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Submission + - Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can't seem to handle the streaming video service's traffic, boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection. What he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit. Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it's adding extra hops. Speeds didn't get slower, they got much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly jumped to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than when connecting directly with Verizon. Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon's Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn't know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed.

Submission + - Congressman Mistakes U.S. Officials For Indian Ones (time.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: Rep. Curt Clawson, a freshman Republican congressman from Florida, mistook two senior U.S. officials for representatives of the Indian government during a House hearing on Friday.

“I am familiar with your country, I love your country,” Clawson said to Nisha Biswal and Arun Kumar, addressing fellow U.S. citizens who hold high-ranking positions in the State Department and Commerce Department, respectively.

After a lingering silence, Clawson smiles slowly. Kumar appears to grin, while Biswal echoes Clawson’s sentiment, informing him it should probably be directed to the Indian government. It’s unclear whether Clawson realized his error.

Submission + - Russia goes after TOR's privacy; announces 4 million Roubles bounty (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
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.”

Comment LibreSSL cannot be different by being the same (Score 1) 151

by ConstantineM (#47470831) Attached to: LibreSSL PRNG Vulnerability Patched

What a whole lot of people seem to want from LibreSSL is to behave in every little bit EXACTLY as OpenSSL does, even though OpenSSL itself is a complete and utter mess.

OpenSSL allowed developers to interfere with RNG, so LibreSSL must do that, too?

Well, you can't really go at improving and cleaning up the library if you have to keep all the old bugs and the whole crusty API around.

It's inconceivable to expect LibreSSL to be both better than OpenSSL, yet to have the exact same API and the exact same set of bugs and nuances as the original OpenSSL.

What they're trying to do is be a simple-enough replacement of OpenSSL for most modern software out there (possibly with some minimal patching of the outside software), and not a one-to-one drop-in-replacement for random edge cases.

Submission + - Chinese State Media Declares iPhone A Threat To National Security (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden came forth last year with US government spying secrets, it didn't take long to realize that some of the information revealed could bring on serious repercussions — not just for the US government, but also for US-based companies. The latest to feel the hit? None other than Apple, and in a region the company has been working hard to increase market share: China. China, via state media, has today declared that Apple's iPhone is a threat to national security — all because of its thorough tracking capabilities. It has the ability to keep track of user locations, and to the country, this could potentially reveal "state secrets" somehow. It's being noted that the iPhone will continue to track the user to some extent even if the overall feature is disabled. China's iPhone ousting comes hot on the heels of Russia's industry and trade deeming AMD and Intel processors to be untrustworthy. The nation will instead be building its own ARM-based "Baikal" processor.

Submission + - First release of LibreSSL portable is available.

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: It has finally happened. Bob Beck of The OpenBSD Foundation has just announced that the first release of LibreSSL portable is now available, and can be found in the LibreSSL directory of your favourite OpenBSD mirror. libressl-2.0.0.tar.gz has been tested to build on various versions of Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. This is intended to be an initial portable release of OpenBSD's libressl to allow the community to start using it and providing feedback, and has been done to address the issue of incorrect portable versions being attempted by third-parties. Support for additional platforms will be added as time and resources permit.

Submission + - Retirement of Prof. Andy Tanenbaum (cs.vu.nl)

Submitted by Thijssss
Thijssss writes: Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum (sometimes referred to by the handle ast) (born March 16, 1944) is an American computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
He is best known as the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and for his computer science textbooks, regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards his teaching job as his most important work. Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com, a website dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

"Prof. Andy Tanenbaum is finally retiring. He has been at the Vrije Universiteit for 43 years, but everything must eventually end." — - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/afsch...

Submission + - Russia Moves from Summer Time to Standard Time (theguardian.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Russia's legislature, often accused of metaphorically turning back the clock, has decided to do it literally – abandoning the policy of keeping the country on daylight-saving time all year. The 2011 move to impose permanent "summer time" in 2011 was one of the most memorable and least popular initiatives of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency. It forced tens of millions to travel to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter. In the depths of December, the sun doesn't clear the horizon in Moscow until 10am. The State Duma, the lower house of parliament, voted 442-1 on Tuesday to return to standard time this autumn and stay there all year.

Submission + - Time Warner Cable customers beg regulators to block sale to Comcast (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New York is shaping up as a major battleground for Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC). While the $45.2 billion merger will be scrutinized by federal officials, it also needs approval at the state level.

TWC has 2.2 million cable TV, Internet, and phone customers in 1,150 New York communities, and hundreds of them have called on the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) to block the sale to Comcast. Comcast doesn't compete against TWC for subscribers, and its territory in New York is limited but includes a VoIP phone service offered to residential and business customers in 10 communities.

Submission + - BlackBerry back in profit (net4tech.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Upon arrival at the controls of BlackBerry last November, CEO John Chen seemed determined to turn things around. In only four months, it has already achieved its objectives, namely reducing operational costs by 30%. To do this, he has had to continue to cut in the workforce, reduced by half in two years.

John Chen estimated that BlackBerry has 80% chance of escape, against 50% a year ago. First positive sign. Results for the first quarter of 2014 During this period, it reported net income of $ 23 million against a loss of 84 million a year ago. However, these results take into account the sale of a building complex sold 500 million. Thus excluding exceptional items, BlackBerry still recorded a loss of $ 60 million, which is still two times lower than analysts' forecasts.

Submission + - The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics (motherjones.com) 2

Submitted by The Grim Reefer
The Grim Reefer writes: Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner's findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.

Those startling results set off a bitter fight with the $375-billion-a-year plastics industry. The American Chemistry Council, which lobbies for plastics makers and has sought to refute the science linking BPA to health problems, has teamed up with Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical—the maker of Tritan, a widely used plastic marketed as being free of estrogenic activity—in a campaign to discredit Bittner and his research. The company has gone so far as to tell corporate customers that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected Bittner's testing methods. (It hasn't.) Eastman also sued CertiChem and its sister company, PlastiPure, to prevent them from publicizing their findings that Tritan is estrogenic, convincing a jury that its product displayed no estrogenic activity. And it launched a PR blitz touting Tritan's safety, targeting the group most vulnerable to synthetic estrogens: families with young children. "It can be difficult for consumers to tell what is really safe," the vice president of Eastman's specialty plastics division, Lucian Boldea, said in one web video, before an image of a pregnant woman flickered across the screen. With Tritan, he added, "consumers can feel confident that the material used in their products is free of estrogenic activity."

Submission + - Congressman asks NSA to provide metadata for "lost" IRS e-mails (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has sent a formal letter to the National Security Agency asking it to hand over “all its metadata” on the e-mail accounts of a former division director at the Internal Revenue Service.

“Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment,” Stockman wrote on Friday.

The request came hours after the IRS told a congressional committee that it had “lost” all of the former IRS Exempt Organizations division director’s e-mails between January 2009 and April 2011.

The IRS has been under investigation since 2013, when the tax agency revealed that it selectively targeted political groups applying for tax-exempt status, particularly those with conservative and “Tea Party” leanings and later those with liberal and “Occupy”-related names.

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