kenmay

Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over iOS Wi-Fi Assist

An anonymous reader writes: A class-action suit has been filed against Apple in U.S. District Court over Wi-Fi Assist being turned on by default in iOS 9. Wi-Fi Assist is designed to switch to cellular data when a user is trying to perform an action over the internet on a poor Wi-Fi signal. This has the natural side effect of using cellular data. Since iOS 9 turned it on for many users, they weren’t necessarily expecting that extra use, causing some of them to exceed their data caps. A former Apple employee who was in a leadership position for Mac OS X Wi-Fi software has commented on the issue, saying that the Wi-Fi Assist mess was unavoidable given how Apple’s management treats that part of the business. Quoting :”[O]ne particular directorial edict which I pushed back against at the end of my tenure sticks out as not just particularly telling, but deeply misguided: ‘Make it self-healing.’ Self healing in this context meaning that the networking system, Wi-Fi in particular, should try to correct problems that caused the network to fail, which, if you have spent any time trying to diagnose networking issues is a clear misunderstanding of the issues involved. … Asking the devices which connect to this vast complex network of networks to detect, and then transparently fix problems in the infrastructure without the permission of the administrators is, well, it’s absolutely the pinnacle of buzzword driven product management. Real pointy-haired boss territory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over iOS Wi-Fi Assist

Patricia, Strongest Hurricane Ever Seen In Eastern Pacific, Strikes In Mexico

CNN reports that Hurricane Patricia has made landfall in Mexico; Patricia is notable for having the third-lowest barometer reading ever recorded, and as “the strongest hurricane ever observed in the eastern Pacific or Atlantic oceans.” Slate points out that at one point, “satellite estimates of Patricia’s intensity broke the Dvorak scale, peaking at 8.3 on the 8.0 scale. … In fact, Patricia is now very close to the theoretical maximum strength for a tropical cyclone on planet Earth.” The Weather Channel is tracking the storm’s path, and predicts “catastrophic damage … along a narrow path as the eye slices into the interior of southwest Mexico Friday night.” Here’s a map from the National Weather Service showing Patricia’s track as well as projected path. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Patricia, Strongest Hurricane Ever Seen In Eastern Pacific, Strikes In Mexico

DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt

The DoJ is currently trying to force Apple to decrypt data stored on a defendant’s Iphone, and Apple, to its great credit, is fighting back, arguing that on the one hand, it doesn’t have the technical capability to do so; and on the other, should not be required to do so. (more…)

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DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt

Joomla bug puts millions of websites at risk of remote takeover hacks

Enlarge / Here’s the control panel hackers can access by exploiting a just-patched Joomla vulnerability. (credit: Spiderlabs) Millions of websites used in e-commerce and other sensitive industries are vulnerable to remote take-over hacks made possible by a critical vulnerability that has affected the Joomla content management system for almost two years. The SQL-injection vulnerability was patched by Joomla on Thursday with the release of version 3.4.5 . The vulnerability, which allows attackers to execute malicious code on servers running Joomla, was first introduced in version 3.2 released in early November 2013. Joomla is used by an estimated 2.8 million websites. “Because the vulnerability is found in a core module that doesn’t require any extensions, all websites that use Joomla versions 3.2 and above are vulnerable,” Asaf Orpani, a researcher inside Trustwave’s Spiderlabs, wrote in a blog post (the post appears to be offline at the moment, but it was working through most of Friday morning). The vulnerability, and two closely related security flaws, have been cataloged as CVE-2015-7297, CVE-2015-7857, and CVE-2015-7858. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Joomla bug puts millions of websites at risk of remote takeover hacks

Botnets running on CCTVs and NASs

Researchers at Incapsula have discovered a botnet that runs on compromised CCTV cameras. There are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of these in the field, and like many Internet of Things devices, their security is an afterthought and not fit for purpose. (more…)

Short story vending machine promises old-school distractions

In the French city of Grenoble, there are unusual vending machines that don’t dispense soda or snacks — they print out short stories that look like paper receipts instead. These machines were built by a publishing company called Short Édition , which placed eight of them in public locations (such as the city hall and libraries) as part of a pilot project. Each dispenser has 1-minute, 3-minute and 5-minute buttons, so readers can choose how long their stories are, all of which were written by members of the Short Édition community. Company co-founder Christophe Sibieude told Agence-France Presse that his team came up with the idea while in front of a chocolate candy machine: “We said to ourselves that we could do the same thing with good quality popular literature to occupy these little unproductive moments.” Best thing about these story dispensers is that they’re free, giving residents something to do if ever they get tired of poking on their phones or want to read the old school way. Via: PSFK Source: Short Edition , Konbini

Mimic, the Evil Script That Will Drive Programmers To Insanity

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Mimic implements a devilishly sick idea floated on Twitter by Peter Ritchie: “Replace a semicolon (;) with a Greek question mark (;) in your friend’s C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error.” There are quite a few characters in the Unicode character set that look, to some extent or another, like others – homoglyphs. Mimic substitutes common ASCII characters for obscure homoglyphs. Caution: using this script may get you fired and/or beaten to a pulp. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mimic, the Evil Script That Will Drive Programmers To Insanity

Watch the Birth of Six Adorable Baby Scorpions

The video starts slow, just a magnified view of the belly of a female scorpion. Be patient. Something amazing is about to happen. Slowly, as you watch, she’ll push her first baby out of her genital opening into the embrace of her “birth basket”–made by flexing her front two pairs of legs. Read more…

Putting your kettle on the Internet of Things makes your wifi passwords an open secret

The $150 Smarter Ikettle lets you start your water boiling from anywhere in the world over the Internet — and it also contains long-term serious security vulnerabilities that allow attackers to extract your wifi passwords from it. (more…)

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Putting your kettle on the Internet of Things makes your wifi passwords an open secret

Prison phone companies fight for right to charge inmates $14 a minute

(credit: Jason Farrar ) The Federal Communications Commission is about to face another lawsuit, this time over a vote to cap the prices prisoners pay for phone calls. Yesterday’s vote came after complaints that inmate-calling companies are overcharging prisoners, their families, and attorneys. Saying the price of calls sometimes hits $14 per minute, the FCC has now capped rates at 11¢ per minute. “None of us would consider ever paying $500 a month for a voice-only service where calls are dropped for seemingly no reason, where fees and commissions could be as high at 60 percent per call and, if we are not careful, where a four-minute call could cost us a whopping $54,” FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said before yesterday’s vote. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

Author: kenmay