A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap”

Posted on by

Like any other new entrant into the highly competitive solar-panel market, perovskites will have difficulty taking on silicon solar cells. The costs of silicon solar cells are falling, and some analysts think they could eventually fall as low as 25 cents per watt, which would eliminate most of the cost advantage of perovskites and lessen the incentive for investing in the new technology. The manufacturing process for perovskite solar cells—which can be as simple as spreading a liquid over a surface or can involve vapor deposition, another large-scale manufacturing process—is expected to be easy. But historically, it has taken over a decade to scale up novel solar-cell technologies, and a decade from now silicon solar cells could be too far ahead to catch.

via A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap” | MIT Technology Review.

‘Fort Disco’ Botnet Behind Attack Campaign Against Thousands Of Sites

Posted on by

“The number of weak passwords is not surprising, as this campaign is clearly a target of opportunity and not focused on a specific target,” Bing says. “This is interesting as it marks a sea change in the tactics of attackers. In addition to drive-by exploits of unpatched Windows machines being the low-hanging fruit, attackers are learning that these blog and content management systems are often vulnerable to trivial attacks.”

via ‘Fort Disco’ Botnet Behind Attack Campaign Against Thousands Of Sites.

A Storm of Servers: How the Leap Second Led Facebook to DCIM

Posted on by

Last July 1, that scenario became real as the “Leap Second” bug caused many Linux servers to get stuck in a loop, endlessly checking the date and time. At the Internet’s busiest data centers, power usage almost instantly spiked by megawatts, stress-testing the facility’s power load and the user’s capacity planning.

via A Storm of Servers: How the Leap Second Led Facebook to DCIM.

What was happening? The additional second caused particular problems for Linux systems that use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their systems with atomic clocks. The leap second caused these systems to believe that time had “expired,” triggering a loop condition in which the system endlessly sought to check the date, spiking CPU usage and power draw.

Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

Posted on by

The resulting material displays all the electrical properties associated with a capacitor, meaning that it can charge and discharge its full capacity almost instantly. But it has a storage density that’s right at the low-end of the range seen in lead-acid batteries. It’s also stable over multiple charge/discharge cycles and holds on to 90 percent of its capacity even after being charged for 300 hours straight.

via Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery | Ars Technica.

2,919 Movie Pirates Walk Free as BitTorrent Trolling Scheme Falls Apart

Posted on by

“The agreements are noticeably devoid of any provision for the disposition of any revenues that could be obtained from verdicts or court orders of fees or costs upon success in court, suggesting a business model of using the information obtained from early discovery into the identities of individual defendants to negotiate quick settlements under the threat of embarrassing and expensive litigation without actually litigating claims on their merits,” the Judge explains.

via 2,919 Movie Pirates Walk Free as BitTorrent Trolling Scheme Falls Apart | TorrentFreak.

Hacking and Rooting SOHO Home Routers

Posted on by

In a previous report, we released a list of SOHO router vulnerabiltiies and showed proof-of-concept (PoC) attack code for how to exploit them. For many of these routers, those PoCs operated through the main web-based interface. In this follow up study, we addressed only the extraneous, non-router services that were present on the routers. What we found was that of the 10 routers reviewed, all 10 could be compromised from the (wireless) LAN once a router had USB attached storage connected.

via Hacking and Rooting SOHO Home Routers.

This is hardly surprising.  Currently I only use SOHO routers as dumb wifi access points and that’s it.  I don’t know why anyone would want to make one of these cheaply built devices into some kind of NAS.

Web Ads Used to Launch Online Attacks

Posted on by

It didn’t take long for the victimized test server to begin struggling under the sudden load. In the first hour of the test, during which only $2 was spent on ads, more than 130,000 connections from browsers swamped the server. It wasn’t much longer until the server began falling offline under the growing load.

via Web Ads Used to Launch Online Attacks | MIT Technology Review.

Haunted A Complete Stranger’s House Via The Internet

Posted on by

Their systems had been made crawl-able by search engines – meaning they show up in search results — and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now-discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion.

via When ‘Smart Homes’ Get Hacked: I Haunted A Complete Stranger’s House Via The Internet – Forbes.

Hacking RFID Tags Is Easier Than You Think

Posted on by

The RFID output that the Arduino gets is a 10-digit hexadecimal. With that in hand, Brown said it’s simple to replicate the remotely stolen information using a Proxmark device.

The unfortunate reality, according to Brown, is that with most of the building security badges that are running at 125KHz, there is no secure authentication mechanism.

via Hacking RFID Tags Is Easier Than You Think: Black Hat.

iPhone Hacked in Under 60 Seconds Using Malicious Charger

Posted on by

Once the charger is plugged in and the user inputs their PIN code, the charger silently and invisibly removes the target app, in this case the official Facebook app. It then replaces it – in exactly the same position on your iPhone/iPad homescreen – with what looks like a perfect replacement.

In actual fact this is malware and once you launch it, your phone/tablet has been compromised. This malware could be used to capture passwords, take screenshots, access your contacts, messages and phone calls, or even make premium rate calls.

via iPhone Hacked in Under 60 Seconds Using Malicious Charger – IBTimes UK.