WikiLeaks follows up its Sony post with Saudi diplomatic cables

Now that Wiki:eaks is back to sharing secrets, it’s released another cache of information. This dump comes in the form of 70,000 documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry, which it attributes to a hack by a group calling itself the Yemeni Cyber Army (Saudi Arabia has been involved in a civil war there recently). WikiLeaks says it went through thousands of pages of scanned images released by the group and put them into its searchable database, revealing Saudi government activity to co-opt and control media worldwide with bribes and confrontations. The release also comes three years after its leader Julian Assange sought refuge in an Ecuadorian embassy, avoiding extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual assault.

According to Buzzfeed, the documents also include passport information for Hillary Clinton and other US diplomats, recalling criticism about the group’s efforts to redact information that might put certain individuals in danger. If you choose to see for yourself, the documents are online — you can read Arabic, right?

[Image credit: Olivier Douliery/Abaca USA]

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Source: Wikileaks (1), (2)

Switch Up hits the Play Store, offers a retro Pong experience on your smartphone

Looking for a retro Pong-like game to play on your smartphone to kill a few times? A new game has launched on the Play Store called Switch Up that takes traditional pong-esque gameplay and twists it up into something that fits very well on a touch screen device.

The game offers an intuitive paddle tapping mechanic that involves the player bouncing a ball back and forth as long as possible to build up a high score. There are several difficulty levels and a way to share scores with your friends, so while it doesn’t offer a ton of depth, it’s a fantastic time waster.

You can check it out at the link below.

Play Store Download Link

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‘Whale tail’ makes ships fuel efficient by using wave power

There’s no better way to develop more efficient marine vessels than to take cues from the animals that can effortlessly navigate the waters. In this case, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) led by postdoctoral fellow Eirik Bøckmann are working on a system inspired by a whale’s tail to lower ships’ fuel consumption. The mechanism looks more like flippers meant to be attached somewhere underneath the front part of the ship, but it undulates up and down as the vessel moves, just like a whale’s tail. It’s not the first system that takes after the majestic marine mammals, but previous attempts were designed quite differently.

NTNU has already started testing the system using a scaled-down ship, with help from Rolls Royce and two other British companies at one of Marintek’s towing tanks in Norway. The ship can cross the 656-foot-long tank in seconds, but footage of the whale tail recorded by cameras in the facility prove that it works. According to the team’s calculations based on the tests, it can reduce a ship’s resistance when tackling waves around 10 feet high by 9 to 17 percent — more if the hull shape is optimized for it. At this point in time, though, the team still needs to perform more tests and to make it tougher, so that it can withstand the harsh conditions faced by ships crossing vast bodies of water.

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Via: Gizmag

Source: Gemini

New York State fines Lyft for drivers not being properly insured

Lyft has been fined $300,000 by the state of New York for not having proper insurance on it’s drivers. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says ride-sharing services like Lyft or Uber are welcomed in New York as long as they follow all the rules. This means from now on all Lyft drivers must have proper insurance issued by a business operating and regulated within New York State.

The new agreements also mean Lyft will be obligated to give authorities three weeks notice when it plans to move into a new city. Buffalo and Rochester officials said they felt they were treated unfairly when Lyft moved there back in April 2014 without any notice.

The larger Lyft and Uber get, the more problems they have to deal with. Everyone seems to be taking a shot at them sooner or later. They have been under fire recently for all sorts of problems such as not taking safety seriously, not respecting other market players (cabs), and unfair wages for their employees.

Although a $300k fine may be a lot of money to some of us, it’s nothing Lyft can’t afford considering they are valued at over $2 billion.

Source: Attorney General Schneiderman
Via: Engadget

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Investigators connect massive federal hack to China

More information about the hack that leaked info on millions of US government employees — including extremely detailed data from background checks — is coming out now. While a computer security firm called CloudStrike said it came from a Chinese group called “Deep Panda” that also is suspected of pilfering data from health insurer Anthem, others disagree. Representatives of another security company, FireEye, tells Re/code that it’s linked to another distinct group of hackers in China that seem focused only on personal information.

Similarly, last year’s Sony hacking by the “Guardians of Peace” also produced differing opinions over exactly where the hackers resided. Wherever they came from, Reuters reports US investigators discovered they used a technique similar to those used against Anthem — registering a web address that looked like an official Office of Personnel Management site to try to phish employee passwords. The Washington Post, citing OPM officials, says the hackers were in the system since June or July of last year, giving them plenty of time to identify and remove the most sensitive stuff.

In an interview, the OPM’s director of IT security claimed that contrary to reports by the Wall Street Journal, it had identified the malware on its systems prior to a tech demo by a security company. The information is out there now, and the motivations of the people who have it is so far unknown even as these suggestions strain the relationship between the governments of US and China.

[Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images]

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Source: Reuters, Re/code, The Washington Post