Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro

An anonymous reader writes “Sony claims that both the new 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch models of its Haswell-equipped Vaio Pro ultrabooks are the world’s lightest. The 11.6-inch model weighs in at 1.9lb (0.87k , where as the 13.3-incher is a little heavier at just 2.33lb (1.06kg). But it’s the battery life on offer here that really makes the new Pros stand out. The 11.6-inch Vaio Pro offers 11 hours of battery life as standard, while the 13.3-inch achieves 8 hours. However, Sony is also offering a sheet battery you can connect to the base of the ultrabooks. On the 13.3-inch Pro that increases battery life to 18 hours, but on the 11.6-inch you get a true day-long amount of juice with 25 hours of battery life claimed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro

More than 360,000 Apache websites imperiled by critical Plesk vulnerability

Wikimedia Hundreds of thousands of websites could be endangered by publicly available attack code exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Plesk control panel . This particular vulnerability gives hackers control of the server it runs on according to security researchers. The code-execution vulnerability affects default versions 8.6, 9.0, 9.2, 9.3, and 9.5.4 of Plesk running on the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, a configuration used by more than 360,000 websites . Plesk running on Windows and other types of Unix haven’t been tested to see if those configurations are vulnerable as well. The exploit code was released Wednesday on the Full-Disclosure mailing list by “kingcope,” a pseudonymous security researcher who has frequented the forum for years. He has a proven track record for developing reliable exploits. “This vulnerability has a high severity rating,” kingcope wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “An attacker can use this exploit to get a command line shell remotely with the privileges of the configured Apache user.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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More than 360,000 Apache websites imperiled by critical Plesk vulnerability

European HbbTV Smart TV Holes Make Sets Hackable

mask.of.sanity writes “Vulnerabilities in Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV television sets have been found that allow viewers’ home networks to be hacked, the programs they watched spied on, and even for TV sets to be turned into Bitcoin miners. The laboratory attacks took take advantage of the rich web features enabled in smart TVs running on the HbbTV network, a system loaded with online streaming content and apps which is used by more than 20 million viewers in Europe.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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European HbbTV Smart TV Holes Make Sets Hackable

Disposable VPN: Tor Gateways With EC2 Free Tiers

The established regime in Turkey (not to mention many other countries: take your pick) may not like any-to-many communications, but luckily established regimes don’t always get the final word. An anonymous reader writes “Lahana is my little side project to help people access the Internet and Tor via Amazon EC2 free tier-based VPNs. It’s a couple of scripts that set up a new VPN in a couple of minutes that automatically tunnels everything through Tor. It’s easy to share credentials with groups of people and for most people is free to set up and use. I built it with Turkey in mind, but it no doubt has other uses.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Disposable VPN: Tor Gateways With EC2 Free Tiers

Kim Dotcom Wins Case Against NZ Police To Get Seized Material Back

New submitter Mistakill writes “It seems the case against Kim Dotcom for the NZ Police isn’t going well, with Kim Dotcom scoring another victory in his legal battles. Police have been told they must search everything they seized from Dotcom and hand back what is not relevant to the U.S. extradition claims. Justice Helen Winkelmann told police their complaints about the cost and time of the exercise were effectively their own fault for indiscriminately seizing material in the first place. She wrote, ‘The warrants could not authorize the permanent seizure of hard drives and digital materials against the possibility that they might contain relevant material, with no obligation to check them for relevance. They could not authorize the shipping offshore of those hard drives with no check to see if they contained relevant material. Nor could they authorize keeping the plaintiffs out of their own information, including information irrelevant to the offenses.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Kim Dotcom Wins Case Against NZ Police To Get Seized Material Back

Gene Therapy May Protect Against Flu

sciencehabit writes “In 2009, a global collaboration of scientists, public health agencies, and companies raced to make a vaccine against a pandemic influenza virus, but most of it wasn’t ready until the pandemic had peaked. Now, researchers have come up with an alternative, faster strategy for when a pandemic influenza virus surfaces: Just squirt genes for the protective antibodies into people’s noses. The method—which borrows ideas from both gene therapy and vaccination, but is neither—protects mice against a wide range of flu viruses in a new study.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gene Therapy May Protect Against Flu

Planetary Resources To Build Crowdfunded Public Space Telescope

kkleiner writes “Planetary Resources, the company that set its sights on mining asteroids, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1M to crowdsource the world’s first publicly accessible space telescope. In an interview, co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis stated that the ARKYD 100 telescope is a means of ‘extending the optic nerve of humanity.’ The company hopes that the campaign, which is supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green, will make an orbiting telescope available to the public to help schools and museums in their educational efforts to inspire great enthusiasm in space.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Planetary Resources To Build Crowdfunded Public Space Telescope

Tesla Motors Repays $465M Government Loan 9 Years Early

Tesla Motors announced today it has completely repaid the $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy the company received in 2010. The funds were generated by Tesla through a recent sale of their stock, worth close to a billion dollars. The stock price had risen sharply after the company reported its first profitable quarter (and the stock still sits roughly 50% higher than before their earnings release). Today’s payment of $451.8 million finished off both the loan’s principal and its interest, nine years before the final payment was due. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, ‘I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress and their staffs that worked hard to create the ATVM program, and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate. I hope we did you proud.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla Motors Repays $465M Government Loan 9 Years Early

NYPD Detective Accused of Hiring Email Hackers

An anonymous reader writes “Edwin Vargas, a detective with the New York City Police Department, was arrested on Tuesday for computer hacking crimes. According to the complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court, between March 2011 and October 2012, Vargas, an NYPD detective assigned to a precinct in the Bronx, hired an e-mail hacking service to obtain log-in credentials, such as the password and username, for certain e-mail accounts. In total, he purchased access to at least 43 personal e-mail accounts belonging to 30 different individuals, including at least 19 who are affiliated with the NYPD.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NYPD Detective Accused of Hiring Email Hackers

Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3

walterbyrd writes “In 2012, IBM started retiring the Lotus brand. Now 1-2-3, the core product that brought Lotus its fame, takes its turn on the chopping block. IBM stated, ‘Effective on the dates listed below, [June 11, 2013] IBM will withdraw from marketing part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement:’ IBM Lotus 123 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9.8.0, and Organizer V6.1.0. Further, IBM stated, ‘Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these offerings after September 30, 2014. No service extensions will be offered. There will be no replacement programs.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3