Author: kenmay

Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Getting companies’ names to show up higher in search engine results is the field of the lucrative business known as search engine optimization, or SEO. There’s a range of SEO practices, from “white hat” ones that are endorsed by search engines, to “black hat” practices that, while they may not be illegal, violate search engine rules. Now Google is taking a rare legal action against one Southern California SEO company it says went too far and broke the law. In its complaint (PDF) , Google says that Tustin, California-based Local Lighthouse has bombarded consumers with “incessant, unsolicited automated telephone calls” since mid-2014, making “false guarantees of first-page placement in Google search results.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Nine of World’s Biggest Banks Create Blockchain Partnership

An anonymous reader writes: Nine major banks, including Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan have teamed up to bring Bitcoin’s blockchain technology to financial markets. “Over the past year, interest in blockchain technology has grown rapidly. It has already attracted significant investment from many major banks, which reckon it could save them money by making their operations faster, more efficient and more transparent.” Leaving aside the question of whether banks actually want to become more transparent, they’re funding a firm dedicated to running tests on how data can be shared and collected through the blockchain. “The blockchain works as a huge, decentralized ledger of every bitcoin transaction ever made that is verified and shared by a global network of computers and therefore is virtually tamper-proof. … The data that can be secured using the technology is not restricted to bitcoin transactions. Two parties could use it to exchange any other information, within minutes and with no need for a third party to verify it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nine of World’s Biggest Banks Create Blockchain Partnership

Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

ZMap.io The highly clandestine attacks hitting Cisco Systems routers are much more active than previously reported. Infections have hit at least 79 devices in 19 countries, including an ISP in the US that’s hosting 25 boxes running the malicious backdoor. That discovery comes from a team of computer scientists who probed the entire IPv4 address space for infected devices. As Ars reported Tuesday, the so-called SYNful Knock router implant is activated after receiving an unusual series of non-compliant network packets followed by a hardcoded password. By sending only the out-of-sequence TCP packets but not the password to every Internet address and then monitoring the response, the researchers were able to detect which ones were infected by the backdoor. Security firm FireEye surprised the security world on Tuesday when it first reported the active outbreak of SYNful Knock. The implant is precisely the same size as the legitimate Cisco router image, and it’s loaded each time the router is restarted. It supports up to 100 modules that attackers can tailor to the specific target. FireEye found it on 14 servers in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Ukraine. The finding was significant, because it showed an attack that had long been theorized was in fact being actively used. The new research shows it’s being used much more widely, and it’s been found in countries including the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and China. The researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

HP To Jettison Up To 30,000 Jobs As Part of Spinoff

An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard says its upcoming spinoff of its technology divisions focused on software, consulting and data analysis will eliminate up to 30, 000 jobs. The cuts announced Tuesday will be within the newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is splitting from the Palo Alto, California company’s personal computer and printing operation. “The new reductions amount to about 10 percent of the new company’s workforce, and will save about $2.7 billion in annual operating costs.” The split is scheduled to be completed by the end of next month. “The head of the group, Mike Nefkens, outlined a plan under which it is cutting jobs in what he called ‘high-cost countries’ and moving them to low-cost countries. He said that by the end of HP Enterprise’s fiscal year 2018, only 40 percent of the group’s work force will be located in high-cost countries.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HP To Jettison Up To 30,000 Jobs As Part of Spinoff

It takes $1500, 6 months, and a lot of farming to truly make a sandwich at home from scratch

How do you make a sandwich at home? Grab some bread, slap together some mustard and mayo, throw in some turkey, add some cheese, lettuce, tomato and onions, and then eat it right? That’s what normal people do but that’s a total shortcut. How do you truly make a sandwich at home and from scratch? It involves farming vegetables, milking cows, killing a chicken and so much more. Read more…

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It takes $1500, 6 months, and a lot of farming to truly make a sandwich at home from scratch

iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed

Andrew Cunningham iOS 8 wasn’t the smoothest operating system rollout in Apple’s history. It’s true, any other ecosystem would kill for Apple’s OS adoption figures—as of this writing, 87 percent of the userbase is running some version of iOS 8. But it had a slower start than past versions of iOS, it required a ton of free space to install, and it had a few unfortunate bugs early in its life cycle that gave it a bad reputation. Like  iOS 7  this was a big release, and with any big change comes the potential for big bugs. Viewed from that lens, iOS 9 feels kind of like iOS 6 did. This is a necessary spit-and-polish release that followed two bigger, transformative releases. There’s some good stuff here, but nothing that’s quite as all-encompassing as iOS 7’s complete redesign or iOS 8’s introduction for Handoff and Continuity and Extensions. Read 180 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed

EPIX enables mobile downloads for offline movie watching

Joining the likes of Google Play Movies and iTunes, streaming content provider EPIX announced on Tuesday that it will allow subscribers to download movies onto their mobile devices for later playback, whether or not there’s an available internet connection. The feature will reportedly be available on iOS and Android devices as well as Amazon’s Kindle, beginning this month. Available titles will include The Hunger Games , James Bond and Star Trek . There’s no word on limits to how many titles subscribers will be able to concurrently download or how long they’ll be able to keep each one. Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Business Wire Tags: Amazon, Comparison of Android devices, downloads, hungergames, iOS, iTunes, jamesbond, Kindle, Star Trek, streaming

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EPIX enables mobile downloads for offline movie watching

New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Software bugs that allow attackers to bypass smartphone lockscreens are common enough for both Android and iOS devices, but like a fender bender on the highway, many of us can’t resist the urge to gawk anyway. There’s a  newly disclosed way  for someone who has a few uninterrupted moments with a handset running most versions of Android 5.x to gain complete control of the device and all the data stored on it. The hack involves dumping an extremely long string into the password field after swiping open the camera from a locked phone. Unless updated in the past few days, devices running 5.0 to 5.1.1 will choke on the unwieldy number of characters and unlock, even though the password is incorrect. From there, the attacker can do anything with the phone the rightful owner can do. The following video demonstrates the attack in action. The technique begins by adding a large number of characters to the emergency call window and then copying them to the Android clipboard. (Presumably, there are other ways besides the emergency number screen to buffer a sufficiently large number of characters.) The hacker then swipes open the camera from the locked phone, accesses the options menu, and pastes the characters into the resulting password prompt. Instead of returning an error message, vulnerable handsets unlock. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Chicago citizens sue to halt new “Netflix tax,” an increase of 9 percent

michel Six Chicagoans have sued the Windy City over its new 9 percent tax levied as part of the “Amusement Tax Ruling ” that went into effect on September 1. The tax, which the city of Chicago maintains is “not an expansion of the laws,” imposes an additional surcharge on various online services, including Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, Xbox Live, and others. “We will be adding it to the cost we charge subscribers,” Anne Marie Squeo, a Netflix spokeswoman, previously told Ars in a statement. “Jurisdictions around the world, including the US, are trying to figure out ways to tax online services. This is one approach.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago citizens sue to halt new “Netflix tax,” an increase of 9 percent