people without health insurance can potentially get treatment by using medical data of one of the hacking victims.Halamka, who also runs the “Life as a healthcare CIO” blog, said a medical record can be worth between US$50 and $250 to the right customer — many times more than the amount typically paid for a credit card number, or the cents paid for a user name and password.
via Why would Chinese hackers want hospital patient data? | ITworld.
The images are available to the public through The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, the most complete online collection of images of Earth taken by astronauts. This database contains photographs beginning with those taken during Mercury missions in the early 1960s up to recent images from the station, with more added daily. As of August 2014, the collection included a total of nearly 1.8 million images, more than 1.3 million of them from the space station. Approximately 30 percent of those were taken at night.
via Space Station Sharper Images of Earth at Night Crowdsourced For Science | NASA.
Lost at Night requires the most skill, seeking to identify cities in images encompassing a circle 310 miles around. “We don’t know which direction the astronaut pointed the camera, only where the station was at the time the image was taken,” explains Sanchez. “Some images are bright cities but others are small towns. It is like a puzzle with 300,000 pieces.”
This reflects how today’s internet, despite its potential as a Democratizing Tool, is controlled by the few. Look at mobile—most apps have to go through Apple and Google’s not-always transparent approval process to be placed on their app stores and become visible to millions of smartphone users. The featured petitions on Change.org, currently a private “B” corporation, (a voluntary, non-binding certification which means they met the nonprofit B Lab’s standards for social and environmental performance) are similarly controlled not by its millions of users but its CEO and founder Ben Rattray, and, according to a spokesperson, a global “Leadership Team.”
via Who’s Getting Rich Off Profit-Driven ‘Clicktivism’ | Motherboard.
Apple issues developer certificates to those who want to do internal distributions of their own applications. Those certificates can be used to self-sign an application and provision it.
Wang’s team found they could sneak a developer provisioning file onto an iOS device when it was connected via USB to a computer. A victim doesn’t see a warning.
That would allow for a self-signed malicious application to be installed. Legitimate applications could also be removed and substituted for look-alike malicious ones.
via The biggest iPhone security risk could be connecting one to a computer – Computerworld.
Three House members—Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.)—have sent a memo to NASA demanding that the agency investigate what they call “an epidemic of anomalies” with SpaceX missions.
via Congress and SpaceX: Red tape ties up private space..
That’s why this whole thing looks to me to be a transparent attempt from members of our Congress to hinder a privately owned company that threatens their own interests.
Sometimes things go wrong, and instances can go down in unexpected ways. Even if the instance has disappeared, OpenStack might still think it’s there. If this happens, one way to deal with it is to delete these phantom instances directly from OpenStack’s database. This guide will show you how to do that with a simple script.
In very simple terms, when that happens, material properties such as resistance no longer depend on the length scales involved. So if electrons move without resistance on a tiny scale, they should also move without resistance on much larger scales too. Hence the phenomenon of superconductivity.
“We have described how it is possible for unparticles in strongly correlated matter to mediate superconductivity,” say LeBlanc and Grushin.
As expected, the hype is pretty high over this. But from the beginning, the story didn’t make sense to me. There are obvious details missing: are the passwords in plaintext or encrypted, what sites are they for, how did they end up with a single criminal gang? The Milwaukee company that pushed this story, Hold Security, isn’t a company that I had ever heard of before. I was with Howard Schmidt when I first heard this story. He lives in Wisconsin, and he had never heard of the company before either. The New York Times writes that “a security expert not affiliated with Hold Security analyzed the database of stolen credentials and confirmed it was authentic,” but we’re not given any details. This felt more like a PR story from the company than anything real.
via Schneier on Security: Over a Billion Passwords Stolen?.
From: Krebs on Security in an article entitled Q&A on the Reported Theft of 1.2B Email Accounts
These actors — mostly spammers and malware purveyors (usually both) — focus on acquiring as many email addresses and account credentials as they can. Their favorite methods of gathering this information include SQL injection (exploiting weaknesses in Web sites that can be used to force the site to cough up user data) and abusing stolen credentials to steal even more credentials from victim organizations.
Overall Krebs trusts some researcher who claims to have seen this data first hand. According to Krebs:
I’ve known Hold Security’s Founder Alex Holden for nearly seven years.
and
Alex isn’t keen on disclosing his methods, but I have seen his research and data firsthand and can say it’s definitely for real.
The “monkey selfie” in question is a diamond in the mud: a truly remarkable portrait, perfectly focused and strategically positioned to capture a mischievous yet vulnerable smile. If that macaque had an Instagram account she’d have, like, a million followers.
But she doesn’t, and the sorry state of our copyright law – as interpreted by the Copyright Office and exploited by Wikipedia – is to blame. Due to the backwards treatment of animal creators everywhere, monkey art (and monkey photography in particular) continues to languish. How is an aspiring monkey photographer supposed to make it if she can’t stop the rampant internet piracy of monkey works?
It is an incontrovertible fact that a society with more monkey selfies is better than a society with none, so, as long as monkeys are denied copyright, we all lose.
“After ten years, five months and four days travelling towards our destination, looping around the Sun five times and clocking up 6.4 billion kilometres, we are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” says Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General.
“Europe’s Rosetta is now the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet, a major highlight in exploring our origins. Discoveries can start.”
via Rosetta arrives at comet destination / Rosetta / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA.
From: Re-Live the excitement
For those of you who couldn’t follow the live streamed event this morning, here’s a short summary of what happened here at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt at the Rosetta Rendezvous event. A full replay of the livestream can be found here.
A couple of pics here.
Previous coverage of it waking up here and of it having its software upgraded here.