This Is the Worst Reply Allpocalypse We’ve Ever Seen

Hitting “ reply all ” on a mass email is generally a bad idea, but a meltdown at the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is the worst reply allpocalypse we’ve ever seen. According to The Guardian , more than 186 million useless emails were sent out, after a technician sent a “test” message to all 1.2 million employees of the NHS. Read more…

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This Is the Worst Reply Allpocalypse We’ve Ever Seen

You can stream songs from Wu-Tang Clan’s ultra-rare album

Whatever you think of the outcome of the US election , it’s providing a surprise for music fans. You see, Martin Shkreli (the infamous pharma exec who jacked up prices on an HIV/AIDS pill) bought the Wu-Tang Clan’s one-copy album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and said he’d release it if Donald Trump won the presidency. Well, he honored that promise… sort of. After word of Trump’s win got out, Shkreli livestreamed both the intro to Wu-Tang’s album and one of its tracks . These weren’t intended as permanent copies, but this is the internet — listeners ripped the video feed and put the tunes on other sites. They’re not album-quality recordings, of course, but this might be the only chance you get at listening to this exceptionally rare composition. Don’t expect Shkreli to livestream more cuts, let alone put high-quality copies online. As he explained , he genuinely wasn’t expecting Trump to pull ahead. If he ever wants to formally release Once Upon a Time , he’ll need to get permission from RZA , Method Man and crew to distribute it to the public. The original agreement prevented the buyer from publicly releasing material for 88 years. We wouldn’t completely rule that out, but it seems unlikely. The whole mystique of the album revolves around its exclusivity, and it wouldn’t be very special if you only had to wait a year to find out whether or not it justifies its multi-million dollar selling price. Via: The Daily Dot , Pitchfork Source: Scarey Pros (YouTube) , Mitsuba Marui (YouTube)

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You can stream songs from Wu-Tang Clan’s ultra-rare album

NASA’s Juno Mission Faces More Delays as Engine Problem Remains Unresolved

NASA’s Juno mission is not exactly proceeding according to plan. Last month, an engine burn that would have brought the Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft into a low-altitude orbit was delayed following a malfunction with a pair of helium valves . Now, NASA has confirmed that the next opportunity to enter “science orbit” will also be missed—and that may be the case for the foreseeable future. Read more…

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NASA’s Juno Mission Faces More Delays as Engine Problem Remains Unresolved

The US Navy’s New Warship Gun Costs $800,000 to Fire

The US Navy’s brand new $4 billion warship is an incredible technological feat. The futuristic DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer is equipped with two guns that can hit targets from a stunning 80 miles away. The only problem? Rounds for the guns cost over $800, 000 each. And the Navy has now decided that it can’t justify spending that much. Read more…

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The US Navy’s New Warship Gun Costs $800,000 to Fire

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

More Than 50 Percent of All Pages In Chrome Are Loaded Over HTTPS Now

Reader Trailrunner7 writes: After years of encouraging site owners to transition to HTTPS by default, Google officials say that the effort has begun to pay off. The company’s data now shows that more than half of all pages loaded by Chrome on desktop platforms are served over HTTPS. Google has been among the louder advocates for the increased use of encryption across the web in the last few years. The company has made significant changes to its own infrastructure, encrypting the links between its data center, and also has made HTTPS the default connection option on many of its main services, including Gmail and search. And Google also has been encouraging owners of sites of all shapes and sizes to move to secure connections to protect their users from eavesdropping and data theft. That effort has begun to bear fruit in a big way. New data released by Google shows that at the end of October, 68 percent of pages loaded by the Chrome browser on Chrome OS machines were over HTTPS. That’s a significant increase in just the last 10 months. At the end of 2015, just 50 percent of pages loaded by Chrome on Chrome OS were HTTPS. The numbers for the other desktop operating systems are on the rise as well, with macOS at 60 percent, Linux at 54 percent, and Windows at 53 percent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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More Than 50 Percent of All Pages In Chrome Are Loaded Over HTTPS Now

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

Samsung’s Nightmare Continues as It Recalls 2.8 Million Washing Machines

2016 has not been a great year for Samsung, and it doesn’t look like it will be getting better anytime soon. The company just recalled 2.8 million of its top load washing machines, because the machines can basically fall apart during use. Read more…

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Samsung’s Nightmare Continues as It Recalls 2.8 Million Washing Machines