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The ‘Impossible’ EM Drive Being Tested By NASA May Finally Be Explained

MarkWhittington writes: The EmDrive, the so-called “impossible” space drive that uses no propellant, has roiled the aerospace world for the past several years ever since it was proposed by British aerospace engineer Robert Shawyer. In essence, the claim advanced by Shawyer and others is that if you bounced microwaves in a truncated cone, thrust would be produced out the open end. Most scientists have snorted at the idea, noting correctly that such a thing would violate physical laws. However, organizations as prestigious as NASA have replicated the same results, that prototypes of the EmDrive produces thrust. How does one reconcile the experimental results with the apparent scientific impossibility? MIT Technology Review suggested a reason why. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The ‘Impossible’ EM Drive Being Tested By NASA May Finally Be Explained

New Full Duplex Radio Chip Transmits and Receives Wireless Signals At Once

Wave723 writes: A new chip by Columbia University researchers uses a circulator made of silicon transistors to reroute signals and avoid interference from a transmitter and receiver that share the same antenna. This technology instantly doubles data capacity and could eventually be built into smartphones and tablets. The chip enables them to work around the principle of Lorentz Reciprocity, in which electromagnetic waves are thought to always travel along the same path both forward and backward. Traditionally, electronic devices required two antennas — a transmitter and receiver — that took turns or operated on different frequencies in order to exchange signals. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Full Duplex Radio Chip Transmits and Receives Wireless Signals At Once

Mitel Buys Polycom For $1.96B In Enterprise Communications Consolidation Play

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mitel announced that it would acquire Polycom in a cash-and-stock deal with a total value of $1.96 billion, creating a company with combined sales of $2.5 billion and 7, 700 employees. Polycom’s acquisition by Mitel comes at a key time in the world of enterprise communications and collaboration. On one hand, it is a time of massive change and evolution. For years a lot of the services that companies used were based on legacy networking, but in the last decade there has been a big shift to IP-based networks for many of these services. However, at the same time the whole space has been massively disrupted by startups that are upsetting by tapping into the next phase of digital services — the internet. Companies like Microsoft by way of services like Skype and Yammer, and smaller startups like Slack, are overturning the whole idea of how people who are not in the same office floor can communicate and collaborate for work. These solutions are way cheaper than a lot of the legacy offerings; they tap into the cloud-based services that are now ubiquitous to share and work on files; and they are also built in very user-friendly ways, based around tech that ordinary consumers are using. Both companies compete against the likes of Cisco and Avaya. Mitel is perhaps best known for its IP telephony solutions, including PBX systems, while Polycom is a leader in conferencing services. They also cover SIP technology, and customers span 82% of Fortune 500 companies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mitel Buys Polycom For $1.96B In Enterprise Communications Consolidation Play

Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code

Reader JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Marco Marsala appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, the hosting provider has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers. Marsala wrote on a Centos help forum, “I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf foo/bar with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line. All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).” The terse “rm -rf” is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles, but not to this guy. Can this example finally serve as a textbook example of why you need to make offsite backups that are physically removed from the systems you’re archiving?”Rm -rf” would mark the block as empty, and unless the programmer hasn’t written anything new, he should be able to recover nearly all of the data. Something about the story feels weird. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code

FBI Offers $25K Reward For Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Painting Heist

coondoggie quotes a report from Networkworld: The FBI today said it was offering a reward of up to $25, 000 for information leading to the recovery of seven Andy Warhol paintings stolen from the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri. The collection, which has been owned by the Springfield Art Museum since 1985, is set number 31 of the Campbell’s Soup I collection and is valued at approximately $500, 000. Each painting in the screen print collection measures 37 inches high by 24.5 inches wide and framed in white frames, the FBI stated. The FBI says that seven of 10 Andy Warhol paintings Campbell’s Soup I collection, made in 1968, were taken. Since its inception, the FBI’s Art Crime Team has recovered more than 2, 650 items valued at over $150 million. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Offers $25K Reward For Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Painting Heist

Experts Crack Petya Ransomware, Enable Hard Drive Decryption For Free

Reader itwbennett writes: Petya appeared on researchers’ radar last month when criminals distributed it to companies through spam emails that masqueraded as job applications. It stood out from other file-encrypting ransomware programs because it overwrites a hard drive’s master boot record (MBR), leaving infected computers unable to boot into the operating system. Now, security experts have devised a method that, while not exactly straightforward, allows users to recover data from computers infected with the ransomware without paying money to cyber criminals. Folks over at BleepingComputer have confirmed that the aforementioned technique works. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Experts Crack Petya Ransomware, Enable Hard Drive Decryption For Free

Hacked Swedish Military Servers Used In Attacks On US Banks

Reader wiredmikey writes: Swedish military computers were hacked and used in an attack targeting major U.S. banks in 2013, the armed forces said on Monday. The attack knocked out the web sites of as many as 20 major U.S. banks and financial institutions, sometimes for several days. According to Swedish military spokesman Mikael Abramsson, a server in the Swedish defense system had a vulnerability which was exploited by hackers to carry out the attacks. At the time, the attack, which began in 2012 and continued for months, was one of the biggest ever reported. U.S. officials blamed Iran, suggesting it was in retaliation for political sanctions and several earlier cyberattacks on its own systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hacked Swedish Military Servers Used In Attacks On US Banks

New Metal Foam Armor Obliterates Bullets To Dust On Impact

HughPickens.com writes: Discovery Magazine reports that researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a super strong armor material that literally turns bullets to dust upon impact. The armor plating is made in part from composite metal foams, or CMFs, which are both lighter and stronger than traditional metal plating used in body and vehicle armor. The armor — only an inch thick — features a ceramic strike face, Kevlar backing, and CMFs in the energy-absorbing middle layer. “We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters, ” says Afsaneh Rabiei. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. Other applications include space exploration and shipping nuclear waste which both require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation. A video shows a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor-piercing projectile that was fired using standard testing procedures established by the Department of Justice for evaluating armor types. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Metal Foam Armor Obliterates Bullets To Dust On Impact

Every Voter In The Philippines Exposed In Massive Data Breach

schwit1 writes: “The database of the Philippine Commission on Elections has been breached and the personal information of 55 million voters potentially exposed in what could rank as the worst ever government data breach anywhere, ” according to Infosecurity Magazine. The magazine attributes an initial web site breach to Anonymous, who were reportedly trying to persuade the commission to enable more security features on their automated vote-counting system before upcoming national elections on May 9. A second group named LulzSec Pilipinas then later posted the entire voter database online. Trend Micro originally broke the story, writing that “Every registered voter in the Philippines is now susceptible to fraud and other risks after a massive data breach leaked the entire database of the Philippines’ Commission on Elections.” They report that the breached data even included 15.8 million fingerprint records, as well as 1.3 million records for overseas Filipino voters, including their passports’ numbers and expiration dates, all stored in plain text. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every Voter In The Philippines Exposed In Massive Data Breach

WordPress.com Enables HTTPS Encryption For All Websites

On Friday, WordPress announced that it is bringing free HTTPS to all — “million-plus” — custom domains, essentially ramping up security on every blog and website. The publishing platform says it partnered with Let’s Encrypt project to implement HTTPS across such a voluminous number of sites. From the blog: For you, the users, that means you’ll see secure encryption automatically deployed on every new site within minutes. We are closing the door to un-encrypted web traffic (HTTP) at every opportunity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WordPress.com Enables HTTPS Encryption For All Websites