Tag: digest

City of Chicago sues red light camera maker Redflex for more than $300 million

Red light cameras in Arizona. Robert Couse-Baker The city of Chicago has joined a lawsuit against Redflex, an Australian company that sold the city red light cameras starting in 2003. Redflex announced the legal action in a statement to stockholders  (PDF) today, sending the company’s already-suffering stock down to $0.17 per share. The suit alleges  (PDF) that Redflex bribed a former Department of Transportation manager, John Bills, with $2 million in kickbacks to secure contracts with the city. The debacle has already resulted in corruption convictions, and the company’s CEO, Karen Finley, pleaded guilty to bribery earlier this year. Beyond these issues, Redflex cameras have been implicated in faulty ticketing accusations , with the company’s cameras allegedly issuing some 13,000 undeserved tickets to motorists in 2014. Redflex cameras have reportedly raised more than $500 million in traffic fines since 2003, according to the Chicago Tribune . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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City of Chicago sues red light camera maker Redflex for more than $300 million

Six UK teens arrested for being “customers” of Lizard Squad’s DDoS service

On August 28, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency announced the arrest of six teenagers, ranging in age from 15 to 18, for launching distributed denial of service attacks against multiple websites. The attacks were carried out using an attack tool created by Lizard Squad , the group behind denial of service attacks on gaming networks and the 8Chan imageboard site last winter. Called Lizard Stresser, the tool exploited compromised home routers, using them as a robot army against targeted sites and services. The six arrested “are suspected of maliciously deploying Lizard Stresser, having bought the tool using alternative payment services such as Bitcoin in a bid to remain anonymous,” an NCA spokesperson wrote in an official statement on the case. “Organizations believed to have been targeted by the suspects include a leading national newspaper, a school, gaming companies, and a number of online retailers.” Those sites, according to a source that spoke with Bloomberg Business , included Microsoft’s Xbox Live, Sony’s Playstation network, and Amazon.com. The timing of the attacks wasn’t mentioned by NCA. However, the user database of Lizard Stresser was leaked in January of this year. The NCA has been investigating individuals listed in the database and has identified a substantial number of them living in the UK. “Officers are also visiting approximately 50 addresses linked to individuals registered on the Lizard Stresser website, but who are not currently believed to have carried out attacks,” the NCA spokesperson noted. “A third of the individuals identified are under the age of 20, and the activity forms part of the NCA’s wider work to address younger people at risk of entering into serious forms of cyber crime.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Six UK teens arrested for being “customers” of Lizard Squad’s DDoS service

Uber hires researchers who hacked Chrysler Uconnect

Less than a month after their command performances at the Black Hat and Def Con security conferences in Las Vegas, security researchers Charlie Miller (late of Twitter) and Chris Valasek (formerly of the security firm IOActive) have been poached by Uber—which ironically had security flaws in its own in-car technology exposed by University of California-San Diego researchers this month as well. According to a report from Reuters , Uber will announce the hiring of Miller and Valasek on Monday. Miller and Valasek’s research on Fiat Chrysler’s Uconnect system  exposed vulnerabilities in the design of the system that allowed them to take remote control of many of the systems of a targeted vehicle—as they demonstrated by shutting down the throttle of a 2014 Jeep Cherokee while it was being driven on an interstate by Wired reporter Andy Greenberg . The research, coordinated with Fiat Chrysler, led to the distribution of a fix by Chrysler and blocking of vulnerable ports by Sprint, the mobile carrier providing the network for Uconnect. But the attention garnered by the video led to Chrysler announcing a recall of 1.4 million vehicles to accelerate the installation of the software patches. Uber announced grants to the University of Arizona to fund autonomous vehicle technology earlier this week. The hiring of Miller and Valasek is likely part of an effort to ensure that Uber’s autonomous vehicle development work remains secure and may be partially prompted by the findings of the UCSD researchers Ian Foster, Andrew Prudhomme, Karl Koscher, and Stefan Savage. The group presented research at the Usenix Security conference two weeks ago that showed a telematics device used by Uber and some auto insurers could be compromised to take remote control of systems in a similar fashion to Miller and Valasek’s hack of the Jeep. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Uber hires researchers who hacked Chrysler Uconnect

BitTorrent patched against flaw that allowed crippling DoS attacks

The maintainers of the open BitTorrent protocol for file sharing have fixed a vulnerability that allowed lone attackers with only modest resources to take down large sites using a new form of denial-of-service attack. The technique was disclosed two weeks ago in a research paper submitted to the 9th Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies. By sending vulnerable BitTorrent applications maliciously modified data, attackers could force them to flood a third-party target with data that was 50 to 120 times bigger than the original request. By replacing the attacker’s IP address in the malicious user datagram protocol request with the spoofed address of the target, the attacker could cause the data flood to hit the victim’s computer. In a blog post published Thursday , BitTorrent engineers said the vulnerability was the result of a flaw in a  reference implementation called libuTP . To fix the weakness, the uTorrent, BitTorrent, and BitTorrent Sync apps will require acknowledgments from connection initiators before providing long responses. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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BitTorrent patched against flaw that allowed crippling DoS attacks

PSA: Classic Bethesda titles available DRM-free on GOG

Bethesda Softworks is mining its library of good, old games and offering many of them up without any digital protections on GOG starting today. Eleven titles from the venerable Doom , Quake , Fallout , and Elder Scrolls series are now available on the service, and are being offered at discounts if you buy them in bundles before September 2. Here are the details. The Elder Scrolls Bundle : 33% off if purchased together Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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PSA: Classic Bethesda titles available DRM-free on GOG

Sham telecoms created to scam AT&T must pay back ill-gotten gains

AT&T has won a $252,000 judgment from the remnants of sham telecoms that were created in order to bill legitimate phone companies for services they didn’t provide. The companies billed AT&T $13 million, but AT&T figured out the scam after paying only a fraction of that. The defendants, All American Telephone Co., e-Pinnacle Communications, Inc., and ChaseCom, operated out of Utah and Nevada and had all shut down by 2010. The Federal Communications Commission granted AT&T’s complaint against the companies in March 2013 and last week ordered the defendants to pay back the $252,496.37 they got from AT&T. The FCC dismissed AT&T’s request for interest and ” consequential damages ,” saying the company can pursue those in court. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sham telecoms created to scam AT&T must pay back ill-gotten gains

Comcast planning gigabit cable for entire US territory in 2-3 years

While Comcast has started deploying  2Gbps fiber-to-the-home service to certain parts of its territory, much of its network is going to be stuck on cable for years to come. But customers outside the fiber footprint will still be able to buy gigabit Internet service after Comcast upgrades to DOCSIS 3.1, a faster version of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. Comcast said in April  that DOCSIS 3.1 will be available to some of its customers in early 2016 and eventually across its whole US footprint. Last week, Comcast said it wants to complete the whole upgrade within two years. “Our intent is to scale it through our footprint through 2016,” Comcast VP of network architecture Robert Howald said in an interview with FierceCable . “We want to get it across the footprint very quickly… We’re shooting for two years.” It could take up to three years, the story said. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast planning gigabit cable for entire US territory in 2-3 years

Elon Musk’s hyperloop is actually getting kind of serious

The hyperloop sounds like science fiction, Elon Musk’s pipe dream: leapfrog high speed rail and go right to packing us into capsules that fling us across the country in hours using what are, essentially, pneumatic tubes. It sounds crazy, when you think about it. It’s starting to look a little less crazy. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced today that it has signed agreements to work with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and global engineering design firm Aecom. The two companies will lend their expertise in exchange for stock options in the company, joining the army of engineers from the likes of Boeing and SpaceX already lending their time to the effort. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Elon Musk’s hyperloop is actually getting kind of serious

New record temperature for a superconductor

Superconductivity was first seen in metals cooled down to close to absolute zero. But after exhausting every metal on the periodic table, the critical temperature at which the metal transitions to superconductivity never budged far from those extremely low temperatures. That changed dramatically with the development of cuprate superconductors, copper-containing ceramics that could superconduct in liquid nitrogen—still very cold (138K or −135°C), but relatively easy to achieve. But progress has stalled, in part because we don’t have a solid theory to explain superconductivity in these materials. Now, taking advantage of the fact that we do understand what’s going on in superconducting metals, a German research team has reached a new record critical temperature: 203K, or -70°C, a temperature that is sometimes seen in polar regions. The material they used, however, isn’t a metal that appears on the periodic table. In fact, they’re not even positive they know what the material is, just that it forms from hydrogen sulfide at extreme pressures. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New record temperature for a superconductor

Windows 10 won’t run games with SecuROM DRM, says Microsoft

While Windows 10 is  largely good news for gamers , it turns out that those with a collection of older games laden with DRM copy protection software are going to have a hard time getting them up and running on the new OS. In an interview with Rocket Beans TV (as translated by Rock, Paper, Shotgun ) at this year’s Gamescom, Microsoft’s Boris Schneider-Johne explained that that Windows 10 won’t be able to run games that use SafeDisc and SecuROM technology. “Everything that ran in Windows 7 should also run in Windows 10,” said Johne, “There are just two silly exceptions: antivirus software, and stuff that’s deeply embedded into the system needs updating—but the developers are on it already—and then there are old games on CD-ROM that have DRM. This DRM stuff is also deeply embedded in your system, and that’s where Windows 10 says, ‘Sorry, we cannot allow that, because that would be a possible loophole for computer viruses.’ That’s why there are a couple of games from 2003-2008 with SecuROM, etc. that simply don’t run without a no-CD patch or some such.” This isn’t a bad thing for most people, though. While SafeDisc has hit the headlines before thanks to security issues in Windows— introducing access vulnerabilities into the OS , for example—it’s SecuROM that is the most famous, and the most hated of all DRM software. Developed by Sony DADC, SecuROM took a heavy-handed approach to DRM, limiting the number of installs and activations end-users had access to, as well as requiring users to check in online to keep the game running. SecuROM even counted certain hardware changes as a change of computer, forcing another activation. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 won’t run games with SecuROM DRM, says Microsoft