yorker-vanity – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

7 million unsalted MD5 passwords leaked by Minecraft community Lifeboat

(credit: Lifeboat ) As security breaches go, they don’t get more vexing than this: 7 million compromised accounts that protected passwords using woefully weak unsalted MD5 hashes, and the outfit responsible, still hadn’t disclosed the hack three months after it came to light. And as if that wasn’t enough, the service recommended the use of short passwords. That’s what Motherboard reported Tuesday about Lifeboat , a service that provides custom, multiplayer environments to gamers who use the Minecraft mobile app. The data circulating online included the e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 7 million Lifeboat accounts. The mass compromise was discovered by Troy Hunt, the security researcher behind the Have I been pwned? breach notification site. Hunt said he had acquired the data from someone actively involved in trading hacked login credentials who has provided similar data in the past. Hunt reported that some of the plaintext passwords users had chosen were so weak that he was able to discover them simply by posting the corresponding MD5 hash into Google. As if many users’ approach to passwords were lackadaisical itself, Lifeboat’s own Getting started guide recommended “short, but difficult to guess passwords” because “This is not online banking.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
7 million unsalted MD5 passwords leaked by Minecraft community Lifeboat

4U Storage Pods offer 240TB of storage for 3.6¢/GB

That’s a lot of hard disks. (credit: Backblaze) For the last few years, we’ve looked at the hard disk reliability numbers from cloud backup and storage company Backblaze, but we’ve not looked at the systems it builds to hold its tens of thousands of hard disks. In common with some other cloud companies, Backblaze publishes the specs and designs of its Storage Pods, 4U systems packed with hard disks, and today it announced its sixth generation design , which bumps up the number of disks (from 45 to 60) while driving costs down even further. The first design, in 2009, packed 45 1.5TB disks into a 4U rackable box for a cost of about 12¢ per gigabyte. In the different iterations that have followed, Backblaze has used a number of different internal designs—sometimes using port multipliers to get all the SATA ports necessary, other times using PCIe cards packed with SATA controllers—but it has stuck with the same 45 disk-per-box formula. The new system marks the first break from that setup. It uses the same Ivy Bridge Xeon processor and 32GB RAM of the version 5, adding extra controllers and port multipliers to handle another 15 disks for 60 in total. The result is a little long—it overhangs the back of the rack by about four inches—but it’s packed full of storage. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original article here:
4U Storage Pods offer 240TB of storage for 3.6¢/GB

“Nuclear” exploit kit service cashes in on demand from cryptoransomware rings

The web console for Nuclear, the customer-friendly malware-as-a-service platform. Some Nucleus infrastructure operating on DigitalOcean servers was recently disrupted. (credit: Check Point) Security researchers at Cisco Talos and Check Point have published reports detailing the inner workings of Nuclear, an “exploit kit” Web service that deployed malware onto victims’ computers through malicious websites. While a significant percentage of Nuclear’s infrastructure has been recently disrupted, the exploit kit is still operating—and looks to be a major contributor to the current crypto-ransomware epidemic. Introduced in 2010, Nuclear has been used to target millions of victims worldwide, giving attackers the ability to tailor their attacks to specific locations and computer configurations. Though not as widely used as the well-known Angler exploit kit , it has been responsible for dropping Locky and other crypto-ransomware onto over 140,000 computers in over 200 countries, according to statistics collected by Check Point (PDF). The Locky campaign appeared to be placing the greatest demand on the Nuclear pay-to-exploit service. Much of Talos’ data on Nuclear comes from tracking down the source of its traffic—a cluster of “10 to 15” IP addresses that were responsible for “practically all” of the exploit infrastructure. Those addresses were being hosted by a single cloud hosting provider—DigitalOcean. The hosting company’s security team confirmed the findings to Talos and took down the servers—sharing what was on them with security researchers. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Follow this link:
“Nuclear” exploit kit service cashes in on demand from cryptoransomware rings

Office up, Surface up, cloud booming in Microsoft’s $20.5 billion quarter

Microsoft posted revenue of $20.5 billion in the third quarter of its 2016 financial year, down 6 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Operating income was $5.3 billion, a 20 percent drop, net income was $3.8 billion, down 25 percent, and earnings per share were $0.47, a 23 percent decline. Over the past few quarters, Microsoft and other tech companies have reported significant impact from the high value of the US dollar, and have offered equivalent financial figures that show what their numbers would have been had the value of foreign earnings not been eroded by this conversion. This currency impact was estimated as reducing revenue by about $0.8 billion. The company also reports that there was a $1.5 billion impact from a combination of revenue deferrals due to Windows 10 upgrades and restructuring charges. Excluding this impact, and assuming constant currency values, the company says that its revenue was $22.1 billion (up 5 percent), operating income was $6.8 billion (up 10 percent), and net income was $5.0 billion (up 6 percent). The commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate—the forecast number that former Steve Ballmer dismissed as ” bullshit “—crept up to $10.0 billion; three months ago, it was estimated at $9.4 billion. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Volkswagen makes it official—it’s buying back 500,000 2.0L diesels

(credit: Spanish Coches ) In San Francisco this morning, US District Judge Charles Breyer said Volkswagen Group would buy back nearly 500,000 2.0L diesel vehicles which were discovered in September to have software that illegally disabled the emissions control system during normal driving conditions. VW Group is facing some 600 lawsuits that Judge Breyer is overseeing collectively, and the German automaker was compelled by court order to present a plan for fixing the faulty vehicles by today. Specifics of the plan will be hammered out in the coming months. Volkswagen will also set up a fund for people who bought certain diesel Jettas, Golfs, Passats, Beetles, and Audi A3s after 2009. Breyer said this would offer customers “substantial compensation,” on top of the car buyback . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Taken from:
Volkswagen makes it official—it’s buying back 500,000 2.0L diesels

Sony PS4K is codenamed NEO, features upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM—report

Sony may be tight-lipped for now, but it’s looking increasingly likely that it will release an updated version of the PlayStation 4 later this year. So far the rumoured console has gone under the moniker PS4K or PS4.5, but a new report from gaming site GiantBomb suggests that the codename for the console is “NEO,” and it even provides hardware specs for the PlayStation 4’s improved CPU, GPU, and higher bandwidth memory. Original PS4 NEO CPU 8 Jaguar Cores @ 1.6GHz 8 Jaguar Cores @ 2.1GHz GPU AMD GCN, 18 CUs @ 800MHz Improved AMD GCN, 36 CUs @ 911MHz Memory 8GB GDDR5, 176GB/s 8GB GDDR5, 218GB/s Those specs include a CPU clock speed bump from 1.6GHz to 2.1Ghz, an improved AMD GPU with 36 Compute Units (CU) running at 911MHz, and a memory bandwidth bump up to 218GB/s. While GiantBomb noted that the CPU cores remain based on AMD’s Jaguar architecture—which was originally a chip developed for laptops—the GPU specs tie into recent rumours that AMD had landed big design wins for its new Polaris architecture. Should the PS4 NEO GPU feature 36 CUs, that would mean around 2304 stream processors—effectively doubling the amount from the old chip. According to TechPowerUp , those specs are extremely similar to AMD’s Polaris 10 “Ellesmere” chip, which is rumoured to be used in an upcoming standalone Radeon R9 480 graphics card. While AMD has refused to comment on the scuttlebutt—telling Ars “we do not comment on rumour or speculation”—the company has noted in the past that the focus of Polaris is on power efficiency and ” console-class gaming on a thin-and-light notebook .” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Follow this link:
Sony PS4K is codenamed NEO, features upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM—report

One of the “most important” shipwreck treasures ever discovered

It wasn’t exactly what divers searching for sunken ships expect to find. When the Texel Divers Club glimpsed a package in the sand-buried remains of a sunken ship off the island of Texel in the Wadden Sea, they brought it to the surface—only to discover it held a wealthy lady’s most prized possessions : a silk damask dress, velvet embroidered purse, perfume ball, lice comb, stockings, and books bound in beautiful leather. Kaap Skil Museum A lice comb made from cow horn. 6 more images in gallery Preserved beneath a layer of sand since the 17th century, the dress was probably for everyday wear and was of a style frequently seen in paintings from the late Renaissance. Made of rich silk damask, it likely belonged to a woman of the upper classes. Despite its fanciness, experts believe it was for everyday wear because it wasn’t beaded or embroidered with golden or silver threads. The woman’s books were stamped with the emblem of King Charles I, of the Stuart royal family from England, which suggests she may even have been royalty. It’s exceedingly rare to find such a well-preserved collection of textiles and makes this find one of the most important of its kind in Europe. The find is also a boon for historians who want to understand what everyday life was like during this era. What we see in paintings is not always an accurate record of people’s lives. Finding this cache of typical (albeit expensive) clothing verifies that privileged women of the era really did dress in the ways we might expect and carry tiny metal balls of scented, dried flowers to mask body odors that would have been common in a culture where people didn’t bathe very often—and never got any medical remedies for all the funguses and bacterial infections that flourish on human bodies. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Help save 17 years of PC game modding history

The FileFront logo, as it existed before the 2010 renaming to GameFront. One of the Web’s oldest and largest repositories for classic and current PC gaming mods will be shutting down for good later this month. GameFront announced today that its servers will be going offline on April 30 and that “any files not downloaded by that time will no longer be accessible.” “Since our founding as FileLeech almost 20 years ago, we have always strived to offer the best file hosting alongside quality gaming content,” former GameFront staffer Ron Whitaker wrote. “To all of our fans who have supported us throughout the years, we thank you for making us your destination for gaming files. Despite name changes, ownership changes, and staff changes, you have always made our jobs rewarding and fun.” The shutdown is a blow to those who rely on GameFront for access to tens of thousands of mods, demos, patches, tools, maps, skins, and add-ons for PC games dating back to the mid-’90s. It’s especially significant to those looking for mods and patches for older games with smaller communities or defunct publishers, which can be hard or impossible to find elsewhere. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the article:
Help save 17 years of PC game modding history

Ancient shopping lists point to widespread Bible-era literacy

The fortress in Arad. Around 2,600 years ago, in a military fortress in Southern Judah, a man called Eliashib sent and received messages written in ink on fragments of pottery. The contents were mundane, mainly concerning food supplies, but they provide evidence of literacy that could inform the debate about when major Biblical texts were written. Eliashib’s correspondence happened on the cusp of the fall of the Kingdom of Judah, which took place during 588-87 BCE. The date plays an important role in an ongoing debate among Biblical scholars: were the first Biblical texts produced before the fall of Jerusalem—as events were unfolding—or afterwards? One part of the debate hinges on the literacy levels at the time: if the pre-demolition population wasn’t generally literate, it wouldn’t have been likely that important historical texts were created in this era. But Eliashib and his colleagues in the Arad military fortress provide some evidence that literacy in this era may have been more widespread than previously thought. A multidisciplinary group of researchers from Tel Aviv University have combined their expertise in applied math, Jewish history, and archaeology to assess communications from the fortress, trying to establish how many people, and of what rank, were writing messages. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See original article:
Ancient shopping lists point to widespread Bible-era literacy

Using synthetic nervous system, paralyzed man is first to move again

(credit: Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center/ Batelle ) With a paralyzing spinal cord injury, the biological wiring that hooks up our controlling brains to our useful limbs gets snipped, leading to permanent loss of sensation and control and usually a lifetime of extra health care. Researchers have spent years working to repair those lost connections, allowing paralyzed patients to sip coffee and enjoy a beer with robotic limbs controlled by just their minds. Now, researchers have gone a step further, allowing a paralyzed person to control his own hand with just his mind. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers report using a “ neural bypass ” that reconnects a patient’s mental commands for movement to responsive muscles in his limbs, creating somewhat of a synthetic nervous system. The pioneering patient, Ian Burkhart, a 24-year-old man left with quadriplegia after a diving accident almost six years ago, can once again move his hand. In the pilot study he could control movement of individual fingers, grasp big and small objects, swipe a credit card, and play Guitar Hero . The advance may open the door to restorative treatments for paralyzed individuals, allowing them to have independent movement—and lives. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue Reading:
Using synthetic nervous system, paralyzed man is first to move again