password – Page 6 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Chinese military “hacked” Israel’s Iron Dome

Iron Dome The technology behind Iron Dome, the missile defense system Israel has been using since 2011, was allegedly stolen by Chinese military hackers. That claim was made by Cyber Engineering Services to Brian Krebs of security news site Krebs On Security , and it identifies Elisra Group, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems as the three defense companies that were compromised during the cyber assault. The perpetrators, Cyber Engineering Services says, are the same ones behind a spate of attacks that have come to light in the past few years, all attributed to Unit 61398, a Shanghai-based arm of the Chinese army. The five Chinese military officers indicted by the US earlier this year for allegedly hacking energy firms in the country also belong to the same unit. The hacks took place from October 2011, some six months after Iron Dome became operational, and continued up until August 2012. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has said that many hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza, particularly during the current military operation and a series of clashes in 2012, have been scuppered by the system, which is thought to be one of the most effective missile-defense technologies in the world. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Model drone finds elderly man, missing for three days, alive

It took just 20 minutes for a model drone to locate a missing elderly Wisconsin man, a feat that helicopters, search dogs, and volunteers couldn’t accomplish in three days. Just don’t tell that to the Federal Aviation Administration, whose regulatory wings are already flapping about model drones. This weekend’s discovery of the 82-year-old man in an area of crops and woods comes amid a legal tussle between flight regulators and model drone operators—the latest of which coincidentally involves search-and-rescue missions. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Robotic glove gives you extra fingers for grabbing

Melanie Gonick / MIT Four fingers and a thumb on each hand is pretty useful. Humans have gone from caves to sprawling cities in part because of our dexterous digits. But researchers at MIT think we could do even better if we had an upgrade. They have developed a glove with two extra robotic fingers that respond intelligently to your movements, allowing you to perform two-handed tasks with just one robot-enhanced hand. “You do not need to command the robot, but simply move your fingers naturally. Then the robotic fingers react and assist your fingers,” said the glove’s creator Harry Asada, of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering . Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Quasiparticles carry entanglement to near infinite speeds

crocus08 In a recent experiment, scientists were able to observe quasiparticles propagating across a string of ions, creating waves of quantum entanglement in their wake. Experiments like this one, which study systems with multiple quantum bodies, are crucial to learning about the behavior of quasiparticles and their interactions with more traditional particles. It’s tempting to think that quasiparticles are not particles at all. Quasiparticles are “objects” that emerge within a complex system, such as a solid object. The collective behavior of the particles in the solid can create the impression of a new particle. The impression—or quasiparticle—moves through the solid as if it were a real particle moving through empty space, and it behaves according to the same rules. Nevertheless, within their system, quasiparticles can have real effects on their environment. Most recently, scientists were able to track the propagation of quasiparticles called magnons through a collection of atoms. Now, scientists have been able to watch as that propagation changed the behavior of these atoms. And in the process, the quasiparticles reached speeds where a conventional model, which we use to understand time, breaks down. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Quasiparticles carry entanglement to near infinite speeds

Id shows off double-jumping, skull-crushing new Doom at QuakeCon

If you weren’t at QuakeCon, this content-free teaser is all you get to see of the new Doom for the time being. The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas’ QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game, which somehow hasn’t been leaked online yet. The good news is that plenty of people that were there are reporting on the unveiling, which seemed to include a number of extremely un- Doom -like additions. One of the bigger changes brought by the new Doom (which is notably not being called Doom 4 anymore ) is a jet-pack powered double-jump, à la Crysis 3 , Titanfall , Destiny and, now, presumably, every first-person shooter to come out in the next year or two. Players can also climb up the sides of “large crates and gaps” according to PC Gamer’s report , adding even more ability to go vertical. But it’s the Mortal Kombat -style melee finishing moves that seem to have gotten the crowd the most riled up. PC Gamer describes how, once an enemy is low on health, the player can get close and activate moves that see “lower jaws pulled off, skulls stomped on, and hearts torn out with the level of detail usually reserved for those slow-mo bullet cams in the Sniper Elite series.” Rock Paper Shotgun noted that “enemies break apart like moldy bread… literally tearing them in half sometimes.” The outlet also reported scenes with “crushing heads, chunks flying everywhere.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets

At least 13,000 Chicago motorists have been cited with undeserved tickets thanks to malfunctioning red-light cameras, according to a 10-month investigation published Friday by the Chicago Tribune . The report found that the $100 fines were a result of “faulty equipment, human tinkering or both.” According to the investigation: Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back to normal. Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563 tickets—560 of them for rolling rights. Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or after when no tickets were issued—downtimes suggesting human intervention that should have been documented. City officials said they cannot explain the absence of such records. City officials and Redflex Traffic Systems of Arizona, the report said, “acknowledged oversight failures and said the explosions of tickets should have been detected and resolved as they occurred. But they said that doesn’t mean the drivers weren’t breaking the law, and they defended the red light camera program overall as a safety success story. The program has generated nearly $500 million in revenue since it began in 2003.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets

It may be “barely an operating system,” but DOS still matters (to some people)

By your command. Sean Gallagher Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. It’s a platform that in the minds of many should’ve died a long time ago. But after 20 years, a few dozen core developers and a broader, much larger contributor community continue furthering the FreeDOS project by gradually adding utilities, accessories, compilers, and open-source applications. All this labor of love begs one question: why? What is it about a single-tasking command-line driven operating system—one that is barely up to the most basic of network-driven tasks—that has kept people’s talents engaged for two decades? Haven’t most developers abandoned it for Windows (or, tragically, for IBM OS/2 )? Who still uses DOS, and for what? To find out, Ars reached out to two members of the FreeDOS core development team to learn more about who was behind this seemingly quixotic quest. These devs choose to keep an open-source DOS alive rather than working on something similar but more modern—like Linux. So, needless to say, the answers we got weren’t necessarily expected. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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It may be “barely an operating system,” but DOS still matters (to some people)

Seattle utility wants $17,500 refund after failure to scrub negative search results

John Tregoning Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility, City Light, is now demanding a refund for the $17,500 that it paid to Brand.com in a botched effort to boost the online reputation of its highly-paid chief executive, Jorge Carrasco. The project was concocted by the CEO’s chief of staff, Sephir Hamilton . In an interview with Ars, Hamilton said that the agency may even file a lawsuit to enforce this refund. “We’re leaving our options open,” he said. “I hope that they’ll see that what we signed up for was not the service that they delivered. We were sold one bill of goods and we were given another.” Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Seattle utility wants $17,500 refund after failure to scrub negative search results

Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

Context In the latest cautionary tale involving the so-called Internet of things, white-hat hackers have devised an attack against network-connected lightbulbs that exposes Wi-Fi passwords to anyone in proximity to one of the LED devices. The attack works against LIFX smart lightbulbs , which can be turned on and off and adjusted using iOS- and Android-based devices. Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson gave a good overview here of the Philips Hue lights, which are programmable, controllable LED-powered bulbs that compete with LIFX. The bulbs are part of a growing trend in which manufacturers add computing and networking capabilities to appliances so people can manipulate them remotely using smartphones, computers, and other network-connected devices. A 2012 Kickstarter campaign raised more than $1.3 million for LIFX, more than 13 times the original goal of $100,000. According to a blog post published over the weekend , LIFX has updated the firmware used to control the bulbs after researchers discovered a weakness that allowed hackers within about 30 meters to obtain the passwords used to secure the connected Wi-Fi network. The credentials are passed from one networked bulb to another over a mesh network powered by 6LoWPAN , a wireless specification built on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard . While the bulbs used the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to encrypt the passwords, the underlying pre-shared key never changed, making it easy for the attacker to decipher the payload. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

$1,099 iMac review: lose 50% of your performance to save 18% of the money

Technically, this is the $1,299 iMac, not that you’d be able to tell the difference. Andrew Cunningham Apple’s new $1,099 iMac will undoubtedly be a popular computer. People in the know who want the most computing bang for their buck would be smarter to step up to a higher-end model, but there are plenty of people—casual users, schools, businesses—who just want an iMac that’s “fast enough,” not one that’s “as fast as it could possibly be.” For those people, we obtained one of the new entry-level iMacs so we could evaluate its performance. On paper, it sounds like a big step down—you’re going from a quad-core desktop processor and GPU to a dual-core Ultrabook processor and GPU. This new iMac and the base MacBook Air models in fact use the exact same processor, even though historically there’s been a big performance gap between MacBook Airs and iMacs. In practice, the story is more complicated. Let’s talk about what the new low-end iMac changes, and then we’ll spend some time looking at processor performance. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$1,099 iMac review: lose 50% of your performance to save 18% of the money