Tag: funny

Gizmodo: Don’t Buy Anyone an Amazon Echo Speaker

Adam Clark Estes, writing for Gizmodo: Three years ago, we said the Echo was “the most innovative device Amazon’s made in years.” That’s still true. But you shouldn’t buy one. You shouldn’t buy one for your family. Your family members do not need an Amazon Echo or a Google Home or an AppleHomePod or whatever that one smart speaker that uses Cortana is called. And you don’t either. You only want one because every single gadget-slinger on the planet is marketing them to you as an all-new, life-changing device that could turn your kitchen into a futuristic voice-controlled paradise. You probably think that having an always-on microphone in your home is fine, and furthermore, tech companies only record and store snippets of your most intimate conversations. No big deal, you tell yourself. Actually, it is a big deal. The newfound privacy conundrum presented by installing a device that can literally listen to everything you’re saying represents a chilling new development in the age of internet-connected things. By buying a smart speaker, you’re effectively paying money to let a huge tech company surveil you. And I don’t mean to sound overly cynical about this, either. Amazon, Google, Apple, and others say that their devices aren’t spying on unsuspecting families. The only problem is that these gadgets are both hackable and prone to bugs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gizmodo: Don’t Buy Anyone an Amazon Echo Speaker

The Underground Uber Networks Driven by Russian Hackers

Joseph Cox, reporting for DailyBeat: Uber’s ride-sharing service has given birth to some of the most creative criminal scams to date, including using a GPS-spoofing app to rip off riders in Nigeria, and even ginning up fake drivers by using stolen identities. Add to those this nefariously genius operation: Cybercriminals, many working in Russia, have created their own illegitimate taxi services for other crooks by piggybacking off Uber’s ride-sharing platform, sometimes working in collaboration with corrupt drivers. Based on several Russian-language posts across a number of criminal-world sites, this is how the scam works: The scammer needs an emulator, a piece of software which allows them to run a virtual Android phone on their laptop with the Uber app, as well as a virtual private network (VPN), which routes their computer’s traffic through a server in the same city as the rider. The scammer acts, in essence, as a middleman between an Uber driver and the passenger — ordering trips through the Uber app, but relaying messages outside of it. Typically, this fraudulent dispatcher uses the messaging app Telegram to chat with the passenger, who provides pickup and destination addresses. The scammer orders the trip, and then provides the car brand, driver name, and license plate details back to the passenger through Telegram. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Underground Uber Networks Driven by Russian Hackers

Sensitive Personal Information of 246,000 DHS Employees Found on Home Computer

The sensitive personal information of 246, 000 Department of Homeland Security employees was found on the home computer server of a DHS employee in May, according to documents obtained by USA TODAY. From the report: Also discovered on the server was a copy of 159, 000 case files from the inspector general’s investigative case management system, which suspects in an ongoing criminal investigation intended to market and sell, according to a report sent by DHS Inspector General John Roth on Nov. 24 to key members of Congress. The information included names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth, the report said. The inspector general’s acting chief information security officer reported the breach to DHS officials on May 11, while IG agents reviewed the details. Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke decided on Aug. 21 to notify affected employees who were employed at the department through the end of 2014 about the breach. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sensitive Personal Information of 246,000 DHS Employees Found on Home Computer

Tom Baker Returns To Finish Shelved Doctor Who Episodes Penned By Douglas Adams

Zorro shares a report from The Register: The fourth and finest Doctor, Tom Baker, has reprised the role to finish a Who serial scuppered in 1979 by strike action at the BBC. Shada, penned by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams, was supposed to close Doctor Who’s 17th season. Location filming in Cambridge and a studio session were completed but the strike nixed further work and the project was later shelved entirely for fear it might affect the Beeb’s Christmas-time productions. The remaining parts have been filled in with animation and the voice of 83-year-old Baker, although he also filmed a scene. BBC Worldwide has now released the episodes, which interweave the 1979 footage with the new material to complete the story. “I loved doing Doctor Who, it was life to me, ” Baker told the BBC of his tenure as the much-loved Time Lord. “I used to dread the end of rehearsal because then real life would impinge on me. Doctor Who… when I was in full flight, then I was happy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tom Baker Returns To Finish Shelved Doctor Who Episodes Penned By Douglas Adams

iMac Pro Will Have An A10 Fusion Coprocessor For ‘Hey, Siri’ Support and More Secure Booting, Says Report

According to Apple firmware gurus Steven Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo, the upcoming iMac Pro will feature an A10 Fusion coprocessor to enable two interesting new features. “The first is the ability for the iMac Pro to feature always-on ‘Hey, Siri’ voice command support, similar to what’s currently available on more recent iPhone devices, ” reports The Verge. “[T]he bigger implication of the A10 Fusion is for a less user-facing function, with Apple likely to use the coprocessor to enable SecureBoot on the iMac Pro.” From the report: In more practical terms, it means that Apple will be using the A10 Fusion chip to handle the initial boot process and confirm that software checks out, before passing things off to the regular x86 Intel processor in your Mac. It’s not something that will likely change how you use your computer too much, like the addition of “Hey, Siri” support will, but it’s a move toward Apple experimenting with an increased level of control over its software going forward. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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iMac Pro Will Have An A10 Fusion Coprocessor For ‘Hey, Siri’ Support and More Secure Booting, Says Report

A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever

New submitter mrcoder83 shares a report from Futurism: Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been able to create a stable plasma ring without a container. According to the Caltech press release, it’s “essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle.” This remarkable feat was achieved using only a stream of water and a crystal plate, made from either quartz and lithium niobate. The union of these tools induced a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect. The researchers blasted the crystal plate with an 85-micron-diameter jet of water (narrower than a human hair) from a specially designed nozzle. The water hit the crystal plate with a pressure of 632.7 kilograms of force per centimeter (9, 000 pounds per square inch), generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1, 000 feet per second) — as fast as a bullet from a handgun. Plasma was formed as a result of the creation of an electric charge when the water hit the crystal surface. The flow of electrons from the point of contact ionizes the molecules and atoms in the gas area surrounding the water’s surface, forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that’s dozens of microns in diameter. Caltech posted a video of the plasma ring on their YouTube channel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever

Boeing 757 Testing Shows Airplanes Vulnerable To Hacking, DHS Says

schwit1 shares a report from Aviation Today: A team of government, industry and academic officials successfully demonstrated that a commercial aircraft could be remotely hacked in a non-laboratory setting last year, a DHS official said Wednesday at the 2017 CyberSat Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia. “We got the airplane on Sept. 19, 2016. Two days later, I was successful in accomplishing a remote, non-cooperative, penetration. [Which] means I didn’t have anybody touching the airplane, I didn’t have an insider threat. I stood off using typical stuff that could get through security and we were able to establish a presence on the systems of the aircraft.” Hickey said the details of the hack and the work his team are doing are classified, but said they accessed the aircraft’s systems through radio frequency communications, adding that, based on the RF configuration of most aircraft, “you can come to grips pretty quickly where we went” on the aircraft. Patching avionics subsystem on every aircraft when a vulnerability is discovered is cost prohibitive, Hickey said. The cost to change one line of code on a piece of avionics equipment is $1 million, and it takes a year to implement. For Southwest Airlines, whose fleet is based on Boeing’s 737, it would “bankrupt” them. Hickey said newer models of 737s and other aircraft, like Boeing’s 787 and the Airbus Group A350, have been designed with security in mind, but that legacy aircraft, which make up more than 90% of the commercial planes in the sky, don’t have these protections. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Boeing 757 Testing Shows Airplanes Vulnerable To Hacking, DHS Says

Study Finds SpaceX Investment Saved NASA Hundreds of Millions

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Mechanics: When a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft connected with the International Space Station on May 25, 2012, it made history as the first privately-built spacecraft to reach the ISS. The Dragon was the result of a decision 6 years prior — in 2006, NASA made an “unprecedented” investment in SpaceX technology. A new financial analysis shows that the investment has paid off, and the government found one of the true bargains of the 21st century when it invested in SpaceX. A new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, looks closely at the finances of SpaceX and NASA. “There were indications that commercial space transportation would be a viable option from as far back as the 1980s, ” Zapata writes. “When the first components of the ISS were sent into orbit 1998, NASA was focused on “ambitious, large single stage-to-orbit launchers with large price tags to match.” For future commercial crew missions sending astronauts into space, Zapata estimates that it will cost $405 million for a SpaceX Dragon crew deployment of 4 and $654 million for a Boeing Starliner, which is scheduled for its first flight in 2019. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but Zapata estimates that its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Study Finds SpaceX Investment Saved NASA Hundreds of Millions

Linux 4.14 Has Been Released

diegocg quotes Kernel Newbies: Linux 4.11 has been released. This release adds support for bigger memory limits in x86 hardware (128PiB of virtual address space, 4PiB of physical address space); support for AMD Secure Memory Encryption; a new unwinder that provides better kernel traces and a smaller kernel size; support for the zstd compression algorithm has been added to Btrfs and Squashfs; support for zero-copy of data from user memory to sockets; support for Heterogeneous Memory Management that will be needed in future GPUs; better cpufreq behaviour in some corner cases; faster TBL flushing by using the PCID instruction; asynchronous non-blocking buffered reads; and many new drivers and other improvements. Phoronix has more on the changes in Linux 4.14 — and notes that its codename is still “Fearless Coyote.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 4.14 Has Been Released

Windows 10’s Version ofd AirDrop Lets You Quickly Share Files Between PCs

Microsoft is testing its “Near Share” feature of Windows 10 in the latest Insider build (17035) today, which will let Windows 10 PCs share documents or photos to PCs nearby via Bluetooth. The Verge reports: A new Near Share option will be available in the notification center, and the feature can be accessed through the main share function in Windows 10. Files will be shared wirelessly, and recipients will receive a notification when someone is trying to send a file. Microsoft’s addition comes just a day after Google unveiled its own AirDrop-like app for Android. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10’s Version ofd AirDrop Lets You Quickly Share Files Between PCs