fnself-program1 – Page 10 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Feds bugged steps of Silicon Valley courthouse

(credit: James Vaughan ) Defense attorneys have asked a federal judge to throw out more than 200 hours of conversations FBI agents recorded using hidden microphones planted on the steps of a California county courthouse. The lawyers are representing defendants accused of engaging in an illicit real estate bid-rigging and fraud conspiracy. The steps to the San Mateo County courthouse are frequently the scene of public auctions for foreclosed homes. Federal prosecutors have admitted that on at least 31 occasions in 2009 and 2010, FBI agents used concealed microphones to record auction participants as they spoke, often in hushed voices with partners, attorneys, and others. Because the federal agents didn’t obtain a court order, the defense attorneys argue the bugging violated Constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In a court brief filed Friday in the case, attorneys wrote: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Chrome to end support for Windows XP, Vista, and OS X 10.8 on April 2016

If you’re on an older operating system, your Chrome could stop getting updates in just a few months. Google’s official Chrome Blog announced it will be ending support for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 in April 2016. Browsers on those operating systems will continue to work, but they will stop getting updates from Google. For Windows XP, this is yet another stay of execution from Google, mirroring Microsoft’s continually extended support for the OS that just won’t die. Chrome support for XP was originally stated to end along with Microsoft’s in April 2014. Google then extended that to ” at least April 2015 ,” then all of 2015 , and now it’s going to hang around for the next five months. On the Mac side of things, Apple usually supports its three newest operating systems. So official support for 10.8 ended when 10.11 El Capitan was released, and 10.6 and 10.7 have long been put to rest by Apple. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chrome to end support for Windows XP, Vista, and OS X 10.8 on April 2016

AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

AT&T’s updated GigaPower coverage map. (credit: AT&T ) AT&T yesterday announced expansions of its gigabit fiber Internet service into parts of 23 cities and towns. The new markets are mostly in the suburbs of big cities where AT&T already offered its fastest broadband. For example, AT&T previously brought its “U-verse with GigaPower” service to Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Nashville, and Orlando. The expansion this week brings the service into a bunch of cities and towns within the larger metro areas. Pricing for the Internet-only 1Gbps package is either $70 a month or $110 a month, depending on where you live. As we’ve reported previously, AT&T tends to match Google Fiber’s $70 pricing , but not in areas where Google isn’t offering service. Besides that, AT&T’s lowest price in each city requires customers to opt into “Internet Preferences ,” which gives the company permission to examine each customer’s Web traffic in order to serve personalized ads. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia

(credit: Sharon Lees/Great Ormond Street Hospital ) With genetic tweaks and snips, researchers created cancer-busting immune cells that, so far, seem to have wiped out a life-threatening form of leukemia in a one-year-old girl. The new cells are one-size-fits-all, beating out earlier cell-based cancer therapies that required custom engineering of each patient’s own immune cells. If proven effective in more trials, the new, generic cells could offer an easy, off-the-shelf treatment for life-threatening forms of leukemia. “It is something we’ve been waiting for,” said Stephan Grupp, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the research. Previous methods requiring engineering cells, specifically T cells, from every single patient could be slow, costly, and impossible in some patients with low T cell counts. “The innovation here is gene-editing T cells so that one person’s T cells could be given to another even if they are not a donor match,” he said in a statement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia

vBulletin password hack fuels fears of serious Internet-wide 0-day attacks

Enlarge (credit: Coldzer0) Developers of the vBulletin software package for website forums released a security patch Monday night, just hours after reports surfaced that a hack on the developers’ site leaked password data and other sensitive information belonging to almost 480,000 subscribers. vBulletin officials have put in place a mandatory password reset for all users after discovering it was subjected to a hack attack. They went on to warn that the attacker “may have accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our system.” A separate post on the vBulletin site makes reference to a security patch for versions 5.1.4 through 5.1.9 of the vBulletin Connect software package. Noticeably missing from either link is an explicit warning that there is a critical vulnerability in vBulletin that has already been actively exploited and puts thousands of sites at risk until they install the patch. Ars asked vBulletin officials to clarify the reports and to confirm or disconfirm the speculation they have generated, but so far the request has gone unanswered. This post contains inferences and information from alternative sources that has yet to be explicitly confirmed. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Changing the Earth’s climate by covering the deserts with solar panels

Solar panels in Chile’s Atacama desert. (credit: OPIC.gov ) Currently, the Earth’s inhabitants are consuming about 17.5TeraWatts of power each year. It’s estimated that an aggressive rollout of solar panels could generate at least 400TW, and possibly much, much more. But that would involve paving over a lot of the Earth’s surface with solar panels, in many cases covering relatively reflective sand with dark black hardware. Could this have its own effects on the climate? The answer turns out to be remarkably complex. That’s in part because the panels don’t simply absorb the energy of the light—a fraction of it gets converted to electricity and shipped elsewhere. A team of US and Chinese scientists decided to account for all of this and found out that massive solar installations would cause changes in the climate, but the changes would be minor compared to what we’d see from continued greenhouse gas emissions. The authors created a number of scenarios to tease out the influence of the panels, and they used climate models to examine the changes they drove. The first method involved covering most of the Earth’s deserts and urban areas with solar panels (this would, of course, lead to a ridiculous overproduction of electricity). In a second, the power harvested by these panels was then sent to urban areas and dissipated as heat. Finally, for a somewhat more realistic view, they simply covered most of the deserts of Egypt with panels. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Changing the Earth’s climate by covering the deserts with solar panels

Vast, uncharted viral world discovered on human skin

A transmission electron microscopy image of a bunch of bacteriophages. (credit: ZEISS Microscopy/Flickr ) In the microbial metropolises that thrive in and on the human body, underground networks of viruses loom large. A closer look at human skin has found that it’s teeming with viruses, most of which don’t target us but infect the microbes that live there. Almost 95 percent of those skin-dwelling virus communities are unclassified, researchers report in mBio . Those unknown viruses may prune, manipulate, and hide out in the skin’s bacterial communities, which in turn can make the difference between human health and disease. The finding highlights how much scientists still have to learn about the microscopic affairs that steer human welfare. Past attempts to unmask the viruses on the human body have been hindered by technical difficulties. Viral genomes are much smaller than those of bacteria, making them hard to identify and sift from contamination. In the new study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used an advanced method to specifically isolate the DNA of virus-like particles from skin swabs. The researchers also screened viral DNA found on swabs that never touched human skin, allowing them to quickly identify and toss contaminating viruses from their analysis. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

In February last year , Microsoft said that it would give a one year warning of when systems with Windows 7 preinstalled would no longer be available from OEMs. That time has finally come to pass. As spotted by Ed Bott , there’s now a date after which Windows 7 OEM preinstalls will no longer be available: October 31, 2016. That same date will also apply to Windows 8.1. Windows 8 preinstalls will end a few months earlier than that, June 30, 2016. This means that after October 31 next year, the only version of Windows that will be available on a new system from a PC builder will be Windows 10. Right now, OEMs can still offer Windows 7 Professional (though not any of the other versions), Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. Windows 7 will remain supported until January 10, 2020. It left mainstream support earlier this year, so it’s no longer eligible to receive non-security fixes or extra features but still has many years of security updates. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around

(credit: Samuel Huron ) On Thursday, the Tor Project released its first public beta of Tor Messenger , an easy-to-use, unified chat app that has security and cryptography baked in. If you care about digital security, you should ditch whatever chat program you’re using and switch to it right now. The app is specifically designed to protect location and routing information ( by using Tor ) and chat data in transit (by using the open source Off-The-Record, or OTR, protocol ). For anyone who has used a similar app (like Pidgin or Adium), Tor Messenger’s interface will be fairly self-explanatory, but there are two notable quirks. First, by default, it will not allow you to send messages to someone who doesn’t support OTR—but there is an option to disable that feature. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) Second, unlike Pidgin or Adium, Tor Messenger cannot log chats, which is handy if you’re privacy-minded. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around

Windows 10 will be made an automatic “recommended” update early next year

The Windows 10 free upgrade program has so far concentrated on those Windows 7 and 8 users who reserved their copy in the weeks leading up to the operating system’s release. Over the coming months, Microsoft will start to spread the operating system to a wider audience . The Windows 10 upgrade will soon be posted as an “Optional Update” in Windows Update, advertising it to anyone who examines that list of updates. Then, early next year, it will be categorized as a “Recommended Update.” This is significant, because it means that systems that are configured to download and install recommended updates—which for most people is the safest option—will automatically fetch the upgrade and start its installer. The installer will still require human intervention to actually complete—you won’t wake up to find your PC with a different operating system—but Windows users will no longer need to actively seek the upgrade. This mirrors an accidental change that Microsoft did earlier this month. The Windows 10 upgrade was showing up for some people as a recommended update and the installer started automatically. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will be made an automatic “recommended” update early next year