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Someone beat the Vikings into the North Atlantic by 500 years

The rugged coast of the Faroe islands don’t lend themselves to easy colonization. Flickr user Stig Nygaard The Faroe Islands, a remote archipelago between Scotland and Iceland, could have been inhabited 500 years earlier than was previously thought, according to a startling archaeological discovery. The islands were thought to have been colonized by the Vikings in the 9th century AD. However, dating of peat ash and barley grains has revealed that humans had actually settled there somewhere between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. The Faroes were the first stepping stone beyond the Shetland Islands for the dispersal of European people across the North Atlantic. The findings therefore allow speculation as to whether Iceland, Greenland, and even North America were reached earlier than previously thought. The Faroes are in the North Atlantic, roughly equidistant between Iceland, Norway, and the UK. Mike Church from the University of Durham said he and his research partner, Símun V. Arge from the National Museum of the Faroe Islands, had not expected to find such evidence. “Símun and myself sampled the site in 2006 to take scientific samples for environmental archaeological analysis from the medieval Viking settlement, “ he said. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Someone beat the Vikings into the North Atlantic by 500 years

Get 4K video from your phone’s USB port with the new MHL 3.0 spec

Simultaneous charging is one of MHL’s advantages over Slimport and Miracast. MHL Consortium The Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) standard already lets you connect certain phones, tablets, and other devices to your TV using adapters that connect to the devices’ micro-USB ports. But the consortium has just announced that an upgrade is coming: the new MHL 3.0 standard adds support for 4K displays. This will allow mobile devices that support the standard to output 3840×2160 (also known as 2160p) video at up to 30 frames per second, an upgrade from MHL 2.0’s 1080p. The updated standard can transmit data and video simultaneously, and a device connected via MHL can draw up to 10 watts of power to charge your device. Backward compatibility with MHL versions 1.x and 2.x, HDCP 2.2 DRM support, and 7.1 channel surround sound support are also part of the standard. The MHL standard competes with a few standards (as well as Apple’s proprietary AirPlay), all of which are designed to put your phone or tablet’s display up on your TV. There’s SlimPort (used most prominently in Google’s Nexus 4 and 2013 Nexus 7), a DisplayPort-compatible spec which like MHL uses the micro USB port to connect over HDMI. There’s also Miracast, an Airplay-like standard that uses a Wi-Fi-equipped receiver to beam video to your TV without the use of cables (Miracast support was baked into Android beginning in version 4.2 , but it’s also included in a smattering of other devices). Neither standard supports 4K video at this point, making MHL 3.0 slightly more appealing for those on the bleeding edge of TV technology. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Get 4K video from your phone’s USB port with the new MHL 3.0 spec

“Hand of Thief” banking trojan doesn’t do Windows—but it does Linux

The administration panel for Hand of Thief. RSA Signaling criminals’ growing interest in attacking non-Windows computers, researchers have discovered banking fraud malware that targets people using the open-source Linux operating system. Hand of Thief, as researchers from security firm RSA have dubbed it , sells for about $2, 000 in underground Internet forums and boasts its own support and sales agents. Its functionality—consisting of form grabbers and backdoor capabilities—is rudimentary compared to Windows banking trojans spawned from the Citadel or Blackhole exploit kits, but that’s likely to change. RSA researcher Limor Kessem said she expects Hand of Thief to become a full-blown banking trojan that includes more advanced features such as the ability to inject attacker-controlled content into trusted bank webpages. “Although Hand of Thief comes to the underground at a time when commercial trojans are high in demand, writing malware for the Linux OS is uncommon, and for good reason, ” Kessem wrote. “In comparison to Windows, Linux’s user base is smaller, considerably reducing the number of potential victims and thereby the potential fraud gains.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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“Hand of Thief” banking trojan doesn’t do Windows—but it does Linux

Mobile startup offers unprecedented plan: 500MB of data, free incoming calls

On Tuesday, the American mobile phone market took one step closer to looking a bit more like the European or Asian markets: free incoming calls, inexpensive outgoing calls, and a focus on data. A Canadian startup, TextNow , just launched a new mobile service in the United States. For $18.99 per month, you get 500MB of data, 750 rollover minutes, and unlimited texting and incoming calls. In the US, it’s the norm for both the sending and receiving parties to be charged for a call. But nearly everywhere else in the world, only the person who originated the call actually pays. “Incoming calls don’t really cost us that much, ” Derek Ting, the company’s CEO, told Ars. “Carriers charge you anyway because they can get away with it.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Mobile startup offers unprecedented plan: 500MB of data, free incoming calls

Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA

A search reveals the address used in an attack on Tor users’ privacy referenced an IP address belonging to the NSA, routed through SAIC. Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting — the “hidden service” hosting provider on the Tor anonymized network brought down late last week—may have de-anonymized visitors to the sites running on that service. This issue could send identifying information about site visitors to an Internet Protocol address that was hard-coded into the script the malware injected into browsers. And it appears the IP address in question belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA). This revelation comes from analysis done collaboratively by Baneki Privacy Labs , a collective of Internet security researchers, and VPN provider Cryptocloud . When the IP address was uncovered in the JavaScript exploit —which specifically targets Firefox Long-Term Support version 17, the version included in Tor Browser Bundle—a source at Baneki told Ars that he and others reached out to the malware and security community to help identify the source. The exploit attacked a vulnerability in the Windows version of the Firefox Extended Support Release  17 browser —the one used previously in the Tor Project’s Tor Browser Bundle (TBB).  That vulnerability had been patched by Mozilla in June, and the updated browser is now part of TBB. But the TBB configuration of Firefox doesn’t include automatic security updates, so users of the bundle would not have been protected if they had not recently upgraded. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA

Indian IT firm accused of discrimination against “stupid Americans”

Sean MacEntee Infosys, an Indian IT software and services company with offices throughout the world, has been accused of discriminating against American job applicants. One Infosys employee who raised concerns about the company’s hiring practices was repeatedly called a “stupid American, ” the lawsuit states. Infosys has about 15, 000 employees in the US “and approximately 90 percent of these employees are of South Asian descent (including individuals of Indian, Nepalese, and Bangladeshi descent), ” the lawsuit states . Infosys allegedly achieved this ratio “by directly discriminating against individuals who are not of South Asian decent in hiring, by abusing the H-1B visa process to bring workers of South Asian descent into the country rather than hiring qualified individuals already in the United States, and by abusing the B-1 visa system to bring workers of South Asian descent into the United States to perform work not allowed by their visa status rather than hiring individuals already in the United States to perform the work.” Infosys “used B-1 visa holders because they could be paid considerably lower wages than other workers including American-born workers, ” the lawsuit states. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Indian IT firm accused of discrimination against “stupid Americans”

Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

If the bottom is a layer of graphene in a super capacitor, then storage can be increased by making the solution above it as low-volume as possible. Lawrence Livermore National Lab Individual pieces of graphene have some pretty amazing properties, but finding a way to produce bulk materials that make good use of those properties has been rather challenging. Now, researchers have figured out a way to make graphene-based electrodes in bulk through a process so simple that it can be adapted to the manufacturing techniques that we currently use to make paper. And the resulting capacitors, at least in these test cases, had storage capacities that approached those of lead-acid batteries. Those of us who have taken basic physics tend to think of capacitors as two parallel, charge-holding plates, since that’s how they’re taught. But electrochemical capacitors perform a similar trick on a much smaller scale, by having the charges held by individual ions that absorb to an electrode. To boost capacity, the simplest thing to do is to increase the surface area for the ions to interact with. That’s why graphene seems so appealing; since it’s only a single atom thick, it should be possible to stick a tremendous amount of surface into a relatively small volume. The problem, however, has been getting the ions into the graphene itself in order for them to interact. Once the graphene is prepared, lots of factors like pore size and inter-sheet spacing come into play, since these control how quickly ions can get into the graphene. A team at Australia’s Monash University came up with an easy solution to this: put the ions in place during the manufacturing process. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

Alleged Tor hidden service operator busted for child porn distribution

Catherine Scott On Friday, Eric Eoin Marques, a 28 year-old Dublin resident, was arrested on a warrant from the US on charges that he is, in the words of a FBI agent to an Irish court , “the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.” The arrest coincides with the disappearance of a vast number of ” hidden services ” hosted on Tor, the anonymizing encrypted network. Marques is alleged to be the founder of Freedom Hosting, a major hidden services hosting provider. While Marques’ connection to Freedom Hosting was not brought up in court, he has been widely connected to the service—as well as the Tormail anonymized e-mail service and a Bitcoin exchange and escrow service called Onionbank—in discussions on Tor-based news and Wiki sites. All those services are now offline. And prior to disappearing, the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting were also distributing malware that may have been used to expose the users of those services. Tor hidden services are a lesser known part of the Tor “darknet.” They are anonymized Web sites, mail hosts, and other services which can only be reached by computers connected to Tor, or through a Tor hidden services proxy website, such as tor2web.org , and they have host names ending in .onion. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Alleged Tor hidden service operator busted for child porn distribution

University of California to allow open access to new academic papers

The University of California—an enormous institution that encompasses 10 campuses and over 8, 000 faculty members— introduced an Open Access Policy late last week. This policy grants the UC a license to its faculty’s work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper’s publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship , its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge. Making the open access license automatic for its faculty leverages the power of the institution—which publishes over 40, 000 scholarly papers a year—against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall. “It is much harder for individuals to negotiate these rights on an individual basis than to assert them collectively, ” writes the UC. “By making a blanket policy, individual faculty benefit from membership in the policy-making group, without suffering negative consequences. Faculty retain both the individual right to determine the fate of their work, and the benefit of making a collective commitment to open access.” Faculty members will be allowed to opt out of the scheme if necessary—if they have a prior contract with a journal, for example. Academic papers published in traditional journals before the enactment of this policy will not be made available on eScholarship at this time. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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University of California to allow open access to new academic papers

Older iPhones won’t be banned as Obama Administration vetoes ITC decision

On Saturday, the Obama Administration vetoed the International Trade Commission’s potential ban on a few models of older Apple phones and tablets. Samsung opened the case against Apple with the ITC in 2011, and the commission decided in June that Apple had, in fact, infringed upon a Samsung patent, US Patent No 7, 706, 348 . The decision garnered attention because the patent is considered essential to industry standards, meaning Samsung is required to license the patent (rather than sit on it, or refuse license it to some competitors). The ITC ended up recommending a ban be placed on the infringing products brought forward in the case, which included AT&T models of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G. In June of 2013, Ars wrote  of the ITC’s ban: ”The decision can only be appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation’s top patent court. Theoretically, the President can also block an ITC-ordered import ban, but that hasn’t happened since the 1980s.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Older iPhones won’t be banned as Obama Administration vetoes ITC decision