Tag: events

Giant Squid Filmed At Japanese Marina

overThruster writes: The Wall Street Journal reports: “The rare sight of a giant squid swimming inside a marina was captured on video on the coast of the Sea of Japan. According to a manager at the Mizuhashi Fisherina in Toyama prefecture, about 250 kilometers northwest of Tokyo, one fisherman found a 3.7-meter (12.1-foot) giant squid swimming beneath fishing boats docked at the marina on the morning of Dec. 24.” The extraordinary close up video taken by divers shows the giant squid’s natural coloration as well as the action of its siphon propelling it through the water. Additional footage here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Giant Squid Filmed At Japanese Marina

Pwnd Aethra Routers Used To Brute-Force WordPress Sites

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers found around 8, 000 Aethra routers (with no admin passwords) as part of a botnet that attacked WordPress sites, trying to brute-force admin accounts. Most routers were deployed in enterprise networks in Italy. Each device could have be used to launch DDoS attacks with a capability between 1 to 10 Gbps for each device, based on the company’s bandwidth. Things could be worse, though: Additional investigation also revealed that some of the routers were also susceptible to various reflected XSS and CSRF attacks that would also allow attackers to take control of the device, even if using different login credentials. Using Shodan, a search engine for locating Internet-connected devices, researchers found over 12, 000 of Aethra routers around the world, 10, 866 in Italy alone, and over 8, 000 of these devices were of the model detected in the initial brute-force attack (Aethra Telecommunications PBX series). At that time, 70% of these Aethra routers were still using their default login credentials Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pwnd Aethra Routers Used To Brute-Force WordPress Sites

Google Joins Mozilla, Microsoft In Pushing For Early SHA-1 Crypto Cutoff

itwbennett writes: Due to recent research showing that SHA-1 is weaker than previously believed, Mozilla, Microsoft and now Google are all considering bringing the deadline forward by six months to July 1, 2016. Websites like Facebook and those protected by CloudFlare have implemented a SHA-1 fallback mechanism. Both companies have argued that there are millions of people in developing countries that still use browsers and operating systems that do not support SHA-2, the replacement function for SHA-1, and will therefore be cut off from encrypted websites that move to SHA-2 certificates. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Joins Mozilla, Microsoft In Pushing For Early SHA-1 Crypto Cutoff

Vivendi Takes Over Radionomy, Winamp Relaunch Now Possible

SmartAboutThings writes: Winamp could once again be brought back to life after Vivendi Group took over the majority stake in Radionomy, the previous owner of the app who purchased it from AOL in early 2014. AOL originally planned to discontinue both Winamp and Shoutcast, but instead the company decided to sell the software to Belgian online radio service, Radionomy. The new owners initially promised that they’ll keep Winamp alive, but no updates have been released since the takeover, which made most people think that Winamp era has ended for good. Vivendi Group, which owns or is involved in famous companies such as Dailymotion, Ubisoft, and Deezer, could help relaunch Winamp, although the press release announcing the acquisition offers no suggestion in this regard. The company, however, does mention Winamp and Shoutcast as two of the most important assets that will join its portfolio following the takeover. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Vivendi Takes Over Radionomy, Winamp Relaunch Now Possible

Juniper’s Backdoor Password Disclosed, Likely Added In Late 2013

itwbennett writes: In a blog post on Rapid7’s community portal Sunday, HD Moore posted some notes on the Juniper ScreenOS incident, notably that his team discovered the backdoor password that enables the Telnet and SSH bypass. Quoting: “Although most folks are more familiar with x86 than ARM, the ARM binaries are significantly easier to compare due to minimal changes in the compiler output. … Once the binary is loaded, it helps to identify and tag common functions. Searching for the text “strcmp” finds a static string that is referenced in the sub_ED7D94 function. Looking at the strings output, we can see some interesting string references, including auth_admin_ssh_special and auth_admin_internal. … The argument to the strcmp call is

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Juniper’s Backdoor Password Disclosed, Likely Added In Late 2013

Facebook Replaces Flash With HTML5 For Videos

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook announced that it officially replaced Flash with HTML5 for its video player. They made the change because of security reasons, but developers also found it easier to work with — it led to quicker turnarounds for site-wide changes, and had better integration with code testing platforms. Facebook reports that user engagement has gone up since the switch was made. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Replaces Flash With HTML5 For Videos

Sony Creating Sulfur-Based Batteries With 40% More Capacity Than Li-Ion

MojoKid writes: Since the original iPhone was released in 2007, we have seen some incredible advances in smartphone processing power along with a wealth of feature improvements like faster Wi-Fi and cellular speeds and larger, higher resolution displays. However, battery technology, for the most part, hasn’t kept up. There are a few major battery suppliers but Sony is currently an underdog, commanding just 8 percent of the market for compact lithium-ion batteries. Its three largest competitors — Samsung (SDI), Panasonic and LG Chem — each command around 20 percent of the market. In an effort to change that, Sony is developing a new type of battery chemistry that can boost runtimes by 40 percent compared to lithium-ion batteries of the same volume. Sony’s batteries use a sulfur compound instead of lithium compounds for the positive electrodes, reportedly allowing for much great energy density. Sulfur batteries can also supposedly be made 30 percent smaller than traditional lithium-ion cells while maintaining the same run times. The company is now working to ensure that the new battery chemistry is safe enough for commercial use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sony Creating Sulfur-Based Batteries With 40% More Capacity Than Li-Ion

DHS Deployed Plane Above San Bernardino To Scoop Up All Phone Calls After Attack

schwit1 writes: Federal investigators looking into the San Bernardino massacre deployed a spy plane overhead after the attacks in an apparent attempt to find additional suspects. The Department of Homeland Security is said to have put up the single engine craft over the California city and ordered it to make repeated circles overhead. The craft would likely have been equipped with Dirtbox technology which can scan tens of thousands of phones in one go to identify suspects. The report adds to the intrigue about whether or not there were accomplices in the San Bernardino attacks, which took place last Wednesday and were the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DHS Deployed Plane Above San Bernardino To Scoop Up All Phone Calls After Attack

AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the antivirus would select the same memory address space every time it would run. If attackers found out the memory space’s address, they could tell their malicious code to execute in the same space, at the same time, and have it execute with root privileges, which most antivirus have on Windows PCs. It’s a basic requirement these days for software programmers to use ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to prevent their code from executing in predictable locations. Affected products: AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky. All “quietly” issued fixes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor

New submitter insitus writes: On 10 December, Germany’s new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor