Technology

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) last week released videos of tests of plastic guns made with 3D printers that show some exploding on the first shot. The explosions could injure users, the testing found.

The ATF has been testing guns made with 3D printers using two commonly used thermoplastic materials over the past year to determine how safe the weapons are.

Guns made using one of the two thermoplastics tested, a polymer from VisiJet, never lasted more than one shot before exploding. The other material, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), could produce a gun that fired eight times without incident.

The agents stopped shooting after eight bullets, an ATF spokesperson said.

It depends on the material as well as the quality of the printer. Those variables both go into it, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson wouldn’t identify 3D printers used or which computer-assisted drawing (CAD) files were downloaded to create the weapon — via redwolf.newsvine.com

If you need to encrypt traffic from your computer or mobile device, you have many options. You could buy a commercial VPN solution, or you could sign up for a VPN service and pay a monthly fee. Or for less money, you could create your own VPN and gain the use of a Linux VPS (Virtual Private Server) anywhere in the world. This roll-your-own option is made possible through the use of the open source OpenVPN project, Linux, and a few open source client-side applications. The VPS-based setup described here is designed to encrypt all the traffic from your laptop, desktop, or mobile phone to your VPN server, which then unencrypts that traffic and passes it on to its destination. This can be very useful if you’re using the Internet from a coffee shop, a hotel, or a conference and you do not trust the network — via ITworld

Three years ago, security consultant Dragos Ruiu was in his lab when he noticed something highly unusual: his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused. He also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. He didn’t know it then, but that odd firmware update would become a high-stakes malware mystery that would consume most of his waking hours.

In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet’s next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also included multiple variants of Windows and Linux.

We were like, ‘Okay, we’re totally owned,’ Ruiu told Ars. ‘We have to erase all our systems and start from scratch,’ which we did. It was a very painful exercise. I’ve been suspicious of stuff around here ever since.

In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that’s able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behaviour would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine’s inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviours can be observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for troubleshooting and forensic investigations.

Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping airgaps designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Cyber-espionage groups are too numerous to count and are often far less skilled than their reputation suggests, according to threat-trackers.

Costin Raiu, director of global research at Kaspersky Lab, estimated that anything between 100 to 200 hacking crews operate in China alone.

Despite the hype abut zero-day attacks, many successful assaults relied on rudimentary attacks that successfully took advantage of poor patching practices and other rudimentary security mistakes, Raiu said during a panel session at the RSA Europe Conference — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The strongest driver for free software adoption in a public administration? Fear of layoffs.

If you don’t believe it, ask the autonomous province of South Tyrol, in Northern Italy. The local government has just begun implementing a plan that will have most public sector organisations in the region using LibreOffice by 2016. Really.

And why did they do it? Because the austerity measures passed by the national government meant the region was left facing a €16m cut to its personnel budget. In order to avoid cutting employees (or, more likely, their pay), management and unions had to find a creative solution. Which they did: a mass migration from Microsoft Office to an open source equivalent.

The savings are mandatory, so it was either us or the proprietary software, said Erwin Pfeifer, not entirely joking. Pfeifer is a member of the autonomous province’s IT department and one of the people managing the project — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Windows 8.1 rollout has hit more hurdles: the new version 11 of Internet Explorer that ships with the operating system does not render Google products well and is also making life difficult for users of Microsoft’s own Outlook Web Access webmail product.

The latter issue is well known: Microsoft popped out some advice about the fact that only the most basic interface to the webmail tool will work back in July. It seems not every sysadmin got the memo and implemented Redmond’s preferred workarounds, but there are only scattered complaints out there, likely because few organisations have bothered implementing Windows 8.1 yet — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Australian scientists have created a customized set of purple titanium shoes for a Melbourne race horse using 3D printing.

The horse, nicknamed Titanium Prints, had its hooves scanned with a 3D scanner.

Using 3D modelling software, scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) then used the scan to design the racing shoe.

CSIRO’s Titanium expert John Barnes says it takes less than 24 hours to print four customised shoes for a horse and it costs approximately $600 for all of them — via redwolf.newsvine.com

I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar …

Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer’s use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it? — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Research conducted at the University of Sydney has delivered photonic chips that slow down light, creating the ability to produce a single photon of light with increased reliability, which allows for more scalable and smaller optical hardware.

The research is published in the Nature Communications journal, with the team responsible made up of members from Macquarie University, the University of St Andrews, the University of York, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) based at the University of Sydney, as well as the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).

It is easy for us to generate photons at high rates, but it’s much harder to ensure they come out one by one, because photons are gregarious by nature and love to bunch together, said lead author of the research article Matthew Collins, a PhD student at CUDOS.

For that reason, the quantum science community has been waiting over a decade for a compact optical chip that delivers exactly one photon at a time at very high rates — via redwolf.newsvine.com