71111759
submission
itwbennett writes:
Target has agreed to pay $10 million in a proposed settlement to a class-action lawsuit stemming from its massive 2013 data breach, which affected as many as 110 million people. Individual victims could receive up to $10,000. The proposed settlement also includes measures to better protect the customer data that Target collects, according to documents filed with the U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota.
71085201
submission
itwbennett writes:
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has fined Verizon $3.4 million over its failure to notify police and fire departments during a 911 service outage last year. Under the commission’s rules, Verizon and other carriers were required to notify emergency call centers of a six-hour outage that occurred in April. The outage involved multiple carriers and affected over 11 million people in seven states.
71084625
submission
itwbennett writes:
After a security enthusiast, a Finnish man who works as an IT manager for a company in the industrial sector, discovered a loophole that allowed him to register a valid SSL certificate for Microsoft’s live.fi domain, he tried to responsibly disclose the issue. But instead of thanks he got locked out of his email, phone, Xbox and online storage accounts. 'Through our own investigations, independent from the researcher, we identified and have fixed the misconfiguration that was allowing people to create accounts reserved for Microsoft’s use,' a Microsoft representative told the IDG New Service via email Wednesday.
71056893
submission
jfruh writes:
Microsoft isn't just trying to kill off Internet Explorer in Windows 10; they're also hoping to do away with passwords. Users will be able to log in using fingerprint, face, or iris scanning, although the latter two options will ony be available on machines with new 3-D cameras from Intel.
71056663
submission
jfruh writes:
Nvidia has unveiled the Drive PX, a $10,000 computer that will be installed in cars and gather data about how to react to driving obstacles. "Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior," said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia. The data collected by Drive PXes will be shared, allowing cars to learn the right and wrong reactions to different situations, essentially figuring out what to do from experience rather than a rigid set of pre-defined situations.
71053705
submission
itwbennett writes:
IBM has put a price on its Twitter analytics service: $2,000 to analyze a million tweets and correlate them with data sources including weather forecasts and sales figures. 'The first access to Twitter data is free, then it’s pay as you go,' Alistair Rennie, general manager for business analytics at IBM, said at Cebit on Tuesday. The commercial launch of the Twitter analytics tool on IBM’s Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service is one of the first fruits of a collaboration IBM and Twitter announced last October.
71053355
submission
itwbennett writes:
Twitter is ramping up its efforts to combat harassment with a tool to help users report abusive content to law enforcement. The reports would include the flagged tweet and its URL, the time at which it was sent, the user name and account URL of the person who posted it, as well as a link to Twitter’s guidelines on how authorities can request non-public user account information from Twitter. It is left up to the user to forward the report to law enforcement and left up to law enforcement to request the user information from Twitter.
71045133
submission
itwbennett writes:
In the course of trying to find out how many servers and devices are still vulnerable to the Web security flaw known as FREAK, researchers at Royal Holloway of the University of London found something else of interest: Many hosts (either servers or other Internet-connected devices) share the same 512-bit public key. In one egregious example, 28,394 routers running a SSL VPN module all use the same 512-bit public RSA key.
71019497
submission
itwbennett writes:
Facebook’s Omar Baldonado set off a round of cheering last week when he told engineers there’s finally an open-source hardware design that they can use to build switches. But it's going to take time for open networking to get traction in the average company. The evolution from proprietary to open networking is like the move from Unix to Windows and Linux in servers, except with much higher risk, said Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa. 'If you get things wrong with a network, you don’t lose an application, you lose the entire data center.'
71019059
submission
jfruh writes:
Users of one of Microsoft's business-class Office 365 plans will soon have access to Delve, a feature designed to analyze how people work on Office 365 and automatically make relevant data on colleagues and content easily accessible. For example, using calendar information, Delve can determine that a user has a meeting in four hours, what topics will be discussed and who will participate, so the application collects documents, files and information it deems relevant and displays the content in the dashboard. Will this herald a new era of assisted collaboration, or is this just Clippy in the cloud?
70949991
submission
itwbennett writes:
After so many years of spinning its wheels, Intel is reportedly about to make a big step into mobile by providing Apple with LTE modem chips for its hot-selling iPhone. The news comes courtesy of VentureBeat, which cites two separate sources of the plans. The story says Apple will begin using Intel’s new 7360 LTE modem processor in place of a Qualcomm chip, which has been there for a few generations.
70949749
submission
itwbennett writes:
Titan Aerospace, the drone-maker acquired last year by Google to help realize the company's ambitious plans to provide Internet access to remote areas via solar-powered drones, recently applied for and received two licenses from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to run tests over the next six months.
70947169
submission
jfruh writes:
Steve Jobs was a well-known audiophile and music lover, which helps explain why Apple transformed the music industry in the '00s with the iPod and iTunes. But according to a new biography soon to be released, Apple may have failed to do the same for TV because of Steve Jobs's disdain for the medium. One of his first acts upon returning to the company was to kill the flashy, expensive 20th Anniversary Macintosh, in part because it had a built-in TV tuner. 'Apple will never make a TV again," Jobs declared.
70942925
submission
itwbennett writes:
The Senate Intelligence Committee, meeting behind closed doors, voted 14-1 late Thursday to approve the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act [CISA]. Senator Ron Wyden, who cast the lone vote against the legislation, said it doesn’t adequately protect privacy. 'If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections, then that’s not a cybersecurity bill — it’s a surveillance bill by another name,' Wyden said in a statement. The bill would have a 'limited impact' on U.S. cybersecurity, he added.
70941735
submission
itwbennett writes:
The privacy breach involves whois, a database that contains contact information for people who’ve bought domain names. For privacy reasons, people can elect to make information private, often by paying an extra fee. But Craig Williams, senior technical leader for Cisco’s Talos research group, discovered that the privacy settings for domain names registered through the company eNom were being turned off right at the time when the domains were up for renewal, starting around mid-2013. Williams contacted Google, and in about six days the privacy settings had been restored. In a notice, Google blamed a 'software defect.' Cisco said in a blog post that some 282,867 domains were affected.
