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75-year-old human cloned for the production of stem cells

sharyn morrow Several years ago, as the therapeutic potential of stem cells was first being recognized, the only way to create them was to harvest cells from an early embryo. That embryo could come from the large collection of those that weren’t used during in vitro fertilization work. But to get one that was genetically matched to the person who needed the therapy, researchers had to create an embryo that’s a genetic duplicate of that individual—meaning they had to clone them. With the development of induced stem cells, work on this approach largely fell by the wayside—induced cells were easier to create and came without the ethical baggage. But there are some lingering doubts that the induced cells are truly as flexible as the ones derived from an embryo, leading a number of labs to continue exploring cloning for therapeutic purposes. Now, a collaboration of US and Korean researchers have succeeded in creating early embryos from two adult humans and converted the embryos to embryonic stem cells. The method used is called somatic cell nuclear transplant. It involves taking an unfertilized egg and removing its nucleus, thereby deleting the DNA of the egg donor. At the same time, a nucleus from the cell of a donor is carefully removed and injected into the egg. After some time, during which the environment of the egg resets the developmental status of the donor’s DNA, cell division is activated. If the process is successful, the end result is a small cluster of cells that starts along the path of forming an embryo. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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75-year-old human cloned for the production of stem cells

Fingerprint lock in Samsung Galaxy 5 easily defeated by whitehat hackers

SRLabs The heavily marketed fingerprint sensor in Samsung’s new Galaxy 5 smartphone has been defeated by whitehat hackers who were able to gain unfettered access to a PayPal account linked to the handset. The hack, by researchers at Germany’s Security Research Labs , is the latest to show the drawbacks of using fingerprints, iris scans, and other physical characteristics to authenticate an owner’s identity to a computing device. While advocates promote biometrics as a safer and easier alternative to passwords, that information is leaked every time a person shops, rides a bus, or eats at a restaurant, giving attackers plenty of opportunity to steal and reuse it. This new exploit comes seven months after a separate team of whitehat hackers bypassed Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner less than 48 hours after it first became available. “We expected we’d be able to spoof the S5’s Finger Scanner, but I hoped it would at least be a challenge,” Ben Schlabs, a researcher at SRLabs, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “The S5 Finger Scanner feature offers nothing new except—because of the way it is implemented in this Android device—slightly higher risk than that already posed by previous devices.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fingerprint lock in Samsung Galaxy 5 easily defeated by whitehat hackers

After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

Netflix’s decision to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the Comcast network has resulted in significantly better video streaming performance for customers of the nation’s largest broadband provider. Netflix has bemoaned the payment, asking the government to prevent Comcast from demanding such interconnection ” tolls .”But there’s little doubt the interconnection has benefited consumers in the short term. Average Netflix performance for Comcast subscribers rose from 1.51Mbps to 1.68Mbps from January to February, though the interconnection didn’t begin until late February. In data released today, Netflix said average performance on Comcast has now risen further  to 2.5Mbps , a 65 percent increase since January. Comcast’s increased speed allowed it to pass Time Warner Cable, Verizon, CenturyLink, AT&T U-verse, and others in Netflix’s rankings. Comcast remains slower than Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, Charter, and Google Fiber. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

Soon, you’ll be able to use Apple’s CarPlay without buying a whole new car. Apple So far, consoles compatible with Apple’s CarPlay feature have only been integrated into a handful of high-end cars. If you want to use the feature without buying an entirely new vehicle, Alpine Electronics will soon be able to hook you up—Nikkei reports that the company will begin selling a standalone CarPlay console in the US and Europe this fall. The console is “likely” to have a 7-inch display and will reportedly cost between $500 and $700. Alpine already sells a lineup of entertainment and navigation systems , and it’s possible that this new CarPlay-compatible version will offer similar features when there’s no iPhone connected to it. Current CarPlay-compatible vehicles offer the CarPlay interface when an iPhone is connected, but it’s available as an alternative to the automakers’ own software solutions rather than a complete replacement. CarPlay was first demonstrated as “iOS in the Car” at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year and was officially released earlier this year as part of the iOS 7.1 update . It provides access to Apple Maps’ turn-by-turn navigation features, your music and podcasts, and a handful of third-party streaming services approved by Apple; as of this writing, there’s no public API that developers can use to support the feature independently. CarPlay requires a compatible in-dash display and an iPhone 5, 5C, or 5S connected via a Lightning cable. Rumors of a wireless version of CarPlay persist, but it’s not clear whether these first CarPlay-compatible displays will be able to operate wirelessly when (and if) that capability arrives. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Citing two anonymous sources “familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg News reports that the National Security Agency has known about Heartbleed, the security flaw in the OpenSSL encryption software used by a majority of websites and a multitude of other pieces of Internet infrastructure, for nearly the entire lifetime of the bug—“at least two years.” The sources told Bloomberg that the NSA regularly used the flaw to collect intelligence information, including obtaining usernames and passwords from targeted sites. As Ars reported on April 9, there have been suspicions that the Heartbleed bug had been exploited prior to the disclosure of the vulnerability on April 5 . A packet capture provided to Ars by Terrence Koeman , a developer based in the Netherlands, shows malformed Transport Security Layer (TSL) Heartbeat requests that bear the hallmarks of a Heartbleed exploit. Koeman said the capture dates to November of last year. But if the NSA has been exploiting Heartbleed for “at least two years,” the agency would have needed to discover it not long after the code for the TLS Heartbeat Extension was added to OpenSSL 1.0.1, which was released on March 14, 2012. The first “beta” source code wasn’t available until January 3, 2012 . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Appeals court reverses hacker/troll “weev” conviction and sentence [Updated]

Self-portrait by Weev A federal appeals court Friday reversed and vacated the conviction and sentence of hacker and Internet troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer. The case against Auernheimer, who has often been in solitary confinement for obtaining and disclosing personal data of about 140,000 iPad owners from a publicly available AT&T website, was seen as a test case on how far the authorities could go under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that federal prosecutors were invoking against Aaron Swartz. But, in the end, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t squarely address the controversial fraud law and instead said Aeurnheimer was charged in the wrong federal court. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Appeals court reverses hacker/troll “weev” conviction and sentence [Updated]

DNA-based logic gates operate inside cockroach cells

DNA robots crawl across a surface made of DNA. Harvard DNA-based nanotechnology has been around for more than 30 years, but it really took off in 2006, when DNA origami was featured on the cover of Nature . This form of origami, the folding of DNA into 2D and 3D shapes, was more of an art form back then, but scientists are now using the approach to construct nanoscale robots. The basic principle of DNA origami is that a long, single-stranded DNA molecule will fold into a predefined shape through the base-pairing of short segments called staples. All that’s required is to ensure that each staple can find a complementary match to base-pair with at the right location elsewhere in the molecule. This approach can be used to create both 2D and 3D structures. The idea behind the new work is that a DNA origami robot can be programmed to have a specific function based on a key, which can be a protein, a drug, or even another robot. Once the right key and the right robot find each other, the key drives a conformational (structural) change in the robot. The new shape causes the robot to perform a programmed function, such as releasing a drug. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DNA-based logic gates operate inside cockroach cells

Heartbleed vulnerability may have been exploited months before patch

guthrieinator There’s good news, bad news, and worse news regarding the “Heartbleed” bug that affected nearly two-thirds of the Internet’s servers dependent on SSL encryption. The good news is that many of those servers (well, about a third) have already been patched. And according to analysis by Robert Graham of Errata Security, the bug won’t expose the private encryption key for servers “in most software” (though others have said several web server distributions are vulnerable to giving up the key under certain circumstances.) The bad news is that about 600,000 servers are still vulnerable to attacks exploiting the bug. The worse news is that malicious “bot” software may have been attacking servers with the vulnerability for some time—in at least one case, traces of the attack have been found in audit logs dating back to last November. Attacks based on the exploit could date back even further. Security expert Bruce Schneier calls  Heartbleed  a catastrophic vulnerability. “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he said in a  blog post today.  The bug affects how OpenSSL, the most widely used cryptographic library for Apache and nginx Web servers, handles a service of Transport Layer Security called Heartbeat—an extension added to TLS in 2012. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed vulnerability may have been exploited months before patch

LAPD officers monkey-wrenched cop-monitoring gear in patrol cars

Cliff The Los Angeles Police Commission is investigating how half of the recording antennas in the Southeast Division went missing, seemingly as a way to evade new self-monitoring procedures that the Los Angeles Police Department imposed last year. The antennas, which are mounted onto individual patrol cars, receive recorded audio captured from an officer’s belt-worn transmitter. The transmitter is designed to capture an officer’s voice and transmit the recording to the car itself for storage. The voice recorders are part of a video camera system that is mounted in a front-facing camera on the patrol car. Both elements are activated any time the car’s emergency lights and sirens are turned on, but they can also be activated manually. According to the Los Angeles Times , an LAPD investigation determined that around half of the 80 patrol cars in one South LA division were missing antennas as of last summer, and an additional 10 antennas were unaccounted for. Citing a police source, the newspaper said that removing the antennas can reduce the range of the voice transmitters by as much as a third of the normal operating distance. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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LAPD officers monkey-wrenched cop-monitoring gear in patrol cars

Microsoft looking into Xbox 360 emulation through Xbox One

Mark Derricutt When the Xbox One was announced last year, many Xbox 360 owners were upset that the system wouldn’t be backward compatible with 360 games . Now, there’s some indication that Microsoft is looking to remedy this situation through emulation, though the specific timing or form that the emulation will take is still unclear. Microsoft’s still-nebulous plans for Xbox 360 emulation via the Xbox One come from a Q&A session at last week’s Build developers conference , as reported by Kotaku AU . When an audience member asked if there were “plans for an Xbox 360 emulator on Xbox One,” Microsoft Partner Development Lead Frank Savage responded: There are, but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately. It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself. The change in architecture between the Xbox 360’s PowerPC processor and Xbox One’s x86 chip has  long been  suspected as the main reason that the newer system can’t natively play games from its predecessor. The PS4 saw a similar architecture change from the PS3 and also lacks native backward compatibility. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft looking into Xbox 360 emulation through Xbox One