Giovane Moura writes "For a number of days the websites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and others are attacked by a group of WikiLeaks supporters (hacktivists). Although the group calls itself 'Anonymous,' researchers at the DACS group of the University of Twente (UT), the Netherlands, discovered that these hacktivists are easy traceable (PDF), and therefore anything but anonymous. The LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) software, which is used by the hacktivists, was analyzed by UT researchers, who concluded that the attacks generated by this tool are relatively simple and unveil the identity of the attacker. If hacktivists use this tool directly from their own machines, instead of via anonymization networks such as Tor, the Internet address of the attacker is included in every Internet message being transmitted. In the tools no sophisticated techniques are used, such as IP-spoofing, in which the source address of others is used, or reflected attacks, in which attacks go via third party systems.
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Angles On Anonymous
A number of readers are sending in links related to Anonymous, the Internet phenomenon — don't call them a group — behind the controversial DDoS attacks on commercial entities that fail to support WikiLeaks. The best insight into Anonymous comes from the Economist's Babbage blogger, who hung out in one of their IRC channels. Reader nk497 points out that UK users looking to join Anonymous's DDoS army should be aware they could face a jail term of up to two years; simply downloading the LOIC software used in the DDoSing could suffice to earn a conviction. One 16-year-old has been arrested in The Netherlands and is charged with participating in the DDoS. Reader ancientribe sends in coverage of a claim by one security outfit that several existing criminal botnets have joined forces with Anonymous's Operation: Payback. And reader Stoobalou notes a Thinq.co.uk story on a manifesto of sorts that purports to come from "ANON OPS," even though Anonymous disclaims any central spokesperson or entity (press release here, PDF).
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Navy Tests Mach 8 Electromagnetic Railgun
hargrand writes "Wired magazine has a story and publicly released video of the Navy test firing of a 32 megajoule electromagnetic railgun: 'Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.'"
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Researchers Develop Genuine 3D Camera
cylonlover writes "Cameras that can shoot 3D images are nothing new, but they don't really capture three dimensional moments at all — they actually record images in stereoscopic format, using two 2D images to create the illusion of depth. These photos and videos certainly offer a departure from their conventional two dimensional counterparts, but if you shift your view point, the picture remains the same. Researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) hope to change all that with the development of a strange-looking camera that snaps 360 degrees of simultaneous images and then reconstructs the images in 3D."
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Informative Shuttle Ascent Video
minterbartolo points out this video, produced by Matt Melis at the Glenn Research Center, excerpting from its description: "Photographic documentation of a Space Shuttle launch plays a critical role in the engineering analysis and evaluation process that takes place during each and every mission. Motion and Still images enable Shuttle engineers to visually identify off-nominal events and conditions requiring corrective action to ensure mission safety and success. This imagery also provides highly inspirational and educational insight to those outside the NASA family. This compilation of film and video presents the best of the best ground-based Shuttle motion imagery from STS-114, STS-117, and STS-124 missions. Rendered in the highest definition possible, this production is a tribute to the dozens of men and women of the Shuttle imaging team and the 30yrs of achievement of the Space Shuttle Program."
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SHA-3 Finalist Candidates Known
Skuto writes "NIST just announced the final selection of algorithms in the SHA-3 hash competition. The algorithms that are candidates to replace SHA-2 are BLAKE, Grøstl, JH, Keccak and Skein. The selection criteria included performance in software and hardware, hardware implementation size, best known attacks and being different enough from the other candidates. Curiously, some of the faster algorithms were eliminated as they were felt to be 'too fast to be true.' A full report with the (non-)selection rationale for each candidate is forthcoming."
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Military Bans Removable Media After WikiLeaks Disclosures
cgriffin21 writes "The Pentagon is taking matters into its own hands to prevent the occurrence of another WikiLeaks breach with removable media ban, preventing soldiers from using USB sticks, CDs or DVDs on any systems or servers. The directive prohibiting removable media followed the recent publication of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, which were leaked to whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks at the end of last month by a military insider."
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Chrome OS Doesn't Trust Apps Or Users
holy_calamity writes "Google's Chrome OS chiefs explain in Technology Review how most of the web-only OS's features flow from changing one core assumption of previous operating system designs. 'Operating systems today are centered on the idea that applications can be trusted to modify the system, and that users can be trusted to install applications that are trustworthy,' says Google VP Sundar Pichai. Chrome doesn't trust applications, or users — and neither can modify the system. Once users are banned from installing applications, or modifying the system security, usability, and more are improved, the Googlers claim."
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Apple Quietly Drops iOS Jailbreak Detection API
bednarz writes "Without explanation, Apple has disabled a jailbreak detection API in iOS, less than six months after introducing it. Device management vendors say the reasons for the decision are a mystery, but insist they can use alternatives to discover if an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad has been modified so it can load and alter applications outside of Apple's iTunes-based App Store."
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A Lost Civilization Beneath the Persian Gulf?
Phoghat sends news of a new theory that a once-fertile landmass beneath the Persian Gulf may have supported some of the earliest humans outside of Africa. "Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago... These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."
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Ex-Goldman Sachs Programmer Found Guilty
Readers twoallbeefpatties and ngrier wrote in essentially simultaneously about the guilty verdict in the trial of former Goldman Sachs computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov. We've discussed the case several times before. The trial itself was sealed from the public to prevent discussion of GS's high-frequency trading system. Reader ngrier summarizes: "After just three hours of deliberation, the jury found Sergey Aleynikov guilty of intentionally stealing proprietary Goldman Sachs code. As he had admitted copying the code as he was preparing to join a startup competitor in 2009, the case hinged on the intent. He faces up to 10 years in prison."
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Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit
CWmike writes "Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its decision to quit the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, and is also acknowledging the ASF's importance to Java's future. In a message released late Thursday, an Oracle executive made conciliatory gestures to Apache. At least for now, the ASF doesn't seem eager to rejoin the committee. 'Give us a reason why the ASF should reconsider other than "please,"' ASF president Jim Jagielski said in a Twitter post on Thursday. The Java Community Process is 'dead,' Jagielski said in a blog post, also on Thursday. 'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'"
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Researchers Develop Self-Healing Plastic
schliz writes "Arizona State researchers have been working on a 'self-healing' polymer that uses a fibre optic 'nervous system' to detect and fix cracks. The system recovers up to 96 percent of an object's original strength in laboratory tests. It could find use in 'large-scale composite structures for which human intervention would be difficult,' such as wind turbines, satellites, aircraft, or the Mars Rover."
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Cheap 3D Fab Could Start an Innovation Renaissance
blackbearnh writes "An article over on O'Reilly Radar makes the argument that, just as inexpensive or free software development environments have led to a cornucopia of amazing Web and mobile applications, the plummeting cost of 3D fabrication equipment could enable myriad new physical inventions. The article was prompted by a new Kickstarter project, which if funded will attempt to produce a DIY CNC milling system for under $400. Quoting: 'We're already seeing the cool things that people have started doing with 3D fab at the higher-entry-level cost. Many of them are ending up on Kickstarter themselves, such as an iPhone 4 camera mount that was first prototyped using a 3D printer. Now I'm dying to see what we'll get when anyone can create the ideas stuck in their heads.'"
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IT Worker's Revenge Lands Her In Jail
aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."
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Tobacco Virus Could Boost Li Batteries
siliconbits alerts us to the possible use of one of the world's most destructive naturally occurring scourges, the tobacco mosaic virus, to boost the capacity of lithium ion batteries by 10 times. It seems the virus can be made to attach itself to the electrodes in a lithium cell perpendicularly, increasing the surface area of the electrode and greatly improving the battery's capacity to store energy. PhysOrg has some more detail on virus-enhanced batteries. Four years ago we discussed the use of the tobacco mosaic virus to enable fast-switching transistors.
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Remote Exim Exploit In the Wild
An anonymous reader sends word of a remote exploit in the wild against the Exim mail agent. The news comes on the exim mailing list, where a user posted that he had his exim install hacked via remote exploit giving the attacker the privilege of the mailnull user, which can lead to other possible attacks. A note up at the Internet Storm Center reminds exim users how to set up to run in unprivileged mode, and a commenter includes recompile instructions for Debian exim for added safety. The security press hasn't picked up on this story so far.
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DNSSEC Comes To .Net Zone Today
wiredmikey sends news that as of today VeriSign has enabled DNSSEC on the .net zone. This is one milestone in a years-long process of securing the DNS against cache poisoning and other attacks. Next step will be for VeriSign to sign the .com root early next year."Having DNSSEC enabled for .net domains... [is] important as it represents one of the most critical implementations of DNSSEC technology, since .net serves as the underpinning for many critical Internet functions. The largest zone to be DNSSEC enabled to date, .net currently has more than 13 million... domain name registrations worldwide."
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World's Largest Patent Troll Fires First Salvo
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Yesterday the biggest software patent troll of all finally woke from its slumbers: Intellectual Ventures filed patent infringement complaints in the US District Court of Delaware against companies in the software security, DRAM and Flash memory, and field-programmable gate array industries. Intellectual Ventures was co-founded by Microsoft's former CTO Nathan Myhrvold, with others from Intel and a Seattle-based law firm." We discussed IV's potential for patent trollery last spring.
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Iron-Eating Bug Is Gobbling Up the Titanic
gambit3 writes "A newly discovered microbe dubbed Halomonas titanicae is chewing its way through the wreck of the Titanic and leaving little behind except a fine dust, researchers report in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. 'In 1995, I was predicting that Titanic had another 30 years,' said Henrietta Mann, a civil engineering adjunct professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 'It's deteriorating much faster than that now.'"
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SpaceX's Dragon Module Successfully Re-Enters
Zitchas writes "Following the news of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon module on-board, and its arrival on orbit, we now have the news that is has successfully re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific. As their website proudly claims, this is the first time a private corporation has recovered a spacecraft they orbited, joining the ranks of a few space nations and the EU space agency. A great step forward for space travel. Hopefully everything continues to go well for them."
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Top Final Fantasy XIV Devs Replaced, PS3 Version Delayed
After Final Fantasy XIV's troubled launch and subsequent attempt to placate angry fans, Square Enix has decided that the game's leadership needs to be replaced. They've asked players to patiently stick around until they're ready to unveil their new plans for the game, extending the free trial period to compensate. Square also announced bad news for PS3 owners who were still somehow interested in the game: "Regarding the PlayStation 3, it is not our wish to release a simple conversion of the Windows version in its current state, but rather an update that includes all the improvements we have planned. For that reason, we have made the difficult decision to delay the release of the PlayStation 3 version beyond the originally announced date of March 2011."
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UK Copyright Blackmailers Rebuked By Court
Sockatume writes "The first eight ACS:Law cases have reached the courts, and have already fallen on their face. The law firm hit the headlines when it demanded money from tens of thousands of Britons for illegal file sharing, threatening legal action. It seems its bark was worse than its legal bite, as default judgments have been refused in six of the cases for such egregious errors as attempting to make a claim when one is not even the copyright holder. Two of the cases were found in default as the defendants had failed to respond, but not on the merits of ACS:Law's case."
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Single-Player Game Model 'Finished,' Says EA Exec
Frank Gibeau, label president for EA Games, recently spoke with Develop about the publisher's long term development strategy. Gibeau thinks developing major games without multiplayer modes is a passing fad: "...it’s not only about multiplayer, it’s about being connected. I firmly believe that the way the products we have are going, they need to be connected online. ... I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads; they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out. I think that model is finished. Online is where the innovation and the action [are] at."
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EC Calls For End To Mobile Roaming Charges
An anonymous reader writes "European travellers who use their mobile phones abroad could soon see a dramatic reduction in their bills, after the European Commission announced plans to eradicate roaming charges by 2015. In a consultation paper launched yesterday, the EC invited consumers, businesses, telecom operators and public authorities to evaluate the EU's existing roaming rules, and to share their ideas on the best ways to boost competition in roaming services. 'Huge differences between domestic and roaming charges have no place in a true EU Single Market,' said vice-president of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes. 'We need to address the source of current problems, namely a lack of competition, and to find a durable solution. But we are keeping an open mind on exactly what solution would work.'"
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