57310819
submission
alphadogg writes:
A second federal bill that proposes "kill-switch" technology be made mandatory in smartphones as a means to reduce theft of the devices was introduced Monday. The kill switch would allow consumers to remotely wipe and disable a stolen smartphone and is considered by proponents to be a key tool in combating the increasing number of smartphone robberies. The Smartphone Theft Prevention Act was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives as H.R. 4065 by Jose Serrano, a New York Democrat, as a companion to a Senate bill that was introduced Feb. 13. The two follow a similar law proposed by officials in California last month.
57221263
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco today kicked off a contest with $300,000 in prize money that challenges security experts around the world to put together ways to secure what's now called the "Internet of Things," the wide range of non-traditional computing devices used on the electric grid, in healthcare and many other industries.
A Cisco SVP concluded his keynote at this week's RSA Conference by announcing what he called the “Internet of Things Security Grand Challenge.” http://blogs.cisco.com/securit... Christopher Young said the idea is “a contest of experts around the world to submit blueprints” for how security issues created by the Internet of Things could be addressed. It’s expected that up to six winning entries would be selected and the prize money awarded at the Internet of Things Forum in the fall.
57197945
submission
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.
57118845
submission
alphadogg writes:
Two recently-discovered flaws in Apple iOS and Mac OS X have security experts openly asking whether the software vulnerabilities represent backdoors inserted for purposes of cyber-espionage. “One line of code—was it an accident or enemy action? I don’t know, but it’s the kind of bug I’d put in,” remarked Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Co3 Systems, about the flaw in Apple OS X SSL encryption that was revealed last week. Schneier, a cryptography expert, alluded to the Apple SSL flaw during his presentation on government surveillance this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. The point, he says, is that the U.S. National Security Agency as well as other governments involved in aggressive mass surveillance are going to take any means necessary, including finding ways to put backdoors into commercial products, such as by code tampering. A FireEye researcher posed similar questions about the recently revealed iOS flaw.
57095759
submission
alphadogg writes:
Here's a whirlwind look at some of the wildest and potentially most useful technology research projects from university and vendor labs related to computer networking, from tracking down time travelers to imploding processors to a Web for robots.
57057765
submission
alphadogg writes:
Ahead of a major new spectrum auction scheduled for next year, America's four major wireless carriers are jockeying for position in the frequencies available to them, buying, selling and trading licenses to important parts of the nation's airwaves. Surging demand for mobile bandwidth, fueled by an increasingly saturated smartphone market and data-hungry apps, has showed no signs of slowing down. This, understandably, has the wireless industry scrambling to improve its infrastructure in a number of areas, including the amounts of raw spectrum available to the carriers. These shifts, however, are essentially just lateral moves – nothing to directly solve the problems posed by a crowded spectrum. What’s really going to save the wireless world, some experts think, is a more comprehensive re-imagining of the way spectrum is used.
57056817
submission
alphadogg writes:
Having acquired the security firm Sourcefire last October for $2.7B, Cisco is using this week's RSA Conference as the showcase for how Cisco's security products are being integrated as well as detailing how it will cut an open-source path for the next-generation application-layer firewall/IPS. The first step Cisco is taking to integrate Sourcefire’s FireAMP advanced malware detection technology into Cisco’s line of e-mail and web gateways, including cloud-based web security, in order to detect and block incoming threats, or trace any impacted enterprise endpoints if malware makes it through.
57020739
submission
alphadogg writes:
U.S. cellphone carriers were offered a technology last year that supporters say would dramatically cut incidents of smartphone theft, but the carriers turned it down, according to sources with knowledge of the proposal. The so-called "kill-switch" software allows consumers to remotely wipe and render their phones useless if stolen. Law enforcement and politicians believe the incentive for stealing a smartphone or tablet would be greatly reduced if the technology became standard, because the devices could quickly be rendered useless. A proposal by Samsung to the five largest U.S. carriers would have made the LoJack software, developed by Canada's Absolute Software, a standard component on many of its Android phones in the U.S. The proposal followed pressure from the offices of the San Francisco District Attorney and the New York Attorney General for the industry to do more to prevent phone theft.
56885823
submission
coondoggie writes:
Microsoft's Lync communications platform gathers enough readily analyzable data to let corporations spy on their employees like the NSA can on U.S. citizens, and it's based on the same type of information — call details. At Microsoft’s Lync 2014 conference, software developer Event Zero detailed just how easy it would be, for instance, to figure out who is dating whom within the company and pinpoint people looking for another job.
56848127
submission
alphadogg writes:
Telecom carrier NTT and navigation service developer Navitime Japan are trying to make free Wi-Fi in Japan easier to find with an app featuring augmented reality guidance. Navitime for Japan Travel, available for free for iOS and Android devices, allows users to find the nearest free Wi-Fi providers through an offline search using location data. It also displays the locations of other facilities such as restaurants and tourist attractions. With Navitime for Japan Travel, users hold up the screen to their surroundings, hit "look in AR mode" and footage from the device's camera will be overlaid with the distance to a destination and an arrow pointing the way.
56799573
submission
alphadogg writes:
Some of the Navy's futuristic weapons sound like something out of "Star Wars," with lasers designed to shoot down aerial drones and electric guns that fire projectiles at hypersonic speeds.
That future is now. The Navy plans to deploy its first laser on a ship later this year, and it intends to test an electromagnetic rail gun prototype aboard a vessel within two years.
56784163
submission
alphadogg writes:
In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs. Soon after that, unless everyone upgraded to IPv6, the world would be facing a crisis that would hamper Internet connectivity for everyone. That crisis would be exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand for IP addresses due to a variety of factors: the Internet of Things (refrigerators needing their own IP address); wearables (watches and glasses demanding connectivity); BYOD (the explosion of mobile devices allowed to connect to the corporate network); and the increase in smartphone use in developing countries. So, here we are three years later and the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses in the United States and Canada. Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?
56647005
submission
alphadogg writes:
Pressure on the cellphone industry to introduce technology that could disable stolen smartphones has intensified with the introduction of proposed federal legislation that would mandate such a system. Senate bill 2032, "The Smartphone Prevention Act," was introduced to the U.S. Senate this week by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. The bill promises technology that allows consumers to remotely wipe personal data from their smartphones and render them inoperable. But how that will be accomplished is currently unclear. The full text of the bill was not immediately available and the offices of Klobuchar and the bill's co-sponsors were all shut down Thursday due to snow in Washington, D.C.
56636227
submission
alphadogg writes:
The FIDO Alliance first showed up a year ago saying it was going to revolutionize e-commerce online authentication by promoting a new multi-factor authentication protocol. Turns out the revolution in security is slow in coming, but the industry group is making some progress. The Fast IDentity Online Alliance, as it’s officially known, started with six members, including PayPal chief information security officer Michael Barrett and the start-up Nok Nok Labs, but now has about 100 members, including Google. Nok Nok is building prototype code to support the new authentication specification called the Online Security Transaction Protocol (OSTP). The idea behind OSTP is it would add a way to let the user with a FIDO-enabled device to voluntarily go beyond simple passwords and logins to evoke a wide range of additional device information, ranging from the trusted platform module to a webcam or biometrics, in a cryptographic process to share that secret as part of a back-end authentication process. The value is creating a multi-factor process on the fly is it could make e-commerce transactions, in particular, much safer.
56602937
submission
alphadogg writes:
The exclusive relationship of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) with the U.S. must end, said the European Union's digital agenda chief on Wednesday. California-based ICANN is responsible for the assignment of top-level domains and has a long-standing operating agreement with the U.S. However, following the revelations by Edward Snowden of widespread surveillance of the Internet by the National Security Agency, many countries have questioned the arrangement. The historical relationship, noted in ICANN's Affirmation of Commitments, is outdated and the governance of the Internet must become more global, said the E.U. Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Kroes was presenting the European Commission's new policy on Internet governance, which rejects any United Nations or governmental takeover of Internet governance and calls for a move to globalize ICANN.
