63397487
submission
itwbennett writes:
Some security researchers on Wednesday said it's still unclear just how serious Hold Security's discovery of a massive database of stolen credentials really is. 'The only way we can know if this is a big deal is if we know what the information is and where it came from,' said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos. 'But I can't answer that because the people who disclosed this decided they want to make money off of this. There's no way for others to verify.' Wisniewski was referring to an offer by Hold Security to notify website operators if they were affected, but only if they sign up for its breach notification service, which starts at $120 per year.
63387323
submission
itwbennett writes:
Wikimedia, which operates Wikipedia, published its first transparency report Wednesday detailing two years of alteration and takedown requests as well as requests for user data it received. Of the 304 general content removal requests, none were granted, Wikimedia said in a blog post. And while the amount of copyright takedown requests was notably low, the requests that were made included a selfie taken by a black macaque monkey and an entire aboriginal language, among other eyebrow-raising items.
63375547
submission
jfruh writes:
NetSuite faced a potentially ugly situation in which one of its own customers sued because they said they had been bamboozled by aggressive salesmen into buying "manifestly unusable" software. The lawsuit has been settled out of court, but the message that software companies should be anxious about, according to one analyst, is that "in some cases the only way you can get a vendor's attention is to bring in a lawyer."
63350167
submission
jfruh writes:
The fallout from HP's Autonomy acquisition keeps getting more dramatic. Autonomy's ex-CFO is trying to block the settlement of lawsuits that arsoe the botched deal, claiming that HP is trying to hide its "own destruction of Autonomy's success after the acquisition." HP hit back, saying the ex-CFO "was one of the chief architects of the massive fraud on HP that precipitated this litigation."
63349991
submission
jfruh writes:
Most techies break out into hives at the sound of the word "marketing". But when looking for work, you need to market yourself — not just selling yourself, but letting potential employers know you exist, so they come to you.
63336815
submission
itwbennett writes:
Patrick Wardle and Colby Moore, both of whom work for security firm Synack, will show at Defcon how a Dropcam could turn into a Trojan horse. Here are the basics: Moore and Wardle plucked the private and public SSL certificates from the Dropcam they analyzed. With those in hand, it would be possible for them to view videos a person has stored or upload their own videos that would appear to have come from a specific Dropcam. 'It would allow an attacker to basically hijack or take over the video stream,' Wardle said. For its part, Nest, which acquired Dropcam in June, maintains that such an attack would require physical access to a Dropcam: 'The Synack folks were not able to remotely compromise any of our cameras — only ones they had physical access to,' wrote spokeswoman Kate Brinks. But it's not far fetched that an attacker could buy a Dropcam and give it as a gift to someone, essentially a Trojan horse attack that opens up their video to monitoring.
63269629
submission
jfruh writes:
The FTC has moved aggressively recently against companies that make it too easy for people — especially kids — to rack up huge charges on purchases within apps. But at a dicussion panel sponsored by free-market think tank, TechFreedom, critics pushed back. Joshua Wright, an FTC commissioner who dissented in a recent settlement with Apple, says a 15-minute open purchase window produced "obvious and intuitive consumer benefits" and that the FTC "simply substituted its own judgment for a private firm's decision as to how to design a product to satisfy as many users as possible."
63269373
submission
jfruh writes:
Investigators in a criminal case want to see some emails stored on Microsoft's servers in Ireland. Microsoft has resisted, on the grounds that U.S. law enforcement doesn't have jurisdiction there, but a New York judge ruled against them, responding to prosecutors' worries that web service providers could just move information around the world to avoid investigation. The case will be appealed.
63247509
submission
jfruh writes:
The rapid rise of Japan's high-tech sector in the 1970s and '80s prompted widespread surprise and more than a little anxiety in the West, with many American sci-fi writers and movie makers depicting a Japanese-dominated near future. The country's economy entered a seemingly permanent recession in the 1990s and it was soon eclipsed by China as the world's #2 economy and source of Western fears about Asian dominance. But Japanese tech companies and enginners keep on innovating in areas ranging from airplanes to tuna.
63246723
submission
itwbennett writes:
Despite becoming one of the most widely used programming languages on the Web, PHP didn't have a formal specification — until now. Facebook engineer and PHP core contributor Sara Golemon announced the initiative at OSCON earlier this month, and an initial draft of the specification was posted Wednesday on GitHub.
63197289
submission
jfruh writes:
IBM has been trying to sell its chipmaking division for a while now as part of its plan to unload underperforming assets, but it's now turning out that nobody else wants an underperforming chipmaking divion either, at least not at the prices IBM is asking. Globalfoundries, which used to be AMD's manufacturing arm and is now largely owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, was reportedly interested in buying, but only wanted the intellectual proprty and engineering staff — they felt IBM's manufacturing plants were of "little or no value."
63196987
submission
jfruh writes:
The Association for Computing Machinery is a storied professional group for computer programmers, but its membership hasn't grown in recent years to keep pace with the industry. Vint Cerf, who recently concluded his term as ACM president, asked developers what was keeping them from signing up. Their answers: paywalled content, lack of information relevant to non-academics, and code that wasn't freely available.
63191553
submission
itwbennett writes:
In a personal blog post last week, ex-Oracle employee Kevin Closson said that Oracle database shops might unwittingly find themselves hit with pricey license fees if an audit turned up accidental usage of the in-memory option, which is turned on by default latest release of Database 12c. In a blog post late Monday, Maria Colgan, an Oracle product manager, responded to the claims, saying that while in-memory 'has been seamlessly integrated into the core of the database as a new component of the Shared Global Area (SGA),' it is not turned on by default. She then went on to spell out in detail the steps needed to enable the feature.
63137951
submission
itwbennett writes:
Since 2007, the U.S. telecom infrastructure has been targeted by more than a thousand malicious acts that resulted in severe outages, (those affecting at least 900,000 minutes of user calls, or when it impacts 911 service, major military installations, key government facilities, nuclear power plants or major airports) according to data obtained from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the Freedom of Information Act. For the last three years, vandalism was the single biggest cause of outages identified, accounting for just over a third of the incidents in each year. Gun shots accounted for 9 percent of the outages in 2013, 7 percent in 2012 and 4 percent in 2011. Cable theft accounted for roughly similar levels — 4 percent of outages in 2013, 8 percent in 2012 and 7 percent in 2011. The FCC didn't list all the causes.
63118179
submission
jfruh writes:
When Facebook launched social plugins that could be installed on third party websites, it promised the information those plugins gathered would not be used to target ads. But now the company has reversed course, announcing plans to track users across multiple websites and use their browsing history to target ads, just as Google does. Privacy groups are gearing up to try to stop them.
