Tag: facebook

Forbes Asks Readers To Disable Adblock, Serves Up Malvertising

Deathlizard writes with a report at Engadget that when this year’s “Forbes 30 Under 30” list came out , “it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list. On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Forbes Asks Readers To Disable Adblock, Serves Up Malvertising

New Dell Tech Support Scams Have Customers Worried Company Was Hacked

Trailrunner7 writes: A new twist on the fake tech support scam has arisen that has victims wondering whether Dell has been hacked.There has been a recent rash of calls to Dell customers in which the caller says he is from Dell itself and is able to identify the victim’s PC by model number and provide details of previous warranty and support interactions with the company. These are details that, it would seem, only Dell or perhaps its contractors would know. One person who was contacted by the scammers wrote a detailed description of the call, and said the caller had personal details that could not have been found online. Dell officials say they’re looking into it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Dell Tech Support Scams Have Customers Worried Company Was Hacked

Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets

An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10, 000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. “Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can’t see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Twitter To Extend 140-Character Limit For Tweets

Razer’s gaming Ultrabook lets you bring your own video card

If you’re a gamer, you don’t have it easy when buying laptops: you may want a sleek, lightweight Ultrabook when you’re traveling, but you also want the big, powerful desktop replacement when you’re home. What to do? Razer thinks you can have both. It’s launching the Blade Stealth , a 12.5-inch ultraportable with some proper gaming cred. Its centerpiece is an optional Thunderbolt 3 -powered dock, the Core (below), that lets you use most any modern desktop graphics card when integrated video won’t cut it — if you just have to play Battlefront at max detail with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti , you can. It has Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports, too, so you only need to plug in one cable to get all your usual peripherals. It’s still a solid machine even if you’re more interested in Facebook than Far Cry . The base $999 Blade Stealth begins with a dual-core 2.5GHz Core i7, 8GB of RAM, a 128GB solid-state drive and a quad HD (2, 560 x 1, 440) screen. It’s light at 2.75 pounds, and you’ll even see Razer’s multi-hued Chroma lighting on the keyboard. Spring for higher-end models (which top out at $1, 599) and you’ll score up to a 4K display and 512GB of flash storage. The Blade Stealth ships this month, and you can get it at Microsoft Stores in February if you need to see it in person. However, the Core doesn’t have either a ship date or a price. That makes it a real wildcard: if it’s expensive or takes forever to ship, the combo won’t be quite so alluring. Nonetheless, this may be your best shot at a best-of-both-worlds laptop. Source: Razer

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Razer’s gaming Ultrabook lets you bring your own video card

How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers

Trailrunner7 writes: Few, if any, companies or government agencies store more sensitive personal information than the IRS, and consumers have virtually no insight into how that data is used and secured. But, as the results of a recent Justice Department investigation show, when you start poking around in those dark corners, you sometimes find very ugly things. Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. The scheme relied upon one key ingredient for its success: access to taxpayers’ personal information. And it brought the alleged perpetrators more than $1 million. What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers

802.11ah Wi-Fi Standard Approved

alphadogg writes: A new wireless standard that extends Wi-Fi’s reach down into the 900MHz band will keep the 802.11 family at the center of the developing Internet of Things, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced today. 802.11ah, combines lower power requirements with a lower frequency, which means that those signals propagate better. That offers a much larger effective range than current Wi-Fi standards, which operate on 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, and lets the newer technology penetrate walls and doors more easily. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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802.11ah Wi-Fi Standard Approved

Four Elements Added To Periodic Table

physburn writes: The Guardian reports that four new elements, with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118, have been formally added to the periodic table. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has now initiated the process of formalizing names and symbols for these elements. “The RIKEN collaboration team in Japan have fulfilled the criteria for element Z=113 and will be invited to propose a permanent name and symbol.” 115 and 117, with the temporary names of ununpentium and ununseptium, will be named by researchers from Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore national labs in the U.S., as well as from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia. 118, known for now as ununoctium, will be named by the same group minus the Oak Ridge researchers. Professor Paul Karol said, “A particular difficulty in establishing these new elements is that they decay into hitherto unknown isotopes of slightly lighter elements that also need to be unequivocally identified, but in the future we hope to improve methods that can directly measure the atomic number, Z.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Four Elements Added To Periodic Table

Samsung’s ‘Rink’ Motion Controllers For Gear VR Look Pretty Great

 A few days ago, Samsung shared a few items that they’d be showing on the floor at CES in Las Vegas. One of them, which barely caused a blip on the radar was the “rink.” It’s Samsung’s motion controllers for the Gear VR, something that is sorely needed for their mobile virtual reality experience. If you remember, Oculus just shared that their own motion… Read More

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Samsung’s ‘Rink’ Motion Controllers For Gear VR Look Pretty Great

The Three Possible Classes of Interstellar Travel

An anonymous reader writes: The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly. Now, when we look to the stars, we know that potentially habitable worlds lurk throughout our galaxy, and our spaceflight capabilities can bring us there. But so far, it would only be a very long, lonely, one-way trip. This isn’t necessarily going to be the case forever, though, as physically feasible technology could get humans to another star within a single lifetime, and potentially groundbreaking technology might make the journey almost instantaneous. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Three Possible Classes of Interstellar Travel

State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified

An anonymous reader sends this report from NBC News: The State Department on Thursday released 5, 500 more pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails, but fell short of meeting a court-ordered target of making 82 percent of the former secretary of state’s messages public by the end of 2015. The email dump is the latest release from the private server Clinton used during her time as America’s top diplomat. The State Department said it failed to meet the court’s goal because of “the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule.” Portions of 275 documents in the batch were upgraded to classified, though they were not classified at the time they were sent to Clinton’s personal email, according to the State Department. In total, 1, 274 of her emails were retroactively classified by the government before their release. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified