Charlie Miller, a respected security researcher, has discovered vulnerabilities in the smart batteries for Apple laptops and mobile devices; he can manipulate their firmware to render them unusable or to cause them to misreport their remaining charge to the OS. The new firmware can survive an OS replacement, leading Miller to speculate that it could be used to store persistent malware that restored itself after the disk was erased and the OS was rewritten.
Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘Hitting Budapest’, from The Boston Review, Vol 35, no. 6 – Nov/Dec 2010.
The Chair of Judges, award-winning author Hisham Matar, announced NoViolet Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday 11 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Hisham Matar said: “The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary.
Story here: http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2011_winner.pdf
The Frank O’Connor Prize shortlist is as follows:
via Blog of a Bookslut.
…is awarded to Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 by Frank Dikötter
“This meticulous account of a brutal man-made calamity is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century. With access to hitherto hidden archives, Frank Dikötter has created a harrowing, superbly-written indictment of Mao’s disastrous revolutionary experiment that led to the unnecessary deaths of 45 million Chinese people. This epic record of human folly is stunningly original and hugely important, and casts Chinese history in a radical new light, with a devastating psychological portrait of the dictator whose “Great Leap Forward’ plunged China into catastrophe.â€
The nation’s major internet service providers, at the urging of Hollywood and the major record labels, have agreed to disrupt internet access for online copyright scofflaws.
The deal, almost three years in the making, was announced early Thursday, and includes participation by AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon. After four copyright offenses, the historic plan calls for these companies to initiate so-called “mitigation measures†(.pdf) that might include reducing internet speeds and redirecting a subscriber’s service to an “educational†landing page about infringement.
The internet companies may eliminate service altogether for repeat file sharing offenders, although the plan does not directly call for such drastic action.
ISPs to Disrupt Internet Access of Copyright Scofflaws | Threat Level | Wired.com.
