Hackers and hospital computers are a bad mix , as a string of attacks has been proving. The latest victim is MedStar Health, a company that operates a chain of hospitals around the Baltimore and Washington area. Read more…
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A Virus Has Forced an Entire Hospital Chain to Shut Down Its Computers
It’s long been said that space tourism will be big business. Whole spaceports have sprung up ( and basically died ) in belief of that economic promise. The problem is that shooting people past our bubble of atmosphere, safely and reliably, is still tricky. Not to mention you need to be rich as hell or dead to even consider it. Read more…
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The Concept Art for Las Vegas’ ‘Mars World’ Looks Nuts
Netflix is bringing back Voltron , and they’ve just revealed the first glimpse of the cartoon, and it looks awesome. Read more…
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Netflix’s Voltron Series Looks Awesome, And it’s Coming June 10th
Reader Thelasko writes: The BBC has a story about people with names that break computer databases. “When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again.” Thelasko compares it to the XKCD comic about Bobby Tables, though it’s a real problem that’s also been experienced by a Hawaiian woman named Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe’ekahaunaele, whose last name exceeds the 36-character limit on state ID cards. And in 2010, programmer John Graham-Cumming complained about web sites (including Yahoo) which refused to accept hyphenated last names. Programmer Patrick McKenzie pointed the BBC to a 2011 W3C post highlighting the key issues with names, along with his own list of common mistaken assumptions. “They don’t necessarily test for the edge cases, ” McKenzie says, noting that even when filing his own income taxes in Japan, his last name exceeds the number of characters allowed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes: A new type of ransomware was discovered that crashes your PC into a BSOD, restarts your computer, and then prevents your OS from starting by altering the hard drive’s master boot record (MBR). This keeps the user locked in a DOS screen that doubles as the ransomware’s ransom note. The ransomware’s name is Petya, and was currently seen only targeting HR departments in Germany. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Petya Ransomware Uses DOS-Level Lock Screen, Prevents OS Boot Up
We’ve shown off how to build a handheld Linux machine using a Raspberry Pi before, but a lot’s happened since Node put together that original guide. So much so, that he’s created an updated version with lots of cool new features. Read more…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP moved on Thursday to overthrow the entire board of Yahoo Inc, including Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who has struggled to turn around the company in her nearly four years at the helm. Starboard, which has been pushing for changes at Yahoo since 2014 and owns about 1.7 percent of the company, said it would nominate nine candidates for the board. The proxy fight comes as Yahoo is pressing ahead with an auction of its core Internet business, which includes search, mail and news sites. Yahoo and Starboard could still come to an agreement before the company’s annual meeting, expected to be in late June. If they cannot avoid a proxy fight and the Yahoo board election is taken to a shareholder vote, attention will swing to the large mutual and index funds that own the stock and will carry heavy weight in the final tally. Yahoo and Starboard representatives met on March 10 to discuss ways the two sides could avoid a proxy fight, according to people familiar with the matter. But those talks broke down, in part because Starboard was upset by Yahoo’s announcement that same day that it appointed two new board directors, these people say. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Starboard Launches Proxy Fight To Remove Entire Yahoo Board
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted seven Iranians with intelligence links over a series of crippling cyberattacks against 46 U.S. financial institutions between 2011 and 2013. The indictment, which was unsealed Thursday, also accuses one of the Iranians of remotely accessing the control system of a small dam in Rye, N.Y, during the same period. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the indictment is meant to send a message: “That we will not allow any individual, group, or nation to sabotage American financial institutions or undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market.” According to the indictment, the seven men worked for two Iran-based computer security companies that have done work for the Iranian government, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The men allegedly carried out large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a server with communications in order to disable it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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U.S. Indicts 7 Iranians Accused of Hacking U.S. Financial Institutions
An anonymous reader quotes an article written by Chris Williams for The Register: Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript. A couple of hours ago, Azer Koculu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from NPM, which is a popular package manager used by JavaScript projects to install dependencies. Koculu yanked his source code because, we’re told, one of the modules was called Kik and that apparently attracted the attention of lawyers representing the instant-messaging app of the same name. According to Koculu, Kik’s briefs told him to take down the module, he refused, so the lawyers went to NPM’s admins claiming brand infringement. When NPM took Kik away from the developer, he was furious and unpublished all of his NPM-managed modules. ‘This situation made me realize that NPM is someone’s private land where corporate is more powerful than the people, and I do open source because Power To The People, ‘ Koculu blogged. Unfortunately, one of those dependencies was left-pad. It pads out the lefthand-side of strings with zeroes or spaces. And thousands of projects including Node and Babel relied on it. With left-pad removed from NPM, these applications and widely used bits of open-source infrastructure were unable to obtain the dependency, and thus fell over. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How One Dev Broke Node and Thousands of Projects In 11 Lines of JavaScript
Pangu, the team behind the most recent jailbreaks on iOS , have just released a jailbreak for the Apple TV. There are a lot of caveats for using it, including the fact you’ll need to still be running tvOS 9.0/9.0.1. Read more…
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The New Apple TV Is Jailbroken, Provided You Didn’t Just Update It