open source – Page 165

Hackers Steal $31 Million at Russia’s Central Bank

The Bank of Russia has confirmed Friday that hackers have stolen 2 billion rubles ($31 million) from correspondent accounts at the Russian central bank. Central bank security executive Artiom Sychev said it could’ve been much worse as hackers tried to steal 5 billion rubles, but the central banking authority managed to stop them. CNNMoney reports: Hackers also targeted the private banks and stole cash from their clients, the central bank reported. The central bank did not say when the heist occurred or how hackers moved the funds. But so far, the attack bears some similarity to a recent string of heists that has targeted the worldwide financial system. Researchers at the cybersecurity firm Symantec have concluded that the global banking system has been under sustained attack from a sophisticated group — dubbed “Lazarus” — that has been linked to North Korea. But it’s unclear who has attacked Russian banks this time around. Earlier Friday, the Russian government claimed it had foiled an attempt to erode public confidence in its financial system. Russian’s top law enforcement agency, the FSB, said hackers were planning to use a collection of computer servers in the Netherlands to attack Russian banks. Typically, hackers use this kind of infrastructure to launch a “denial of service” attack, which disrupts websites and business operations by flooding a target with data. The FSB said hackers also planned to spread fake news about Russian banks, sending mass text messages and publishing stories on social media questioning their financial stability and licenses to operate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Steal $31 Million at Russia’s Central Bank

Nestle Discovers ‘Breakthrough’ Method To Cut Sugar In Chocolate By 40% Without Affecting Taste

Nestle and its scientists have discovered how to “structure sugar differently” to reduce the amount of sugar in some of its products by 40%. What’s more is that it can be done reportedly without compromising the taste. The Guardian reports: The new process is said to make sugar dissolve faster so that even when less is used, the tongue perceives an identical level of sweetness. It plans to patent the process, discovered by its scientists, which it says will enable it to significantly decrease the total sugar in its confectionery products. A four-finger milk chocolate Kit Kat currently contains 23.8g of sugar, a plain (milk chocolate) Yorkie contains 26.9g and a medium peppermint Aero has 24.9g of sugar. If the amount of sugar in each of these products was cut by 40% the new amounts would be 14.3g, 16.1g and 14.9g respectively. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children’s show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI’s five-year strategy for 2017-2022. “Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk, ” said Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director. “It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don’t do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. “Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years’ time.” The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK’s entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100, 000 of the “most at-risk” British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes “early children’s programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television.” The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. “We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe, ” she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

Google Asked to Remove a Billion ‘Pirate’ Search Results in a Year

Copyright holders asked Google to remove more than 1, 000, 000, 000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine over the past twelve months, TorrentFreak reports. According to stats provided in Google’s Transparency Report for the past one year, Google was asked to remove over one billion links — or 1, 007, 741, 143 links. From the article: More than 90 percent of the links, 908, 237, 861 were in fact removed. The rest of the reported links were rejected because they were invalid, not infringing, or duplicates of earlier requests. In total, Google has now processed just over two billion allegedly infringing URLs from 945, 000 different domains. That the second billion took only a year, compared to several years for the first, shows how rapidly the volume of takedown requests is expanding. At the current rate, another billion will be added by the end of next summer. Most requests, over 50 million, were sent in for the website 4shared.com. However, according to the site’s operators many of the reported URLs point to the same files, inflating the actual volume of infringing content. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Asked to Remove a Billion ‘Pirate’ Search Results in a Year

For the First Time, Living Cells Have Formed Carbon-Silicon Bonds

From a ScienceDaily alert: Scientists have managed to coax living cells into making carbon-silicon bonds, demonstrating for the first time that nature can incorporate silicon — one of the most abundant elements on Earth — into the building blocks of life. While chemists have achieved carbon-silicon bonds before — they’re found in everything from paints and semiconductors to computer and TV screens — they’ve so far never been found in nature, and these new cells could help us understand more about the possibility of silicon-based life elsewhere in the Universe. After oxygen, silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and yet it has nothing to do with biological life. Why silicon has never be incorporated into any kind of biochemistry on Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for scientists, because, in theory, it would have been just as easy for silicon-based lifeforms to have evolved on our planet as the carbon-based ones we know and love. Not only are carbon and silicon both extremely abundant in Earth’s crust – they’re also very similar in their chemical make-up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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For the First Time, Living Cells Have Formed Carbon-Silicon Bonds

Android Malware Used To Hack and Steal Tesla Car

An anonymous reader writes: By leveraging security flaws in the Tesla Android app, an attacker can steal Tesla cars. The only hard part is tricking Tesla owners into installing an Android app on their phones, which isn’t that difficult according to a demo video from Norwegian firm Promon. This malicious app can use many of the freely available Android rooting exploits to take over the user’s phone, steal the OAuth token from the Tesla app and the user’s login credentials. This is possible because the Tesla Android app stores the OAuth token in cleartext, and contains no reverse-engineering protection, allowing attackers to alter the app’s source code and log user credentials. The OAuth token and Tesla owner’s password allow an attacker to perform a variety of actions, such as opening the car’s doors and starting the motor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android Malware Used To Hack and Steal Tesla Car

Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

A new AI tool created by Google and Oxford University researchers could significantly improve the success of lip-reading and understanding for the hearing impaired. In a recently released paper on the work, the pair explained how the Google DeepMind-powered system was able to correctly interpret more words than a trained human expert. From a report: To accomplish the task, a cohort of scientists fed thousands of hours of TV footage — 5000 to be precise — from the BBC to a neural network. It was made to watch six different TV shows, which aired between the period of January 2010 and December 2015. This included 118, 000 difference sentences and some 17, 500 unique words. To understand the progress, it successfully deciphered words with a 46.8 percent accuracy. The neural network had to recognize the same based on mouth movement analysis. The under 50 percent accuracy might seem laughable to you but let me put things in perspective for you. When the same set of TV shows were shown to a professional lip-reader, they were able to decipher only 12.4 percent of words without error. Thus, one can understand the great difference in the capability of the AI as compared to a human expert in that particular field. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, CVS

From a Bloomberg report:The aloe vera gel many Americans buy to soothe damaged skin contains no evidence of aloe vera at all. Samples of store-brand aloe gel purchased at national retailers Wal-Mart, Target and CVS showed no indication of the plant in various lab tests. The products all listed aloe barbadensis leaf juice — another name for aloe vera — as either the No. 1 ingredient or No. 2 after water. There’s no watchdog assuring that aloe products are what they say they are. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve cosmetics before they’re sold and has never levied a fine for selling fake aloe. That means suppliers are on an honor system, even as the total U.S. market for aloe products, including drinks and vitamins, has grown 11 percent in the past year to $146 million, according to Chicago-based market researcher SPINS LLC. “You have to be very careful when you select and use aloe products, ” said Tod Cooperman, president of White Plains, New York-based ConsumerLab.com, which has done aloe testing. Aloe’s three chemical markers — acemannan, malic acid and glucose — were absent in the tests for Wal-Mart, Target and CVS products conducted by a lab hired by Bloomberg News. The three samples contained a cheaper element called maltodextrin, a sugar sometimes used to imitate aloe. The gel that’s sold at another retailer, Walgreens, contained one marker, malic acid, but not the other two. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, CVS

US Dementia Rates Drop 24%, New Study Finds

A new study involving more than 21, 000 people across the country finds that dementia rates in people over age 65 fell from 11.6 percent in 2000 to 8.8 percent in 2012 — a decline of 24 percent. CNN reports: The decline in dementia rates translates to about one million fewer Americans suffering from the condition, said John Haaga, director of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the new study. Dementia is a general term for a loss of memory or other mental abilities that’s severe enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s disease, which is believed to be caused by a buildup of plaques and tangles in the brain, is the most common type of dementia. Vascular dementia is the second most common type of dementia and occurs after a stroke. The study, which began in 1992, focuses on people over age 50, collecting data every two years. Researchers conduct detailed interviews with participants about their health, income, cognitive ability and life circumstances. The interviews also include physical tests, body measurements and blood and saliva samples. Although researchers can’t definitively explain why dementia rates are decreasing, Langa said doctors may be doing a better job controlling high blood pressure and diabetes, which can both boost the risk of age-related memory problems. High blood pressure and diabetes both increase the risk of strokes, which kill brain cells, increasing the risk of vascular dementia. Authors of the study found that senior citizens today are better educated than even half a generation ago. The population studied in 2012 stayed in school 13 years, while the seniors studied in 2000 had about 12 years of education, according to the study. People who are better educated may have more intellectually stimulating jobs and hobbies that help exercise their brains, Langa said. The study has been published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Dementia Rates Drop 24%, New Study Finds

Second Chinese Firm In a Week Found Hiding a Backdoor In Android Firmware

An anonymous reader quotes Bleeping Computer: Security researchers have discovered that third-party firmware included with over 2.8 million low-end Android smartphones allows attackers to compromise Over-the-Air (OTA) update operations and execute commands on the target’s phone with root privileges. This is the second issue of its kind that came to light this week after researchers from Kryptowire discovered a similar secret backdoor in the firmware of Chinese firm Shanghai Adups Technology Co. Ltd.. This time around, the problem affected Android firmware created by another Chinese company named Ragentek Group. It apparently affects more than 55 low-end/burner phones from BLU, Infinix Mobility, DOOGEE, LEAGOO, IKU Mobile, Beeline, and XOLO. According to the article, the binary performing the insecure updates “also includes code to hide its presence from the Android OS, along with two other binaries and their processes… Without SSL protection, this OTA system is an open backdoor for anyone looking to take control of it.” Even worse, three domains were hard-coded into the binaries, two of which were unregistered, according to the researchers. “If an adversary had noticed this, and registered these two domains, they would’ve instantly had access to perform arbitrary attacks on almost 3, 000, 000 devices without the need to perform a Man-in-the-Middle attack.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

Tag: open source