63273221
submission
hypnosec writes:
Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, on Friday called out billions of Facebook users to support him by joining a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for violating users’ privacy laws. Schrems has filed a law suit at Vienna's commercial court and has also invited others to join the action at www.fbclaim.com using their Facebook login. According to Europe-V-Facebook.org campaign, the Austrian law allows for a group of people to assign their claims to a single person in this case, Schrems, who can sue on their behalf and redistribute any damages awarded. In such a case, legal proceedings are then run as a class action. Schrems is claiming 500 Euros ($670) per user from Facebook in damages for allegedly violating data privacy policies, including its participation in the US National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance programme aimed at accessing the personal data of Facebook and other web services users, its graph search feature, use of “big data” systems for spying on users as well as company’s non-compliance with EU privacy law.
63060445
submission
hypnosec writes:
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India has ordered for a preliminary enquiry (PE) against Google for violating Indian laws by mapping sensitive areas and defence installations in the country. As per the PE, registered on the basis of a complaint made by Surveyor General of India’s office to the Union Home Ministry, Google has been accused of organizing a mapping competition dubbed ‘Mapathon’ in February-March 2013 without taking prior permission from Survey of India, country’s official mapping agency. The mapping competition required citizens to map their neighbourhoods, especially details related to hospitals and restaurants. The Survey of India (SoI), alarmed by the event, asked the company to share its event details. While going through the details the watch dog found that there were several coordinates having details of sensitive defence installations which are out of the public domain.
63012857
submission
hypnosec writes:
Linus Torvalds has called GCC 4.9.0 compiler ‘pure and utter sh*t’ and 'terminally broken' after a random panic was discovered in a load balance function in Linux 3.16-rc6. “Ok, so I'm looking at the code generation and your compiler is pure and utter *shit*”, in one of the mails on Linux kernel mailing list. “gcc-4.9.0 seems to be terminally broken”, he added further. The issue that invited such comments from Torvalds is to do with the compiler apparently spilled a constant and incorrect stack red-zoning on x86-64 code generation.
62905319
submission
hypnosec writes:
Government of Russia has announced a 4 million Roubles (~£65,000) bounty to anyone who develops a technology to identify users of TOR – an anonymising network capable of encrypting user data and hiding the identity of its users. The bounty has been announced by Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the form of a tender titled “Perform research, code ‘TOR’ (Navy)”. The public description of the project has been removed now and it only reads "cipher 'TOR' (Navy)". The ministry has said in the tender that it is looking for experts and researchers to “study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users and users equipment on the Tor anonymous network.”
62743193
submission
hypnosec writes:
Motorists stop on hard shoulders mainly for either of the following two reasons: breakdowns or crashes – however, these are not the only two reasons as Highway Agency has revealed that motorists give out a range of bizarre reasons for stopping on hard shoulders.
- One motorist pulled over because they saw fire” on their dashboard display, it later turned out it was the name of the Adele track they were listening to.
- One motorist parked up and fell asleep on the M6.
- People stopping to read a map or check their sat-navs.
- Traffic officers stopped with two cars on the hard shoulder – the owners were half way through the selling and buying process for one of the cars.
- One driver realised their car insurance policy was up for renewal – they were ringing around for quotes to renew.
- Parents feeding children.
- Taxi drivers waiting on the hard shoulder around Heathrow airport for their client’s flights to arrive.
- A mobile phone operator, stopping at regular intervals in their private car carrying out signal tests on the hard shoulder.
- A driver who stopped to pick flowers.
- Have you broken down Sir? No, came the reply, we are taking pictures of our new born grandchild (in their open top sports car) as it is a lovely day.
62233485
submission
hypnosec writes:
With several controversies arising about in-app purchases, a Chinese couple has done the most unthinkable by selling their sons to buy in-app items. An unmarried couple, A Hui and A Mei, severely addicted to online games were accused of selling their sons and were arrested. In an interview to the Guangdong TV, they revealed that they chose to sell their sons to child traffickers to be relieved of the financial burden of supporting their children. A Hui said A Mei is fond of playing online games and likes to buy game items. As he could not give up his in-app purchases, he was not able to support his first son and they sold him to Fujian-based child traffickers. When the wife A Mei bore another son, they felt they would not be able to support their second child too. As they were both more interested in buying in-app items, they again sold him to the traffickers.
61929809
submission
hypnosec writes:
With a staggering 68% proof, a Scottish concoction that costs just £50 a 275ml bottle, has been named as the world’s strongest beer by the Trading Standards officials. Snake Venom from the Brewmeister Brewery in Keith Scotland is produced using special ingredients like smoked peat malt and two different yeast strains – champagne and beer – and is freeze-concentrated to boost its alcohol content.
61588603
submission
hypnosec writes:
The ICO has issued a mildly toned reminder about how people and organisations need to be mindful about privacy laws in the UK while they are using Google Glass. Andrew Paterson, Senior Technology Officer at ICO notes that the primary issue with Google Glass is whether people have been given notice if they are filmed. Citing instances of Google Glass bans in some bars in the US, Paterson notes that companies in the UK will also be considering their own responses and we anticipate that there will be quite a few businesses which may ban Google Glass. Paterson reminds users that use of such wearable devices should be in compliance with the law and that they should be operated in line with the requirements with the country’s Data Protection Act.
61459995
submission
hypnosec writes:
Cisco has released a new experimental block cipher dubbed FNR or Flexible Naor and Reingold, which it claims is suitable for data with less than 128 bits or where preservation of input length is a must. Sashank Dara, software engineer at Cisco, explains that traditional block ciphers including AES work well with data of sizes greater than 128, 192 or 256 bits, but in cases wherein data transmission involves small chunks of data like IP addresses and MAC addresses and AES is used, the small blocks of data get bloated because of the padding requirement. This is where FNR comes in handy as it proposes “invertible matrices to provide a neat and generic way to achieve pair-wise independence for any arbitrary length”. Cisco has offered the code at github under the LPGLv2 and has also provided an application demoing IPV4 address encryption.
61392777
submission
hypnosec writes:
A new movement dubbed the Open Wireless Movement is asking users to open up their private Wi-Fi networks for total strangers – a random act of kindness – with an aim of better securing networks and facilitating better use of finite broadband resources. The movement is supported by non-profit and pro-internet rights organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, Open Rights Group, and Free Press among others. EFF is planning to unveil one such innovation – Open Wireless Router – at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference to be held next month on New York. This firmware will allow individuals to share their private Wi-Fi to total strangers to anyone without a password.
61387315
submission
hypnosec writes:
Google has forked OpenSSL to create its own cryptography library dubbed BoringSSL – something that Mountain View reveals was done because maintaining the different patches Google created over years was getting difficult to manage over different code bases. Adam Langley, a widely respected cryptography engineer and Google employee, revealed that he started tidying up the OpenSSL code long before Heartbleed was discovered. Google had been busy applying a series of patches on top of OpenSSL, few of which have already been into main OpenSSL repository, but as multiple Google products including Chrome and Android have been dependent on the patches they had built, it was becoming complex to handle these patches “across multiple code bases is getting to be too much”. For this reason they decided to switch to a model where they import changes from OpenSSL instead of the other way around.
61369347
submission
hypnosec writes:
Security researcher over at CARI.net has revealed that thousands of servers fitted with Supermicro motherboards are just waiting there, storing admin passwords in clear text, to be probed by hackers and attackers. The plain text password threat is to do with the baseboard management controller (BMC) – a motherboard component – using which administrators can monitor physical status of servers including their temperatures, disk and memory performance, and fan speeds. Wikholm notes that it’s not just the password file that you download via the port, but the entire /nv directory is up for grabs and anyone can download “server.pem file, the wsman admin password and the netconfig files”.
61040657
submission
hypnosec writes:
Starting today businesses and individuals in the UK will be able to register a new national web address ‘.uk’ and drop their existing ‘.co.uk’ or ‘.com’ suffix in favour of a shorter and snappier domain name. The entire process along with the transition is being overseen by private yet not-for-profit organisation Nominet, which has already started notifying existing customers with a ‘.co.uk’ domain of their chance to adopt a ‘.uk’ domain. Nominet will reserve all ‘.uk’ domain names, which already have a ‘.co.uk’ counterparts, for the next five years offering registrants the chance to adopt the new domain and to keep cyber squatters at bay.
60332003
submission
hypnosec writes:
A consumer rights firm, Hagens Berman, has filed a national class-action lawsuit against Google on behalf of Free Range Content, the California-based owner of Repost.us, claiming that the search engine giant unlawfully denies payments to thousands of website owners and operators under its AdSense programme.
The lawsuit partly relies on the recent accusations that Google is engaged in AdSense fraud and through a scheme developed in 2009 denies payments to thousands of publishers just close to the payout dates without providing a valid reason.
Further the lawsuit also cites the case of Free Range Content whose account was also disabled. In February 2014, Free Range Content noticed an unusual spike in their AdSense earnings – something in tune of $40,000.
Free Range Content scheduled a call with a Google AdSense representative on March 6, but just two days before the call Google disabled its account. Google refused to talk with Free Range Content after this, claims the lawsuit.
59880919
submission
hypnosec writes:
Mozilla has ditched its Firefox’s new-tab monetization plans as they ‘didn’t go over well’ with the community finding it hard to understand the scheme. Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s VP of Firefox said that a lot of Firefox’s community was worried that Mozilla was “going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder” and that users wouldn’t have either control over this or any actual benefit. “That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla.”
