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Security

Submission + - FBI Says Wire Fraud Scam Sending Millions to China (threatpost.com) 2

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The FBI is warning businesses about an ongoing spate of attacks that are stealing millions of dollars from companies through unauthorized bank transfers to Chinese companies. The fraudulent wire transfers are not a new tactic, but the FBI says the current round of attacks is notable in that virtually all of the transfers are going to shell companies based in China and have cost U.S. businesses $11 million.
The FBI said that many of the cases it has seen involve well-known pieces of malware, such as Zeus, SpyEye and others. The amount of money the attackers try to transfer varies from $50,000 up to nearly $1 million.
Microsoft

Submission + - What's Eating Into Windows 7's Market Share? (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "Last week, Microsoft announced that it had sold 350 million Windows 7 licenses. Sounds impressive, but as InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard points out, if you compare that to overall PC sales numbers, more than a third of new PCs don't ship with Microsoft's latest OS, even taking the 9 percent that are Macs out of the equation. So what is running on those machines? PC World's Katherine Noyes thinks Linux plays a role. ITworld's Brian Proffitt has a more prosaic and depressing answer: millions of machines are still shipping with Vista and XP."

Submission + - DoJ asks Supreme Court to take up GPS tracking (google.com)

Submitted by Whorhay
Whorhay writes: The DOJ has been directed by the Obama Administration to push the Supreme Court to take up the legality of Warrantless GPS Tracking. This on the heels of the a federal appeals court in Washington overturning the conviction of a man citing warrantless GPS tracking as violating his fourth ammendmant rights.
Science

Submission + - Jets shoot out of stars, black holes recreated (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It’s not always easy to recreate the heart of a star, but a team of Italian and US researchers have made lab equipment that recreates the jets that shoot out of stars and black holes.
Science

Submission + - Caterpillar-Inspired Robots Rock 'n' Roll (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Forget Roy Batty, the android who easily evaded Harrison Ford in Bladerunner: Robots with superhuman speed and flexibility might look more like somersaulting caterpillars. A new soft-bodied robot made out of silicon mimics caterpillars' ballistic roll, which is among the fastest wheeling behaviors in nature. Their 10-centimeter-long robot, named GoQBot for the Q-shape it forms as it rolls, is powered by shape memory coils that bend at three points to allow it to change its body conformation in less than 100 milliseconds. Soft-bodied robots that can both squirm into difficult spaces and change direction extremely quickly could be useful for getting into debris-strewn areas for rescues or intel gathering.
Idle

Submission + - Female Dogs Aren't Easily Fooled (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The battle of the sexes has just heated up—in dogs. A new study finds that when a ball appears to magically change size in front of their eyes, female dogs notice but males don't. The researchers aren't sure what's behind the disparity, but experts say the finding supports the idea that—in some situations—male dogs trust their noses, whereas females trust their eyes. (Video of a female dog acting surprised included)
Android

Submission + - Android Interest: Consumer Up, Developer Down (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "A pair of surveys released Tuesday deliver good news and bad news for Android. First, the good news. A Nielsen survey finds that slightly more people want Android (31%) than iOS (30%) phones, trailed by Blackberry (11%) and Windows (6%). Now the bad: A survey conducted by Appcelerator and IDC finds developer interest in Android waning due to OS fragmentation 63%, weak sales of tablets (30%) and app store confusion (28%)."
Botnet

Submission + - FBI Decimates Coreflood Botnet (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Some two weeks have passed since the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI have been granted by the federal court the permission to substitute the C&C servers of the Coreflood botnet with servers of their own to send out "kill" commands to the infected computers, and the results are showing. The FBI has revealed that the pings that the bureau servers have been receiving from infected computers located in the U.S. have fallen from 800,000 to less than 100,000 only a week after they had begun sending out the "kill" command, and that the number of pings from computers outside the country has also experienced a 75 percent drop.
Iphone

Submission + - Apple Updating iOS to Address Privacy Concerns (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Apple today responded to several of the common questions it has recently received about the gathering and use of location information by its devices.

The company also said that over the next few weeks it would release a software update for iOS that would reduce the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, cease backing up the cache, and delete the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off. Additionally, Apple said that in the next major iOS software release the cache would be encrypted on the iPhone, though a timeline for that was not provided.

Submission + - What We Learned From Stuxnet (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
Batblue
Batblue writes: "If there's a lesson to be learned from last year's Stuxnet worm, it's that the private sector needs to be able to respond quickly to cyber-emergencies, the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Monday.

"The key thing we learned from Stuxnet was the need for rapid response across the private sector," DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told engineering students at the University of California, Berkeley. "There, we need to increase the rapidity of response, because in that area — as in several other recent attacks — we've seen very, very sophisticated, very, very novel ways of attacking. When you're getting at control systems, now you're really talking [about] taking things over, so this is an area of deep concern for us."

Although nobody knows who created Stuxnet, many believe that it opened a new chapter in the annals of cybersecurity: the first worm written to destroy factory control systems. On Monday, Iran said it had been hit with a second worm, called Stars, but security experts aren't sure that it really falls into the same class as Stuxnet."

Submission + - BREIN removes data from seized hard drives (tweakers.net)

Submitted by
guruevi
guruevi writes: "In January BREIN (the Dutch counterpart to the RIAA) illegally seized 8 servers from a hosting provider. In order to get the servers back, BREIN and the hosting provider reached a settlement where all servers would be returned but 4 servers BREIN claims hosted illegal websites would be completely erased. The other 4 hosted administrative data of the hosting company.

According to BREIN, the servers hosted illegal top sites (sites where data is shared among releasers, not end-users) but the owner of the servers and the hosting provider denies the allegation, the company that owned the websites that were hosted on the servers went into bankruptcy in the mean time.

BREIN settled before a judge could review the case and in return for the servers and in order not to prolong the impact on his business made the owner agree to a gag order as well. According to Tim Kuik, proprietor of BREIN, "we got exactly what we wanted" and calls the opponents lawyers a "bad loser"."
Advertising

Submission + - Amazon, Mags Sued with Network Advertising Patent (techdirt.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "By way of Techdirt, Sheldon Goldberg is at it again. If the name isn't familiar, he's a lawyer with a history of serious patent trolling. And his latest targets are Amazon and a number of magazines for violating his "Network system for presenting advertising" patent. You can visit Mr. Goldberg's amazin company website to see all the products and services he offers for licensing his patents. Where do you think a patent suit would be filed by a lawyer from Nevada targeting companies from New York and Delaware? Why, Eastern District of Texas Marshall Division of course!"

Submission + - Mediacom using DPI to hijack searches, 404 errors (mediacomcable.com) 1

Submitted by Verteiron
Verteiron writes: Cable company Mediacom recently began using deep packet inspection to redirect 404 errors, Google and Bing searches to their own, ad-laden "search engine". Despite repeated complaints from customers, Mediacom continues this connection hijacking even after the user has opted out of the process. Months after the problem was first reported, the company seems unwilling or unable to fix it and has even experimented with injecting their own advertising into sites like Google. How does one get a company infamous for its shoddy customer service and comfortable, state-wide cable monopolies to act on an issue like this?
Android

Submission + - B&N Responds to Microsoft's Android Suit (groklaw.net)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "You're probably familiar with Microsoft's long running assault on Android but, as noticed by Groklaw, Barnes and Noble has fired back saying, 'Microsoft has asserted patents that extend only to arbitrary, outmoded, or non-essential design features, but uses these patents to demand that every manufacturer of an Android-based mobile device take a license from Microsoft and pay exorbitant licensing fees or face protracted and expensive patent infringement litigation.' Barnes and Noble goes on to assert that Microsoft violates 'antitrust laws, threatens competition for mobile device operating systems and is further evidence of Microsoft’s efforts to dominate and control Android and other open source operating systems.' The PDF of the filing from two days ago is rife with accusations including, 'Microsoft intends to utilize its patents to control the activities of and extract fees from the designers, developers, and manufacturers of devices, including tablets, eReaders, and other mobile devices, that employ the Android Operating System.' and 'Microsoft has falsely and without justification asserted that its patents somehow provide it with the right to prohibit device manufacturers from employing new versions of the Android Operating System, or third party software.' Barnes and Noble does not mince words when explaining Microsoft's FUD campaign to both the public and developers in its attempts to suppress Android. It's good to see PJ still digging through massive court briefs to bring us the details on IP court battles."
Google

Submission + - Google Pumps $6 Million into Summer of Code 2011 (internetnews.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Google Summer of Code 2011 is now underway. Google is providing stipends for 1,116 students to mentor with 175 open source projects.
In total, Google will be investing over $6 million dollars, into Summer of Code 2011. There are a few project omissions this time around though. Neither Fedora nor Ubuntu have any students this year.

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