Bitcoin is created and exchanged without the involvement of banks or governments. Transactions allow anonymity, which has made bitcoin popular with people who want to conceal their activity. Bitcoin can be converted to cash when deposited into accounts at prices set in online trading.
Source: Reports: China orders bitcoin exchanges to shut down – ABC News
That vulnerability, according to a report on the data breach by William Baird & Co., was in a popular open-source software package called Apache Struts, which is a programming framework for building web applications in Java. Two vulnerabilities in Struts have been discovered so far in 2017. One was announced in March, and another was announced earlier this week on Sept. 4. At the moment, it’s unclear which vulnerability the Baird report was referring to.
Source: The hackers who broke into Equifax exploited a flaw in open-source server software — Quartz
The bug specifically affects a popular plugin called REST, which developers use to handle web requests, like data sent to a server from a form a user has filled out. The vulnerability relates to how Struts parses that kind of data and converts it into information that can be interpreted by the Java programming language. When the vulnerability is successfully exploited, malicious code can be hidden inside of such data, and executed when Struts attempts to convert it.
I cannot recall a previous data breach in which the breached company’s public outreach and response has been so haphazard and ill-conceived as the one coming right now from big-three credit bureau Equifax, which rather clumsily announced Thursday that an intrusion jeopardized Social security numbers and other information on 143 million Americans.
Source: Equifax Breach Response Turns Dumpster Fire — Krebs on Security
Rotor sails rely on a bit of aerodynamics known as the Magnus effect. In the 1850s, German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus noticed that when moving through air a spinning object such as a ball experiences a sideways force. The force comes about as follows. If the ball were not spinning, air would stream straight past it, creating a swirling wake that would stretch out directly behind the ball like the tail of a comet. The turning surface of a spinning ball, however, drags some air with it. The rotation deflects the wake so that it comes off the ball at an angle, closer to the side of the ball that’s rotating into the oncoming air. Thanks to Isaac Newton’s third law that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, the deflected wake pushes the ball in the opposite direction, toward the side of the ball that’s turning away from the oncoming air. Thus, the spinning ball gets a sideways shove.
Source: Spinning metal sails could slash fuel consumption, emissions on cargo ships
A Council of the European Union document leaked by Statewatch on 30 August reveals that during the summer months, that Estonia (current EU Presidency) has been pushing the other Member States to strengthen indiscriminate internet surveillance, and to follow in the footsteps of China regarding online censorship.
Source: Leaked document: EU Presidency calls for massive internet filtering – EDRi
According to the leaked document, the text suggests two options for each of the two most controversial proposals: the so-called “link tax” or ancillary copyright and the upload filter.
“Everybody I know in the cryptocurrency space has gotten their phone number stolen,” said Joby Weeks, a Bitcoin entrepreneur.
Source: Identity Thieves Hijack Cellphone Accounts to Go After Virtual Currency – The New York Times
Under the gun, Smith and Boyle went into an office and, in one hour, emerged with the basic plans for the CCD, the sensor still used in digital photography today. A CCD works like this: Light hits a tiny grid of photosensitive silicon cells, each which build a charge proportional to the intensity of the light hitting it. This charge can be measured precisely and we can know exactly how bright that portion should be. Add filters, and color can be discerned too.
A Federal Judge has shot down an AT&T lawsuit against the city of Louisville, one of several company bids to slow down Google Fiber’s arrival to the region. AT&T sued the city back in February of last year after Louisville streamlined its utility pole attachment rules to speed up the arrival of competing broadband services to the city. Incumbent ISPs have long abused the absurdly bureaucratic pole attachment process to slow competitors, and Louisville’s “one touch make ready” reforms streamlined the process significantly.
Source: Judge Kills AT&T’s Attempt to Slow Google Fiber in Louisville
Berg and Ulfberg and Amano and Maruoka have used CNF-DNF-approximators to prove exponential lower bounds for the monotone network complexity of the clique function and of Andreev’s function. We show that these approximators can be used to prove the same lower bound for their non-monotone network complexity. This implies P not equal NP.
Source: [1708.03486] A Solution of the P versus NP Problem
More background at: The P-versus-NP page
This page collects links around papers that try to settle the “P versus NP” question (in either way). Here are some links that explain/discuss this question:
A clear formulation of the “P versus NP” question by Stephen Cook.
Physicist James Clerk Maxwell was perhaps the first to recognize that atoms could be used to keep time. In 1879 he wrote to electricity pioneer William Thomson, suggesting that the “period of vibration of a piece of quartz crystal” would be a better absolute standard of time than the mean solar second (based on the Earth’s rotation) but would still depend “essentially on one particular piece of matter” and therefore would be “liable to accidents.” Maxwell theorized that atoms would work even better as a natural standard of time. Thomson wrote in the second edition of the Elements of Natural Philosophy, published in 1879, that hydrogen atoms, sodium atoms, and others were “absolutely alike in every physical property” and “probably remain the same so long as the particle itself exists.”
Source: Device That Revolutionized Timekeeping Receives an IEEE Milestone – IEEE – The Institute