It isn’t only the junk processor that makes a really cheap computer slow. Or the memory or the video card (or lack of video card). The primary reason your cheap laptop loudly chugs along at glacial speeds is because of the hard drive. Cheap laptops use cheap hard disk drives, which are much slower than the solid state… Read more…
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Intel’s Optane Memory Makes Cheap Hard Drives as Fast as Expensive SSDs
The United States Air Force dropped a 21, 600-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB, bomb on what it said were ISIS militants in Afghanistan on Thursday. At least 36 people were killed in the explosion from the largest American non-nuclear bomb. Read more…
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That MOAB Bomb Dropped On Afghanistan Actually Cost $170,000
The US might not have had much success with cyberattacks against North Korea’s nuclear program , but that apparently hasn’t stopped officials from further efforts… not that they’re having much success. The New York Times has learned that then-President Obama ordered escalated cyberwarfare against North Korea in 2014 a bid to thwart its plans for intercontinental ballistic missiles. However, it’s not clear that this strategy has worked — and there may be problems if it does. The newspaper understands that Obama pushed both intelligence agencies and the military to “pull out all the stops” on cyberwarfare efforts to wreck missiles either before they launch or in the first seconds afterward. While evidence shows that North Korean missiles started floundering at a very high rate (the mid-range Musudan missile has an 88 percent failure rate) soon after, it’s not certain how much of that was due to American efforts versus the inherent riskiness of the missile designs. The US effort “accented the failures, ” according to the Times , but the launch rate has improved lately — and proper intercontinental missile tests might not be far off, if you believe North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. A large part of this comes from the natures of both the country and its missile efforts. North Korea is notoriously isolated from the internet (not to mention computing technology as a whole), and its missile systems are both mobile and shuffled around to confuse enemies. It’s not so simple as slipping malware into the computers at a fixed location, like with the Stuxnet attack against Iran — you need to find out where and when a launch will take place. President Trump hasn’t signaled if or how his administration might change this approach. Everything is still on the table, according to the Times . However, it might not want to press much harder. If a digital campaign is successful, it might give China, Russia and other nuclear-armed nations tacit permission to attack American nuclear launch systems. A belligerent country might be more tempted to launch a nuke if it knows that the US can’t respond in kind. Source: New York Times
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US hopes cyberattacks will stall North Korea’s missile program
Earlier this week, a fire at a power plant in Puerto Rico set off a series of failures across the island’s aging electrical grid. These before-and-after pics from space show what it looks like when 1.5 million customers suddenly lose power. Read more…
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Satellite Images Show the Extent of Puerto Rico’s Huge Blackout
You can’t watch Netflix in North Korea , but the Democratic People’s Republic now has something , at least: Manbang — a state-approved set-top box that streams live TV, on-demand video content and newspaper articles over the internet. It’s a step forward for digital media delivery for North Korea , but it’s still fairly limited. Manbang, which ironically translates to “everywhere, ” is only available to citizens in Pyongynag, Siniju and Sariwon. The service’s limited availability is hardly a surprise. North Korea isn’t exactly known for having widespread internet access — and what it does have is fairly limited. That seems to be the case here, too: the service’s on-demand content seems to focus on Juche ideology and documentaries about North Korean leaders (we’re guessing The Interview won’t arrive on this service anytime soon). Viewers will also be able to call up educational programs designed to learn English and Russian. Naturally, the device isn’t being marketed so much as a propaganda delivery system as a convenience — North Korea’s KCTV describes Manbang as a respite from the “radio interference” that makes television broadcasts unwatchable in border cities. That sounds all well and good for citizens who want to watch what the state wants them to watch. As for everybody else? Well, there are options . Source: NK News
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North Korea’s ‘Manbang’ is a state-approved streaming service
Twitter says it has suspended 235, 000 accounts for promoting terrorism since February, the company said. Twitter says it has removed 360, 000 accounts for promoting terrorism since June 2015. Read more…
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Twitter Suspends 235,000 Accounts for Promoting Terrorism
New submitter ReginaldBryan45 quotes a report from Reuters: North Korea has restarted production of plutonium fuel, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday, showing that it plans to pursue its nuclear weapons program in defiance of international sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAE) said on Monday that it had seen signs based on satellite imagery that show that the secretive country had re-activated the nuclear fuel production reactor at Yongbyon. The analysis by the IAEA pointed to “resumption of the activities of the five megawatt reactor, the expansion of centrifuge-related facility, [and] reprocessing — these are some of the examples of the areas [of activity indicated at Yongbyon].” U.S. Intelligence tried to infect the Yongbyon site with a variant of the Stuxnet malware last year but ultimately failed. Experts at the U.S.-Korea Institute at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington predicted last year that the country’s nuclear arsenal could grow to as many as 100 bombs within five years, from an estimated 10 to 16. Naturally, this news is a cause for concern as North Korea had four (failed) test launches in the last two months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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North Korea Restarts Plutonium Production For Nuclear Bombs
Google has been steadily migrating its resources towards the Photos ecosystem since the company first announced it at last year’s I/O developers conference. It’s already shut down Google+ photos in lieu of the newer service and linked Photos to your phone’s native camera app. Today Google announced that it will shut down Picasa . The move will occur over the next several months, beginning on May 1, 2016. Take note, however, that the Picasa desktop application won’t work after March 1st. Current Picasa users simply have to log into Photos — all of their content has already been moved over. Source: Google (Picasa Blog)
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Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos
StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they’re more ambitious, the United States. The physics of what a nuclear explosion actually does and how that signal propagates through the air, oceans and ground, however, can tell us whether this was truly a nuclear detonation at all, and if so, whether it was fusion or fission. From all the data we’ve collected, this appears to be nothing new: just a run-of-the-mill fission bomb, with the rest being a sensationalized claim. (Related: Yesterday’s post about how seismic data also points to a conventional nuke, rather than an H-bomb.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How We Know North Korea Didn’t Detonate a Hydrogen Bomb
Bruce66423 points out an analysis at The Guardian of North Korea’s Red Star Linux-based OS, based on a presentation Sunday to the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin : The features of their Fedora based OS include a watermarking system to enable tracking of files — even if unopened. The operating system is not just the pale copy of western ones that many have assumed, said Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess of the German IT security company ERNW, who downloaded the software from a website outside North Korea and explored the code in detail. … This latest version, written around 2013, is based on a version of Linux called Fedora and has eschewed the previous version’s Windows XP feel for Apple’s OS X – perhaps a nod to the country’s leader Kim Jong-un who, like his father, has been photographed near Macs. The OS, unsurprisingly, allowed only tightly fettered access to web sites, using a whitelist approach that gives access to government-controlled or approved sites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.