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The ROVéo, a robot that can climb stairs, is bringing us one step closer to an android rebellion. But fortunately, the robot was actually built to help us all. Rovenso, the Swiss startup that created ROVéo, hopes that their invention can assist in disaster relief that would otherwise be extremely challenging. Read more...

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Hate passwords? Google does too, and may begin doing away with conventional passwords on Android devices this year. At Google I/O, the company announced the next steps in its plans to begin using a password alternative: "trust scores" that determine your creds based on various data points. Developed by Google's Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, the Trust API will roll out to "several very large" financial institutions within the next few weeks.

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 Utah Senator Todd Weiler has proposed a bill to rid the state of porn by adding Internet filters and anti-porn software on all cell phones and requiring citizens to opt-in before viewing porn online. It’s to save the children, he says. Weiler successfully pushed an anti-porn resolution through the state Senate earlier this year, declaring porn a “public health crisis.” He… Read More

Last week, a criminal offered a hacked database of LinkedIn accounts on the dark web for a bit over $2,000 in bitcoin. The hacker said the data contained 117 million combinations of usernames and passwords stolen from LinkedIn in 2012.

At the time, nobody was sure how many people were part of that incident, as only 6.5 million encrypted passwords, but not their corresponding usernames, leaked online. Now, you can finally check for yourself if you were one of the 164,611,595 million victims.

Troy Hunt, a security researcher who runs the breach notification website “Have I Been Pwned?” has obtained the leaked data and is allowing anyone to check if they were part of the hack.

Given that the data was starting to spread online, “I made the call to load it and as of now, it's searchable within [Have I Been Pwned],” Hunt wrote in a blog post commenting on the incident on Monday.

Earlier on Monday, LinkedIn said that it had finished resetting passwords for all the victims on the 2012 data breach, who according to their own estimates were “more than 100 million.”

But in case you haven’t received LinkedIn’s email notification, you can check if you were a victim yourself on Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned.

Recent initiatives offer new strategies for balancing technology, security, and organizational policy goals. Here are three approaches worth considering.

London-based resident Annabelle Narey posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet. She noted in her review that her ceiling fell down in an upstairs bedroom. The Guardian reports about what happened to her in the aftermath of posting that review. Building firm BuildTeam sent a letter to Mumsnet, which the site passed on to Narey. According to Narey, BuildTeam found Narey's comment defamatory and untrue, and asked for the removal of the comment from the website. The original comment saw several other users also post similar grievances, though many of these users pulled their comments in response to the legal threats from BuildTeam. Narey wanted to keep hers up. Then things got even weirder, reports the Guardian. Narey says BuiltTeam staff visited her apartment, and instead of offering any apology, asked her to remove the comment. Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request under DMCA, alleging copyright infringement. This led Google to de-list the entire thread. From the report: No copyright infringement had occurred at all. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled "Home Improvement Tips and Tricks". The post, headlined "Buildteam interior designers" was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it. BuildTeam says it has no idea why Narey's review was reposted, but that it had nothing to do with it.The Guardian deep dives into what is wrong with the copyright system, the issues Google faces in dealing with them, and the consequences many users are facing because of this.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce just released the full 91-page report detailing the findings of their investigation into the NFL’s attempts to improperly influence the direction of the National Institute of Health’s concussion research . We’ve embedded the whole report below, and will highlight interesting excerpts here as we read through it.

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 In seemingly bizarre news out of the porn industry, PornHub is launching a new fitness system (wearable + workout videos) called BangFit. As its name suggests, it helps you bang to get fit. Here’s how it works: Users can join the game at this website, which will allow users to then sync the game to their phones. BangFit offers options for one player, two players, and three players.… Read More

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In 2005, an email server of the FBI’s was catastrophically hacked, and journalists quoted sources who were worried that sensitive information had been obtained. At the time, the agency downplayed its seriousness, castigating the reporters in a press release for not providing an informed or accurate portrayal of the attack.

It turns out secrets were exposed, and pretty serious ones at that. According to a new longform piece from WIRED's Kevin Poulsen, a hacker got hold of a list of cybercriminals the US government was trying to hunt down.

The list, marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive” and “Do not transmit over the Internet,” contained the aliases of over 100 hackers, and in some cases, Poulsen writes, their real names. On top of this, some of the hackers were labeled as “top-level target,” or “currently cooperating with the government.” The White House was reportedly informed of the incident.

The hack targeted an AT&T data center in New Jersey which ran servers for the US government, including one that had handled email for every agent with an FBI.gov address, Poulsen writes.

“The compromise affected only those fbi.gov Internet e-mail accounts hosted by a particular commercial service provider. All FBI Internet e-mail accounts have been migrated, or are in the process of being migrated, to a more secure e-mail capability,” the FBI wrote in a February 2005 press release.

According to Poulsen's story, the hacker responsible was Maksym Igor Popov, a Ukrainian with a long, twisted history working for, and betraying, the FBI.

Naturally, this isn't the first time a US government agency has played down the seriousness of a data breach. Earlier this year, a hacker dumped the contact details of 20,000 FBI and 9,000 DHS employees. The DHS said that “there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive or personally identifiable information.” But days later, it emerged the hacker had obtained forensics reports, as well as State Department emails.

This home was burned to the ground in the Fort McMurray wildfire. The owners watched their living room go up in smoke via a security camera feed sent to their iPhone.

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It only takes a minute, and you don't need any special gadgets or tools. The post How to Check How Much Propane Is in Your Tank appeared first on WIRED.

Give any adult the Makey Makey Invention Kit and they’ll all invariably have the same reaction: I wish I had something like this when I was a kid.

But it’s probably best to just put the Makey Makey into the hands where they belong...because children and the imagination of those formative years are all the fuel needed to make this Makey Makey Invention Kit: Collector’s Edition (right now $47.99 in the Boing Boing Store) a Hall of Fame toy-slash-introduction to computer engineering.

It’s deceptively simple on the surface, just a set of multi-colored alligator clamps and connecting wires. But the magic of Makey Makey takes shape in what a child brings to it. Wanna use balls of Play-Doh as controller buttons for a real computer game?  You can do that. Wanna turn bananas into piano keys that can actually play music?  You can do that too.

Once a kid grasps the ultra-simple method of connecting real-world objects to virtual outcomes (no programming know-how or expertise needed), they’ll take the fun into areas adults never dreamed of.

The Makey Makey can even keep inquisitive adults on the their toes.  It’s compatible with both Mac and Windows systems and doesn’t require any special software or training.

You’ve got to see the Makey Makey Invention Kit in action to gain a true appreciation for its potential, so get one now at 19% off its regular price.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQqh7iCcOU&w=560&h=315]

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An anonymous reader writes: Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo announced it will be giving away a total of $225,000 to support nine open source projects, each project will receive $25,000. DuckDuckGo said it performed 3 billion searches in 2015. It differs from many other search engines as it offers private, anonymous internet search. It doesn't gather information about you to sell ads to marketeers, like Google. Instead, it shows generic ads as it's part of the Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo ad network. It also has revenue-sharing agreements with certain companies in the Linux Open Source worlds, and makes money from select affiliate links. The $225,000 DuckDuckGo is giving away is chump change compared to the $100 million Google gives away in grants ever year. However, for the select projects, it should still be very beneficial. Last year, DuckDuckGo gave away a total of $125,000 to open source projects, so it's nice to see them donate an extra $100,000 to a good cause.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How will Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign be remembered? Predicting history is a fool’s errand but it seems like a safe bet that Cruz will go down as the Republican candidate so openly distasteful that he made Donald Trump seem palatable.

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A new secure communication application has been developed which allows users to communicate online with friends while bypassing social networking servers such as Facebook. The application, DiscoverFriends, from a UCLA research team led by Joshua Joy, has been created in order to increase privacy and security levels for people using Online Social Networks (OSNs) such...

The article New wi-fi-based network keeps Facebook servers at bay, by John Bensalhia originally appeared on The Stack.

A new cybersecurity bill pushed by Michigan Senators Ken Horn and Mike Kowall will send car hackers to jail for life, if it manages to pass through the Senate.

Senate Bill 927 and 928 detail the type of crime, punishment, and felony. Near the bottom, the bill states that “a person shall not intentionally access an electronic system of a motor vehicle to willfully destroy, damage, impair, alter, or gain unauthorized control of the vehicle” and the penalty for violating the law is “guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for life or any term of years.”

See Also: Hackers drive huge global IoT security market growth

That is on the very extreme end of the law and puts ethical hackers in an awkward legal grey area. While the bill does not say if controlled environment hacks are illegal, we doubt hackers are going to test to see if the word of the law is wrong.

“I hope that we never have to use it,” said Kowall to Automotive News. “That’s why the penalties are what they are. The potential for severe injury and death are pretty high. Some of these people are pretty clever. As opposed to waiting for something bad to happen, we’re going to be proactive on this and try to keep up with technology.”

When you turn the steering wheel, you are accessing an electronic system to willfully alter the motor vehicle. Happily IANAL.

— Charlie Miller (@0xcharlie) April 29, 2016

Computer security researcher Charlie Miller, who has a keynote on car hacking at SecureWorld scheduled, took issue with the wording of the bill on Twitter. He suggests that turning a steering wheel could be considered “accessing the electronic system to alter the vehicle”, which would make it illegal to commandeer the vehicle.

Michigan is home to quite a few self-driving projects, so it is odd to see lawmakers from the state push a bill so fervently opposed by hackers and self-driving manufacturers alike.

Ethical hacking is useful for all types of electronic products and most tech companies pay out huge sums of money for reports on zero day exploits. Without this, hackers with criminal ambitions might be able to find the exploit before the company, leading to huge security risks.

The post Hack a car in Michigan, get a life sentence? appeared first on ReadWrite.

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A mass brawl broke out in Turkey between legislators from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), with people throwing bottles of water and punches at each other.

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A federal judge ruled that Amazon is responsible for billing parents unauthorized charges that kids made within apps, the Federal Trade Commission said on Wednesday.

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