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Boeing 787 Dreamliners contain a potentially catastrophic software bug

A software vulnerability in Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner jet has the potential to cause pilots to lose control of the aircraft, possibly in mid-flight, Federal Aviation Administration officials warned airlines recently. The bug—which is either a classic integer overflow or one very much resembling it—resides in one of the electrical systems responsible for generating power, according to memo the FAA issued last week . The vulnerability, which Boeing reported to the FAA, is triggered when a generator has been running continuously for a little more than eight months. As a result, FAA officials have adopted a new airworthiness directive (AD) that airlines will be required to follow, at least until the underlying flaw is fixed. “This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode,” the memo stated. “This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Boeing 787 Dreamliners contain a potentially catastrophic software bug

Grooveshark, bowing to RIAA, shuts down and apologizes for “serious mistakes”

Grooveshark, the free online music streaming service that allowed users to upload their own songs, announced on Thursday that it was shutting down. Josh Greenberg and Sam Tarantino founded the streaming service in 2006, and the site attracted tens of millions of users. Grooveshark called itself “the world’s largest on-demand and music discovery service.” But the service not only allowed users to upload any song; the founders also apparently demanded that employees upload popular songs  in an effort to expand the site’s music library. The service came under fire in recent years for allowing copyrighted material on the site. Several record companies, including Warner Bros., Sony, and Universal Music Group, sued Grooveshark in 2011 . Now the record companies have come to an agreement with Grooveshark under which it shut down the site and remove all copyrighted songs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Grooveshark, bowing to RIAA, shuts down and apologizes for “serious mistakes”

Raspberry Pi gets a remote Windows desktop client from Parallels

Parallels today is unveiling an RDP (remote desktop protocol) client for the Raspberry Pi, allowing the tiny computer to remotely access Windows desktops and applications. Although the Pi has appealed to hobbyists and developers, this product is for businesses, turning the Pi into a thin client for virtual desktop deployments. The pricing isn’t aimed at individuals. The Pi client works with the Parallels 2X Remote Application Server , which costs $75 per concurrent user, requiring a minimum of 15 users, making the minimum price $1,125. But there does seem to be an exception that allows free use for small groups and individuals. There’s a 30-day free trial that supports 50 concurrent users, and “After 30 days, you can continue using 2X Remote Application Server for three concurrent users with the FREE license key that you will receive via email after registration,” the 2X download page says . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Raspberry Pi gets a remote Windows desktop client from Parallels

Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers

Several thousand computers running the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been infected over the past seven months with sophisticated malware that surreptitiously makes them part of a renegade network blasting the Internet with spam, researchers said Wednesday. The malware likely infected many more machines during the five years it’s known to have existed. Most of the machines infected by the so-called Mumblehard malware are believed to run websites, according to the 23-page report issued by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During the seven months that they monitored one of its command and control channels, 8,867 unique IP addresses connected to it, with 3,000 of them joining in the past three weeks. The discovery is reminiscent of Windigo, a separate spam botnet made up of 10,000 Linux servers that Eset discovered 14 months ago. The Mumblehard malware is the brainchild of experienced and highly skilled programmers. It includes a backdoor and a spam daemon , which is a behind-the-scenes process that sends large batches of junk mail. These two main components are written in Perl and they’re obfuscated inside a custom “packer” that’s written in assembly , an extremely low-level programming language that closely corresponds to the native machine code of the computer hardware it runs on. Some of the Perl script contains a separate executable with the same assembly-based packer that’s arranged in the fashion of a Russian nesting doll. The result is a very stealthy infection that causes production servers to send spam and may serve other nefarious purposes. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers

Rogue Silk Road DEA agent arrested with “go bag,” 9mm pistol

SAN FRANCISCO—Federal prosecutors successfully argued Wednesday that Carl Mark Force, the former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who allegedly went rogue during the investigation of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, should not be granted bail. “I am not prepared to release him today,” United States Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte said during the Wednesday hearing. She heard 90 minutes of argument from government lawyers and from one of Force’s defense attorneys. After the hearing, Force was transferred from Santa Rita Jail in nearby Alameda County to San Francisco County Jail. Read 36 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rogue Silk Road DEA agent arrested with “go bag,” 9mm pistol

Microsoft brings Android, iOS apps to Windows 10

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft announced a four-pronged effort to bring developers and their apps to Windows at its build conference today. One of these prongs—a way for Web developers to present their sites as apps—was already announced at Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. The second prong is logical but not altogether surprising. In Windows 10, developers will be able to specially prepare existing Windows apps, whether Win32, .NET WinForms, .NET WPF, or any other Windows development technology, and sell them through the Windows Store. Unlike the “traditional” Windows application installation experience, these apps will be guaranteed to install, update, and uninstall cleanly—one of the important things that Store apps do to ensure that users feel confident trying apps out and removing them if they don’t like them. Behind the scenes, virtualization technology will be used to provide this isolation and robustness. Islandwood and Astoria The next two prongs are the more surprising: Microsoft is going after Android and iOS developers. With Project Islandwood, iOS developers will be able to take their iOS apps and build them for Windows. Microsoft has developed an Objective C toolchain and middleware layer that provide the operating system APIs that iOS apps expect. A select group of third parties have been using the Islandwood tools already, with King’s Candy Crush Saga for Windows Phone being one of the first apps built this way. King’s developers had to change only a “few percent” of the code in order to fully port it to Windows Phone. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft brings Android, iOS apps to Windows 10

AT&T/DirecTV merger likely to be approved

Despite Comcast abandoning  its Time Warner Cable (TWC) purchase in the face of government opposition, mergers of Internet and TV providers are still on the table. AT&T’s proposed $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV is likely to win approval from the Federal Communications Commission,  The Wall Street Journal reported . And TWC could still be acquired, but by Charter Communications instead of Comcast. The FCC hasn’t publicly revealed its position on AT&T’s attempt to buy the satellite TV provider. But despite opposing Comcast/TWC, the commission “sees the AT&T deal as helping competition and aiding the spread of broadband into rural areas that lack service, people familiar with the matter said,” according to the Journal report. FCC officials haven’t yet finalized concessions that AT&T would make in exchange for approval, “but the commission’s staff is inclined to recommend the approval of the deal.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T/DirecTV merger likely to be approved

170-year-old champagne provides clues to past winemaking

Divers discovered bottles in a shipwreck off the Finnish Aland archipelago in the Baltic Sea in 2010. After tasting the bottles on site, the divers realized they were likely drinking century-old champagne. Soon after, 168 unlabeled bottles were retrieved and were identified as champagnes from the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin (VCP), Heidsieck, and Juglar (known as Jacquesson since 1832) champagne houses. A few of the recovered bottles had been lying horizontal in close-to-perfect slow aging conditions. Discovery of these wines, likely the oldest ever tasted, unleashed a flood of questions. When were these wines produced? What winemaking processes were in use at the time? Where was the wine going when the shipwreck occurred? An analytic approach A team of scientists gathered to search for the answers through the application of current analytical techniques, an approach called archaeochemistry. Using a combination of targeted and nontargeted modern chemical analytic approaches, the researchers aimed to uncover aspects of the winemaking practices. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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170-year-old champagne provides clues to past winemaking

Microsoft’s Office 365 “lockbox” gives customers last word on data access

One of the concerns that keeps many companies from adopting software-as-a-service for e-mail and other collaboration services has been the issue of who has control over the security of the content. Today at the RSA Conference, Microsoft is announcing changes to its Office 365 service that will allay some of those concerns, giving customers greater visibility into the security of their applications and control over what happens with them. At the same time, it will potentially be harder for government agencies and law enforcement to secretly subpoena the contents of an organization’s e-mail. In an interview with Ars, Microsoft’s general manager for Office 365 Julia White outlined the three new features, which are being announced in a blog post from Office 365 team Corporate Vice President Rajesh Jha today . Office 365 will now include a “Customer Lockbox” feature that puts customer organizations in control of when Microsoft employees can gain access to their data, requiring explicit permission from a customer before systems can be accessed to perform any sort of service on their Office 365 services. The capability will be turned on by the end of 2015 for e-mail and for SharePoint by the end of the first quarter of 2016. “We have automated everything we can to prevent the need for our people having to touch customer data,” White told Ars. “It’s almost zero—there are very rare instances when a Microsoft engineer has to log in to a customers’ services. Now we’re going to, in those rare instances, make customer approval mandatory to do so.” That would also apply to law enforcement requests for access, White acknowledged. “When the customer opts into the Lockbox, all requests would go into that process. So it’s a customer assurance of transparency. We want to systematically look at what kind of control and transparency customers want and provide it to them,” White said. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft’s Office 365 “lockbox” gives customers last word on data access

Solar powered Blue Cell provides cellular backhaul without wires

As we mentioned in our earlier coverage of LINK , Bell Labs is expecting that the near future will bring a lot of growth in cellular devices, like smart appliances and sensors. Part of its solution to this flood of new devices is to give them their own chunk of the spectrum to keep them from getting in the way of user-driven devices, like phones and tablets. But that’s only part of the solution; phone and tablet traffic is going to climb as well. The solution there is simply to create more cells so that there are fewer devices talking to a single base tower. But adding more access points isn’t a simple matter. Each requires power and a network connection, and constructing large towers can be a headache of siting permits and contracts. To address this, a research effort at Bell Labs called “Blue Cell” is attempting to simplify cellular access points by getting rid of the wires. As solar panel prices have plunged, getting rid of the power cord has gotten a lot easier. Of course, siting a large solar panel can be just as much trouble as siting a cell phone tower, so one of the major goals of the research was to reduce the energy requirements of a cellular access point. Examining the existing hardware, engineers found that the biggest energy draw was the digital signal processor, which converts the cellular signal into something that can be sent over network cables. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Solar powered Blue Cell provides cellular backhaul without wires