Eliminating pests sure worked well for the Chinese, didn't it? http://io9.gizmodo.com/5927112...

Here is a picture of somebody in China hand-pollinating a pear tree due to one of the unintended side effects (no bees): https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9wT...

This article has enough completely-wrong aspects that exempts it from the concept of "not even wrong" I suppose.

1) The watch does not engage in covert traffic. It's the pairing app for the watch that a user installs on a phone that does the communication.

2) What on earth does the redundant phrase "covert communications behind the users' back" even mean? Have you looked at network traffic when *any* application has been launched? If you think that any app talking on the internet without explicitly asking the user first counts as "covert communications", then I think you can label just about all of the software out there (esp. in the mobile space) as engaging in "covert communications."

3) The phrase "random IP address" used by the speaker is slang meant to convey that he didn't know what it is. In this case, it's a system referred to by its IP rather than its DNS name. So rather than looking up who owns the IP address, he says it's "random" and shrugs.

4) To give up and say that it's "very difficult to determine" what is being sent over the network because it's over an encrypted channel is ridiculous. For all we know, it's just talking to the software vendor via HTTPS. In which case it would be trivial to inspect by using MITM.

I'm not saying that there's nothing sketchy going on here. But to provide zero evidence of what's actually happening and just speculate and spread FUD is irresponsible.

As always, it wasn't the crypto which was broken -- just the lousy method it was applied.

Where on earth did the information to back up this difficult-to-parse statement come from? The video was encoded with VideoCrypt. VideoCrypt, which was released in 1989, has a number of ways that it can be attacked. Including brute force, which was used here in the form of the Antisky app (from 1994).

This site has been becoming less and less relevant as time goes on. But this makes it very clear. Slashdot is not news for nerds. It is revenue for Dice Holdings. And they're not even trying to hide it. It's been real...

"Nobody is actually losing anything." Wait a minute... You don't think...

I hope at least *some* people see what brokep did there.

US-CERT does not have a vulnerability analysis capability. That's why they contract that work out to Carnegie Mellon University. I work for CERT, so I'm pretty sure that I would know.

This article is about US-CERT, not CERT.

Yet another example of why Flash should be uninstalled at the OS level. For example, on Windows this means removing the Flash ActiveX control. If you ever encounter a web page that needs Flash (they're becoming less and less common), just open it in Chrome, which you have configured to use Flash as click-to play.

"News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."

OpenWRT runs on 3G/4G modems?

OK, this is the sort of question that could be answered by RTFA, however when it's a 40-minute long video, I don't feel as bad.

When configuring Siri for voice activation, you go through some steps that give the impression that it's tuning the activation for your specific pattern of speech. Which presumably is to prevent false activation when somebody next to you is using the feature on their phone.

Assuming this is actually happening, would that prevent this sort of attack?

Add-ons will continue to work. This is talking about NPAPI plugins.

This is Twitter we're talking about. A DM means that it's not broadcast to the world. If people are surprised that Twitter has control of their Twitter messages, I don't even know where to begin.

Phones are different than computers, yet people still try to apply the computer mentality to it. You don't just buy a smartphone and sit back and use it until it breaks. Unlike Windows XP, your smartphone OS has a very limited window in which it will receive security and other software updates. For iPhones, it seems to be a few years. For Android, it is worse and generally always less than two years. For some of the discount Android phones on discount carriers, the phone may have been abandoned before you even made the purchase!

In what world do you buy a smartphone and use it for the rest of your life? An upgrade plan that includes Apple Care "bad for most"? Hint to the author: You can't extrapolate your personal opinion to apply to the rest of the world.

Yes, this is quite unfortunate. However: given a random selection of 30 million individuals, at what rate would suicides be observed? Make sure you know the answer to this question before jumping to conclusions.