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FBI director says Chinese hackers are like a “drunk burglar”

Ivan David Gomez Arce James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, says Chinese hackers are daily targeting US companies’ intellectual property. “I liken them a bit to a drunk burglar. They’re kickin’ in the front door, knocking over the vase, while they’re walking out with your television set,” Comey said Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes . “They’re just prolific. Their strategy seems to be: `We’ll just be everywhere all the time. And there’s no way they can stop us.”‘ 60 Minutes Comey’s remarks on the news magazine comes two weeks after a Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded that China’s military broke into Pentagon contractors’ computer networks at least 50 times—hacks that threaten ” to erode US military technical superiority .” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI director says Chinese hackers are like a “drunk burglar”

References to iOS 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 showing up in site analytics

iOS 8 development continues apace. Andrew Cunningham iOS 8 has been in the hands of the public  for about a week and a half , and the OS has already received a pair of minor updates.  One fixed a handful of small issues in the initial release;  another fixed the major bugs introduced in the first update. But we’re already seeing evidence that Apple is working on some larger updates to the operating system, namely versions 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3. 9to5Mac first pointed out evidence of these new iOS versions this morning, found in its own analytics and data from some of its sources. So we quickly looked into our traffic data for September for similar data. We found requests listing iOS 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 coming from Apple IP addresses—several thousand from 8.1 and just a few hundred from 8.2 and 8.3, which makes sense given that 8.1 is probably being worked on more aggressively at this point. The news here is not that Apple is continuing to develop new versions of iOS but that releasing an iOS 8.2 or 8.3 update would be a break from recent tradition. The last iOS version to progress beyond x.1 was iOS 4, which came during a much busier period for Apple in general and iOS specifically. Version 4.1 fixed many of the glaring bugs in version 4.0 and helped boost speed on the iPhone 3G, version 4.2 unified the iPhone and iPad versions of the OS and ushered in the first non-AT&T iPhones, and version 4.3 was introduced alongside the iPad 2. To some degree, software version numbers are arbitrary, but releasing three “major” updates for iOS 8 could indicate that iOS 8’s lifecycle will be similarly busy. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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References to iOS 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 showing up in site analytics

Comcast seeks to fix awful customer service, admits “it may take a few years”

Comcast executive Charlie Herrin is aiming to improve Comcast’s legendarily poor customer service. Comcast After months of getting bashed for treating customers poorly, Comcast today said it’s going to make improving customer service its “number one priority.” But the company admitted that “it may take a few years before we can honestly say that a great customer experience is something we’re known for.” Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast’s cable division,  wrote today  that Comcast’s customer service hasn’t kept up with Comcast’s focus on “product innovation,” technology, and content. “But this is only one half of the customer experience equation. The other half is operational excellence in how we deliver service,” he wrote. “The way we interact with our customers—on the phone, online, in their homes—is as important to our success as the technology we provide. Put simply, customer service should be our best product.” A longtime Comcast executive is being called upon to fulfill that goal. Smit announced the promotion of 15-year Comcast veteran Charlie Herrin to a new role as senior VP of customer experience. Herrin previously was senior VP of product development and led design of X1, Comcast’s new TV user interface. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast seeks to fix awful customer service, admits “it may take a few years”

How An Octogenarian Preserved An Endangered Native American Language

It’s easy to take translations for granted when Google can swap between Albanian and Zulu with the click of a button, but even that tech has real world limitations. Marie Wilcox is the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, one of 130 different endangered Native American languages in the United States that don’t have any kind of digital—or analog—legacy. Read more…

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How An Octogenarian Preserved An Endangered Native American Language

Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Samsung loves “big.” Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you’ll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined . We dug through everyone’s 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this: Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo At 275,000 employees, Samsung ( just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung’s machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones  and 27 tablets  just in 2014. If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple’s headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The “Sony” on this chart only means “Sony Electronics,” the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Update: Bug in Bash shell creates big security hole on anything with *nix in it

Mac OS X Mavericks is also a *nix, and also vulnerable to the Bash bug. Sean Gallagher Update: The Bash vulnerability, now dubbed by some as “Shellshock”, has been reportedly found in use by an active exploit against web servers. See Ars’ latest report for further details. A security vulnerability in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash), the command-line shell used in many Linux and Unix operating systems, could leave systems running those operating systems open to exploitation by specially crafted attacks. “This issue is especially dangerous as there are many possible ways Bash can be called by an application,” a Red Hat security advisory warned. The bug , discovered by Stephane Schazelas , is related to how Bash processes environmental variables passed by the operating system or by a program calling a Bash-based script. If Bash has been configured as the default system shell, it can be used by network–based attackers against servers and other Unix and Linux devices via Web requests, secure shell, telnet sessions, or other programs that use Bash to execute scripts. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Update: Bug in Bash shell creates big security hole on anything with *nix in it

Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

iOS 8.0.1 fixes a handful of bugs with the new update. Andrew Cunningham Apple has just released iOS 8.0.1, the first update to the new operating system that reached the public last week . The update is available through iTunes or as an over-the-air update for any device that runs iOS 8—the iPhone 4S or newer, iPad 2 or newer, and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. Though it comes just a week after iOS 8’s release, the 8.0.1 update fixes a wide-ranging list of problems. Apple has fixed the bug that was keeping HealthKit-compatible apps from working, and it corrected a problem where third-party keyboards could be toggled off after entering a passcode. The company also addressed photo library access for third-party apps, “unexpected cellular data usage when receiving SMS/MMS messages,” the Ask To Buy feature of Family Sharing, something keeping ringtones from being restored from iCloud backups, and “a bug that prevented uploading photos and videos from Safari.” Those updates are available for all devices, but the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus get one specific fix that is meant to make the Reachability feature more consistent. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Malicious ads appears on Last.fm after advertising network Zedo serves up malicious content. Courtesy Malwarebytes Google shut down malicious Web attacks coming from a compromised advertising network on Friday. The move follows a security firm’s analysis that found the ad platform, Zedo, serving up advertisements that attempted to infect the computers of visitors to major websites. In an attack that ended early Friday morning, visitors to Last.fm, The Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Post ran the risk of their computers becoming infected as Zedo  redirected visitors’ systems to malicious servers . Because the advertisements hosted on Zedo’s servers were distributed through Google’s Doubleclick, the attack reached millions of potential victims, Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes Labs, told Ars. Distributing malware through legitimate advertising networks, a technique known as “malvertising,” has become an increasingly popular way to compromise the systems of consumers and workers alike. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Charles Chan When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, “putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Alibaba’s IPO beat out  record IPOs like Visa’s $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors’ $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms). Earlier this month , the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share , as of this writing. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers

The official Android Twitter app running on Mac OS. Ron Amadeo If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the ” App Runtime for Chrome .” The release came with a lot of limitations—it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS. But a developer by the name of ” Vladikoff ” has slowly been stripping away these limits. First he figured out how to load  any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. Now he’s made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on  any desktop OS that Chrome runs on. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client , a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as “incompatible.” Vladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon , that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. ARC doesn’t run raw Android app packages (APKs)—they need to be converted into a Chrome extension—but Vladikoff has a tool called ” chromeos-apk ” that will take care of that, too. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers