Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

US: 1811 wreck of Perry ship discovered off Rhode Island

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© AP Photo/Tom PackerThis Nov. 10, 2006 photo provided on Jan. 6, 2011 by Charles Buffum, shows a submerged cannon that a team of divers say is one of the remains of the U.S.S. Revenge, a ship commanded by U.S. Navy hero Oliver Hazard Perry. The ship was wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Rhode Island on Jan. 9, 1811
A team of divers say they've discovered the remains of the USS Revenge, a ship commanded by U.S. Navy hero Oliver Hazard Perry and wrecked off Rhode Island in 1811.

Perry is known for defeating the British in the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie off the shores of Ohio, Michigan and Ontario in the War of 1812 and for the line "We have met the enemy and they are ours." His battle flag bore the phrase "Don't give up the ship," and to this day is a symbol of the Navy.

The divers, Charles Buffum, a brewery owner from Stonington, Conn., and Craig Harger, a carbon dioxide salesman from Colchester, Conn., say the wreck changed the course of history because Perry likely would not have been sent to Lake Erie otherwise. Sunday is the 200th anniversary of the wreck.

Buffum said he's been interested in finding the remains of the Revenge ever since his mother several years ago gave him the book Shipwrecks on the Shores of Westerly. The book includes Perry's account of the wreck, which happened when it hit a reef in a storm in heavy fog off Watch Hill in Westerly as Perry was bringing the ship from Newport to New London, Conn.

Telescope

Wolf Moon Rising

Last night, Jan. 19th, as photographer Laurent Laveder was positioning his camera in front of the Tronoen Chapel in Brittany, France, he received a text message from his stepdaughter Manon. "Look at the Moon! :o)" she typed. "She didn't know I already was!" says Laveder. Click here to view the movie he recorded, entitled Wolf Moon Rising:

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© Laurent Laveder
It's called the Wolf Moon because of folklore: northern Native Americans named it after packs of singing wolves they once heard during the winter month of January. "For years, I've been meaning to catch the Wolf Moon rising," says Laveder. "I'm glad I finally did!"

Radar

Report: ZDNet's Danchev Hospitalized?

The mystery surrounding noted security researcher and blogger Dancho Danchev continued on Monday, after reports from Bulgaria suggested that Danchev may be confined to a hospital in the country.

The unconfirmed report comes by way of Dnevnik.org, a Bulgarian online publication, which cites two unnamed sources as confirming that Danchev has been hospitalized since December 11, 2010. Danchev is now "stabalized and will soon be discharged," Dnevnik reports. The report did not say why Danchev had been hospitalized.

Threatpost reported on Friday that Danchev, a frequent blogger on computer security for ZDNet.com's Zero Day blog, has been missing since early September. Regular posts to his personal blog and Zero Day ceased. During that time, he has been offline and unreachable by phone or e-mail, though he appears to have been using Twitter through late October.

Network

Wikipedia: You Still Can't Trust It

wikipediaprivacy
© PC Mag
Wikipedia, the world's largest user-generated online encyclopedia is 10. Sometimes it's hard to believe anything on the web could be 10 years old. In human years, 10 is but a pup: a small, gangly thing with too large hands and feet. Old enough to sense the onset of teenage-dom, but still too young to see the world as it really is. Knowing the difference between fact and fiction, for instance, can be particularly difficult at this age--and in this one way, Wikipedia is still a lot like that prepubescent child.

Six years ago, I pondered whether Wikipedia was in fact dangerous. So much information, so many people using it as a source, and so much potential for misuse. When I wrote the story, the site was being roiled by a fresh controversy. One man had, as a joke, written a fake biography of journalist John Seigenthaler. The entry included nonsense about him and the John F Kennedy assassination. The post author lost his job and Wikipedia ended up with a black eye. Up until then, it seems as if no one realized how easy it was for anyone to enter virtually anything in the information Wiki.

Network

Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head

On 19th of December, 2010 elections were held in Belarus, my dear home country. The apparent popularity of opposition candidates was met with a crackdown. Seven out of nine presidential candidates were thrown to jail, some of them maimed in the process. A peaceful street protest of tens of thousands was brutally dispersed, with many hundreds beaten and arrested. All NGOs and political parties shut down, with human rights activists dragged to courts.

While none of it really was new for this long abused nation, some things surfaced for the first time. The Great Belarussian Firewall debuted, shutting down SSL connections, blocking major social media websites and replacing opposition news outlets with fake dummies. Traditional wiretapping of phone networks was combined with GSM location services: thousands of people are now getting subpoenas and are dragged to police stations for being on streets in the vicinity of protests.

Bug

Lame Stuxnet worm 'full of errors', says security consultant

Far from being cyber-spy geniuses with ninja-like black-hat coding skills, the developers of Stuxnet made a number of mistakes that exposed their malware to earlier detection and meant the worm spread more widely than intended.

Stuxnet, the infamous worm that infected SCADA-based computer control systems, is sometimes described as the world's first cyber-security weapon. It managed to infect facilities tied to Iran's controversial nuclear programme before re-programming control systems to spin up high-speed centrifuges and slow them down, inducing more failures than normal as a result. The malware used rootkit-style functionality to hide its presence on infected systems. In addition, Stuxnet made use of four zero-day Windows exploits as well as stolen digital certificates.

All this failed to impress security consultant Tom Parker, who told the Black Hat DC conference on Tuesday that the developers of Stuxnet had made several mistakes. For one thing, the command-and-control mechanisms used by the worm were inelegant, not least because they sent commands in the clear. The worm spread widely across the net, something Parker argued was ill-suited for the presumed purpose of the worm as a mechanism for targeted computer sabotage. Lastly, the code-obfuscation techniques were lame.

Display

Facebook suspends personal data-sharing feature

Developers kicked back out of your undie drawer

Facebook has "temporarily disabled" a controversial feature that allowed developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users.

The social network suspended the feature, introduced on Friday, after only three days. The decision follows feedback from users that the sharing of data process wasn't clearly explained and criticism from security firms that the feature was ripe for abuse.

Individual users had to grant permission before developers could hook into the API on Facebook's platform. However, because many users often click through permission dialogue boxes without paying attention, concerns were raised by net security firms such as Sophos that the feature might make life easier for the developers of rogue applications.

Display

Creepy as hell: Facebook developers get to know you better

Home addresses and mobile numbers up for grabs

Facebook has added APIs for developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users, so FarmVille can see where, as well as who, you are.

Permission to access such data must be given through the usual notification system, but with the vast majority of users simply agreeing with everything they're asked, the new facility is attracting privacy concerns beyond those incurred by sharing one's details with the developers of Bejeweled Blitz or similar.

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© The Register

Bug

Carbon trading registry suspends ops following hack attack

Smokey and the bandits

A carbon emissions trading registry in Austria has suspended operations until at least 21 January following a hacking attack earlier this month.

The registry has been disconnected from the EU and UN carbon trading registries in response to the 10 January attack, details on which are unclear. A statement on the trading registry website (extract below) explains that the disconnection from other registries and suspension of operations is a security precaution taken to safeguard the operation of wider EU systems while problems on the Austrian site are identified and resolved.
Umweltbundesamt GmbH as registry and ECRA GmbH as registry service provider inform that for security reasons all access to the Austrian emissions trading registry has been locked because of a hacker attack on 10 January 2011. The Austrian registry can therefore not be reached until further notice.

Since the registry also had to be disconnected from the CITL and the ITL to ensure security, it is currently not foreseeable when trading in the Austrian emissions trading registry may continue.

Magnify

$1b effort yields no bioterror defenses

Mass. labs in line to join scaled-back Pentagon program

The Pentagon is scaling back one of its largest efforts to develop treatments for troops and civilians infected in a germ warfare attack after a $1 billion, five-year program fell short of its primary goal.

Even the heavy infusion of research cash and a unified effort by university labs and biotech companies from Boston to California were insufficient to break through limitations of genetic science, according to government officials and specialists in biological terrorism.

Instead, the Pentagon's next $1 billion for the Transformational Medical Technologies program will focus on better ways to identify mutant versions of Ebola, Marburg, and other deadly viruses. Those are among the genetically modified agents that officials fear could be used by terrorists or rogue states against urban or military targets.