Category: Uncategorised

(credit: CDC)

In a recent phone survey, 42 percent of Americans reported thinking that people infected with the Zika virus were likely to die from the infection.

The survey, conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that despite massive news coverage of the ongoing outbreaks, critical information about the virus is not being clearly conveyed.

For the record, infections with the Zika virus, which are mainly transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, typically result in mild to no illness. In fact, health experts estimate that around 80 percent of those infected will show no symptoms at all. For the remaining 20 percent-or-so that do, the symptoms are generally mild and include fever, aches, rashes, and pink eye.

An image taken from the Nefertiti Hack 3-D scan, whose provenance is now more mysterious than ever. (credit: Nefertiti Hack)

Last month, two artists grabbed headlines across the world by announcing that they had snuck a hacked Kinect Sensor into the Neues Museum in Berlin and done a guerrilla 3D scan of the bust of Queen Nefertiti, a precious artwork from ancient Egypt. Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles called their work The Other Nefertiti and released their data file to world. Now anyone can have an incredibly high-quality reproduction of the sculpture, or remix it to make new artworks. But immediately, experts raised questions about the scan—it was just too high quality for a Kinect. Al-Badri and Nelles inflamed speculation when they refused to share more details about their scanning techniques.

The bust of Nefertiti has long been a bone of contention in the art world. Arguably, it belongs in Egypt, but German archaeologists took it from Amarna, Egypt over a century ago and have never given it back. Nefertiti holds a special place in ancient Egyptian history. In the 1350s BCE, her husband Pharaoh Akhenaten moved the royal palace from Thebes to the newly built city of Akhetaten (now Amarna). Together, Nefertiti and Akhenaten radically changed the structure of the state religion—some call it an early version of monotheism—and ushered in an era of unusually realistic art.

Al-Badri and Nelles displayed a 3D printed reproduction of Nefertiti's bust in Cairo as part of their project, suggesting that only a high-tech heist allowed them bring this part of Egyptian history back to its rightful place. Their message, and the intriguing story of a covert museum scan, captured the public's imagination.

The gate to the Bowman Avenue Dam facility in Rye Brook, NY is locked, but the cellular modem used for its controls wasn't. (credit: Google)

In 2013, someone gained access to the operations center for the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small flood control dam on Blind Brook in Rye Brook, New York. The attackers were later identified in a classified Department of Homeland Security report as being the same Iranian group alleged to have been responsible for attacks on PNC Financial Services Group, SunTrust, and Capital One Financial.

The attack was first made public in December 2015 by a Wall Street Journal report. Now, according to a CNN report, the US Department of Justice is preparing to file an indictment against those believed to be behind the intrusion—individuals believed to have been operating at the direction of the Iranian government.

Calling the intrusion an "attack" may be a bit of an overstatement—the controls of the dam were not accessed, according to government officials cited anonymously by CNN, and only "back office systems" were penetrated. The intrusion was made possible by a broadband cellular modem used to connect the small facility to the Internet, and the Bowman Avenue facility was targeted by a network scan for industrial control systems exposed to the Internet.

NASA successfully fired a space shuttle main engine today that will power the SLS rocket. (credit: NASA)

As NASA builds its new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), it is relying on some older technologies, including the space shuttle's reusable engines. And before the new rocket flies, the older engines must be test fired to ensure they still function properly. On Thursday, that happened for the first time with one of the engines that will be used on the SLS's maiden flight.

The engine, number 2059, fired for 500 seconds on a test stand at NASA's Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi. It had not been used since 2011, when it powered space shuttle Endeavour to orbit in what was the penultimate flight of the space shuttle program. This engine flew five times into space.

The SLS rocket will rely on four space shuttle main engines, which combined will provide more than 2 million pounds of thrust. The new rocket may make its initial flight in late 2018 or 2019, with an uncrewed launch of the rocket and Orion spacecraft called Exploration Mission-1. Unlike the shuttle, however, only the capsule returns from space so engines that were designed to be reusable are lost.

Making a typo in a tweet that then gets retweeted is bad enough, but imagine how dumb these hackers feel. Reuters reports that hackers broke into Bangladesh's central bank in February and started transferring large sums to accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka from an account held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Unfortunately for the hackers, only four of these transfers, for a total value of about $81 million, went through successfully. Not because the break-in was detected by the Bangladesh Bank or because heavily armed police kicked down the hackers' doors and arrested them all at gunpoint... but because one of the transfers had a typo. Attempting to transfer $20 million to a Sri Lankan non-governmental organization called the Shalika Foundation, the hackers instead attempted a transfer to the Shalika "Fandation." Staff at Deutsche Bank spotted this error and got in contact with the Bangladeshis to ask for clarification. The ruse was discovered and the remaining transfers were canceled.

Reuters writes that the NGO does not in fact appear to exist.

(credit: Julien Sabardu)

As expected, federal prosecutors filed their formal response on Thursday in the ongoing case involving the seized iPhone 5C that was used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack in December 2015.

Last month, the government obtained an unprecedented court order that would compel Apple to assist in the government’s investigation. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on the phone. Apple has said both publicly and in court filings that it will fight the order as much as possible, and the company has drawn support from many cryptographers, tech companies, and even the husband of a survivor of the attack.

In the new filing, Eileen Decker, a United States Attorney, argued that the court order is "modest," and only applies to a single iPhone.