digest – Page 40 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Google will flag search results erased due to “right to be forgotten”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is a vocal critic of the new ruling. Jimmy Wales/ Wikipedia In the wake of a controversial European high court ruling last month that search providers like Google must remove “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant” materials from search results upon request by EU citizens, the US search giant has expressed a desire to alert users to when such results have been altered. Google’s plan to flag censored search results will likely be similar to how the company notifies users that links have been removed due to a copyright takedown request. The search giant aims to place such notifications at the bottom of pages that would have contained links that have been erased in order to alert users of the change, reports The Guardian. The company also plans to include statistics regarding “right to be forgotten” link removal requests in its biannual transparency report. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google will flag search results erased due to “right to be forgotten”

“WARNING Your phone is locked!” Crypto ransomware makes its debut on Android

Eset Security researchers have documented another first in the annals of Android malware: a trojan that encrypts photos, videos, and documents stored on a device and demands a ransom for them to be restored. The crudeness of Android/Simplocker, as the malicious app has been dubbed, suggests it’s still in the proof-of-concept phase, Robert Lipovsky, a malware researcher for antivirus provider Eset, said in a recent blog post . The malware also addresses users in Russian and demands that payments be made in Ukrainian hryvnias, an indication that it targets only people in Eastern Europe. Still, the trojan—with its combination of social engineering, strong encryption, and robust Internet architecture—could be a harbinger of more serious and widespread threats to come. After all, the first Android trojans to make hefty SMS charges also debuted in the same region. Once installed on a device, the app delivers the following message: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“WARNING Your phone is locked!” Crypto ransomware makes its debut on Android

Microsoft: Software update unlocks more GPU bandwidth on Xbox One

The system update does not turn the system white… only the employee models do that. The June system update rolling out to Xbox One system worldwide this week includes surface-level features like external hard drive support, as we mentioned this morning . But Microsoft says the new firmware will also help developers extract more power from the system’s Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), even though the base hardware in the system is obviously staying the same. Microsoft didn’t trumpet this news in a press release or blog post, but threw it out there in a tweet from Microsoft’s new executive in charge of Xbox, Phil Spencer: “June #XboxOne software dev kit gives devs access to more GPU bandwidth. More performance, new tools and flexibility to make games better.” As far back as last October, Microsoft was publicly acknowledging how Kinect and system processing took “a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation… for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode.” Back then, the company promised it would be opening up that slice of processing time to game developers in the future in a way that didn’t impact the system’s background performance. That appears to be what has come to pass with the system’s latest software update. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft: Software update unlocks more GPU bandwidth on Xbox One

Payback time: First patent troll ordered to pay “extraordinary case” fees

FindTheBest CEO Kevin O’Connor and Director of Operations Danny Seigle. FindTheBest When Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest (FTB) was sued by a patent troll called Lumen View last year, it vowed to fight back rather than pay up the $50,000 licensing fee Lumen was asking for. Company CEO Kevin O’Connor made it personal, pledging $1 million of his own money to fight the legal battle. Once FindTheBest pursued the case, the company dismantled the troll in short order. In November, the judge invalidated Lumen’s patent, finding it was nothing more than a description of computer-oriented “matchmaking.” At that point, FindTheBest had spent about $200,000 on its legal fight—not to mention the productivity lost in hundreds of work hours spent by top executives on the lawsuit, and three all-company meetings. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Airbnb gives up customer data to NY attorney general

Airbnb Home renting company Airbnb announced Wednesday that under pressure from the New York attorney general’s office, it will hand over the anonymized personal data of its New York hosts to the state. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed three years’ worth of data in 2013 in an effort to suss out whether Airbnb users are running “illegal hotels” and to determine if Airbnb’s business model and platform comply with the law. Schneiderman stated his suspicions in April that Airbnb hosts in New York operate residences or parts of their homes like hotels—but without the fire, safety, and tax regulations normally applied to hotels. Airbnb hosts could also be in violation of a 2010 law that prohibits New Yorkers from renting entire apartments for less than 29 consecutive days. Schneiderman claimed that Airbnb sells itself to investors as a hotel network, but it attempts to keep that pitch out of the public sphere for fear of incurring legal hotel status. The New York Supreme Court rejected Schneiderman’s subpoena request on May 13, “but the judge’s ruling also made it clear that he would accept a new, narrower subpoena and require Airbnb to turn over personal information about hosts if the Attorney General’s Office made some changes to their demands,” wrote Airbnb in its blog post Wednesday. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Airbnb gives up customer data to NY attorney general

For Do Not Call violations, Sprint will pay FCC $7.5M in largest ever settlement

Hunter Edwards On Monday, Sprint agreed to pay the Federal Communications Commission $7.5 million to resolve violations of the Do Not Call registry—the largest settlement payout ever. The program first began in 2003 as a way to allow Americans to opt out of unsolicited sales calls. According to the FCC, Sprint will also put into effect a “robust compliance plan,” designate a new senior manager to deal with compliance, retrain its employees, and report any further noncompliance to the agency, among other necessary actions. “We expect companies to respect the privacy of consumers who have opted out of marketing calls,” said Travis LeBlanc, acting chief of the Enforcement Bureau, in a statement . “When a consumer tells a company to stop calling or texting with promotional pitches, that request must be honored. Today’s settlement leaves no question that protecting consumer privacy is a top enforcement priority.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Intel CEO: Delayed next-gen Broadwell CPUs will be here for holidays

One of the few looks we’ve gotten at a Broadwell CPU so far. Intel New CPUs and chipsets from Intel normally go hand-in-hand, but earlier this month when the company announced its 9-series chipsets , all we got was a slightly faster clock speed bump to Haswell . News of truly new CPUs based on the upcoming “Broadwell” architecture was nowhere to be found, and we’ve generally heard very little about Broadwell aside from an announcement of a delay into the second half of 2014. There are many months in the second half of 2014, but Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich got a little more specific in a statement to Reuters today . “I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday,” said Krzanich. “Back to school—that’s a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That’s going to be tough.” This means we’ll most likely see Broadwell chips (and, more importantly, new devices from OEMs that can use Broadwell chips) sometime between September and early December. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Aurich Lawson / PCCare247 Sitting in front of her PC, the phone in her hand connected to a tech support company half a world away, Sheryl Novick was about to get scammed. The company she had reached, PCCare247, was based in India but had built a lucrative business advertising over the Internet to Americans, encouraging them to call for tech support. After glimpsing something odd on her computer, Novick did so. “I saw some sort of pop-up and I don’t know if there’s a problem,” she told a PCCare247 tech named Yakeen. He offered to check the “management part” of her computer for possible problems. Read 61 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Shocker: Cable TV prices went up four times the rate of inflation

The Federal Communications Commission today issued a report on average cable TV prices in the US , and to the surprise of no one, it turns out they went up a lot. “Basic cable service prices increased by 6.5 percent [to $22.63] for the 12 months ending January 1, 2013. Expanded basic cable prices increased by 5.1 percent [to $64.41] for those 12 months, and at a compound average annual rate of 6.1 percent over the 18-year period from 1995-2013,” the FCC said. The basic cable increase was four times the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the 12-month period, and substantially above inflation for the 1995-2013 measurement. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Shocker: Cable TV prices went up four times the rate of inflation

Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant

NSA techs perform an unauthorized field upgrade to Cisco hardware in these 2010 photos from an NSA document. A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide details how the agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they’re delivered. These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being “some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.” The document, a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department (S3261) includes photos (above) of NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task. The NSA manager described the process: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant