Tag: science

Ultra-Low Power Radio Transceiver Enables Truly Wireless Earbuds

First time accepted submitter irl_4795 (4020741) writes At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona NXP Semiconductors will demonstrate Near Field Magnetic Induction technology in a truly wireless earbud including wireless audio streaming from ear to ear. From the article: “The wireless technology being used to enable truly wireless earbuds is based on Near Field Magnetic Induction (NFMI). NFMI features important properties such as ultra-low power consumption and the ability to create a very reliable network in and around the human body, with both high-quality audio and data streaming supported over small distances. An additional integration advantage is also that it requires few external components. NFMI is a short range technology and as such also creates a private network, making it is much less susceptible to interference than 2.4 GHz transceivers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ultra-Low Power Radio Transceiver Enables Truly Wireless Earbuds

Blu-Ray Players Hackable Via Malicious Discs

An anonymous reader writes: Some Blu-Ray disc interactive features use a Java variant for UIs and applications. Stephen Tomkinson just posted a blog discussing how specially created Blu-Ray discs can be used to hack various players using exploits related to their Java usage. He hacked one Linux-based, network-connected player to get root access through vulnerabilities introduced by the vendor. He did the same thing against Windows Blu-Ray player software. Tomkinson was then able to combine both, along with detection techniques, into a single disc. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Blu-Ray Players Hackable Via Malicious Discs

Microsoft Finally Allows Customers To Legally Download Windows 7 ISOs

MojoKid writes: It’s long been a pet peeve of many end users that Microsoft has made it such a challenge to procure a legitimate ISO image of its various operating systems. It seems like the company should have no problem offering them in an easy-to-find spot on its website, because after all, it’s not like they can be taken utilized without a legal key. Sometimes, people simply lose the disc or ISO they had, and so it shouldn’t be such a challenge to get a replacement. Fortunately, with a new feature on the Microsoft site, you are now able to get that replacement Windows 7 ISO. However, it’s behind a bit of protection. You’ll need to provide your legal product code, and then the language, in order to go through to the download page. If you’ve somehow lost your key but are still using the OS that it’s tied to, you can retrieve it through a few different third party tools. However, it does seem like not all valid keys work properly just yet, since some users are reporting valid keys throwing errors or not enabling a download for some reason. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Finally Allows Customers To Legally Download Windows 7 ISOs

Inventors Revolutionize Beekeeping

wombatmobile writes For more than 5, 000 years, apiarists donned protective suits and lit bundles of grass to subdue swarms of angry bees while they robbed their hives of precious, golden honey. Now two Australian inventors have made harvesting honey as easy as turning a tap — literally. Cedar Anderson and his father Stuart have just been rewarded for a decades worth of inventing and refining with a $2 million overnight success on Indiegogo. Their Flow Hive coopts bees to produce honey in plastic cells that can be drained and restored by turning a handle, leaving the bees in situ and freeing apiarists from hours of smoke filled danger time every day. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Inventors Revolutionize Beekeeping

Intel To Rebrand Atom Chips Along Lines of Core Processors

angry tapir writes Intel has announced that going forward it will use style of branding for its Atom chips that is similar to its branding for Core chips. Atom CPUs will have the X3, X5 and X7 designations, much like with the Core i3, i5 and i7 brands. An Atom X3 will deliver good performance, X5 will be better and X7 will be the best, an Intel spokeswoman said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel To Rebrand Atom Chips Along Lines of Core Processors

FBI Offers $3 Million Reward For Russian Hacker

mpicpp sends word that the FBI and the U.S. State Department have announced the largest-ever reward for a computer hacking case. They’re offering up to $3 million for information leading to the arrest of Evgeniy Bogachev, a 31-year-old Russian national. Bogachev is the alleged administrator of the GameOver Zeus botnet, estimated to have affected over a million computers, causing roughly $100 million in damages. “Bogachev has been charged by federal authorities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with conspiracy, computer hacking, wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering… He also faces federal bank fraud conspiracy charges in Omaha, Nebraska related to his alleged involvement in an earlier variant of Zeus malware known as ‘Jabber Zeus.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Offers $3 Million Reward For Russian Hacker

AMD Unveils Carrizo APU With Excavator Core Architecture

MojoKid writes: AMD just unveiled new details about their upcoming Carrizo APU architecture. The company is claiming the processor, which is still built on Global Foundries’ 28nm 28SHP node like its predecessor, will nonetheless deliver big advances in both performance and efficiency. When it was first announced, AMD detailed support for next generation Radeon Graphics (DX12, Mantle, and Dual Graphics support), H.265 decoding, full HSA 1.0 support, and ARM Trustzone compatibility. But perhaps one of the biggest advantages of Carrizo is the fact that the APU and Southbridge are now incorporated into the same die; not just two separates dies built into and MCM package. This not only improves performance, but also allows the Southbridge to take advantage of the 28SHP process rather than older, more power-hungry 45nm or 65nm process nodes. In addition, the Excavator cores used in Carrizo have switched from a High Performance Library (HPL) to a High Density Library (HDL) design. This allows for a reduction in the die area taken up by the processing cores (23 percent, according to AMD). This allows Carrizo to pack in 29 percent more transistors (3.1 billion versus 2.3 billion in Kaveri) in a die size that is only marginally larger (250mm2 for Carrizo versus 245mm2 for Kaveri). When all is said and done, AMD is claiming a 5 percent IPC boost for Carrizo and a 40 percent overall reduction in power usage. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Unveils Carrizo APU With Excavator Core Architecture

TrueCrypt Audit Back On Track After Silence and Uncertainty

itwbennett writes: In October 2013 Cryptography professor Matthew Green and security researcher Kenneth White launched a project to perform a professional security audit of TrueCrypt, partly prompted by the leaks from Edward Snowden that suggested the NSA was engaged in efforts to undermine encryption. Their report, published in April 2014, covered the first phase of the audit. Phase two was supposed to involve a formal review of the program’s encryption functions, with the goal of uncovering any potential errors in the cryptographic implementations—but then the unexpected happened. In May 2014, the developers of TrueCrypt, who had remained anonymous over the years for privacy reasons, abruptly announced that they were discontinuing the project and advised users to switch to alternatives. Now, almost a year later, the project is back on track. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TrueCrypt Audit Back On Track After Silence and Uncertainty

Resistant Bacterial Infection Outbreak At California Hospital

puddingebola writes From the article: “A potentially deadly “superbug” resistant to antibiotics has infected seven patients, including two who died, and more than 160 others were exposed at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center through contaminated medical instruments, the hospital revealed. The drug-resistant superbug known as CRE was likely transmitted to the Los Angeles patients by contaminated medical scopes during endoscopic procedures that took place between October 2014 and January 2015, a university statement said. ” UCLA says the infections occurred via contaminated endoscopes that were sterilized according to the manufacturer’s specifications. (Note: beware autoplaying video ad; adjust your volume accordingly.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Resistant Bacterial Infection Outbreak At California Hospital

FreeBSD-Current Random Number Generator Broken

First time accepted submitter bobo the hobo writesThe FreeBSD random number has been discovered to be generating possibly predictable SSH keys and SSL certificates for months. Time to regenerate your keys and certs if using FreeBSD-Current. A message to the freebsd-current mailing list reads in part: “If you are running a current kernel r273872 or later, please upgrade your kernel to r278907 or later immediately and regenerate keys. I discovered an issue where the new framework code was not calling randomdev_init_reader, which means that read_random(9) was not returning good random data. read_random(9) is used by arc4random(9) which is the primary method that arc4random(3) is seeded from.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FreeBSD-Current Random Number Generator Broken