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How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

Surveillance footage of one of the robbers. On February 18, 2010, the FBI field office in Denver issued a “wanted” notice for two men known as “the High Country Bandits”—a rather grandiose name for a pair of middle-aged white men who had been knocking down rural banks in the northern Arizona and Colorado, grabbing a few thousand dollars from a teller’s cash drawer, and sometimes escaping on a stolen all terrain vehicle (ATV). In each of their 16 robberies, the bandits had a method: “The unknown male identified as suspect number one often enters the banks in rural locations near closing time and brandishes a black semi-automatic handgun. Suspect number one then demands all the money from the teller drawers. He obtains an undisclosed amount of money, puts it in a bag, orders everyone on the ground, then exits the banks with a second suspect. They have been seen leaving the banks on a green or maroon four-wheel ATV with suspect number two driving.” Investigators had bank surveillance footage of the robberies, but the bandits wore jackets, ski masks, and gloves and proved hard to track down. It wasn’t for a lack of witnesses or police effort, either. At one 2009 robbery in Pinetop, Arizona, for instance, the bandits got away with $3, 827. Witnesses saw a man run from the bank and into a residential area, “looking around as if he were lost.” Witnesses later saw the man tear out of the area on an ATV driven by another man. Police followed their escape route and found the spot where the ATV left the road through a freshly-cut barbed wire fence. The cops followed the tracks 17 miles northwest of town before losing the trail completely. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand’s Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents. The relevant clause of the patent bill actually states that a computer program is “not an invention.” Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty which requires patents to be “available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology.” Processes will still be patentable if the computer program is merely a way of implementing a patentable process. But patent claims that cover computer programs “as such” will not be allowed. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents

Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

So far, Bethesda Softworks (and parent company Zenimax Media) has bucked industry trends by planning a $15 per month subscription for its upcoming The Elder Scrolls Online , adding a bit of insult to injury by including a real-money shop for nonessential items . Now the company says it’s trying to get Microsoft to agree to waive the additional requirement of an Xbox Live Gold subscription for Xbox One players, though without much success so far. Microsoft currently requires a $60/year Xbox Live Gold account to play any and all online games on the system, even otherwise free-to-play titles like World of Tanks . Speaking to the UK’s official Xbox Magazine , though, Zenimax Online Creative Director Paul Sage says the company has “been in talks with Microsoft” about getting a waiver for The Elder Scrolls Online since the game already has its own subscription fee. “[We’re] seeing whether or not there’s any room to change their minds about that, for folks who are only paying The Elder Scrolls Online and don’t want to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription, just to pay The Elder Scrolls Online , ” Sage said. So far Microsoft has been less than responsive to these concerns, reportedly answering, “that’s the way it works, ” but Sage promises that Bethesda will “keep on pushing” on the issue. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bethesda “pushing” against Xbox Live Gold fee for Elder Scrolls Online

In surveillance era, clever trick enhances secrecy of iPhone text messages

Creative Heroes A security researcher has developed a technique that could significantly improve the secrecy of text messages sent in near real time on iPhones. The technique, which will debut in September in an iOS app called TextSecure, will also be folded into a currently available Android app by the same name. The cryptographic property known as perfect forward secrecy has always been considered important by privacy advocates, but it has taken on new urgency following the recent revelations of widespread surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. Rather than use the same key to encrypt multiple messages—the way, say PGP- and S/MIME-protected e-mail programs do—applications that offer perfect forward secrecy generate ephemeral keys on the fly . In the case of some apps, including the OTR protocol for encrypting instant messages , each individual message within a session is encrypted with a different key. The use of multiple keys makes eavesdropping much harder. Even if the snoop manages to collect years worth of someone’s encrypted messages, he would have to crack hundreds or possibly hundreds of thousands of keys to transform the data into the “plaintext” that a human could make sense of. What’s more, even if the attacker obtains or otherwise compromises the computer that his target used to send the encrypted messages, it won’t be of much help if the target has deleted the messages. Since the keys used in perfect forward secrecy are ephemeral, they aren’t stored on the device. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In surveillance era, clever trick enhances secrecy of iPhone text messages

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

Substantial news out of Redmond this morning: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is retiring within the next 12 months. Ballmer has been a prominent fixture at Microsoft since joining the company in 1980. Prior to becoming the CEO, Ballmer was active in a number of Microsoft divisions, with a particular focus on the sales side of the house. He took over chief executive duties when Bill Gates stepped down in January 2000. Though much pilloried in the tech press for Microsoft’s more recent missteps, including Windows RT and, most famously, Windows Vista, Ballmer’s tenure as CEO has been a positive one for Microsoft—at least from a revenue perspective. Under his leadership, Microsoft’s net income has increased to $23 billion, with annual revenue climbing from $25 billion to $70 billion, with an average annual profit growth of over 16 percent. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

After “technical glitch” halts Nasdaq for hours, trading finally resumes

Trading was halted on the Nasdaq stock market for a few hours on Thursday after what was described as a “technical glitch.” No other detailed technical information has been released other than that the snafu involved a problem with the “quote dissemination system” and a “data feed issue.” The exchange , on which many major tech stocks are traded, re-opened later in the afternoon. As the modern stock market operates almost entirely by computer and happens with crazy-fast speed, this problem is troubling, particularly when there have been a few major technological problems in recent years. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After “technical glitch” halts Nasdaq for hours, trading finally resumes

Hyperloop—a theoretical, 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets

Concept sketches of the Hyperloop passenger capsules; note the air intake noses. Tesla Motors The proposed design for the “Hyperloop, ” an ultra-fast transit system that would run between San Francisco and Los Angeles, was revealed today on Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors website. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, describes a system that moves pods under low pressure through a tube between the two cities following the I-5 freeway, all within a 56-page PDF document . The Hyperloop would consist of aluminum pods inside a set of two steel tubes, one for each direction of travel. These are connected at each terminus. The tubes would be positioned on top of pylons spaced 100 feet apart holding the tube 20 feet in the air, and the tube would be covered by solar arrays to generate its own power. Inside the tubes, the pods would carry people up to 760 miles per hour. The pods would each carry 28 passengers, departing every two minutes from either location (or every 30 seconds at peak times). So each pod would have about 23 miles between each other while traversing the tube. The transport capacity would therefore be about 840 passengers per hour. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hyperloop—a theoretical, 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets

“Hand of Thief” banking trojan doesn’t do Windows—but it does Linux

The administration panel for Hand of Thief. RSA Signaling criminals’ growing interest in attacking non-Windows computers, researchers have discovered banking fraud malware that targets people using the open-source Linux operating system. Hand of Thief, as researchers from security firm RSA have dubbed it , sells for about $2, 000 in underground Internet forums and boasts its own support and sales agents. Its functionality—consisting of form grabbers and backdoor capabilities—is rudimentary compared to Windows banking trojans spawned from the Citadel or Blackhole exploit kits, but that’s likely to change. RSA researcher Limor Kessem said she expects Hand of Thief to become a full-blown banking trojan that includes more advanced features such as the ability to inject attacker-controlled content into trusted bank webpages. “Although Hand of Thief comes to the underground at a time when commercial trojans are high in demand, writing malware for the Linux OS is uncommon, and for good reason, ” Kessem wrote. “In comparison to Windows, Linux’s user base is smaller, considerably reducing the number of potential victims and thereby the potential fraud gains.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

If the bottom is a layer of graphene in a super capacitor, then storage can be increased by making the solution above it as low-volume as possible. Lawrence Livermore National Lab Individual pieces of graphene have some pretty amazing properties, but finding a way to produce bulk materials that make good use of those properties has been rather challenging. Now, researchers have figured out a way to make graphene-based electrodes in bulk through a process so simple that it can be adapted to the manufacturing techniques that we currently use to make paper. And the resulting capacitors, at least in these test cases, had storage capacities that approached those of lead-acid batteries. Those of us who have taken basic physics tend to think of capacitors as two parallel, charge-holding plates, since that’s how they’re taught. But electrochemical capacitors perform a similar trick on a much smaller scale, by having the charges held by individual ions that absorb to an electrode. To boost capacity, the simplest thing to do is to increase the surface area for the ions to interact with. That’s why graphene seems so appealing; since it’s only a single atom thick, it should be possible to stick a tremendous amount of surface into a relatively small volume. The problem, however, has been getting the ions into the graphene itself in order for them to interact. Once the graphene is prepared, lots of factors like pore size and inter-sheet spacing come into play, since these control how quickly ions can get into the graphene. A team at Australia’s Monash University came up with an easy solution to this: put the ions in place during the manufacturing process. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

Alleged Tor hidden service operator busted for child porn distribution

Catherine Scott On Friday, Eric Eoin Marques, a 28 year-old Dublin resident, was arrested on a warrant from the US on charges that he is, in the words of a FBI agent to an Irish court , “the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.” The arrest coincides with the disappearance of a vast number of ” hidden services ” hosted on Tor, the anonymizing encrypted network. Marques is alleged to be the founder of Freedom Hosting, a major hidden services hosting provider. While Marques’ connection to Freedom Hosting was not brought up in court, he has been widely connected to the service—as well as the Tormail anonymized e-mail service and a Bitcoin exchange and escrow service called Onionbank—in discussions on Tor-based news and Wiki sites. All those services are now offline. And prior to disappearing, the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting were also distributing malware that may have been used to expose the users of those services. Tor hidden services are a lesser known part of the Tor “darknet.” They are anonymized Web sites, mail hosts, and other services which can only be reached by computers connected to Tor, or through a Tor hidden services proxy website, such as tor2web.org , and they have host names ending in .onion. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alleged Tor hidden service operator busted for child porn distribution

Ken May

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