Man gets ransomware porn pop-up, goes to cops, gets arrested on child porn charges

A man from just outside of Washington, DC turned himself in to local police—with his computer in tow—after receiving a pop-up message from what he believed was an “FBI Warning” telling him to click to pay a fine online, or face an investigation. While specific details on the case are scant as of yet, it appears that the suspect here fell victim to a type of ransomware that has been proliferating for years now—raking in millions for the scammers behind it. Police said Jay Matthew Riley, 21, of Woodbridge, Virginia, walked into Prince William’s Garfield District Station on July 1, 2013 to “inquire if he had any warrants on file for child pornography.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Man gets ransomware porn pop-up, goes to cops, gets arrested on child porn charges

Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

It’s been a rough year for Zynga, which ousted founder Mark Pincus earlier this month. Fortune Live Media In its latest earnings statement filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zynga reported the number of daily average users (DAU) dropped to 39 million in the second quarter of 2013—the lowest ever since the company began keeping track. Last quarter, the DAU fell to the then-lowest record,   52 million users . The fall to 39 million means that 25 percent of its daily user base stopped using Zynga products in just one quarter. Not surprisingly, Zynga’s bottom line fell too. The company sustained a net loss of $15.8 million in Q2 2013. (Last quarter, the gaming firm profited just $4.1 million.) The market wasn’t too thrilled with these numbers: in after-hours trading, Zynga’s stock price plummeted by nearly 15 percent. The once top-dog has gone through a bit of a rough patch during the last year. In the summer of 2012, the company quickly  lost  a bunch of executives and managers. That October, the company  announced that it had overpaid for OMGPOP (maker of  Draw Something ). More recently, Mark Pincus, the company’s founder, was  ousted  as CEO in early July 2013. Then Zynga  suddenly shut down OMGPOP  last month as well. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

LibreOffice 4.1 is released, borrows new sidebar from OpenOffice

LibreOffice 4.1 was released today, with the open source office suite borrowing a new sidebar from its rival, OpenOffice. As we wrote yesterday , the sidebar was debuted in OpenOffice 4.0 after being contributed by IBM developers. In LibreOffice, it’s only an experimental feature thus far, and it can be enabled in the settings. Enabling the sidebar. “LibreOffice 4.1 is … importing some AOO [Apache OpenOffice] features, including the Symphony sidebar, which is considered experimental, ” the Document Foundation said in the LibreOffice 4.1 announcement . “LibreOffice developers are working at the integration with the widget layout technique (which will make it dynamically resizeable and consistent with the behaviour of LibreOffice dialog windows).” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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LibreOffice 4.1 is released, borrows new sidebar from OpenOffice

Poker player who won $1.5 million charged with running Android malware ring

A man who has won about $1.5 million in poker tournaments has been arrested and charged with running an operation that combined spam, Android malware, and a fake dating website to scam victims out of $3.9 million, according to Symantec. Symantec worked with investigators from the Chiba Prefectural Police in Japan, who earlier this week “arrested nine individuals for distributing spam that included e-mails with links to download Android.Enesoluty —a malware used to collect contact details stored on the owner’s device, ” Symantec wrote in its blog . Android.Enesoluty is a Trojan distributed as an Android application file. It steals information and sends it to computers run by hackers. It was discovered by security researchers in September 2012. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Poker player who won $1.5 million charged with running Android malware ring

Congress nearly shuts down NSA dragnet, in sudden 217-205 vote

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) sponsored the amendment that led to today’s close vote. Gage Skidmore / flickr A critical vote for intelligence funding today showed that Congress is sharply divided on the issue of NSA domestic surveillance. This afternoon, the House of Representatives narrowly shot down an amendment that would have stopped the NSA from engaging in any warrantless collection of telephone data on a 217-205 vote. The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and co-sponsored by John Conyers (D-MI). The summary of the amendment read: Ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act. Bars the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215. Amash and Conyers sponsored a similar bill several weeks ago, but there’s been little movement on it. Their strategy this week was to propose the change as an amendment to a $600 billion defense spending bill being considered this week. That strategy quickly pushed the surveillance issue to the House floor. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Congress nearly shuts down NSA dragnet, in sudden 217-205 vote

Fake "Speed Enforced By Drones" Signs On California Freeways

NF6X writes “CBS station KPIX reports that somebody has been installing counterfeit traffic signs on California bay area freeways, warning motorists of drone-based speed enforcement. They are professionally-made reflective metal signs of comparable style and quality to official traffic signs, and in some cases are even mounted with tamper-resistant hardware. The signs show the familiar silhouette of an MQ-1 Predator drone launching a weapon. According to KPIX, California Highway Patrol denies that they operate any drones, and states that the signs are fake.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fake "Speed Enforced By Drones" Signs On California Freeways

The Days of Door-to-Door Mail Delivery Could Be Numbered

Every day, millions of people enjoy the simple luxury of a blue and grey-clad letter carrier showing up at their house and dropping the day’s mail on their doorstep. But if some Republican lawmakers get their way, this luxury may be short-lived. Read more…        

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The Days of Door-to-Door Mail Delivery Could Be Numbered

NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a ” supercomputing powerhouse ” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ e-mail? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology. “There’s no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately, ” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic, ” she added. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails

VLC media player returns to the iOS App Store after 30-month hiatus

A selection of videos on VLC 2.0 running on an iPad. VLC After disappearing the better part of three years ago, the VLC media player app for iOS has made its triumphant return to Apple’s App Store. Its version number has been bumped to 2.0, and the app now includes features like Wi-Fi and Dropbox syncing as well as the ability to download files from the Web. A version of VLC created by the company Applidium first made its debut on the App Store back in November 2010, but it was pulled in January 2011 due to a licensing dispute . All versions of VLC were then open-source and licensed under GPLv2; the App Store imposes its own licensing and DRM restrictions on apps. One of VLC’s original developers, Rémi Denis-Courmont, claimed that the licensing policies did not mesh and filed a complaint against the app. It was shortly removed. VLC 2.0 for iOS is licensed under both the Mozilla Public License v2 as well as the GNU General Public License v2 (or later). “The MPLv2 is applicable for distribution on the App Store, ” Felix Paul Kühne of VideoLAN told Ars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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VLC media player returns to the iOS App Store after 30-month hiatus

The cops are tracking my car—and yours

Aurich Lawson OAKLAND, CA—The last time the Oakland Police Department (OPD) saw me was on May 6, 2013 at 6:38:25pm. My car was at the corner of Mandana Blvd. and Grand Ave. , just blocks away from the apartment that my wife and I moved out of about a month earlier. It’s an intersection I drive through fairly frequently even now, and the OPD’s own license plate reader (LPR) data bears that out. One of its LPRs—Unit 1825—captured my car passing through that intersection twice between late April 2013 and early May 2013. I have no criminal record, have committed no crime, and am not (as far as I know) under investigation by the OPD or any law enforcement agency. Since I first moved to Oakland in 2005, I’ve been pulled over by the OPD exactly once—for accidentally not making a complete stop while making a right-hand turn at a red light—four years ago. Nevertheless, the OPD’s LPR system captured my car 13 times between April 29, 2012 and May 6, 2013 at various points around the city, and it retained that data. My car is neither wanted nor stolen. The OPD has no warrant on me, no probable cause, and no reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, yet it watches where I go. Is that a problem? Read 73 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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The cops are tracking my car—and yours