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Piracy site for academic journals playing game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole

Alexandra Elbakyan won’t let her Sci-Hub pirate site of academic journals die— despite publisher Elsevier’s lawsuit. (credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Elbakyan) We reported a few weeks ago on a popular pirate site for science journals whose oversees admin was being sued by one of the world’s leading academic publishers, Elsevier. Elsevier is the same New York publisher that the late Aaron Swartz had noted in his ” Guerilla Open Access Manifesto ” that told academics and researchers they had a “duty” to free the knowledge they were privileged to read behind Elsevier’s paywall. Because of the lawsuit, which Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has refused to participate in, she’s been engaged in a game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole in response to Elsevier winning court orders demanding the shuttering of the popular site’s domain name. The site allows anybody, not just academics, to access tens of millions of scholastic research articles for free. When Ars interviewed Elbakyan and learned that she had a similar philosophy to Swartz, she had already altered the site’s domain from sci-hub.org to sci-hub.io and changed others because of a court order blocking the .org domain. Now that domain, registered with Chinese registrar Now.cn, has also been killed. That has forced the site to move to sci-hub.bz and sci-hub.cc. This cat-and-mouse domain game is reminiscent of the decade-long game the admins of The Pirate Bay have been playing. When one domain gets lost to a court order, the site springs up on another. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Piracy site for academic journals playing game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole

FDA flexes regulatory muscles, says vaping, e-cigs now under its control

(credit: Flickr/ecig click ) The US Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it has extended its authority and will now regulate electronic cigarettes, hookah tobacco, cigars, and other tobacco products under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act . The regulatory move, first proposed in 2014, is largely aimed at protecting kids from tobacco and nicotine products. The result is that e-cigs and the other products will now be subject to the same federal regulations as regular cigarettes. These regulations include some relatively uncontroversial rules such as a ban on selling e-cigs to minors (which some states have already done), requiring a photo ID to buy e-cigs, not selling e-cigs out of vending machines, and a ban on free e-cig samples. But the regulations also require that e-cigarette manufactures register with the agency and put any new devices through a pre-market regulatory approval process. By “new,” the FDA means any novel devices put on the market after February 15, 2007. Devices released before then will be grandfathered into the regulations. However, in the relatively young e-cig market, the vast majority of current products were introduced after 2007 and will be subject to the approval process. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FDA flexes regulatory muscles, says vaping, e-cigs now under its control

The Wheel of Time turns… into a “cutting-edge TV series”

Cover art for the first Wheel of Time novel. (credit: Tor Books) After a rough false start , it looks like Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic The Wheel of Time will be coming to television after all. The news was delivered on the series’ Google+ page by Jordan’s widow, Harriet McDougal, who owns the copyright to the novels and has controlled the franchise’s direction since Jordan’s death in 2007. We have few details about the project at this point, aside from assurances that a “major studio” will have more to share soon: Wanted to share with you exciting news about The Wheel of Time . Legal issues have been resolved. The Wheel of Time will become a cutting edge TV series! I couldn’t be more pleased. Look for the official announcement coming soon from a major studio —Harriet Optioning The Wheel of Time makes sense, given the appetite for TV adaptations of dense, sprawling fantasy series. HBO’s Game of Thrones and Starz’s Outlander have both been successful, and Wheel of Time is a firmly established property that has the added benefit of actually being a finished story already. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Wheel of Time turns… into a “cutting-edge TV series”

4U Storage Pods offer 240TB of storage for 3.6¢/GB

That’s a lot of hard disks. (credit: Backblaze) For the last few years, we’ve looked at the hard disk reliability numbers from cloud backup and storage company Backblaze, but we’ve not looked at the systems it builds to hold its tens of thousands of hard disks. In common with some other cloud companies, Backblaze publishes the specs and designs of its Storage Pods, 4U systems packed with hard disks, and today it announced its sixth generation design , which bumps up the number of disks (from 45 to 60) while driving costs down even further. The first design, in 2009, packed 45 1.5TB disks into a 4U rackable box for a cost of about 12¢ per gigabyte. In the different iterations that have followed, Backblaze has used a number of different internal designs—sometimes using port multipliers to get all the SATA ports necessary, other times using PCIe cards packed with SATA controllers—but it has stuck with the same 45 disk-per-box formula. The new system marks the first break from that setup. It uses the same Ivy Bridge Xeon processor and 32GB RAM of the version 5, adding extra controllers and port multipliers to handle another 15 disks for 60 in total. The result is a little long—it overhangs the back of the rack by about four inches—but it’s packed full of storage. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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4U Storage Pods offer 240TB of storage for 3.6¢/GB

“Nuclear” exploit kit service cashes in on demand from cryptoransomware rings

The web console for Nuclear, the customer-friendly malware-as-a-service platform. Some Nucleus infrastructure operating on DigitalOcean servers was recently disrupted. (credit: Check Point) Security researchers at Cisco Talos and Check Point have published reports detailing the inner workings of Nuclear, an “exploit kit” Web service that deployed malware onto victims’ computers through malicious websites. While a significant percentage of Nuclear’s infrastructure has been recently disrupted, the exploit kit is still operating—and looks to be a major contributor to the current crypto-ransomware epidemic. Introduced in 2010, Nuclear has been used to target millions of victims worldwide, giving attackers the ability to tailor their attacks to specific locations and computer configurations. Though not as widely used as the well-known Angler exploit kit , it has been responsible for dropping Locky and other crypto-ransomware onto over 140,000 computers in over 200 countries, according to statistics collected by Check Point (PDF). The Locky campaign appeared to be placing the greatest demand on the Nuclear pay-to-exploit service. Much of Talos’ data on Nuclear comes from tracking down the source of its traffic—a cluster of “10 to 15” IP addresses that were responsible for “practically all” of the exploit infrastructure. Those addresses were being hosted by a single cloud hosting provider—DigitalOcean. The hosting company’s security team confirmed the findings to Talos and took down the servers—sharing what was on them with security researchers. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Nuclear” exploit kit service cashes in on demand from cryptoransomware rings

Sony PS4K is codenamed NEO, features upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM—report

Sony may be tight-lipped for now, but it’s looking increasingly likely that it will release an updated version of the PlayStation 4 later this year. So far the rumoured console has gone under the moniker PS4K or PS4.5, but a new report from gaming site GiantBomb suggests that the codename for the console is “NEO,” and it even provides hardware specs for the PlayStation 4’s improved CPU, GPU, and higher bandwidth memory. Original PS4 NEO CPU 8 Jaguar Cores @ 1.6GHz 8 Jaguar Cores @ 2.1GHz GPU AMD GCN, 18 CUs @ 800MHz Improved AMD GCN, 36 CUs @ 911MHz Memory 8GB GDDR5, 176GB/s 8GB GDDR5, 218GB/s Those specs include a CPU clock speed bump from 1.6GHz to 2.1Ghz, an improved AMD GPU with 36 Compute Units (CU) running at 911MHz, and a memory bandwidth bump up to 218GB/s. While GiantBomb noted that the CPU cores remain based on AMD’s Jaguar architecture—which was originally a chip developed for laptops—the GPU specs tie into recent rumours that AMD had landed big design wins for its new Polaris architecture. Should the PS4 NEO GPU feature 36 CUs, that would mean around 2304 stream processors—effectively doubling the amount from the old chip. According to TechPowerUp , those specs are extremely similar to AMD’s Polaris 10 “Ellesmere” chip, which is rumoured to be used in an upcoming standalone Radeon R9 480 graphics card. While AMD has refused to comment on the scuttlebutt—telling Ars “we do not comment on rumour or speculation”—the company has noted in the past that the focus of Polaris is on power efficiency and ” console-class gaming on a thin-and-light notebook .” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony PS4K is codenamed NEO, features upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM—report

Out-of-date apps put 3 million servers at risk of crypto ransomware infections

(credit: Dr F. Eugene Hester, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) More than 3 million Internet-accessible servers are at risk of being infected with crypto ransomware because they’re running vulnerable software, including out-of-date versions of Red Hat’s JBoss enterprise application , researchers from Cisco Systems said Friday. About 2,100 of those servers have already been compromised by webshells that give attackers persistent control over the machines, making it possible for them to be infected at any time, the Cisco researchers reported in a blog post . The compromised servers are connected to about 1,600 different IP addresses belonging to schools, governments, aviation companies, and other types of organizations. Some of the compromised servers belonged to school districts that were running the Destiny management system that many school libraries use to keep track of books and other assets. Cisco representatives notified officials at Destiny developer Follett Learning of the compromise, and the Follett officials said they fixed a security vulnerability in the program. Follett also told Cisco the updated Destiny software also scans computers for signs of infection and removes any identified backdoors. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Out-of-date apps put 3 million servers at risk of crypto ransomware infections

Chrome 50 ends support for Windows XP, OS X 10.6, other old versions

Google Chrome version 50 was released to the browser’s stable channel yesterday, and in addition to a handful of new features and security fixes , the update also ends support for a wide range of operating systems that have been supported since Chrome launched on those platforms. Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7, and OS X 10.8 are no longer supported. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since Google promised last November to end support for these older OS versions in April of 2016. Old versions of Chrome installed on these OSes won’t stop working (for now), but they’ll no longer receive updates and there’s no guarantee that things like Google account sign-in and data syncing will continue to work. If you’re still using one of these operating systems, you have a couple of options. One is to upgrade to a newer OS, assuming your hardware can handle it. Security patches for Windows XP stopped in April of 2014 , and patches for OS X 10.6 stopped a few months before that . Updates for OS X 10.7 and 10.8 ended roughly when versions 10.10 and 10.11 were released, respectively, since Apple’s unofficial policy is to provide security fixes for the most recent OS X release and the two previous releases. Windows Vista is still getting bare-minimum security patches from Microsoft, but that ends in April of 2017 . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chrome 50 ends support for Windows XP, OS X 10.6, other old versions

Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines

A botnet that enslaved about 4,000 Linux computers and caused them to blast the Internet with spam for more than a year has finally been shut down. Known as Mumblehard, the botnet was the product of highly skilled developers . It used a custom “packer” to conceal the Perl-based source code that made it run, a backdoor that gave attackers persistent access, and a mail daemon that was able to send large volumes of spam. Command servers that coordinated the compromised machines’ operations could also send messages to Spamhaus requesting the delisting of any Mumblehard-based IP addresses that sneaked into the real-time composite blocking list , or CBL, maintained by the anti-spam service. “There was a script automatically monitoring the CBL for the IP addresses of all the spam-bots,” researchers from security firm Eset wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “If one was found to be blacklisted, this script requested the delisting of the IP address. Such requests are protected with a CAPTCHA to avoid automation, but OCR (or an external service if OCR didn’t work) was used to break the protection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Amazon cloud has 1 million users and is near $10 billion in annual sales

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (credit: Dan Farber ) Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become a $10 billion business this year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders this week. While Amazon as a whole “became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales” in 2015, Amazon Web Services will hit the $10 billion mark “at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone,” Bezos wrote. AWS is used by more than 1 million people from “organizations of every size across nearly every industry,” he wrote. AWS launched in March 2006 with the Simple Storage Service (S3). It expanded with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a few months later, letting customers rent virtual machines over the Internet. The service allowed developers to obtain computing capacity on demand without having to operate their own servers, and over the years, many startups have built online businesses with Amazon’s data centers and services providing the back-end infrastructure. It’s not just small companies relying on Amazon, though, as big names like Adobe, Capital One, GE, MLB Advanced Media, Netflix , and Pinterest use the online platform. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

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