function – Page 72 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Apple releases iOS 7.1.2 with iBeacon, mail attachment encryption fixes

Andrew Cunningham Apple today released iOS 7.1.2, the second minor update to iOS 7.1 . The list of changes is short and focused mainly on minor bugs—it “improves iBeacon connectivity and stability,” patches a security hold whereby at-rest e-mail attachments could be accessed by an attacker if he or she had physical access to your phone, and fixes a problem with data transfers from accessories “including barcode scanners.” The e-mail attachment bug is probably the most important thing addressed by the update—it was reported widely back in April when Andreas Kurtz wrote about it on his blog . Kurtz was able to access e-mail attachments using standard tools on several different iOS devices running versions 7.1.1 and 7.0.4. As part of the iBeacon update, iOS 7.1.2 also re-enables Bluetooth on iOS devices, which we verified on an iPhone 5S by disabling Bluetooth before installing the update. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 7.1.2 with iBeacon, mail attachment encryption fixes

Verizon Wireless employee stole 900 phones, made $270,000 profit on eBay

A Verizon Wireless account executive who pleaded guilty to stealing more than 900 cell phones and selling them on eBay for a profit of $272,290 was sentenced this week to 27 months in prison. James Hopkins, 35, committed the fraud throughout most of 2009 while working as a business-to-business account executive at a Verizon Wireless branch office in Trevose, PA, according to a criminal complaint. He was charged with mail fraud and sentenced in US District Court in New Jersey, where Verizon is based. “From February through November 2009, Hopkins placed numerous orders for Verizon Wireless cellular telephones, handheld devices and accessories in the names of existing Verizon Wireless customers without their knowledge,” the US Attorney’s office in New Jersey wrote in an announcement. “After arranging for the merchandise to be shipped to the home of a relative in New Jersey, the defendant manipulated Verizon’s computer database to conceal the fraudulent orders and shipments. Hopkins received $328,517 worth of stolen Verizon Wireless merchandise, which he sold on eBay for a profit of $272,290.” That amounts to a profit of about $300 for each stolen phone. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon Wireless employee stole 900 phones, made $270,000 profit on eBay

Burglar logs in to Facebook in victim’s house, forgets to sign off

Nicholas Wig. Dakota County Sheriff’s Office A 27-year-old Minnesota man appears to have violated at least two tenets of the digital age: Never log in to your Facebook account in a stranger’s house you’re burglarizing, and don’t forget to sign off if you do. Such egregious violations have led to the arrest of a South St. Paul man charged with burglary allegations. Nicholas Steven Wig is accused of stealing cash, credit cards, a watch, a checkbook, and other items. When the victim came home last week, he noticed a screen missing from a window and his house in disarray. He also discovered his home computer was open to a Facebook page of one “Nick Dub,” who turned out to be Wig, police said. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Burglar logs in to Facebook in victim’s house, forgets to sign off

Mint 17 is the perfect place for Linux-ers to wait out Ubuntu uncertainty

The team behind Linux Mint unveiled its latest update this week—Mint 17 using kernel 3.13.0-24, nicknamed “Qiana.” The new release indicates a major change in direction for what has quickly become one of the most popular Linux distros available today. Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04, and this decision appears to have one major driver. Consistency. Like the recently released Ubuntu 14.04, Mint 17 is a Long Term Support Release. That means users can expect support to continue until 2019. But even better, this release marks a change in Mint’s relationship with Ubuntu. Starting with Mint 17 and continuing until 2016, every release of Linux Mint will be built on the same package base—Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. With this stability, instead of working to keep up with whatever changes Ubuntu makes in the next two years, Mint can focus on those things that make it Mint. With major changes on the way for Ubuntu in the next two years, Mint’s decision makes a lot of sense. Not only does it free up the Mint team to focus on its two homegrown desktops (Cinnamon and MATE), but it also spares Mint users the potential bumpy road that is Ubuntu’s future. Read 53 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mint 17 is the perfect place for Linux-ers to wait out Ubuntu uncertainty

Microsoft wants you to trade in your MacBook Air for a Surface Pro 3

Ready to kick your MacBook Air to the curb (and wonder how much exactly in in-store credit it’s worth)? Your friendly neighborhood Microsoft Store is ready to help. Peter Bright This weekend, Microsoft Stores launched a trade-in program to encourage sales of the new Surface Pro 3 , but the trade-in promotion named only a single device : the MacBook Air, at a value of “up to $650” toward any Surface Pro 3 purchase. At the lowest specification, that trade-in amount would let buyers walk out of a Microsoft Store with an Intel i3 Surface Pro 3 for as little as $150. Though Microsoft Stores maintain a trade-in program that accepts video games, consoles, Apple iDevices, and PC laptops, this is the first promotion from Microsoft Stores that has actively sought Apple laptops—or, in this case, laptop singular. Seeing as how Microsoft has attempted to position the Surface Pro 3 as the best of both tablet and laptop worlds, the capable, paper-thin MacBook Air is the obvious recipient of Microsoft’s promotional crosshairs. We called the flagship Microsoft Store in Seattle with trade-in value questions, and while the representative said that any Macbook Air could be traded in at stores in the United States and Canada, he insisted that Microsoft won’t break down the exact trade-in value of a given Macbook Air or any other Apple hardware (iPhones, iPads, etc.) without seeing the product in person. The response came even after we tried listing off our MacBook Air’s processor, hard drive, and other specs. This stays in line with Microsoft Store policy through their own website to not disclose trade-in values. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

IE users get new protection against potent form of malware attack

a_codepoet Microsoft developers have fortified Internet Explorer with new protections designed to prevent a type of attack commonly used to surreptitiously install malware on end-user computers. The “isolated heap for DOM objects” made its debut with last week’s Patch Tuesday . Just as airbags lower the chance of critical injuries in automobile accidents, the new IE protection is designed to significantly lessen the damage attackers can do when exploiting so-called use-after-free flaws in the browser code. As the name suggests, use-after-free bugs are the result of code errors that reference computer memory objects after they have already been purged, or freed, from the operating system heap. Attackers can exploit them by refilling the improperly freed space with malicious code that logs passwords, makes computers part of a botnet, or carries out other nefarious behavior. Use-after-free flaws are among the most commonly exploited, often at great expense to end users. Recent in-the-wild attacks that targeted IE versions 9, 10, and 11 capitalized on a use-after-free bug. The bug class has been at the heart of many other real-world attacks on IE that are too numerous to count . (They have also been known to bring down Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.) Wei Chen, an exploit developer with Rapid 7’s Metasploit vulnerability framework, likens use-after-free exploits to sneaking tainted cookies into an already-opened bag of Oreos. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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IE users get new protection against potent form of malware attack

At least 32,000 servers broadcast admin passwords in the clear, advisory warns

An alarming number of servers containing motherboards manufactured by Supermicro continue to expose administrator passwords despite the release of an update that patches the critical vulnerability, an advisory published Thursday warned. The threat resides in the baseboard management controller (BMC), a motherboard component that allows administrators to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers, including their temperatures, disk and memory performance, and fan speeds. Unpatched BMCs in Supermicro motherboards contain a binary file that stores remote login passwords in clear text. Vulnerable systems can be detected by performing an Internet scan on port 49152. A recent query on the Shodan search engine indicated there are 31,964 machines still vulnerable, a number that may not include many virtual machines used in shared hosting environments. “This means at the point of this writing, there are 31,964 systems that have their passwords available on the open market,” wrote Zachary Wikholm, a senior security engineer with the Carinet Security Incident Response Team. “It gets a bit scarier when you review some of the password statistics. Out of those passwords, 3,296 are the default combination. Since I’m not comfortable providing too much password information, I will just say that there exists a subset of this data that either contains or just was ‘password.'” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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At least 32,000 servers broadcast admin passwords in the clear, advisory warns

Harley-Davidson Is Making An Electric Motorcycle

Harley fanatics are about to lose their collective shit. The crew from Milwaukee is going to show off its first electric motorcycle tomorrow, causing scads of chap-wearing dentists to revaluate their alternative weekend lifestyles. Read more…

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Harley-Davidson Is Making An Electric Motorcycle

Undergrad breaks Android crypto ransomware

Early in June, Ars reported the discovery of Android/Simplocker , which appeared to be the first cryptographic ransomware Trojan targeted at Android devices. Simplocker encrypts photos, documents, and videos in devices’ local storage and then instructs the device owner to send money if they ever want to see that content again. One researcher—Simon Bell, an undergraduate student at the University of Sussex—managed to dissect the code for Simplocker. He found that while the code actually called back to a command and control server over the Tor anonymizing network to pass information about the infected device, all of the encryption work was done by the malware itself. Today, Bell released an antidote to Simplocker —a Java program that can decrypt the files attacked by the malware. “The antidote was incredibly easy to create because the ransomware came with both the decryption method and the decryption password,” Bell wrote. “Therefore producing an antidote was more of a copy-and-paste job than anything.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Undergrad breaks Android crypto ransomware

Unicode 7.0 introduces 2,834 new characters, including 250 emoji

We can leave dumb old “words” behind as soon as emoji evolve to express all forms of human feeling and emotion. Andrew Cunningham The Unicode Consortium has just announced the release of version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard , the list of characters ” which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards .” Unicode 7.0 adds 2,834 new characters to the existing list of 110,187 characters defined by Unicode 6.3, including new symbols for currency, new “lesser-used and historic scripts,” and extended support “for written languages of North America, China, India, other Asian countries, and Africa.” Of course, the Internet being what it is, what people seem the most excited about are the 250 new emoji characters, listed here by Emojipedia . Notable additions include “hot pepper,” “sleuth or spy,” “man in business suit levitating,” “reversed hand with middle finger extended,” and “raised hand with part between middle and ring fingers” (aka the ” live long and prosper ” thing). The list of emoji also extends the character set’s adorable fascination with outmoded technology thanks to icons like “soft shell floppy disk,” “fax icon,” and “old personal computer.” Mostly absent from that list of new emoji are the more racially diverse characters Apple said it was trying to introduce back in March . There are a few characters that suggest progress on that front (“sideways black left pointing index,” “black up pointing backhand index,” and so on, assuming that “index” is a reference to index fingers), but those additions don’t introduce parity between black- and white-skinned icons, nor do they account for other skin tones. That’s not necessarily surprising, since these standards take a long time to change—hopefully more characters are introduced in a future Unicode release. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Unicode 7.0 introduces 2,834 new characters, including 250 emoji