DeLorean Motor Company will start building new DMC-12s

Ian Weddell @ Flickr The DMC-12 was styled by the legendary Giogretto Giugiaro. The gullwing doors suggested exotic performance that the underpowered car was never able to provide. 5 more images in gallery The DeLorean DMC-12 might have been destined to pass quietly into obscurity, that is until its starring role in 1985’s Back to the Future . A little more than 8,500 DMC-12s left DeLorean’s factory in Northern Ireland between 1981 and 1983, until it all fell apart following founder John DeLorean’s arrest by the FBI on charges of drug trafficking. But Doc Brown souped up his DeLorean with a flux capacitor, imbuing the DMC-12 with iconic status in the nerd canon. Soon, you’ll be able to buy a brand new one—production is about to resume on this side of the Atlantic, in Humble, Texas. The Texas-based DeLorean Motor Company —not directly related to its defunct predecessor—has been supplying parts and rebuilding or restoring DMC-12s for many years. Now it is able to build new cars as well, following changes to the laws governing low-volume auto manufacturers. The 2015 Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015 rolled up a lot of different transportation-related bills, including one that now allows companies to build replica vehicles without having to satisfy modern safety regulations, as long as fewer than 325 are made each year. Replica cars still have to meet current Environmental Protection Agency standards for emissions, so the DMC-12’s old Peugeot-Renault-Volvo V6 is out. DMC’s CEO told Houston’s KPRC2 that the final price will depend upon whichever engine replaces the old unit, although new cars should still cost less than $100,000 (£70,000) There could even be an electric variant , although little has been heard about this version for some time now. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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DeLorean Motor Company will start building new DMC-12s

Israel’s electric grid hit by “severe” hack attack

Israel experienced a serious hack attack on its electrical grid that officials are still working to repel, the head of the country’s energy minister said Tuesday. “The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it,” Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz told attendees of a computer security conference in Tel Aviv, according to this article published Tuesday by The Times of Israel . “We had to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli Electricity Authority. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over … but as of now, computer systems are still not working as they should.” The “severe” attack was detected on Monday as temperatures in Jerusalem dipped to below freezing, creating two days of record-breaking electricity consumption, according to The Jerusalem Post . Steinitz said it was one of the biggest computer-based attacks Israel’s power infrastructure has experienced, and that it was responded to by members of his ministry and the country’s National Cyber Bureau. The energy minister didn’t identify any suspects behind the attack or provide details about how it was carried out. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Israel’s electric grid hit by “severe” hack attack

Why the calorie is broken

(credit: Getty Images) Calories consumed minus calories burned—it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain, but dieters often find that it doesn’t work. Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of Gastropod investigate for Mosaic science , where this story first appeared . It’s republished here under a Creative Commons license. “For me, a calorie is a unit of measurement that’s a real pain in the rear.” Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. He has a wife and child. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs—which means he is classed as obese. Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Doctor Who gets lengthy sabbatical as showrunner Steven Moffat quits

Doctor Who fans prepare to be bitterly disappointed: you won’t be getting your timey-wimey fix this year, because season 10 won’t hit our screens until 2017, the BBC has confirmed. The reason? Long-running showrunner Steven Moffat has run out of puff. He will pass the baton (OK, Sonic Screwdriver) to Chris Chibnall—the creator of ITV’s gripping whodunnit, Broadchurch —who will take over the iconic British sci-fi drama at the start of season 11. The BBC, which fiendishly buried this news late on Friday night in the hope that no-one would notice, has promised a Christmas Day special, but that will be the first and only time a new episode of the much-loved show will appear on the TV this year. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Doctor Who gets lengthy sabbatical as showrunner Steven Moffat quits

After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

(credit: Andrew ) In 2015, the FBI seized a Tor-hidden child-porn website known as Playpen and allowed it to run for 13 days so that the FBI could deploy malware in order to identify and prosecute the website’s users. That malware, known in FBI-speak as a “network investigative technique,” was authorized by a federal court in Virginia in February 2015. In a new revelation, Vice Motherboard has now determined that this operation had much wider berth. The FBI’s Playpen operation was effectively transformed into a global one, reaching Turkey, Colombia, and Greece, among others. Motherboard’s Joseph Cox wrote on Twitter on Friday that he was able to find a document describing this infiltration as something called “Operation Pacifier” by using creative “Google-fu.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

(credit: AMX) A company that supplies audio-visual and building control equipment to the US Army, the White House, and other security-conscious organizations built a deliberately concealed backdoor into dozens of its products that could possibly be used to hack or spy on users, security researchers said. Members of Australia-based security firm SEC Consult said they discovered the backdoor after analyzing the AMX NX-1200 , a programmable device used to control AV and building systems. The researchers first became suspicious after encountering a function called “setUpSubtleUserAccount” that added an highly privileged account with a hard-coded password to the list of users authorized to log in. Unlike most other accounts, this one had the ability to capture data packets flowing between the device and the network it’s connected to. “Someone with knowledge of the backdoor could completely reconfigure and take over the device and due to the highest privileges also start sniffing attacks within the network segment,” SEC Consult researcher Johannes Greil told Ars. “We did not see any personal data on the device itself, besides other user accounts which could be cracked for further attacks.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Media devices sold to feds have hidden backdoor with sniffing functions

Apple releases OS X 10.11.3 with fixes for bugs and security [Updated]

(credit: Andrew Cunningham) Today Apple released OS X 10.11.3, the third major update for El Capitan since the operating system was released to the public in September. You can grab it now through the Update tab of the Mac App Store, or you can manually download and install the Combo Update version from Apple’s support site. As with the iOS 9.2.1 update, Apple’s release notes are unusually light, and the more detailed release notes aren’t available on Apple’s support site as of this writing (they will be posted  here when they’re ready). The security release notes detail a handful of fixes for El Capitan and one for the still-supported Mavericks and Yosemite, most of which have been resolved thanks to memory handling improvements. Update : The general release notes are live. 10.11.3 fixes a pair of edge cases: One where a Mac connected to a 4K display wouldn’t wake from sleep, and one where “third-party .pkg file receipts stored in /var/db/receipts are now retained when upgrading from OS X Yosemite.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases OS X 10.11.3 with fixes for bugs and security [Updated]

Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10

Intel Skylake die shot. (credit: Intel) If you own a system with an Intel 6th generation Core processor—more memorably known as Skylake—and run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you’ll have to think about upgrading to Windows 10 within the next 18 months. Microsoft announced today that after July 17, 2017, only the “most critical” security fixes will be released for those platforms and those fixes will only be made available if they don’t “risk the reliability or compatibility” of Windows 7 and 8.1 on other (non-Skylake) systems. The full range of compatibility and security fixes will be published for non-Skylake machines for Windows 7 until January 14 2020, and for Windows 8.1 until January 10 2023. Next generation processors, including Intel’s ” Kaby Lake “, Qualcomm’s 8996 ( branded as Snapdragon 820 ), and AMD’s “Bristol Ridge” APUs (which will use the company’s Excavator architecture, not its brand new Zen arch) will only be supported on Windows 10. Going forward, the company says that using the latest generation processors will always require the latest generation operating system. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10

Department of Transportation going full speed ahead on self-driving cars

The world as seen by a self-driving car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin) We’ve been hitting the tech of self-driving cars pretty heavily this week, taking a look at what companies like Audi , BMW , Ford , QNX , and Tesla are doing in the field. But it’s looking more and more likely that it’s not going to be the technology itself that determines when  we’ll be able to buy a self-driving car for that morning commute. Instead, all the other stuff— regulations, laws, insurance questions, and society’s comfort level —appear ready to own the issue of timing. At this week’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced that “i n 2016, we are going to do everything we can to promote safe, smart and sustainable, vehicles. We are bullish on automated vehicles.” Still, w orking out how to regulate self-driving cars is far from settled. Each state (well, OK maybe every state but Maryland) has a pretty good idea of how to test young drivers to determine whether they’re ready to mix it with the rest of us in traffic. Figuring out how to apply that to a car itself is proving to be more of a challenge. California, for instance, is about to hold a couple of public workshops to get input into its draft regulations on the the matter, and DMVs in other states are being told by their respective legislatures to start working on the problem. Today, there’s a real fear in the industry that we could end up with a patchwork of different state laws (something Cars Technica even talked about on the radio yesterday ). Then there’s the federal government, where crafting policies, regulations, and guidances can be slow work. Take recent advances in headlight technology for example. Over in Europe, you can now buy cars that use LED lasers to supplement their high-beams. Those lights are intelligent enough to avoid blinding other cars on the road, and they represent a significant safety advantage. But the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for headlights in the US went into effect in 1968 and haven’t been updated since. And because they don’t make any allowances for anything other than a high beam and a low beam, such systems are illegal here in the US. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Department of Transportation going full speed ahead on self-driving cars

Security firm sued for filing “woefully inadequate” forensics report

(credit: ErrantX ) A Las Vegas-based casino operator has sued security firm Trustwave for conducting an allegedly “woefully inadequate” forensics investigation that missed key details of a network breach and allowed credit card thieves to maintain their foothold during the course of the two-and-a-half month investigation. In a legal complaint filed in federal court in Las Vegas, Affinity Gaming said it hired Trustwave in October 2013 to investigate and contain a network breach that allowed attackers to obtain customers’ credit card data. In mid January 2014, Trustwave submitted a report required under payment card industry security rules on all merchants who accept major credit cards. In the PCI forensics report, Trustwave said it had identified the source of the data breach and had contained the malware responsible for it. More than a year later after Affinity was hit by a second credit card breach, the casino operator allegedly learned from Trustwave competitor Mandiant that the malware had never been fully removed. According to the December, 2015 complaint : Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Security firm sued for filing “woefully inadequate” forensics report