Krebs On Security: Data Breach At Oracle’s MICROS Point-of-Sale Division

Data Breach At Oracle’s MICROS Point-of-Sale Division
Brian Krebs, August 8, 2016

A Russian organized cybercrime group known for hacking into banks and retailers appears to have breached hundreds of computer systems at software giant Oracle Corp., KrebsOnSecurity has learned. More alarmingly, the attackers have compromised a customer support portal for companies using Oracle’s MICROS point-of-sale credit card payment systems.
...
MICROS is among the top three point-of-sale vendors globally. Oracle’s MICROS division sells point-of-sale systems used at more than 330,000 cash registers worldwide.
...
Oracle’s own statement seems to suggest the company is concerned that compromised credentials for customer accounts at the MICROS support portal could be used to remotely administer — and, more importantly, to upload card-stealing malware to — some customer point-of-sale systems. The term “on-premise” refers to POS devices that are physically connected to cash registers at MICROS customer stores.

Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst at Gartner Inc., says ... "I’d say there’s a big chance that the hackers in this case found a way to get remote access" to MICROS customers' on-premises point-of-sale devices.
...

This is really ugly. If criminals have managed to use the manufacturer's maintenance access to remotely install card-skimming software into point of sale terminals worldwide, then nothing is safe.

All the more reason to use a merchant's chip reader or Apple Pay wherever possible. These technologies work with device-specific account numbers, one-time pads and encryption to make it difficult (if not impossible) for a captured transaction to be used to create a fake card or initiate new transactions. (I am aware that there are many more virtual-card technologies in use but I don't know enough about them to have an opinion about their security.)

NASA: The Moon crossing the face of the Earth

From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth
August 5, 2015

A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. The series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth.

The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Read the whole article for more details and an animated image of the Moon making transit across the Earth's face.

h/t to John Kovalic's Twitter Feed for a funny tweet that made me look up this awesome image.

Retro Tech: The Wire Recorder

Before tape recorders were invented, there were wire recorders. This is a fascinating video that shows one in action.

Entropic Time, by A Capella Science

This is a really cool science song and an even more cool video. I don't want to think about how much work it must've been to make it (but I will soon find out, because they have a "making of" companion video, which I've embedded below the music video.)

And, the making-of video:

Ars Technica: Digging into the dev documentation for APFS, Apple’s new file system

Digging into the dev documentation for APFS, Apple’s new file system
Copy-on-write metadata, native encryption, instant cloning, snapshots, and more.
by Lee Hutchinson - Jun 13, 2016 4:35pm EDT

Though the feature wasn’t mentioned in Apple’s WWDC 2016 keynote, I’m most excited about the introduction of the Apple File System, or APFS. The preliminary version of the developer documentation is online now, and it looks like the new file system introduces a whole boat-load of solid features—including a few out of the ZFS playbook.

APFS looks to be a major update over Apple’s old and creaky HFS+ file system, which has been around in one form or another for decades. It has been the subject of expansions and additions over the years, but HFS+ never approached the extensibility and flexibility of current next-generation file systems. Rather than continuing to bolt stuff onto the old code, we now (finally!) get a new file system that has some truly compelling features.

It'll probably be a while before this becomes mainstream, but what I've read so far looks really attractive. Especially support for snapshots, which is something I've been wanting ever since I discovered them as a part of Network Appliance's file server software almost 20 years ago. I assume Apple took so long to develop the tech because they were waiting for NetApp's patents to expire, or some other non-technical reason.

Once this ships (and has gone through the usual rounds of bug-fixing to fix the inevitable problems in something this big), it will be a truly compelling reason to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X ('scuze me, macOS.) Which is great, considering that the last few OS updates seem to be mostly cosmetic and app changes - things that really shouldn't need a whole-OS update.

AP: Trump team tells GOP he has been 'projecting an image'

Trump team tells GOP he has been 'projecting an image'
By STEVE PEOPLES and THOMAS BEAUMONT Apr. 21, 2016 8:12 PM EDT

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. (AP) — Donald Trump's chief lieutenants told skeptical Republican leaders Thursday that the GOP front-runner has been "projecting an image" so far in the 2016 primary season and "the part that he's been playing is now evolving" in a way that will improve his standing among general election voters.
...
Trump's newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage.

"When he's out on the stage, when he's talking about the kinds of things he's talking about on the stump, he's projecting an image that's for that purpose," Manafort said in a private briefing.
...

In other words, Mr. Trump stands for nothing and believes in nothing. Or if he does stand for something, he has not let anyone of us know what it is. He and the guy running his campaign have stated what the rest of us have suspected all along - he's putting on a show in order to trick people into voting for him. If you haven't figured it out from the fact that he tells each audience what they want to hear even when he contradicts himself to do so, then this should prove it.

Is he going to build a wall on the Mexican border like he loudly promised? Maybe not. Lower taxes? Raise taxes? Subsidies for corn farmers? Who knows. But when his top people are now on record as saying that everything he says is just role playing and doesn't mean a thing, I think this is something we should all believe.

Graphical proof of the Pythagorean Theorem

h/t to my friend Derek who re-blogged this from one of his friends:

Sultan Knish: The First Year Of President Bernie Sanders

The First Year Of President Bernie Sanders
by Daniel Greenfield, Febuary 18, 2016

On January 20, 2017, President Bernie Sanders was sworn into office. The elderly Vermont politician, who had always made waves, refused to use a bible, instead taking his oath on a smudged copy of his own economic five-year plan. He also unilaterally modified the presidential oath from "preserve, protect and defend" to "enhance, enrich and humanize the Constitution of the United States".

The unlikely candidacy of Bernie Sanders had shocked and divided a party and then a nation.

President Sanders won the Democratic Party nomination by going far to the left and then, defying conventional wisdom, he moved even further to the left in the general election. Unable to retain the minority portion of the Obama coalition, many of whose leaders had been allied with Hillary Clinton and were still bitter over her loss and did little to help him, his victory relied heavily on youth voter turnout.

Yeah, this sounds a lot like how it might actually happen. Don't forget to read the rest of the story.

AppleInsider: Software bug shuts down Nest thermostats, turns off heating for unlucky customers

Software bug shuts down Nest thermostats, turns off heating for unlucky customers
By Sam Oliver
Thursday, January 14, 2016, 06:19 am PT (09:19 am ET)

A buggy software update has caused many users of Nest's smart thermostat to wake up in the cold in recent days, as the devices have been found to quickly drain their batteries and shut down, leaving heating and cooling systems offline.
...
For users, fixing the problem — Nest says 99.5 percent of its customers are back online — means rebooting their now-dead thermostat, which is easier said than done. Nest's support site details a nine-step process that requires removing the device from the wall, connecting it to auxiliary power, and performing a series of incantations.

Ow. That's embarrassing.

A better question is: "Why does Nest require a battery to operate?" Every furnace and A/C system I've seen provides DC voltage to power thermostats. Why can't the Nest thermostat run off of that and only use the battery to maintain configuration during a power outage (or even better, use flash memory for storing configuration)?

Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification

China has gamified being an obedient citizen with the creation of Sesame Credit. The game links to your social network and gives you a score for doing things that the government approves of, but it also reduces that score for doing things the government disapproves of. Even your friends' scores affect your own, and being friends with people who have a low score will drag your score down as well. This insidious system applies social pressure on people to ostracize their friends with lower scores, either forcing those friends to change their ways or effectively quarantining their rebellious ideas. While many sci-fi visions of a dystopian future have centered around a bleak government that controls through fear, Sesame Credit shows us that a government can use gamification and positive reinforcement to be just as controlling. And it's real. While currently the system is opt-in, the government plans to make it mandatory in 2020. Once mandatory, it may give rewards for good scores or penalties for bad ones. And in the meantime, making it opt-in has already set the tone for the game: people participate willingly, so they find it fun, and they set a very high standard for what the "average" score should be. Already people have begun sharing their scores on social media.

Scary scary stuff. Anyone still think China is somehow going to become a free country just because they sell us lots of manufactured goods?