science – Page 221

Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phone Arena: On Tuesday, Apple is expected to report its fiscal second quarter earnings. In that report, the tech titan will reportedly announce that it is holding $250 billion in cash. If you think that this is a lot of money, you’re absolutely right. According to Marketwatch.com, this is more than the foreign currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined. Looking at it another way, at current valuations Apple could purchase all of the outstanding shares of Walmart and Procter & Gamble and still have money left over. It has taken Apple only 4 and half years to double its cash hoard. During the fiscal first quarter of 2017, Apple was adding $3.6 million to its cash position every hour. It finished the quarter ending in December with $246.09 billion in cash. 90% of the money is banked overseas, which means that Apple would be one of the companies to benefit the most from President Trump’s plan to offer a one time tax break on repatriated funds. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas

Encrypted WhatsApp Message Recovered From Westminster Terrorist’s Phone

Bruce66423 brings word that a terrorist’s WhatsApp message has been decrypted “using techniques that ‘cannot be disclosed for security reasons’, though ‘sources said they now have the technical expertise to repeat the process in future.'” The Economic Times reports: U.K. security services have managed to decode the last message sent out by Khalid Masood before he rammed his high-speed car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed to death a police officer at the gates of Parliament on March 22. The access to Masood’s message was achieved by what has been described by security sources as a use of “human and technical intelligence”… The issue of WhatsApp’s encrypted service, which is closed to anyone besides the sender and recipient, had come under criticism soon after the attack. “It’s completely unacceptable. There should be no place for terrorists to hide. We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other, ” U.K. home secretary Amber Rudd had said. Security sources say the message showed the victim’s motive was military action in Muslim countries, while the article adds that though ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, “no evidence has emerged to back this up.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Encrypted WhatsApp Message Recovered From Westminster Terrorist’s Phone

NASA Is Developing 3D-Printed Chain Mail to Protect Ships and Astronauts

Chain mail was an essential tool for medieval warriors hoping to avoid a quick (or slow) death by a sword. But NASA engineers hope a similar material , with a few modern upgrades, could prove to be just as useful for spacecraft and astronauts looking to survive the rigors of outer space. Read more…

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NASA Is Developing 3D-Printed Chain Mail to Protect Ships and Astronauts

Intel’s Optane Memory Makes Cheap Hard Drives as Fast as Expensive SSDs

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

WikiLeaks Releases New CIA Secret: Tapping Microphones On Some Samsung TVs

FossBytes reports: The whistleblower website Wikileaks has published another set of hacking tools belonging to the American intelligence agency CIA. The latest revelation includes a user guide for CIA’s “Weeping Angel” tool… derived from another tool called “Extending” which belongs to UK’s intelligence agency MI5/BTSS, according to Wikileaks. Extending takes control of Samsung F Series Smart TV. The highly detailed user guide describes it as an implant “designed to record audio from the built-in microphone and egress or store the data.” According to the user guide, the malware can be deployed on a TV via a USB stick after configuring it on a Linux system. It is possible to transfer the recorded audio files through the USB stick or by setting up a WiFi hotspot near the TV. Also, a Live Liston Tool, running on a Windows OS, can be used to listen to audio exfiltration in real-time. Wikileaks mentioned that the two agencies, CIA and MI5/BTSS made collaborative efforts to create Weeping Angel during their Joint Development Workshops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WikiLeaks Releases New CIA Secret: Tapping Microphones On Some Samsung TVs

Anbox Can Run Android Apps Natively On Linux (In A Container)

Slashdot user #1083, downwa, writes: Canonical engineer Simon Fels has publicly released an Alpha version of Anbox. Similar to the method employed for Android apps on ChromeOS, Anbox runs an entire Android system (7.1.1 at present) in an LXC container. Developed over the last year and a half, the software promises to seamlessly bring performant Android apps to the Linux desktop. After installing Anbox (based on Android 7.1.1) and starting Anbox Application Manager, ten apps are available: Calculator, Calendar, Clock, Contacts, Email, Files, Gallery, Music, Settings, and WebView. Apps run in separate resizeable windows. Additional apps (ARM-native binaries are excluded) can be installed via adb. Installation currently is only supported on a few Linux distributions able to install snaps. Contributions are welcome on Github. In a blog post Simon describes it as “a side project” that he’s worked on for over a year and a half. “There were quite a few problems to solve on the way to a really working implementation but it is now in a state that it makes sense to share it with a wider audience.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Anbox Can Run Android Apps Natively On Linux (In A Container)

Physicists Observe ‘Negative Mass’

Physicists have created a fluid with “negative mass, ” which accelerates towards you when pushed. From a report on BBC: In the everyday world, when an object is pushed, it accelerates in the same direction as the force applied to it; this relationship is described by Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion. But in theory, matter can have negative mass in the same sense that an electric charge can be positive or negative. Prof Peter Engels, from Washington State University (WSU), and colleagues cooled rubidium atoms to just above the temperature of absolute zero (close to -273C), creating what’s known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, particles move extremely slowly, and following behaviour predicted by quantum mechanics, acting like waves. They also synchronise and move together in what’s known as a superfluid, which flows without losing energy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Physicists Observe ‘Negative Mass’

Holiday Inn Cops to Massive Credit Card Data Breach

It seems like every day there’s news of another significant data breach, so here’s today’s: An internal investigation by the InterContinental Hotel Group, which owns Holiday Inn, has revealed that guests at more than a thousand of their hotels had their credit card details stolen. The company identified malware on… Read more…

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Holiday Inn Cops to Massive Credit Card Data Breach

How Do You Keep a 13,600-Year-Old Woman From Looking Like Wilma Flintstone?

Recreations of Paleolithic people at the museum usually look like the typical Geico commercial caveman. Famed Otzi the Iceman , for example, has the face of someone who’d be fun to disembowel a moose with, but whose conversation might be just a little gauche. A new facial reconstruction of a Stone Age woman who lived… Read more…

Cylance Accused of Distributing Fake Malware Samples To Customers To Close Deals

New submitter nyman19 writes: Ars Technica reports how security vendor Cylance has been distributing non-functioning malware samples to prospective customers in order to “close the sale[s] by providing files that other products wouldn’t detect” According to the report: “A systems engineer at a large company was evaluating security software products when he discovered something suspicious. One of the vendors [Cylance] had provided a set of malware samples to test — 48 files in an archive stored in the vendor’s Box cloud storage account. The vendor providing those samples was Cylance, the information security company behind Protect, a ‘next generation’ endpoint protection system built on machine learning. In testing, Protect identified all 48 of the samples as malicious, while competing products flagged most but not all of them. Curious, the engineer took a closer look at the files in question — and found that seven weren’t malware at all.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

Tag: science