gaming – Page 6 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Verizon technician sold calling, location data for thousands of dollars

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images) An Alabama man who worked as a Verizon Wireless technician has agreed to plead guilty to a federal hacking charge in connection to his illegal use of the company’s computers to acquire customer calling and location data. The man, Daniel Eugene Traeger, faces a maximum five years in prison next month. He admitted Thursday that he sold customer data—from 2009 to 2014—to a private investigator whom the authorities have not named. According to the man’s signed plea deal (PDF): At some point in 2009, the Defendant met a private investigator (“the PI”) who wanted to buy Verizon customer information from the Defendant. The Defendant accepted the PI’s offer. The defendant used Verizon computer systems and facilities to access customer call records and customer location data that he knew he was not authorized to access, and provided that information to the PI even though the Defendant knew that he was not authorized to provide it to a third party. The Defendant accessed customer call records by logging into Verizon’s MARS system. The Defendant then compiled the data in spreadsheets, which the Defendant provided to the PI, including by e-mail. The Defendant accessed customer location data using a Verizon system called Real Time Tool. Using RTT, the Defendant “pinged” cellular telephones on Verizon’s network and provided location data for those telephones to the PI. The plea agreement said that Traeger began making $50 monthly in 2009, when he sold two records a month. By mid-2013, he was earning $750 each month by selling 10 to 15 records. In all, the plea deal says he made more than $10,000 over a five-year period. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon technician sold calling, location data for thousands of dollars

Inside a Treasure Trove of Rare Ralph McQuarrie Star Wars Art

There is no doubt that Ralph McQuarrie’s sublime art was fundamental in shaping the success of Star Wars , and enriching the galaxy far, far away. For years his work has been archived and championed, but a new book is collecting some of his best (and some of his rarest) Star Wars art in a lavish volume, and we’ve got an exclusive look inside. Read more…

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Inside a Treasure Trove of Rare Ralph McQuarrie Star Wars Art

Hubble finds additional evidence of water vapor plumes on Europa

Enlarge / Scenario for getting water to Europa’s surface. Artist’s conception of ridges and fractures on Europa. (credit: Caltech/NASA) In the seminal science fiction series Space Odyssey , novelist Arthur C. Clarke called attention to the Jovian moon Europa’s special place in the Solar System. At the end of the series’ second novel, 2010: Odyssey Two , a spaceship sent to the Jupiter system receives a message from aliens: “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” In data released publicly Monday NASA didn’t get quite such a declarative message from the intriguing moon, but the new information is nonetheless thrilling. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what are likely water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. If the plumes do, in fact, emerge and rain down on the surface, it will be significantly easier for scientists to study the moon’s interior ocean. “E uropa is a world of great interest,” Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said during a news conference Monday. Monday’s news is significant because it comes as NASA is taking formative steps toward launching a pair missions to Europa in the 2020s—an orbiter to scout the moon, and a lander that will follow a couple of years later. The same engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who masterminded Curiosity’s landing on Mars have turned their attention toward how best to land a probe on Europa’s icy surface. And it is no easy feat. The moon creaks as Jupiter’s gravitation bulk rends its frozen surface in deep crevasses, pushing and pulling the ice upward and downward by tens of meters every few days. And with only a very tenuous atmosphere, it is cold: -210 degrees Celsius. The radiation from nearby Jupiter would kill a human in a matter of hours or days. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hubble finds additional evidence of water vapor plumes on Europa

Conspiracy! The Reddit rundown on the man who deleted Clinton e-mails

Bleach those bits away. (credit: Adina Firestone ) A system administrator with Platte River Networks, the company that took over hosting Hillary Clinton’s mail server after it was moved out of her basement in Chappaqua, has been the target of a crowdsourced investigation on Reddit into whether he took part in a conspiracy to cover up Clinton’s e-mails. Paul Combetta, an employee of Platte River Networks who was granted immunity from prosecution by the Justice Department in exchange for cooperation with the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s e-mails, apparently went to Reddit for help with a sticky problem related to the e-mail investigation by the House Select Committee on Benghazi—scrubbing the e-mails of Clinton’s personal address. While the post doesn’t provide evidence that Clinton herself instructed Combetta to erase her e-mails, it does suggest that his staff wanted to excise her private e-mail address from the archives to be turned over to the State Department—ånd in turn, to the House Select Committee. The later destruction of the e-mails during the continuing investigation was apparently, as Combetta told investigators, an “oh-shit moment.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Conspiracy! The Reddit rundown on the man who deleted Clinton e-mails

Police IT staff checked wrong box, deleted 25% of body cam footage

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News) One quarter of all body-worn camera footage from the Oakland, Calif. police was accidentally deleted in October 2014, according to the head of the relevant unit. As per the San Francisco Chronicle , Sgt. Dave Burke testified on Tuesday at a murder trial that this was, in fact, a mistake. This incident marks yet another setback in the efforts to roll out body-worn cameras to police agencies nationwide. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, founder and Chief Executive of Amazon.com, in May, (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images) We can say this much for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin—he does not lack ambition. First Bezos founded an online bookstore that became the largest retailer in the western world, and now he plans to self-fund a New Glenn rocket that is nearly as tall as the Saturn V launch vehicle and more than half as powerful. As wild as Bezos’ idea sounds, Blue Origin might be able to get the job done. And if Bezos and Blue Origin can fly their massive orbital rocket in the next three to four years, it would be a remarkable, unprecedented achievement in a number of ways that could radically remake spaceflight. Proof of concept First, a few words about why this might really be viable. It is true that all Blue Origin has flown so far is a propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, and a capsule on a suborbital flight. The company’s New Shepard spacecraft is designed to carry six passengers on 10- to 15-minute hops up to about 100km before bringing them back down to Earth. This is not dissimilar to the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s, hence the moniker New Shepard, named after pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

The SENA UD100 Bluetooth adapter, plus a slightly larger antenna, allows Blue Hydra to peer deep into the Bluetooth world. Sean Gallagher My new neighbor was using AirDrop to move some files from his phone to his iMac. I hadn’t introduced myself yet, but I already knew his name. Meanwhile, someone with a Pebble watch was walking past, and someone named “Johnny B” was idling at the stoplight at the corner in their Volkswagen Beetle, following directions from their Garmin Nuvi. Another person was using an Apple Pencil with their iPad at a nearby shop. And someone just turned on their Samsung smart television. I knew all this because each person advertised their presence wirelessly, either over “classic” Bluetooth or the newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) protocol—and I was running an open source tool called Blue Hydra , a project from the team at Pwnie Express . Blue Hydra is intended to give security professionals a way of tracking the presence of traditional Bluetooth, BTLE devices, and BTLE “iBeacon” proximity sensors. But it can also be connected to other tools to provide alerts on the presence of particular devices. Despite their “Low Energy” moniker, BTLE devices are constantly polling the world even while in “sleep” mode. And while they use randomized media access control (MAC) addresses, they advertise other data that is unique to each device, including a universally unique identifier (UUID). As a result, if you can tie a specific UUID to a device by other means, you can track the device and its owner. By using the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), you can get a sense of how far away they are. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

5,300 Wells Fargo employees fired after 2 million fake accounts discovered

(credit: Mike Mozart ) Since at least 2011, Wells Fargo employees have been creating fake accounts using customers’ identities to boost their sales numbers, federal regulators said on Thursday. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined the bank $100 million after a third-party consulting firm found that 2 million fake deposit and credit card accounts had been made without the consent of the person whose name was on the account. According to CNN Money, the bank fired 5,300 employees for taking part in the scheme, which constitutes about 1 percent of the bank’s payroll. In order to boost their sales numbers, employees opened 1.5 million deposit accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts on customers’ behalf but without authorization from those customers. “Employees then transferred funds from consumers’ authorized accounts to temporarily fund the new, unauthorized accounts,” the CFPB wrote. “This widespread practice gave the employees credit for opening the new accounts, allowing them to earn additional compensation and to meet the bank’s sales goals.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Supreme Court blocks Senate Backpage sex ad subpoena

US Supreme Court building. (credit: MitchellShapiroPhotography ) The US Supreme Court is giving Backpage.com a victory over the US Senate, at least in the short term. Chief Justice John Roberts says the online classified ad portal, at least for now, does not have to comply with a Senate subpoena investigating how Backpage conducts its business. The investigation demands documents about the ins and outs of the site’s editorial practices. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations contends that the site is littered with ads that amount to offering sex services by women and children forced into prostitution, and it wants to know how it screens ads posted to its site by third parties. The chief justice’s decision Tuesday comes days after a federal appeals court upheld a ruling by a lower court judge and said (PDF) Backpage must comply with the subpoena. The Senate and Backpage have been deadlocked in a legal battle for more than a year. Backpage said the First Amendment shields it from having to comply with the subpoena , (PDF) while the Senate maintains that the First Amendment implications are secondary (PDF) to cutting down on sex trafficking ads on the site. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Android 7.0 Nougat review—Do more on your gigantic smartphone

The unveiling of the Nougat statue. After a lengthy Developer Preview program starting in March, the final version of Android 7.0 (codenamed “Nougat”) is finally launching today. The OS update will slowly begin to rollout to devices over the next few weeks. This year, Google is adding even more form factors to the world’s most popular operating system. After tackling watches, phones, tablets, TVs, and cars, Nougat brings platform improvements aimed at virtual reality headsets and—with some help from Chrome OS—also targets laptops and desktops. For Android’s primary platform (still phones and tablets), there’s a myriad of improvements. Nougat brings a new multitasking split screen mode, a redesigned notification panel, an adjustable UI scale, and fresh emoji. Nougat also sports numerous under-the-hood improvements, like changes to the Android Runtime, updates to the battery saving “Doze” mode, and developer goodies like Vulkan and Java 8 support. As usual, we’ll be covering Google’s Android package as a whole without worrying about what technically counts as part of the “OS” versus an app in the Play Store. Android is a platform not just for third-parties, but for Google as well, so we’re diving into everything that typically ships on a new Android smartphone. Read 154 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android 7.0 Nougat review—Do more on your gigantic smartphone