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Submission + - Kim Dotcom To Revive Megaupload; Claims Bitcoin Will Spike As A Result (fortune.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The controversial entrepreneur Kim Dotcom said last month that he was preparing to relaunch Megaupload, the file-sharing site that U.S. and New Zealand authorities dramatically shut down in 2012, with bitcoins being involved in some way.

This system will be called Bitcache and Dotcom claimed its launch would send the bitcoin price soaring way above its current $575 value.

The launch of Megaupload 2.0 will take place on Jan. 20, 2017, he said, urging people to “buy bitcoin while cheap, like right now, trust me.” Bitcoin’s value fell sharply this week after a $72 million theft from the Hong Kong exchange Bitfinex, though it subsequently bounced back to a degree.

Crucially, Dotcom said the Bitcache system would overcome bitcoin’s scaling problems. “It eliminates all blockchain limitations,” he claimed.

Submission + - Proposed 'social media ID, please' law met with anger (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A plan by the U.S. government to require some foreign travelers to provide their social media IDs on key travel documents is being called by critics “ludicrous,” an “all-around bad idea,” “blatant overreach,” “desperate, paranoid heavy-handedness,” “preposterous,” “appalling,” and “un-American." That's just a sampling of the outrage. Some 800 responded to the U.S. request for comments about a proposed rule affecting people traveling from “visa waiver” countries to the U.S., where a visa is not required. This includes most of Europe, Singapore, Chile, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Travelers will be asked to provide their Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and whatever other social ID you can imagine to U.S. authorities. It’s technically an “optional” request, but since it’s the government asking, critics believe travelers will fear consequences if they ignore it. People who are traveling from a country where a visa is required, such as India or China, get a security vetting when they apply for a visa at a U.S. consulate, so this proposal doesn’t apply to them. In a little twist of irony, some critics said U.S. President Obama’s proposal for foreign travelers is so bad, it must have been hatched by Donald Trump.

Submission + - Driver Signing To Be Enforced In Next Windows 10 (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The control of what software users can run on their machines is becoming ever tighter. Now Microsoft has announced that only signed drivers will work in the next release of Windows 10.
Before you start to panic about backward compatibility with existing drivers the lockdown is only going to be enforced on new installations of Windows 10. If you simply upgrade an existing system then the OS will take over the drivers that are already installed. Only new installations, i.e. installing all drivers from scratch, will enforce the new rules from Windows 10 version 1607.
Be warned, if you need to do a fresh install of Windows 10 in the future you might find that your existing drivers are rejected.
There's an xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/1144/

Submission + - New browser fingerprinting site launched

Submitted by AnonymousCube
AnonymousCube writes: The University of Adelaide and ACEMS has launched a new browser fingerprinting test suite.
On the site you can see what data can be used to track you and how unique your fingerprint is.
The site includes new tests such as detecting software such as Privacy Badger via how social media buttons are disabled and CSS only (no JavaScript or flash) tests to get screen size and installed fonts.

Submission + - Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History (cnn.com) 17

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From CNN:

"Fifty people were killed inside Pulse, a gay nightclub, Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other officials said Sunday morning, just hours after a shooter opened fire in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. At least 53 more people were injured, Mina said. Police have shot and killed the gunman, he told reporters.

The shooter is not from the Orlando area, Mina said. He has been identified as Omar Saddiqui Mateen, 29, of Fort Pierce, about 120 miles southeast of Orlando, two law enforcement officials tell CNN.
Orlando authorities said they consider the violence an act of domestic terror. The FBI is involved. While investigators are exploring all angles, they "have suggestions the individual has leanings towards (Islamic terrorism), but right now we can't say definitely," said Ron Hopper, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Orlando bureau."

Submission + - Pornhub Lanches Bug Bounty Programme For Security Researchers

Submitted by Mickeycaskill
Mickeycaskill writes: Pornhub is launching a bug bounty program for security researchers and pornography enthusiasts who are able to identify flaws on its platform.

Hunters will be paid a minimum of $50 for each vulnerability discovered, with up to $25,000 on offer for particularly vicious flaws, although the site notes that 23 reports have already been resolved.

Successful applicants to the scheme will need to be the first person to responsibly disclose an unknown issue, which the Pornhub security team has 30 days to respond to, and up to 90 days to implement a fix base on the severity of the report.

However there are some restrictions, such as users not being allowed to carry out Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Pornhub, or even carry out physical attacks on the company’s offices or data centres.

Social engineering tactics are also not allowed, such as phishing attacks against Pornhub employees, and researchers are not allowed to compromise user accounts.

Submission + - Man Faces Prison Sentence For Circumventing UK Pirate Site Blockade (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has charged a man for operating several proxy sites and services that allowed UK Internet users to bypass local pirate site blockades. In a first of its kind prosecution, the Bakersfield resident is charged with several fraud offenses and one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property.

cityoflondonpoliceDuring the summer of 2014, City of London Police arrested the then 20-year-old Callum Haywood of Bakersfield for his involvement with several proxy sites and services.

Haywood was interrogated at a police station and later released on bail. He agreed to voluntarily hand over several domain names, but the police meanwhile continued working on the case.

Submission + - Best Way to Mine Bitcoins - Allow Errors!

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent paper from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows that bitcoin mining profits can be increased considerably if mining hardware is allowed to produce occasional errors. The research shows that a mining hardware that allows occasional errors ("approximate mining") can run much faster and takes less area than a conventional miner. Furthermore, the errors are are produced by the miner do no corrupt the blockchain since such errors are easily detected and discarded by the bitcoin network. Mining profits can increase by over 30%.

Submission + - What Bell Labs was like c.1967 1

Submitted by niittyniemi
niittyniemi writes: There's a rather interesting photo-gallery over at The Guardian which gives an indication of what life was like at Bell Labs c.1967.

This was the year that Dennis Ritchie joined Bell Labs and went on to produce a body of work which has been pretty much unrivalled in its influence on the modern computing landscape, even some 50 years later.

What's noticeable about the pictures, is that they are of woman. I don't think this is a result of the photographer just photographing "eye candy". I think it's because he was surrounded by women, whom from his comments he very much respected and hence photographed.

In those times, wrangling with a computer was very much seen as "clerical work" and therefore the domain of woman. This can be seen as far back as Bletchley Park and before that Ada Lovelace.

Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.

Submission + - DARPA's robot ship slated for April unveiling (nationaldefensemagazine.org) 1

Submitted by 93 Escort Wagon
93 Escort Wagon writes: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to launch a 130-foot autonomous ship this year. The Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel "will be the largest unmanned surface vehicle ever built at 130-feet long. It will be christened in April in Portland, Oregon, and then begin to demonstrate its long-range capabilities over 18 months in cooperation with the Office of Naval Research and the Space and Naval Systems Warfare Command."

My regards to Captain Dunsel.

Submission + - Even with Telemetry Disabled, Windows 10 Talks to Dozens of Microsoft Servers (voat.co) 1

Submitted by Motherfucking Shit
Motherfucking Shit writes: Curious about the various telemetry and personal information being collected by Windows 10, one user installed Windows 10 Enterprise and disabled all of the telemetry and reporting options. Then he configured his router to log all the connections that happened anyway. Even after opting out wherever possible, his firewall captured Windows making around 4,000 connection attempts to 93 different IP addresses during an 8 hour period, with most of those IPs controlled by Microsoft. Even the enterprise version of Windows 10 is checking in with Redmond when you tell it not to — and it's doing so frequently.

Submission + - Whatsapp Will Become Free, Companies Can Pay to Reach Users (nytimes.com)

Submitted by speedplane
speedplane writes: The popular messaging service, Whatsapp, will soon become free (they previously charged $0.99 per year after the first). The troubling news is that to compensate for the lost revenue, companies will now be able to pay to contact users directly:

[Whatsapp founder] Mr. Koum said that his team was still experimenting with how such services could work, and that many companies were already using the messaging service, particularly in developing countries, to connect with mobile-savvy customers.

If this smells like advertising, Whatsapp vehemently disagrees:

people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today's announcement means we're introducing third-party ads. The answer is no.

Submission + - Cuba's nationwide sneakernet -- a model for other developing nations?

Submitted by lpress
lpress writes: Cuba has little Internet infrastructure, but they have a well-organized sneaker net called El Paquete Semanal (the weekly packet). El Paquete distributes a terabyte of digital entertainment nationwide every week using portable drives. The system is reliable and the organization is said to be Cuba's largest private employer, but it is technically illegal and the content is pirated. A legitimatized Paquete would save scarce Internet resources for other applications. El Paquete is also a possible model for other developing nations.

Submission + - Why is Microsoft monitoring how long you use Windows 10? (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Update did nothing to curtail privacy invasion, and the latest Windows 10 installation figures show that Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system.

This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.

Submission + - The fan HD remakes yet to be banned (redbull.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While companies like Valve have given their seal of approval to HD fan remakes and re-imaginings of their classic games, many more are all too eager to wield the ban hammer and shut down these homebrew projects with legal threats. Not all, though, as one writer points out in a new article taking a look at the most promising unofficial remakes underway right now. Some companies see these projects as an opportunity — the creator of Shen Mue HD was recently hired by Yu Suzuki to work on Shen Mue 3 — while others choose to ignore them entirely.

Surprisingly, one of these appears to be Konami, which despite a controversial 2015, has shown no interest in shutting down Outer Heaven, a remake of the very first Metal Gear game. As the author points out however, given "the fact that Konami shut down a similar project not long ago – one which had the involvement of original Solid Snake voice actor David Hayter – [it] doesn't bode too well for Outer Heaven's long-term prospects...but we're crossing our fingers that it makes it to the finish line."

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