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Submission + - British Government Is Scanning All Internet Devices Hosted In UK (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the government agency that leads the country's cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities. The goal is to assess UK's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to help the owners of Internet-connected systems understand their security posture. "These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact," the agency said. "The NCSC uses the data we have collected to create an overview of the UK's exposure to vulnerabilities following their disclosure, and track their remediation over time."

NCSC's scans are performed using tools hosted in a dedicated cloud-hosted environment from scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk and two IP addresses (18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231). The agency says that all vulnerability probes are tested within its own environment to detect any issues before scanning the UK Internet. "We're not trying to find vulnerabilities in the UK for some other, nefarious purpose," NCSC technical director Ian Levy explained. "We're beginning with simple scans, and will slowly increase the complexity of the scans, explaining what we're doing (and why we're doing it)."

Submission + - Swedish Engineer Creates Playable Accordion From 2 Commodore 64 Computers (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Akesson unveiled a playable accordion—called "The Commodordion" — he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Akesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Åkesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.

So how does the Commodordion work? Åkesson wired up a custom power supply, and when he flips the unit on, both Commodore 64 machines boot (no display necessary). Next, he loads custom music software he wrote from a Commodore Datasette emulator board into each machine. A custom mixer circuit board brings together the audio signals from the two units and measures input from the bellows to control the volume level of the sound output. The bellows, composed of many 5.25-inch floppy disks cut and taped into shape, emit air through a hole when squeezed. A microphone mounted just outside that hole translates the noise it hears into an audio envelope that manipulates the sound output to match. The Commodordion itself does not have speakers but instead outputs its electronic audio through a jack.

Submission + - AstraZeneca Password Lapse Exposed Patient Data (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has blamed “user error” for leaving a list of credentials online for more than a year that exposed access to sensitive patient data. Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity startup SpiderSilk, told TechCrunch that a developer left the credentials for an AstraZeneca internal server on code sharing site GitHub in 2021. The credentials allowed access to a test Salesforce cloud environment, often used by businesses to manage their customers, but the test environment contained some patient data, Hussein said. Some of the data related to AZ&ME applications, which offers discounts to patients who need medications. TechCrunch provided details of the exposed credentials to AstraZeneca, and the GitHub repository containing the credentials was inaccessible hours later.

Submission + - How Sydney Destroyed Its Trams For Love of the Car (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams – some only a few years old – were rolled to the workshops in the city’s eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney’s tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.

The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to “burning hill” at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network “the largest organised vandalism in our nation’s history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. “When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn’t how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia.

Submission + - SPAM: French election: Hollande vows 'response' to Macron hack attack

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

The French media and public have been warned not to spread details about a hacking attack on presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron.

Strict election rules are now in place and breaching them could bring criminal charges, the election commission said.

A trove of documents said to mix genuine files with fake ones was released online shortly before campaigning ended on Friday.

The centrist Mr Macron faces far-right candidate Marine Le Pen on Sunday.

Why is there a ban on spreading the data?

It is part of the restrictions that came into force at midnight local time on Friday.

No campaigning or media coverage of it that could sway the election is allowed until polls close at 20:00 local time (18:00 GMT) on Sunday. Some overseas French territories have already begun voting.

The election commission warned it could be a criminal offence to republish the leaked data.

Enforcing that restriction in the internet age is problematical at best.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Social media giants sued for helping ISIS (torontosun.com)

Submitted by nnet
nnet writes: Social media giants Twitter, Google and Facebook are being sued by the families of victims of the San Bernardino terror attacks.
The lawsuit claims those companies aided ISIS by letting them build their online profile and bolster recruitment.
Fourteen people were killed in the December 2015 attacks by twisted husband-wife Islamist extremists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.

“Without defendants Twitter, Facebook and Google (YouTube), the explosive growth of IS over the last few years into the most feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible,” the suit, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles, alleges.

Submission + - A new use for browser fingerprints: defeating spoofing

Submitted by AnonymousCube
AnonymousCube writes: Researchers at the University of Adelaide have found a new use for browser fingerprints: uncovering and defeating spoofing by web browsers. By using machine learning on browser fingerprints they were able to correctly guess the OS or browser family of a browser 90% of the time, and defeat operating system and browser family spoofing 76% of the time. This was done with small training sets of less than 1000 fingerprints, so accuracy with a much larger training set, like the size of the EFF's Panopticlick database should give even better results; you can help prove this, and see what their site thinks your browser family and OS is, by submitting your fingerprint to their site.

Submission + - Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid

Submitted by DogDude
DogDude writes: National Security Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont
This week, officials from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shared the Grizzly Steppe malware code with executives from 16 sectors nationwide, including the financial, utility and transportation industries, a senior administration official said. Vermont utility officials identified the code within their operations and reported it to federal officials Friday, the official said.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Are Some Great Games Panned And Some Inferior Games Praised? (soldnersecretwars.de) 2

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: A few years ago I bought a multiplayer war game called Soldner that I had never heard of before. (The game is entirely community maintained now and free to download and play at www.soldnersecretwars.de) The professional reviews completely and utterly destroyed Soldner — buggy, bad gameplay, no singleplayer mode, disappointing graphics, server problems and so on. For me and many other players who did give it a chance beyond the first 30 minutes, Soldner turned out to be THE most fun, addictive, varied, sattisfying and multi-featured multiplayer war game ever. It had innovative features that AAA titles like Battlefield and COD did not have at all at the time — fully destructible terrain, walls and buildings, cool physics on everything from jeeps flying off mountaintops to Apache helicopters crashing into Hercules transport aircraft, to dozens of trees being blown down by explosions and then blocking an incoming tank's way. Soldner took a patch or three to become fully stable, but then was just fun, fun, fun to play. So much freedom, so much cool stuff you can do in-game, so many options and gadgets you can play with. By contrast, the far, far simpler — but better looking — Battlefield, COD, Medal Of Honor, CounterStrike war games got all the critical praise, made the tens of millions in profit per release, became longstanding franchises and are, to this day, not half the fun to play that Soldner is. How does this happen? How does a title like Soldner that tried to do more new stuff than the other war games combined get trashed by every reviewer, and then far less innovative and fun to play war games like BF, COD, CS sell tens of millions of copies per release and get rave reviews all around?

Submission + - Atlas V Rocket Launches Sharp-Eyed Earth-Observing Satellite (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A super-powerful Earth-observing spacecraft has finally taken to the skies, nearly two months after a wildfire nixed its first launch attempt. The WorldView-4 satellite lifted off today (Nov. 11) at 1:30 p.m. EST (10:30 a.m. local time; 1830 GMT), riding a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket from Space Launch Complex-3 at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base to a near sun-synchronous, pole-to-pole orbit. In addition, seven tiny cubesats were onboard in a "ridesharing" initiative. All of the cubesats manifested for the WorldView-4 mission are sponsored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency in charge of the United States' spy satellites, and are unclassified technology-demonstration programs. The Atlas-V that lofted WorldView-4 today had been scheduled to launch NASA's InSight Mars lander earlier this year, before issues with one of InSight's instruments delayed the Red Planet probe's liftoff until 2018. WorldView-4 is a multispectral, high-resolution commercial imaging satellite owned and operated by DigitalGlobe of Westminster, Colorado, and built by the aerospace company Lockheed Martin. Its mission is to provide high-resolution color imagery to commercial, government and international customers. Once in operation, WorldView-4 has a global capacity to image 260,000 square miles (680,000 square kilometers) per day.

Submission + - All about life around an M-class star

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Arxiv has a review article on "The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars" (PDF). Although Star Trek had a minor smattering of "M-class planets" — a designation that tells one nothing of substance, "M-class star" is a much more meaningful designation of colour, with two size classes, the dwarfs and the red giants. M-class ("red") giants are not prospective for life — it's a short duration of the life of any star that gets into that state (most won't) and it ends badly for anything not made of tungsten carbide. M-class dwarfs, on the other hand "are our galaxy’s silent majority: they constitute 70% of the stars in the Milky Way and 40% of its stellar mass budget, yet not a single M dwarf is visible to the naked eye. They span nearly an order of magnitude in mass and two orders of magnitude in luminosity. [...] As a spectral class, M dwarfs span a larger range in mass than the next three spectral classes (F,G & K) combined." But probably the most important reason for paying attention to them is their persistence — an M-dwarf of 1/10 the mass of the Sun will burn for around 1000 times the time that the Sun does. No M-dwarf has ever turned into a red giant — there hasn't been enough time.

Therefore, if humanity ever meets an alien species, the odds of them coming from an M-dwarf are already high. If humanity ever meets an alien species that has been around a billion years longer than us and has technology we can't even dream of, then the odds of it coming from an M-dwarf are overwhelmingly high. Clearly, understanding these stars, and the influences of these stars range of properties on their planets and possible inhabitants (including our distant descendants) is a good idea. And this review article will keep you up to date for your next term paper. Or for keeping your SF magnum opus somewhere with a passing acquaintance with reality.

Submission + - Target Passes Walmart As Top US Corporate Installer of Solar Power (electrek.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Target is the top corporate installer of solar power in the USA with 147MW installed on 300 stores. Walmart is close behind with 140MW, while Ikea has installed solar on 90% of its retail locations. The Solar Energy Institute of America (SEIA) report shows over 1,000MW of solar installed in almost 2,000 unique installations by the largest corporate entities in the country. Additionally these groups have more than doubled their installation volume year on year, with 2015 seeing a total of 130MW, while 2016 is projected to be closer to 280MW. Big box retail locations offer some of the best potential spaces for solar power to be installed – on top of square, flat structures and in previously built parking lots. The average size of an installation by a company in this group is about 500kW – 75X the size of an average residential solar installation. The RE100 organization has signed up 81 global corporations (many on the SEIA list) who have pledged 100% renewable energy. “We’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made in improving building efficiencies and reducing environmental impact. Our commitment to installing solar panels on 500 stores and distribution centers by 2020 is evidence of that progress” – said John Leisen, vice president of property management at Target. The geographic breakdown of solar installations is based upon three main drivers – good sunlight, expensive electricity and state level renewable mandates, with Southern California having all three. The northeast USA, with its ">expensive electricity and aggressive clean energy push, has been on par with California (50% of total solar) for commercial installations. A report put together by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) breaks down the various state level laws that support corporations going green – and, without surprise, it becomes clear that the legal support of renewable energy is a definite driver.

Submission + - First New US Nuclear Reactor In 20 Years Goes Live (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Tennessee Valley Authority is celebrating an event 43 years in the making: the completion of the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. In 1973, the TVA, one of the nation's largest public power providers, began building two reactors that combined promised to generate enough power to light up 1.3 million homes. The first reactor, delayed by design flaws, eventually went live in 1996. Now, after billions of dollars in budget overruns, the second reactor has finally started sending power to homes and businesses. Standing in front of both reactors Wednesday, TVA President Bill Johnson said Watts Bar 2, the first US reactor to enter commercial operation in 20 years, would offer clean, cheap and reliable energy to residents of several southern states for at least another generation. Before Watts Bar 2, the last time an American reactor had fired up was in 1996. It was Watts Bar 1--and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it cost $6.8 billion, far greater than the original price tag at $370 million. In the 2000s, some American power companies, faced with growing environmental regulations, eyed nuclear power again as a top alternative to fossil fuels such as coal and oil. A handful of companies, taking advantage of federal loan guarantees from the Bush administration, revived nuclear reactor proposals in a period now known as the so-called "nuclear renaissance." Eventually, nuclear regulators started to green light new reactors, including ones in Georgia and South Carolina. In 2007, the TVA resumed construction on Watts Bar 2, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The TVA originally said it would take five years to complete. The TVA, which today serves seven different southern states, relies on nuclear power to light up approximately 4.5 million homes. Watts Bar 2, the company's seventh operating reactor, reaffirms its commitment to nukes for at least four more decades, Johnson said Wednesday. In the end, TVA required more than five years to build the project. The final cost, far exceeding its initial budget, stood at $4.7 billion.

Submission + - New browser fingerprinting site launched

Submitted by AnonymousCube
AnonymousCube writes: The University of Adelaide and ACEMS has launched a new browser fingerprinting test suite.
On the site you can see what data can be used to track you and how unique your fingerprint is.
The site includes new tests such as detecting software such as Privacy Badger via how social media buttons are disabled and CSS only (no JavaScript or flash) tests to get screen size and installed fonts.

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