Tag: business

TSMC Preparing To Manufacturer A6X Chip As Apple Looks to Ditch Samsung

An anonymous reader writes with reports that TSMC is preparing to do a first test run of Apple’s A6X chipset currently manufactured by Samsung. The TSMC manufactured chips will feature a process shrink from 32nm to 28nm, and there’s a good chance Apple will grant them the contract for the next generation A7 chip. From SlashGear: “The test will kick off in Q1 2013, The China Times reports, with TSMC producing a new, 28nm version of the existing 32nm A6X that Samsung has been producing for the full-sized iPad 4th-gen; the smaller chip, which will likely be more power efficient as well, will debut in a new iPad 5th-gen and iPad mini 2.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TSMC Preparing To Manufacturer A6X Chip As Apple Looks to Ditch Samsung

Your Cisco phone is listening to you: 29C3 talk on breaking Cisco phones

Here’s a video of Ang Cui and Michael Costello’s Hacking Cisco Phones talk at the 29th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin. Cui gave a show-stealing talk last year on hacking HP printers, showing that he could turn your printer into a inside-the-firewall spy that systematically breaks vulnerable machines on your network, just by getting you to print out a document. Cui’s HP talk showed how HP had relied upon the idea that no one would ever want to hack a printer as its primary security. With Cisco, he’s looking at a device that was designed with security in mind. The means by which he broke the phone’s security is much more clever, and makes a fascinating case-study into the cat-and-mouse of system security. Even more interesting is the discussion of what happened when Cui disclosed to Cisco, and how Cisco flubbed the patch they released to keep his exploit from working, and the social issues around convincing people that phones matter. We discuss a set of 0-day kernel vulnerabilities in CNU (Cisco Native Unix), the operating system that powers all Cisco TNP IP phones. We demonstrate the reliable exploitation of all Cisco TNP phones via multiple vulnerabilities found in the CNU kernel. We demonstrate practical covert surveillance using constant, stealthy exfiltration of microphone data via a number of covert channels. We also demonstrate the worm-like propagation of our CNU malware, which can quickly compromise all vulnerable Cisco phones on the network. We discuss the feasibility of our attacks given physical access, internal network access and remote access across the internet. Lastly, we built on last year’s presentation by discussing the feasibility of exploiting Cisco phones from compromised HP printers and vice versa. We present the hardware and software reverse-engineering process which led to the discovery of the vulnerabilities described below. We also present methods of exploiting the following vulnerabilities remotely. Hacking Cisco Phones [29C3] ( Thanks, Ang! )

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Your Cisco phone is listening to you: 29C3 talk on breaking Cisco phones

China’s Princelings: descendants of Mao’s generals who control the country’s wealth

This long-read from Bloomberg about China’s “Princelings” — the generation of hyper-rich oligarchs’ children, descended from Mao’s generals — is endlessly fascinating. Wealth in China is even more concentrated than Russia, Brazil or the USA, and the Chinese looter-class use complex screens that take advantage of different ways of representing their names in English, Cantonese and Mandarin to obscure the ownership of former state assets, flogged at pennies on the dollar in sweetheart deals for the hyper-privileged. The Princelings are western-educated, mostly in the USA, and flaunt expensive luxury-brand accessories on their social media profiles. The accompanying interactive graphic lets you explore the intertwining relationships between the families of the “eight immortals.” Opportunities for the princelings surged in the 1990s after Deng kick-started another wave of economic changes. They jumped into booming industries including commodities and real estate as new factories and expanding cities transformed China’s landscape. Two of Deng’s children — Deng Rong, 62, and her brother, Deng Zhifang — were among the first to enter real estate, even before new rules in 1998 commercialized the mainland’s mass housing market. Two years after Deng Rong accompanied her father on his famous 1992 tour of southern China to showcase the success of emerging export center Shenzhen, she was in Hong Kong to promote a new development she headed in Shenzhen. Some apartments in the 32-story complex were priced at about $240,000 each, according to a front-page story in the South China Morning Post. Corporate records show that by the late 1990s half of the company was owned by two people with the same names as Deng Rong’s sister-in-law, Liu Xiaoyuan, and the granddaughter of Wang Zhen, Wang Jingjing. Deng Rong and Deng Zhifang didn’t respond to questions sent by fax to their respective offices in Beijing. Liu couldn’t be reached for comment through one of the companies with which she’s associated. Wang Jingjing didn’t respond to questions couriered to her office in the Chinese capital and a reporter who visited on two occasions was told she wasn’t there. Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility [Bloomberg News]

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China’s Princelings: descendants of Mao’s generals who control the country’s wealth

Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

As most observers  expected , Sprint has finally made a formal offer to acquire the rest of Clearwire. On Thursday, Sprint said it would pay $2.1 billion for the remaining 49.7 percent of Clearwire that it does not currently control. As we reported yesterday , the move is widely seen as a play for Sprint to acquire Clearwire’s valuable 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it would use to offer LTE and strengthen its position against Verizon and AT&T. The bid works out to $2.90 per share—higher than the company’s closing price on Wednesday—but analysts say the offer may not be good enough. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

FreedomPop launches free home wireless to compete with low-end DSL

FreedomPop’s new Hub Burst will begin shipping in January 2013. FreedomPop Just over three months after launching its free portable hotspot , FreedomPop now says its ready for the second phase of its expansion plan—a free home wireless connection. Like its portable device, which requires an $89 deposit to get 500MB of free mobile data over WiMAX, this new device (also with an $89 deposit) will offer 1GB of free data in nearly all of the 80 largest urban markets across the United States. “You’ll get speeds of 9 to 12Mbps when it’s fully optimized,” FreedomPop’s CEO Stephen Stokols told Ars, saying that it would be comparable to DSL. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FreedomPop launches free home wireless to compete with low-end DSL

Google App Verification Service Detects Only 15% of Infected Apps

ShipLives writes “Researchers have tested Google’s app verification service (included in Android 4.2 last month), and found that it performed very poorly at identifying malware in apps. Specifically, the app verification service identified only ~15% of known malware in testing — whereas existing third-party security apps identified between 51% and 100% of known malware in testing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google App Verification Service Detects Only 15% of Infected Apps