Tag: digest-golf

Microsoft, like Google, asks secret court if it can publish data sharing total

In a new legal filing made public on Wednesday, Microsoft submitted a motion (PDF) to the notoriously secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) saying that the company “continues to seek—to correct the misimpression, furthered by such inaccurate media reporting, that it provides the United States Government with direct access to its servers and network infrastructure and, thereby, indiscriminately discloses Microsoft users’ information to the Government.” The filing was submitted on June 19, 2013, just one day after Google’s similar motion . Like Google, Microsoft said it “seeks to report aggregate information about [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] orders and [FISA Amendments Act] directives separately from all other local, state, and federal law enforcement demands.” Tech companies are presumably attempting to get FISC to allow them to release this information so that they can show there isn’t a hand-in-glove relationship between these corporations and the federal government. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft, like Google, asks secret court if it can publish data sharing total

Can Apple read your iMessages? Ars deciphers “end-to-end” crypto claims

Aurich Lawson Ever since the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program came to light three weeks ago, implicated companies have issued carefully worded statements denying that government snoops have direct or wholesale access to e-mail and other sensitive customer data. The most strenuous denial came 10 days ago, when Apple said it took pains to protect personal information stored on its servers , in many cases by not collecting it in the first place. “For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them,” company officials wrote . “Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.” Some cryptographers and civil liberties advocates have chafed at the claim that even Apple is unable to bypass the end-to-end encryption protecting them. After all, Apple controls the password-based authentication system that locks and unlocks customer data. More subtly, but no less important, cryptographic protections are highly nuanced things that involve huge numbers of moving parts. Choices about the types of keys that are used, the ways they’re distributed, and the specific data that is and isn’t encrypted have a huge effect on precisely what data is and isn’t protected and under what circumstances. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Can Apple read your iMessages? Ars deciphers “end-to-end” crypto claims

Stow it no more: FAA easing ban on electronics during takeoff, landing

The words “please stow all electronic devices” may soon disappear from the scripts of flight attendants. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is poised to lift its ban on the use of electronic devices aboard airline flights at elevations under 10,000 feet. It would also allow the use of e-readers, iPods, tablets, and phones in “airplane” mode even during take-offs and landings. The Wall Street Journal reports that the FAA is circulating a draft set of recommendations from an advisory panel that recommends relaxing the bans. Cell phone calls during flight would still be banned. T he report acknowledges that technology has changed dramatically since the FAA originally placed the ban on electronic devices during takeoff and landing back in the 1960s, when there were valid concerns about interference to aircraft communications from personal radios and other electronics.  The panel also admitted that having airlines each evaluate the safety of individual electronic devices before allowing them to be left on at low altitude “has become untenable.” Passengers are widely ignoring the ban already, and the FAA advisory panel’s report cited research that showed a third of airline passengers had “accidentally” left a device turned on for entire flights at least once. An FAA spokeswoman sent a statement to the Wall Street Journal that said that the FAA “recognizes consumers are intensely interested in the use of personal electronics aboard aircraft. That is why we tasked a government-industry group to examine the safety issues and the feasibility of changing the current restrictions. At the group’s request, the FAA has granted the two-month extension to complete the additional work necessary for the safety assessment.” Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Stow it no more: FAA easing ban on electronics during takeoff, landing

New OS X uses Windows file sharing by default

@darth News about the new release of OS X, ” Mavericks ,” is trickling out as developers and other WWDC attendees post information about it to the Internet. However, hidden a bit down in Apple’s OS X Mavericks Technology Overview document is an interesting tidbit: SMB2 is replacing AFP as the default file sharing protocol for OS X. AFP— Apple Filing Protocol —has a long pedigree that stretches all the way back to the Mac’s early days (and even a bit before that). Contemporary AFP piggybacks on top of TCP/IP for transport, but it supports a few Mac-specific things that other network file protocols don’t, like type and creator codes. These don’t matter as much as they used to, but OS X’s HFS+ file system supports a pretty rich amount of metadata, and AFP transports and preserves that metadata. But AFP isn’t particularly friendly to non-Apple systems, and no operating systems other than OS X support it natively. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that one of OS X’s killer features, Time Machine, only works over a LAN with destinations that support AFP. This is at least in part because of Time Machine’s reliance on Unix hard links, and also in part because it has to be able to ensure that any OS X files with HFS+ specific metadata are correctly preserved. This in turn means that third-party Time Capsule devices have to rely on reverse-engineered implementations of AFP to continue functioning, and OS X updates occasionally break third-party Time Capsule devices, sometimes for weeks. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New OS X uses Windows file sharing by default

Apple announces flatter, sleeker iOS 7

A new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7, was announced at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The release will feature, among a number of changes, a departure from the bubbly, skeuomorphic design that has prevailed on both iOS and OS X for the last several years in favor of flatter, more angular design elements influenced by Apple SVP of Industrial Design Jony Ive. The most front-facing part of the OS, the home screen, now has app icons that lack the dimension and gloss effect of previous versions. Design elements within the icon, like the musical note on the Music app icon, appear as a flat design flush with the background rather than a cutout like before. iOS 7 isn’t doing away completely with dimensionality, as some text elements shown in the intro video still feature embossing, and Ive emphasized that the OS focuses on “depth and vitality.” The look of several key apps in iOS 7. Many of the skeuomorphic touches are also gone from the OS, such as the textured paper in the iBooks app and the leather-bound elements in the Calendar app. Of the Game Center redesign, Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi stated, “we just ran out of green felt.” Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple announces flatter, sleeker iOS 7

Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

greyweed Recently discovered malware targeting Android smartphones exploits previously unknown vulnerabilities in the Google operating system and borrows highly advanced functionality more typical of malicious Windows applications, making it the world’s most sophisticated Android Trojan, a security researcher said. The infection, named Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a, isn’t very widespread at the moment. The malware gives an idea of the types of smartphone malware that are possible, however, according to Kaspersky Lab expert Roman Unuchek in a blog post published Thursday . Sharply contrasting with mostly rudimentary Android malware circulating today, the highly stealthy Obad.a exploits previously unknown Android bugs, uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections to spread to near-by handsets, and allows attackers to issue malicious commands using standard SMS text messages. “To conclude this review, we would like to add that Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a looks closer to Windows malware than to other Android trojans, in terms of its complexity and the number of unpublished vulnerabilities it exploits,” Unuchek wrote. “This means that the complexity of Android malware programs is growing rapidly alongside their numbers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Kaspersky Lab Security researchers have blown the whistle on a computer-espionage campaign that over the past eight years has successfully compromised more than 350 high-profile targets in 40 countries. “NetTraveler,” named after a string included in an early version of the malware, has targeted a number of industries and organizations, according to a blog post published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Targets include oil industry companies, scientific research centers and institutes, universities, private companies, governments and governmental institutions, embassies, military contractors and Tibetan/Uyghur activists. Most recently, the group behind NetTraveler has focused most of its efforts on obtaining data concerning space exploration, nanotechnology, energy production, nuclear power, lasers, medicine, and communications. “Based on collected intelligence, we estimate the group size to about 50 individuals, most of which speak Chinese natively and have working knowledge of the English language,” the researchers wrote. “NetTraveler is designed to steal sensitive data as well as log keystrokes, and retrieve file system listings and various Office of PDF documents.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Espionage malware infects raft of governments, industries around the world

Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

OS X 10.8.4 comes with a long list of fixes. Andrew Cunningham After several weeks of beta testing, Apple has released OS X version 10.8.4 for all Macs running Mountain Lion. The update fixes a long list of minor issues  and some security bugs as the OS nears its first birthday. Those hoping for major changes to OS X will have to wait until Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week, at which Apple is widely expected to show off Mountain Lion’s successor. Quite a few of 10.8.4’s fixes are aimed at businesses. There are fixes that will help Calendar work better with Microsoft Exchange servers, compatibility and speed improvements to OS X’s Active Directory integration, improvements to compatibility with “certain enterprise Wi-Fi networks,” and fixes to issues with the SMB and NFS network sharing protocols. As ever, Apple is annoyingly nonspecific about the exact problems these updates solve, but network administrators with OS X clients may find something to like about the new update. Other squashed bugs will be of more interest to consumers. For example, there’s an iMessage fix that will prevent out-of-order messages, a fix for a FaceTime issue that would prevent calls to international numbers, and an update to Safari (now at version 6.0.5) that “improves stability for some websites with chat features and games.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

Internet Explorer 10 takes chunks out of IE9, Windows 8 closes on Vista

Net Market Share One wonders what the browser market would look like if Microsoft had enabled automatic updates before. Though the overall positions in the market were little changed in May, one thing is clear: Internet Explorer 10’s uptake is fast, in a way that no older version of the browser has ever been. Net Market Share Net Market Share Internet Explorer was up slightly, picking up 0.18 points for a 55.99 percent share of the desktop market. Firefox had stronger growth, up 0.33 points to 20.63 percent. Chrome was the month’s big loser, dropping 0.61 points to 15.74 percent—its lowest share since August 2011. Safari was marginally up, adding 0.08 points to reach an all-time high of 5.46 percent. Opera ended the month up 0.04 percent points, at 1.77 percent. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 takes chunks out of IE9, Windows 8 closes on Vista

Microsoft promises annual Windows Server updates, can IT cope?

Windows Server 2012 will be updated this autumn to Windows Server 2012 R2. This will be the first in a series of more or less annual updates to the Windows Server platform. It’s not just the operating system that’ll get these regular updates, either. On the server side, System Center and SQL Server are also going to be on an annual cadence. On the client side, Visual Studio will be too. Even though Windows Server 2012 is less than a year old, Microsoft promises a stack of new features for the R2 iteration. Hyper-V, in particular, has some compelling improvements: legacy-free, UEFI-booting “generation 2” virtual machines, faster live migration, live cloning of VMs, online disk resizing, and support for live migration, backup, disk resizing, and dynamic memory for Linux guests. Windows’ pooled storage system, Storage Spaces, is set to become a lot smarter. Pools can use a mix of solid state and spinning disk media, and the Storage Space software will automatically move hot data off the spinning disks and onto the solid state ones. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft promises annual Windows Server updates, can IT cope?