Voting System Test Hack Elects Futurama's Bender To School Board

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 02, @11:36AM 

from the bite-my-shiny-metal-ballot dept.

mr crypto writes with this quote from El Reg:"In 2010 the Washington DC election board announced it had set up an e-voting system for absentee ballots and was planning to use it in an election. However, to test the system, it invited the security community and members of the public to try and hack it three weeks before the election. 'It was too good an opportunity to pass up,' explained Professor Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan. 'How often do you get the chance to hack a government network without the possibility of going to jail?' With the help of two graduate students, Halderman started to examine the software. Despite it being a relatively clean Ruby on Rails build, they spotted a shell injection vulnerability within a few hours. They figured out a way of writing output to the images directory (PDF) on the compromised server, and of encrypting traffic so that the front-end intrusion detection system couldn't spot them. The team also managed to guess the login details for the terminal server used by the voting system. ... The team altered all the ballots on the system to vote for none of the nominated candidates. They then wrote in names of fictional IT systems as candidates, including Skynet and (Halderman's personal favorite) Bender for head of the DC school board."

Are Rich People Less Moral?

Are Rich People Less Moral?:

sciencehabit writes "New research suggests that the upper classes are more likely to behave dishonorably than those lower on the economic spectrum. The rich are more likely to cheat, steal, and even disobey traffic laws than those with less money and power (abstract). Curiously, in one experiment, Prius drivers also behaved badly, regardless of their wealth."

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Microsoft Kinect Games Grocery Shopping at Texas Whole Foods

Microsoft Kinect Games Grocery Shopping at Texas Whole Foods: The Board of Awesomeness is now lugging groceries at a Whole Foods in Texas. Last month, Chaotic Moon Labs' Board of Awesomeness was one of the stars of CES in Las Vegas. It's a motorized skateboard tricked out with a Samsung tablet and Microsoft's Kinect so that it can be steered by hand gestures and voice commands. But it turns out that the Moon Lab had more on its mind than just skateboarding.

Flatworms Defy Aging Through Cell Division Tricks

Flatworms Defy Aging Through Cell Division Tricks:

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from The University of Nottingham have demonstrated how a species of flatworm overcomes the ageing process to be potentially immortal. The discovery, published (abstract; full text PDF) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Medical Research Council and may shed light on the possibilities of alleviating ageing and age-related characteristics in human cells."

After finding the gene for telomerase synthesis in the worms, the researchers were able to observe that the worms "...dramatically increase the activity of this gene when they regenerate, allowing stem cells to maintain their telomeres as they divide to replace missing tissues."

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Pinball pioneer Steve Kordek dies at 100

Pinball pioneer Steve Kordek dies at 100:

Believe it or not, pinball (that most beloved of nerd pastimes) hasn't always looked this way -- a familiar field of bumpers with a pair of forward facing flippers at the bottom. That particular design originated with the 1948 title Triple Action, the work of Steve Kordek who died this week at the age of 100. Kordek is credited with a number of innovations to the analog arcade games, including multi-ball mode and drop targets. All told, the pioneer designed well over 100 different machines for Genco, Bally and Williams -- some of the biggest names in the pinball pantheon -- over the course of his roughly 60 year career. So, it is with a heavy heart that we bid farewell to a man that provided us with hours of entertainment and cost us plenty of quarters.

Pinball pioneer Steve Kordek dies at 100 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Women More Likely To Unfriend Than Men

Women More Likely To Unfriend Than Men:

Hugh Pickens writes writes "AFP reports that a study by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project shows that women are more likely than men to delete friends from their online social networks like Facebook and tend to choose more restrictive privacy settings. Sixty-seven percent of women who maintain a social networking profile said they have deleted friends compared with 58 percent of men. The study also found that men are nearly twice as likely as women to have posted updates, comments, photos or videos that they later regret (PDF). "Even as social media users become more active curators of their profile, a small group of what might be described as trigger-happy users say they post updates, comments, photos, or videos that they later regret sharing.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Moxi whole-home six tuner DVR on its way to WOW! customers

Moxi whole-home six tuner DVR on its way to WOW! customers:

Just because Arris found limited success with its Moxi DVR in the consumer space, that doesn't mean it won't continue to seek success providing hardware to cable companies. Ultra TV is what the number 15 TV provider (432k subscribers) in the US, WOW!, will be calling the 6 tuner, 500GB multi-room DVR, with MoCA, VOIP and WiFi -- a deal that seems to be a bit better than the one TiVo offers for the number 16 provider in the US, RCN. The Moxi user interface in the video below looks like the Moxi we know, but we assume the DVR gateway and players will resemble the Shaw counterparts rather than the retail ones. A comment on the WOW Buzz blog indicates that a gateway and two players will set you back $25 a month, while another indicates that installs are already being scheduled.

Continue reading Moxi whole-home six tuner DVR on its way to WOW! customers

Moxi whole-home six tuner DVR on its way to WOW! customers originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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