Through a series of microwave towers, the dish beams market data 734 miles to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer warehouse in Aurora, Ill., in 4.13 milliseconds, or about 95% of the theoretical speed of light, according to the company.
Fiber-optic cables, which are made up of long strands of glass, carry data at roughly 65% of light speed.
via Firms race to transmit Wall Street data at nearly light speed – latimes.com.
A Chinese Long March rocket is scheduled to blast off to the Moon on Sunday evening at about 6pm British time carrying a small robotic rover that will touch down on to the lunar surface in about two weeks’ time – the first soft landing on the Earth’s only natural satellite since 1976.
The take-off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan Province marks the latest stage in China’s grand ambitions not just to put a man on Moon by the end of the next decade, but to build a permanent lunar base from which it can plan missions to Mars and beyond.
via In the footsteps of the US: Why next man on Moon will be Chinese – Science – News – The Independent.
My best guess is that what they did was to impersonate the EP-EXT wifi network and steal our credentials from the login page (https://wifiauth.europarl.europa.eu/, now no longer available, see screenshot below for what it more-or-less used to look like). In this scenario, after I automatically connect to the rogue WiFi (because my phone recognizes the SSID), it presents me with the familiar login page, but this time it’s not HTTPS but plain HTTP. So, no warning about a self-signed certificate is presented to the user.
After I type in my credentials, the rogue WiFi is turned off for a minute or more, so my phone re-connects to the real EP-EXT network and I am asked for my credentials again. I would probably think that I mistyped the password or something and not think twice about it. After a minute the rogue WiFi goes back online, waiting for the next victim.
via epfsug – Re: Ang.: [EPFSUG] 14 MEPs emails intercepted by a hacker thanks to Microsoft flaws – arc.
This is classic MITM where a user inadvertently accepts a different certificate than provided from the mail server which allows the man in the middle access to the encrypted stream. Always be on the lookout for those pop up notifications. An attacker can’t get to an encrypted stream without your permission — even on an unsecured open wifi.
From: Temporary Switch-off of the EP Public WI-FI Network. EP Private Wi-Fi Network Still Available.
The Parliament has been subject for a man-in-the-middle attack, where a hacker has captured the communication between private smartphones and the public Wi-Fi of the Parliament (EP-EXT Network).
The consequence is that some individual mail-boxes have been compromised. All concerned users have already been contacted and asked to change their password.
As a precaution, the Parliament has therefore decided to switch-off the public Wi-Fi network until further notice, and we invite you to contact the ITEC Service Desk in order to install an EP software certificate on all the devices that you use to access the EP IT systems (email, etc..).
So far, SolidEnergy has made small, hand-built battery cells, similar to what you would find in a cell phone, using equipment and experts at an A123 Systems lab near Boston. (A123 Systems went bankrupt last year, and was acquired by the Chinese company Wanxiang.) These experimental cells store 30 percent more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries, but the company calculates that the approach could eventually lead to a 40 percent improvement.
via Startup Cuts Lithium-Ion Battery Costs | MIT Technology Review.
The top-rated reasons for preferring physical to digital products were: “I like to hold the product” (51%), “I am not restricted to a particular device” (20%), “I can easily share it” (10%), “I like the packaging” (9%), and “I can sell it when used” (6%).
via Young adult readers ‘prefer printed to ebooks’ | Books | theguardian.com.
Double is the ultimate tool for telecommuting. From anywhere in the world, you have a physical presence in the office and can speak to co-workers at anytime. Double is a remotely controlled, mobile teleconferencing system, enabling conversations to happen anywhere and anytime.
via Double Robotics – Telepresence Robot for Telecommuters.
These do seem a little creepy. They appear built on Segway tech and priced at $2500. There could be some use for these such as being able to walk around a museum as shown in the video below. How much would someone pay to do walk around on your own at the Louvre in Paris without having to fly there? Perhaps one day these robots become ubiquitous to a point where entire meeting rooms consist of nothing but these robots talking with other robots.
Double by Double Robotics – Buy Now from Double Robotics on Vimeo.
Different applications of covert acoustical mesh networks are presented, including the use for remote keylogging over multiple hops. It is shown that the concept of a covert acoustical mesh network renders many conventional security concepts useless, as acoustical communications are usually not considered. Finally, countermeasures against covert acoustical mesh networks are discussed, including the use of lowpass filtering in computing systems and a host-based intrusion detection system for analyzing audio input and output in order to detect any irregularities.
Thanks to a huge effort to fix the most obvious weaknesses and the appointment at last of a single contractor, QSSI, to oversee the work, the website now crashes much less frequently, officials said. That is a major improvement from a month ago, when it was up only 42 percent of the time and 10-hour failures were common. Yet an enormous amount of work remains to be done, all sides agree.
via Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash – NYTimes.com.
Systems like this should require 5 9s availability from the beginning. This means that the system should be operationally up 99.999% of the time. This allows for around 5.7 minutes downtime per year. I suspect companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google meet this standard for high availability. There are all kinds of methods and tricks to achieve this that have been learned over the past century in telecommunication systems.
In the last week of September, the disastrous results of the project’s inept management and execution were becoming fully apparent. The agency pressed CGI to explain why a performance test showed that the site could not handle more than 500 simultaneous users. The response once again exhibited the blame-shifting that had plagued the project for months.
I had the opportunity to observe a display stuck in the middle of its bootup sequence, displaying a version string. This revealed that the system is called IBus and it’s made by the Swedish company Axentia. Sure enough, their website talks about DARC and how it requires no return channel, making it possible to use battery-powered displays in remote areas.
Not much else is said about the system, though; there are no specs for the proprietary protocol. So I implemented the five-layer DARC protocol stack in Perl and was left with a stream of fully error-corrected packets on top of Layer 5, separated into hundreds of subchannels. Some of these contained human-readable strings with names of terminal stations. They seemed like an easy starting point for reverse engineering.
via absorptions: Decoding radio-controlled bus stop displays.
A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide. In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software.
via NSA infected 50,000 computer networks with malicious software – nrc.nl.
This article is a bit short on details. It doesn’t say what OSs or exactly how they got malware onto victim machines. The only way to infect a network would be to perhaps get control of its firewall or main router. Since most people use cheap SOHO routers that might not be very difficult to swap out firmware on them that can do all kinds of things unbeknownst to its owner. The article implies that the victim machines are PCs according to this:
One example of this type of hacking was discovered in September 2013 at the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom. For a number of years the British intelligence service – GCHQ – has been installing this malicious software in the Belgacom network in order to tap their customers’ telephone and data traffic. The Belgacom network was infiltrated by GCHQ through a process of luring employees to a false Linkedin page.