A pair of crooks in Oklahoma made more than $400, 000 with a whisper-thin gas-pump credit-card skimmer that they installed in Wal-Mart gas stations, using rental cars while they were doing the installation.
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Whisper-thin gas-pump credit-card skimmers
First time accepted submitter Consistent1 writes “A paywalled article in the “Nature Materials” journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences hopes ‘to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide.’ Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon-based chips used today.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude.
The company says that it’s planning to create 5, 000 more jobs for fulfillment centers around the country, and also has already started hiring 2, 000 new customer service employees. [Read more]
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Amazon: We’re hiring 7,000 new workers in the U.S.
Thirty-one of the city’s parks, plazas, and rec centers will be getting free Wi-Fi within the next year; and the Web giant is paying for equipment costs, installation, and maintenance. [Read more]
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Google to pay $600,000 for free Wi-Fi in San Francisco’s parks
cold fjord writes “I wish it was always this easy. Business Insider reports, ‘Iodized salt is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it. Few people know why it even exists. Iodine deficiency remains the world’s leading cause of preventable mental retardation. According to a new study (abstract), its introduction in America in 1924 had an effect so profound that it raised the country’s IQ. A new NBER working paper from James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David N. Weil finds that the population in iodine-deficient areas saw IQs rise by a full standard deviation, which is 15 points, after iodized salt was introduced…. The mental impacts were unknown, the program was started to fight goiter, so these effects were an extremely fortunate, unintended side effect.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Gained a Decade of Flynn-Effect IQ Points After Adding Iodine To Salt
An anonymous reader writes “Still the most popular open source office suite, Apache OpenOffice 4 has been released, with many new enhancements and a new sidebar, based on IBM Symphony’s implementation but with many improvements. The code still has comments in German but as long as real new features keep coming and can be shared with other office suites no one is complaining.” The sidebar mentioned brings frequently used controls down and beside the actual area of a word-processing doc, say, which makes some sense given how wide many displays have become. This release comes with some major improvements to graphics handling, too; anti-aliasing makes for smoother bitmaps. In conjunction with this release, SourceForge (also under the Slashdot Media umbrella) has announced the launch of an extensions collection for OO. Extensions mean that Open Office can gain capabilities from outside contributors, rather than being wrapped up in large, all-or-nothing updates. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apache OpenOffice 4.0 Released With Major New Features
It sometimes feels like there’s a big data breach in the news every week—but some are far worse than others. This data visulization shows the world’s biggest data breaches to date, and how they compare over time. Read more…
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The World’s Biggest Data Breaches, Visualized
SmartAboutThings writes “Smartphones are susceptible to malware and carriers have enabled NSA snooping, but the prevailing wisdom has it there’s still one part of your mobile phone that remains safe and un-hackable: your SIM card. Yet after three years of research, German cryptographer Karsten Nohl claims to have finally found encryption and software flaws that could affect millions of SIM cards, and open up another route on mobile phones for surveillance and fraud.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Rooting SIM Cards
satuon writes “The popular Ubuntu Forums site is now displaying a message saying there was a security breach. What is currently known: Unfortunately the attackers have gotten every user’s local username, password, and email address from the Ubuntu Forums database. The passwords are not stored in plain text. However, if you were using the same password as your Ubuntu Forums one on another service (such as email), you are strongly encouraged to change the password on the other service ASAP. Ubuntu One, Launchpad and other Ubuntu/Canonical services are NOT affected by the breach.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ubuntuforums.org Hacked
An anonymous reader writes “The U.S. Dept. of Justice has announced that Panasonic and its subsidiary Sanyo have been fined $56.5 million for their roles in price fixing conspiracies involving battery cells and car parts. The fines are part of a larger investigation into the prices of auto parts. Interestingly, 12 people at various companies have been sentenced to jail time, and three more are going to prison. Since the charges are felonies, none of the sentences are shorter than a year and a day. Criminal fines targeting these companies has totaled over $874 million. ‘The conduct of Panasonic, SANYO, and LG Chem resulted in inflated production costs for notebook computers and cars purchased by U.S. consumers. These investigations illustrate our efforts to ensure market fairness for U.S. businesses by bringing corporations to justice when their commercial activity violates antitrust laws.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Jail Time For Price-Fixing Car Parts