california – Page 37

Latest tech support scam stokes concerns Dell customer data was breached

Enlarge (credit: Jjpwiki ) Tech-support scams, in which fraudsters pose as computer technicians who charge hefty fees to fix non-existent malware infections, have been a nuisance for years . A relatively new one targeting Dell computer owners is notable because the criminals behind it use private customer details to trick their marks into thinking the calls come from authorized Dell personnel. “What made the calls interesting was that they had all the information about my computer; model number, serial number, and notably the last item I had called Dell technical support about (my optical drive),” Ars reader Joseph B. wrote in an e-mail. “That they knew about my optical drive call from several months prior made me think there was some sort of information breach versus just my computer being compromised.” He isn’t the only Dell customer reporting such an experience. A blog post published Tuesday reported scammers knew of every problem the author had ever called Dell about. None of those problems were ever discussed in public forums, leading the author to share the suspicion that proprietary Dell data had somehow been breached. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Intel’s new Atom and Core M Compute Sticks get faster and look better

Andrew Cunningham Intel’s new Compute Stick has a better-looking design. 7 more images in gallery Intel’s original Compute Stick was an neat idea that ultimately wasn’t executed very well. Any system based on one of Intel’s Atom processors is going to be a little slow, but flaky wireless, inconsistent performance, and a clunky setup process all made it less appealing than it could have been. It had all of the hallmarks and rough edges of a first-generation product. Today Intel showed us its next-generation Compute Sticks, and it’s clear that the company is taking seriously the criticism of the first model. There are three new versions to talk about: the lowest end stick uses a Cherry Trail Atom CPU and is the closest relative to the first-generation Compute Stick. The other two use more powerful Skylake Core M processors—one has a Core m3-6Y30 processor, and another has a Core m5-6Y57 CPU with Intel’s vPro management features enabled. All three sticks share the same basic design. The first-generation stick used a bulky, glossy plastic housing that made it look and feel more like a reference design than an actual shipping product, but all three new models switch to a softer, curvier case that looks more refined. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Link:
Intel’s new Atom and Core M Compute Sticks get faster and look better

T-Mobile added another 8.3 million customers in 2015

T-Mobile USA added 8.3 million customers last year, including 2.1 million in the fourth quarter, solidifying its position as the country’s number three wireless carrier ahead of Sprint and behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T. T-Mobile had 63.3 million customers as of December 31, 2015, up from 55 million customers at the end of 2014, the company announced today in a preliminary earnings report. In total, T-Mobile now has 29.4 million postpaid phone customers, 2.3 million postpaid mobile broadband customers, 17.6 million prepaid customers, and 14 million wholesale customers. This was the second consecutive year that T-Mobile boosted its customer total by more than 8 million. (credit: T-Mobile) T-Mobile has also improved its churn rate—the percentage of subscribers who discontinued service—meaning that fewer customers are leaving for other carriers. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
T-Mobile added another 8.3 million customers in 2015

First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation

(credit: Krzysztof Lasoń ) Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said. The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure . The report went on to say that the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations. On Monday, researchers from security firm iSIGHT Partners said they had obtained samples of the malicious code that infected at least three regional operators. They said the malware led to “destructive events” that in turn caused the blackout. If confirmed it would be the first known instance of someone using malware to generate a power outage. “It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT’s cyber espionage intelligence practice, told Ars. “It’s the major scenario we’ve all been concerned about for so long.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original post:
First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation

AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris

The rumours were true: AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris (it previously went under the codename Arctic Islands), it’s based on a 14nm FinFET process, and it’ll ship in “mid-2016.” Given that AMD’s GPUs—and indeed Nvidia’s—have been stuck at the larger 28nm process node for several years, the move to 14nm should bring huge improvements in power consumption and performance per watt. Details are thin on the ground—AMD has promised to go into much greater detail at a later date—but for now the company has confirmed that Polaris is the fourth generation of its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The current GCN architecture, GCN 1.2, is used by the likes of the Radeon R9 285 and R9 Fury. Improvements to the command processor, geometry processor, L2 cache, memory controller, multimedia cores, and display engine are promised in fourth-gen GCN, as well as to the all important compute units at the heart of the GPU. Polaris will support hardware 4K h.265 encoding and decoding at 60 FPS, DisplayPort 1.3, and, at long last, HDMI 2.0a. The latter was missing from AMD’s recent Fury and 300-series of GPUs, which instead featured HDMI 1.4a that limited 4K signals to 30 FPS at 60Hz, making them less than ideal for use in the living room with 4K TVs. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris

CBS, Paramount sue crowdfunded Star Trek filmmakers for copyright infringement

Prelude to Axanar (Official). On Tuesday, lawyers representing CBS and Paramount Studios sued Axanar Productions, a company formed by a group of fans attempting to make professional-quality Star Trek fan-fiction movies, for copyright infringement. “The Axanar Works are intended to be professional quality productions that, by Defendants’ own admission, unabashedly take Paramount’s and CBS’s intellectual property and aim to ‘look and feel like a true Star Trek movie,’” the complaint reads (PDF). Axanar Productions released a short 20-minute film called Prelude to Axanar in 2014, in which retired Starfleet leaders talk about their experiences in the Four Years War, a war between the Federation and the Klingons that occurred in the Star Trek universe before The Original Series began. The feature-length Axanar is scheduled to premier in 2016 and follows the story of Captain Kirk’s hero, Garth of Izar . Both productions were funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, raising more than $1.1 million from fans. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

TSA may soon stop accepting drivers’ licenses from nine states

TSA screening passengers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (credit: danfinkelstein ) The citizens of several US states may soon find that they can’t use their drivers’ licenses to get into federal facilities or even board planes. Enforcement of a 2005 federal law that sets identification standards, known as “Real ID,” has been long-delayed. But now Department of Homeland Security officials say enforcement is imminent. The “Real ID” law requires states to implement certain security features before they issue IDs and verify the legal residency of anyone to whom they issue an ID card. The statute is in part a response to the suggestion of the 9/11 Commission, which noted that four of the 19 hijackers used state-issued ID cards to board planes. Real ID also requires states to share their databases of driver information with other states. The information-sharing provisions are a big reason why some privacy groups opposed the law , saying it would effectively be the equivalent of a national identification card. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More here:
TSA may soon stop accepting drivers’ licenses from nine states

A Totally Feasible Plan to Turn Manhattan’s Busiest Street Into a 40-Block Park

New York City has plenty of parks that revamp aging transit infrastructure: The High Line transforms a decrepit elevated rail route , the Lowline reclaims forgotten tunnels . But neither of those is as ambitious as the Green Line, a concept that would turn a major street into a linear park. Read more…

See the article here:
A Totally Feasible Plan to Turn Manhattan’s Busiest Street Into a 40-Block Park

Hackers actively exploit critical vulnerability in sites running Joomla

Enlarge / An payload that’s been modified so it can’t be misused. Malicious hackers are using it to perform an object injection attack that leads to a full remote command execution. (credit: Sucuri ) Attackers are actively exploiting a critical remote command-execution vulnerability that has plagued the Joomla content management system for almost eight years, security researchers said. A patch for the vulnerability, which affects versions 1.5 through 3.4.5, was released Monday morning . It was too late: the bug was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from security firm Sucuri warned in a blog post . The attacks started on Saturday from a handful of IP addresses and by Sunday included hundreds of exploit attempts to sites monitored by Sucuri. “Today (Dec 14th), the wave of attacks is even bigger, with basically every site and honeypot we have being attacked,” the blog post reported. “That means that probably every other Joomla site out there is being targeted as well.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the article here:
Hackers actively exploit critical vulnerability in sites running Joomla

‘Plants Vs. Zombies’ is becoming a theme park attraction

If it’s not Mario or Shepherd and the Mass Effect crew , it’s… plants and zombies. Cedar Fair Entertainment , which runs 14 park attractions across the US, is working with EA on two attractions for Great America in California, and Carowinds in North Carolina. Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will be adapted into what the theme park is terming a “digital attraction”. This means that it’ll be able to substitute in and reprogram the ride later for sequel content — which sounds a whole lot like its namesake. Carowinds will get the PvZ attraction, which will open next year. Source: Journal Now

Ken May

Tag: california