Hacker demos persistent Mac keyboard attack

Apple’s sleek $49 Mac keyboards can be hacked and infected with keystroke loggers and impossible-to-detect rootkits, according to a security researcher presenting at this year’s Black Hat/DEFCON conferences.

The researcher, known only as “K. Chen,” found a way to reverse engineer and tamper with the keyboard’s firmware upgrade. With the firmware under control, an attacker can subvert the keyboard by embedding malicious code that allows a rootkit to survive a clean re-installation of the host operating system.

Chen, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, said malicious code embedded into the firmware would be immune to the typical rootkit detection methods which examine the integrity of the filesystem, check for hooks or direct kernel object manipulation, or detect hardware and/or timing discrepancies due to virtualization in the case of a virtual-machine based rootkit.

“Such code could also completely bypass the remote attestation of a Trusted Platform Module, if one were present in the computer. As far as everybody is concerned, our [malicious keyboard] code is simply the user typing commands at the keyboard,” he explained.

Chen said a malicious keyboard can be used to snoop on keystrokes from any machine it is plugged into.

Here’s a technical paper discussing the keyboard firmware attack.

via Hacker demos persistent Mac keyboard attack | Zero Day | ZDNet.com.

Think you are safe with a PC laptop? Think again:  Researchers find insecure BIOS ‘rootkit’ pre-loaded in laptops

Food picture web site: ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com

Enjoy some “food” photos: http://thisiswhyyourefat.com. Warning: Looking at these photos may harden your arteries.

Quite a tower. Could it withstand an attack? What would Richard Gage, AIA say?

Mr. Rowley the Dragon Seer.

There hasn’t been any alien activity for several days now near Michael Rowley’s home — creatures only appear three days before or after a full moon — but he says something else is now active.

“The actual North Port devil was spotted flying overhead, and it’s going to be back the next full moon,” he said. “It’s going to show up, and we’re going to catch it on film. It’s a dragon, and it’s got all sorts of alien friends out there.”

Since Rowley went public with his claims of aliens in the woods near his home in the eastern part of town earlier this month, he’s been inundated with calls and e-mails from different media outlets and Web sites.

News stations in Naples, Alabama and Colorado have picked up the story, as did supermarket favorite Weekly World News.

And Rowley, 58, said he’s received “hundreds” of e-mails from the Netherlands, Australia and around the U.S. …

Another person visited with a ouija board and asked questions about what was in the woods. Rowley said there was no response when the board was asked if there were “alien grays” or “reptilian creatures” in the woods.

“Then … he asked if there was a dragon in the woods, and the thing went crazy,” Rowley said.

Many of the visitors to the home Rowley shares with his 15-year-old son, Shane, have signed the guest book he keeps handy and shared their experiences of mysterious creatures and occurrences. Once a person has signed the book, Rowley turns the page so other guests won’t be influenced by what someone else has recorded previously. “People would look back and say, ‘My God, they saw the same thing I did,’” Rowley said, proceeding to read some of the guest book entries.

“Shawn writes, ‘red lights, noises.’ Tyler writes, ‘red eyes, tall, long, bright legs.’ Babs came and wrote in my book ‘blinking, square lights,’” he read. Rowley recalled how two women in their 20s, Tanya and Jaclyn, visited recently and heard “something like wings beating air, loud crashes and stomping sounds” while on Rowley’s porch.

“The dragon came stomping through in a rush to meet these two young ladies. It was very supernatural, and that really shocked me,” he said. “My favorite one is from Mike K., who writes, ‘I saw something flying over the street, long, skinny and fast, then it was out of sight and I couldn’t tell exactly what it was.’”

Rowley, who believes his son has been abducted by aliens in the past and “lost time,” says Shane — after an encounter with a shorter alien gray — figured out how to keep that from happening by locking eyes with it and not blinking. Mutual UFO Network — also known as MUFON — was investigating Rowley’s claims, but he hasn’t heard from them lately.

“They have totally quit, but I do my own investigations,” he said. Rowley invites anyone interested to contact him through his Web site and then come to his home three days before to three days after the next full moon — Sept. 4 — and bring cameras to capture the creatures on film.

“I really believe (the dragon is) going to make a grand reappearance,” he said. “I think it will be a great show.” He is also looking to sell T-shirts, his home and a plaster cast he claims was taken of the creature’s footprint. For more information, visit www.northportdevil.com.

via Today’s Top Story.

SCIENTIST ADMITS TO STUDY OF ROSWELL CRASH DEBRIS! (Confirmed by FOIA Document) by Anthony Bragalia

by Anthony Bragalia

A research study that has recently been obtained through FOIA offers stunning confirmation that Wright-Patterson Air Force base contracted Battelle Memorial Institute to analyze material from a crashed UFO at Roswell in 1947. Remarkably, the co-author of this very metals study is the same scientist who decades ago had confessed that he had examined extraterrestrial metal from a crashed UFO while he was a research scientist at Battelle! This just-received document also reveals that another one of its metallurgist authors reported directly to a Battelle scientist who was conducting secret UFO studies for the USAF. It appears that the study represents first-ever attempts in creating highly novel and advanced Titanium alloys. Some of these alloys were later associated with the development of “memory metal” of the type reported as crash debris at Roswell.

This 1949 Battelle research study had never before been publicly available until earlier this month. Its release was compelled under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA.) It was sought because references to it had been found as footnotes within later military-sponsored studies on shape-memory alloys such as Nitinol. It was previously believed to be “missing” because both Battelle and Wright historians were unable to locate it. Earlier research had revealed a paper trail that led from Roswell to Wright Patterson, to the doors of Battelle- and to this 1949 study.

Once received, investigators were astounded to learn that the sought study was in fact co-authored by none other than Elroy John Center. Center was a Battelle scientist who -in June of 1960- had privately related that he had analyzed metal from a fallen UFO when he was at the Institute. Citations that had been found to this Battelle report had not listed Center as a co-author. When the report was finally received, Center was revealed to be an “et al” or “and others” author of the study. Center’s story about examining ET debris was first publicly told in 1992. But it was not known that Center was the co-author of this Battelle study until it was obtained under FOIA in August of 2009!

… Nitinol (a lightweight Nickel-Titanium alloy that is the “Cadillac” of memory metals) finds its history in late 1940s metallurgical work at Battelle- in studies that were contracted by Wright Patterson in the months immediately following the Roswell crash.  A metals expert at Battelle during the time -Dr. Howard C. Cross- was leading a dual life secretly researching UFOs for government agencies while at the same time directing top-secret Titanium alloy studies. It was found that Cross “seeded” Titanium alloy studies to the US Navy Lab- where Nitinol was later “discovered.”  Titanium alloy was named as part of the composition of the Roswell memory metal according to General Arthur Exon, Wright’s one-time Base Commander. Exon also referred to the material’s unique “processing” and that the “reports” on the metal “were still around.” Exon spoke of “chemical analysis, compression tests and flexing.” These were the precise tests found to have been conducted on Titanium alloys in the Battelle report received though FOIA.

Read the rest here: The UFO Iconoclast(s): SCIENTIST ADMITS TO STUDY OF ROSWELL CRASH DEBRIS! (Confirmed by FOIA Document) by Anthony Bragalia.

I have a small sample of Nitinol. Fascinating stuff! The reader comments on Anthony’s full article are interesting as well.

Mystery storm clouds on Saturn’s largest moon appear

At last, the missing storm clouds on Saturn’s moon Titan may have been found.

In the last decade, researchers have monitored clouds at both of Titan’s poles, where large lakes of methane have been spotted by Earth-based observers and by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting the moon for the last three years. But the moon’s clouds seemed inexplicably confined to those areas.

“We’ve seen a lot of clouds at the poles. But we’d never seen a major storm at the equator,” said Michael Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech.

This result has had scientists scratching their heads. When the European probe Huygens parachuted to the surface of Saturn’s large moon from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in January 2005, the probe’s cameras showed what looked to geologists to be dry channels left by methane rivers cutting through dune fields in the equatorial zone.

If there were no storms at the equator, scientists wondered, what made the river channels? “Some people even suggested maybe these are not rain-carved,” Brown said.

Now, Brown and one of his former graduate students, Emily Schaller, have found the first evidence of a storm over Titan’s tropical latitudes. Their research, titled “Storms in the tropics of Titan,” is published in this week’s journal Nature.

via Mystery storm clouds on Saturn’s largest moon appear — latimes.com.

U.S. Should Prepare for Mars With Asteroid Flight, Panel Says

U.S. astronauts should travel to asteroids and other “deep space” destinations in preparation for a mission to Mars rather than fly directly to the planet, members of a presidential panel said yesterday.A flight to Mars, which has been urged by some former astronauts and spaceflight advocates, would be too costly and dangerous, panel members said during a public meeting in Washington.“Technically, economically and in terms of the rewards it produces” deep space is “a reasonable step on the way to Mars,” Norman Augustine, chairman of the committee, told reporters after the meeting. A direct-to-Mars flight “would likely not succeed.”The meeting was the panel’s last public one as it prepares a report with recommendations for President Barack Obama on the space program’s future that is due at the end of this month. Augustine said the committee will give White House officials a preliminary briefing on its findings tomorrow.The committee is focused on four choices, including the deep-space option, a plan that would end U.S. participation in the International Space Station by 2016 and another that would extend U.S. station efforts to 2020. The fourth calls for prolonging the space shuttle program past the current 2010 retirement date.Current budget and future funding estimates for NASA won’t pay for humans to explore space, said former astronaut Sally Ride, a panel member and the first American woman in space. She said that the administration’s plan to return to the moon by 2020 would require more money than is now budgeted.

- Bloomberg.com

New material for nanoscale-computer chips

New data from Chinese-Danish collaboration shows that organic nanoscale wires could be an alternative to silicon in computer chips. The discovery has just been published in the respected scientific journal, Advanced Materials.

Nanochemists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Nano-Science Center, Department of Chemistry have developed nanoscale electric contacts out of organic and inorganic nanowires. In the contact they have crossed the wires like Mikado sticks and coupled several contacts together in an electric circuit. In this way they have produced prototype computer electronics on the nanoscale.

Alternative to silicon computers

Today the foundation of our computers, mobile phones and other electronic apparatus is silicon transistors. A transistor is in principal an on- and off- contact and there are millions of tiny transistors on every computer chip. However, we are reaching the limit for how small we can make transistors out of silicon.

We already use various organic materials in, for example, flat screens, such as OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode). The new results show how small and advanced devices made of organic materials can become. …

University of Copenhagen – News.

Go-Carts Stolen, Raced Down Interstate 70

… Police said the thieves broke a window in a storage shed and stole the carts, which sounded the alarms at the entertainment park.

Witnesses reported seeing the go-carts driving down the highway.

“Some people driving by thought it was odd there were go-carts on the highway, so they called in and reported it,” Cool Crest’s Kyle Breon told KMBC’s Peggy Breit.

Police spotted the two go-carts pulling off Interstate 70 at Manchester Trafficway, which is about 4 miles away from Cool Crest.

The teens tried to run away, but police quickly caught them. Two 14-year-old boys from Kansas City were arrested.

The go-carts were not damaged.

via Go-Carts Stolen, Raced Down Interstate 70 – Kansas City News Story – KMBC Kansas City.