portfolio-cond – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Files on nearly 200 floppy disks belonging to Star Trek creator recovered

(credit: churl ) According to a press release from DriveSavers data recovery, information on nearly 200 floppy disks that belonged to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has been recovered. The information on the disks belongs to Roddenberry’s estate and has not been disclosed to the general public. DriveSavers notes, however, that Roddenberry used the disks to store his work and “to capture story ideas, write scripts and [take] notes.” VentureBeat reports that the disks, containing 160KB of data each, were likely used and written in the ’80s. The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Files on nearly 200 floppy disks belonging to Star Trek creator recovered

YouTube mad at T-Mobile for throttling video traffic

(credit: Aurich Lawson) T-Mobile USA’s recently instituted practice of downgrading video quality to 480p in order to reduce data usage now has a prominent critic: YouTube. “Reducing data charges can be good for users, but it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent,” a YouTube spokesperson said, according to a Wall Street Journal article today . T-Mobile’s “Binge On” program automatically reduces the quality of video while allowing many video services to stream without counting against customers’ high-speed data limits. Video services that cooperate with T-Mobile by meeting the company’s “technical criteria” have their videos exempted from customers’ data caps. Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and many others worked with T-Mobile to get the exemption. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hackers actively exploit critical vulnerability in sites running Joomla

Enlarge / An payload that’s been modified so it can’t be misused. Malicious hackers are using it to perform an object injection attack that leads to a full remote command execution. (credit: Sucuri ) Attackers are actively exploiting a critical remote command-execution vulnerability that has plagued the Joomla content management system for almost eight years, security researchers said. A patch for the vulnerability, which affects versions 1.5 through 3.4.5, was released Monday morning . It was too late: the bug was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from security firm Sucuri warned in a blog post . The attacks started on Saturday from a handful of IP addresses and by Sunday included hundreds of exploit attempts to sites monitored by Sucuri. “Today (Dec 14th), the wave of attacks is even bigger, with basically every site and honeypot we have being attacked,” the blog post reported. “That means that probably every other Joomla site out there is being targeted as well.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hackers actively exploit critical vulnerability in sites running Joomla

Copyright case over “Happy Birthday” is done, trial canceled

With less than a week to go before a trial, a class-action lawsuit over the copyright status of “Happy Birthday” has been resolved. Details of the settlement, including what kind of uses will be allowed going forward, are not clear. A short order (PDF) filed yesterday by US Chief District Court Judge George King says that all parties have agreed to a settlement, and it vacates a trial which was scheduled to start on December 15. The key turning point came in September , when King ruled that Warner/Chappell’s copyright transfer was invalid because there was no proof it was ever properly transferred from the Hill sisters, who claimed to have written the song. The trial would have addressed damages issues. Also looming was a late copyright claim by Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI), a children’s’ charity affiliated with the Hill sisters. ACEI came forward in November to say that if Warner/Chappell didn’t own the song, it did. The settlement revealed yesterday resolves all claims by the plaintiffs, Warner/Chappell, and ACEI. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Getting a Linux box corralled into a DDoS botnet is easier than many think

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson and Getty) Getting a Linux server hacked and made part of a botnet is easier than some people may think. As two unrelated blog posts published in the past week demonstrate, running a vulnerable piece of software is often all that’s required. Witness, for example, a critical vulnerability disclosed earlier this year in Elasticsearch , an open source server application for searching large amounts of data. In February, the company that maintains it warned it contained a vulnerability that allowed hackers to execute commands on the server running it. Within a month, a hacking forum catering to Chinese speakers provided all the source code and tutorials needed for people with only moderate technical skills to fully identify and exploit susceptible servers. A post published Tuesday by security firm Recorded Future deconstructs that hacker forum from last March. It showed how to scan search services such as Shodan and ZoomEye to find vulnerable machines. It includes an attack script written in Python that was used to exploit one of them and a separate Perl script used to make the newly compromised machine part of a botnet of other zombie servers. It also included screenshots showing the script being used against the server. The tutorial underscores the growing ease of hacking production servers and the risk of being complacent about patching. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Getting a Linux box corralled into a DDoS botnet is easier than many think

Spike TV orders 10-episode series for Red Mars written by Babylon 5 creator

According to sources speaking to Variety , Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has been green-lighted for a 10-episode TV adaptation on Spike TV. Each episode will be an hour long, and J. Michael Straczynski, creator and writer of Babylon 5 and co-creator of Sense8 will serve as Red Mars ’ writer, co-executive producer, and showrunner. Vince Gerardis, co-executive producer of Game of Thrones , will also serve as executive producer on Red Mars with Straczynski. Robinson will reportedly be an on-the-set consultant. The Red Mars project has been on Spike TV’s plate for some time , but the network only just decided to move full-speed ahead with it, according to Variety . The show will go into production this summer and premiere in January 2017. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spike TV orders 10-episode series for Red Mars written by Babylon 5 creator

Thunderbird “a tax” on Firefox development, and Mozilla wants to drop it

Mozilla would like to drop Thunderbird from its list of projects. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) You might know Mozilla primarily for its Firefox browser, but for many years the company has also developed an e-mail client called Thunderbird. The two projects use the same rendering engine and other underlying technology, but Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla would like to stop supporting Thunderbird, calling its continuing maintenance “a tax” on the more important work of developing Firefox. “Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact,” Baker writes. “With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential.” Mozilla doesn’t plan to drop Thunderbird immediately, however—the current maintenance schedule will continue and Thunderbird users can continue to use the product. But the end goal for Mozilla, according to Baker, is to find “the right kind of legal and financial home” for the Thunderbird project, and “[separate] itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology.” In other words, the company would like to give Thunderbird to people who will take care of it, freeing the Firefox team from having to worry about it. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple’s A9X has a 12-core GPU and is made by TSMC

Enlarge / A die shot of the A9X. The ratio of GPU to CPU is becoming pretty insane. (credit: Chipworks via AnandTech ) Apple makes interesting chips for its mobile devices, but it doesn’t talk about them much aside from extremely high-level relative performance comparisons. That means it’s up to experts like the ones at Chipworks to open them up and figure it out, and they’ve partnered up with AnandTech to dig into the A9X in the iPad Pro. The most significant news is about the GPU, which is a 12-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series 7XT design. The company doesn’t generally offer a 12-core design, as shown in the chart below, but the architecture is designed to be easily scalable and it wouldn’t be the first time Apple had gotten something from a supplier that other companies couldn’t get. The standard A9 in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus uses a 6-core version of the same GPU. Apple feeds that GPU with a 128-bit memory bus, something that it’s also included in other iPads to boost memory bandwidth and GPU performance. The Series 7XT lineup. The iPad Pro’s GPU falls somewhere in between the stock 8-cluster and 16-cluster designs. (credit: Imagination Technologies) Imagination’s chart for the Series 7XT GPU puts a hypothetical 12-core design in the same general performance neighborhood as an Nvidia GeForce GT 730M, a low-end discrete GPU that’s a bit slower than the stuff Apple is shipping in its high-end MacBook Pros. Our own graphics benchmarks place it a bit higher than that, but as some of you have pointed out , iOS may have a small advantage in some of these tests because of differences between the mobile OpenGL ES API in iOS and the standard OpenGL API used in OS X. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

FDA approves first GM food animal—Atlantic salmon

(credit: Artizone/Flickr ) After two decades of deliberation, the Food and Drug Administration has approved the first ever genetically engineered food animal, a fast-growing Atlantic Salmon called AquAdvantage salmon. According the agency, which announced the approval Thursday , the modified salmon are safe to eat, equally nutritious as other salmon, and should pose no threat to the environment. First created in 1989 and submitted to the agency for approval in 1995, the Atlantic salmon are modified to carry a growth hormone gene from Chinook salmon. That gene is further engineered to be under the control of a tiny bit of DNA, called a promoter, from the eel-like ocean pout fish. In general, DNA promoters are non-coding sequences that help control the expression level of a gene—how much protein product is synthesized from the gene. With the engineered promoter boosting hormone production, the modified salmon grow to market-size in about half the time of conventional Atlantic salmon. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FDA approves first GM food animal—Atlantic salmon

Android adware can install itself even when users explicitly reject it

(credit: Lookout) Two weeks ago, Ars reported on newly discovered Android adware that is virtually impossible to uninstall . Now, researchers have uncovered malicious apps that can get installed even when a user has expressly tapped a button rejecting the app. The hijacking happens after a user has installed a trojanized app that masquerades as an official app available in Google Play and then is made available in third-party markets. During the installation, apps from an adware family known as Shedun try to trick people into granting the app control over the Android Accessibility Service , which is designed to provide vision-impaired users alternative ways to interact with their mobile devices. Ironically enough, Shedun apps try to gain such control by displaying dialogs such as this one, which promises to help weed out intrusive advertisements. From that point on, the app has the ability to display popup ads that install highly intrusive adware. Even in cases where a user rejects the invitation to install the adware or takes no action at all, the Shedun-spawned app uses its control over the accessibility service to install the adware anyway. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android adware can install itself even when users explicitly reject it