Georgia and security experts have accused Russian state-sponsored hackers of breaking into Georgian government and commercial websites as part of a cyber war to supplement Russia’s military operations in South Ossetia
A federal judge has blocked three MIT students from presenting a paper at the Defcon 16 security conference on hacking the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s CharlieCard
system
Google said it has resolved an issue with its contacts system that caused many users of its Gmail service to have trouble accessing their online e-mail. The problems began at about 5.00pm EDT and an announcement on the company’s Gmail Help Centre
site said the issue is now resolved
In about 30 percent, the coils of their DNA carry a glitch, one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions. A paucity of dopamine receptors is linked to an inability to avoid self-destructive behavior such as illicit drug use. But the effects spill beyond such extremes. Children with the genetic variant are unable to learn from mistakes. No matter how many tests they blow by partying the night before, the lesson just doesn’t sink in
Life takes Visa, says the credit card company’s catchy and ubiquitous TV ads. And now, according to a group of security researchers speaking at the DefCon hacker conference Friday in Las Vegas, Medeco high-security locks take Visa, too. As well as MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards. To be more precise, the researchers say that plastic used in all of these credit cards can be easily fashioned into simulated keys that open three kinds of M3 high-security locks made by the Virginia-based Medeco Security Locks company — locks that are used to secure sensitive facilities in places such as the White House, the Pentagon, embassies and other buildings. Virtually all conventional pin-tumbler locks are vulnerable to this method of attack, and frankly nobody has really considered it or looked at it before,
says Marc Weber Tobias, one of the researchers
Scientists have taken another step toward the goal of rendering objects invisible using high-tech cloaks that redirect light. Researchers for the first time demonstrated that a new material can bend visible light the wrong way in three dimensional tests. It builds on research that cloaks objects in the microwave wavelength
Three journalists for a French security magazine were kicked out of the Black Hat security conference after they allegedly sniffed the press room computer network
The Pirate Bay has been censored
in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay’s IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures
In the latest twist on electronics, Japanese scientists said on Thursday they have developed a rubbery material that conducts electricity, a finding that could be used to make devices that bend and stretch. The material, described by Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo in the journal Science, could be used on curved surfaces or even in moving parts. Sekitani’s team developed their material using carbon nanotubes, a long stretch of carbon molecules that can conduct electricity
Tingrui Pan and Hailin Cong, researchers at UC Davis, have designed a contact lens that keeps tabs on glaucoma all by itself. And they’re working up to one that dispenses medication automatically, too. Their smart
lenses are fitted with an organic polymer called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which is commonly used in biological applications. Since glaucoma develops as a result of raised pressure inside the eye, the goal of the lenses is to detect that intraocular pressure and mark warning signs
Yahoo said it will start letting users opt out of receiving customised advertising later this month, in an announcement the company made along with its response to a congressional inquiry about online privacy practices
Mozilla has launched a prototype messaging Firefox extension that it says could eventually enable users to keep track of all of their electronic communications, including email, RSS, social networks and web discussions. Snowl
enables users to prioritise messages by importance and have a search-based interface for message retrieval, according to Mozilla developer Myk Melez
A carbon membrane only a single atom thick has been used to create a pressurised balloon
that is impermeable to gas. To make it, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York inflated a sheet of graphene. This is a recently discovered carbon material just one atom thick, and is tipped to succeed silicon as the basis of computing
The Pew Internet & American Life Project is reporting an increase in the percentage of users who access search engines on a daily basis. Pew states that search engine use is fast approaching e-mail use. The percentage of Internet users who search on a typical day, according to Pew, grew 69 percent from January 2002 until May 2008
Google’s Vint Cerf today offered some positive thoughts about how to do traffic management. In his view, it’s all about the minimum guarantee, and users can do with that minimum bandwidth whatever they want
New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports. Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged
Scientists have discovered a virus that can infect another virus. The fact that viruses can essentially get sick may change the debate over whether they are alive or not. Check out Nature for a slightly more technical article about the virophage — via Slashdot
What do you get when you combine images from Google Earth and the brainpower from researchers at Oak Ridge National Labs? Well in this case you get a tool that enables real-time status of the national electric grid that federal state and local agencies can use to coordinate and respond to major problems such as wide-area power outages, natural disasters and other catastrophic events
In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren’t hackers — they’re students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software. The companies that make their living fighting viruses aren’t happy about what’s going on in Ledin’s classroom. Managers at some computer-security companies have even vowed not to hire Ledin’s students. The computer establishment’s scorn may be hyperbolic, but it’s understandable. Malware is spreading at an exponential rate
More than a thousand hacked Web sites are serving up fake Flash Player software to users duped into clicking on links in mail that’s part of a massive spam attack masquerading as CNN.com news notifications. The bogus messages, which claim to be from the CNN.com news Web site, include links to what are supposedly the day’s Top 10 news stories and Top 10 news video clips from the cable network. Clicking on any of those links, however, brings up a dialog that says an incorrect version of Flash Player has been detected and that tells users they needed to update to a newer edition
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