major General Jeffrey Harrigian, director of the Air Force’s F-35 integration office at the Pentagon, was quoted as saying “radar stability – the radar’s ability to stay up and running. What would happen is they’d get a signal that says either a radar degrade or a radar fail – “something that would force us to restart the radar.” The issue was spotted in late 2015, and thankfully, it was caught during the testing period. The software version “3i” is affected. An update aimed to resolve the bug is expected to be delivered to the US Air Force by the end of March. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Software Bug in F-35 Radar Causes Mid-Flight System Reboot

Hackers tried and failed to steal a billion dollars from bank

Hackers stole $80 million from a bank, but it could have been a lot worse if they had just Googled the name of a company, according to Reuters . Thieves got inside servers of the Bangladesh Bank, stealing the credentials used to make online transfers. They then bombarded the Federal Reserve Bank in New York with up to 13 money transfer requests to organizations in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. The Fed allowed four to go through totaling $81 million, but the next one was flagged by a routing bank in Germany because the hackers misspelled “foundation” as “fandation.” Once alerted, officials put a stop to the the remaining transfers, which amounted to nearly $850 million. The $81 million theft is still one of the largest ever, but if all the transfers had gone through, it would have been one of the biggest heists on record. Last year, Russian hackers reportedly got away with up to $1 billion from 100 banks using malware. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi officials are trying to lock down their systems and figure out how the attack happened, but say there’s little hope the hackers and money will be recovered. As with many large-scale attacks , experts told Reuters that the thieves likely targeted and spied on employees to gain access to servers. While the bank blames the US Federal Reserve Bank for not stopping the transfers, Fed officials say that it’s systems were not breached and that it has been cooperating in the investigation. Luckily, hackers are just as bad at spelling in large fraud attempts as they are in basic spear-phishing attacks. Source: Reuters

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Hackers tried and failed to steal a billion dollars from bank

No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores

campuscodi writes: Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it is removing PageRank scores from the Google toolbar, which was the last place where someone could check their site’s PageRank status. Many SEO experts are extremely happy at this point, since it seems that PageRank is responsible for all the SEO spam we see today. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores

ScummVM, Update With a Bang

KingofGnG writes: The developers of ScummVM have announced a new version for the virtual machine preferred by graphic adventure fans: also known as “Lost with Sherlock, ” ScummVM 1.8.0 is hailed as one of the heftiest releases ever prepared by the team, with the addition of many games and game engines, the substantial update of graphics and sound sub-systems and the availability of new conversions for minor platforms. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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ScummVM, Update With a Bang

Google Docs Can Now Export EPUB

An anonymous reader writes: The EPUB format is now available as an export option from Google Docs. Tests show that the feature can very accurately translate Word-style hyperlinked indexes into EPUB sidebar indices, offering the possibility of updating legacy documents to a more portable and open format. However, despite the completely open XML-based nature of the format, and how much better it handles text-reflow than PDF can, the paucity of easy-to-use editors — particularly in the mobile space — may mean that EPUB continues to be seen as a ‘baked’ format. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Docs Can Now Export EPUB

Run 500 hard-to-find Apple II programs in your web browser

Sure, it’s easy to find ways to run classic Apple II programs like The Oregon Trail or Prince of Persia . But what about that obscure educational title you remember using as a kid? Is it doomed to be forgotten? You might not have to worry. The Internet Archive has announced that its web-based emulation catalog now includes over 500 relatively tough-to-find Apple II programs that might otherwise have disappeared forever. If you remember using the likes of The Quarter Mile or The Observatory , you can fire it up without having to dig your old computer out of storage. In many cases, it’s almost surprising that the programs are available at all. They come from an era when copy protection frequently involved hardware-specific tricks, and attempts to crack them often broke code or included unsightly credits to the cracking teams involved. Here, that isn’t an issue — the goal is to preserve the software as faithfully as possible. The Internet Archive likely can’t save everything even it keeps expanding its library, but it could prevent large swaths of Apple II history from being reduced to memories. Source: Internet Archive

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Run 500 hard-to-find Apple II programs in your web browser

Transmission BitTorrent App Contained Malware

An anonymous reader writes: Apple users were targeted in the first known Mac ransomware campaign. Hackers targeted Transmission, which is one of the most popular Mac applications used to download software, videos, music, and other data from the BitTorrent peer-to-peer information sharing network. As per this forum post (English screenshot of warning), OS X detected malware called OSX.KeRanger.A. This is the first one in the wild that is functional as it encrypts your files and seeks a ransom. An Apple representative said the company had taken steps over the weekend to prevent attacks by revoking a digital certificate from a legitimate Apple developer that enabled the rogue software to install on Macs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Transmission BitTorrent App Contained Malware

Quantum computer revolves around just 5 atoms

It’s no mean feat to find the factors of a very large number — even a supercomputer can take years to find all the multipliers. However, MIT researchers have found a way to clear this massive hurdle. They’ve built a quantum computer that discovers number factors using just five atoms. Four of the atoms are turned into logic gates using laser pulses that put them into superpositions (where they maintain two different energy states at once), while the fifth atom stores and delivers answers. The result is a computer that not only calculates solutions much more efficiently than existing quantum systems, but scales relatively easily. Need to get the factors for a larger number? Introduce more atoms. It’s a one-trick pony at the moment (it can only get factors for the number 15), and a truly complex computer would require “thousands” of simultaneous laser blasts to work. However, it could have big ramifications for the security world. A sufficiently powerful machine could end the use of any encryption that depends on factoring — a government agency or hacking team could easily crack codes that are otherwise near-impenetrable. On a basic level, this quantum factoring could also help solve math problems involving extremely large numbers (say, universe-scale calculations) that would normally be too daunting. Source: MIT News

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Quantum computer revolves around just 5 atoms

Kremlin Falls For Its Own Fake Satellite Imagery

An anonymous reader writes: The Turkish downing of the Russian SU-24 jet last November saw a predictable series of statements from each side claiming complete innocence and blaming the other entirely. Social media was a key battleground for both sides — the Turkish and Russian governments, along with their supporters — as each tried to establish a dominant narrative explanation for what had just happened. In the midst of the online competition, a little-observed, funhouse mirror of an online hoax was brilliantly perpetrated, one with consequences likely exceeding the expectation of the hoaxster. The Russian Ministry of Defense was duped by a fake image that Russian state media itself had circulated more than a year earlier, as a way to deny Moscow’s involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Kremlin Falls For Its Own Fake Satellite Imagery