Tag: yorker-vanity

How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)

Aurich Lawson On October 24, the country of Georgia took an unusual step: it posted to the Web a 27-page writeup  (PDF), in English, on how it has been under assault from a hacker allegedly based in Russia. The paper included details of the malware used, how it spread, and how it was controlled. Even more unusually, the Georgians released pictures of the alleged hacker—taken with his own webcam after the Georgians hacked the hacker with the help of the FBI and others. The story itself, which we covered briefly earlier this week , is fascinating, though it remains hard to authenticate and is relayed in a non-native English that makes for some tough reading. But what caught my eye about the whole cloak-and-dagger tale is the broader points it makes about hacking, jurisdiction, and the powerful surveillance devices that our computers have become. It’s also an example of how hacks and the alleged hackers behind them today play an increasing role in upping geopolitical suspicions between countries already wary of one another. Georgia and Russia have of course been at odds for years, and their conflict came to a head in a brief 2008 war; Russia still maintains a military presence in two tiny breakaway enclaves that Georgia claims as its own. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)

Curiosity’s first chem test: Sands of Mars taste a lot like volcano

NASA/JPL After a few dry runs, the Curiosity rover has now put its chemistry set to use at a site called the Rock Garden. For the first time, we’ve operated an X-ray diffraction system on another planet, telling us something about the structure of the minerals in the Martian soil. The first results tell us the sand the rover has driven through contains some material that wouldn’t be out of place near a volcano on Earth. Curiosity comes equipped with a scoop that lets it pick up loose soil from the Martian surface and drop it into a hatch on the main body. From there, the samples can be directed into a variety of chemistry labs. Yesterday, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed the first results obtained by the Chemistry and Mineralogy (or CheMin) instrument, the first time anything of this kind has been operated on another planet. We have a lot of ways to look at the composition of the material on Mars’ surface. We can look at the absorption of light by materials (including from orbit), which can tell us a lot about its likely composition. The rover itself has a number of spectrometers, which can also tell us about the chemical composition of rocks, as well as wet and dry chemistry labs. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Curiosity’s first chem test: Sands of Mars taste a lot like volcano

Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

Facebook officials told a blogger to keep their discussions with him private as they investigate claims he acquired names and e-mail addresses belonging almost one million account holders for $5 through a publicly available service online. “Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation,” member’s of Facebook’s platform policy team said during a tape-recorded telephone conversation, according to a blog post published by Bogomil Shopov, who describes himself as a “community and technology geek” who lives in Prague, Czech Republic. “It is a secret that we are even having this conversation.” Shopov said Facebook officials set up the conversation after an earlier blog post claiming he purchased data for one million Facebook users online for just $5. The blogger said it was impossible for him to determine exactly how recent the data was, although several of the entries he checked contained accurate e-mail addresses for people he knew. In addition to containing names and e-mail addresses, the cache he purchased also contained profile IDs. In an e-mail to Ars, Shopov said he suspects the data came from a third-party developer. The website selling the information has since removed the post that advertised the data, but for the time being it’s still available in Google cache . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook tries cloaking probe into data leak involving 1 million accounts

$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal

A prototype of Parallella. The final version will be the size of a credit card. Adapteva A month ago, we told you about a chipmaker called Adapteva that turned to Kickstarter in a bid to build a new platform that would be the size of a Raspberry Pi and an alternative to expensive parallel computing platforms. Adapteva needed at least $750,000 to build what it is calling “Parallella”—and it has hit the goal. Today is the Kickstarter deadline, and the project is up to more than $830,000  with a few hours to go. ( UPDATE : The fundraiser hit $898,921 when time expired.) As a result, Adapteva will build 16-core boards capable of 26 gigaflops performance, costing $99 each. The board uses RISC cores capable of speeds of 1GHz each. There is also a dual-core ARM A9-based system-on-chip, with the 16-core RISC chips acting as a coprocessor to speed up tasks. Adapteva is well short of its stretch goal of $3 million, which would have resulted in a 64-core board hitting 90 gigaflops, and built using a more expensive 28-nanometer process rather than the 65-nanometer process used for the base model. The 64-core board would have cost $199. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal

Apple updates iPad with Lightning, A6X, “global” LTE support

At a special media event on Tuesday, Apple announced that it would begin shipping a new fourth-generation iPad on November 2. The updated device features Apple’s new Lightning connector introduced on the iPhone 5 and fifth-generation iPod touch. In addition, it will also include a custom-designed A6X processer and a newer Qualcomm 4G LTE baseband chip that is compatible with more LTE networks around the globe. The revision comes just six months before Apple typically launches new iPad hardware around late March or early April. However, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple was “putting its foot on the gas” and revising the iPad even faster than before. Jacqui Cheng The new A6X processor is built around the custom ARM core Apple designed for the iPhone 5, which offers twice the processing performance of the A5X. However, it has apparently included some changes to the graphics cores used, as Apple claims it also has double the graphics performance as well. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple updates iPad with Lightning, A6X, “global” LTE support

Dept. of Veterans Affairs spent millions on PC software it couldn’t use

Rolling out new software to a few thousand users is an involved process for any organization. But installing software that affects hundreds of thousands of PCs as part of a response to a data breach while under embarrassing scrutiny is a task that would challenge even the most well-managed IT departments. And, apparently, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ answer to that challenge was to sweep it under the rug. After removable hard disks containing unencrypted personal identifying information of  26 million military veterans  were stolen from the home of a VA employee in 2006, then-Secretary of Veterans Affairs   R. James Nicholson mandated that the VA’s Office of Information Technology install encryption software on all of the department’s notebook and desktop computers. But while the VA purchased 400,000 licensees for Symantec’s Guardian Edge encryption software, more than 84 percent of those licenses—worth about $5.1 million, including the maintenance contracts for them—remain uninstalled, a  VA Inspector General’s audit  has found. The VA’s OIT purchased 300,000 licenses and maintenance agreements for Guardian Edge in 2006 and continued to pay for maintenance on those licenses for the next five years. And in 2011, the VA purchased 100,000 more software licenses from Symantec and extended maintenance on all 400,000 licenses for two years. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Dept. of Veterans Affairs spent millions on PC software it couldn’t use

Analyst calls AMD “un-investable,” downgrades rating

Another day, and AMD inches even closer to irrelevance . Just one day after the company posted pretty terrible quarterly earnings (“Net loss $157 million, loss per share $0.21, operating loss $131 million”), followed by a 16 percent drop in the company’s stock price and job cuts of 1,800 (15 percent of its global workforce), two financial analysts have now downgraded the company. It certainly doesn’t help things that the company’s CFO resigned abruptly last month, either. In a financial analysis report released Friday, Bernstein Research‘s Stacy Rasgon wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Analyst calls AMD “un-investable,” downgrades rating