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Prosecutors: ex-LulzSec hacker “Sabu” helped authorities stop 300+ cyberattacks

The much delayed sentencing of former LulzSec hacker-turned-FBI informant Hector “Sabu” Monsegur is set to take place next week. But before any decisions are made public, new court documents (PDF) show Monsegur has helped the feds disrupt more than 300 attacks against targets ranging from the US military to NASA, Congress to private companies. “The amount of loss prevented by Monsegur’s actions is difficult to fully quantify, but even a conservative estimate would yield a loss prevention figure in the millions of dollars,” the document stated. The tale of Sabu’s arrest and LulzSec’s fall: FBI still needs Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, sentencing delayed (again) “Literally” the day he was arrested, hacker “Sabu” helped the FBI LulzSec leader “Sabu” worked with FBI since last summer FBI names, arrests Anon who infiltrated its secret conference call Inside the hacking of Stratfor: the FBI’s case against Antisec member Anarchaos All the latest on the unmasking of LulzSec leader “Sabu,” arrests Stakeout: how the FBI tracked and busted a Chicago Anon Doxed: how Sabu was outed by former Anons long before his arrest Anonymous attacks security firm as revenge for LulzSec arrests “Everything incriminating has been burned”: Anons fight panic after Sabu betrayal Monsegur assisted in high-profile hacks of security firm HBGary and others as a member of LulzSec, a sect of Anonymous. He began cooperating with the FBI in June 2011 after his arrest at the Jacob Riis public housing complex in New York City. His work for the feds began immediately . Eventually Monsegur helped the government build cases against numerous Anonymous hackers, including Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond . He apparently also assisted the government in its investigation of Wikileaks . According to the New York Times , prosecutors filed the new documents because they are asking Judge Loretta A. Preska for leniency in light of Monsegur’s “extraordinary cooperation.” Sentencing in Monsegur’s case is currently scheduled for Tuesday in a Federal District Court in Manhattan. But while some of the other hackers in the LulzSec saga have faced steep penalties (for example, Hammond is serving a 10-year sentence), the government has asked for Monsegur to only be sentenced to time served— just seven months . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prosecutors: ex-LulzSec hacker “Sabu” helped authorities stop 300+ cyberattacks

Apple will fix iMessage bug that makes it harder to leave the service

Andrew Cunningham iPhone users (and ex-iPhone users) attempting to sign out of Apple’s iMessage service recently began running into a nasty bug. Signing out of iMessage means that iPhones trying to text your number should seamlessly switch back to using SMS. However, this hasn’t been happening lately—instead, these iMessages continue to be sent as iMessages. They never actually make it to their destination, and neither the sender nor the receiver is given any indication that the message has failed. Apple acknowledged the bug in a statement to Re/code this morning , noting that it has “recently fixed a server-side iMessage bug which was causing an issue for some users,” and that an additional software update was being planned to fix more problems. Signing out of the iMessage service has always been more difficult than enabling it, and I say that as someone who recently disabled iMessage to make jumping between iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and other mobile operating systems easier. In my case, iMessages sent to my newly disconnected number would simply fail to send, and the problem only worked itself out after I changed my Apple ID password (thereby signing all of my devices out of the service), disassociating my phone number from my Apple ID, and then calling Apple support about the problem. This new bug sounds worse, since message senders don’t even know that the texts aren’t arriving at their destination. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple will fix iMessage bug that makes it harder to leave the service

Sailor convicted of hacking websites from aboard aircraft carrier

The USS Harry S. Truman apparently had adequate Internet bandwidth for a sailor to hack websites in his spare time. US Navy A 27-year old now-former sailor pleaded guilty in a federal court in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 20 to charges of conspiracy after leading a band of hackers in the US and Canada from onboard an aircraft carrier . Nicholas Paul Knight, who was the system administrator for the USS Harry S. Truman’s nuclear reactors department, was caught trying to hack into a Navy database while at sea. Knight and a co-defendant—Daniel Kreuger of Salem, Illinois—were part of “Team Digi7al,” a collective of hackers who attacked at least 24 websites in 2012 in search of personal identifying information. Knight himself hacked the Navy’s Smart Web Move website , a system for sailors to manage household moves during transfers between stations; that hack included about 220,000 service members’ Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and other personal data. Other sites attacked by the group included ones operated by the Department of Homeland Security, the Library of Congress, Stanford University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Toronto Police Service, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sailor convicted of hacking websites from aboard aircraft carrier

Airbnb gives up customer data to NY attorney general

Airbnb Home renting company Airbnb announced Wednesday that under pressure from the New York attorney general’s office, it will hand over the anonymized personal data of its New York hosts to the state. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed three years’ worth of data in 2013 in an effort to suss out whether Airbnb users are running “illegal hotels” and to determine if Airbnb’s business model and platform comply with the law. Schneiderman stated his suspicions in April that Airbnb hosts in New York operate residences or parts of their homes like hotels—but without the fire, safety, and tax regulations normally applied to hotels. Airbnb hosts could also be in violation of a 2010 law that prohibits New Yorkers from renting entire apartments for less than 29 consecutive days. Schneiderman claimed that Airbnb sells itself to investors as a hotel network, but it attempts to keep that pitch out of the public sphere for fear of incurring legal hotel status. The New York Supreme Court rejected Schneiderman’s subpoena request on May 13, “but the judge’s ruling also made it clear that he would accept a new, narrower subpoena and require Airbnb to turn over personal information about hosts if the Attorney General’s Office made some changes to their demands,” wrote Airbnb in its blog post Wednesday. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Airbnb gives up customer data to NY attorney general

Missing features we’d like to see in the next version of OS X

It’s only been about seven months since Apple released OS X 10.9, the latest and greatest version of its Mac operating system. But the yearly upgrade cycle means that unless something unexpected happens, Apple will tell us about OS X 10.10 at the traditional keynote next month on the first morning of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The operating system is over 13 years old and it’s come a long way since those first versions , but it’s still not perfect. What areas do we think Apple should focus on in 10.10? Think of the SSDs Isn’t it time our modern hard drives got a modern filesystem? The latest Macs may have solid state drives that can read and write over 700 megabytes per second over a direct PCI Express connection, but all that data is still organized by a file system from the previous millennium: HFS+. There’s something to be said for using stable, battle-hardened code for the file system, which is probably the most critical part of the operating system. Unfortunately, Apple’s current HFS+ implementation isn’t as stable as it should be, much to the chagrin of Ars’ OS X reviewer extraordinaire John Siracusa. With the introduction of a logical volume manager—Core Storage—it looks like Apple has found a way to innovate in the area of storage without having to replace HFS+. One of the big missing features in HFS+ is snapshots . Time Machine, for example, works per-file. Changing a few bytes in the middle of a large file means that the entire file is copied during the next backup. With snapshots, that’s not necessary: multiple snapshots share the unmodified disk blocks. As such, snapshots could be implemented in Core Storage rather than in the file system. This would allow Time Machine backups to be much faster and more efficient. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Missing features we’d like to see in the next version of OS X

Wi-Fi networks are wasting a gigabit—but multi-user beamforming will save the day

Aurich Lawson Wi-Fi equipment based on the new 802.11ac standard—often called Gigabit Wi-Fi —has been on the market for nearly two years. These products offer greater bandwidth and other improvements over gear based on the older 802.11n specification, but they don’t implement one of the most impressive features of 11ac. It was simply too complicated to deploy all the upgrades at once, hardware makers say. As a result, 11ac networks actually waste a lot of capacity when serving devices like smartphones and tablets. This shortcoming should be fixed over the next year with new networking equipment and upgrades to end-user devices. Once everything is in place, Wi-Fi networks will be better able to serve lots of devices at once, particularly the mobile devices that every single person in the US seemingly has in his or her hands every minute of the day.The soon-to-be-deployed technology is called MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple-input and multiple-output), which is like a wireless “switch” that sends different data to different receivers at the same time. It’s powered by multi-user beamforming, an improvement over the single-user beamforming found in first-generation 11ac products. MU-MIMO will let wireless access points send data streams of up to 433Mbps to at least three users simultaneously, for a total of 1.3Gbps or more. First-generation 11ac equipment without MU-MIMO could send those streams of data simultaneously, but only to one device—and only if that device was capable of receiving multiple streams. Many computers could handle the influx of data, but smartphones and tablets generally couldn’t. That meant they could only receive one stream (occasionally two) because of power limitations. Read 37 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wi-Fi networks are wasting a gigabit—but multi-user beamforming will save the day

For Do Not Call violations, Sprint will pay FCC $7.5M in largest ever settlement

Hunter Edwards On Monday, Sprint agreed to pay the Federal Communications Commission $7.5 million to resolve violations of the Do Not Call registry—the largest settlement payout ever. The program first began in 2003 as a way to allow Americans to opt out of unsolicited sales calls. According to the FCC, Sprint will also put into effect a “robust compliance plan,” designate a new senior manager to deal with compliance, retrain its employees, and report any further noncompliance to the agency, among other necessary actions. “We expect companies to respect the privacy of consumers who have opted out of marketing calls,” said Travis LeBlanc, acting chief of the Enforcement Bureau, in a statement . “When a consumer tells a company to stop calling or texting with promotional pitches, that request must be honored. Today’s settlement leaves no question that protecting consumer privacy is a top enforcement priority.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Urine and the bladder are not sterile, contain bacteria

Gray’s Anatomy No, urine is not sterile, according to a study presented this week by researchers from the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University. Instead, the bodily excretion does contain a diverse array of bacteria that can vary depending on bladder condition. Up until now, the types of bacteria present have been hard to detect because they don’t grow in urine cultures. That urine is not sterile is not actually news; the same medical school reported findings in 2012 suggesting that urine can contain bacteria when drawn directly from the bladder. But the study may surprise many due to the deeply entrenched belief , even in the medical community, that urine is bacteria-free and thus safe to use in a number of activities, from drinking to rinsing wounds in a pinch. A commonly traded rule of thumb is that, while the initial part of a stream of urine contains bacteria washed from the urethra, the “mid-stream” is safely sterile. This is not so, or at least it’s not entirely reliable information. The two studies, from 2013 and 2012, looked only at samples from women. The 2013 study compared samples from women with and without overactive bladder disorder (OAB) and found different types of bacteria in both types of samples, including Streptococcus and Staphylococcus. The authors of the study suggested that the presence of certain types of bacteria in women with OAB could be causing their symptoms, and treating their presence could help with their condition. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Urine and the bladder are not sterile, contain bacteria

Intel CEO: Delayed next-gen Broadwell CPUs will be here for holidays

One of the few looks we’ve gotten at a Broadwell CPU so far. Intel New CPUs and chipsets from Intel normally go hand-in-hand, but earlier this month when the company announced its 9-series chipsets , all we got was a slightly faster clock speed bump to Haswell . News of truly new CPUs based on the upcoming “Broadwell” architecture was nowhere to be found, and we’ve generally heard very little about Broadwell aside from an announcement of a delay into the second half of 2014. There are many months in the second half of 2014, but Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich got a little more specific in a statement to Reuters today . “I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday,” said Krzanich. “Back to school—that’s a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That’s going to be tough.” This means we’ll most likely see Broadwell chips (and, more importantly, new devices from OEMs that can use Broadwell chips) sometime between September and early December. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Aurich Lawson / PCCare247 Sitting in front of her PC, the phone in her hand connected to a tech support company half a world away, Sheryl Novick was about to get scammed. The company she had reached, PCCare247, was based in India but had built a lucrative business advertising over the Internet to Americans, encouraging them to call for tech support. After glimpsing something odd on her computer, Novick did so. “I saw some sort of pop-up and I don’t know if there’s a problem,” she told a PCCare247 tech named Yakeen. He offered to check the “management part” of her computer for possible problems. Read 61 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers