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This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out Of Thin Air

An anonymous reader shares an article on Fast Co Design (edited and condensed for clarity): Researchers at University of Washington’s Sensor Lab have created the WISP, or Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform: a combination sensor and computing chip that doesn’t need a battery or a wired power source to operate. Instead, it sucks in radio waves emitted from a standard, off-the-shelf RFID reader — the same technology that retail shops use to deter shoplifters — and converts them into electricity. The WISP isn’t designed to compete with the chips in your smartphone or your laptop. It has about the same clock speed as the processor in a Fitbit and similar functionality, including embedded accelerometers and temperature sensors. It has about the same bandwidth as Bluetooth Low Energy mode, the wireless power-sipping technology which drives most Bluetooth speakers and wireless headphones. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out Of Thin Air

Dutch Police Seize Encrypted Communication Network With 19,000 Users

An anonymous reader writes: Dutch police have seized and shut down Ennetcom, an encrypted communications network with 19, 000 users, according to Reuters. The network’s 36-year-old owner, Danny Manupassa, has also been arrested, and faces charges of money laundering and illegal weapons possession, while the information obtained in the seizure may also be used for other criminal prosecutions. “Police and prosecutors believe that they have captured the largest encrypted network used by organized crime in the Netherlands, ” prosecutors said in a statement. “Although using encrypted communications is legal, ” Reuters reports, “many of the network’s users are believed to have been engaged in ‘serious criminal activity, ‘ said spokesman Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor’s office, which noted that the company’s modified phones have repeatedly turned up in cases involving drugs, criminal motorcycle gangs, and gangland killings. A spokesman for the National Prosecutor’s office “declined to comment on whether and how police would be able to decrypt information kept on the servers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dutch Police Seize Encrypted Communication Network With 19,000 Users

MongoDB Config Error Exposed 93M Mexican Voter Records

An anonymous reader cites an article on CSOOnline: A 132 GB database, containing the personal information on 93.4 million Mexican voters has finally been taken offline. The database sat exposed to the public for at least eight days after its discovery by researcher Chris Vickery, but originally went public in September 2015. Vickery, who works as a security researcher at Kromtech, discovered the MongoDB instance on April 14, but had difficulty tracking down the person or company responsible for placing the voter data on Amazon’s AWS. He first reached out to the U.S. State Department, as well as the Mexican Embassy, but had little success. The database contains all of the information that Mexican citizens need for their government-issued photo IDs that enable them to vote. Along with their municipality, and district information, the database records include the voter’s name, address, voter ID number, date of birth, the names of their parents, occupation, and more. Given that the database has been online since September 2015, it isn’t clear how many people have accessed the records. Additionally, the actual owner of the account hosting the data remains unknown. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MongoDB Config Error Exposed 93M Mexican Voter Records

New Metal Foam Armor Obliterates Bullets To Dust On Impact

HughPickens.com writes: Discovery Magazine reports that researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a super strong armor material that literally turns bullets to dust upon impact. The armor plating is made in part from composite metal foams, or CMFs, which are both lighter and stronger than traditional metal plating used in body and vehicle armor. The armor — only an inch thick — features a ceramic strike face, Kevlar backing, and CMFs in the energy-absorbing middle layer. “We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters, ” says Afsaneh Rabiei. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. Other applications include space exploration and shipping nuclear waste which both require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation. A video shows a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor-piercing projectile that was fired using standard testing procedures established by the Department of Justice for evaluating armor types. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Metal Foam Armor Obliterates Bullets To Dust On Impact

Outdated and Vulnerable WordPress, Drupal Versions Contributed To Panama Papers Breach

An anonymous reader quotes a report from WordPress Tavern: Authorities have not yet identified the hacker behind the Panama Papers breach, nor have they isolated the exact attack vector. It is clear that Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that protected the assets of the rich and powerful by setting up shell companies, had employed a dangerously loose policy towards web security and communications. The firm ran its unencrypted emails through an outdated (2009) version of Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access. Outdated open source software running the frontend of the firm’s websites is also now suspected to have provided a vector for the compromise. Forbes has identified outdated WordPress and Drupal installations as security holes that may have led to the data leak. [WordPress Tavern Editor Sarah Gooding] found that the firm’s WordPress-powered site is currently running on version 4.1 (released in December 2014), based on its version of autosave.js, which is identical to the autosave.js file shipped in 4.1. The main site is also loading a number of outdated scripts and plugins. Its active theme is a three-year-old version of Twenty Eleven (1.5), which oddly resides in a directory labeled for /twentyten/. The Mossack Fonseca client portal changelog.txt file is public, showing that its Drupal installation hasn’t been updated for three years. Since the release of version 7.23, the software has received 25 security updates, which means that the version it is running includes highly critical known vulnerabilities that could have given the hacker access to the server. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Outdated and Vulnerable WordPress, Drupal Versions Contributed To Panama Papers Breach

WhatsApp Enables End-To-End Encryption For All Forms of Communications By Default

Popular instant messaging app WhatsApp, on Tuesday, announced that it is turning on end-to-end encryption for all its users by default. The company says that every call a user makes, every text message they send, all photos and videos they share will now be more secure. Furthermore, the encryption status of any chat is visible under the chat’s preferences screen. The announcement comes a little over a year after the Facebook-owned company partnered with Open Whisper Systems, a nonprofit software group that develops collaborative open source projects with a mission to “make private communication simple.” The end-to-end encryption feature is available on the latest version of the app. In a blog post, Open Whisper Systems further explains the feature: Once a client recognizes a contact as being fully e2e capable, it will not permit transmitting plaintext to that contact, even if that contact were to downgrade to a version of the software that is not fully e2e capable. This prevents the server or a network attacker from being able to perform a downgrade attack. In a blog post, WhatsApp writes: While WhatsApp is among the few communication platforms to build full end-to-end encryption that is on by default for everything you do, we expect that it will ultimately represent the future of personal communication. WhatsApp has also made available the technical details about how the two companies implemented this feature (PDF). For those of you who haven’t heard of WhatsApp, it’s an instant messaging and voice calling app. The free service, which is available across all popular platforms, is used by more than a billion people worldwide every month. A report on Wired says that a team of only 15 engineers enabled this security feature for over a billion users. Privacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian rightfully adds, “Google has no excuse.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WhatsApp Enables End-To-End Encryption For All Forms of Communications By Default

Free Wi-Fi Program in Los Angeles Fails to Provide Free Wi-Fi

The Los Angeles Time found no internet connectivity in 24 public locations, despite a three-year, $500, 000 grant to provide them with free Wi-Fi service. Investigations both last year and again in March found that none of the 18+ locations checked were able to successfully connect to the internet, prompting a PUC investigation that confirmed only two of the hotspots were working. The grant was part of a $315 million state-wide program using surcharges on utility bills to promote high-quality communication services, though in Los Angeles most of the money for “underserved” areas was being directed to outreach and education. The Wi-Fi company’s executive director said maintaining their networks had proved to be difficult, though one economist argued it would’ve been more productive to give net-access subsidies directly to the poor, a program the FCC recently voted to expand. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Free Wi-Fi Program in Los Angeles Fails to Provide Free Wi-Fi

Sony’s Ultra 4K Streaming Service Launching On April 4; Titles Priced At $30

Janko Roettgers reports for Variety: Sony is launching its 4K movie streaming service called Ultra next month: Consumers will be able to buy movies from the service, and stream to supported Sony 4K TV sets, starting April 4. The new service will offer 4K HDR movies to stream, including extras that have previously been able only on physical discs. Ultra ties into UltraViolet, the cloud locker service backed by Sony. Consumers will be able to upgrade SD and HD quality movies from their UltraViolet cloud locker for $12 to $15, respectively. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sony’s Ultra 4K Streaming Service Launching On April 4; Titles Priced At $30

Atari Vault Hits Steam, Play 100 Classic Games On PC

An anonymous reader quotes an article on SlashGear: Classic and retro video game fans will be eager to hear that Atari Vault has just landed on PC via Steam, making it the easiest way possible to enjoy 100 of the most iconic arcade and home console titles from the early generation of gaming. This eliminates the need to use emulators and ROMs to enjoy games like Asteroids, Centipede, Pitfall, and Pong, not to mention it being cheaper than buying several included titles individually. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Atari Vault Hits Steam, Play 100 Classic Games On PC

Cinema-Quality Unity Engine ‘Adam’ Demo Claims To Run Real-Time On GeForce GTX 980

MojoKid writes: This week at GDC 2016 the team at Unity revealed their stable release of the Unity 5.3.4 game engine along with a beta of Unity 5.4. There are a number of upgrades included with Unity 5.4 including in-editor artist workflow improvements, VR rendering pipeline optimizations, improved multithreaded rendering, customizable particles which can use Light Probe Proxy Volumes (LPPV) to add more realistic lighting models and the ability to drop in textures from tools like Quixel DDo Painter. But for a jaw-dropping look at what’s possible with the Unity 5.4 engine, check out the short film “Adam” that Unity has developed to demo it. The film showcases all of Unity Engine 5.4’s effects and gives a great look at what to expect from Unity-based games coming in 2016. Unity will showcase the full film at Unite Europe 2016 in Amsterdam. But what’s most impressive about Adam perhaps is that Unity says that this is all being run in real-time at 1440p resolution on just an upper-midrange GeForce GTX 980 card. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cinema-Quality Unity Engine ‘Adam’ Demo Claims To Run Real-Time On GeForce GTX 980