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Bradley Manning is an Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Depending on your perspective, he's become a symbol for high tech whistleblowing, or dangerous cyber-crime. Either way, you should be paying attention to his pre-trial hearing, which unfolded this week. Manning's case represents a convergence of issues that shed light on the future of lawbreaking and punishment. More »
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An upcoming Congressional report suggests that NASA satellites have been hacked four times in recent years, possibly by people involved with the Chinese military. NASA isn't confirming all of that - but they do admit "suspicious events" have occurred. More »
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Two federal lawmakers have asked the General Accountability Office to look into the security of medical devices after a researcher showed how he was able to hack his insulin pump and alter settings due to security flaws in the system. More »
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In yet another excellent road sign hack, Kentucky wizards have been kind enough to warn locals about their impending doom. Unfortunately, the Muggles were not amused. This sign only stayed up for a few hours before it went back to broadcasting information about road conditions and other nonsense that couldn't possibly protect anyone from Voldemort. More »
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Hacking is a noble pursuit — it's what tinkerers do to create cool new machines and innovate. But the media is obsessed with using the word "hacker" interchangeably with "criminal." That's why IEEE Spectrum magazine has created this helpful chart (click to enlarge), in which they try to separate out the good hacks from the bad. See if you can guess which ones are good and which are bad . . . answers are on the interactive chart at IEEE, where you can check the boxes to show only good hacks, bad ones, or neutral. More »
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You go to your favorite pizza place, pay with your credit card, then leave. Seems like all that's happened is you've picked up a steaming box of cheese and meat. But you've actually been robbed by a guy 3,000 miles away, who is snarfing up all the data from the pizza joint's credit card validation system. And because there are thousands of other little shops using the same exact validation system software, that guy isn't just robbing you. He's robbing 1,000 other people simultaneously, placing all their credit cards in a tidy little spreadsheet, and handing them off to the highest bidder. More »
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In late December I attended Berlin's Chaos Communication Congress, an annual hacker conference where speakers reveal the latest in high-tech deviousness. Straight from CCC, here are ten ways hackers will subvert your computer, phone, bank card, and life in 2011. More »
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As you've probably heard, the Gawker Media sites were compromised over the weekend. But we're here for you. We've got the latest information, and want you to use this post as a place to talk. More »
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A North Carolina teenager has agreed to plead guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for phoning in hoax bomb threats to colleges, middle schools and FBI offices around the country for the amusement of a live internet audience. More »
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The US government worries that terrorists could take down the country's electrical grid just by hitting a small node in the system. But a new study reveals the grid is too unreliable for that kind of attack. More »
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With the Stuxnet virus wreaking havoc on Iranian nuclear plants, NATO is divided on how to prevent and respond to future cyberattacks. Americans advocating a more proactive stance on combating cyber-ne'er-do-wells, an approach America's NATO allies are skeptical of. More »
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What the heck is that blue box on top of the Small Dome at MIT? Students starting school this week at the venerable geek institution were wondering that themselves. Let's take a closer look . . . More »
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Should the U.S. government declare a cyberwar against WikiLeaks? More »
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Last week the high tech world got just a bit more dangerous - or a bit safer, depending on your perspective. And it was all because of research presented at computer security conferences Black Hat and Defcon. Here's the lowdown. More »
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Computer security expert Barnaby Jack recently demonstrated how to get an ATM to spit money for minutes on end. Jack purchased some ATMs online for his research, and says the tools required to hack them cost less than $100. More »
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According to no less an authority than the New York Times, internet attacks on Google last month may be the work of students with ties to the Chinese military. Not so, responds one of the schools accused. More »
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A handcuff escapist named Ray gave a presentation at Dutch hacker camp HAR about how to quickly make a plastic key that will break you out of Dutch police handcuffs. He did it with a homemade 3D printer, and tested it on actual handcuffs. It's not clear how he got the schematic to make the keys, though some have suggested it might be as easy as photographing the keys, which Dutch police wear dangling from their belts. More »
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Every four years, the Netherlands countryside is invaded by roughly 2500 people obsessed with technology. Together they build a futurist experiment, a massively hacked data network, and a party. Here's a gallery of last weekend's Hacking At Random camp. More »
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Over the weekend, Austin, TX drivers received some important warnings from their road signs about the impending zombie invasion. And the hackers who did it may know something we don't about the undead. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5142117&view=rss&microfeed=true Perhaps hoping the bad news would get buried in presidential inauguration mania, Heartland Payment Systems yesterday announced the discovery of a piece of malicious software buried in their processing system. The malware gave somebody (or something?) access to credit card numbers moving through Heartland's network. Potentially millions of credit card users are affected, because Heartland supplies credit card processing to roughly 250,000 businesses across the United States. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5135950&view=rss&microfeed=true Here's another piece of news that should make you feel nice and secure for the New Year - if you're on the starship Serenity, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Or hell, just stealing from anyone. Yesterday at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, a group of computer security researchers presented evidence that by linking together several hundred standard PlayStation3 machines, they could create evil websites that look exactly like the good websites you might be looking for (like, say, Bank of America). This may sound like a standard phishing scam, but it's a lot worse that that. These evil websites are such good imitations that they fool companies like VeriSign, a company that hands out online "certificates" that guarantee a site is what it claims to be. More »
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So the thought police are on their way to your underground control chamber, and you need to erase your hard drives fast. They can break the crypto on your secret docs, and even if you overwrite them with a bunch of junk data, they've got forensic techniques that could pull an erased file out of a shark's ass. What do you do? Take Hackaday's advice, and use a little thermite. More »
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A new mobile phone-based device called Block&Track, the result of several homebrew hacks by a young Kenyan inventor, acts as a quick and dirty car theft prevention gadget. The device sits in your car and sends a message to your cell phone when somebody starts the engine. At that point, you can send a command that will alert the police, shut down your engine, and activate a listening device that captures sound inside your car. Not only can you stop auto theft before it happens, but you can get your own private Cops show when you listen in as the cops bust the thieves. More »
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At least two things happened in the world of science fiction and science in the past week. One of them was cool, and the other was crap. More »
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When I see scifi flicks from the 1960s and 70s, I always love the blocky, blinky lights on all the computers. Though they were obviously considered "futuristic" at some point before we all started fetishizing miniaturization and gesture-based computers. But now the DiY geeks over at Hackaday have found a way to make those blinky blocks into something useful: a keypad combination lock. Instead of keying a number sequence into it, you can key a color sequence. It's a great home electronics project, and it makes your front door look like it should open with that Star Trek "fffwwp!" noise. More »
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I can't stop thinking about a story that broke earlier this week about a bug that reduced the breast sizes of tons of large-boobed avatars in the MMO "Age of Conan" (you can see before and after pictures here). No word on whether the boobs have been re-inflated, nor any real explanation of how it happened beyond some hand-waving about patches and "morph values" for body parts. My theory is that it was actually a gang of feminist modders who infected the MMO with properly-sized boobies. [Kotaku] More »
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In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the most indispensible form of technology is the Hitchhiker's Guide itself, a pocket computer containing information (some of it wildly inaccurate) about every place in the galaxy. Now the good people at Instructables have a posted a cool project that lets you create your very own Guide — just get crappy old handheld PC, stick Linux on it, and fill it entirely with Wikipedia. Presto, your own somewhat-inaccurate computerized guide to everything in the galaxy. Don't forget your towel! [Instructables via Hackaday] More »
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Neal Stephenson speculated about computer viruses that could crash human brains in his classic novel Snow Crash, but the technology to do something like that has always seemed (luckily) far in the future. Now, however, computer hackers have created a loophole that lets them do it today. Over a month ago, a group of anonymous people exploited a fairly well-known software vulnerability that allows them to flood web forums with a lot of posts. In this case, however, the posts were on an epilepsy site — and many contained images full of flashing icons explicitly designed to cause seizures. More »
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It's now possible for a kid with a laptop to take down the electrical grid, say CIA officials. On Friday, intelligence officials told a cybersecurity conference in New Orleans that evil hackers could cut cities (or even nations) off from water supplies and electricity. Apparently, this has already happened in one country that the CIA wouldn't name. Is this a real threat, or just the CIA's bid to get more government money to fight fictional cyberterrorists? The experts weigh in. More »
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What does this one-micron sized object look like to you? Despite what Freud would say, that boldly thrusting little guy is a microcrystal, once classified as a powder too tiny to be imaged using X-rays. But a bunch of European X-ray fiends have rigged up a special X-ray diffractor at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, and presto — what was once unseeable powder is now a crystal! This discovery means we can see crystals today that are 10 times smaller than ones we could see yesterday. More »
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Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Sherilyn Connelly. More »
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Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Sherilyn Connelly. More »
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Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by James Rocchi. More »
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Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Jason Shankel. More »
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