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Senator Barbara Mikulski has worked hard to ensure funding for Goddard Space Flight Center. (credit: NASA)

The US Senate talks a good game about sending humans to Mars. The group holds itself up as the protector of NASA and a champion for the space organization's grand exploration aims. For example, as part of this spring's appropriations process, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee with oversight of NASA's budget chided Charlie Bolden, the space agency's administrator, when his budget request didn't amply fund exploration.

"Mr. Administrator, you have traveled around the country in recent months touting NASA’s strong support for the SLS and Orion missions, when in reality this budget will effectively delay any advancement in a NASA-led human mission to Mars, or anywhere at all," Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican senator from Alabama, told Bolden during a hearing in March.

Shelby was upset with Bolden because the president's budget request did not seek a stratospheric level of funding for the Space Launch System rocket, which is being designed at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. And if there were any doubt about his parochial intent, consider Shelby's own position statement on NASA: "The ability of NASA to achieve our goals for further space exploration has always been and always will be through Marshall Space Flight Center."

Fortuately, the computer systems at the Gundremmingen nuclear power facility in Germany don't have Internet access, because they certainly weren't secure. (credit: Felix König)

A nuclear power plant 75 miles from Munich has been harboring malware—including remote-access trojans and file-stealing malware—on the computer system that is used to monitor the plant's fuel rods. Fortunately, as Reuters reported, the computer isn't connected to the Internet, and the malware was never able to be activated.

The malware was discovered on computer systems at the Gundremmingen nuclear power facility by employees of the German electrical utility company RWE. It included Conflicker, a worm first detected in 2008 designed to steal user credentials, personal financial data, and turn infected computers into "bots" to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. W32.Ramnit, a worm that provides attackers with a remote access tool and allows them to steal files and inject code into webpages to capture banking data, was also discovered on the system.

In addition to the infected computer system, last upgraded in 2008, malware was discovered on 18 USB removable storage devices. Both Conflicker and W32.Ramnit spread themselves through USB drives. The malware did no harm because it required Internet access to contact a command-and-control network, and it appears that the plant was not specifically targeted by attackers since the malware was focused largely on financial fraud.

(credit: Lifeboat)

As security breaches go, they don't get more vexing than this: 7 million compromised accounts that protected passwords using woefully weak unsalted MD5 hashes, and the outfit responsible, still hadn't disclosed the hack three months after it came to light. And as if that wasn't enough, the service recommended the use of short passwords. That's what Motherboard reported Tuesday about Lifeboat, a service that provides custom, multiplayer environments to gamers who use the Minecraft mobile app.

The data circulating online included the e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 7 million Lifeboat accounts. The mass compromise was discovered by Troy Hunt, the security researcher behind the Have I been pwned? breach notification site. Hunt said he had acquired the data from someone actively involved in trading hacked login credentials who has provided similar data in the past.

Hunt reported that some of the plaintext passwords users had chosen were so weak that he was able to discover them simply by posting the corresponding MD5 hash into Google. As if many users' approach to passwords were lackadaisical itself, Lifeboat's own Getting started guide recommended "short, but difficult to guess passwords" because "This is not online banking."

(credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T started the year with a mix of subscriber gains and losses in its core businesses, with losses in TV and postpaid phone customers to go along with increases in DirecTV and its overall total of wireless subscriptions.

In wireless, AT&T ended the quarter with 363,000 fewer postpaid phone subscribers, the company said yesterday. This loss coincided with T-Mobile USA adding 877,000 postpaid phone customers, mostly at the expense of AT&T. "According to [T-Mobile CEO John] Legere, approximately 80 percent of postpaid port-ins come from rival carriers AT&T and Verizon, with the lion’s share coming from AT&T," Wireless Week reported yesterday. (Verizon Wireless lost 8,000 postpaid phone customers in the quarter, though it added 640,000 retail postpaid customers overall.)

On the plus side for AT&T, most of its postpaid phone losses came from customers with feature phones. The average smartphone subscriber pays AT&T twice as much as a feature phone user. Overall, AT&T has 58.3 million postpaid smartphone subscribers, accounting for 88 percent of its postpaid phone customers. That proportion is growing, as smartphones accounted for 97 percent of AT&T's new phone sales in the quarter.

(credit: Aleksander Markin)

Google has yet another enemy in Europe, after Getty Images formally complained to Brussels' antitrust officials about the multinational's alleged anti-competitive behaviour.

Getty has flagged up concerns about Google's use of "scraped third party imagery" on its search engine.

A spokesperson at competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager's office told Ars: "The commission has received a complaint, which it will assess."

(credit: Twitter: EvLeaks)

It has been a while since we've seen a new Gear Fit wearable from Samsung, but new leaks suggest that another model is right around the corner. Tweeted by EvLeaks and reported by Venturebeat, the supposed Samsung Gear Fit 2 is slightly curvier than the original, and it may make its debut with a new pair of wireless earbuds dubbed the Gear IconX.

The Gear Fit 2 doesn't look too different from the original. Samsung appears to have redesigned it a bit so it fits easier around your wrist, similarly to how Microsoft rounded-out its Band fitness tracker for comfort. The device also seems to have two release notches on its underside, meaning you may be able to use multiple bands with the Gear Fit 2.

Reports suggest that the new model will have a GPS chipset as well, which would allow it to better track and monitor outdoor activities. However, that addition will likely increase the price (the original started at $199) while also decreasing the tracker's battery life. Otherwise, the device appears to have the same super-AMOLED display and optical heart rate monitor as the first tracker.