British royal baby's birth drafted as phishing bait

It may be old news now, but hackers are still using news of the U.K. royal baby's birth to entice people into clicking on malicious links, according to researchers at Trend Micro.

When the official announcement was made on July 22, the researchers spotted plenty of spammed messages related to the birth of Price George. In a statement, they described the speed with which this spam hit the Internet as "remarkable."

"These messages appear to be from ScribbleLive, a service that provides real-time engagement platforms.

The false page (click to enlarge)

The offer, of course, is false, and clicking on links in the email will only trigger multiple redirections that are typical among Blackhole exploit kit (BHEK) spam runs," the researchers said.

BHEK is a page that cybercriminals use to determine what software versions are used by a victim so that the page can deliver the "correct" exploit. Generally, people using outdated software are more at risk of being caught by exploits.

In this case, the script that triggers the redirections is detected as JS_OBFUSC.BEB, the researchers said. This particular exploit targets two vulnerabilities in Java: CVE-2013-1493 and CVE-2013-2423. Both of these vulnerabilities have been patched by Oracle, though many people still run on older versions of Java.

Trend Micro described this technique of taking advantage of current affairs as a social engineering lure, adding that they often come in the form of highly publicized events. The researchers gave the Boston Marathon incident and the election of Pope Francis as prime examples. What's more, they said, hackers take advantage of more than one big news story at a time.

"This particular BHEK run is not limited to the royal baby alone. Other spammed messages took advantage of the controversy surrounding the upcoming sci-fi film Ender's Game," they said.

"While these messages are made to look like an article from CNN, clicking on links will trigger the same redirections as that of the royal baby spam."

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Google Street View Trekker photographs British canals

Google's Street View backpack has ascended Dubai's record-breaking Burj Khalifa skyscraper, hiked Arizona's Grand Canyon, and climbed Mount Everest. Now it's coming to map the U.K.'s canal network.

The U.K.'s Canal and River Trust revealed last week that the Trekker—as Google has dubbed it—will start to capture the U.K.'s 200 year-old canals and waterways.

The 4-foot, 39-pound backpack uses 15 lenses angled in different directions to take photos every two and a half seconds that can be stitched together to create 360-degree panoramic views and help map remote parts of the world.

Volunteers from the Canal and River Trust will carry the backpack over 100 miles a month to map canals and rivers in England and Wales.

The Street View Trekker photographed the Grand Canyon.

"We are thrilled to be collaborating with the Canal & River Trust on such a fun project, and we hope to help boost the discovery of and make these historical canals accessible to more people in the U.K. and across the world through Street View technology," said Google program manager Pascale Milite.

Starting on Regent's Canal in North London, the Trekker will take in some of the U.K.'s Seven Wonders of the Waterways over the next month, including the longest and deepest canal in the country—the Standedge Tunnel on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal.

Other canals on the network that will be photographed include Bingley Five Rise (a steep "staircase" set of locks and another Wonder of the Waterways) and the blacksmith's workshop on the Grand Union Canal at Stoke Bruerne, described as "one of the most picturesque canal villages" by the Canal & River Trust.

"We're delighted to be the first people in the U.K. to get the Trekker on our backs—it's fantastic that our 200-year old network is being given a different lease of life thanks to cutting edge, 21st-century technology," said Wendy Hawk, partnerships manager of the Canal & River Trust. "The footage we get will allow millions of people from all over the world to see our canals, rivers and towpaths, and will hopefully encourage some people to make a trip to see them."

Google loans The Trekker to trusts and charities, which believe that their locations deserve to appear on Street View. Google also has a fleet of cars and tricycles that are used to map other parts of the world.

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British academics brand Elon Musk's rapid transit system "Hyperloopy"

Academics have responded to Elon Musk's hotly-anticipated transport concept, Hyperloop, by calling it unrealistic and "hyperloopy".

The Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX founder said the near-supersonic service would use magnets and fans to fire passenger-carrying capsules floating on a cushion of air through pressurised tubes.

Rod Smith, a professor of engineering at Imperial College London, told Techworld that the project is very unlikely to take off, even though nothing outlined in Musk's 57-page proposal violates the fundamental laws of physics.

Indeed, the concept of capsules being fired through a pressurised tube isn't a new one with "the father of modern rocket propulsion" Robert Goddard first proposing a 1,200mph vacuum system between New York City and Boston in 1909. Several other proposals have followed but none have taken off due to the technical difficulties of maintaining such a system, according to Smith.

I'd go as far as to call it fantasy.

"It's not based on strong engineering principals," said Smith in reference to Hyperloop. "I'd go as far as to call it fantasy."

Smith's main issue with Musk's proposal relate to the entrepreneur's energy calculations. Musk claims Hyperloop will use a similar amount of energy to high-speed rail but Smith believes this is a miscalculation. "To get a narrow projectile down a thin tube requires a lot of energy," he said.

An artist rendition that may never materialize.

Smith also said that it would be very hard to earthquake-proof Hyperloop because no matter how strong the tubes can always be twisted out of alignment, no matter how strong they are.

Meanwhile, Tim Schwanen, professor of transport studies at Oxford University, told Techworld that the spread of people across California does not support Musk's vision.

"With the exception of the stretch of the line through the San Francisco Bay Area, the area traversed by the line is characterised by heavy urban sprawl," said Schwanen. "So building densities are low, meaning that access and egress time between stations and actual origins and destinations will be considerable for most users, partly cancelling out the travel time gains achieved by the new system."

He also believes that it will be difficult to raise the finances for the $6bn (£3.9bn) project.

"The project will be considered extremely risky by policy-makers and the (private) institutions that will have to be involved in funding the construction of the system, such as banks and institutional investors, as this is an unproven technology," said Schwanen.

He added: "Politicians - especially Republicans - will not be very eager to invest in what is no doubt a very costly project given the dire state that California's public finances are in at the moment and the more general political climate in the USA at the moment."

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