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IBM Dipping Chips In ‘Ionic Liquid’ To Save Power

Nerval’s Lobster writes “IBM announced this week that it has developed a way to manufacture both logic and memory that relies on a small drop of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip oxides back and forth between an insulating and conductive state without the need to constantly draw power. In theory, that means both memory and logic built using those techniques could dramatically save power. IBM described the advance in the journal Science, and also published a summary of its results to its Website. The central idea is to eliminate as much power as possible as it moves through a semiconductor. IBM’s solution is to use a bit of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip the state. IBM researchers applied a positively charged ionic liquid electrolyte to an insulating oxide material — vanadium dioxide — and successfully converted the material to a metallic state. The material held its metallic state until a negatively charged ionic liquid electrolyte was applied in order to convert it back to its original, insulating state. A loose analogy would be to compare IBM’s technology to the sort of electronic ink used in the black-and-white versions of the Kindle and other e-readers. There, an electrical charge can be applied to the tiny microcapsules that contain the ‘ink,’ hiding or displaying them to render a page of text. Like IBM’s solution, the e-ink doesn’t require a constant charge; power only needs to be applied to re-render or ‘flip’ the page. In any event, IBM’s technique could conceivably be applied to both mobile devices as well as power-hungry data centers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IBM Dipping Chips In ‘Ionic Liquid’ To Save Power

Tracking the Web Trackers

itwbennett writes “Do you know what data the 1300+ tracking companies have on you? Privacy blogger Dan Tynan didn’t until he had had enough of being stalked by grandpa-friendly Jitterbug phone ads. Tracking company BlueKai and its partners had compiled 471 separate pieces of data on him. Some surprisingly accurate, some not (hence the Jitterbug ad). But what’s worse is that opting out of tracking is surprisingly hard. On the Network Advertising Initiative Opt Out Page you can ask the 98 member companies listed there to stop tracking you and on Evidon’s Global Opt Out page you can give some 200 more the boot — but that’s only about 300 companies out of 1300. And even if they all comply with your opt-out request, it doesn’t mean that they’ll stop collecting data on you, only that they’ll stop serving you targeted ads.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tracking the Web Trackers

Google Implements DNSSEC Validation For Public DNS

wiredmikey writes “Google on Tuesday announced that it now fully supports DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on its Google Public DNS resolvers. Previously, the search giant accepted and forwarded DNSSEC-formatted messages but didn’t actually perform validation. ‘With this new security feature, we can better protect people from DNS-based attacks and make DNS more secure overall by identifying and rejecting invalid responses from DNSSEC-protected domains,’ Yunhong Gu, Team Lead, Google Public DNS, wrote in a blog post. According to Gu, about 1/3 of top-level domains have been signed, but most second-level domains remain unsigned. According to NIST, there has been no progress in enabling DNSSEC on 98 percent of all 1,070 industry domains tested as of March 18, 2013. ‘Overall, DNSSEC is still at an early stage and we hope that our support will help expedite its deployment,’ Gu said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps

An anonymous reader writes “Tom’s Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new “Haswell” CPUs from Intel. It’s just a performance preview, but it isn’t just more of the same. While it’s got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing.” The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hacker Challenge Winner: Automate Your Phone With Old Hotel Key Cards

In last week’s Hacker Challenge , we asked you to share your best hotel room hack . We received some great entries, but the winning hack shows us some clever ways to automate a hotel room. More »

Researcher: Hackers Can Jam Traffic By Manipulating Real-Time Traffic Data

An anonymous reader writes “Hackers can influence real-time traffic-flow-analysis systems to make people drive into traffic jams or to keep roads clear in areas where a lot of people use Google or Waze navigation systems, a German researcher demonstrated at BlackHat Europe. ‘If, for example, an attacker drives a route and collects the data packets sent to Google, the hacker can replay them later with a modified cookie, platform key and time stamps, Jeske explained in his research paper (PDF). The attack can be intensified by sending several delayed transmissions with different cookies and platform keys, simulating multiple cars, Jeske added. An attacker does not have to drive a route to manipulate data, because Google also accepts data from phones without information from surrounding access points, thus enabling an attacker to influence traffic data worldwide, he added.’ ‘You don’t need special equipment for this and you can manipulate traffic data worldwide,’ Jeske said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researcher: Hackers Can Jam Traffic By Manipulating Real-Time Traffic Data

Backdoor Found In TP-Link Routers

New submitter NuclearCat writes “Polish security researchers have found a backdoor in TP-Link routers, allowing an attacker to not only gain root access to the local network, but also to knock down the router via a CSRF attack remotely. (Further information — Google translation of Russian original). According to the researchers, TP-Link hasn’t yet responded to give an answer about issue. The good news: Users who replaced their TP-Link firmware with Open/DD-WRT firmware can sleep well.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Backdoor Found In TP-Link Routers

H&R Block Software Glitch To Delay 600,000 U.S. Tax Refunds

mrquagmire sends this quote from a Reuters report: “Tax refunds for about 600,000 taxpayers claiming an education credit will be delayed, the Internal Revenue Service said on Wednesday, citing a software glitch at some tax-preparation companies, including industry leader H&R Block Inc. Refunds may be delayed four to six weeks from mid-February, likely not showing up until late March, the IRS said. … On Tuesday, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc executive said shoppers had cashed about $2.7 billion in tax refund checks at its U.S. stores so far this year. At this point last year, that amount was about $4 billion. The IRS delayed the start of the tax filing season by eight days, to January 30, due to the enactment of tax law changes made to resolve the “fiscal cliff.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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H&R Block Software Glitch To Delay 600,000 U.S. Tax Refunds

Massive Email Crash Hits Canadian ISP Shaw

rueger writes “One of Canada’s biggest cable/Internet providers has their customers in an outrage. ‘… after an interruption of Shaw’s email services Thursday led to millions of emails being deleted … About 70 per cent of Shaw’s email customers were affected when the company was troubleshooting an unrelated email delay problem and an attempted solution caused incoming emails to be deleted … Emails were deleted for a 10-hour period between 7:45 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. Thursday, although customers did not learn about the problem until Friday, and only then by calling customer service or accessing an online forum for Shaw Internet subscribers.’ To top it off, when Shaw did send out notices about this, they looked so much like every day phishing spam that many people deleted them unread.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

City Councilman: Email Tax Could Discourage Spam, Fund Post Office Functions

New submitter Christopher Fritz writes “The Berkeley, CA city council recently met to discuss the closing of their downtown post office, in attempt to find a way to keep it from relocating. This included talk of ‘a very tiny tax’ to help keep the U.S. Post Office’s vital functions going. The suggestion came from Berkeley City Councilman Gordon Wozniak: ‘There should be something like a bit tax. I mean a bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email.’ He says a one-hundredth of a cent per e-mail tax could discourage spam while not impacting the typical Internet user, and a sales tax on Internet transactions could help fund ‘vital functions that the post office serves.’ We all know an e-mail tax is infeasible, and sales tax for online purchases and for digital purchases are likely unavoidable forever, but here’s hoping talk of taxing data usage doesn’t work its way to Washington.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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City Councilman: Email Tax Could Discourage Spam, Fund Post Office Functions