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New Destructive Malware Intentionally Bricks IoT Devices

An anonymous reader writes: “A new malware strain called BrickerBot is intentionally bricking Internet of Things (IoT) devices around the world by corrupting their flash storage capability and reconfiguring kernel parameters. The malware spreads by launching brute-force attacks on IoT (BusyBox-based) devices with open Telnet ports. After BrickerBot attacks, device owners often have to reinstall the device’s firmware, or in some cases, replace the device entirely. Attacks started on March 20, and two versions have been seen. One malware strain launches attacks from hijacked Ubiquiti devices, while the second, more advanced, is hidden behind Tor exit nodes. Several security researchers believe this is the work of an internet vigilante fed up with the amount of insecure IoT devices connected to the internet and used for DDoS attacks. “Wow. That’s pretty nasty, ” said Cybereason security researcher Amit Serper after Bleeping Computer showed him Radware’s security alert. “They’re just bricking it for the sake of bricking it. [They’re] deliberately destroying the device.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Destructive Malware Intentionally Bricks IoT Devices

Driverless pods begin ferrying the public around Greenwich

It’s been almost a year since the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) opened sign-ups for a driverless pod trial in Greenwich. The original plan was to start before Christmas, but given today’s date that obviously didn’t happen. Still, better late than never, eh? Over the next three weeks, roughly 100 people will clamber aboard “Harry, ” a self-driving shuttle named after clockmaker John Harrison. It will take them around a two-mile course in North Greenwich, near The O2, to demonstrate how the technology could be used for “last mile” trips in urban areas. The shuttle is a repurposed Ultra Pod , which is already in operation at London’s Heathrow Airport. With a maximum speed of 10MPH (16KPH), it’s not the fastest electric vehicle — you could beat it on a Boosted Board — however it’s hoped the leisurely pace will reassure pedestrians and minimise dangerous incidents. Each pod carries up to four people, including a safety operator who can pepper the breaks in an emergency. It’s able to ‘see’ it’s surroundings using a mixture of cameras and lasers, and use that information to track obstacles and create a collision-free route. Notably, it doesn’t need to rely on GPS for any of these calculations. The purpose of the trials is to see how the public reacts to self-driving vehicles, and to examine how the technology can best be applied in built-up areas. Each trip will give the research team a wealth of valuable information — four terabytes of data every eight hours, to be precise. It’ll be supplemented with passenger interviews, taken before and after each trip, and written feedback that anyone can submit online through an interactive map . “It is critical that the public is fully involved as these technologies become a reality, ” Professor Nick Reed, academy director at TRL said. The “GATEway Project” at Greenwich is one of many research initiatives being funded by the UK government. We’ve already seen the ” Lutz Pathfinder ” pod, which is being tested in Milton Keynes, and a modified Land Rover that’s serving as a research testbed in Bristol. Plans are also underway for a 41-mile ” connected corridor , ” which will be used to test LTE, local WiFi hotspots and other forms of connectivity in self-driving vehicles. In the private sector, Nissan is testing its electric Leaf cars in the capital, and Roborace is developing a driverless motorsport . It’s an impressive hub of activity, even without Google and Uber’s involvement. Via: BBC

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Driverless pods begin ferrying the public around Greenwich

NBC will finally air all of the Olympics live, across time zones

Today NBC announced that for the 2018 Winter Olympics, it will finally back off of its hated policy of tape delaying significant portions of the games. In 2016, it streamed much of the competition live, but segments like the Opening Ceremony and each day’s prime time programming got the tape delay treatment on TV. In a world connected in real time by phones, Facebook and Twitter, splitting up viewers makes less sense than ever, and NBC is finally acknowledging that instead of just pointing to the ratings or encouraging that viewers ” move back east .” Ratings for the 2016 Olympics dropped 18 percent from the 2012 London games, and going live everywhere could help turn that around. With the 2018 event occurring in PyeongChang, South Korea, big events that are scheduled to take place in the morning there will happen during the prime time window on the East Coast of the US. Rather than forcing viewers to jump on the internet to watch events live, going all live on TV could boost those ratings back up in the place where advertisers are paying the most money. NBC will kick off its evening lineup simultaneously at 8PM ET, 7PM CT, 6PM MT, and 5PM PT, with a break for local news and then the “Primetime Plus” package in all areas. The network has already signed up for Olympics broadcasts rights through 2032, however, exec Jim Bell would only tell the LA Times that it is “likely” to continue the all-live broadcasts for Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022. Source: NBC

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NBC will finally air all of the Olympics live, across time zones

New Release Of StarCraft In 4K Ultra High Definition Annouonced

The classic 90s-era videogames StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War will be re-released this summer — remastered in 4K Ultra High Definition. An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: It will also include a number of updates, such as remastered sound, new additional illustrations for the campaign missions, new matchmaking capabilities, the ability to connect to Blizzard App, the ability to save to the cloud, and more… Blizzard also announced that it was issuing a new update to StarCraft: Brood War this week, which will include some bug fixes and anti-cheat measures, but will also make StarCraft Anthology (which includes StarCraft and Brood War) available to download for free. Kotaku reports that the news was announced at this weekend’s I

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New Release Of StarCraft In 4K Ultra High Definition Annouonced

Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti review: The fastest graphics card, again

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton) Specs at a glance: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti CUDA CORES 3584 TEXTURE UNITS 224 ROPS 88 CORE CLOCK 1,480MHz BOOST CLOCK 1,1582MHz MEMORY BUS WIDTH 352 bits MEMORY BANDWIDTH 484GB/s MEMORY SIZE 11GB GDDR5X Outputs 3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b with support for 4K60 10/12b HEVC Decode Release date March 9, 2017 PRICE Founders Edition (as reviewed): £700/$700. Partner cards priced at: £700/$700. I find it odd that a room full of otherwise seemingly normal human beings (press excluded) would cheer at being charged £700/$700 for the GTX 1080 Ti, even if it does claim to be the fastest gaming graphics card money can buy. After all, that £700 could otherwise be spent on an entire gaming PC, the latest iPhone, a return flight from London to Los Angeles, or 139 bottles of the finest Scottish craft beer . Besides, surely those Americans in attendance at Nvidia’s grand GTX 1080 Ti reveal in San Francisco had more pressing things to worry about? After all, life isn’t all graphics cards and iPhones when your health is on the line . Still, Nvidia was true to its word: the GTX 1080 Ti is indeed the fastest gaming graphics card money can buy—even faster than the £1,100/$1,200 e-peen extension that is the Titan X Pascal . It’s a hell of a lot faster than the GTX 1080 too—which now sits in a “cheaper” price bracket of £500/$500—by as much as 30 percent. It’s the first graphics card since the Titan XP that can play many games in 4K at 60FPS without having to fiddle with settings—you just whack everything on ultra and start playing. Plus it’s a quiet graphics card, in its Founders Edition form at least, thanks to the improvements Nvidia has made to its iconic all-metal shroud. Read 28 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti review: The fastest graphics card, again

GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Source-code hub Gitlab.com is in meltdown after experiencing data loss as a result of what it has suddenly discovered are ineffectual backups. On Tuesday evening, Pacific Time, the startup issued the sobering series of tweets, starting with “We are performing emergency database maintenance, GitLab.com will be taken offline” and ending with “We accidentally deleted production data and might have to restore from backup. Google Doc with live notes [link].” Behind the scenes, a tired sysadmin, working late at night in the Netherlands, had accidentally deleted a directory on the wrong server during a frustrating database replication process: he wiped a folder containing 300GB of live production data that was due to be replicated. Just 4.5GB remained by the time he canceled the rm -rf command. The last potentially viable backup was taken six hours beforehand. That Google Doc mentioned in the last tweet notes: “This incident affected the database (including issues and merge requests) but not the git repos (repositories and wikis).” So some solace there for users because not all is lost. But the document concludes with the following: “So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place.” At the time of writing, GitLab says it has no estimated restore time but is working to restore from a staging server that may be “without webhooks” but is “the only available snapshot.” That source is six hours old, so there will be some data loss. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

Ultrafast lasers capture elusive photosynthesis reactions

Using ultra-rapid lasers, researchers have created the first “movie” of photosynthesis chemical reactions that shows exactly how fast they happen. The finding proves that a key process that strips electrons from water, starting the conversion of solar into chemical energy, happens more quickly than previously thought. “We can now see how nature has optimized the physics of converting light energy to fuel, ” says study author Jasper van Thor. The work could help scientists improve artificial photosynthesis to produce biofuels more efficiently. The researchers from Imperial College London wanted to find out exactly how fast the so-called Photosystem II enzyme reaction works. That process, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, was thought to be the bottleneck, or slowest part of photosynthesis. In contrast, the first part of photosynthesis, where light is harvested by an “antenna complex” of proteins and clorophyll molecules, was thought to be faster. Can we mimic it or tune it to make artificial photosynthesis more efficient? These questions, and many others, can now be explored. Slow and fast are relative terms here, because the process actually happens in picoseconds, or trillionths of a second. To measure it more precisely, scientists first created crystals of the Photosystem II enzyme, then zapped them with a sophisticated laser system. The process, which was developed in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is described in an earlier paper . Using infrared spectroscopy, the team was able to measure electron movements across tiny parts of the system to see when energy was transferred. Their measurements proved that the water-splitting process happens more quickly than the antenna complex light harvesting, a result that upends decades of teachings. “We can now show that what I was lectured as an undergraduate in the 1990s is no longer supported, ” van Thor says. Furthermore, the team has essentially created a movie of key parts of the photosynthesis process, which lasts just a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second). This lets scientists understand what the molecule is doing in very small time slices during the process, helping them better understand and even improve it. “Can we mimic it or tune it to make artificial photosynthesis more efficient? These questions, and many others, can now be explored, ” says van Thor. Via: Imperial College London Source: Nature

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Ultrafast lasers capture elusive photosynthesis reactions

21st Century Fox is buying UK’s Sky in $14.6 billion deal

Following talks last week , 21st Century Fox has agreed to buy Sky, the UK’s largest pay-TV network, for £11.7 billion ($14.6 billion). The UK-based pay-TV broadcaster and broadband provider counts nearly 22 million subscribers in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria. That’ll give Rupert Murdoch’s Fox a delivery platform for content from its 20th Century Fox movie studio and Fox TV network, along with cable TV channels like FX, Fox Sports and National Geographic. The deal “creates a global leader in content creation and distribution, enhances our sports and entertainment scale, and gives us unique and leading direct-to-consumer capabilities and technologies, ” 21st Century Fox said in a statement . As part of the deal, Sky headquarters will stay in London and continue a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) expansion of its headquarters. Rumored talks last week valued Sky as high as £18.5 billion ($23.2 billion). The Rupert Murdoch-owned media empire already owns 39 percent of Sky and tried to buy the remaining shares back in 2010. However, the company abandoned the attempt after several of the company’s tabloids became embroiled in a the so-called phone hacking scandal. With Brexit significantly weakening the pound, Sky has become significantly cheaper for US-based Fox, making it ripe for an acquisition. Source: 21st Century Fox

Body cameras given to ‘over 22,000’ London police officers

To help keep the peace, more than 22, 000 London police officers will soon be given body cameras . The roll-out begins today — six months later than former mayor Boris Johnson had anticipated. The new hardware, supplied by Taser, won’t be recording around the clock; instead, officers will need to hit the shutter manually and notify the public “as soon as practical.” A red light and beeping noise will indicate new recordings. The footage will then be uploaded to a secure server where it can be used as evidence in court. If it’s not required, the data will be deleted automatically after 31 days. Metropolitan Police hope the cameras will add a greater level of transparency to their work. Accused citizens should, in theory, be able to call on these images to prove their innocence. They could play a similar role for the police, helping officers to defend their actions on the street. It’s hoped that the new hardware will play a preventative role too, discouraging both sides from acting outside of the law in the first place. Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, believes the cameras can make the court system more efficient — if footage of the incident exists, many offenders will plead guilty immediately, rather than hide the truth. “Video captures events in a way that can’t be represented on paper in the same detail, ” Hogan-Howe added. “A picture paints a thousand words, and it has been shown the mere presence of this type of video can often defuse potentially violent situations without the need for force.” The Met says the rollout is the “largest” of its kind in the world. Officers will be kitted out in phases, with an expected completion date of “next summer.” It follows years of trials , as well as public consultation and academic evaluation. Similar hardware has been deployed in the US , where police trust has fallen to an arguably greater low. Body cameras, if used fairly and consistently, could help to repair that fragile relationship. Source: Metropolitan Police

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Body cameras given to ‘over 22,000’ London police officers

This Bluetooth N64 Controller Is Every 90s Kid’s Dream

There’s really nothing like playing a Nintendo 64 game with one of the classic controllers. The problem is that classic N64 controllers don’t hook up to phones, tablet, or laptops, which makes playing console emulators a real pain. Now, there’s finally some sweet relief for retro gaming fans. Read more…