Ottawa bitcoin exchange Canadian Bitcoins was subject to a heist that led to $100,000 worth of bitcoins being stolen. But it was no complicated, security fraud: it was simple, social engineering.

The Ottawa Citizen reports:

The Ottawa police are investigating an Oct. 1, 2013, incident at Canadian Bitcoins, when someone opened an online chat session with a technical support worker at Granite Networks, now owned by Rogers Communications, and claimed to be Canadian Bitcoins owner James Grant. He claimed to have a problem with a server and asked the attendant to reboot it into recovery mode, allowing him to bypass security on the server. "It's ridiculous," said the real James Grant when asked about the incident. "There was absolutely zero verification of who it actually was."

The most frustrating details relate to the high degree of physical security that the real owner was subjected to when attempting to access his server cage - something the thieves didn't face. Canadian Bitcoins' statement on the matter is here.

Don't be surprised if the next flight attendant that serves you seems to know more about you than you'd expected. Airlines seem to be strongly interested in the possibilities offered by new wearable technology, and at least two - Qantas and Virgin Atlantic - are giving wearable tech a try in order to provide more personalized service to their customers.

Looks like you shouldn't be surprised if the person to whom you hand your boarding pass is wearing Google Glass, now.

The Cord Cutting movement , in which people choose to do away with cable TV packages in lieu of entertainment provided over the Internet, seems to be picking up the pace. In 2013, the number of American cable TV subscribers dropped for the first time ever, and by the impressive amount of 105,000. A recent report by the Leichtman Research Group finds that the top nine cable companies lost about 1.8 million video subscribers in 2013 (more than they lost in 2012), while other providers gained some users, for a total (net) loss. 2013 was the first year numbers dropped.

Just a blip on the radar? Or the beginning of something more?

CEO Ginny Rometty is finishing off another round of divesting commodity product lines, along with associated headcount, as IBM tries to remain in the forefront of high-margin IT product and service businesses. At or near the top of Rometty's forward agenda is cloud computing, starting with the expansion of the SoftLayer business IBM bought last year.

Some investors like the story. But, as the folks at itjungle.com (a very underrated news site focusing on IBM and its competitors) point out, cloud computing might not turn into the sort of high margin business IBM is accustomed to, even with the enticement of Big Data analytics that IBM and others have been pushing.

Meanwhile, in contrast with generations past, many of the biggest consumers of IT are also among the biggest and innovative producers of platform technology: Google, Amazon, Facebook.

Here's an unpleasant start to your morning: confirmation of a long-running openSSH exploit [PDF] that has led to an extensive botnet pumping out spam, viruses, malware, and of course links to redirect farms. Symantec provides some analysis here . "Operation Windigo" as it's called has been alive since 2011, stealing SSH credentials on Windows, Linux, and BSD systems, and it has hit a couple of well-known companies, including cpanel and the Linux Foundation.

Check your system in the time it takes for your morning coffee to cool, with this command to see if you've been affected:

ssh -G 2>&1 | grep -e illegal -e unknown >/dev/null && echo "System clean" || echo "System infected"

Uninfected systems return an "error illegal option" or "unknown option" for the -G flag, plus as the usage message, whereas infected systems will return only the usage message.

If your system doesn't come up clean, you are probably one of an estimated 25,000 compromised servers currently sending out over 35 million pieces of spam.

The US FBI has been working with the FAA and the Air Line Pilots Association to crack down on people pointing lasers at aircraft. "Reported incidents of laser attacks on aircraft in flight in the US have increased more than 1,000 percent since 2005, according to the FAA, from 283 up to 3,960 in 2013 - an average of 11 incidents a day."

Per the Air Line Pilots Association, " reports of aircraft laser illuminations in the U.S. have increased sharply over the past few years from 2836 in 2010 to 3,960 last year."

Sergio Patrick Rodriguez, 26, now has the dubious distinction of being sentenced to "14 years in federal prison, a term prosecutors believe to be among [California's] longest for such a crime." Rodriguez's gang membership and criminal record were likely factors in his sentence, as was using a laser that is called 13 times more powerful than most laser pointers.

Has anyone seen this happen? Or experienced it as a pilot or aircraft passenger?

Nokia's latest offering for Windows Phone 8, the Lumia Icon is out for review, and though early reviewers approve of the hardware's build quality, battery life and high-resoution screen and camera, many cite concerns about the OS and its app ecosystem and conclude the phone fails to compel.

Sporting a 2.22Ghz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB internal storage (but no SD slot), a 20 megapixel rear-facing camera, a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera, and a 5" 440ppi, HD-capable 1920x1080 resolution screen, the phone is no slouch. But reviews by Wired , Digital Trends , Gizmodo , The Verge , and IGN all use conflicting language like "best Windows phone ever made" and "pretty but flawed," "fantastic," and "bland," or "beautiful" and "unrefined." What's going on here? Is this a winner for the struggling Windows Phone brand, or does it fall short of the mark?

Lastly, rumours are circulating that Microsoft is considering Android compatibility. Is this going to be the secret sauce, or will it undermine WinPhones the way Windows compatability led to poor sales of IBM's OS/2?

Scientists working with the powerful BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescopes at the South Pole may have just discovered evidence of the Big Bang Theory that has been sought since the 1970s . Observing the light of 13.8 billion years ago, the team of astronomers, led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have detected gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time).

These gravitational waves have long been theorized but never observed, and provide strong evidence of a theory of cosmology called Inflation , in which the Big Bang led to an instantaneous inflation of the universe and expansion at speeds that surpass the speed of light. Astrophysicists have been trying to find convincing evidence of the theory for 35 years.

Says the New York Times, "If corroborated, Dr. Kovac's work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or the Big Bang itself." They add:

Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.

We live in amazing times.

German videogame producer Crytek had long been suggesting they would offer official Linux support for their CryENGINE game engine some day. That day is now.

According to a post on their website last week, we now know that at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) that began yesterday, attendees will be able to see this version of the engine in action. They have not mentioned which games they plan on demonstrating.

CryTek is well known for the popular games the Crysis series and Far Cry,as well as Ryse: Son of Rome. From their website:

During presentations and hands-on demos at Crytek's GDC booth, attendees can see for the first time ever full native Linux support in the new CRYENGINE. The CRYENGINE all-in-one game engine is also updated with the innovative features used to recreate the stunning Roman Empire seen in Ryse - including the brand new Physically Based Shading render pipeline, which uses real-world physics simulation to create amazingly realistic lighting and materials in CRYENGINE games.

There will also be games on offer, with the latest version of free online FPS Warface available to play.

Anyone ready for Star Citizen on Linux? And if you're in the San Francisco area, how about giving your fellow readers a word about how it looks?

"CGI Group, the Montreal-based IT consulting company behind the botched rollout of the Federal Healthcare.gov site, has been removed from the Massachusetts Health Connector project. This comes about two months after being removed from Healthcare.gov, and a few weeks after CGI admitted the MA site 'may not be fully functioning by the end of June, and that one option under consideration is to scrap the multi-million-dollar site and start over.'

Like Oregon's similar troubles , Massachusetts uses paper submissions as a workaround to meet Federal sign-up requirements. 'The paper backlog fell to 21,000 pending applications, from 54,000 two weeks ago.'

If you are in the US, have you used Healthcare.gov or a State equivalent? If you are not in the US, do you use similar online systems in your nation?"