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Submission + - Data Commissioner protects Facebook privacy by ending discussion - via SMS (europe-v-facebook.org)

Submitted by cheros
cheros writes: Just in case you thought you had ANY rights to privacy protected by Facebook having a site in Ireland, you may want to read the latest update of Europe versus Facebook where the Commissioner apparently ended the discussion via SMS.

For more than a year we have been 'engaged' in the proceeding against Facebook before the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC). Now we experienced a more than surprising move by the authority (ODPC): Via a text message (!) we were told that the authority is not planning to talk to us anymore, despite the fact that we are parties of the biggest proceeding the DPC has ever had on his table... It is now unclear how we will overcome this situation.

Streisand Effect in 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..
Security

Submission + - Tracking Chinese Cyber-Espionage Botnets (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by wiredog
wiredog writes: From Brian Krebs, reporting on a large scale Chinese cyber-espionage operation:

the infrastructure that frames these these spy machines generally points in one of two directions: one group’s infrastructure points back to Shanghai, the other to Beijing.

“There have to be hundreds of people involved, just to maintain this amount of infrastructure and this much activity and this many spear phishes, collecting so many documents, and writing this much malware,” Stewart said
Encryption

Submission + - Tools Released at Def Con Cracks PPTP Encryption in under a day (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Defcon is seeing some amazing hacking revelations, the latest one being a new tool that is capable of decrypting any PPTP and WPA2 wireless that use MS-CHAPv2 authentication mechanism. The two tools, ChapCrack developed by Moxie Marlinspike and CloudCracker.com that runs on FPGA cracking box developed by David Hulton of Pico Computing can be used together to crack the encryption of any PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) and WPA2-Enterprise (Wireless Protected Access) sessions that use MS-CHAPv2 for authentication.
Linux

Submission + - ScummVM 1.5.0 "Picnic Basket" Released (scummvm.org)

Submitted by
YokimaSun
YokimaSun writes: "Fans of classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, will be happy to learn that a new version of ScummVM has been released with support for new games such as Once Upon A Time: Little Red Riding Hood, Backyard Baseball 2003, Blue Force, Darby the Dragon, Dreamweb, Geisha, Gregory and the Hot Air Balloon, Magic Tales: Liam Finds a Story and more. ScummVM not only supports Windows, Linux and new platforms such as iPhone and Android but also consoles such as Dreamcast, Gamecube and Nintendo 64 and rarer handhelds such as Openpandora and Dingoo."
Security

Submission + - JavaScript Botnet Sheds Light on Criminal Activity (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Informatica64, a security research group, demonstrated the use of cached JavaScript to control computers connecting to a malicious proxy.
"The researchers found a variety of low-level criminals using their proxy server: fraudsters posing as British immigration officials offering work permits in hopes of stealing money and sensitive documents from their victims; a man pretending to be a pretty woman on a number of dating sites to con victims into sending money for a plane ticket; and another fraudster selling nonexistent Yorkshire Terriers.""
Games

Submission + - GameStop Wants To Sell Secondhand Digital Download Video Games (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "GameStop makes a killing selling used videogames, but what happens to that business model when digital distribution platforms run physical media out of town? That's not anything to worry about today, tomorrow, next week, or even next year, but at some point, GameStop will have to deal with the direction the games industry is headed, and it may already have a solution. GameStop CEO Paul Raines recently brought up the possibility of reselling used digital downloads."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Abstainers could be labeled Suspicious 2

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: According to this article printed in tagesspiegel.de, not having a facebook account should be the first sign that you are a mass murderer. As examples they use Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik, who used myspace instead of facebook and the newer Aurora shooter who used adultfriendfinder instead of facebook. They already consider those with facebook accounts, who lack friends to be suspicious, but now they are suggesting that anyone who abstains from facebook altogether may be even more suspicious. While it is already established that sites like facebook and google+ are no good for political activists, abuse survivors, and people in the witness protection program; abuse survivors will have to take a back seat while more and more insane articles like this come out. This line of thinking could sure help facebook's stock value.
Android

Submission + - Apple v. Samsung: Surprising Reveals in Latest Court Documents (wired.com)

Submitted by Nerdfest
Nerdfest writes: "The lawyers behind the upcoming Apple v. Samsung trial have been hard at work filing docket after docket as their court battle looms closer, and many of those dockets have just been released to the public. We’re now seeing a lot of previously secret information about the early days of iPhone and iPad R&D, and what’s happened behind closed doors at both Apple and Samsung."

Surprises include the iPhone design being 'inspired' by Sony product ideas, and that Samsung was warned that it was copying Apple.
Cellphones

Submission + - Fighting the iCrime Wave

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'What's the point of a mobile device,' asks WSJ reporter and iPad-beatdown-victim Rolfe Winkler, 'if people don't feel safe using it while they're mobile?' A lucrative secondhand market for today's electronics devices — a used iPad or iPhone can fetch $400+ — has produced an explosion in 'Apple picking' by thieves. So, how big is the iCrime wave? In New York City alone, there were more than 26,000 incidents of electronics theft in the first 10 months of 2011 — 81% involving mobile phones — according to an internal NYPD document. And plenty of the crimes are violent. The best way to deter theft is to reduce the value of stolen device — the wireless industry is moving to adopt a national registry that would deny service to such devices. A remote kill switch has been discussed as another approach. For its part, Apple says the company 'has led the industry in helping customers protect their lost or stolen devices,' although some are unimpressed. Could the estimated $575 in profit per iOS device be part of the problem?"

Submission + - 6 IT Projects are $8 Billion Over Budget at the Dept of Defense (federaltimes.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Federal Times has the stunning but not surprising news (http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20120723/DEPARTMENTS01/307230001/At-DoD-6-projects-8-billion-over-budget) that a new audit has found that Six Defense Department modernization projects are a combined $8 Billion — or 110 percent — over budget. The projects are also suffering from years-long schedule delays.

In 1998, work began on the Army’s Logistics Modernization Program (LMP). In April 2010, the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued their report "Actions Needed to Improve Implementation of the Army Logistics Modernization Program" (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-461) about the status of LMP. LMP is now scheduled to be fully deployed in September 2016, 12 years later than originally scheduled, and 18 years after development first began! (Development of the often-maligned Duke Nukem Forever (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever) only took 15 years.)

Prime contractors Computer Sciences Corp, Accenture, IBM and CACI obviously have learned the "If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" lesson! (http://www.despair.com/consulting.html)
Games

Submission + - Games could predict whether you're color blind, a gambler, or have ADD (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lukasz Twardowski, a young Polish entrepreneur, recently made an unexpected discovery. By analyzing data from video games, he thinks he’ll be able to predict whether players are color blind, have Alzheimer’s disease, or suffer from various learning and development disorders. He can already use this data to tell whether players are gamblers, cheaters, or minors, so the profiling of medical conditions is not that distant, Twardowski claims.

“Games are the richest and the most meaningful form of human computer interaction,” said Twardowski in an interview with VentureBeat. “We can use [them] to build a full user behavioral profile.”
Encryption

Submission + - Sudoku Inspired Algorithm used for Encrypting Images (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Sudoku puzzles, solved the world over by millions of users every day, have managed to grab attention of mathematicians allowing them to use the underlying mathematics as a means for scrambling or encrypting images. Yue Wu at Tufts University in Medford along with a couple of friends has used Sudoku’s 9x9 grid to formulate a completely new type of matrix mathematics. For readers who are not so mathematics savvy, a matrix is a rectangular array of numbers wherein each element can uniquely identified by its row and column number – in other words, its grid reference. As Sudoku is the reference for new technique, according to Wu and co it is possible to identify elements in an array such that each of the elements contains a digit from 1 to 9 and that it satisfies the rules of Sudoku. This means that each element can now be identified by a row reference, a column reference and a digit. According to the team there are a total of six different ways of representing each element according to Wu. Through the use of simple mathematical functions [PDF], the co-ordinates in one system can be converted to that of the other. When we consider encryption, these simple conversion functions are the key to scrambling images. So, how to go about it? One can start with an image made up of 9x9 pixels. Next, superimpose a Sudoku solution onto this grid such that each of the pixels can now be represented by the new coordinate systems. Now using any one of the conversion functions swap the position of pixels. This will effectively scramble the image.
Businesses

Submission + - Mark Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Nathan Vardi writes in Forbes that in the last two months, Mark Zuckerberg has had a rude introduction to the capital markets and with Facebook’s stock in free-fall, down more than 40% from its IPO price, Zuckerberg has a big problem. "Zuckerberg did not want to deal with the pressures of being a public company. Like many entrepreneurs these days he viewed the capital markets with suspicion," writes Vardi. "So Zuckerberg made a fateful decision, he decided to keep Facebook a privately-held company for much longer than other success stories like Google or Amazon." But waiting eight years to conduct an IPO has turned out to be an impossible problem to manage. The bankers at Morgan Stanley applied all the lessons of the last 15 years and priced the IPO at $38, which was very aggressive, in an attempt to avoid leaving any money on the table and the embarrassment that a huge IPO pop would represent. With such a big valuation at IPO time, Facebook had to show some results but the numbers that Facebook announced in its first quarterly earnings report were underwhelming and the trading hordes drove Facebook’s stock down by 15% in Friday morning trading. Now the early institutional investors are heading for the exits and it's hard to imagine morale at Facebook won’t take a hit that correlates with the loss in value of the shares belonging to the employees. "The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.""
Google

Submission + - Google didn't delete all Street View Wi-Fi data (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes: "Google is in more trouble over the Street View Wi-Fi data slurping incident. Two years ago Google admitted it had collected snippets of personal data while sniffing for Wi-Fi connections. The UK's data watchdog, the ICO, didn't fine Google, but did demand it delete the collected data. Following the FCC's investigation, the ICO double-checked with Google that the data was deleted, receiving confirmation that it had. Except... it hadn't all been deleted, Google has now admitted. That breaches the deal between the ICO and Google, and the watchdog has said it's in talks with other regulators about what to do next."
Medicine

Submission + - Two more men with HIV now virus-free (msn.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: Two men unlucky enough to get both HIV and cancer have been seemingly cleared of the virus, raising hope that science may yet find a way to cure for the infection that causes AIDS, 30 years into the epidemic.

The researchers are cautious in declaring the two men cured, but more than two years after receiving bone marrow transplants, HIV can't be detected anywhere in their bodies. These two new cases are reminiscent of the so-called "Berlin patient," the only person known to have been cured of infection from the human immunodeficiency virus.

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