Monday, August 31
How To Keep Employees Excited About Working At Your Startup
Six UK teens arrested for being “customers” of Lizard Squad’s DDoS service
On August 28, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency announced the arrest of six teenagers, ranging in age from 15 to 18, for launching distributed denial of service attacks against multiple websites. The attacks were carried out using an attack tool created by Lizard Squad, the group behind denial of service attacks on gaming networks and the 8Chan imageboard site last winter. Called Lizard Stresser, the tool exploited compromised home routers, using them as a robot army against targeted sites and services.
The six arrested “are suspected of maliciously deploying Lizard Stresser, having bought the tool using alternative payment services such as Bitcoin in a bid to remain anonymous,” an NCA spokesperson wrote in an official statement on the case. “Organizations believed to have been targeted by the suspects include a leading national newspaper, a school, gaming companies, and a number of online retailers.” Those sites, according to a source that spoke with Bloomberg Business, included Microsoft’s Xbox Live, Sony’s Playstation network, and Amazon.com.
The timing of the attacks wasn’t mentioned by NCA. However, the user database of Lizard Stresser was leaked in January of this year. The NCA has been investigating individuals listed in the database and has identified a substantial number of them living in the UK. “Officers are also visiting approximately 50 addresses linked to individuals registered on the Lizard Stresser website, but who are not currently believed to have carried out attacks,” the NCA spokesperson noted. “A third of the individuals identified are under the age of 20, and the activity forms part of the NCA’s wider work to address younger people at risk of entering into serious forms of cyber crime.”
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Liquid Metal Changes Shape to Tune Antenna
Antennas can range from a few squiggles on a PCB to a gigantic Yagi on a tower. The basic laws of physics must be obeyed, though, and whatever form the antenna takes it all boils down to a conductor whose length resonates at a specific frequency. What works at one frequency is suboptimal at another, so an adjustable antenna would be a key component of a multi-band device. And a shape-shifting liquid metal antenna is just plain cool.
The first thing that pops into our head when we think of liquid metal is a silvery blob of mercury skittering inside the glass vial salvaged out of an old thermostat. The second image is a stern talking-to by the local HazMat team, so it’s probably best that North Carolina State University researchers [Michael Dickey] and [Jacob Adams] opted for gallium alloys for their experiments. Liquid at room temperature, these alloys have the useful property of oxidizing on contact with air and forming a skin. This allows the researchers to essentially extrude a conductor of any shape. What’s more, they can electrically manipulate the oxidative state of the metal and thereby the surface tension, allowing the conductor to change length on command. Bingo – an adjustable length antenna.
Radio frequency circuits aren’t the only application for gallium alloys. We’ve already seen liquid metal 3D printing with them. But we need to be careful, since controlling the surface tension of liquid metals might also bring us one step closer to this.
Filed under: chemistry hacks, radio hacks
Yes, a license plate reader helped nab Roanoke shooter—but that’s a rare win
As someone who has been reporting on license plate readers (LPR) for some time now, it actually surprised me when I heard that Roanoke, Virginia, shooter Vester Lee Flanagan had been first located through the use of the scanning device. While the devices have been in use in Virginia for years, their effectiveness and efficiency there—and nationwide—is questionable.
According to local media accounts, when Virginia State Police Trooper Pamela Neff received the suspect’s plate number over her radio last week, she punched it into her LPR system and got an alert that the car had passed by not three minutes earlier. Within 10 minutes, Neff and other officers converged on Flanagan’s location, finding that he had shot himself, ending the manhunt.
There were a number of news stories and tweets that attempted to explain the technology to a public that is presumably unaware of its presence. One television reporter in Cleveland even asked Twitter for more information, saying he’d never heard of the tools.
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Worst case scenario: How bad could a tropical cyclone be?
Before Natalie Portman slipped on a pair of ballet shoes and won an Academy Award, the term “black swan” was already full of psychological tension. Nassim Taleb coined the term to describe extreme, unforeseeable events with nasty consequences, whether in the natural world or in financial markets.
A notch down from there, we find what can be described as “gray swans”—things that are stronger than anything we’ve seen, but that we can foresee to be physically possible. Given that we have pretty short historical records in most places, it’s not much of a stretch to accept that we haven’t experienced the full range of possible weather. And after all, low probability events happen eventually.
Recently Princeton’s Ning Lin and MIT’s Kerry Emanuel went gray swan hunting in the world of tropical cyclones, using climate models to simulate many more storms than exist in our brief historical records. And some of the gray swans they found look like mean bastards.
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Take an Early Look at the Big Art of Burning Man
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Can iOS Support Help Android Wear Take Off?
The Quest to Make the World’s Biggest Arcade Game
The post The Quest to Make the World’s Biggest Arcade Game appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Make Your Own Waterproof Matches
The post Make Your Own Waterproof Matches appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Malware infecting jailbroken iPhones stole 225,000 Apple account logins
A newly discovered malware family that preys on jailbroken iPhones has collected login credentials for more than 225,000 Apple accounts, making it one of the largest Apple account compromises to be caused by malware.
KeyRaider, as the malware family has been dubbed, is distributed through a third-party repository of Cydia, which markets itself as an alternative to Apple's official App Store. Malicious code surreptitiously included with Cydia apps is creating problems for people in China and at least 17 other countries, including France, Russia, Japan, and the UK. Not only has it pilfered account data for 225,941 Apple accounts, it has also disabled some infected phones until users pay a ransom and made unauthorized charges against some victims' accounts.
Researchers with Palo Alto Networks worked with members of the Chinese iPhone community Weiphone after members found the unauthorized charges. In a blog post published Sunday, the Palo Alto Networks researchers wrote:
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China and Russia cross-referencing OPM data, other hacks to out US spies
The identities of a group of American technical experts who have provided assistance to covert operations by the US government overseas have been compromised as the result of cross-referencing of data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and other recent data breaches, according a Los Angeles Times report. The Times' Brian Bennet and W. J. Hennigan cited allegations from two US officials speaking under the condition of anonymity that Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies have worked with both private software companies and criminal hacking rings to obtain and analyze data.
William Evanina, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's National Counterintelligence Executive, confirmed in an interview with the LA Times that data from breaches had "absolutely" been used to unmask US covert agents. Performing data analytics on breach data could tell foreign intelligence agencies "who is an intelligence officer, who travels where, when, who's got financial difficulties, who's got medical issues" and help create a "common picture" of US intelligence operations, he said.
According to the report, the OPM hack and other major data breaches were being merged and analyzed by China in an effort to both ferret out US covert operations—to provide background information for targeted cyber-attacks—and to provide intelligence on individuals who could be targeted for blackmail. And Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) is also using recent data breaches and ties to cybercriminals to target US government employees for cyber-attacks, the unnamed officials claimed.
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Android Wear gets iOS support
Google has announced that iOS is an officially supported operating system for Android Wear. Users with an iPhone 5, 5C, 5S, 6, or 6 Plus running iOS 8.2 and above will be able to pair with "newer" Android Wear devices, download the app, and be off and running.
Until now, smartwatch platforms from Google and Apple have been ecosystem lock-in devices. If you have an Android phone, you have to get an Android Wear watch, and if you have an iPhone you have to get an Apple Watch. By supporting both OSes, Android Wear will have a much larger potential user base to try and sell a watch to.
Since Google controls the Android operating system, it created specific hooks in the OS for Android Wear to plug into. On iOS—where Google is not in control—things have to be different, don't they? We've been told the iOS experience is "similar" to what users get on Android—rich notifications, voice commands, and Google Now cards will be present. Any differences between the Android and iOS implementations will have to be investigated once the app comes out, but just judging from the supplied picture, contact images will not show up on the watch when the message is sent.
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Core Memory for the Hard Core
[Brek] needed to store 64 bits of data from his GPS to serve as a last-known-position function. This memory must be non-volatile, sticking around when the GPS and power are off. Solutions like using a backup battery or employing a $0.25 EEPROM chip were obviously too pedestrian. [Brek] wanted to store his 64 bits in style and that means hand-wired core memory.
OK, we’re pretty sure that the solution came first, and then [Brek] found a fitting problem that could be solved, but you gotta give him props for a project well executed and well documented.
Core memory is basically just a bunch of magnetizable rings on wires. When you pass enough current through a ring it becomes magnetically charged (North or South) depending on the direction of the current. Once magnetized, if you try to re-magnetize the core in the same direction, nothing changes. But if you flip the polarity of the ring, it emits a short electric pulse in the process. Sensing this pulse (and re-writing the bit back to its original state if necessary) buys you one-bit-per-ring of memory that remembers even when the power goes off.
Look at the way the cores are wired up in a matrix. If you want to select a single core, you can apply half the current to one of the y-axis wires, for instance, and then another half current to a single x-axis wire. Now the one ring to get enough current to flip state is the core in the cross-hairs; all the other rings in the x or y direction only get half.
What’s amazing to us young(er) whipper-snappers is that this was the dominant form of computer memory from the 1950s to the beginning of the transistor age in the mid-1970s. (Come to think of it, my father’s PDP-8 had core memory cards that I vaguely remember seeing as a kid. The sheer wiring required for 4KB was ridiculous.)
Thanks, [Brek] for all the work and documentation!
Filed under: classic hacks, hardware
Binary stars can throw planetary orbits into chaos
Planets go through a process known as precession, where the angle of their orbital tracks around a star changes over time. This is a very slow process, requiring many orbits to complete.
The part that isn’t generally covered in introductory astronomy courses is what happens to precession in binary star systems. For distant companions, the orbit is very long, and thus the change in gravitational influences is slow. In some cases, the two processes can be close to a match with each other, taking roughly the same amount of time to cycle. This led a group of researchers to wonder if they could be so close as to get into a resonance. If so, it could have profound effects for the planets. To find out, the researchers constructed a numerical simulation.
According to the simulation, planetary orbits are indeed susceptible to perturbation from the companion star. As the researchers suspected, this can happen when a planet’s precession is resonant with the companion star’s orbital motion.
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T-Mobile promises to “eliminate” customers who abuse unlimited data
T-Mobile US is planning to take unlimited data plans away from customers who use workarounds to bypass limits on tethering.
Customers who buy "unlimited" high-speed data for smartphones are also given up to 7GB a month for tethering, which lets a phone act as a Wi-Fi hotspot for other devices such as laptops. But some customers are masking their tethering activity and using as much as 2TB in a month, T-Mobile says.
T-Mobile CEO promised to "eliminat[e] anyone who abuses our network."
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Report: New Apple TV said to cost between $149 and $199
An iPhone refresh at Apple's September 9 event is all but certain, but the more interesting news might actually be about the Apple TV. The company is said to be revamping the set-top box's hardware for the first time since March of 2012, and historically reliable sources say that it will also include a redesigned remote control with touch capabilities, Siri support, along with a new app store and SDK.
Those features come at a cost, though. A report from 9to5Mac says that the new Apple TV could cost somewhere between $149 and $199, a substantial increase from the $99 that the third-generation Apple TV cost when it was released. That model currently sells for $69 and we don't yet know which of the new capabilities will be back-ported, but the report suggests it won't see the App Store or Siri. Apple apparently plans to keep it around as an entry-level model, though, so hopefully it will pick up some kind of software update.
A price between $149 and $199 would place the new Apple TV above competitors like the Roku 3, the Chromecast, and Amazon's Fire TV Stick as well, though a fully fledged app store and SDK would make Apple's box more versatile than streaming-only devices. The original Fire TV box had a more substantial app store, but as of this writing it's unavailable and Amazon has never been able to garner Apple-esque levels of third-party developer support.
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