Wikileaks crashes under cyber attack

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 Wikileaks today announced via twitter that its website has crashed under an apparent cyber-attack; this following the recent release of tens of thousands of US State Department cables. Sources in the US say the mass-disclosure of cables is causing diplomatic setbacks, and embarrassment, for the administration of Barack Obama. These previously unreleased cables are said to contain the names of sensitive sources that the authors asked higher bodies to “strictly protect”. The authenticity of the latest documents has not been confirmed but, US State Department spokeswoman…

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Chinese researchers crack major U.S. government algorithm used in digital signatures

Wednesday, February 16, 2005According to computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a widely-used cryptography algorithm, known as SHA-1, has been broken by three researchers at Shandong University in China. Designed by the US intelligence agency NSA, SHA-1 has been adopted as an official US government standard and has become widely-used in security applications worldwide, notably digital signatures. The three female researchers, Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu, have reduced the amount of time needed to find two documents with the same signature by a factor of more than 2000.…

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2008 COMPUTEX Taipei: Three awards, One target

Monday, June 23, 2008 2008 COMPUTEX Taipei, the largest trade fair since its inception in 1982, featured several seminars and forums, expansions on show spaces to TWTC Nangang, great transformations for theme pavilions, and WiMAX Taipei Expo, mainly promoted by Taipei Computer Association (TCA). Besides of ICT industry, “design” progressively became the critical factor for the future of the other industries. To promote innovative “Made In Taiwan” products, pavilions from “Best Choice of COMPUTEX”, “Taiwan Excellence Awards”, and newly-set “Design and Innovation (d & i) Award of COMPUTEX”, demonstrated the…

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Wikileaks crashes under cyber attack

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 Wikileaks today announced via twitter that its website has crashed under an apparent cyber-attack; this following the recent release of tens of thousands of US State Department cables. Sources in the US say the mass-disclosure of cables is causing diplomatic setbacks, and embarrassment, for the administration of Barack Obama. These previously unreleased cables are said to contain the names of sensitive sources that the authors asked higher bodies to “strictly protect”. The authenticity of the latest documents has not been confirmed but, US State Department spokeswoman…

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Witnesses saw truck “rev up and race” before recent Texas oil refinery blast

Friday, April 1, 2005File:Map of USA highlighting Texas.png Witnesses say a truck was idling near the scene of an explosion at a Texas refinery which killed 15 and injured over 100 others on March 23, according to U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Manager Bill Hoyle. “Witnesses saw vapor in the area of the truck and observed the engine begin to rev up and race,” Hoyle’s statement said. “This behavior by a diesel engine indicates the presence of a flammable atmosphere entering the air intake. A driver reported trying to…

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Keep your eyes peeled for cosmic debris: Andrew Westphal about Stardust@home

Sunday, May 28, 2006 Stardust is a NASA space capsule that collected samples from comet 81P/Wild (also known as “Wild 2) in deep space and landed back on Earth on January 15, 2006. It was decided that a collaborative online review process would be used to “discover” the microscopically small samples the capsule collected. The project is called Stardust@home. Unlike distributed computing projects like SETI@home, Stardust@home relies entirely on human intelligence. Andrew Westphal is the director of Stardust@home. Wikinews interviewed him for May’s Interview of the Month (IOTM) on May…

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Teen hacker admits to attack on scientology.org

Monday, October 20, 2008 A teenager, belonging to the anti-scientology group Anonymous, has admitted that he launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the official website of the Church of Scientology, scientology.org. Dmitriy Guzner, aged 18, will admit to the charges related to carrying out the DDoS attack. He now faces a maximum sentence of ten years imprisonment. In response to incidents such as these, Scientology have called Anonymous “cyber-terrorists.” A DDoS attack occurs when multiple computers are used to attack a certain website with so much traffic…

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Food with cancer-causing dye recalled in Britain

Saturday, April 30, 2005 The British Food Standards Agency (FSA) has announced a recall of foods containing banned dyes which increase the risk of cancer. The food products were sold at the Tesco, Waitrose, and Somerfield supermarkets. A Bristol company called “Barts Spices” found the illegal Para Red substance in their Barts Ground Paprika, which was sold in 48g and 46g jars with a “Co-op” label. The batch codes on the affected products are 5032 and 5089 (expiration Dec 2007), and 5075 (expiration February 2007). Tesco also found that their…

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Sky purchases UK Glee rights

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 Subscription channel Sky has purchased the rights to broadcast US television programme Glee in the United Kingdom. New episodes of the show are anticipated to commence airing on BSkyB television station Sky1 during the autumn of this year. Channel 4, who have been broadcasting the programme from its first episode until the end of the second season, rejected the opportunity to involve themselves in broadcasting rights negotiations in May of this year. According to reports, Sky had placed an offer of £12 million for season three…

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