A recent series of attacks against WordPress blogs is creating a growing botnet, according to security researchers. The attacks—which focus on individuals whose WordPress username is “admin”—attempts to crack their password for signing into the blog using brute-force attacks. The botnet reportedly now consists of 90,000 or more computers. Security experts are concerned the botnet could continue growing and create a massive problem. The attacks reportedly started after WordPress began offering an optional two-step authentication login. Once a website is infected, it is equipped with a backdoor. This lets the hackers control the site remotely and make it part of the botnet. (BBC)(Matt Mullenweg)(Krebs on Security)
 

Satellite TV provider Dish Network has submitted an informal $25.5 billion bid for Sprint Nextel, upping a previous offer from Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank. Dish has offered Sprint shareholders $4.76 in cash and roughly $2.24 in stock that would be financed through $17.3 billion in cash and debt financing. SoftBank offered $20.1 billion in October 2012. Sprint—the third-biggest US cellular provider with 56 million subscribers—has yet to comment on the Dish proposal. Sprint is currently the No. 3 cellphone service provider in the United States with 56 million subscribers nationwide. (ZDNet)(CNNMoney)(The New York Times)(Dish)
 

Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications researchers have forecast that global wireless-cloud access will generate as much carbon dioxide as 4.9 million cars by 2015. CEET estimates that Wi-Fi, 3G, and long-term evolution (LTE) services will use up to 43 terawatt-hours of energy in 2015, compared to just 9.2 TWh in 2012. This is an increase of 367 percent and is based on estimates that cloud users will transfer 23 exabytes (1018 bytes) of data per month by 2015. The Australia-based CEET is a partnership between the University of Melbourne, Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, and the Victorian state government. (ZDNet)(Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications)
 

Face recognition is an active area of computer-vision and pattern-recognition research. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (GBU) Challenge Problem is a recent effort to build on earlier successful evaluations of face-recognition systems relative to illumination, pose, expression, and age. GBU focuses on “hard” aspects of face recognition from still frontal image pairs that aren’t acquired under studio-like controlled conditions. The image pairs are partitioned into the good (easy to match), the bad (average matching difficulty), and the ugly (difficult to match).

In a paper presented at the 2012 IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2012), researchers from the University of Notre Dame investigate image and facial characteristics that can account for the observed significant differences in performance across these three partitions. Their analysis indicates that the differences reflect simple but often ignored factors such as image sharpness, hue, saturation, and extent of facial expressions.

“Predicting Good, Bad and Ugly Match Pairs” and other papers from WACV 2012 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.
 

Analysts with IDC, a market research firm, say Windows 8 is responsible for the recent significant drop in PC sales by confusing consumers. The new operating system “not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market,” according to a statement from Bob O’Donnell, IDC Program VP Clients and Displays. According to IDC, global PC shipments dipped 13.9 percent through the first three months of 2013, compared with the same time period last year. This is the largest drop since the firm began tracking quarterly desktop-computer sales in 1994. O’Donnell added that, although some consumers seem to appreciate the new capabilities, “the radical changes to the [user interface], removal of the familiar Start button, and the costs associated with touch have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices. Analysts originally forecast first quarter 2013 PC sales would dip 7.7 percent. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year shipment declines. (SlashDot)(ABC News)(ZDNet)(Mashable)

Google formally submitted a concession package to European Union regulators in hopes of ultimately settling antitrust allegations without incurring either formal charges or a fine. These concessions have not been made public, but industry observers say the Internet search giant has proposed labeling its own services in search results, such as results from YouTube, and easing restrictions on advertisers by allowing them to export analytical data and permitting them to move to competitors’ services. These concessions will reportedly be the first time Google has responded to any type of regulatory pressure. The EU has been investigating various complaints against Google for its business practices, such as allegedly manipulating search results, since 2010. (Reuters)(Mail Online)
 

When US Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski leaves his post “in the coming weeks,” there will likely be a heap of expectations facing his successor. President Barack Obama has yet to name a replacement and no firm date for Genachowski’s last day at the agency has been released, but Capitol Hill and industry pundits are rife with opinions as to what direction the agency head should go. For example, Phil Weiser, dean of the University of Colorado law school and a former senior presidential adviser, claims this could be a time to redefine the FCC’s role, which could include improving its enforcement capabilities and allow it to be more responsive to emerging issues through self-regulation. He told the Washington Post that one of the main priorities will be “freeing up wireless spectrum not only for consumers but also for machine-to-machine communications.” He added, “A core challenge for the FCC and the government is to create more access to spectrum, which will enable more entrepreneurs, companies, and individuals to use it in interesting ways. In addition to freeing up licensed spectrum, the government could also make available additional unlicensed spectrum.” The leading candidates for the FCC post are reportedly Tom Wheeler, a venture capitalist who has led wireless and the cable trade groups; and Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC commissioner backed by US Senate Commerce Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller and 37 other senators. (The Washington Post)(Reuters)
 

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) researchers—with the US National Science Foundation and DARPA—designed a laser printer-like machine able to properly and precisely place tens or even hundreds of thousands of tiny chips on a surface, which could eventually eliminate the need for circuit boards and specialized assembly processes. These tiny circuits could be any component needed to make a computer, smart objects, or other systems such as MEMS. Known as Xerographic micro-assembly, the process uses silicon wafers that are broken into tens of thousands of chiplets. These are used as “ink” in the printing process, which the researchers compare to the process of a Xerox laser printer putting toner on paper. The PARC researchers say this is the first step toward such a commercial chip-printing system. (SlashDot)(The New York Times)

A security researcher claims he could successfully hack aircraft flight-management systems. Hugo Teso, a security researcher for German IT consultancy n.runs, said he sent radio signals with false navigation information to a simulated aircraft that could exploit vulnerabilities in commercial flight-management software and cause the system to change, for example, aircraft direction or the pilot’s displays. He constructed a simulated aircraft from aviation equipment acquired via eBay. Teso used it to test an attack toolkit that subverts the flight management system by using the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Report System protocol, which provides planes with weather and airline-schedule data. He said both the European Aviation and Safety Agency and the US Federal Aviation Administration have contacted him about the work. EASA issued a statement in which it states that the research “did not reveal potential vulnerabilities on actual flying systems” and that there are substantial differences between flight-management systems software for training purposes and the systems actually used in flight. Teso said hackers would have trouble taking advantage of the vulnerabilities he discovered, which also would require expertise in aviation. He presented his findings at the recent Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam. (BBC)(Forbes)

University of California, San Diego, researchers have developed a 3D first-person video game to teach children Java programming. CodeSpells targets elementary- to high school-aged students. In the game, a wizard in a land of gnomes has no spells to help them. The player assists by writing spells in Java and performing quests that teach concepts such as conditional and loop statements. The game was tested with 40 girls, aged 10 to 12, with no programming experience. The researchers said the girls mastered basic Java concepts within an hour of game play. They are making the game freely available by request to any educational institution and are doing further testing in San Diego-area elementary schools. They presented their findings at the recent 2013 SIGCSE Technical Symposium, sponsored by ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. (SlashDot)(Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego)