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Submission + - Hacker Intercepts FBI and Secret Service calls .. (gawker.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, Bryan Seely, a network engineer and one-time Marine, played me recordings of two phone calls (embedded below.) The calls were placed by unwitting citizens to the FBI office in San Francisco and to the Secret Service in Washington, D.C. Neither the callers nor the FBI or Secret Service personnel who answered the phone realized that Seely was secretly recording them. He used Google Maps to do it.

Submission + - Snowden's NSA leaks gave IETF a needed security wake-up call, Chairman says (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Security and how to protect users from pervasive monitoring will dominate the proceedings when members of Internet Engineering Task Force meet in London starting Sunday. For an organization that develops the standards we all depend on for the Internet to work, the continued revelations made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have had wide-ranging repercussions. "It wasn't a surprise that some activities like this are going on. I think that the scale and some of the tactics surprised the community a little bit. ... You could also argue that maybe we needed the wake-up call," said IETF Chairman Jari Arkko. Part of that work will also be to make security features easier to use and for the standards organization to think of security from day one when developing new protocols.

Submission + - ReactOS Finally on Kickstarter (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by jeditobe
jeditobe writes: Aleksey Bragin, along with Steven Edwards (Present and former ReactOS Project Coordinators) have just launched ReactOS to Kickstarter under the name "Thorium Core Cloud Desktop".

"Thorium Core" is a commercial distribution of ReactOS, the Open Source Windows compatible operating system, targeted for cloud computing

Thorium Core will allow you to configure an optimized, virtualized or embedded system tailored to run Windows-compatible applications using fewer resources than a modern version of Windows would require, without the licensing costs and complexity associated with Microsoft products and giving the user the Freedom that comes with Open Source software."

Submission + - Samsung Galaxy S4 Security Vulnurability (bgu.ac.il)

Submitted by olsmeister
olsmeister writes: The Samsung KNOX enterprise security system (presumably a play on Ft Knox, the location of the United States Bullion Depository) contains a security vulnurability that could put both personal and business data at risk. This is according to a discovery by a Ph.D. student at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. This is the security system used in Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4 phone, which Samsung hopes will allow it to compete with BlackBerry in government and enterprise applications. The flaw could allow attackers to access secure data, as well as load malicious applications.

Submission + - Who's Selling Credit Cards from Target? (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Brian Krebs does some detective work to determine who is behind the recent Target credit card hack. Krebs sifted through posts from a series of shady forums, some dating back to 2008, to determine the likely real-life identity of one fraudster. He even turns down a $10,000 bribe offer to keep the information under wraps.

Submission + - Intel Linux Driver Now Nearly As Fast As Windows OpenGL Driver (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver is now running neck-and-neck with the Windows 8.1 driver for OpenGL performance between the competing platforms when using the latest drivers for each platform. The NVIDIA driver has long been able to run at similar speeds between Windows and Linux given the common code-base, but the Intel Linux driver is completely separate from their Windows driver due to being open-source and complying with the Linux DRM and Mesa infrastructure. The Intel Linux driver is still trailing the Windows OpenGL driver in supporting OpenGL4.

Submission + - Bitcoin miners bundled with PUPs in legitimate applications backed by EULA (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Bitcoin miners are being integrated with third party potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that come bundled with legitimate applications. These miners surreptitiously carry out Bitcoin mining operations on the user’s system consuming valuable CPU time without explicitly asking for user’s consent. Malwarebytes, the company which found evidence of these miners, first came across such an instance of a Bitcoin miner when one of the users of its software requested for assistance on November 22 through a forum post. The user revealed that “jh1d.exe” was taking up over 50 percent of the CPU resource and even after manual deletion the executable was re-appearing. Malwarebytes dug deeper into this and found traces of a miner “jhProtominer”, a popular mining software that runs via the command line”. However, it seems that the company behind the application has a specific clause 3 in EULA that talks about mathematical calculations similar to Bitcoin mining operation. This means that the company behind the software can and will install Bitcoin miners and use system resources to perform operations as required to mine Bitcoins and keep the rewards for themselves.

Submission + - The Dismantling of POTS: bold move or grave error? 2

Submitted by TheRealHocusLocus
TheRealHocusLocus writes: The FCC is drafting rules to formalize the process of transition of "last-mile" subscriber circuits to digital IP-based data streams. The move is lauded by AT&T Chairman Tom Wheeler who claims that significant resources are spent to maintain 'legacy' POTS service, though some 100 million still use it. POTS, or 'Plain Old Telephone Service' is the analog standard that allows the use of simple unpowered phone devices on the wire, with the phone company supplying ring and talk voltage. I cannot fault progress, in fact I'm part of the problem: I gave up my dial tone a couple years ago because I needed cell and could not afford to keep both. But what concerns me is, are we poised to dismantle systems that are capable of standing alone to keep communities and regions 'in-touch' with each other, in favor of systems that rely on centralized (and distant) points of failure? Despite its analog limitations POTS switches have enforced the use of hard-coded local exchanges and equipment that will faithfully complete local calls even if its network connections are down. But do these IP phones deliver the same promise? For that matter, is any single local cell tower isolated from its parent network of use to anyone at all? I have had a difficult time finding answers to this question, and would love savvy /. folks to weigh in: In a disaster that isolates the community from outside or partitions the country's connectivity — aside from local Plain Old Telephone Service, how many IP and cell phones would continue to function? Are we setting ourselves up for a 'fail'?

Comment Re: Mulefeathers! (Score 1) 346

by LandGator (#45559877) Attached to: The Burning Bridges of Ubuntu
Whereas it was necessary to release 12 Ubuntu versions to keep up with the every-six-months releases of Ubuntu, for each of the Desktops, here's the track record of Debian based distros by Mint: six releases of Debian, three of those supporting multiple Desktops. So, Anonymous Coward, you seem to overlooked 83% of the Debian based releases of Mint. 2013.03.22: LMDE 201303 (MATE and Cinnamon) was released. 2012.04.24: LMDE 201204 (MATE/Cinnamon and Xfce) was released. 2011.09.16: LMDE 201109 (Gnome and Xfce) was released. 2011.04.06: LMDE 201104 Xfce was released. 2011.01.02: LMDE 201101 32-bit re-spin. 2010.12.24: LMDE 201012 was released.

Submission + - Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself Using Tor

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: David Talbot writes at MIT Technology review that engineers on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code and operates by rough consensus, have asked the architects of Tor to consider turning the technology into an Internet standard. If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps and would allow far more people to browse the Web without being identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic. The IETF is already working to make encryption standard in all web traffic. Stephen Farrell believes that forging Tor into a standard that interoperates with other parts of the Internet could be better than leaving Tor as a separate tool that requires people to take special action to implement. “I think there are benefits that might flow in both directions,” says Farrell. “I think other IETF participants could learn useful things about protocol design from the Tor people, who’ve faced interesting challenges that aren’t often seen in practice. And the Tor people might well get interest and involvement from IETF folks who’ve got a lot of experience with large-scale systems.” Andrew Lewman, executive director of Tor, says the group is considering it. “We’re basically at the stage of ‘Do we even want to go on a date together?’ It’s not clear we are going to do it, but it’s worth exploring to see what is involved. It adds legitimacy, it adds validation of all the research we’ve done.”

Submission + - Disabled Woman Denied Entrance to USA Due to Private Medical Records (thestar.com) 4

Submitted by Jah-Wren Ryel
Jah-Wren Ryel writes: The latest from the front lines in the War on Dignity:

In 2012, Canadian Ellen Richardson was hospitalized for clinical depression. This past Monday she tried to board a plane to New York for a $6,000 Caribbean cruise. DHS denied her entry, citing supposedly private medical records listing her hospitalization.

Submission + - Google supercomputers tackle giant drug-interaction data crunch (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: By analysing the chemical structure of a drug, researchers can see if it is likely to bind to, or ‘dock’ with, a biological target such as a protein. Researchers have now unveiled a computational effort that used Google's supercomputers to assesses billions of potential dockings on the basis of drug and protein information held in public databases. The effort will help researchers to find potentially toxic side effects and to predict how and where a compound might work in the body.
“It’s the largest computational docking ever done by mankind,” says Timothy Cardozo, a pharmacologist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, who presented the project at the US National Institutes of Health’s High Risk–High Reward Symposium in Bethesda, Maryland. The result, a website called Drugable, is still in testing, but it will eventually be available for free, allowing researchers to predict how and where a compound might work in the body, purely on the basis of chemical structure

Submission + - Why CyanogenMod was Pulled from Google Play

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Next Web seems to have the answer: http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/27/google-forces-cyanogenmod-pull-one-click-installer-play-store-violation-developer-terms/

"We did some further digging, however, and sources told us the app was pulled over Google Play’s system interference clause, which notes that if an app makes changes with the user’s knowledge and consent, the user must be able to easily reverse the change either within the app or by uninstalling it altogether. CyanogenMod doesn’t offer either, and until it does, it’s staying outside of Google Play."

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