Month: April 2016

Jennifer Cramblett with her daughter Payton in 2014. (credit: Family via Georgia Newsday)

An Ohio woman has sued a sperm bank that mistakenly gave her sperm from an African-American donor.

Plaintiff Jennifer Cramblett, who is white, gave birth to her mixed-race daughter Payton three years ago. In her lawsuit (PDF), she says that the sperm bank's mix-up led to "an unplanned transracial parent-child relationship for which she was not, and is not, prepared."

Cramblett was artificially inseminated with sperm she ordered from Illinois-based Midwest Sperm Bank, meant to be from Donor No. 380, a Caucasian man. Five months into her pregnancy, she found out that she had actually been sent a sample from Donor No. 330, an African-American male.

The Band of Holes in a photograph taken by drone. The road stretches for a mile up a mountain top, and may be the remains of a structure used for collecting and measuring food tributes for the Inca state. (credit: Charles Stanish)

The Inca Empire covered vast parts of South America, uniting distant cities in Chile, Peru, and even Argentina with well-engineered highways. Sophisticated agricultural systems and architecture allowed the Inca to live on the steep slopes and jagged peaks of mountains. And they did it all without money or markets as we know them. Instead, Inca leaders had an elaborate system of tributes or taxes that took the form of the land's most precious resource: food.

But how do you quantify many different forms of tribute—from squash and rope to corn and peppers—without a system like money to measure exchange value? Perhaps by inventing other systems of measurement. Archaeologists are exploring a mile-long road made entirely of shallow, rock-lined holes that may have once been a dropoff point for Inca food tributes. Dubbed the "Band of Holes," the road climbs the slope of Peru's Monte Sierpe, in a region that has been home to complex human settlements for thousands of years. The rock here is so hard that the people who built it did not bother to dig their carefully sized holes (each is about 3 feet wide and 20-40 inches deep); instead, they constructed the nearly 6,000 holes out of soil and fist-sized rocks they brought from elsewhere. Seen from above, the Band of Holes looks like ribbon of precisely placed firepits, or maybe an infinite punchcard.

Though locals have always known about the Band of Holes, it's possible that archaeologists have ignored it because it's hard to see except from the air. The first modern-day record we have of the structure comes from an aerial photograph taken in 1931, and today two archaeologists, Charles Stanish and Henry Tantaleán, are exploring it with drones.

Cole Marshall's house—and a welcome message from Charter. (credit: Cole Marshall)

The Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission chairman have formally signed off on the blockbuster deal that allows Charter Communications to purchase Time Warner Cable for $78 billion and Bright House Networks for $10.4 billion.

However, both agencies expressed conditions that the telcos must abide by for the deal to go through. The remaining full FCC must now vote on the proposed deal.

As Ars reported earlier, Charter is now set to become the nation's second largest Internet service provider after Comcast, with the two companies controlling the majority of high-speed Internet subscriptions. Comcast struck a deal to buy Time Warner Cable in February 2014, but it failed to convince the FCC and DOJ to approve that merger. Among other things, the agencies were concerned that a bigger Comcast would try to harm online video providers that need access to Comcast's broadband network.

The Bangladesh central bank had no firewall and was using a second-hand $10 network when it was hacked earlier this year. Investigation by British defense contractor BAE Systems has also shown that the SWIFT software used to make payments was compromised, enabling the hackers to send money around the world without leaving any trace in Bangladesh.

In February, unknown hackers broke into the Bangladesh Bank and almost got away with just shy of $1 billion. In the event, their fraudulent transactions were cancelled after they managed to transfer $81 million when a typo raised concerns about one of the transactions. That money is still unrecovered, but BAE has published some of its findings.

The SWIFT organization is owned by 3,000 financial companies and operates a network for sending financial transactions between financial institutions. Institutions using the network must have existing banking relationships; SWIFT transactions do not actually send money but instead send payment orders that must then be settled by having the institutions involved moving money between accounts.

Enlarge (credit: CloudFlare)

In less than two months, online businesses have paid more than $100,000 to scammers who set up a fake distributed denial-of-service gang that has yet to launch a single attack.

The charlatans sent businesses around the globe extortion e-mails threatening debilitating DDoS attacks unless the recipients paid as much as $23,000 by Bitcoin in protection money, according to a blog post published Monday by CloudFlare, a service that helps protect businesses from such attacks. Stealing the name of an established gang that was well known for waging such extortion rackets, the scammers called themselves the Armada Collective.

"If you don't pay by [date], attack will start, yours service going down permanently price to stop will increase to increase to 20 BTC and will go up 10 BTC for every day of the attack," the typical demand stated. "This is not a joke."

Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. (left) and Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah (center) are both signatories to a letter demanding answers about how many Americans have had their information caught up by NSA "upstream" data collection. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, a group of members of Congress who are central to the surveillance debate demanded some kind of answer, even a vague one, about how many Americans are having their data harvested by surveillance programs.

In a sharply worded letter (PDF) to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, 14 members of the House Judiciary Committee insisted he provide some type of "public estimate" of the number of US communications that are being caught up in surveillance programs authorized by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. That's the law that spy agencies like the NSA use to justify "upstream collection" of bulk data from Internet infrastructure.

"We note that we are not the first to ask you for this basic information," states the group of representatives. They mentioned that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D-N.M.) have asked for such information since 2011.

(credit: US DefenseImagery)

Opening a new front in its campaign to defeat Islamic State terrorists, the US military has, for the first time, directed its Cyber Command to mount hacking attacks against ISIS computers and networks, The New York Times reported Sunday.

While US National Security Agency hackers have targeted ISIS members for years, its military counterpart, the Cyber Command, virtually conducted no attacks against the terrorist organization. The new campaign reflects President Obama's desire to bring the types of clandestine military hacking operations that have targeted Iran and other nations to the battle against ISIS. According to the NYT:

The goal of the new campaign is to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State to spread its message, attract new adherents, circulate orders from commanders and carry out day-to-day functions, like paying its fighters. A benefit of the administration’s exceedingly rare public discussion of the campaign, officials said, is to rattle the Islamic State’s commanders, who have begun to realize that sophisticated hacking efforts are manipulating their data. Potential recruits may also be deterred if they come to worry about the security of their communications with the militant group.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter is among those who have publicly discussed the new mission, but only in broad terms, and this month the deputy secretary of defense, Robert O. Work, was more colorful in describing the effort.

“We are dropping cyberbombs,” Mr. Work said. “We have never done that before.”

The campaign began by installing several implants in the militants’ networks to learn the online habits of commanders. Now, Cyber Command members plan to imitate the commanders or alter their messages. The goal is to redirect militants to areas more vulnerable to attack by American drones or local ground forces. In other cases, officials said, US military hackers may use attacks to interrupt electronic transfers and misdirect payments.