An anonymous reader writes: The North Korean regime lost contact with one of its submarines earlier this week, three U.S. officials familiar with the latest information told CNN. According to CNN, the U.S. military had been observing the submarine operate off North Korea's east coast when the vessel stopped, and U.S. spy satellites, aircraft and ships have been secretly watching for days as the North Korean navy searched for the missing sub. The U.S. is unsure if the missing vessel is adrift under the sea or whether it has sunk, the officials said, but believes it suffered some type of failure during an exercise. This comes after North Korea has threatened to use nuclear weapons at any time and turn its military posture to "pre-emptive attack" mode.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: E-commerce giant Amazon is planning to launch a new education platform which would enable educators to upload, manage, share, and discover open education resources. Earlier this month, the company quietly opened an Amazon Education Wait List to allow educators to be alerted about the availability of the platform. The website currently reads, "The future of education is open. Someday soon, educators everywhere will have free and unlimited access to first-class course materials from a revolutionary platform. Get on the wait list to be notified when the platform is available for all schools and classrooms!" The webpage, do note, could be related to some other project. This isn't the first time Amazon has shown interest in the education sector. In 2013, it acquired TenMarks, a company that offers mathematics learning materials. Amazon, which lets you purchase or rent books for Kindle, is also a major name in the publishing world. Over the years, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have also become increasingly interested in seeing their hardware and software in classrooms.

Two observations

davewiner

Tomorrow the View from Nowhere gets a huge test. The Sunday morning moderators, Stephanopoulos, Todd and Dickerson, obviously know that Trump orchestrated the violence at his rallies. Will they let Trump and other Repubs pretend otherwise? And will the Democrats make that the issue?
Trump's two heroic generals, Patton and MacArthur, were famous for their independence, and with MacArthur, insubordination. Unusual choices, until you remember who made the choices.

jones_supa writes: The hotel in which Matthew Garrett was staying at, had decided that light switches are unfashionable and replaced them with a series of Android tablets. In his tour to the system, one was quickly met with a glitch message "UK_bathroom isn't responding." Anyway, two of the tablets had convenient-looking ethernet cables plugged into the wall, so MacGyver began hacking. He managed to borrow a couple of USB ethernet adapters, set up a transparent bridge and then stick his laptop between the tablet and the wall. Tcpdump showed traffic, and Wireshark revealed that it was Modbus over TCP. Modbus is a pretty trivial protocol, and does not implement authentication. The Pymodbus tool could be used to control lights, turn the TV on/off, and even close and open the curtains. Then he noticed something. His room number was 714. The IP address he was communicating with was 172.16.207.14. They wouldn't, would they? Indeed, he could access the control systems on every floor and query other rooms to figure out whether the lights were on or not, which strongly implies that he could control them as well.