A mysterious visitor who each year leaves roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe’s tomb in Baltimore, Maryland, has missed his rendezvous for the first time in 61 years, the Poe Society said. He did not show up this morning,
Jeffrey Savoye, secretary and treasurer of the 380 member society, said
The Gmail accounts of foreign reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing have been hijacked, a journalists’ group in China said Monday. The news comes just one week after Google said it had been targeted by recent cyberattacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The US search giant cited the attacks as one reason it has decided to stop censoring its Chinese search engine and may ultimately close its China offices, a threat China has dismissed. The hijacked Gmail accounts used by the journalists in Beijing had been set to forward all e-mails to a stranger’s address, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said in an e-mail to members. The group did not name the news organizations hit by the attack or say when the hijacking occurred
Private details of more and more people are finding their way on to databases used by the nation’s police. Information about licensed drivers and car owners are to be added to a network that already holds nearly 9 million police records. Police say it makes their job faster and safer, but critics warn of the potential for the misuse of such mountains of information
Alligators and birds share a breathing mechanism which may have helped their ancestors dominate Earth more than 200 million years ago. Research published in the journal Science found that like birds, in alligators air flows in one direction. Birds’ lung structure allows them to breathe when flying in low oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions. This breathing may have helped a common ancestor of birds and alligators thrive in the hypoxic period of the Triassic
Last week, CYBERsitter sued the People’s Republic of China, the two Chinese software makers, and seven computer manufacturers for distributing Web filtering software known as Green Dam with allegedly stolen code. This week, the law firm representing the company said that it had been targeted in a cyber attack from China. In a phone interview, Elliot B Gipson of Gipson Hoffman & Pancione described what amounts to a spear-phishing attack — the same technique used against Google in China. They were e-mails targeted at individuals in our law firm that were made to appears as if they were coming from other individuals at our law firm,
he said. They attempted to get the target to click on a link or attachment
The ongoing patent battle between Apple and Nokia escalated Friday, when Apple moved to block imports of Nokia mobile phones to the US. Apple made its request in a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency that examines issues including unfair trade practices involving patent, trademark, and copyright infringement
When Ross Clark read in New Scientist that the US military considered the Nintendo Wiimote controller accurate enough to control bomb disposal robots, it set him thinking. Could the Wii’s skiing and snowboarding attachment, the balance board, help rehabilitate people who have had a stroke? I wanted to know if it would be any good for assessing the standing balance of patients,
says Clark. He reasoned that being able to measure the centre of pressure of a person’s foot will be useful to a physio who is helping someone relearn how to stand. Yet the lab-grade force platforms
needed to do that cost more than £11,000 — putting them out of the reach of many physio clinics. So Clark and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Australia, took apart a Wii balance board and hacked into its strain gauges and accelerometers to tap into their raw data. We found the data to be excellent. I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up
In a statement issued today, the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (known as BSI) recommends that all Internet Explorer users switch to an alternative browser. They may resume using Explorer after a fix is issued by Microsoft for a critical vulnerability that has been implicated in the Chinese cyberattack against Google
Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) are usually associated with warfare. The idea is to use a blast of energy to fry the enemy’s computers and telecommunications gear. One common way proposed to do this is with an atomic bomb. In a less extreme fashion, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. They are already employed industrially to shape soft and light metals, such as aluminium and copper. Now a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, has found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through industry’s metallic heavyweight–steel. This could transform manufacturing by doing away with the need to use large, heavy presses to make goods ranging from cars to washing machines
Updated Hackers who breached the defences of Google, Adobe Systems and at least 32 other companies used a potent vulnerability in all versions of Internet Explorer to carry out at least some of the attacks, researchers from McAfee said Thursday. The previously unknown flaw in the IE browser was probably just one of the vectors used in the attacks, McAfee CTO George Kurtz wrote in a blog post. Using a sophisticated spear-phishing campaign, the perpetrators included malicious links exploiting the bug in emails and instant messages sent to employees from at least three of the targeted companies. Contrary to previous speculation, there was no evidence vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Reader or Acrobat applications were used in any of the attacks, Kurtz said. In its own statement, Adobe concurred, saying researchers have not been able to obtain any evidence to indicate that Adobe Reader or other Adobe technologies were used as the attack vector in this incident
. Kurtz said his findings were based on malware samples taken from three to five
of the targeted companies and he stressed that other zero days or exploits could have been used against other victims
The dangerous Internet Explorer attack code used in last month’s attack on Google’s corporate networks is now public. The code was submitted for analysis Thursday on the Wepawet malware analysis Web site, making it publicly available. By Friday, it had been included in at least one publicly available hacking tool and could be seen in online attacks, according to Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications at McAfee. The attack is very reliable on Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP, and it could possibly be modified to work on more recent versions of the browser, Marcus said. The game really changes now that it’s hosted publicly,
he said
John Hunter wants to shoot stuff into space with a 1,000-metre gun. And he’s dead serious — he’s done the math. Making deliveries to an orbital outpost on a rocket costs $5,000 per pound, but using a space gun would cost just $250 per pound. Building colossal guns has been Hunter’s pet project since 1992, when, while a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he first fired a 130-metre gun he built to test-launch hypersonic engines. Its methane-driven piston compressed hydrogen gas, which then expanded up the barrel to shoot a projectile. Mechanical firing can fail, however, so when Hunter’s company, Quicklaunch, released its plans last fall, it swapped the piston for a combustor that burns natural gas. Heat the hydrogen in a confined space and it should build up enough pressure to send a half-ton payload into the sky at 21,000 kph
VeriSign’s iDefense security lab has published a report with technical details about the recent cyberattack that hit Google and over 30 other companies. The iDefense researchers traced the attack back to its origin and also identified the command-and-control servers that were used to manage the malware. The cyber-assault came to light on Tuesday when Google disclosed to the public that the Gmail Web service was targeted in a highly-organized attack in late December. Google said that the intrusion attempt originated from China and was executed with the goal of obtaining information about political dissidents, but the company declined to speculate about the identity of the perpetrator. Citing sources in the defense contracting and intelligence consulting community, the iDefense report unambiguously declares that the Chinese government was, in fact, behind the effort
As mobile phones get more sophisticated, hi-tech criminals are dusting off some old tricks. Security companies have noticed a rise in trojans known as diallers that used to be popular during the days of dial-up net access. On a smartphone the diallers are being used to call premium rate lines leaving victims with a big bill. Experts say the diallers are proving popular as a quick way for criminals to cash in
Channel 4 looks set to become embroiled in another taste row after backing a project which seeks to mummify a terminally-ill volunteer for a TV documentary. The body of the candidate selected to be embalmed could then end up being displayed in a museum. If the project goes ahead it will follow a trail of programmes which seek to challenge views on death
Many experiments in biology rely on manipulating cells: adding a gene, protein, or other molecule, for instance, to study its effects on the cell. But getting a molecule into a cell is much like breaking into a fortress; it often relies on biological tricks such as infecting a cell with a virus or attaching a protein to another one that will sneak it through the cell’s membrane. Many of these methods are specific to certain types of cells and only work with specific molecules. A paper in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a surprisingly simple and direct alternative: using nanowires as needles to poke molecules into cells
Although Gmail has long supported HTTPS as an option, Gmail announced their decision yesterday to switch everyone to HTTPS by default: We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there’s a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn’t travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we’ve been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do
— via Slashdot
LG Display has developed a flexible electronic-paper screen that’s almost as large as a tabloid newspaper. The screen measures 25 centimeters by 40 centimeters, which translates into a 19-inch diagonal screen size, and is 0.3 millimeters thin so it can bend. LG Display managed to make it flexible by utilizing a metal foil instead of the more traditional glass substrate. The South Korean company said the screen is the largest flexible e-paper display yet produced
Internet giant Google has said it may end its operations in China following a sophisticated and targeted
cyber attack originating from the country. It did not accuse Beijing directly, but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine — google.cn. This could result in closing the site, and its Chinese offices, Google said
Google is opening up its Docs hosted office productivity suite so that users can store any type of file in it, giving the popular software-as-a-service product an important online storage component. The functionality will be rolled out over the coming weeks to all Docs users, both the ones who use the stand-alone suite as well as those who use it as part of the broader communication and collaboration Apps suite for organisations. Now, Docs users will be able to store all their important files in a single place online, where they can access them from anywhere and share them with other people, according to Google
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