Customers who paid $99.99 to watch the Conor McGregor-Floyd Mayweather fight are suing Showtime due to the quality of their stream and buffering issues. From a report via Hollywood Reporter: Portland, Ore., boxing fan Zack Bartel paid to stream the fight in high-definition through the Showtime app but says all he saw was "grainy video, error screens, buffer events, and stalls." Bartel is suing Showtime for unlawful trade practices and unjust enrichment, alleging the network rushed its pay-per-view streaming service to the market without securing the bandwidth necessary to support the scores of cable-cutting fans. The complaint, which is largely composed of screenshots and tweets, is seeking for each member of the class actual damages or $200 in statutory damages, whichever is greater. The proposed class includes Oregon consumers who viewed Showtime's app advertisement on iTunes and paid $99.99 to stream the fight, but were unable to view the fight live on the app "in HD at 1080p resolution and at 60 frames per second, and who experienced ongoing grainy video, error screens, buffer events, and stalls instead." Showtime senior vp sports communications director, Chris DeBlasio, says: "We have received a very limited number of complaints and will issue a full refund for any customer who purchased the event directly from Showtime and were unable to receive the telecast." DeBlasio recommends users contact their cable or satellite provider if they experienced any issues.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: A half dozen technology and security companies -- some of them competitors -- issued the exact same press release today. This unusual level of cross-industry collaboration caps a successful effort to dismantle "WireX," an extraordinary new crime machine comprising tens of thousands of hacked Android mobile devices that was used this month to launch a series of massive cyber attacks. Experts involved in the takedown warn that WireX marks the emergence of a new class of attack tools that are more challenging to defend against and thus require broader industry cooperation to defeat. News of WireX's emergence first surfaced August 2, 2017, when a modest collection of hacked Android devices was first spotted conducting some fairly small online attacks. Less than two weeks later, however, the number of infected Android devices enslaved by WireX had ballooned to the tens of thousands. Experts tracking the attacks soon zeroed in on the malware that powers WireX: Approximately 300 different mobile apps scattered across Google's Play store that were mimicking seemingly innocuous programs, including video players, ringtones or simple tools such as file managers.

Experts involved in the takedown say it's not clear exactly how many Android devices may have been infected with WireX, in part because only a fraction of the overall infected systems were able to attack a target at any given time. Devices that were powered off would not attack, but those that were turned on with the device's screen locked could still carry on attacks in the background, they found. The identical press release that Akamai and other firms involved in the WireX takedown agreed to publish says the botnet infected a minimum of 70,000 Android systems, but Seaman says that figure is conservative.

Takashi Mochizuki and Sarah E. Needleman report via The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Nintendo's latest videogame machine, the Nintendo Switch, is winning fans for both its lineup of popular games and its flexibility -- it works as both a living-room console and a hand-held device. But the real challenge for gamers has been actually getting their hands on it. Production isn't keeping up with demand in Japan, resulting in blockbuster queues and lotteries there. Over weekends in July and early August, tens of thousands of fans lined up at stores for a one-in-10 chance to buy the $300 console at events that have become a form of entertainment. Nintendo's official target is to ship 10 million Switch units in its current fiscal year ending in March 2018. People involved in the supply chain say they have been told to prepare for 18 million units. One executive in the supply chain said his company was ready to pick up the pace of production if asked. One delicate balance for Nintendo: The more it tries to boost output quickly, the more it has to bow to the terms of parts makers, some of whom are also busy with orders for Apple Inc.'s next iPhone. "We're doing everything we can to make sure everyone who wants to buy a Nintendo Switch system can do so," Nintendo said in a statement. "We will ramp up production for the holiday period, which has been factored into our forecast."

UnderAttack writes: Over two days, the Internet Storm Center connected a default configured DVR to the internet, and rebooted it every 5 minutes in order to allow as many bots as possible to infect it. They detected about one successful attack (using the correct password xc3511) every 2 minutes. Most of the attackers were well known vulnerable devices. A year later, what used to be known as the "Mirai" botnet has branched out into many different variants. But it looks like much hyped "destructive" variants like Brickerbot had little or no impact.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook says it's taking another step against Pages that share fabricated news stories. The company has already been working with outside fact-checkers like Snopes and the AP to flag inaccurate news stories. (These aren't supposed to be stories that are disputed for reasons of opinion or partisanship, but rather outright hoaxes and lies.) It also says that when a story is marked as disputed, the link can can no longer be promoted through Facebook ads. The next step, which the company is announcing today, involves stopping Pages that regularly share these stories from buying any Facebook ads at all, regardless of whether or not the ad includes a disputed link. In this case, Leathern said blocking ad-buying is meant to change the economic incentives. Facebook is concerned that "there are Pages posting this information that are using Facebook Ads to build audiences" to spread false news. By changing the ad policy, Facebook makes it harder for companies to attract that audience.

The New York City Police Department says it will give up its 36,000 Windows phones and transition to iPhones by the end of the year. The Verge reports: The switch is prompted in part by news in July that Microsoft was ending support for Windows Phone 8.1, which a large percentage of all Windows-powered phones are still using. It's a predictable end to the Windows phone, considering that its market share had already slipped below 1 percent at the time the police department adopted its phones last year. The ill-fated decision to go with the Windows phone was made solely by its NYPD deputy commissioner for IT, according to The New York Post, and apparently did not receive further judgment before implementing the program. The Windows models were Nokia Lumia 830 and Lumia 640 XL, equipped with special 911 apps, case management apps, and the ability to receive assignments. They were purchased as part of a $160 million initiative to modernize the NYPD, which has been around since 1845. The new business for Microsoft's phones was clearly not enough to keep Windows Phone alive.

According to CNBC, Apple will host its big iPhone 8 product launch event on September 12th. From the report: The tech giant is expected to announce a bevy of products, including two new iterative iPhone updates, possibly named the iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus, in addition to a high-end iPhone 8. Apple is also reportedly gearing up to announce a new 4K Apple TV that will support sharper content than current models, and a new Apple Watch. The iPhone 8 will reportedly feature a display that takes up almost the entire front of the device, using new OLED panels that are brighter and more colorful than previous screens. Rumor has it Apple has moved the fingerprint reader to the back of the phone but will also support facial recognition thanks to a new 3-D sensor on the front of the device. Rumors have suggested the most high-end iPhone 8 will start at $1,000. Apple typically sells its new phones within a week or so of the announcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: President Donald Trump has selected Andrei Iancu, the managing partner of a major Los Angeles law firm, to be the next head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Iancu has been a partner at Irell & Manella since 2004 and was an associate at the firm for five years earlier. His most notable work in the tech sector is likely his representation of TiVo Corp. in its long-running patent battles with companies like EchoStar, Motorola, Microsoft, Verizon, and Cisco. TiVo ultimately succeeded in compelling those defendants to pay up for its pioneering DVR patents, and payments to TiVo ultimately totaled more than $1.6 billion, according to Iancu's biography page. Iancu also had a hand in Immersion Corp.'s $82 million jury verdict against Sony Computer Entertainment, in which a jury found that Immersion's patent claims on tactile feedback technology were valid and infringed. Those big wins aside, most of Iancu's work has been on the defense side. He's represented eBay in a case against Acacia Research Corp., a large, publicly traded non-practicing entity, and he worked for Hewlett-Packard when it defended against Xerox patent claims. He's also worked in the medical device area, enforcing patents for St. Jude Medical on vascular closure devices.

An anonymous reader writes: A list of thousands of fully working Telnet credentials has been sitting online on Pastebin since June 11, credentials that can be used by botnet herders to increase the size of their DDoS cannons. The list includes an IP address, device username, and a password, and is mainly made up of default device credentials in the form of "admin:admin", "root:root", and other formats. There are 33,138 entries on the list, which recently became viral on Twitter after several high-profile security experts retweeted a link to it. During the past week, a security researcher has been working to find affected devices and notify owners or their ISPs. Following his work, only 2,174 devices still allow an attacker to log on via its Telnet port, and 1,775 of the published credentials still work. "There are devices on the list of which I never heard of," the researcher said, "and that makes the identification process much slower."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nearly 3 million viewers are estimated to have watched the fight this weekend via online streams, according to Irdeto, a digital security firm. Though many of these were slick, traditional streaming websites, there was also a new surge in social streams. Between Periscope, Instagram live, Facebook live, YouTube, Twitch, and smaller platforms like Kodi, Irdeto identified 239 streams of the fight over the weekend. And with the option to have private, share-with-just-your-friends streams (like private Facebook Live feeds), it's likely there are many more streams of the fight that were running than Irdeto wasn't able to track. Social media livestreaming has exploded in recent years, creating a whole new avenue for illegal sharing. In 2015, when Mayweather squared off against Manny Pacquiao in another much-anticipated fight, Periscope was only two months' old. Facebook and Instagram's live feed functions were still a year away. Now, they're as ubiquitous as the platforms that host them. Plus, with every smartphone now equipped with a high definition camera, most homes connected to high-speed internet, and the ease of streamable services on already-familiar social media sites, it's no wonder there was such a torrent of pirated feeds.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook hired Michael Sayman for an internship when he was 17 years old, and gave him a full-time engineering job at 18. Now, the wunderkind is leaving for Alphabet's Google. He turned 21 last week. At Facebook, Sayman was a product manager who helped the social-media giant understand how his generation uses their phones, advising on experimental products for teens and helping executives understand trends. At Google, he'll be a product manager for Assistant, a voice-based service built on the search engine's giant database.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you'll be eating something else -- without a second bottle of wine, because you can't find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out. The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful. It can track the restaurant's duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills. So Big Data is staging an intervention. Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The 'creator' of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world's most elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi's real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire's identity. Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him -- his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the 'writer invariant' method of stylometry to compare Satoshi's 'known' writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi's texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a 'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing. The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM and then through MUSCULAR, the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sarahah, a new app that lets people sign up to receive anonymized, candid messages, has been surging in popularity; somewhere north of 18 million people are estimated to have downloaded it from Apple and Google's online stores, making it the No. 3 most downloaded free software title for iPhones and iPads. Sarahah bills itself as a way to "receive honest feedback" from friends and employees. But the app is collecting more than just feedback messages. When launched for the first time, it immediately harvests and uploads all phone numbers and email addresses in your address book. Although Sarahah does in some cases ask for permission to access contacts, it does not disclose that it uploads such data, nor does it seem to make any functional use of the information. Zachary Julian, a senior security analyst at Bishop Fox, discovered Sarahah is uploading of private information when he installed the app on his Android phone, a Galaxy S5 running Android 5.1.1. The phone was outfitted with monitoring software, known as Burp Suite, which intercepts internet traffic entering and leaving the device, allowing the owner to see what data is sent to remote servers. When Julian launched Sarahah on the device, Burp Suite caught the app in the act of uploading his private data.

Chuq Von Rospach, a former Apple employee and commentator, has criticized the MacBook-maker to force consumers to pay extra for the Touch Bar -- a signature feature of the last year's MacBook Pro lineup -- in order to have the highest-end MacBook Pro currently available. He writes: The current [MacBook Pro] line forces users to pay for the Touch Bar on the higher end devices whether they want it or not, and that's a cost users shouldn't need to pay for a niche technology without a future. So Apple needs to either roll the Touch Bar out to the entire line and convince us we want it, or roll it back and offer more laptop options without it. [...] So what's the future of the Touch Bar? I don't know. I'm not sure Apple does, either. I was fascinated that when Apple released the iMacs earlier this year not one word was mentioned about the Touch Bar or Touch ID and support for them via an updated keyboard or trackpad was nowhere to be found. I'm taking that as an indication that after the lackluster response to this with the laptop releases, they've gone back to the drawing board a bit before rolling it out further.