69405221
submission
jfruh writes:
When Randy Westergren, acting out of curiosity, investigated Verizon's Android MyFiOS app for security vulnerabilities, he spotted some big ones, and let the telecom giant know about them. Somewhat amazingly, Verizon didn't react by punishing the messenger, but rather fixed the problems right away and gave him a free year of FiOS for his trouble.
69405151
submission
jfruh writes:
According to a new report derived from the treasure trove of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA uses hijacks existing criminal botnets for its own purposes. Computers already infected by run-of-the-mill crooks might find themselves repurposed by the NSA, and then launching attacks that would be difficult to trace back to the shadowy security agency.
69321617
submission
jfruh writes:
Since a smartphone is an easily portable — and easily losable, and easily stealable — device that contains all sorts of personal data, the idea of a remote "kill switch" or wipe solution is a popular one. Now Qualcomm is looking to build the concept right into their next-gen Snapdragon chip, preventing any OS-level workarounds.
69278279
submission
jfruh writes:
Since the middle of December, visitors to sites that run Google AdSense ads have intermittently found themselves redirected to other sites featuring spammy offerings for anti-aging and brain-enhancing products. While webmasters who have managed to figure out which advertisers are responsible could quash the attacks on their AdSense consoles, only now has Google itself managed to track down the villains and ban them from the service.
69277705
submission
itwbennett writes:
The story began a few months ago when it was reported that both Verizon and AT&T were injecting unique identifiers in the Web requests of their mobile customers. AT&T has since stopped using the system, but Verizon continues. Now, Stanford computer scientist Jonathan Mayer has found that one advertising company called Turn, which tracks users across the Web when they visit major sites including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, BlueKai, AppNexus, Walmart and WebMD, uses the Verizon UIDH to respawn its own tracking cookies.
69243233
submission
jfruh writes:
China's state-owned Internet service providers are improving the nation's connection to the worldwide Internet, adding seven new access points to the world's Internet backbone to improve speed and reliability for Chinese customers. This reveals the nation's essential Internet contradiction, improving its physical connection even as the government continues to block a number of important Intenet sites.
69243121
submission
jfruh writes:
With much of the US smartphone market set in its ways in either the iOS or Android camps, other companies are aiming to gain traction at the low end of the market, either in developming countries like India or with first-world customers who will never drop big money on a phone. Two of the main candidates are Samsung's new line of phones with its Tizen OS and, somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft, which is aggressively cutting prices of its Windows Phones. On specs, it seems that the Windows Phones have the edge.
69206439
submission
jfruh writes:
A lot of handwriting recognition tech involves writing with a finger or stylus on a screen of some sort, but Fujitsu has a different approach. It's introducing a Bluetooth ring that allows the wearer to "write" Japanese or Latin characters in midair, with the text appearing on a paired smartphone or computer. The company claims 95% accuracy in transcription, and is aiming the device at maintenance and repair workers who need to do data entry but also keep their hands free.
69206299
submission
jfruh writes:
More than 20 travel-related websites have experienced data breaches in the past two months, according to a security expert who tracks the trade in stolen data, with United Airlines reporting that some customers' frequent flier mileage accounts were compromised as recently as this past Sunday. The reason they're such tempting targets: frequent flier points, and the airline tickets they can be redeemed for, are easy to sell for quick profits.
69205567
submission
itwbennett writes:
Social learning platform Piazza looked at over 2 million questions asked and answered during four recent semesters by almost 1 million undergraduate and graduate students at schools in the U.S. and Canada in a wide range of fields to see if they could identify a gender confidence gap (defined as the percentage difference between the average number of questions answered by male and female students). Overall, they found a noticeably greater confidence gap between the genders in computer science than in other STEM fields. Among CS students, women answered 37% fewer questions than men, as compared to 18% fewer in non-CS STEM fields. Outside of STEM, the confidence gap is much lower and sometimes reversed, where women answered just 7% fewer questions than men in humanities while actually answering more questions than the men in business and social sciences, 11% more and 5% more, respectively. But take this with a grain of salt: The most confident aren't always (or even often) the most correct.
69204887
submission
itwbennett writes:
A California court has issued a preliminary sales ban for controller chips that SanDisk uses in its high-speed SSDs. The injunction 'affects all modules containing Diablo components,' said Netlist, a U.S. company that designs and manufactures high-performance, logic-based memory subsystems for servers. This means that the order has an effect on IBM, which uses components derived from Diablo technology in ULLtraDIMM and eXFlash modules. It could also have an effect on Huawei, Lenovo and Supermicro, which are looking to offer ULLtraDIMMs in their server platforms, Netlist added.
69182379
submission
itwbennett writes:
Saying that having access to people's communications is vital for combating terrorism, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has laid out surveillance plans that may involve banning online messaging services that offer encryption such as WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage. 'In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which, even in extremists ... that we cannot read?' Cameron said, adding later, 'No, we must not.'
69174585
submission
jfruh writes:
A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union is empowering Europeans to fight for privacy rights in national courts. The court said that an EU-wide policy mandating that ISPs retain customer location and metadata over 12 months to aid law enforcement violated citizen privacy rights. Now people are using this ruling to challenge data retention laws in the Netherlands and Sweden.
69174345
submission
jfruh writes:
The longtime open source dream of Linux on the desktop looks like it's never going to arrive — but, then again, we live in a world where the desktop is less and less important. Nothing could make that clearer than this year's CES, where five of the biggest announcements may not have been branded with a smiling penguin, but had Linux under the hood just the same.
69170515
submission
itwbennett writes:
The FBI’s access to email and other data collected from overseas targets in the NSA’s Prism program has been growing since 2008, according to a 2012 U.S. Department of Justice inspector general’s report declassified last Friday by the DOJ in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times. Here are some of the milestones mentioned in the report: In 2008, the FBI began reviewing email accounts targeted by the NSA through the Prism program. In October 2009, the FBI requested that information collected under the Prism program be 'dual routed' to both the NSA and the FBI so that the FBI 'could retain this data for analysis and dissemination in intelligence reports.' And in April 2012, the FBI began nominating email addresses and phone numbers that the NSA should target in it surveillance program, according to the document.
