deals – Page 13 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Los Angeles Tests Reflective ‘Cool Pavement’ On Streets

mikeebbbd writes: As reported in the Los Angeles Daily News, during the current heatwave various officials swooped down on streets coated with an experimental light-gray sealer that makes the old asphalt into a “cool street” — and it works, with average temperature differences between coated streets and adjacent old asphalt around 10F. At a large parking lot, the temperature reduction was over 20F. If the material holds up and continues to meet other criteria, LA plans to use it on more pavement rehab projects, which could eventually make a difference in the heat island effect. The “CoolSeal” coating is apparently proprietary to a company named GuardTop LLC, costs $25-40K/mile, and lasts 5-7 years. At that price, it’s might not be used a lot, at least at first; typical slurry seals run $15-30K/mile. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Los Angeles Tests Reflective ‘Cool Pavement’ On Streets

Texting While Driving Now Legal In Colorado — In Some Cases

Fines for texting and driving in Colorado have jumped to $300, but according to the fine print, the increased fine only applies to drivers who are texting in “a careless or imprudent manner.” Therefore, drivers who are texting in any other manner are still within the law. FOX31 Denver reports: Before the new legislation, any texting while driving was illegal. Tim Lane of the Colorado District Attorney’s Office confirmed the softening crackdown on all texting and driving. “The simple fact is that if you are texting while driving but not being careless, it’s no longer illegal, ” he said. What constitutes “careless” driving is up to the discretion of each individual law enforcement officer. Cellphone use of any kind is still banned for drivers younger than 18. Teens caught with a phone in hand while driving will be slapped with a $50 fine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

32TB of Windows 10 Internal Builds, Core Source Code Leak Online

According to an exclusive report via The Register, “a massive trove of Microsoft’s internal Windows operating system builds and chunks of its core source code have leaked online.” From the report: The data — some 32TB of installation images and software blueprints that compress down to 8TB — were uploaded to betaarchive.com, the latest load of files provided just earlier this week. It is believed the data has been exfiltrated from Microsoft’s in-house systems since around March. The leaked code is Microsoft’s Shared Source Kit: according to people who have seen its contents, it includes the source to the base Windows 10 hardware drivers plus Redmond’s PnP code, its USB and Wi-Fi stacks, its storage drivers, and ARM-specific OneCore kernel code. Anyone who has this information can scour it for security vulnerabilities, which could be exploited to hack Windows systems worldwide. The code runs at the heart of the operating system, at some of its most trusted levels. In addition to this, hundreds of top-secret builds of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, none of which have been released to the public, have been leaked along with copies of officially released versions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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32TB of Windows 10 Internal Builds, Core Source Code Leak Online

Sci-Hub Ordered To Pay $15 Million In Piracy Damages

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Two years ago, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint (PDF) against Sci-Hub and several related “pirate” sites. It accused the websites of making academic papers widely available to the public, without permission. While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier’s legal team, who obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall. The injunction ordered Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. However, this didn’t happen. Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit achieved the opposite. Sci-Hub grew bigger and bigger up to a point where its users were downloading hundreds of thousands of papers per day. Although Elbakyan sent a letter to the court earlier, she opted not engage in the U.S. lawsuit any further. The same is true for her fellow defendants, associated with Libgen. As a result, Elsevier asked the court for a default judgment and a permanent injunction which were issued this week. Following a hearing on Wednesday, the Court awarded Elsevier $15, 000, 000 in damages, the maximum statutory amount for the 100 copyrighted works that were listed in the complaint. In addition, the injunction, through which Sci-Hub and LibGen lost several domain names, was made permanent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sci-Hub Ordered To Pay $15 Million In Piracy Damages

Just 14 People Make 500,000 Tons of Steel a Year in Austria

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg Businessweek feature: The Austrian village of Donawitz has been an iron-smelting center since the 1400s, when ore was dug from mines carved out of the snow-capped peaks nearby. Over the centuries, Donawitz developed into the Hapsburg Empire’s steel-production hub, and by the early 1900s it was home to Europe’s largest mill. With the opening of Voestalpine AG’s new rolling mill this year, the industry appears secure. What’s less certain are the jobs. The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500, 000 tons of robust steel wire a year — vs. as many as 1, 000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s. Inside the facility, red-hot metal snakes its way along a 700-meter (2, 297-foot) production line. Yet the floors are spotless, the only noise is a gentle hum that wouldn’t overwhelm a quiet conversation, and most of the time the place is deserted except for three technicians who sit high above the line, monitoring output on a bank of flatscreens. “We have to forget steel as a core employer, ” says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine’s chief executive officer for the past 13 years. “In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Just 14 People Make 500,000 Tons of Steel a Year in Austria

Cisco Subdomain Private Key Found in Embedded Executable

Earlier this month, a developer accidentally discovered the private key of a Cisco subdomain. An anonymous reader shares the post: Last weekend, in an attempt to get Sky’s NOW TV video player (for Mac) to work on my machine, I noticed that one of the Cisco executables contains a private key that is associated with the public key in a trusted certificate for a cisco.com sub domain. This certificate is used in a local WebSocket server, presumably to allow secure Sky/NOW TV origins to communicate with the video player on the users’ local machines. I read the Baseline Requirements document (version 1.4.5, section 4.9.1.1), but I wasn’t entirely sure whether this is considered a key compromise. I asked Hanno Bock on Twitter, and he advised me to post the matter to this mailing list. The executable containing the private key is named ‘CiscoVideoGuardMonitor’, and is shipped as part of the NOW TV video player. In case you are interested, the installer can be found here (SHA-256: 56feeef4c3d141562900f9f0339b120d4db07ae2777cc73a31e3b830022241e6). I would recommend to run this installer in a virtual machine, because it drops files all over the place, and installs a few launch items (agents/daemons). The executable ‘CiscoVideoGuardMonitor’ can be found at ‘$HOME/Library/Cisco/VideoGuardPlayer/VideoGuardMonitor/ VideoGuardMonitor.bundle/Contents/MacOS/CiscoVideoGuardMonitor’. Certificate details: Serial number: 66170CE2EC8B7D88B4E2EB732E738FE3A67CF672, DNS names: drmlocal.cisco.com, Issued by: HydrantID SSL ICA G2. The issuer HydrantID has since communicated with the certificate holder Cisco, and the certificate has been revoked. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cisco Subdomain Private Key Found in Embedded Executable

Microsoft Will Disable WannaCry Attack Vector SMBv1 Starting This Fall

An anonymous reader writes: Starting this fall, with the public launch of the next major Windows 10 update — codenamed Redstone 3 — Microsoft plans to disable SMBv1 in most versions of the Windows operating systems. SMBv1 is a three-decades-old file sharing protocol that Microsoft has continued to ship “enabled by default” with all Windows OS versions. The protocol got a lot of attention recently as it was the main infection vector for the WannaCry ransomware. Microsoft officially confirmed Tuesday that it will not ship SMBv1 with the Fall Creators Update. This change will affect only users performing clean installs, and will not be shipped as an update. This means Microsoft decision will not affect existing Windows installations, where SMBv1 might be part of a critical system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Will Disable WannaCry Attack Vector SMBv1 Starting This Fall

NSA Links WannaCry To North Korea

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: The National Security Agency has linked the North Korean government to the creation of the WannaCry computer worm that affected more than 300, 000 people in some 150 countries last month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The assessment, which was issued internally last week and has not been made public, is based on an analysis of tactics, techniques and targets that point with “moderate confidence” to North Korea’s spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, according to an individual familiar with the report. The assessment states that “cyber actors” suspected to be “sponsored by” the RGB were behind two versions of WannaCry, a worm that was built around an NSA hacking tool that had been obtained and posted online last year by an anonymous group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Though the assessment is not conclusive, the preponderance of the evidence points to Pyongyang. It includes the range of computer Internet protocol addresses in China historically used by the RGB, and the assessment is consistent with intelligence gathered recently by other Western spy agencies. It states that the hackers behind WannaCry are also called “the Lazarus Group, ” a name used by private-sector researchers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NSA Links WannaCry To North Korea

Samsung Left Millions Vulnerable To Hackers Because It Forgot To Renew a Domain

An anonymous reader writes: Samsung cellphones used to have a stock app called S Suggest. The company apparently discontinued the app recently, and then forgot to renew a domain that was used to control it. This snafu left millions of smartphone users vulnerable to hackers who could’ve registered the domain and installed malicious apps on the phones. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Left Millions Vulnerable To Hackers Because It Forgot To Renew a Domain

Netflix Has More American Subscribers Than Cable TV

According to Leichtman Research estimates from the first quarter of 2017, there are more Netflix subscribers in the U.S. (50.85 million) than there are customers for major cable TV networks (48.61 million). While it doesn’t mean Netflix is bigger than TV because it doesn’t account for the 33.19 million satellite viewers, it represents a huge milestone for a streaming service that had half as many users just 5 years ago. Engadget reports: The shift in power comes in part through Netflix’s ever-greater reliance on originals. There’s enough high-quality material that it can compete with more established networks. However, it’s also getting a boost from the decline of conventional TV. Those traditional sources lost 760, 000 subscribers in the first quarter of the year versus 120, 000 a year earlier. Leichtman believes a combination of cord cutters and reduced marketing toward cost-conscious viewers is to blame. Cable giants might not be in dire straits, but they’re clearly focusing on their most lucrative customers as others jump ship for the internet. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix Has More American Subscribers Than Cable TV