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Former Microsoft employee gets 3 months in jail for leaking Windows 8 secrets

Earlier this week, a man accused of stealing trade secrets from Microsoft and handing them to a French blogger was sentenced to three months in jail and a $100 fine in the Western District of Washington. Alex Kibkalo worked for Microsoft in the company’s Russia and Lebanon offices. According to an FBI complaint filed earlier this year, Kibkalo leaked pre-release updates for Windows RT and a Microsoft-internal Activation Server SDK to a French blogger in retaliation for a poor performance review. The blogger allegedly asked a third party to verify the stolen SDK, but that third party, who connected with the blogger via Hotmail, alerted Microsoft of the theft instead. At that point, Microsoft launched its own internal investigation and searched the Hotmail account to find the blogger and his source. The company’s investigation team was soon able to trace back to Kibkalo and then discovered that he had created a virtual machine on Microsoft’s corporate network from which he uploaded the stolen goods to SkyDrive. When confronted, Kibkalo admitted to handing over software, company memos, and other documents. He was fired and later arrested. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Former Microsoft employee gets 3 months in jail for leaking Windows 8 secrets

Local cops in 15 US states confirmed to use cell tracking devices

ACLU A new map released  Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union shows that fake cell towers, also known as stingrays, are used by state and local law enforcement in 15 states. Police departments in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Tucson, Los Angeles, and even Anchorage, among others, have been confirmed to use the devices. Beyond those states, 12 federal law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI to the National Security Agency, also employ them. Relatively little is known about precisely how police decide when and where to deploy them, but stingrays are used to track targeted phones and can also be used to intercept calls and text messages. However, privacy advocates worry that while the devices go after specific targets, they also often capture data of nearby unrelated people. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Local cops in 15 US states confirmed to use cell tracking devices

Is Chicago using cell tracking devices? One man tries to find out

David D’Agostino A local activist has filed a new lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department in an attempt to learn how the city uses fake cell tower devices, also known as stingrays. Relatively little is known about the devices, which are used to track targeted phones and can also be used to intercept calls and text messages. The American Civil Liberties Union recently began a campaign to learn more about how stingrays are used by filing public records requests in Florida, the home state of the Stingray’s manufacturer, Harris Corporation. (While “Stringray” is a trademarked name and particular product, it has entered the technical lexicon as a generic term, like Kleenex or Xerox.) In nearly every sales agreement , that firm has required law enforcement agencies to sign nondisclosure agreements forbidding them from discussing whether or not an agency even possesses such a device, much less describing its capabilities. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Is Chicago using cell tracking devices? One man tries to find out

RadioShack continues death march, loses $98.3 million in a quarter

On Tuesday, electronics retailer RadioShack reported its quarterly earnings , and the results were not good. The company lost $98.3 million in its first fiscal quarter of 2014, a figure that’s more than triple the loss it sustained in the same quarter last year. Ars put RadioShack on our 2014 “Deathwatch” earlier in January, and not without reason. The retailer has relied on mobile phone sales to buoy it through the hard times and has tried to rebrand itself as the place to shop for Do-It-Yourselfers, stocking its shelves with various Arduino projects. But customers can find the handsets they need in carriers’ shops, and they often choose to buy DIY electronics goods online or in hardware stores. In a press release , the company attributed the quarter results to ” an industry-wide decline in consumer electronics and a soft mobility market which impacted traffic trends throughout the quarter.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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RadioShack continues death march, loses $98.3 million in a quarter

Google will flag search results erased due to “right to be forgotten”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is a vocal critic of the new ruling. Jimmy Wales/ Wikipedia In the wake of a controversial European high court ruling last month that search providers like Google must remove “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant” materials from search results upon request by EU citizens, the US search giant has expressed a desire to alert users to when such results have been altered. Google’s plan to flag censored search results will likely be similar to how the company notifies users that links have been removed due to a copyright takedown request. The search giant aims to place such notifications at the bottom of pages that would have contained links that have been erased in order to alert users of the change, reports The Guardian. The company also plans to include statistics regarding “right to be forgotten” link removal requests in its biannual transparency report. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google will flag search results erased due to “right to be forgotten”

Amtrak wants 25Mbps per train

A familiar dialogue box for riders on the Northeast corridor. Amtrak is looking to build a trackside Wi-Fi network on its Northeast corridor that would bump its trains’ connections to broadband-level speeds. The increase is meant to accommodate busy trains with hundreds of customers crowding the Wi-Fi, a common scenario that results in slow or no connections for some customers. Amtrak has offered Wi-Fi on trains running between Boston and Washington, DC for several years now , but currently, the connection is 10Mbps shared among everyone on the train. In this reporter’s experience on crowded trains, this means you can only get on the Wi-Fi long enough to re-establish a connection through the network’s dialog boxes before the process resets. The company has requested proof-of-concept bids to bump the connection speed to 25Mbps per train “to meet growing customer data usage demands.” The bids will be used to see if it is “technically and financially feasible” to bring network improvements to the entire stretch of the Northeast corridor. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amtrak wants 25Mbps per train

California top court says red light camera photos are evidence

A red light camera at the intersection of Sylvan and Coffee in Modesto, California. Cyrus Farivar On Thursday, the California Supreme Court upheld the admissibility of images taken from red light cameras as evidence of traffic violations in the Golden State. The unanimous decision in the case, known as The People of California v. Goldsmith , marks the end of a five-year-old legal odyssey. Fines issued as the result of a red light camera in California are by far the highest nationwide ($436 in this case)—typically they’re in the $100 range in the rest of the country. The decision  (PDF) comes amid a flurry of challenges to the red light cameras before other state high courts: the Louisiana Supreme Court recently declined to hear such a case, letting stand a lower court ruling that challenged cameras in New Orleans. The Illinois Supreme Court heard oral arguments against  such cameras in Chicago in May 2014. A decision in a similar case currently before the Ohio Supreme Court is expected before the end of the year. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California top court says red light camera photos are evidence

Microsoft: Software update unlocks more GPU bandwidth on Xbox One

The system update does not turn the system white… only the employee models do that. The June system update rolling out to Xbox One system worldwide this week includes surface-level features like external hard drive support, as we mentioned this morning . But Microsoft says the new firmware will also help developers extract more power from the system’s Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), even though the base hardware in the system is obviously staying the same. Microsoft didn’t trumpet this news in a press release or blog post, but threw it out there in a tweet from Microsoft’s new executive in charge of Xbox, Phil Spencer: “June #XboxOne software dev kit gives devs access to more GPU bandwidth. More performance, new tools and flexibility to make games better.” As far back as last October, Microsoft was publicly acknowledging how Kinect and system processing took “a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation… for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode.” Back then, the company promised it would be opening up that slice of processing time to game developers in the future in a way that didn’t impact the system’s background performance. That appears to be what has come to pass with the system’s latest software update. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft: Software update unlocks more GPU bandwidth on Xbox One

Comcast charged $2,000 for alarm system that didn’t work—for 7 years

Houston resident Lisa Leeson says she paid Comcast nearly $2,000 over seven years for an alarm system, only to find out that it never worked. Comcast, it turns out, installed the alarm system improperly. Even though the alarm made a sound indicating that it was active when Leeson and her family set it each day, “It was unable… to actually call the police and/or Comcast once it was activated,” Leeson told KPRC Local 2 Houston . What did Comcast do after the problem was finally discovered? At first, the company offered only a $20 credit, before eventually agreeing to refund all of the money. “When Davis called Comcast’s corporate office, a spokesman apologized, but not before he pointed to a line in Leeson’s alarm agreement where she agreed to ‘test her system’ on ‘a regular basis,'” the news station reported. “Chances are your alarm company requires the same, putting the onus back on you to make sure your system is functioning properly.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast charged $2,000 for alarm system that didn’t work—for 7 years

Bugs in widely used WordPress plug-in leave sites vulnerable to hijacking

Security researchers have discovered vulnerabilities in a widely used WordPress extension that leaves sites susceptible to remote hijacking. WordPress-powered sites that use the All in One SEO Pack should promptly install an update that fixes the privilege escalation vulnerabilities, Marc-Alexandre Montpas, a researcher with security firm Sucuri wrote in a blog post published Saturday . Administrators can upgrade by logging in to the admin panel, selecting plug-ins, and choosing the All in One title. The just-released version that fixes the vulnerabilities is 2.1.6. The worst of the attacks made possible by the bugs can allow attackers to inject malicious code into the admin control panel, Montpas warned. Malicious hackers could then change an admin’s password or insert backdoor code into the underlying websites. People could also remotely tamper with a site’s search engine optimization settings. To exploit the bugs, attackers need only an unprivileged account on the site, such as one for posting reader comments. In some cases, the privilege escalation and cross-site scripting bugs in All in One SEO are combined with another vulnerability that Montpas didn’t elaborate on. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bugs in widely used WordPress plug-in leave sites vulnerable to hijacking