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Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data

An anonymous reader writes Code Spaces [a code hosting service] has been under DDOS attacks since the beginning of the week, but a few hours ago, the attacker managed to delete all their hosted customer data and most of the backups. They have announced that they are shutting down business. From the announcement: An unauthorized person who at this point who is still unknown (All we can say is that we have no reason to think its anyone who is or was employed with Code Spaces) had gained access to our Amazon EC2 control panel and had left a number of messages for us to contact them using a Hotmail address. Reaching out to the address started a chain of events that revolved around the person trying to extort a large fee in order to resolve the DDOS. At this point we took action to take control back of our panel by changing passwords, however the intruder had prepared for this and had already created a number of backup logins to the panel and upon seeing us make the attempted recovery of the account he proceeded to randomly delete artifacts from the panel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data

Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’

Amazon has unveiled the Fire Phone. It runs a modified version of Android, and it will launch exclusively for AT&T’s network. The screen is a 4.7″ IPS LCD (they tested from 4.3″ to 5.5″, and decided 4.7″ worked best for single-hand use), with an emphasis on brightness. It runs on a quad-core 2.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 330 GPU. It has a rear-facing, 13-megapixel camera using an f/2.0 five-element lens with image stabilization. There’s a dedicated physical button on the side of the phone that will turn it on and put it into camera mode when pressed. The phone comes with dual stereo speakers that produce virtual surround sound. Amazon wants the phone to be distinctive for its ability to provide video content, both from a hardware and software perspective. The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon’s live tech support service for devices. They also demonstrated Firefly, software that recognizes physical objects using the phone’s camera, as well as TV shows and songs it hears. It runs quickly, often identifying things in less than a second (and it pulls up an Amazon product listing, of course). It can even recognize art. Firefly has its own dedicated physical button on the phone, and Amazon is providing a Firefly SDK to third parties who want to develop with it. Another major feature of the Fire Phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” Using multiple front-facing cameras, the phone tracks the position of a user’s head, and uses that to slightly adjust what’s displayed on the screen so content is easier to see from the new angle. It allows for gesture control of the phone — for example, you can tilt the phone to scroll a web page or move your head slightly look around a 2-D stadium image when browsing for available seats. Putting your thumb on the screen acts like a mute button for the head tracking, so it isn’t confused when you look up from the screen or turn your head to talk to somebody. It’s an impressive piece of software, and they’ve made an SDK available for it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’

Unisys Phasing Out Decades-Old Mainframe Processor For x86

angry tapir writes: Unisys is phasing out its decades-old mainframe processor. The chip is used in some of Unisys’ ClearPath flagship mainframes, but the company is moving to Intel’s x86 chips in Libra and Dorado servers in the ClearPath line. The aging CMOS chip will be “sunsetted” in Libra servers by the end of August and in the Dorado line by the end of 2015. Dorado 880E and 890E mainframes will use the CMOS chip until the servers are phased out, which is set to happen by the end of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Unisys Phasing Out Decades-Old Mainframe Processor For x86

IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation

phrackthat writes with an update to Friday’s news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS’s apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes. Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. … Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation

Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews

An anonymous reader writes Over the past few months, we’ve seen a disturbing trend from first Kingston, and now PNY. Manufacturers are launching SSDs with one hardware specification, and then quietly changing the hardware configuration after reviews have gone out. The impacts have been somewhat different, but in both cases, unhappy customers are loudly complaining that they’ve been cheated, tricked into paying for a drive they otherwise wouldn’t have purchased. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews

Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs

crookedvulture (1866146) writes “Last year, we kicked off an SSD endurance experiment to see how much data could be written to six consumer drives. One petabyte later, half of them are still going. Their performance hasn’t really suffered, either. The casualties slowed down a little toward the very end, and they died in different ways. The Intel 335 Series and Kingston HyperX 3K provided plenty of warning of their imminent demise, though both still ended up completely unresponsive at the very end. The Samsung 840 Series, which uses more fragile TLC NAND, perished unexpectedly. It also suffered a rash of cell failures and multiple bouts of uncorrectable errors during its life. While the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, all six SSDs exceeded their rated lifespans by hundreds of terabytes. The fact that all of them wrote over 700TB is a testament to the endurance of modern SSDs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs

Artificial Pancreas Shows Promise In Diabetes Test

An anonymous reader writes A cure for Type 1 diabetes is still far from sight, but new research suggests an artificial “bionic pancreas” holds promise for making it much more easily manageable. From the article: “Currently about one-third of people with Type 1 diabetes rely on insulin pumps to regulate blood sugar. They eliminate the need for injections and can be programmed to mimic the natural release of insulin by dispensing small doses regularly. But these pumps do not automatically adjust to the patient’s variable insulin needs, and they do not dispense glucagon. The new device, described in a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, dispenses both hormones, and it does so with little intervention from the patient.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Artificial Pancreas Shows Promise In Diabetes Test

EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards

jfruh writes The European Commission and the South Korean government announced that they will be harmonizing their radio spectrum policy in an attempt to help bring 5G wireless tech to market by 2020. While the technology is still in an embryonic state, but one South Korean researcher predicts it could be over a thousand times faster than current 4G networks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards

Civilians Try to Lure an Abandoned NASA Spacecraft Back to Earth

A New York Time piece (as carried by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) outlines a fascinating project operating in unlikely circumstances for a quixotic goal. They want to control, and return to earth, the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, launched in 1978 but which “appears to be in good working order.” Engineer Dennis Wingo, along with like minded folks (of whom he says “We call ourselves techno-archaeologists”) has established a business called Skycorp that “has its offices in the McDonald’s that used to serve the Navy’s Moffett air station, 15 minutes northwest of San Jose, Calif. After the base closed, NASA converted it to a research campus for small technology companies, academia and nonprofits. … The race to revive the craft, ISEE-3, began in earnest in April. At the end of May, using the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the team succeeded in talking to the spacecraft, a moment Mr. Wingo described as “way cool.” This made Skycorp the first private organization to command a spacecraft outside Earth orbit, he said. The most disheartening part: “No one has the full operating manual anymore, and the fragments are sometimes contradictory.” The most exciting? “Despite the obstacles, progress has been steady, and Mr. Wingo said the team should be ready to fire the engines within weeks.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Civilians Try to Lure an Abandoned NASA Spacecraft Back to Earth

Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock

alphadogg (971356) writes “Microsoft has been forced to start using its global stock of IPv4 addresses to keep its Azure cloud service afloat in the U.S., highlighting the growing importance of making the shift to IP version 6. The newer version of the Internet Protocol adds an almost inexhaustible number of addresses thanks to a 128-bit long address field, compared to the 32 bits used by version 4. The IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the U.S., meaning there are no additional addresses available, Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this week. This requires the company to use the IPv4 address space available to it globally for new services, it said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Runs Out of US Address Space For Azure, Taps Its Global IPv4 Stock