Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Malicious ads appears on Last.fm after advertising network Zedo serves up malicious content. Courtesy Malwarebytes Google shut down malicious Web attacks coming from a compromised advertising network on Friday. The move follows a security firm’s analysis that found the ad platform, Zedo, serving up advertisements that attempted to infect the computers of visitors to major websites. In an attack that ended early Friday morning, visitors to Last.fm, The Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Post ran the risk of their computers becoming infected as Zedo  redirected visitors’ systems to malicious servers . Because the advertisements hosted on Zedo’s servers were distributed through Google’s Doubleclick, the attack reached millions of potential victims, Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes Labs, told Ars. Distributing malware through legitimate advertising networks, a technique known as “malvertising,” has become an increasingly popular way to compromise the systems of consumers and workers alike. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Charles Chan When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, “putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Alibaba’s IPO beat out  record IPOs like Visa’s $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors’ $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms). Earlier this month , the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share , as of this writing. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules

A federal judge in Texas has convicted a local man of conducting a massive Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme, and ordered him to pay $40.4 million. The court found on Friday that Tendon Shavers had created a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam—and it turned out they were right. The Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST) shut down in August 2012, and by June 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against its founder . In a statement at the time, 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.” Judge Amos Mazzant wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules

Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers

The official Android Twitter app running on Mac OS. Ron Amadeo If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the ” App Runtime for Chrome .” The release came with a lot of limitations—it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS. But a developer by the name of ” Vladikoff ” has slowly been stripping away these limits. First he figured out how to load  any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. Now he’s made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on  any desktop OS that Chrome runs on. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client , a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as “incompatible.” Vladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon , that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. ARC doesn’t run raw Android app packages (APKs)—they need to be converted into a Chrome extension—but Vladikoff has a tool called ” chromeos-apk ” that will take care of that, too. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers

Facebook acknowledges news feeds are bad at news, vows to improve

Facebook’s News Feed pays attention to trending topics, right, but news feeds have lately seemed to be lacking in news. Following criticism of the lack of current events in Facebook news feeds, Facebook has announced tweaks to its algorithms meant to help surface timely content. The company plans to do this by giving more value to posts that get interactions, such as likes and comments, and pushing posts when that activity seems to be cresting. In the blog post announcing the changes, Facebook wrote that it often prioritizes posts about “trending” topics that appear in the chart of hashtags posted on the right side of users’ homepages. Facebook also places higher value on posts according to how many interactions (likes, comments, shares) they receive. But as things are, some users have noted that Facebook seems to miss news waves , or is late to them, as with the fatal shooting of Mike Brown and the related protests that played out over weeks in August. When Facebook’s curation methods didn’t acknowledge those events, users noticed the news vacuum in their news feeds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook acknowledges news feeds are bad at news, vows to improve

Apple releases OS X 10.9.5 with fixes, new code signing requirements [updated]

Yesterday evening Apple released OS X 10.9.5 to the general public, the fifth major update for OS X Mavericks. As usual, the update comes with a handful of fixes for user-facing features as well as a small pile of security updates . Many of these security patches are also available for OS X 10.7.5 and 10.8.5 in separate updates. Like OS X 10.9.4 , the update focuses on smaller problems that affect a subset of Macs. The new features include Safari 7.0.6, improved “reliability for VPN connections that use USB smart cards for authentication,” and better reliability for connecting to file servers that use the SMB protocol. For businesses using OS X, the update fixes a problem that could keep system admins from “performing some administrative tasks successfully” on larger groups of Macs, and it also speeds up authentication “when roaming on 802.1x networks which use EAP-TLS.” Among the security updates are fixes for Bluetooth, CoreGraphics generally and the Intel graphics driver specifically, and OS X’s version of OpenSSL among many others. The latter problems were fixed by updating from OpenSSL version 0.9.8y to 0.9.8za. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases OS X 10.9.5 with fixes, new code signing requirements [updated]

Artificial sweeteners may leave their users glucose intolerant

Flickr user Bukowsky18 People who are watching their weight will often opt for a diet soda, reasoning that the fewer calories, the better. But the availability of drinks and foods made with artificial sweeteners like saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame hasn’t seemed to help much with our booming obesity levels. Now, some researchers might have identified a reason for this: the sweeteners leave their users with elevated blood glucose levels. But they don’t seem to act directly on human metabolism. Instead, the effects come through alterations in the bacterial populations that live inside us. The paper that describes this work, which was performed by a large collaboration of researchers from Israel, is being released by Nature today. The researchers note that epidemiological studies about the effects of artificial sweeteners have produced mixed results; some show a benefit, while others indicate that they’re associated with weight gain and diabetes risk. Given that human populations haven’t given us a clear answer, the researchers turned to mice, where they could do a carefully controlled study. They started taking a group of genetically matched mice and spiking their drinking water with either sucrose or a commercial prep of an artificial sweetener (either saccharin, sucralose, or aspartame). After five weeks, they checked the blood glucose levels of these animals. Eleven weeks later, the groups that were given the artificial sweeteners all had elevated blood glucose levels compared to those that received sucrose. This is typically a sign of metabolic problems, most often caused by insulin losing its effectiveness. It can be a precursor to type 2 diabetes. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Artificial sweeteners may leave their users glucose intolerant

Why T-Mobile needs Wi-Fi calling: its network can’t match AT&T and Verizon

T-Mobile’s “data strong network.” T-Mobile T-Mobile US’ latest “Un-carrier” move is just about the most amazing thing ever, CEO John Legere said last week. “This is like adding millions of towers to our network in a single day,” Legere boasted in a press release . “The difference between us and the traditional carriers is that they’ll do everything they can to make more money off you. We’ll do everything we can to solve your problems.” The innovation is actually something that T-Mobile has had since 2007: Wi-Fi calling. It makes sense for T-Mobile to promote Wi-Fi calling now, given that Apple is adding the capability to iPhones in iOS 8. The initiative has some nice benefits for customers—T-Mobile offered to upgrade all customers to phones that can make Wi-Fi calls and is giving out a free “Personal CellSpot,” a Wi-Fi router that prioritizes voice calls. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why T-Mobile needs Wi-Fi calling: its network can’t match AT&T and Verizon

Boeing and SpaceX getting NASA money for manned space launches [Updated]

SpaceX’s Dragon V2. Megan Geuss Today, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced that there were two winners in the campaign to become the first company to launch astronauts to low-Earth orbit: Boeing and SpaceX. The two will receive contracts that total $6.8 billion dollars to have hardware ready for a 2017 certification—a process that will include one crewed flight to the International Space Station (ISS). In announcing the plan, Bolden quoted President Obama in saying, “The greatest nation on earth should not be dependent on any other nation to get to space.” And he promoted the commercial crew program as a clear way of ending a reliance on Russian launch vehicles to get to the ISS. But Bolden and others at the press conference were also looking beyond that; several speakers, including Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana and astronaut Mike Fincke, mentioned that the ultimate goal is Mars. To that end, Bolden emphasized that NASA is still doing its own vehicle and rocket development. The Orion crew capsule, intended to be suitable for missions deeper into the Solar System, recently underwent a splashdown test in the Pacific. Its first test flight aboard a Delta IV rocket is scheduled for this December. Work on the Space Launch System, a heavy lift vehicle that can transport the additional hardware needed for deep space missions, was also mentioned. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Boeing and SpaceX getting NASA money for manned space launches [Updated]

Watch out, California’s self-driving car permits take effect today

Audi On Tuesday, permits for self-driving cars issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) took effect for the first time. Applications for the permits began in May 2014. Only the Volkswagen Group (which includes Volkswagen and Audi cars among others), Mercedes Benz, and Google have been issued permits for their 29 total vehicles. Overall, that represents a miniscule fraction of all 32 million registered cars in the Golden State. Bernard Soriano, a DMV spokesman, told Ars that Tuesday also marked the first time those numbers had been disclosed outside of the agency. “There are a handful of different companies that are completing their application,” he added, noting that the DMV expected to issue more permits soon. “They’re all large automakers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Watch out, California’s self-driving car permits take effect today