Technology News

Iran's Nuclear Facilities, Thunderstruck.

In 2005, Mahmoud Ahamadinejad, as head of Iran's Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, banned western music or songs from being played on radio and televisions in Iran.

Considering such a drastic move, Ahmadinejad can't be too amused by this; Iran's nuclear facilities have allegedly been infiltrated and hacked, causing all nuclear power stations in the area to play-at full volume- AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" at top volume.

Back in 2010, the systems that ran nuclear facilities in Iran where also cyber-attacked by a specific malware named Stuxnet, which was previously developed by the US and Israel. Their mission, named "Olympic games," initiated with the Bush administration than was later carried on by Obama.

The first person to notice this attack was Finnish computer securities chief research officer, Mikko Hypponen, who said he received emails from a nuclear scientist based in the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran:


I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom. 

According to the email our cyber experts sent to our teams, they believe a hacker tool Metasploit was used. The hackers had access to our VPN. The automation network and Siemens hardware were attacked and shut down. I only know very little about these cyber issues as I am scientist not a computer expert. There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC. 


Hypponen later said that he cannot confirm this all happened, but he was able to write, "We can confirm the scientist sending the emails was [in fact] sending and receiving emails from within the AEOI. 


What do you think? Did Iran deserve all this? Tell us your opinion by writing a comment!



Hackers Threaten London 2012 Scoring System


Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake, the fastest men in the world, storm over in the 100M line, a photo finish at the London 2012 Olympics.

As they both eagerly look up, a political message appears on the time screen, covering disbelief throughout the world, and the times will never be known, a re-race won't be fair as both athletes are tired from their long -sought performance. What happens?



With the opening ceremony taking place in less than four days, when sport will bring together the world in London, there is very little space to worry about potential hacking threats, but like all other threats, measures have to be taken for them to not become reality.



Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer of eEye Digital Security and also a former hacker who was raided by the FBI at the age of 17, said the Olympics was a focal target.

With up to 12 million defended cyber attacks happening everyday in Beijing 2008, analysts are saying that that number could jump up to 14 million/day!

"I think this year even more so, given what's been happening recently in the hacktivist and related community," Maiffret said.

Atos The company in charge for maintaining IT (information technology) security in the 2012 Olympics, is responsible for some 11,500 computers and servers across Britain, and will monitor possible cyber threats second by second from its Olympic Technology Operations Centre in east London's Canary Wharf business district.


What ever happens, The London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games'(LOCOG) will hope the $750 million they have spent on technology is enough to protect the Games.





A new report claims that Apple's rumored move to new plug will be met with a interim adapter


If Apple does decide to change its current adapter to a more efficient one, car kits and other third-party accessories made specifically for the current adapter won't be left collecting dust.


The same sources that say Apple will launch its new iPhone with a better, pill-shaped adapter say that the launch will also be met with a adapter connecting the existing 30-pin adapter to the newer one.


As sources point out, Apple also offered a very much similar adapter with its new MagSafe power technology, last month. The newer plug was made to support future design cues for the companies latest and new updated notebook line. That adapter, which Apple is selling for $9.99 comes in the package with the companies new ThunderBolt display.


The foreseen adapter change will be apple's first since the change from FireWire to USB which happened in late 2005. While Apple has shrunk many of their adapter and USB's the change will bring hardships to third-party developed for quite some time.

What do you think about the change? Do you think Apple should redesign its USB's?

























New Technology Reveals the Answer to a Popular Question

Scientists wielding a powerful super computer think they have cracked the mystery of whether the chicken or the egg came first...


The short answer: Chicken.

The long answer is contained in the analysis called Structural Control of Crystel Nuclei by Eggshell Protein, published by Colin Freeman and John Harding of the University of Sheefield.

“It had long been suspected that the egg came first, but now we have the scientific proof that shows in fact the chicken came first,” said Freeman. The analysis says that what came first was particular chicken protein found in bird's ovaries that maintain crystal growth and the system that they used to be able to virtually spawn an eggshell overnight.

The protein (OC-17) has been known to be found only in the hard parts of a shell but until now, scientists have long been trying to find out how it contributes to the building of eggshells.

Using the UK national super computer to simulate this process, scientists have found that the OC-17 protein sometimes manages to just fall off on its own, this elegant process results in detaching, and more formation that creates an eggshell as quickly as 24 hours.

So it's official, the chicken arrived first!

Sapphire Disk Could Leave Messages for The Future

Storing data for large periods of time are becoming a big worry for todays companies, these days, with advancing technology makes this task specially harder. So what are our options, if we need to store data for thousands or even millions of years?

It is hard to communicate with future generations for a number of reasons:

1. It is very tricky to find a medium that could stay intact and not become damaged for so long.

2. Aside from the latter, it is also hard to predict what language future civilizations will be using, thus, we cannot put information in a specific language if it could potentially become extinct.

Recently, ANDRA which is a French nuclear waste agency, created a disk made out of only industrial metal Sapphire that could potentially last up to 2 million years, because of its high degree of resistance to scratches and damage. One of these disks is worth around 38,000 USD because of the high sapphire content. This amount of sapphire could go on to store over 40,000 amounts of miniature pages of text so that they can be viewed by future archaeologists through a simple microscope. The sapphire disk is just one of the few ideas currently being explored by ANDRA in an attempt to bring together and unite material scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists all around the world.

Facebook Users Becoming Increasingly Unhappy with Services



Facebook, with over 800 Million users signed up, is the largest and most popular social media website out there, but, as a survey suggests, its users are at an all-time low in regards of happiness.



Advertisements and compulsory changes (timeline) are reportedly making Facebook users angry and irritated.

Facebook clearly has a problem,  and David Johnson, principal with Strategic Vision, refers to it as death by a thousand cuts.

"Facebook is an entity we love -- but love to hate as well. It comes across as arrogant, and it positions its changes as something the user has to adapt to, and if they don't like it, too bad," he told TechNewsWorld.

Johnson than went on to say: "Sooner or later a social network -- and it may be Google+ -- will [have] both the scale of a Facebook but far better customer service,."


Being a Facebook fanatic myself, the though of Facebook losing all its power is saddening, as they where among the first to come up with the idea of social networking, but like everything else in this world, we will have to see what time brings.





Worlds Largest Laser Beam Fired

The United States National Ignition Facility at  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has succeed in firing the most powerful laser beam to have ever been recorded.

192 laser beams was all it took to deliver more than 500 trillion watts of peak power and 1.85 mega-joules of ultraviolet laser light to a target which was 2mm in diameter.

This is "1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 mega-joules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today," said Breanna Bishop and LLNL spokesperson.

The NIF project is among the 4-step process towards making fusion energy an alternative to coal and oil in the Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) project, which is almost exclusively funded by the U.S government.

How Does the NIF Work?

NIF pulls electricity off the power grid, stores it over a period of one minute in farms of large high-voltage capacitors and immediately releases in a 400 microsecond burst, LLNL's bishop said.

The resulting energy is widely taken to run turbines and there is very little wasted heat [during the process] as  this is a fusion reactor, UC Berkeley's Kammen said.

All together, the NIF cost about US$3.5 billion dollars, but it is not currently known how much a counterpart of this plant would take to build in the mid-2020's. 

Although the project is costly, it is clear that it will definitely pay off in the long-term of things.



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