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Breakthrough Starshot to fund planet-hunting hardware for telescope

Enlarge / The VISIR instrument before its impending upgrades. (credit: ESO ) Today, the European Southern Observatory announced an agreement with Breakthrough Starshot, the group dedicated to sending hardware to return data from the nearest stars. The agreement would see Breakthrough Starshot fund the development of new hardware that would allow the ESO’s Very Large Telescope to become an efficient planet hunter. The goal is presumably to confirm there’s something in the Alpha Centauri system worth sending hardware to image. Breakthrough Starshot’s audacious plan involves using ground-based lasers and light sails to accelerate tiny craft to a significant fraction of the speed of light. This would allow the craft to visit the stars of the Alpha Centauri system within decades. The company’s goal is to get data back to Earth while many of the people alive today are still around. Getting meaningful data requires a detailed understanding of the Alpha Centauri system, which is where the new telescope hardware will come in. Last year, scientists confirmed the existence of an exoplanet orbiting the closest star of the three-star system, Proxima Centauri. But we’ll want to know significantly more about it, its orbit, and whether there are signs of any other planets in the system before we send spacecraft. The other two stars of Alpha Centauri are also worth a closer look. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

AT&T imposes another $5 rate hike on grandfathered unlimited data plans

Enlarge AT&T is raising the price of its grandfathered unlimited data plans by $5 a month, the second such increase in the past year. The price increase affects longtime mobile customers who have held onto unlimited data plans for years after AT&T stopped selling them to new subscribers. The latest price increase was reported by DSLReports yesterday , and AT&T confirmed the move to Ars. “If you have a legacy unlimited data plan, you can keep it; however, beginning in March 2017, it will increase by $5 per month,” AT&T said. The unlimited data price had been $30 a month for seven years, until AT&T raised it to $35 in February 2016. The price increase this year will bring it up to $40. That amount is just for data: Including voice and texting, the smartphone plans cost around $90 a month. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T imposes another $5 rate hike on grandfathered unlimited data plans

Shamoon disk-wiping malware can now destroy virtual desktops, too

Enlarge / A computer infected by Shamoon System is unable to find its operating system. (credit: Palo Alto Networks) There’s a new variant of the Shamoon disk-wiping malware that was originally unleashed on Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company in 2012, and it has a newly added ability to destroy virtual desktops, researchers said. The new strain is at least the second Shamoon variant to be discovered since late November, when researchers detected the return of disk-wiping malware after taking a more than four-year hiatus. The variant was almost identical to the original one except for the image that was left behind on sabotaged computers. Whereas the old one showed a burning American flag, the new one displayed the iconic photo of the body of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee boy who drowned as his family tried to cross from Turkey to Greece. Like the original Shamoon, which permanently destroyed data on more than 30,000 work stations belonging to Saudi Aramco , the updates also hit one or more Saudi targets that researchers have yet to name. According to a blog post published Monday night by researchers from Palo Alto networks, the latest variant has been updated to attack virtual desktops, which have emerged as one of the key protections against Shamoon and other types of disk-wiping malware. The update included usernames and passwords related to the virtual desktop infrastructure products from Huawei, which can protect against a destructive malware through its ability to load snapshots of wiped systems. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Shamoon disk-wiping malware can now destroy virtual desktops, too

Two India-based call center employees blew whistle on massive phone scam

Enlarge / This is a call center in New Dehli, India, not the Phoenix 007 operation that was busted. (credit: ILO ) Last year’s unraveling of the massive India-based telephone scam ring may have been helped by a phone call to a Federal Trade Commission lawyer. According to a Tuesday report in The New York Times , the bust seemingly was aided by the efforts of two teenage employees from one of the companies. The pair blew the whistle on their former employer, the Phoenix 007 call center that’s based outside of Mumbai. The workers reached Betsy Broder of the FTC after being shuffled from the Internal Revenue Service’s main switchboard. Indian and American authorities believe that this call center, along with several others, was part of a massive ring to call Americans in the United States and trick them into ponying up thousands of dollars in fraudulent fees. This criminal operation is believed to have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

A new AI tool created by Google and Oxford University researchers could significantly improve the success of lip-reading and understanding for the hearing impaired. In a recently released paper on the work, the pair explained how the Google DeepMind-powered system was able to correctly interpret more words than a trained human expert. From a report: To accomplish the task, a cohort of scientists fed thousands of hours of TV footage — 5000 to be precise — from the BBC to a neural network. It was made to watch six different TV shows, which aired between the period of January 2010 and December 2015. This included 118, 000 difference sentences and some 17, 500 unique words. To understand the progress, it successfully deciphered words with a 46.8 percent accuracy. The neural network had to recognize the same based on mouth movement analysis. The under 50 percent accuracy might seem laughable to you but let me put things in perspective for you. When the same set of TV shows were shown to a professional lip-reader, they were able to decipher only 12.4 percent of words without error. Thus, one can understand the great difference in the capability of the AI as compared to a human expert in that particular field. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

Some hacked e-mails, documents from Putin advisor confirmed as genuine

Enlarge Recently a cache of 2,337 e-mails from the office of a high-ranking advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin was dumped on the Internet after purportedly being obtained by a Ukrainian hacking group calling itself CyberHunta . The cache shows that the Putin government communicated with separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine, receiving lists of casualties and expense reports while even apparently approving government members of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. And if one particular document is to be believed, the Putin government was formulating plans to destabilize the Ukrainian government as early as next month in order to force an end to the standoff over the region, known as Donbass. Based on reporting by the Associated Press’s Howard Amos and analysis by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab , at least some of the e-mails—dumped in a 1-gigabyte Outlook .PST mailbox file—are genuine. Amos showed e-mails in the cache to a Russian journalist, Svetlana Babaeva, who identified e-mails she had sent to Surkov’s office. E-mail addresses and phone numbers in some of the e-mails were also confirmed. And among the documents in the trove of e-mails is a scan of Surkov’s passport (above), as well as those of his wife and children. A Kremlin spokesperson denied the legitimacy of the e-mails, saying that Surkov did not have an e-mail address. However, the account appears to have been used by Surkov’s assistants, and the dump contains e-mails with reports from Surkov’s assistants. The breach, if ultimately proven genuine, would appear to be the first major publicized hack of a Russian political figure. And in that instance, perhaps this could be a response to the hacking of US political figures attributed to Russia. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ubuntu 16.10: Convergence is in a holding pattern; consistency’s here instead

Enlarge / Rumor has it staffer Megan Geuss is now considering Ubuntu 16.10 solely based on codename . (credit: itsfoss.com / YouTube ) There’s plenty in Ubuntu 16.10 that makes it worth the upgrade, though nothing about Canonical’s latest release is groundbreaking. This less experimental but worthwhile update continues to refine and bug-fix what at this point has become the fastest, stablest, least-likely-to-completely-change-between-point releases of the three major “modern” Linux desktops. Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offers stability and speed today, it’s not long for this world. Ubuntu 16.10 is the seventh release since the fabled Unity 8 and its accompanying Mir display server were announced. Yet in Ubuntu 16.10, there’s still no Unity 8 nor Mir. Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubuntu 16.10: Convergence is in a holding pattern; consistency’s here instead

Russia Reveals ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow

Russia is flexing its military muscle as tensions with the US simmer in the wake of a heated third presidential debate, where Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton called Republican candidate Donald Trump a “ puppet ” for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, Russia has declassified the first image of its new thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile. Read more…

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Russia Reveals ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow

Using Rowhammer bitflips to root Android phones is now a thing

Enlarge / An LG Nexus 5 at the moment it is rooted using Rowhammer-induced bit flips. (credit: van der Veen et al.) Researchers have devised an attack that gains unfettered “root” access to a large number of Android phones by exploiting a relatively new type of bug that allows adversaries to manipulate data stored in memory chips. The breakthrough has the potential to make millions of Android phones vulnerable, at least until a security fix is available, to a new form of attack that seizes control of core parts of the operating system and neuters key security defenses. Equally important, it demonstrates that the new class of exploit dubbed Rowhammer can have malicious and far-reaching effects on a much wider base of devices than was previously known, including those running ARM chips. Previously, some experts believed Rowhammer attacks that altered specific pieces of security-sensitive data weren’t reliable enough to pose a viable threat because exploits depended on chance hardware faults or advanced memory-management features that could be easily adapted to repel the attacks. Now, an international team of academic researchers is challenging those assumptions by demonstrating a Rowhammer exploit that alters crucial bits of data in a way that completely roots name brand Android devices from LG, Motorola, Samsung, OnePlus, and possibly other manufacturers. An app containing the researchers’ rooting exploit requires no user permissions and doesn’t rely on any vulnerability in Android to work. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Using Rowhammer bitflips to root Android phones is now a thing

Feds seized 50TB of data from NSA contractor suspected of theft

The National Security Operations Center at NSA, photographed in 2012—the nerve center of the NSA’s “signals intelligence” monitoring. (credit: National Security Agency ) In a new Thursday court filing , federal prosecutors expanded their accusations against a former National Security Agency contractor. Federal investigators seized at least 50 terabytes of data from Harold Thomas Martin III, at least some of which was “national defense information.” If all of this data was indeed classified, it would be the largest such heist from the NSA, far larger than what former contractor Edward Snowden took. Prosecutors also said that Martin should remain locked up and noted that he will soon be charged with violations of the Espionage Act . That law, which dates back nearly a century, is the same law that was used to charge Chelsea Manning and Snowden, among others. If convicted, violators can face the death penalty. United States Attorney Rod Rosenstein and two other prosecutors laid out new details in the case against Martin, whose arrest only became public earlier this month . Martin had been a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton and possessed a top-secret clearance. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds seized 50TB of data from NSA contractor suspected of theft

Ken May

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