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Submission + - Linksys Routers Exploited by "TheMoon" (sans.edu)

Submitted by UnderAttack
UnderAttack writes: A vulnerability in many Linksys routers, allowing for unauthenticated code execution, is used to mass-exploit various Linksys routers right now. Infected routers will start scanning for vulnerable systems themselves, leading to a very fast spread of this "worm".

Submission + - Apple's hiring spree of biosensor experts continues as iWatch team grows (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As the rumors surrounding Apple's mythical iWatch continue to swell, Apple has continued to hire folks with deep biomedical and sensor technology expertise.

A previously unreported addition to Apple's growing cadre of medical device experts is Marcelo Malini Lamego, who began working at Apple this January.

Before joining Apple this past January, Lamego spent 8 years as the CTO of Cercacor, a medical devices company with a focus on developing noninvasive monitoring technologies.

As CTO, Lamego spearheaded the company's engineering and R&D efforts, where he helped develop the Pronto-7, an award-winning and noninvasive medical device capable of measuring a patient's oxygen saturation and hemoglobin levels, along with a patient's pulse rate. The Pronto-7 is currently being sold by Masimo, a company specializing in noninvasive patient monitoring technologies.

Submission + - French journalist "hacks" govt by inputting correct URL, later fined $4,000+ (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: In 2012, French blogger, activist, and businessman Olivier Laurelli sat down at his computer. It automatically connected to his VPN on boot (he owns a small security services company, called Toonux, which was providing a connection via a Panamanian IP address) and began surfing the Web.

Laurelli, who goes by the alias “Bluetouff” in most circles (including on Ars Technica), is something of a presence among the French tech-savvy community. Besides managing Toonux, he also co-founded the French-language activist news site Reflets.info, which describes itself as a “community project to connect journalists and computer networking specialists.” As such, Laurelli initiated a Google search on other subjects, but what he stumbled on was perhaps more interesting: a link that led to 7.7 Gb of internal documents from the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor (the acronym is ANSES in French).

Although the documents were openly indexed by Google, Laurelli would soon be in the French government’s crosshairs for publishing them. He eventually faced criminal charges, though he was later acquitted of those. However, a separate government agency pursued a civil appeal. And last Tuesday, a French appeals court fined Laurelli 3,000 Euros (or a little over $4,000), meaning he likely made one of the more expensive Google searches to date.

Submission + - Elon Musk, Tesla CTO Talk Model X Details, Model S Upgrades (greencarreports.com)

Submitted by joe5
joe5 writes: Tesla Motors tries to keep product details quiet for the most part, but in a recent Q & A session in Norway (Teslas sell extremely well there) Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the company's CTO JB Straubel discussed some interesting nuggets about the Model S, the upcoming Model X SUV, and the company's planned Model E sedan. One hint: the production Model X will definitely have the crazy "falcon doors." (video and transcript in the article)

Submission + - What are the weirdest places you've spotted Linux?

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Bryan Lunduke recently pulled together a collection of the weirdest places he's found Linux, from installations in North Korea and the International Space Station to a super-computer made out of Legos and computer engineer Barbie.

But I figured the Slashdot crowd would have some suggestions to expand the list. See any weird places for Linux not mentioned in this list?

Submission + - How Apple's iBeacon technology is turning location sensing inside out (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Apple's iBeacon location sensing technology, based on the Bluetooth radio in your iPhone, promises to personalize the world around you. For users, this increasingly popular technology changes the question of "Where am I?" into the announcement "Here I am!" An iBeacon is a Bluetooth Low Energy radio that broadcasts a signal in a given area, say the doorway to a clothing or grocery store. Your iPhone – if it has Bluetooth 4.0, and the radio is turned on, and iOS notifications and location services are active – can detect that signal and query the beacon. The beacon uses radio signal strength to figure out the phone’s location and can share that with iOS. Your phone shows an invitation from the beacon to enable something like “in-store notifications,” which involves sharing your Bluetooth-determined location. Now organizations from the NFL to major league baseball are embracing it.

Submission + - Price of Amazon Prime may jump to $99 or $119 a year (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Perhaps investors have had enough, because when Amazon released earnings yesterday that weren't quite up to part with analysts' expectations, shares of the world's largest e-retailer sank by nearly 10%. Money-wise, Amazon raked in a profit of $239 million on revenue of $25.59 billion with EPS coming in at $0.51. The folks on Wall Street, though, were anticipating EPS of $0.66 on revenue of $26.06 billion.

Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak hinted during the company's earnings conference call yesterday that we might see an increase to the company's popular Amazon Prime service. As it stands now, Amazon Prime costs $79 per year and offers users free shipping on millions of items, free book borrowing for select Kindle titles, and last but not least, free streaming to the company's video on-demand service. Going forward, Amazon may increase that pricepoint to either $99 or $119.

That's a rather significant price increase, but it's important to keep in mind that the price of Amazon Prime has remained the same ever since Amazon first started the program nine years ago.

Submission + - What exactly is Facebook's Paper app? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Perhaps what’s most interesting about Paper is that it seems like a subtle admission of what Facebook users who are interested in following trustworthy sources and content have alleged in recent years – Facebook has basically become a watered-down version of Instagram. Facebook Paper incorporates enough new features for Facebook to call it a unique app, but it’s still pretty close to a straight-up re-design

Facebook Paper is a new Facebook newsfeed without the stigmas of the old one. It puts content first and foremost, and lets users brush the messy, social aspects aside. Whether people actually treat it like that or fall back into their old ways will dictate how successful it is.

Submission + - It's getting easier to steal your neighbors' unused Wi-Fi bandwidth (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: A new project from Telefonica called BeWifi enables internet users to snag unused bandwidth from Wi-Fi networks running nearby. So, if you have a family of five trying to stream five different movies at the same time, and your neighbors happen to be out for the night, you and your family could borrow their unused bandwidth until the neighbors come home and log on again.

The technology has been in development since about 2008, and required Telefonica to build and install routers adorned with software that pools available bandwidth to make it available for all Telefonica customers in the area, through what Telefonica director of product innovation and research Pablo Rodriguez described as "a mesh to aggregate the capabilities [of the routers]." The pilot program attracted more than 1,000 users to sign up in the first week it was available, according to Wired UK. Rodriguez said the company was "able to double the speed that customers were getting," in some places where users previously couldn't stream Skype and YouTube in the same household at the same time.

Submission + - NSA and GCHQ target 'leaky' phone apps to scoop user data (theguardian.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: New leaked NSA documents shed a new light on the agency's assault on the data controls of smartphone apps. Using app data permissions as a jumping off point, the documents show agency staffers building huge quantities of data, including "intercepting Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and using them to collect large volumes of location information." One slide lists capabilities for "hot mic" recording, high precision geotracking, and file retrieval which would reach any content stored locally on the phone, including text messages, emails and calendar entries. As the slide notes in a parenthetical aside, "if it's on the phone, we can get it.

Submission + - Amazon Delivery Drones and Predictive Shipping: Don't Believe the Hype (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Amazon is seemingly cat nip to journalists. From flying drone to knowing what you are going to order before you even order it, stories related to Amazon have been carried in virtually all publications of note in the last two months — despite the stories themselves having very little news value. The reason for such widespread coverage, David Gilbert at IBTimes UK guesses, is the mythology which has been built up around Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos over the last two decades.

Submission + - Public libraries tinker with offering makerspaces (medium.com)

Submitted by eggboard
eggboard writes: Public libraries are starting to build temporary and permanent labs that let patrons experiment with new arts, crafts, and sciences, many of them associated with the maker movement. It's a way to bring this technology and training to those without the money or time to join makerspaces or buy gear themselves. It seems to extend the mission of libraries to educate, inform, and enrich, but is a seemingly rare move in the direction of teaching people to create for pleasure and professionally. Many libraries are experimenting with experimenting.

Submission + - Bitcoin Exchange CEO Charlie Shrem Arrested on Money Laundering Charge (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Charlie Shrem, the chief executive officer of bitcoin exchange BitInstant, has been arrested and charged with money laundering.

Shrem was arrested at JFK airport on 26 January and was also charged, along with alleged co-conspiratior Robert Faiella, of selling more than $1 million (£600,000) worth of bitcoins to users of Silk Road.

Submission + - ATMs could be compromised when Windows XP support ends (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: The majority of the 420,000 ATMs in the U.S. run XP, and an executive with an ATM software provider says he expects only 15% of bank ATMs in the U.S. to be on Windows 7 by the April 8th deadline when Microsoft will end support for XP. It's apparently not unusual for the ATM industry to move slowly. "As a rule, security patches that directly affect the machines might be issued only once a quarter," the executive said.

And unlike the old Windows PCs sitting in doctor offices that likely don't have an Internet connection, ATM machines have to be wired 24/7 for transactions. It's also unclear how often those independent ATMs found at convenience stores and gas stations that look like they're 30 years old, and which aren't tied to a bank, are updated to prevent hacking.

Submission + - Why Bitcoin Matters

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Marc Andreessen writes in an op-ed in the NYT that Bitcoin is an Internet-wide distributed ledger that gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. "The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate," writes Andreessen. "Anyone in the world can pay anyone else in the world any amount of value of Bitcoin by simply transferring ownership of the corresponding slot in the ledger." Andreessen says that Bitcoin can be a powerful force to bring a much larger number of people around the world into the modern economic system. "Only about 20 countries around the world have what we would consider to be fully modern banking and payment systems; the other roughly 175 have a long way to go. As a result, many people in many countries are excluded from products and services that we in the West take for granted." Another use for Bitcoin is micropayments. "Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free," writes Andreessen. "Another potential use of Bitcoin micropayments is to fight spam. Future email systems and social networks could refuse to accept incoming messages unless they were accompanied with tiny amounts of Bitcoin – tiny enough to not matter to the sender, but large enough to deter spammers, who today can send uncounted billions of spam messages for free with impunity." Finally says Andreessen there's been a lot of sensationalistic press coverage that Bitcoin is a haven for bad behavior, for criminals and terrorists to transfer money anonymously with impunity. "Much like email, which is quite traceable, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous," says Andreessen. "Every transaction in the Bitcoin network is tracked and logged forever in the Bitcoin blockchain, or permanent record, available for all to see. As a result, Bitcoin is considerably easier for law enforcement to trace than cash, gold or diamonds." Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era concludes Andreessen, and "a catalyst to reshape that system in ways that are more powerful for individuals and businesses alike."

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