Cody Taylor

narramissic writes “Researchers with security consultancy IOActive have created a worm that could quickly spread among Smart Grid devices, small computers connected to the power grid that give customers and power companies better control over the electricity they use. ‘[The worm] spread from one meter to another and then it changed the text in the LCD screen to say “pwned,”‘ said Travis Goodspeed, an independent security consultant who worked with the IOActive team. In the hands of a malicious hacker, this code could be used to cut power to Smart Grid devices that use a feature called ‘remote disconnect,’ which allows power companies to cut a customer’s power via the network. The robustness of US power networks has been a hot-button issue after a technical glitch in 2003 caused a cascading power failure in the eastern United States and Canada that affected 55 million people.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MJackson writes “BT has revealed new details about the roll-out of its £1.5bn programme to deploy super fast fibre optic broadband to as many as 10 million UK homes (40%) by 2012. Scotland will become one of the first places to benefit from next-generation broadband services, with more than 34,000 homes and businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow receiving speeds of up to 40Mbps and potentially 60Mbps from early next year (2010). Overall, BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT’s local network, aims to deploy Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) based next generation broadband services next summer (2010) to 500,000 homes and businesses in the UK.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt_dk writes “Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. ‘We’ll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet’s atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,’ said Kaltenegger. ‘We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'” The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers’ work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arnie87 writes “One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: ‘If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista’s successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MBCook writes “AppleInsider has an article discussing Dell’s attempt to enter the smartphone market, as well as the news that the phone was rejected by carriers as too dull. The article doesn’t pull punches: ‘Dell’s failure to successfully step from the commodity PC business into the mobile handset market should come as no surprise, as smartphones requires expertise in software platform development, consumer design savvy, and portable device engineering, all things Dell has never demonstrated any proficiency in.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What a waste! Now the value of Toys ‘R’ Us’ .1M purchase of Toys.com has been relegated to type-in traffic and potentially some of the inbound links to Toys.com.

Kugrian writes “Showing that it’s not just the British and the French who have trouble seeing each other on the high seas, a US Nuclear submarine yesterday crashed into a US Navy heavy cruiser. The USS Hartford, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, was submerged as it crashed into the USS New Orleans in the strait of Hormuz, resulting in the spillage of 95,000 litres of diesel fuel. Both vessels were heading in the same direction when the collision occurred in the narrow strait and were subsequently heading to port for repairs. A spokesman for the 5th Fleet said that the USS Hartford suffered no damage to its nuclear propulsion system.” According to the USS New Orleans’ Wikipedia page, it’s actually an amphibious transport dock.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KentuckyFC writes “Many countries censor internet traffic using techniques such as blocking IP addresses, filtering traffic with certain URLs in the data packets and prefix hijacking. Others allow wiretapping of international traffic with few if any legal safeguards. There are growing fears that these practices could trigger a major international incident should international traffic routed through these countries fall victim, whether deliberately or by accident (witness the prefix hijacking of YouTube in Pakistan last year). So how to avoid these places? A group of computer scientists investigating this problem say it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to determine which countries traffic might pass through. But their initial assessment indicates that the countries with the most pervasive censorship policies — China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — pose a minimal threat because so little international traffic passes their way. The researchers instead point the finger at western countries that have active censorship policies and carry large amounts of international traffic. They highlight the roles of the two biggest carriers: Great Britain, which actively censors internet traffic, and the US, which allows warrantless wiretapping of international traffic (abstract).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alphadogg writes “Business incentives are completely lacking today for upgrading to IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, according to a survey of network operators conducted by the Internet Society (ISOC). In a new report, ISOC says that ISPs, enterprises and network equipment vendors report that there are ‘no concrete business drivers for IPv6.’ However, survey respondents said customer demand for IPv6 is on the rise and that they are planning or deploying IPv6 because they feel it is the next major development in the evolution of the Internet.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krebsatwpost writes “TrafficConverter.biz, one of the more notorious pay-per-install affiliate programs, was dismantled this week after media attention caused Visa and Mastercard to shut down the group’s payment operations. The action comes just a few days after a report by The Washington Post that showed some affiliates were making more than 0,000 USD a week installing rogue anti-virus software. The credit card industry may have been spurred by the fact that the first version of the Conficker worm told infected systems to download a file from TrafficConverter, although the story posits that this could have been an attempted Joe Job rather than a blatant attempt to drum up more installs.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.