Tag: entertainment

Phone and laptop encryption guide: Protect your stuff and yourself

The worst thing about having a phone or laptop stolen isn’t necessarily the loss of the physical object itself, though there’s no question that that part sucks. It’s the amount of damage control you have to do afterward. Calling your phone company to get SIMs deactivated, changing all of your account passwords, and maybe even canceling credit cards are all good ideas, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Using strong PINs or passwords and various Find My Phone features is a good place to start if you’d like to limit the amount of cleanup you need to do, but in this day and age it’s a good idea to encrypt your device’s local storage if at all possible. Full-disk or full-device encryption (that is, encrypting everything on your drive, rather than a specific folder or user profile) isn’t yet a default feature across the board, but most of the major desktop and mobile OSes support it in some fashion. In case you’ve never considered it before, here’s what you need to know. Why encrypt? Even if you normally protect your user account with a decent password, that doesn’t truly protect your data if someone decides to swipe your device. For many computers, the drive can simply be removed and plugged into another system, or the computer can be booted from an external drive and the data can be copied to that drive. Android phones and tablets can be booted into recovery mode and many of the files on the user partition can be accessed with freely available debug tools. And even if you totally wipe your drive, disk recovery software may still be able to read old files. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Phone and laptop encryption guide: Protect your stuff and yourself

Lightning Wipes Storage Disks At Google Data Center

An anonymous reader writes: Lightning struck a Google data center in Belgium four times in rapid succession last week, permanently erasing a small amount of users’ data from the cloud. The affected disks were part of Google Computer Engine (GCE), a utility that lets people run virtual computers in the cloud on Google’s servers. Despite the uncontrollable nature of the incident, Google has accepted full responsibility for the blackout and promises to upgrade its data center storage hardware, increasing its resilience against power outages. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Lightning Wipes Storage Disks At Google Data Center

Bruce Schneier On Cisco ROMMON Firmware Exploit: "This Is Serious"

When Bruce Schneier says of a security problem “This is serious, ” it makes sense to pay attention to it. And that’s how he refers to a recently disclosed Cisco vulnerability alert about “an evolution in attacks against Cisco IOS Classic platforms. Cisco has observed a limited number of cases where attackers, after gaining administrative or physical access to a Cisco IOS device, replaced the Cisco IOS ROMMON (IOS bootstrap) with a malicious ROMMON image.” Schneier links to Ars Technica’s short description of the attack, whicih notes The significance of the advisory isn’t that the initial firmware can be replaced. As indicated, that’s a standard feature not only with Cisco gear but just about any computing device. What’s important is that attackers are somehow managing to obtain the administrative credentials required to make unauthorized changes that take control of the networking gear. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Follow this link:
Bruce Schneier On Cisco ROMMON Firmware Exploit: "This Is Serious"

Air Traffic Snafu: FAA System Runs Out of Memory

minstrelmike writes: Over the weekend, hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled in the Washington, D.C. area after air traffic systems malfunctioned. Now, the FAA says the problem was related to a recent software upgrade at a local radar facility. The software had been upgraded to display customized windows of reference data that were supposed to disappear once deleted. Unfortunately, the systems ended up running out of memory. The FAA’s report is vague about whether it was operator error or software error: “… as controllers adjusted their unique settings, those changes remained in memory until the storage limit was filled.” Wonder what programming language they used? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More:
Air Traffic Snafu: FAA System Runs Out of Memory

Bitcoin Fork Divides Community

HughPickens.com writes: The Bitcoin community is facing one of the most momentous decisions in its six-year history. The Bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity, and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem. The technical issue is that a block, containing a record of recent transactions, currently has a 1MB limit. Increasing the block size would allow more transactions on the network at once, helping it to scale up to meet growing demand. But it would also make it more difficult for ordinary users to host full network “nodes” that validate new transactions on the network, potentially making the digital currency more centralized as a result. Now Rob Price writes that two high-profile developers have released a competing version of the codebase that risks splitting the digital currency in two. Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have released Bitcoin XT, an alternative version of the core software that supports increasing the block size when required. Bitcoin users will now be forced to decide between “Bitcoin Core” and Bitcoin XT, raising the prospect of a “fork, ” where the digital currency divides into two competing versions. According to Price, Core and XT are compatible right now. However, if XT is adopted by 75% of users by January 2016, it will upgrade to a larger block size that will be incompatible with Core — meaning that if the other 25% don’t then choose to convert, it will effectively split the currency into two. So far, 7.7% of the network has adopted XT, according to website XTnodes.com. “Ultimately, how the dispute is resolved may matter more than the specific decision that’s reached, ” says Timothy B. Lee. “If the community is ultimately able to reach a consensus, the process could become a template for resolving future disagreements. On the other hand, if disagreements fester for months — or, worse, if a controversial software change splits the Bitcoin network into two warring camps — it could do real damage to Bitcoin’s reputation.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original article here:
Bitcoin Fork Divides Community

Breathing Beijing’s Air Is the Equivalent of Smoking Almost 40 Cigarettes a Day

iONiUM writes: The Economist has a story about how bad the air quality is in Beijing. Due to public outcry the Chinese government has created almost 1, 000 air quality monitoring stations, and the findings aren’t good. They report: “Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold. That is even worse than the satellite data had suggested. Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total. A previous estimate, based on a study of pollution in the Huai river basin (which lies between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers), put the toll at 1.2m deaths a year—still high.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
Breathing Beijing’s Air Is the Equivalent of Smoking Almost 40 Cigarettes a Day

DirectX 12 Performance Tested In Ashes of the Singularity

Vigile writes: The future of graphics APIs lies in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, both built to target GPU hardware at a lower level than previously available. The advantages are better performance, better efficiency on all hardware and more control for the developer that is willing to put in the time and effort to understand the hardware in question. Until today we have only heard or seen theoretical “peak” performance claims of DX12 compared to DX11. PC Perspective just posted an article that uses a pre-beta version of Ashes of the Singularity, an upcoming RTS utilizing the Oxide Games Nitrous engine, to evaluate and compare DX12’s performance claims and gains against DX11. In the story we find five different processor platforms tested with two different GPUs and two different resolutions. Results are interesting and show that DX12 levels the playing field for AMD, with its R9 390X gaining enough ground in DX12 to overcome a significant performance deficit that exists using DX11 to the GTX 980. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More:
DirectX 12 Performance Tested In Ashes of the Singularity

Ask Slashdot: How To "Prove" a Work Is Public Domain?

New submitter eporue writes: YouTube claims that I haven’t been able to prove that I have commercial rights to this video of Superman. They are asking me to submit documentation saying “We need to verify that you are authorized to commercially use all of the visual and audio elements in your video. Please confirm your material is in the public domain.” I submitted a link to the Wikipedia page of the Superman cartoons from the 40s where it explains that the copyright expired, and to the Archive page from where I got it. And still is not enough to “prove” that I have the commercial rights. So, how do you “prove” public domain status ? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visit site:
Ask Slashdot: How To "Prove" a Work Is Public Domain?

Former Employees Accuse Kaspersky Lab of Faking Malware

An anonymous reader writes: Reuters reports that two former employees of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab faked malware to damage the reputations of their rivals. The alleged campaign targeted Microsoft, AVG, Avast, and others, tricking them into classifying harmless files as viruses. The ex-employees said co-founder Eugene Kaspersky ordered some of the attacks as retaliation for emulating his software. The company denied the allegations, and Kaspersky himself reiterated them, adding, “Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.” The targeted companies had previously said somebody tried to induce false positives in their software, but they declined to comment on the new allegations. “In one technique, Kaspersky’s engineers would take an important piece of software commonly found in PCs and inject bad code into it so that the file looked like it was infected, the ex-employees said. They would send the doctored file anonymously to VirusTotal.” The alleged attacks went on for more than 10 years, peaking between 2009 and 2013. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visit site:
Former Employees Accuse Kaspersky Lab of Faking Malware

Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries

ckwu writes: The designs of pacemakers, watches, and other wearable gadgets have to be tailored around existing battery shapes, such as cylinders, coin cells, and rectangles. But a team of researchers hopes their fully printable, flexible lithium-ion batteries will one day free designers from these constraints. Battery shapes are now limited because of the need to contain liquid electrolytes. Two years ago, the researchers designed a printable, solid-state electrolyte composed of alumina nanoparticles and lithium combined with polymer that can be cured by ultraviolet light. In this latest work, they used a stencil printing technique to print full battery cells with the electrolyte and other printable materials for the electrodes. They printed batteries on paper and the curved surface of a glass mug. These printed Li-ion batteries can power small LEDs but still need a lot of improvements because they don’t last long before needing recharging. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries