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Millions of routers and other embedded devices are affected by a serious vulnerability that could allow hackers to compromise them. The vulnerability is located in a service called NetUSB, which lets devices connected over USB to a computer be shared with other machines on a local network or the Internet via IP (Internet Protocol). The shared devices can be printers, webcams, thumb drives, external hard disks and more. NetUSB is implemented in Linux-based embedded systems, such as routers, as a kernel driver. The driver is developed by Taiwan-based KCodes Technology. Once enabled, it opens a server that listens on TCP...

Turns out, there are a few savvy (and super-easy) keyboard tricks that can do just that. Your desktop, browser, Gmail, and even Facebook all have simple keyboard-based shortcuts you can press to more quickly accomplish things you do all the time — things like creating a new tab in Chrome or favoriting a tweet. We’ve rounded up 10 super-handy keyboard hacks that will help you zip through your daily grind, so you can spend more time on things that matter — or at least save your index finger from repetitive stress syndrome. And, we've organized them from the most basic...

A Californian start-up is seeking funding to make a computer that will cost $9 (£6) in its most basic form. Next Thing wants $50,000 to finish development of the credit-card sized Chip computer. The first versions will have a 1Ghz processor, 512MB of Ram and 4GB of onboard storage. The gadget, due to go on general release in early 2016, could become yet another rival to the popular Raspberry Pi barebones computer.

Such glitches emerge with surprising frequency. It’s suspected that the reason why Nasa lost contact with the Deep Impact space probe in 2013 was an integer limit being reached. And just last week it was reported that Boeing 787 aircraft may suffer from a similar issue. The control unit managing the delivery of power to the plane’s engines will automatically enter a failsafe mode – and shut down the engines – if it has been left on for over 248 days. Hypothetically, the engines could suddenly halt even in mid-flight. The Federal Aviation Administration’s directive on the matter states that...

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. You are “Gunman Taco Truck.” “It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game. And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for...

The race is on around the world as scientists strive to develop a new generation of batteries that can perform beyond the limits of the current lithium-ion based battery. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have taken a significant step toward the development of a battery that could outperform the lithium-ion technology used in electric cars such as the Chevy Volt. They have shown they can replace the lithium ions, each of which carries a single positive charge, with magnesium ions, which have a plus-two charge, in battery-like chemical reactions, using an electrode with a structure like those...

Molybdenum disulfide sheets -- which are "sandwiches" of one molybdenum atom between two sulfur atoms -- may improve rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, according to the latest research from Gurpreet Singh, assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering. Credit: Kansas State University The key to better cellphones and other rechargeable electronics may be in tiny "sandwiches" made of nanosheets, according to mechanical engineering research from Kansas State University. Gurpreet Singh, assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering, and his research team are improving rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The team has focused on the lithium cycling of molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2, sheets, which Singh...

Tech Ping: Bought the Computer, Trying to Do Wireless File Transfer HELP!! Is there any help out there for Win7 among the Freepers? Wanted to file transfer from the old WIN 7 machine to the new WIN7 machine and the new computer wont recognize the old computer and vice versa. Both computers I think have the same name, could that be a problem. The old computer has a home group and the new computer keeps trying to make its own home group, the hussy! The last legs are rapidly approaching for old computer Last conversation was this: Question about Laptop...

Pranksters be warned Eight-grader Domanik Green was arrested on felony charges in Holiday, Fla. Wednesday after breaking into his teacher’s computer to change the background picture to two men kissing. Green, 14, who was released the day of his arrest, said that he broke into the computer of teacher he didn’t like after realizing that faculty members’ passwords were simply their last names, the Tampa Bay Times reports. Green, who previously faced a three-day suspension for a similar prank, said that many students got in trouble for breaking into teachers’ computers.

Are smartphones making our children mentally ill?Leading child psychotherapist Julie Lynn Evans believes easy and constant access to the internet is harming youngsterstelegraph.co.uk/news/health/children/11486167/Are-smartphones-making-our-children-mentally-ill.html

No browsers are safe as proved yesterday at Pwn2Own, but crashing one of them with just one line of special code is slightly different. A developer has discovered a hack in Google Chrome which can crash the Chrome tab on a Mac PC. The code is a 13 character special string which appears to be written in Assyrian script *break* Matt C has reported the bug to Google, who have marked the report as duplicate. This means that Google are aware of the problem and are reportedly working on it.

The world’s first fully digital radio transmitter has been developed by Cambridge Consultants, paving the way for 5G high-speed broadband for mobile devices. Unlike software-defined radio (SDR), the breakthrough – named Pizzicato – is not a mixture of analogue and digital components but is completely digital, which can enable new ways of using the radio spectrum intelligently. When transmitting data, only low frequency signals of 1GHz or lower propagate well over distance or through walls, so they are in great demand. Expanding to make use of frequencies of 10GHz and beyond will require techniques such as meshing and beamforming...

A Chinese immigrant who stole trade secrets from the Chicago Merc worth an estimated $50 million was spared prison Tuesday by a federal judge who cited his otherwise “exemplary life.” Chunlai Yang, 50, of Libertyville, was instead sentenced to just four years probation for stealing software that underpinned the CME Group’s Globex trading platform. Yang, who worked as a high-ranking programmer for the Merc from 2000 until his arrest in 2011, pleaded guilty in 2012 to the theft, admitting he was trying to create a similar product in China when he illegally downloaded more than 10,000 computer source code files....

Eventually, the conventional ways of manufacturing microprocessors, graphics chips, and other silicon components will run out of steam. According to Intel researchers speaking at the ISSCC conference this week, however, we still have headroom for a few more years. Intel plans to present several papers this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the key academic conferences for papers on chip design. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr will also appear on a panel Monday night to discuss the challenges of moving from today's 14nm chips to the 10nm manufacturing node and beyond.

This is an update to article written a few years ago. Everybody knows that retail and institutional investors are usually late to a trade. When they decide to buy, the wise guys are distributing or selling their shares to them and locking in their gains. When they sell, the wise guys are accumulating or buying their shares from them, again locking in their gains. How do the wise guys pull it off? The answer lies in the combination of reflexive human behavior and the use of high frequency, algorithmic (HFA) trading. With the advance of computer trading on a massive...

Computers have as much consciousness as cars or concrete. This will not change. They’re machines. They can be programmed to follow directions and calculate certain kinds of solutions within those directed parameters. That’s it. That’s the beginning and end of the story. Why do some technocrats believe computers will gain actual consciousness? They think a) the brain is a machine that expresses consciousness via information processing, and b) information processing is all the consciousness there is. To sum up, technocrats are high-IQ idiots. You can assemble all the information in the world and cross-reference it 100 billion different ways; you...

KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- A Taiwanese man who was on a three-day computer gaming binge died in an Internet cafe and went unnoticed for hours, the second such death in the area in less than a month. The man, identified as Hsieh, went into the Internet cafe on Jan. 6 and was found motionless on a table on Jan. 8. Investigators said the man had a heart attack. His death went unnoticed for several hours as gamers continued around him. "The CCTV footage from the Internet cafe showed that he had a small struggle before he collapsed motionless,"...

wanted for a dying laptop.

One of my New Years resolutions is to not stay signed into Google mail or Google anything// Does this help with the tracking google does? I use track me not on Firefox and Chrome. I am using Bing and Google for searches Thanks

Researchers at Check Point have discovered a serious security vulnerability affecting at least 12 million leading-brand home and SME routers that appears to have gone unnoticed for over a decade. Dubbed the ’Misfortune Cookie’ flaw, the firm plans to give a detailed account of the issue at a forthcoming security conference but in the meantime it’s important to stress that no real-world attacks using it have yet been detected. That said, an attacker exploiting the flaw would be able to monitor all data travelling through a gateway such as files, emails and logins and have the power to infect connected...