Older iPhones won’t be banned as Obama Administration vetoes ITC decision

On Saturday, the Obama Administration vetoed the International Trade Commission’s potential ban on a few models of older Apple phones and tablets. Samsung opened the case against Apple with the ITC in 2011, and the commission decided in June that Apple had, in fact, infringed upon a Samsung patent, US Patent No 7, 706, 348 . The decision garnered attention because the patent is considered essential to industry standards, meaning Samsung is required to license the patent (rather than sit on it, or refuse license it to some competitors). The ITC ended up recommending a ban be placed on the infringing products brought forward in the case, which included AT&T models of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G. In June of 2013, Ars wrote  of the ITC’s ban: ”The decision can only be appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation’s top patent court. Theoretically, the President can also block an ITC-ordered import ban, but that hasn’t happened since the 1980s.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Older iPhones won’t be banned as Obama Administration vetoes ITC decision

Raspberry Pi and Arduino to get cellular access with SIM card add-on

SparqEE A new Kickstarter project aims to give Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards Internet access throughout the world with an add-on that allows integration with a SIM card. SparqEE Cellv1.0 would need to raise $70, 000 to get the technology to backers, with donors pledging at least $69 to get the device. SparqEE CEO Christopher Higgins, an engineer, said he plans to take the Kickstarter page live on August 20. For now, it’s viewable in a draft form so that people can provide feedback. Cellv1.0 consists of a board with a cellular chip, a power supply, and a SIM holder, as well as a “jumper board” that “includes level shifters for whatever voltage levels you’re using (ex. 3.3V, 5V, or other).” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Raspberry Pi and Arduino to get cellular access with SIM card add-on

Trusting iPhones plugged into bogus chargers get a dose of malware

The Mactans charger uses a BeagleBoard for its computational power. Billy Lau, Yeongjin Jang, and Chengyu Song Plugging your phone into a charger should be pretty safe to do. It should fill your phone with electricity, not malware. But researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology have produced fake chargers they’ve named Mactans that do more than just charge your phone: they install custom, malicious applications onto iPhones. Their bogus chargers—which do, incidentally, charge the phone—contain small computers instead of mere transformers. The iPhone treats these computers just as it does any other computer; instead of just charging, it responds to USB commands. It turns out that the iPhone is very trusting of USB-attached computers; as long as the iPhone is unlocked (if only for a split second) while attached to a USB host, then the host has considerable control over the iPhone. The researchers used their USB host to install an app package onto any iPhone that gets plugged in. iOS guards against installation of arbitrary applications with a strict sandboxing system, a feature that has led to the widespread practice of jailbreaking. This attack doesn’t need to jailbreak, however. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Trusting iPhones plugged into bogus chargers get a dose of malware

Rideshare drivers given citizen arrest by SF International Airport officials

Hopefully none of these cars at SFO are in for a citizen arrest. dreamagicjp Officials at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) say they have been making citizen arrests of rideshare drivers throughout July. Airport spokesperson Doug Yakel told Ars on Tuesday that airport officials have made 12 such arrests since July 10. Rideshare companies like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar use mobile apps to help city dwellers find rides in areas where cabs are scarce or expensive. But taxi service is heavily regulated in big cities nationwide, and rideshare companies have ruffled feathers by operating outside of traditional restraints placed on taxi drivers. Cities like New York and Chicago have made it difficult for rideshare companies to operate, and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) slapped Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar with $20, 000 fines in November 2012 (although the commission later rescinded the fines ). In December of last year, the CPUC issued a proposal for examining the legality of the rideshare services, and the commission is expected to revisit the issue sometime this week. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Rideshare drivers given citizen arrest by SF International Airport officials

Man gets ransomware porn pop-up, goes to cops, gets arrested on child porn charges

A man from just outside of Washington, DC turned himself in to local police—with his computer in tow—after receiving a pop-up message from what he believed was an “FBI Warning” telling him to click to pay a fine online, or face an investigation. While specific details on the case are scant as of yet, it appears that the suspect here fell victim to a type of ransomware that has been proliferating for years now—raking in millions for the scammers behind it. Police said Jay Matthew Riley, 21, of Woodbridge, Virginia, walked into Prince William’s Garfield District Station on July 1, 2013 to “inquire if he had any warrants on file for child pornography.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Man gets ransomware porn pop-up, goes to cops, gets arrested on child porn charges

LibreOffice 4.1 is released, borrows new sidebar from OpenOffice

LibreOffice 4.1 was released today, with the open source office suite borrowing a new sidebar from its rival, OpenOffice. As we wrote yesterday , the sidebar was debuted in OpenOffice 4.0 after being contributed by IBM developers. In LibreOffice, it’s only an experimental feature thus far, and it can be enabled in the settings. Enabling the sidebar. “LibreOffice 4.1 is … importing some AOO [Apache OpenOffice] features, including the Symphony sidebar, which is considered experimental, ” the Document Foundation said in the LibreOffice 4.1 announcement . “LibreOffice developers are working at the integration with the widget layout technique (which will make it dynamically resizeable and consistent with the behaviour of LibreOffice dialog windows).” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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LibreOffice 4.1 is released, borrows new sidebar from OpenOffice

Poker player who won $1.5 million charged with running Android malware ring

A man who has won about $1.5 million in poker tournaments has been arrested and charged with running an operation that combined spam, Android malware, and a fake dating website to scam victims out of $3.9 million, according to Symantec. Symantec worked with investigators from the Chiba Prefectural Police in Japan, who earlier this week “arrested nine individuals for distributing spam that included e-mails with links to download Android.Enesoluty —a malware used to collect contact details stored on the owner’s device, ” Symantec wrote in its blog . Android.Enesoluty is a Trojan distributed as an Android application file. It steals information and sends it to computers run by hackers. It was discovered by security researchers in September 2012. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Poker player who won $1.5 million charged with running Android malware ring

Congress nearly shuts down NSA dragnet, in sudden 217-205 vote

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) sponsored the amendment that led to today’s close vote. Gage Skidmore / flickr A critical vote for intelligence funding today showed that Congress is sharply divided on the issue of NSA domestic surveillance. This afternoon, the House of Representatives narrowly shot down an amendment that would have stopped the NSA from engaging in any warrantless collection of telephone data on a 217-205 vote. The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and co-sponsored by John Conyers (D-MI). The summary of the amendment read: Ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act. Bars the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215. Amash and Conyers sponsored a similar bill several weeks ago, but there’s been little movement on it. Their strategy this week was to propose the change as an amendment to a $600 billion defense spending bill being considered this week. That strategy quickly pushed the surveillance issue to the House floor. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Congress nearly shuts down NSA dragnet, in sudden 217-205 vote

Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

If you don’t follow the often-shady world of Bitcoin , you may not be familiar with Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST), a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam. BTCST shut down in August 2012, and on Wednesday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged its founder, Trendon Shavers, with running a Ponzi scheme. In a statement , the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700, 000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” The government’s financial regulator alleges that Shavers violated a number of federal financial regulations. In court documents , the SEC wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

Apple blames days-long Developer Center outage on “intruder”

Apple Since Thursday, registered Apple developers trying to download OS X 10.9, iOS 7, or any other Apple software from the company’s developer portal have been greeted with a notice that the site was down for “maintenance.” Today, the company issued a brief statement (above) blaming the extended outage on an “intruder, ” and that Apple “[has] not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed.” The notice says that “sensitive” information could not be accessed by the intruder because it was encrypted, and the company told MacWorld that the system in question is not used to store “customer information, ” application code, or data stored by applications. Anecdotal reports (including one from our own Jacqui Cheng ) point to a sudden spike in password reset requests for some Apple IDs, suggesting that email addresses have in fact been accessed and distributed but that passwords were not. In any case, we generally recommend that users change their passwords when any breach (or suspected breach) like this one occurs. “In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database, ” the statement said. Apple has also given week-long extensions to any developers’ whose program subscriptions were scheduled to lapse during the outage, which will keep those developers’ applications from being delisted in Apple’s various App Stores. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Apple blames days-long Developer Center outage on “intruder”