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Apple ceases online sales in Russia due to extreme ruble fluctuations

Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Apple has ceased all online sales in Russia as the country has been unable to keep its currency from fluctuating dramatically. In the last month, Apple had already increased the price of its iPhone 6 in that country by 25 percent due to currency uncertainties. “Our online store in Russia is currently unavailable while we review pricing,” Alan Hely, a spokesman for the Cupertino, California-based company, told Bloomberg. “We apologize to customers for any inconvenience.” It is uncertain when Apple will reinstate its operations in Russia. Bloomberg noted that the Ruble sank 19 percent today, “with a surprise interest-rate increase failing to stem a run on the currency.” At one point during the day, the ruble sank to 80 on the dollar. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple ceases online sales in Russia due to extreme ruble fluctuations

Cops illegally nailed webcam to utility pole for 6 weeks to spy on house

A federal judge on Monday tossed evidence that was gathered by a webcam—turned on for six weeks—that the authorities nailed to a utility pole 100 yards from a suspected drug dealer’s rural Washington state house. The Justice Department contended that the webcam, with pan-and-zoom capabilities that were operated from afar—was no different from a police officer’s observation from the public right-of-way. The government argued  (PDF): Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops illegally nailed webcam to utility pole for 6 weeks to spy on house

4 seconds of body cam video can reveal a biometric fingerprint, study says

Researchers say they can have computers examine body camera video footage and accurately identify a person wearing a body-mounted device in about four seconds, according to a recently released paper . The authors of the study had their software look at biometric characteristics like height, stride length, and walking speed to find the identity of the person shooting the footage. As they point out, this could have both positive and negative implications for civilians, law enforcement, and military personnel if they’re using body-mounted cameras. (It’s important to note that this research paper,  Egocentric Video Biometrics , was posted  to the arXiv repository . As such, it’s not considered a final, peer-reviewed work.) Using static, mounted cameras to match a person’s height and gait is a relatively common and well-researched vector for narrowing down the identity of people caught in videos. The authors said that, to get an accurate read of the biometric data of the person wearing the body cam, the footage has to be from a camera secured to one point on a person’s body (handheld cameras don’t work), and it has to have at least four seconds of video of the camera-wearer walking. Despite these restrictions, the two researchers from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem noted that once the necessary information had been gathered, “the identity of the user can be determined quite reliably from a few seconds of video.” “This is like a fingerprint,” Shmuel Peleg, one of the paper’s authors, told The Verge. “In order to find the person you have to have their fingerprint beforehand. But we can compare two people and say whether two videos were shot by the same person or not.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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4 seconds of body cam video can reveal a biometric fingerprint, study says

Steam’s first “Holiday Auction” halted after dupe bug ruins market [Updated]

Update:  Valve has updated its auction site to note that the Gem auctions will return “shortly” and that “an issue with Gems… means we need to reset and start again.” Specifically: All gems created by you will be returned to your Inventory. All Gem purchases from the Community Market will be reimbursed. All Auction bids have been canceled and the Auction will be reset. Trades involving Gems are being investigated on a case-by-case basis. Original Story The virtual “Holiday Auction” Steam first announced yesterday evening seemed like a cute idea at the time. For a limited time, users would be able to trade in unused or unwanted Steam Inventory items for “gems,” which could in turn, starting Monday, be used to bid against others on codes for 2,000 Steam games, 200,000 copies in all. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam’s first “Holiday Auction” halted after dupe bug ruins market [Updated]

Microsoft withdraws bad Windows 7 update that broke future Windows 7 updates

One of this week’s Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 7 has been withdrawn after some users discovered that it blocked installation of software containing digital signatures, including first- and third-party software, and even other Windows updates. The problem update is called KB3004394. The purpose of this update was to change how Windows updates its collection of root certificates used to authenticate SSL and TLS connections. Without the update, Windows is meant to poll for certificate updates once a week. With the update, this frequency is increased to once a day. Unfortunately, this apparently simple change has had severe consequences for some users of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, with users reporting that Windows Update, drivers from both NVIDIA and AMD, as well as some third-party software including Virtual Box are all unable to install correctly. The error code 0x8004FF91 seems to be a common finding. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft withdraws bad Windows 7 update that broke future Windows 7 updates

Synaptics builds a fingerprint reader right into its trackpads

Consider the trackpad. The ones in Windows laptops are rarely (if ever) their best feature, but they nevertheless remain ubiquitous. Synaptics is one of the biggest names in trackpads, and today it announced a new one called the ” SecurePad ” that integrates a fingerprint reader into the trackpad itself rather than as a separate component. The SecurePad will have a small, 4mm by 10mm sensor on the trackpad’s surface that can scan a “fingertip placed at any angle on the sensor.” Said sensor will be available in a variety of different Synaptics trackpads, including the TouchPad , ClickPad , and ForcePad , and those trackpads will all be available in a variety of sizes. LED lights will provide feedback and allow the sensor to be used in dark environments. Fingerprint data traveling between the sensor and the “host processor” is encrypted to prevent the information from being accessed by other apps (Apple uses a similar sort of encryption with TouchID , and it prevents user apps from accessing fingerprint data in transit). We’ve contacted Synaptics to see if storing and reading fingerprints securely requires a separate chip to be installed in laptops that use the SecurePad and to get more detail on how this encryption works—we’ll update this article if we receive a response. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Synaptics builds a fingerprint reader right into its trackpads

A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Not the silk casing discussed. Flickr user: CameliaTWU For a variety of medical reasons, it’s useful to implant devices inside the body. These devices may be needed to help regulate the cardiovascular system, or they can release drugs inside the body. Unfortunately, they’re also problematic. Once such a device has served its function, it must be removed, which necessitates another surgery. Plus, the presence can lead to complications such as infection, inflammation, and pain. To address some of these problems, scientists have developed new kinds of circuitry that can safely dissolve in the body. While these water-soluble devices don’t need to be removed, they come with a new problem—they dissolve too quickly for many purposes. So a group of researchers have now reported that they’ve developed a new way to control how long the devices last. The researchers propose that dissolving devices could be encased in a material made from silk protein and magnesium. The advantage of this approach comes from a property of the silk: its crystallinity. Different preparations of silk dissolve in water at different rates depending on their crystallinities. Altering this property allows researchers to choose among a range of dissolution times from only a few minutes up to a few weeks. This gives more control over the duration of the device, which is important, since different medical situations require devices that can last vastly different times. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Researchers have uncovered an extremely stealthy trojan for Linux systems that attackers have been using to siphon sensitive data from governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world. The previously undiscovered malware represents a missing puzzle piece tied to “Turla,” a so-called advanced persistent threat (APT) disclosed in August by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec . For at least four years, the campaign targeted government institutions, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies in more than 45 countries. The unknown attackers—who are probably backed by a nation-state, according to Symantec—were known to have infected several hundred Windows-based computers by exploiting a variety of vulnerabilities, at least two of which were zero-day bugs. The malware was notable for its use of a rootkit that made it extremely hard to detect. Now researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have detected Linux-based malware used in the same campaign . Turla was already ranked as one of the top-tier APTs, in the same league as the recently disclosed Regin  for instance. The discovery of the Linux component suggests it is bigger than previously thought and may presage the discovery of still more infected systems. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades

Rovio has confirmed that 110 people will lose their jobs as the Angry Birds maker also shuts down its game-development studio in Tampere, Finland. The layoffs, first announced in October, amount to about 14 percent of the company’s workforce. It had been expected that Rovio would make 130 people redundant but after a round of consultations this number has now been reduced. Rovio said that as a result of the redundancies “several positions” have been opened for internal applications. The actual number of employees out of work will depend on how many new internal positions are filled. The closing of its Tampere development studio means that Rovio will move all of its Finnish operation to its Espoo headquarters. The company shot to fame in 2009 when it released Angry Birds , its 52nd game . The title went on to become the most downloaded mobile game of all time. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades

Android 5.0.1 released; fixes inadvertent factory reset bug

It seems like every big software release is quickly followed up by a bug fix update, and it looks like that’s what Google has just pushed out to AOSP and the Nexus image page . Android 5.0.1 is the latest version of Lollipop, and is now available for select devices. On the factory images page, there are downloads for the Wi-Fi Nexus 9 , Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013) , and the Nexus 10 , and we’re expecting updates for the rest of the Nexus devices soon. Google hasn’t said anything official about the update, but Peter Kiddier, an intrepid commenter  over at Android Police , has picked out the new commits from the source code. The major showstopper looks to be this bug , which, in some instances, could cause stray input on the lock screen to erase everything on the device. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android 5.0.1 released; fixes inadvertent factory reset bug