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Solar plane lands in New York City

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...

US embassy worker hacked for sex images

Michael Ford, who worked in the American embassy in London, pleaded guilty to nine charges of cyber-stalking, seven of computer hacking to extort and one of wire fraud.  He preyed on sorority members at US universities and aspiring models.  Ford used the details he learned after hacking the women to find new victims.The 36-year-old, from Atlanta, in the American state of Georgia, posed as technical support staff from a well-known email company and sent phishing messages to thousands of potential victims.  Pretending to be a member of the non-existent account-deletion team, he told them their accounts would be closed unless they sent him their passwords.  He then accessed their email and social media accounts in search of explicit photos and other personal information, such as home and work addresses, employment information and details about family members.  He used that information to demand additional sexually explicit material, such as videos of the wom...

Children's electronic toy maker Vtech hacked

The firm said that there was "unauthorised access" to the database on 14 November.  The app is a gateway for customers to download games, e-books and other content on to their Vtech devices.  It is not clear how many customers have been affected,  A large amount of data, which looked like it could be from the hack, was seen online but has now been hidden, according to some experts. It also appeared to include a considerable number of children's names, dates of birth and gender. In an email to customers, the company said: "Upon discovering the  unauthorised access we immediately conducted a thorough investigation, which involved a comprehensive check of the affected site and implementation of measures to defend against further attacks."  The company stressed it was "important to note that our customer database does not contain any credit card or banking information" nor social security numbers.  However it does contain what the Vtech describe...

Crowdfunding site Patreon has been hacked

About 15 gigabytes of data including names, addresses and donations have been published online following a hack attack on crowdfunding site Patreon.  Patreon allows people to make regular donations to artists for projects.  Projects currently seeking funding include a science video series featuring former International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield.  Credit card details were not stolen, said chief executive Jack Conte.  We do not store full credit card numbers on our servers and no credit card numbers were compromised," he wrote on the firm's blog.  Although accessed, all passwords, social security numbers and tax form information remain safely encrypted with a 2048-bit RSA key." He said that passwords were not stored unencrypted but urged site  users to change their login details as a precaution.  According to Patreon's statistics the site was attracting 16 million viewers per month in June 2015.  The site was breached via a t...