Bad Robot, No Cookie!!!

Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC finds a powerful godfather in Google, as it focuses on Android. It's rapidly gaining market share to pull ahead of rivals Samsung and LG in the smartphone market. So, what makes this company tick?

This month's Found gives you a closer look at wildlife in the mid-22nd century. Navigating the Everglades in 2150 will be no glide through the park. Here, we envision how evolution, human tampering and happy accident could transform the subtropics.

This month's Found contest asks you to imagine the future of athletic gear. Today, aerodynamic outerwear is making superjocks sleeker. Safety equipment is making them less vulnerable. In 50 years, what else will tech do for the sports set?

A former Morgan Stanley coder has been sentenced to two years in prison for his role in the TJX hack.

The two great friends talked every day and shared information about all of their exploits — sexual, narcotic and hacking — according to prosecutors. Now another thing they’ll have to share information about is their experience in federal prison.

Stephen WattPhoto courtesy Michael Farkas

While accused TJX hacker kingpin Albert Gonzalez awaits a possible sentence of 17 years or more in prison, one of his best friends and accomplices was sentenced on Tuesday in Boston to two years for his role in what the feds are calling “the largest identity theft in our nation’s history.”
Stephen Watt, a 25-year-old former Morgan Stanley software engineer, pleaded guilty last December to creating a custom sniffing program dubbed “blabla” that Gonzalez and other hackers used to siphon millions of credit and debit card numbers from TJX’s network. The breach cost TJX TeX Embedding failed!171.5 million.
According to a source familiar with the case, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner indicated that her sentence was based in part on the enormity of the harm that was caused to the public by the crime and Watt’s undeniable assistance in causing that harm.
“She believed in the end that a probation sentence would not be sufficient to satisfy the general deterrence to prevent harm to the public,” the source said.
His lawyer, Michael Farkas, declined to comment on the sentencing.
Farkas asserted in his court filings that Watt was a minor and peripheral player in the credit card theft ring that Gonzalez dubbed “Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin” that began in 2005 to breach numerous vulnerable national retailers and card processors.
Watt, who graduated from high school at 16 with a 4.37 grade point average, was driven by intellectual curiosity and friendship, not greed, his lawyer said, and had no idea his program would be put to criminal use.
Prosecutors never alleged that Watt received money for the software he wrote, or directly profited from the hacks. But they brandished more than 300 pages of chats the two friends exchanged that belied Watt’s stated ignorance.
“You have got to convince typedeaf to do some work for me,” Gonzalez wrote Watt in one of them, referencing the handle of another hacker. ”If he was able to hack some euro dumps we can make a fortune. I hacked a place and took ~30k euro dumps and this last week I made ~11k from only selling ~968 dumps.” (Dumps are the carding underground’s term for credit or debit card magstripe data, including account numbers.)
As Gonzalez and his accomplices hacked target after target, he sent Watt links to news stories describing a tidal wave of debit fraud spreading around the world.
Authorities found Watt’s customized code stored on a server Gonzalez leased in Latvia, as well as 16.3 million stolen card numbers. Another 27.5 million stolen numbers were found on a server in Ukraine.
They said Watt was a witness to the ill-gotten gains his code produced. He attended a TeX Embedding failed!300,000 for Watt to make the transaction appear more legitimate.
Watt and Gonzalez met online when Watt was still in high school and bonded over a shared fascination with computers. While still a teen, Farkas says, Watt worked for Florida software firm Identitech. He was hired by Morgan Stanley in New York 2004 earning TeX Embedding failed!130,000.
This is where he was working on Aug. 13, 2008, when authorities swooped in to search the premises. Watt, who is married, was fired and is now banned from working in the securities industry.
Currently unemployed, his lawyer says he’s been living in an apartment his mother paid off while awaiting sentencing.
“Watt will have to start over, and hope that his skills not only will land him on his feet,” Farkas wrote in a court filing earlier this year, “but that they will do so in a field that is at least somewhat as financially promising as the career that he has lost.”
See also

• TJX Hacker Was Awash in Cash; His Penniless Coder Faces Prison
• TJX Hacker Will ‘Never Commit Any Crime Again’
• Document Reveals TJX Hacker’s Assistance to Prosecutors
• TJX Hacker to Plead Guilty to Heartland Breach
• TJX Hacker Charged With Heartland, Hannaford Breaches
• TJX Suspect Was Near Plea Agreement Until New Charges Halted Talks
• Accused TJX Hacker Agrees to Guity Plea — Faces 15 to 25 Years
• Card Processor Admits to Large Data Breach
• Former Teen Hacker’s Suicide Linked to TJX Probe
• I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
• Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold
• Hacking Godfather ‘Maksik’ Sentenced to 30 Years by Turkish Court
• Stakeouts, Lucky Breaks Snare 6 More in Citibank ATM Heist

Tests show that diesel-hybrid trucks provide greater fuel economy and lower operating costs than standard diesel delivery trucks, with comparable performance.

After losing an appeal in a patent-infringement case, Microsoft said it will tweak the XML editor in its Word application, in order to continue selling one of its most widely used products.

Modern koalas are known for their cuteness, nearly exclusive eucalyptus-leaf diet, and the unexpectedly weird noises they make.
Now, new research into their ancient ancestors shows that the koalas’ odd appeal arose through the evolutionary interplay between an increasing reliance on an odd food supply and the need to maintain distinct ear structures for hearing each others’ bellows.
By studying the skulls of koala predecessors that lived five to 24 million years ago in the Miocene, an Australian team argues that evolution reshaped the animals faces to enable them to eat the tough leaves while maintaining their specialized communication anatomy.
“The unique cranial configuration of the modern koala is therefore the result of accommodating their masticatory adaptations without compromising their auditory system,” write the researchers, led by Mike Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales, in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The koalas communicate across the Australian forests by making low-frequency calls that are shockingly uncute (listen to the embedded video). The upside to the sounds is that they can travel longer distances — they act like the long waves of AM radio instead of the shorter waves of FM. The researchers hypothesize that the ancient koalas evolved their communication system at a time when the Australian continent was drying out and the koala habitat becoming less dense. By lowering the frequency of their calls, they were able to maintain communication in the sparser forests.
To hear the lower frequencies, they evolved an ever larger apparatus in the middle ear. Modern koala bellows can travel more than 2,500 feet.
Meanwhile, as the Miocene wore on, those same forests were increasingly dominated by the eucalyptus, which became the koalas’ main food source. To make use of that resource, though, they had to add chewing power to deal with the tough leaves. And it’s that combination of evolutionary quirks that yielded the strange skull of Phascolarctos cinereus, the modern koala.
Citation: “Cranial Anatomy of Oligo-Miocene Koalas (Diprotodontia phascolarctidae): Stages in the Evolution of an Extreme Leaf-Eating Specialization” by Julien Louys, Ken Aplin, Robin M.D. Beck, and Michael Archer in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(4):981–992, December 2009
Image: Dorothy Dunphy.
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Koala cuteness is finally explained by research into the Australian animals' ancestors. It turns out their unique faces evolved so they could eat eucalyptus and still hear each other bellowing across the forest.