Cities beefing up their smart infrastructure have tapped the ubiquitous streetlamp to track traffic data and measure pollution . Now, in Los Angeles, some streetlights will help keep the communications network intact after an emergency. Read more…
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LA’s New Streetlamps Will Keep Cell Service Running After an Earthquake
An anonymous reader writes: Ransomware comes in various forms, and not all ransomware encrypts files — some just block computers until the ransom is paid. When the file encryption feature is included, the encryption key is usually sent to the malware’s C&C server, which is controlled by the crooks — but not always. Researchers have recently analyzed a crypto-ransomware sample that demonstrated an alternative method of encrypting files and delivering the key (i.e., the information required to discover the right key) to the criminal behind the scheme — it doesn’t need to contact a C&C to receive an encryption key or to send it to the crook. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Crypto-Ransomware Encrypts Files "Offline"
Not that you need another reminder that government cybersecurity is screwed, but here we are: After a four-year federal probe, contractors will pay a combined $12.75 million in civil penalties to settle a suit alleging that they let Russian programmers write military code. Read more…
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IT Contractors Who Let Russians Write Military Code Will Pay $12.7 Million
Crews working on water mains below New York City’s Greenwich Village made an appropriately spooky find for the week after Halloween: A 19th-century burial vault containing the remains of least a dozen people. Read more…
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Workers Discover 19th-Century Burial Vault With a Dozen Human Skeletons Under Manhattan
In the ‘90s, Sennheiser asked it engineers to make the best headphones ever and the result was 300 sets of the legendary Orpheus , each pair of which sold for $16, 000. Now, Sennheiser has created an ever better-sounding successor to those luxurious cans—but they’ll set you back $55, 000. Read more…
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Sennheiser’s Built Probably the World’s Best Headphones—But They Cost $55,000
AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson replaces Catalyst. 16 more images in gallery AMD is taking the fight directly to Nvidia with the long-overdue launch of a new driver software package and UI. Called Radeon Software Crimson, the new software replaces the old AMD Catalyst Control Center (CCC) with a flat modern UI, and simplified menus. Most importantly, AMD is promising that a new major version of the software will be released every year, with minor versions arriving every month. Each new major version will have a different, colour-themed name. The software is due to roll out later this year. Crimson has been developed in QT, a cross-platform application framework that AMD says is much quicker than the old .NET framework CCC used to use. It claims that start-up time has been reduced from eight seconds to 0.6 seconds on a mid-performance AMD E-350-based laptop; high-end desktops will be even faster. Crimson is the first in a number of software changes that AMD is implementing following the restructuring of its graphics group into the Radeon Technologies Group under the leadership of Raja Koduri. For now, AMD is only talking about the UI changes in Crimson, which is dramatically different from the old CCC. (More will be revealed about underlying driver changes at a later date, but AMD was vague about when that might be.) The new flat design features five tabs at the top for Gaming, Video, Display, Eyefinity, and System, while then buttons at the bottom for Updates, Preferences, and Notifications. In the middle, taking up the lion’s share of the window, there’s a carousel that displays announcements and promotions about games when not being used to display settings. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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AMD Radeon Software Crimson: A new name and a new look for Catalyst
An anonymous reader writes with a story that might warm the hearts of anyone just outside the service area of a decent internet provider: Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by [friends Chris Brems and Chris Sutton], and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How a Group of Rural Washington Neighbors Created Their Own Internet Service
Techdirt comments approvingly on a new project from Harvard Law School, called Free the Law, which in a joint effort with a company called Ravel to scan and post in nicely searchable format all federal and state court decisions, and put them all online, for free. As Techdirt puts it, This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton — and the public is left out. This new project is designed to give much more widespread access to the public. And it sounds like they’re really going above and beyond to make it truly accessible, rather than just dumping PDFs online. … Harvard “owns” the resulting data (assuming what’s ownable), and while there are some initial restrictions that Ravel can put on the corpus of data, that goes away entirely after eight years, and can end earlier if Ravel “does not meet its obligations.” Anything that helps disrupt the stranglehold of the major legal publishers seems like a good thing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Harvard Project Aims To Put Every Court Decision Online, For Free
itwbennett writes: Researchers from Kaspersky Lab and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service have obtained the last set of encryption keys from command-and-control servers that were used by CoinVault and Bitcryptor, ‘ writes Lucian Constantin. ‘Those keys have been uploaded to Kaspersky’s ransomware decrypt or service that was originally set up in April with a set of around 750 keys recovered from servers hosted in the Netherlands. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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CoinVault and Bitcryptor Ransomware Victims Can Now Recover Their Files For Free
Music, if it is to be perfect, can’t be perfectly timed. A perfectly timed musical composition may sound mistimed to our stupid human brains, especially if it’s synthesized. Read more…
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Here’s Why Perfectly-Timed Synthesized Music Can Sound Slightly Wrong