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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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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Calling Chicken Little: Clouds Getting Lower

Calling Chicken Little: Clouds Getting Lower: Chicken Licken was right, the sky really is falling. NASA satellite data has shown that the Earth's cloud tops have been lowering over the last decade.

Whitman expects HP Windows 8 Intel tablet this year

Whitman expects HP Windows 8 Intel tablet this year:

Looks like old Fujitsu isn't the only PC-maker looking to get into the Windows 8 tablet business before year's end. Addressing a conference in Northern California, HP CEO Meg Whitman let it be known that her company plans on pushing out an Intel-packing tablet running the new Microsoft operating system in 2012. How about a dual-boot webOS system, Meg? We can dream, can't we?

Whitman expects HP Windows 8 Intel tablet this year originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Real Fish Welcome Robotic Overlord Into Their School

Real Fish Welcome Robotic Overlord Into Their School: A robotic fish has sailed across an aquatic uncanny valley by tricking real fish into following it upstream.

World of Warcraft boosts cognitive functioning in older adults

World of Warcraft boosts cognitive functioning in older adults: For some older adults, the online video game World of Warcraft (WoW) may provide more than an opportunity for escapist adventure. Researchers have found that playing WoW boosted cognitive functioning for older adults – particularly those who had scored poorly on cognitive ability tests before playing the game.

Earliest horses show past global warming affected body size of mammals

Earliest horses show past global warming affected body size of mammals: As scientists continue developing climate change projection models, paleontologists studying an extreme short-term global warming event have discovered direct evidence about how mammals respond to rising temperatures. Researchers have now found a correlation between temperature and body size in mammals by following the evolution of the earliest horses about 56 million years ago: As temperatures increased, their body size decreased.

Girls' verbal skills make them better at arithmetic, study finds

Girls' verbal skills make them better at arithmetic, study finds: While boys generally do better than girls in science and math, some studies have found that girls do better in arithmetic. A new study finds that the advantage comes from girls' superior verbal skills.

Replacing electricity with light: First physical 'metatronic' circuit created

Replacing electricity with light: First physical 'metatronic' circuit created: The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light.

Blood mystery solved: Two new blood types identified

Blood mystery solved: Two new blood types identified: You probably know your blood type: A, B, AB or O. You may even know if you're Rhesus positive or negative. But how about the Langereis blood type? Or the Junior blood type? Positive or negative? Most people have never even heard of these. Yet this knowledge could be "a matter of life and death." While blood transfusion problems due to Langereis and Junior blood types are rare worldwide, several ethnic populations are at risk.

Funny From my bro

U.S. Navy Receives First Industry Built Railgun Prototype

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Wednesday February 08, @10:58AM 

from the killing-pirates-with-magnets dept.

Zothecula writes"Two years after BAE Systems was awarded a US$21 million contract from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to develop an advanced Electromagnetic Railgun for the U.S. Navy, the company hasdelivered the first industry-built prototype demonstrator to the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren. The prototype launcher is now being prepared for testing which is scheduled to take place in the coming weeks."

New Technique Promises Much Faster Hard Drive Write Speeds

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Wednesday February 08, @09:37AM 

from the sharks-in-my-drives dept.

MrSeb writes"Hold onto your hats: Scientists at the University of York, England have completely rewritten the rules of magnetic storage (abstract; full paper paywalled). Instead of switching a magnetic region using a magnetic field (like a hard drive head), the researchers have managed to switch a ferrimagnetic nanoisland using a 60-femtosecond laser. Storing magnetic data using lasers is up to 1,000 times faster than writing to a conventional hard drive (we're talking about gigabytes or terabytes per second) — and the ferrimagnetic nanoislands that store the data are capable of storage densities that are some 15 times greater than existing hard drive platters. Unfortunately the York scientists only detailed writing data with lasers; there's no word on how to read it."

DC man’s ‘NO TAGS’ vanity plate earns him $20,000 in tickets

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Washington, D.C. driver Danny White thought he had a really good idea for a joke. But the joke's on him--to the tune of $20,000, reports local affiliate NBC4.
White's prank started 25 years ago when he got a vanity license plate reading, "NO TAGS." He told NBC4 that he was "Just having fun!" and that "D.C. don't get the joke. They don't get it."
The issue? Each time a car without proper identification is cited for a violation, a DMV employee enters "NO TAGS" into their paperwork. Because White's vanity plate is registered with the District of Columbia's DMV, his name and vehicle appear in the computer's system whenever a "NO TAGS" violation is entered. Notices for the fines are then mailed to White's residence.
Vanity tags have a long history of causing trouble for the DMV and other motorists; White is hardly alone in becoming a target for bad ticket karma. In 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported on California driver Nick Vautier, who got into trouble over his personalized license plate, which simply contained his initials, "NV." Unfortunately for Vautier, "NV" is also the California DMV's code for when a vehicle's plates are "Not Visible."
"I started to get random parking tickets from Los Angeles, where my car has never been," Vautier told the LAT. "For every type of car. Except a Mazda. Which is what I drive."
Vautier eventually gave up his vanity plate, which White refuses to do.
White himself drives a Chevrolet Avalanche truck. So, when a ticket arrives at his home citing a non-Chevy vehicle, he doesn't have much trouble getting those dismissed. But White isn't always so lucky when he does get a copy of a ticket meant for someone else's Chevy.
"I've got enough tickets here to plaster my whole car," he told NBC4. "It had to be $20,000 in tickets. Over $20,000."
White says he has to take time off from work every few months to have the tickets dismissed. And yet he still refuses to give up the vanity plate, even though the backlog of other people's tickets prevent him from renewing his license or registration.

(NBC4/nbcwashington.com)After hearing about White's story, NBC4 launched an investigation with the Washington, D.C. DMV. And while the DMV has yet to "fix" the problem, DMV Director Lucinda Babers told the station that she's considering simply revoking White's vanity tags, along with other "confusing" plates, to avoid any future mishaps.
In the meantime, Babers said ticket writers must collect the last six digits of a vehicle's VIN instead of "NO TAGS."
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How fast you walk and your grip in middle age may predict dementia, stroke risk

How fast you walk and your grip in middle age may predict dementia, stroke risk: Simple tests such as walking speed and hand grip strength may help doctors determine how likely it is a middle-aged person will develop dementia or stroke.

Microsoft's Killer Tablet Opportunity

Microsoft's Killer Tablet Opportunity:

snydeq writes "Advice Line's Bob Lewis sees ripe opportunity for Microsoft in the tablet market: Forget about outdoing Apple's iPad and give us the features that finally improve the way we work. 'The game isn't beating Apple at its own game. The magic buzzword is to "differentiate" and show what your technology will do that Apple won't even care about, let alone beat you at. One possible answer: Help individual employees be more effective at their jobs,' Lewis writes, outlining four business features to target, not the least of which would be to provide UI variance, enabling serious tablet users to expose the OS complexity necessary to do real work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube's Nerdy Fiddlers Strike a Chord With Geeks

YouTube's Nerdy Fiddlers Strike a Chord With Geeks:

Why People Don't Live Past 114

Why People Don't Live Past 114:

kkleiner writes "Average life expectancy has nearly doubled in developed countries over the 20th century. But a puzzling part to the equation has emerged. While humans are in fact living longer lives on average, the oldest age that the oldest people reach seems to be stubbornly and oddly precisely cemented right at 114. What will it take for humans to live beyond this limit?"

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New theory of moral behavior may explain recent ethical lapses in banking industry

New theory of moral behavior may explain recent ethical lapses in banking industry: Why do some people behave morally while others do not? Sociologists have developed a theory of the moral self that may help explain the ethical lapses in the banking, investment and mortgage-lending industries that nearly ruined the U.S. economy.

Did Anonymous Take Down CIA.gov?

Did Anonymous Take Down CIA.gov?:

jfruh writes "The CIA's website has been down intermittently since Friday, apparently the victim of a DDOS attack. One of the more interesting questions of the story is whether elements of Anonymous are behind this — a question that even prominent members of the Anonymous movement can't seem to answer with any certainty. Perhaps this is obvious, but it seems that an anarchic, leaderless grouping can be hard to keep tabs on."

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