An anonymous reader writes: Unfortunately the hard disk drive industry is not ready to go live with Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The technology is yet not reliable enough for mass production. Over the years, producers of hard drives, platters and recording heads have revealed various possible timeframes for commercial availability of drives with HAMR technology. Their predictions were not accurate. The current goalpost is set to year 2018. While solid state disks based on Flash memory keep seeing rapid improvements as well, HDDs still kick butt in scenarios where high areal density is more important than ripping transfer speeds. The areal density of HAMR products is predicted to exceed 1.5 Tb per square inch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tag: score2
Sony Creating Sulfur-Based Batteries With 40% More Capacity Than Li-Ion
MojoKid writes: Since the original iPhone was released in 2007, we have seen some incredible advances in smartphone processing power along with a wealth of feature improvements like faster Wi-Fi and cellular speeds and larger, higher resolution displays. However, battery technology, for the most part, hasn’t kept up. There are a few major battery suppliers but Sony is currently an underdog, commanding just 8 percent of the market for compact lithium-ion batteries. Its three largest competitors — Samsung (SDI), Panasonic and LG Chem — each command around 20 percent of the market. In an effort to change that, Sony is developing a new type of battery chemistry that can boost runtimes by 40 percent compared to lithium-ion batteries of the same volume. Sony’s batteries use a sulfur compound instead of lithium compounds for the positive electrodes, reportedly allowing for much great energy density. Sulfur batteries can also supposedly be made 30 percent smaller than traditional lithium-ion cells while maintaining the same run times. The company is now working to ensure that the new battery chemistry is safe enough for commercial use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the original post:
Sony Creating Sulfur-Based Batteries With 40% More Capacity Than Li-Ion
iPhone Hacker Geohot Builds Self-Driving Car AI
An anonymous reader writes: George Hotz, known for unlocking early iPhones and the PlayStation 3, has developed an autonomous driving system in his garage. “Hotz’s approach isn’t simply a low-cost knockoff of existing autonomous vehicle technology. He says he’s come up with discoveries—most of which he refuses to disclose in detail—that improve how the AI software interprets data coming in from the cameras.” The article has a video with Hotz demonstrating some basic autonomous driving similar to what Tesla rolled out earlier this year. He’s clearly brimming with confidence about what the system can accomplish with more training. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See more here:
iPhone Hacker Geohot Builds Self-Driving Car AI
Developer Claims ‘PS4 Officially Jailbroken’
colinneagle sends word that a developer has claimed to have achieved a jailbreak of the PlayStation 4. Networkworld reports: “If you have a PS4 and want to run homebrew content, then you might be happy to know developer CTurt claimed, “PS4 is now officially jailbroken.” Over the weekend, CTurt took to Twitter to make the announcement. He did not use a jail vulnerability, he explained in a tweet. Instead, he used a FreeBSD kernel exploit. Besides posting “an open source PlayStation 4 SDK” on GitHub, CTurt analyzed PS4’s security twice and explained PS4 hacking. CTurt updated the open source PS4 SDK yesterday; he previously explained that Sony’s proprietary Orbis OS is based on FREEBSD. In the past he released the PS4-playground, which included PS4 tools and experiments using the Webkit exploit for PS4 firmware version 1.76. To put that in context, Sony released version 3.0 in September. However, CTurt claimed the hack could be made to work on newer firmware versions. Other PS4 hackers are reportedly also working on a kernel exploit, yet as Wololo pointed out, it is unlikely there might be more than proof-of-concept videos as the developers continue to tweak the exploit. Otherwise, Sony will do as it has in the past and release a new firmware version. In October 2014, developers nas and Proxima studied the PSVita Webkit exploit, applied it to the PS4, and then released the PS4 proof-of-concept. Shortly thereafter. Sony pushed out new firmware as a patch.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DHS Deployed Plane Above San Bernardino To Scoop Up All Phone Calls After Attack
schwit1 writes: Federal investigators looking into the San Bernardino massacre deployed a spy plane overhead after the attacks in an apparent attempt to find additional suspects. The Department of Homeland Security is said to have put up the single engine craft over the California city and ordered it to make repeated circles overhead. The craft would likely have been equipped with Dirtbox technology which can scan tens of thousands of phones in one go to identify suspects. The report adds to the intrigue about whether or not there were accomplices in the San Bernardino attacks, which took place last Wednesday and were the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
DHS Deployed Plane Above San Bernardino To Scoop Up All Phone Calls After Attack
AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug
An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the antivirus would select the same memory address space every time it would run. If attackers found out the memory space’s address, they could tell their malicious code to execute in the same space, at the same time, and have it execute with root privileges, which most antivirus have on Windows PCs. It’s a basic requirement these days for software programmers to use ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to prevent their code from executing in predictable locations. Affected products: AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky. All “quietly” issued fixes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Continue Reading:
AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug
French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi
Several readers sent word that French newspaper Le Monde got its hands on documents showing the French government is debating two new pieces of legislation that are unfriendly to internet users. The first would ban people from sharing Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency. “This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public Wi-Fi networks.” The second would forbid the use of Tor within France’s borders. “The main problem with such a ban on Tor is that it wouldn’t achieve a whole lot. Would-be terrorists could still access Tor from outside the country, and if they did manage to access Tor from within France I doubt they’re concerned about being arrested for illegal use of the network.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the original post:
French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi
MST3K Kickstarter Poised To Break Kickstarter Record
New submitter the_Bionic_lemming writes: Recently Joel Hodgson, the creator of Mystery Science 3000 — which had a successful run of over 197 shows — has after 15 years launched a kickstarter to relaunch the series. In just over two weeks Joel has been wildly successful in not only having over 25000 fans contribute, but actually scoring the second-highest show kickstarter on record — he has just under two weeks to shoot past the Number 1 kickstarter, Veronica Mars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
MST3K Kickstarter Poised To Break Kickstarter Record
Critical Zen Cart Vulnerability Could Spell Black Friday Disaster For Shoppers
Mark Wilson writes: It’s around this time of year, with Black Friday looming and Christmas just around the corner, that online sales boom. Today security firm High-Tech Bridge has issued a warning to retailers and shoppers about a critical vulnerability in the popular Zen Cart shopping management system. High-Tech Bridge has provided Zen Cart with full details of the security flaw which could allow remote attackers to infiltrate web servers and gain access to customer data. Servers running Zen Cart are also at risk of malware, meaning that hundreds of thousands of ecommerce sites pose a potential danger. Technical details of the vulnerability are not yet being made public, but having notified Zen Cart of the issue High-Tech Bridge says the date of full public disclosure is 16 December. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More:
Critical Zen Cart Vulnerability Could Spell Black Friday Disaster For Shoppers
Even the Dumbest Ransomware Is Almost Unremovable On Smart TVs
An anonymous reader writes: Apparently even the easiest-to-remove ransomware is painfully hard to uninstall from smart TVs, if they’re running on the Android TV platform, and many are. This didn’t happen in a real-world scenario (yet), and was only a PoC test by Symantec. The researcher managed to remove the ransomware only because he enabled the Android ADB tool beforehand, knowing he would infect the TV with the ransomware. “Without this option enabled, and if I was less experienced user, I’d probably still be locked out of my smart TV, making it a large and expensive paper weight, ” said the researcher. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View article:
Even the Dumbest Ransomware Is Almost Unremovable On Smart TVs