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Thursday, September 2nd, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 2:02a | Fired NY Credit Union Employee Nukes 21GB of Data In Revenge Juliana Barile, the former employee of a New York credit union, pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution's computer systems without authorization and destroying over 21 gigabytes of data in revenge after being fired. BleepingComputer reports: According to court documents, the defendant worked remotely as a part-time employee for the credit union until May 19, 2021, when she was fired. Even though a credit union employee asked the bank's information technology support firm to disable Barile's remote access credentials, that access was not removed. Two days later, on May 21, Barile logged on for roughly 40 minutes. The defendant deleted over 20,000 files and around 3,500 directories during that time, totaling roughly 21.3 gigabytes of data stored on the bank's share drive. The wiped included files related to customers' mortgage loan applications and the financial institution's anti-ransomware protection software. Besides deleting documents with customer and company data, Barile also opened various confidential Word documents, including files containing board minutes for the credit union. Five days later, on May 26, she also told a friend via text messages how she was able to destroy thousands of documents on her former employer's servers, saying, "They didn't revoke my access so I deleted p drift lol. [..] I deleted their shared network documents." Although the New York credit union had backups of some of the data deleted by the defendant, it still had to spend more than $10,000 to restore the destroyed data following Barile's unauthorized intrusion. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 1:00p | Wooden Floors Laced With Silicon Generate Electricity From Footsteps An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Wooden floors infused with silicon and metal ions can generate enough electrical power from human footsteps to light LED bulbs. Researchers hope that they could provide a green energy source for homes. [...] Guido Panzarasa at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues found that although wood sits in the middle of this spectrum and doesn't readily pass electrons, it can be altered to generate larger charges. The team infused one panel of wood with silicon, which picks up electrons on contact with an object. A second panel was infused with nanocrystals of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8), a compound containing metal ions and organic molecules, and these crystals tend to lose electrons. They called this impregnation process "functionalization." The team found that this treatment made a device that contained both wooden panels 80 times more efficient than standard wood at transferring electrons, meaning it was powerful enough to light LED bulbs when human footsteps compressed the device and brought the two wooden panels into contact. The engineered wood was fitted with electrodes from which the charge could be directed, and the team found that a 2-centimeter-by-3.5-centimeter sample that was placed under 50 newtons of compression -- an order of magnitude less than the force of a human footstep -- was able to generate 24.3 volts. A larger sample that was around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators. The findings have been published in the journal Matter.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 6:50p | ASUS Bets on OLED for All of Its New Creator Laptops ASUS has just four letters to sell you on its latest creator-focused notebooks: OLED. From a report: The company is bringing OLED screens to all of its new models, a move meant to differentiate them in the increasingly crowded PC market. Compared to traditional LCD screens, OLED offers deeper blacks levels, vastly better contrast, and more responsiveness. Even today, as LCDs have evolved to be brighter and faster, OLED offers a more pronounced visual "pop." We've been seeing notebooks with OLED for years, like on the XPS 15 and ZenBook, but they've typically been positioned as a premium feature for select models. Now ASUS is trying to make its name synonymous with OLED, so much so that it's bringing it to new mid-range notebooks like the VivoBook Pro 14X and 16X. It's also touting the first 16-inch 4K OLED HDR screens on notebooks across several models: the ProArt Studiobook Pro, ProArt Studiobook and the Vivobook Pro. Befitting its name, you can expect to see the fastest hardware on the market in the StudioBook Pro 16 OLED (starting at $2,500). It'll be powered by H-series Ryzen 5000 processors, 3rd-gen Intel Xeon chips and NVIDIA's professional-grade RTX A2000 and A5000 GPUs. And if you don't need all of that power, there's also the Studiobook 16 OLED ($2,000), which has the same Ryzen chips, Intel Core i7 CPUs and either RTX 3070 or 3060 graphics. Both notebooks will be equipped with 4K OLED HDR screens that reach up to 550 nits and cover 100 percent of DCI-P3 color gamut. They'll also sport ASUS Dial, a new rotary accessory located at the top of their trackpads, offering similar functionality to Microsoft's forgotten Surface Dial.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 7:20p | Apple's Upcoming AR/VR Headset To Require Connection To iPhone The first AR/VR headset that Apple has been in development will need to be wirelessly tethered to an iPhone or another Apple device to unlock full functionality, reports The Information. MacRumors: It will be similar to the WiFi-only version of the Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone connection to work. The headset is meant to wirelessly communicate with another Apple device, which will handle most of the powerful computing. According to The Information, Apple recently completed work on the 5-nanometer custom chips that are set to be used in the headset, and that's where the connectivity detail comes from. Apple has completed the key system on a chip (SoC) that will power the headset, along with two additional chips. All three chips have hit the tape-out stage, so work on the physical design has wrapped up and it's now time for trial production.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 10:40p | GM Suspends Production At North American Plants Amid Ongoing Chip Shortages Starting on Monday, General Motors will temporarily halt production at all but four of its North American factories due to chip supply constraints. Engadget reports: The halt in production will affect many of the automaker's most profitable vehicles, including the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra. "During the downtime, we will repair and ship unfinished vehicles from many impacted plants, including Fort Wayne and Silao, to dealers to help meet the strong customer demand for our products," a spokesperson for GM told the Detroit Free Press. "Although the situation remains complex and very fluid, we remain confident in our team's ability to continue finding creative solutions to minimize the impact on our highest-demand and capacity-constrained vehicles."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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