71330041
submission
jfruh writes:
GPS, originally designed by the U.S. Defense Department, has completely transformed navigation for military and civilians alike. But GPS isn't foolproof — it can be jammed and isn't accessible everywhere — and so DAPRA is working on "radically" new technologies to deliver a more advanced position- and navigation-tracking system.
71319807
submission
itwbennett writes:
The State Department will pay up to $2 million for information on Roman Olegovich Zolotarev, 29 and the alleged leader of the Carder.ru website, and up to $1 million for information on Konstantin Lopatin, 32 and an alleged moderator on the site. The Carder.ru website and international enterprise was taken down by law enforcement in March 2012 and 19 people arrested for their role in crimes that are estimated to have cost at least $50 million, according to the State Department.
71288637
submission
itwbennett writes:
British engineering company BladeRoom Group says it contacted Facebook in 2011 about using its technique, which involves constructing data centers in a modular fashion from pre-fabricated parts. What happened next isn’t clear, since much of the public version of BRG’s lawsuit is redacted. But it claims Facebook ended up stealing its ideas and using them to build part of a data center in Lulea, Sweden, that opened last year. 'Facebook’s misdeeds might never have come to light had it decided that simply stealing BRG’s intellectual property was enough,' the company said in its lawsuit, filed Monday at the federal district court in San Jose, California. 'Instead, Facebook went further when it decided to encourage and induce others to use BRG’s intellectual property though an initiative created by Facebook called the ‘Open Compute Project’.'
71288355
submission
jfruh writes:
PayPal may not be a bank, but it's still legally required to follow regulations on transferring money — but the company has admitted to a number of violations, including allowing transfers to an individual specifically sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for helping proliferate nuclear weapons.
71281633
submission
itwbennett writes:
For years, RadioShack made a habit of collecting customers’ contact information at checkout. Now, the bankrupt retailer is putting that data on the auction block. A list of RadioShack assets for sale includes more than 65 million customer names and physical addresses, and 13 million email addresses. Bloomberg reports that the asset sale may include phone numbers and information on shopping habits as well. New York's Attorney General says his office will take 'appropriate action' if the data is handed over.
71276893
submission
itwbennett writes:
Late last week, Amazon was issued permission by the FAA to fly an experimental drone as part of its tests for a planned automatic delivery service but it came too late, Paul Misener, vice president of global public policy at Amazon, told lawmakers on Tuesday. 'The UAS [unmanned aircraft system] approved last week by the FAA has already become obsolete,' he said. As a result, Amazon has filed for permission to fly a more advanced drone—one that is already being flown in several countries including the U.K., said Misener, who was speaking at a hearing of the Senate Committee on commerce, science and transportation.
71275719
submission
itwbennett writes:
Nearly half of Android devices are vulnerable to an attack that could replace a legitimate app with malicious software that can collect sensitive data from a phone. Google, Samsung and Amazon have released patches for their devices, but 49.5 percent of Android users are still vulnerable, according to Palo Alto Networks, which discovered the problem. Google said it has not detected attempts to exploit the flaw.
71275637
submission
itwbennett writes:
It’s a commonly held belief among software developers that avoiding disk access in favor of doing as much work as possible in-memory will results in shorter runtimes. To test this assumption, researchers from the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia compared the efficiency of alternative ways to create a 1MB string and write it to disk. The results consistently found that doing most of the work in-memory to minimize disk access was significantly slower than just writing out to disk repeatedly.
71253709
submission
itwbennett writes:
The vulnerability, known as CVE-2011-2461, was unusual because fixing it didn’t just require the Adobe Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) to be updated, but also patching all the individual Flash applications (SWF files) that had been created with vulnerable versions of the SDK. The company released a tool that allowed developers to easily fix existing SWF files, but many of them didn’t. Last year, Web application security engineers Luca Carettoni from LinkedIn and Mauro Gentile from Minded Security came across the old flaw while investigating Flash-based techniques for bypassing the Same-Origin Policy (SOP) mechanism found in browsers. They found SWF files that were still vulnerable on Google, Yahoo, Salesforce, Adobe, Yandex, Qiwi and many other sites. After notifying the affected websites, they presented their findings last week at the Troopers 2015 security conference in Germany.
71250721
submission
itwbennett writes:
A Dutch utility is inviting five families to use radiator-sized servers to heat their living rooms for free. In a trial organized by local utility Eneco, Nerdalize will install its server radiators in five homes, using them to deliver cloud computing services to its clients.
71230447
submission
itwbennett writes:
Facebook has released as open source an application, called Augmented Traffic Control (ATC), that can simulate the connectivity of a portable telephone accessing an app over 2G, Edge, 3G, or LTE network. It can also simulate weak and erratic WiFi connections. The simulations can give engineers an estimate of how long it would take a user to download a file, for instance, given varying network connections. It can help engineers re-create problems that crop up only on very slow networks.
71220211
submission
itwbennett writes:
You don’t need to be the NSA to tap calls on Cisco’s SPA 300 and 500 IP phones: An authentication flaw allows potential attackers to do that by default.
71219981
submission
itwbennett writes:
For years, U.S. businesses and government agencies have complained about attacks originating from China, while the Chinese government persisted in denying attacking U.S. targets. Then last week the Chinese government noted the existence of the country’s cyberwarfare unit in “The Science of Military Strategy,” a publication put out by a research institute of the People’s Liberation Army, according to news reports.
71210139
submission
jfruh writes:
Nothing confronts you with how addicted you are to your phone than constantly taking it out of your pocket and entering and re-entering your passcode over and over again to unlock. But without fanfare, Google is releasing an Android update that might solve the problem: a "smart lock" that can figure out if your phone has been set down since the last time you unlocked it. As long as it stays on your person, you won't need to re-enter your password.
71142853
submission
itwbennett writes:
On Tuesday, Steve Ragan's GoDaddy account was compromised. He knew it was coming, but considering the layered account protections used by the world's largest domain registrar, he didn't think the attacker would be successful. He was wrong. Within days, the attacker gained control over Steve's account just by speaking to customer support and submitting a Photoshopped ID.
