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DDoS Attack Halts Heating in Finland Amidst Winter

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack halted heating distribution at least in two properties in the city of Lappeenranta, located in Eastern Finland. In both of these events, the attacks disabled the computers that were controlling heating in the buildings. An anonymous reader writes: Both of the buildings were managed by Valtia, the company which is in charge of managing the buildings overall operation and maintenance. According to Valtia CEO, Simo Ruonela, in both cases the systems that controlled the central heating and warm water circulation were disabled. In the city of Lappeenranta, there were at least two buildings whose systems were knocked down by the network attack. According to Rounela, the attack in Eastern Finland lasted from late October to Thursday — the 3rd of November. The systems that were attacked tried to respond to the attack by rebooting the main control circuit. This was repeated over and over so that heating was never working. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DDoS Attack Halts Heating in Finland Amidst Winter

Researchers Create An Undetectable Rootkit That Targets Industrial Equipment

An anonymous reader quotes Bleeping Computer: “Two researchers presenting at the Black Hat Europe security conference in London revealed a method of infecting industrial equipment with an undetectable rootkit component that can wreak havoc and disrupt the normal operations of critical infrastructure all over the world. The attack targets PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), devices that sit between normal computers that run industrial monitoring software and the actual industrial equipment, such as motors, valves, sensors, breakers, alarms, and others.” Researchers say they packed their attack as a loadable kernel module [PDF], which makes it both undetectable and reboot persistent. The attack goes after PLC pin configurations, meaning the PLC won’t be able to tell which are the actual input and output pins, allowing the attacker full-control to make up bogus sensor data, send fake commands, or block legitimate ones. The researchers acknowledge that the attack is extremely complicated, but the article argues it would still be of interest to a state-sponsored actor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Create An Undetectable Rootkit That Targets Industrial Equipment

The FBI Spent Two Years Investigating An Online Cult That Didn’t Exist

A two-year FBI investigation apparently centered on the satirical web site “GodHatesGoths”. Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: In 2005, the FBI launched an investigation into the “Church of the Hammer, ” a fundamentalist Christian sect which called for the wholesale slaughter of practitioners of the goth subculture. Two years later, the investigation was closed, on grounds that the Church didn’t exist. The FBI’s threat assessment detailed “an extremely right-wing Christian group that adheres to a Middle Ages Catholic text called the ‘Malleus Malificarum.'” But MuckRock.com reports that “The Bureau’s main source on the case was a goth who had engaged with members of the Church via their Yahoo Group…trying to dispel their misconceptions about the relationship between the subculture and Satanism.” After two years of scouring through crime databases and making phone calls to the Salem police department, FBI investigators actually visited the GodHatesGoths web site — which turned out to be a parody. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The FBI Spent Two Years Investigating An Online Cult That Didn’t Exist

Adobe Is Working On ‘Photoshop For Audio’ That Will Let You Add Words Someone Never Said

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Adobe is working on a new piece of software that would act like a Photoshop for audio, according to Adobe developer Zeyu Jin, who spoke at the Adobe MAX conference in San Diego, California today. The software is codenamed Project VoCo, and it’s not clear at this time when it will materialize as a commercial product. The standout feature, however, is the ability to add words not originally found in the audio file. Like Photoshop, Project VoCo is designed to be a state-of-the-art audio editing application. Beyond your standard speech editing and noise cancellation features, Project VoCo can also apparently generate new words using a speaker’s recorded voice. Essentially, the software can understand the makeup of a person’s voice and replicate it, so long as there’s about 20 minutes of recorded speech. In Jin’s demo, the developer showcased how Project VoCo let him add a word to a sentence in a near-perfect replication of the speaker, according to Creative Bloq. So similar to how Photoshop ushered in a new era of editing and image creation, this tool could transform how audio engineers work with sound, polish clips, and clean up recordings and podcasts. “When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative, ” reads an official Adobe statement. “We have developed a technology called Project VoCo in which you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Adobe Is Working On ‘Photoshop For Audio’ That Will Let You Add Words Someone Never Said

Every Year of Smoking Causes About 150 New DNA Mutations That Can Make Cancer More Likely, Says Study

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: For every year that you continue your pack-a-day habit, the DNA in every cell in your lungs acquires about 150 new mutations. Some of those mutations may be harmless, but the more there are, the greater the risk that one or more of them will wind up causing cancer. The threat doesn’t stop there, according to a study in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. After a year of smoking a pack of cigarettes each day, the cells in the larynx pick up roughly 97 new mutations, those in the pharynx accumulate 39 new mutations, and cells in the oral cavity gain 23 new mutations. Even organs with no direct exposure to tobacco smoke appear to be affected. The researchers counted about 18 new mutations in every bladder cell and six new mutations in every liver cell for each “pack-year” that smokers smoked. The findings are based on a genetic analysis of 5, 243 cancers, including 2, 490 from smokers and 1, 063 from patients who said they had never smoked tobacco cigarettes. The researchers used powerful supercomputers to compare thousands of cancer genome sequences. The computers grouped the sequences into about 20 distinct categories, or “mutational signatures.” Mutations tied to five of these signatures were more common in tumors from smokers than in tumors from nonsmokers. One of the signatures involves a specific DNA nucleobase change — instead of a C for cytosine, there was an A for adenine — that “is very similar” to the change that occurs in the lab when cells are exposed to benzo[a]pyrene, a compound that the International Agency for Research on Cancer says is carcinogenic to humans. Most of the lung and larynx cancers obtained from smokers had this type of mutation, the researchers reported. They also found that the signature was more common among smokers than nonsmokers. Another mutational signature was characterized by Cs that should have been Ts (thymine) and vice versa. Although these changes can be found in all kinds of cancers, the signature was 1.3 to 5.1 times more common in tumors from smokers than in tumors from nonsmokers, according to the study. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every Year of Smoking Causes About 150 New DNA Mutations That Can Make Cancer More Likely, Says Study

Computer Virus Attack Forces Hospitals To Cancel Operations, Shut Down Systems

A hospital system in the United Kingdom has canceled all planned operations and diverted major trauma cases to neighboring facilities citing a computer virus outbreak. From a report on ZDNet: The Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust says a “major incident” has been caused by a “computer virus” which infected its electronic systems on Sunday. As a result of the attack, the hospital has taken the decision to shut down the majority of its computer networks in order to combat the virus. “A virus infected our electronic systems [on Sunday] and we have taken the decision, following expert advice, to shut down the majority of our systems so we can isolate and destroy it, ” said Dr Karen Dunderdale, the trust’s deputy chief executive. The use of a shared IT system also means the United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust has been taken offline as staff attempt to combat the attack. As a result of the attack, all outpatient appointments and diagnostic procedures that were set to take place at the infected hospitals on Monday and Tuesday have been canceled, while medical emergencies involving major trauma and women in high-risk labor are being diverted to neighboring hospitals. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Computer Virus Attack Forces Hospitals To Cancel Operations, Shut Down Systems

Foxconn Testing Wireless Charging For iPhone 8

One of the first big secrets regarding Apple’s upcoming smartphone has been spilled. According to a report from Nikkei Asian Review, Foxconn, the firm responsible for assembling iPhones, is testing wireless charging modules for the iPhone 8. TrustedReviews reports: Citing ‘an industry source familiar with the matter, ‘ the report states the wireless charging feature could appear on the next Apple handset, but it depends whether the company can produce enough satisfactory units. The source told Nikkei: “Whether the feature can eventually make it into Apple’s updated devices will depend on whether Foxconn can boost the yield rate to a satisfactory level later on.” The yield rate refers to the ‘number of satisfactory units in the production of a batch of components, ‘ and if it’s found to be too low, the wireless charging feature could be left out of the iPhone 8 according to the report. It’s also claimed the wireless tech could make it into some versions of the iPhone 8 and not others. Nikkei is also reporting that Apple’s next gen smartphones are expected to arrive in three different sizes — 4.7-inch, 5-inch and 5.5-inch — all of which will come with glass-backed bodies. The Next Web reports: “Nikkei further suggests out of the three new iPhones will be a premium model with a curved edge-to-edge OLED display; the other two models will likely have standard LCD displays. Here’s what Nikkei’s source said: “Apple has tentatively decided that all the 5.5-inch, 5-inch and 4.7-inch models will have glass backs, departing from metal casings adopted by current iPhones, and Biel and Lens are likely to be providing all the glass backs for the new iPhones next year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Foxconn Testing Wireless Charging For iPhone 8

Mozilla Announces Quantum, a New Browser Engine For Firefox

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is currently working on a new browser engine called Quantum, which will take parts from the Servo project and create a new core for the Firefox browser. The new engine will replace the aging Gecko, Firefox’ current engine. Mozilla hopes to finish the transition to Quantum (as in Quantum Leap) by the end of 2017. The first versions of Quantum will heavily rely on components from Servo, a browser engine that Mozilla has been sponsoring for the past years, and which shipped its first alpha version this June. In the upcoming year, Mozilla will slowly merge Gecko and Servo components with each new release, slowly removing Gecko’s ancient code, and leaving Quantum’s engine in place. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Announces Quantum, a New Browser Engine For Firefox

Linux Marketshare is Above 2-Percent For Third Month in a Row

For the third month in a row the share of worldwide desktop computer users running Linux has been above two percent — up from one percent — according to data from web analytics company Net Market Share. From a OMGUbuntu report: We reported back in July that Linux marketshare had passed two percent for the first time, and that figure remains the highest they’ve ever reported for Linux, at 2.33 percent. But the share for September 2016 was almost as good at 2.23 percent. It’s the third consecutive month that Linux marketshare has been above 2 percent. Those of us who use Linux as our primary desktop computing platform can take a degree of pride in these figures. They do show a clear trend towards Linux, rather than away from it. But we should also remember that statistics, numbers and reporting methods vary between analytics companies and that all figures, however positive, remain open to interpretation and debate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Marketshare is Above 2-Percent For Third Month in a Row

New MacBook Pros Max Out At 16GB RAM Due To Battery Life Concerns

The new MacBooks Pros have been improved in nearly every way — except when it comes to RAM capacity. With faster, more energy efficient Skylake processors, faster SSDs, and better GPUs, one would think the amount of RAM wouldn’t be capped off at 16GB. However, that is the case. The reason why the MacBook Pros continue to max out at 16GB RAM is due to battery life concerns, according to marketing chief Phil Schiller. MacRumors reader David emailed Apple to get an explanation: Question from David: “The lack of a 32GB BTO option for the new MBPs raised some eyebrows and caused some concerns (me included). Does ~3GBps bandwidth to the SSD make this a moot issue? I.e. memory paging on a 16GB system is so fast that 32GB is not a significant improvement?” Schiller’s answer: “Thank you for the email. It is a good question. To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would require a memory system that consumes much more power and wouldn’t be efficient enough for a notebook. I hope you check out this new generation MacBook Pro, it really is an incredible system.” For the 2016 MacBook Pro, Apple was able to reach “all-day battery life, ” which equates to 10 hours of wireless web use or iTunes movie playback. That’s an hour improvement over the previous generation in the 15-inch machine, and a small step back in the 13-inch machine. While none of Apple’s portable machines offer more than 16GB RAM, 32GB of RAM is a high-end custom upgrade option in the 27-inch iMac. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New MacBook Pros Max Out At 16GB RAM Due To Battery Life Concerns