Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock “See! That shit keeps popping up on my fucking computer!” says a blond woman as she leans back on a couch, bottle-feeding a baby on her lap. The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker’s computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman’s screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman’s computer. The woman is startled. “Did it scare you?” she asks someone off camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. “Yes,” he says. Both stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security product blocks a “dangerous site.” Read 65 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Porn trolling mastermind is the world’s most evasive witness
Stefan Schlautmann On Wednesday we wrote about the elaborate chart defense attorney Morgan Pietz created to help Judge Otis Wright keep track of the many organizations associated with porn copyright trolling firm Prenda law, all of which seem to be run by the same half-dozen people. Pietz has now released a transcript of a remarkable deposition he took of Paul Hansmeier, who along with John Steele is widely regarded as the brains behind Prenda’s litigation campaign. Officially, a Prenda-linked shell company called “AF Holdings” is suing Pietz’s client for infringing copyright by downloading a pornographic film from BitTorrent. But in recent weeks, the focus of the litigation has shifted to alleged misconduct by Prenda, including whether the firm stole the identity of Minnesota resident Alan Cooper to use as an officer of AF Holdings. Judge Wright has scheduled a Monday hearing to get to the bottom of the allegations. Last month, we covered a filing by Prenda attorney Brett Gibbs, who insisted that all the important decisions had been made by “senior members of the law firms” connected to Prenda. Gibbs later identified these individuals as Hansmeier and Steele. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Porn trolling mastermind is the world’s most evasive witness
Bill would force cops to get a warrant before reading your e-mail
Last fall we wrote about how easy it probably was for the FBI to get the e-mails it needed to bring down CIA chief David Petraeus over allegations of infidelity. Under the ancient Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, the police can often obtain the contents of private e-mails without getting a warrant from a judge. A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced a bill to the House of Representatives to change that. The bill would require the police to get warrants before reading users’ e-mails in most circumstances and would also repudiate the view, advanced by the Obama administration last year, that the police can obtain information about the historical location of your cell phone without a warrant. The new legislation , proposed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and supported by Reps. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA), would extend privacy protections for both e-mail and location privacy. “Fourth Amendment protections don’t stop at the Internet,” Lofgren said in an e-mailed statement. “Establishing a warrant standard for government access to cloud and geolocation provides Americans with the privacy protections they expect, and would enable service providers to foster greater trust with their users and international trading partners.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Bill would force cops to get a warrant before reading your e-mail
Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars
A comet spotted earlier this year may pass close enough for Mars to feel the rock’s hot breath down its neck, according to new reports that surfaced Monday and Tuesday. The comet, named C/2013 A1, may pass within a few tens of thousands of miles of Mars’ center, with a remote chance that the miles-wide comet will collide with the planet. C/2013 A1 “Siding Spring,” a comet between 5 and 30 miles wide, was spotted January 3 by astronomer Robert H. McNaught. Researchers were able to look back in the image history of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and spot signs of the comet as early as December 8, 2012. NASA states that other archives have traced sightings back to October 4, 2012. According to scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office , Siding Spring originates from the Oort Cloud of our Solar System and has been journeying to this point for more than a million years. In less than two years, around October 19, 2014, the comet will pass very close to Mars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars
Five features iOS should steal from Android
Aurich Lawson, Age 5 If you’ve come anywhere near a tech site in the last year or so, you’ve heard it all before. “iOS is getting stale compared to Android! It needs some new ideas!” Whether that’s actually true is up for (heated) debate, but those with an open mind are usually willing to acknowledge that Apple and Google could afford to swap a few ideas when it comes to their mobile OSes. So in a fantasy world where we could bring over some of the better Android features to iOS, which features would those be? Among the Ars staff, we sometimes have spirited “conversations” about what aspects would be the best for each company to photocopy. So, we thought we’d pick a few that might go over well with iOS users. Don’t worry, we have a companion post of features that Android could afford to steal from iOS. The copying can go both ways. No one wants iOS to become Android or vice versa. This is about recognizing how to improve iOS with features that would be useful to people depending on their smartphones for more than the occasional text or phone call. We recognize that Apple tries to keep an eye towards elegant implementation, too. So which features are we talking about? Glad you asked… Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Five features iOS should steal from Android
Facebook’s Getting a News Feed Overhaul Next Week
As though Graph Search wasn’t enough to turn your Facebook world upside down, the company’s retooling its news feed again. So what will new new new (new) Facebook have in store? We’ll find out next Friday. More »
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Facebook’s Getting a News Feed Overhaul Next Week
The World’s Biggest Fiber LAN Lives at a Nuclear Weapons Research Lab
Sandia National Laboratories is the nation’s premiere nuclear weapons research facility, and for more than 60 years, its researchers have poked and prodded the interiors of atoms to suss out their secrets—a task that has produced mountains of data that the facility’s copper network struggles to contain. But now, even the most remote building’s on Sandia’s campuses have access to the biggest bandwidth modern technology can muster. More »
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The World’s Biggest Fiber LAN Lives at a Nuclear Weapons Research Lab
“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds
The white portion of this AR-15, known as the “lower,” was manufactured using 3D printing. Defense Distributed Cody Wilson, like many of his Texan forebears, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to further his agenda. Wilson’s non-profit organization, Defense Distributed , released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process. Last year, his group famously demonstrated that they could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and can seemingly fire for quite awhile. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.) Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds
Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users
Apple’s System Status page offers some info, but no expectation of when the services will be back up. If you’re a regular Photo Stream or Documents in the Cloud user, this morning’s iCloud outage is probably already giving you hives. The entire service isn’t down, but key parts of it are. Users can still make use of Find My Friends, iTunes Match, and Contact, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes syncing, but iOS device backups, document syncing, and Photo Stream have been down for (as of this writing) almost seven hours and counting. Apple’s System Status page , which was revamped last December to offer more information to users, shows that the three iCloud services have been down since just after 3am CST. Apple claims “less than 3%” of users are affected by this outage, though such a claim seems disingenuous—at the very least, there’s a hefty portion of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users who back up their devices to the cloud, and tons of others sync documents over iCloud through various apps. (And, as noted by 9to5Mac earlier, some users on Twitter are reporting other iCloud services being down that Apple has not indicated on the status page.) iCloud outages are, unfortunately, nothing new. Still, they rarely last this long. There’s no indication when these services will be back up; we’ve reached out for comment, but Apple has yet to respond. We’ll update this article if we hear anything back. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users
Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33
After rising steadily over the last several months, Bitcoin has reached an all-time high according to data on Bitcoin Charts . As of this writing, Mt. Gox , the most popular Bitcoin trading site (which announced on Wednesday that its operations would move to Silicon Valley), recorded a high price of $33.22 per Bitcoin. There’s no single explanation as to why Bitcoin has continued to rise, accelerating particularly over the last month. That said, it’s been clear that interest in the digital currency has been rapidly rising, as any regular reader of Ars knows. It’s likely that online gambling has played a part. As we’ve reported earlier this year, one Bitcoin-based site took in $500,000 in profit in just six months in 2012—and Bitcoin gambling is set to get even bigger . For now, gambling with the cryptocurrency, like using Bitcoins in general, remains in a legal grey area (which may be part of the appeal as well). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33