Smoking hurts the computer you love.

Smoking hurts the computer you love.

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Cocktails From Behind The Iron Curtain - Food

Although the Berlin Wall came down over the period of a long summer, November 4, 1989 — when over 1,000,000 people gathered in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz — is often regarded as the beginning of the end, not only for the Berlin Wall, but for the Soviet Bloc itself.

Cocktails From Behind The Iron Curtain - Food & Drink - FOXNews.com

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Leo Laporte & Net Neutrality

OPEN (ep 3) explores the inner-workings of the TWiT Cottage and the creative process of Leo Laporte. Leo has build an online network with over a dozen shows, a staff of 7 and an unrelenting drive ...

Several Restaurants Sue Vendor for Unsecured Card Processor

"Seven restaurants have sued the maker of a bank card-processing system for failing to secure the product from a Romanian hacker who breached their systems.

The restaurants, located in Louisiana and Mississippi, filed a class-action suitagainst Georgia-based Radiant Systems for producing a point-of-sale (POS) system that they say was not compliant with payment card industry security standards and resulted in an undetermined number of customers having their debit and credit card numbers stolen.

The suit alleges that the system stored all the data embedded on the bank card magnetic stripe after the transaction was completed — a violation of industry security standards that made it a high-risk target for hackers.

Also named in the suit is Computer World, a Louisiana-based retailer, which sold and maintained Radiant’s Aloha POS system.

According to plaintiffs, Computer World’s technicians allegedly installed the remote-access program PCAnywhere on the systems to allow its technicians to fix technical problems from off-site. The only problem is, the company failed to secure the program. The suit alleges that the system was not up to date with software patches, and the PCAnywhere remote log-in and password that technicians used to access the POS systems was the same at every one of the 200 Louisiana locations where the system was installed. According to one of the plaintiffs who spoke with Threat Level, the default login was “administrator” and the password was “computer.”

As a result, a hacker, believed to be based in Romania, accessed the systems of at least 19 businesses through the PCAnywhere software, and possibly others plaintiffs say. "

Image courtesy California State Controller’s Office & Wired

Read the full story by Kim Zetter of Wired

Home owners and HOA's butt heads over solar

"Ready to chuck his electric bills, Camarillo resident Marc Weinberg last year asked his homeowners association for permission to put solar panels on his roof.

When the Spanish Hills Homeowners Assn. said no, Weinberg sued the group. Under the state's Solar Rights Act, he argued, a homeowners association can't unreasonably block solar installations.

Weinberg won, and the Spanish Hills Homeowners Assn. was ordered to not only permit the solar panels but to cover the tens of thousands of dollars that Weinberg had spent on legal fees. Since last fall, when he installed a double row of matte black panels, three other homes in the hilltop neighborhood of luxury estates have added panels. "

Read the full story at the LA Times

Eco Motors creates radically new type of engine

"Eco Motors is the name of a new company that has come up with a radically new type of engine. It has two opposing pistons in two contiguous cylinders, connected to a common crankshaft in the middle of the engine. An electric supercharger provides boost on demand. It's a two-stroke engine with no valves, yet still achieves 90% scavenging efficiency with less oil consumption than a four-stroke engine. In other words, it's a two-stroke engine that can meet the strictest emissions standards. It can be made as a spark-ignited or compression-ignition engine, and the diesel version can meet emission standards without using urea."

Read the full story at autoblog

SSL/TLS Zero-day flaw found in web encryption

"Security researchers Marsh Ray and Steve Dispensa unveiled the TLS (Transport Layer Security) flaw on Wednesday, following the disclosure of separate, but similar, security findings. TLS and its predecessor, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), are typically used by online retailers and banks to provide security for web transactions.

The flaw in the TLS authentication process allows an outsider to hijack a legitimate user's browser session and successfully impersonate the user, the researchers said in a technical paper.

The fault lies in an "authentication gap" in TLS, Ray and Dispensa said. During the cryptographic authentication process, in which a series of electronic handshakes take place between the client and server, there is a loss of continuity in the authentication of the server to the client. This gives an attacker an opening to hijack the data stream, they said.

In addition, the flaw allows practical man-in-the-middle attacks against hypertext transfer protocol secure (Https) servers, the researchers said. Https is the secure combination of http and TLS used in most online financial transactions."

Read the full story at ZDnet UK