golf – Page 59 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit

Yesterday, Amazon announced that it would be cutting the prices of both its S3 and EBS cloud-based storage. Today, Microsoft announced that it too was cutting the cost of its cloud storage. The software giant promised last April that it would match Amazon’s prices for commodity cloud services: storage, bandwidth, and computation. Amazon’s pricing varies from region to region, and the price cuts range from 6 percent if you’re storing between 1 and 50 terabytes of data, to up to 22 percent—though you’ll need to be storing at least 5 petabytes to take advantage of this. Microsoft says that not only is it going to match these prices, making cuts of up to 20 percent itself, but it will also charge the same amount in every region . This means that Azure storage will in some parts of the world as much as 10 percent cheaper than the Amazon equivalent. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Supreme Court will hear case on police search of cell phones

On Friday, the Supreme Court said that it would weigh in on whether it is legal for police officers to search the contents of a suspect’s cell phone when they are arrested. Specifically, the high court will take up two cases from California and Massachusetts, both arising from criminal prosecutions, that have brought to question the admissibility of evidence obtained through a search of the suspect’s phone after arrest. The legal decision will come down to whether searching cell phones without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Earlier court precedent has allowed police officers to search all the items that a person has on them at the time of arrest. But as phones have grown to include e-mail, bank history, and location data, the potential problems with the old standards have become more apparent. A Supreme Court ruling, at least, would give some clarity as to how such situations should be handled. Reuters notes that 91 percent of Americans now have cellphones, and over half of those can connect to the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight

Cyberslayer Independent security journalist Brian Krebs has uncovered important new details about the hack that compromised as many as 110 million Target customers, including the malware that appears to have infected point-of-sale systems and the way attackers first broke in. According to a post published Wednesday to KrebsOnSecurity, point-of-sale (POS) malware was uploaded to Symantec-owned ThreatExpert.com on December 18, the same day that Krebs broke the news of the massive Target breach . An unidentified source told Krebs that the Windows share point name “ttcopscli3acs” analyzed by the malware scanning website matches the sample analyzed by the malware scanning website . The thieves used the user name “Best1_user” to log in and download stolen card data. Their password was “BackupU$r”. KrebsonSecurity The class of malware identified by Krebs is often referred to as a memory scraper, because it monitors the computer memory of POS terminals used by retailers. The malware searches for credit card data before it has been encrypted and sent to remote payment processors. The malware then “scrapes” the plain-text entries and dumps them into a database. Krebs continued: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight

Creator of PGP e-mail encryption making secure Android “Blackphone”

Blackphone Phil Zimmerman, creator of PGP e-mail encryption , is leading a team of security industry executives building an Android phone with a variety of built-in privacy tools. “I’ve been interested in secure telephony for longer than I’ve been interested in secure e-mail,” Zimmerman said in a video on so-called Blackphone ‘s website. “I had to wait for the rest of the technology infrastructure to catch up to make it possible to do secure telephony. PGP was kind of a detour for me while waiting for the rest of the technology to catch up to make really good secure telephony possible.” The narrator of the Blackphone video ominously says, “Technology was supposed to make our lives better. Instead we have lost our privacy—we have become enslaved.” The Blackphone website says the phone will use “PrivatOS,” an Android-based operating system, while letting users “make and receive secure phone calls; exchange secure texts; exchange and store secure files; have secure video chat; browse privately; and anonymize your activity through a VPN.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Creator of PGP e-mail encryption making secure Android “Blackphone”

New DoS attacks taking down game sites deliver crippling 100Gbps floods

Online gamers such as these ones often stream their play in real time. Twitch Recent denial-of-service attacks taking down League of Legends and other popular gaming services are doing more than just wielding a never-before-seen technique to vastly amplify the amount of junk traffic directed at targets. In at least some cases, their devastating effects can deprive celebrity game players of huge amounts of money. As Ars reported last week, the attacks are abusing the Internet’s Network Time Protocol (NTP), which is used to synchronize computers to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time . A command of just 234 bytes is enough to cause some NTP servers to return a list of up to 600 machines that have previously used its time-syncing service. The dynamic creates an ideal condition for DoS attacks. Attackers send a modest-sized request to NTP servers and manipulate the commands to make them appear as if they came from one of the targeted gaming services. The NTP servers, which may be located in dozens or even hundreds of locations all over the world, in turn send the targets responses that could be tens or hundreds of times bigger than the spoofed request. The technique floods gaming servers with as much as 100Gbps, all but guaranteeing that they’ll be taken down unless operators take specific precautions ahead of time. Among the targets of this new type of attack are game servers used by celebrity players who broadcast live video streams of their gaming prowess that are viewed as many as 50,000 times. In some cases, the massive audiences translate into tens of thousands of dollars per month, as ads are displayed beside video feeds of the players blowing away opponents in Dota 2 and other games. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New DoS attacks taking down game sites deliver crippling 100Gbps floods

Hackers use Amazon cloud to scrape mass number of LinkedIn member profiles

Image courtesy of TheTruthAbout. Image courtesy TheTruthAbout LinkedIn is suing a gang of hackers who used Amazon’s cloud computing service to circumvent security measures and copy data from hundreds of thousands of member profiles each day. “Since May 2013, unknown persons and/or entities employing various automated software programs (often referred to as ‘bots’) have registered thousands of fake LinkedIn member accounts and have extracted and copied data from many member profile pages,” company attorneys alleged in a complaint filed this week in US District Court in Northern California. “This practice, known as ‘scraping,’ is explicitly barred by LinkedIn’s User Agreement, which prohibits access to LinkedIn ‘through scraping, spidering, crawling, or other technology or software used to access data without the express written consent of LinkedIn or its Members.'” With more than 259 million members—many who are highly paid professionals in technology, finance, and medical industries—LinkedIn holds a wealth of personal data that can prove highly valuable to people conducting phishing attacks, identity theft, and similar scams. The allegations in the lawsuit highlight the unending tug-of-war between hackers who work to obtain that data and the defenders who use technical measures to prevent the data from falling into the wrong hands. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hackers use Amazon cloud to scrape mass number of LinkedIn member profiles

AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock AT&T today confirmed a long-rumored plan to monetize wireless data caps by charging content providers for the right to serve up video and other media without chewing up consumers’ monthly data limits. Sometimes called 1-800-DATA, AT&T billed the plan as “a new way for eligible 4G customers to enjoy mobile content and apps over AT&T’s wireless network without impacting their monthly wireless data plan.” Basically, the price of data is being charged to content providers instead of consumers. The rates for consumers and business will be similar. “We will offer AT&T Sponsored Data providers a wide range of options,” an AT&T spokesperson told Ars. “Customers will be billed according to usage, with costs varying by amounts of usage. Rates are comparable to consumer rates.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers

Putting Windows and Android on the same PC doesn’t solve anyone’s problems

PC makers at CES may announce Windows PCs that run Android apps. But should you do something just because you can? Andrew Cunningham CES begins in just a few short days, but rumors about what we’ll be seeing there are already in full-swing. It’s a fair bet that the usual suspects will show up—phones, tablets, PCs, maybe even a Linux-powered gun or two—but the things that stick out usually end up being the Flavors of the Year. These are often technologies that are cool in theory but fail to light the world on fire in practice. Netbooks, 3D TVs, and the first run of Android tablets are all members of this illustrious group, and so far baubles like 4K TVs and smartwatches look like worthy heirs to the throne. One such upcoming flavor, according to a report from The Verge , is an Intel-backed initiative that combines Windows 8.1 and Android on the same device. Rather than combine an Android tablet with a Windows PC like Asus’ Transformer Book Trio , these computers will seamlessly run Android apps within a Windows environment, probably by way of a virtualization layer like Bluestacks . This idea is in no way new, though the report suggests that a larger push is imminent. The initiative makes some sense for Intel and the OEMs. For Intel, it’s a way to offer tablet makers something that they can’t get from ARM chips like those from Qualcomm or Nvidia: the ability to provide full Windows 8.1 app compatibility combined with Android app compatibility. For the OEMs, it’s (theoretically) a way to patch gaps in Windows 8.1’s improving-but-spotty app store by giving consumers Android tablet apps that they (theoretically) know and love. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Putting Windows and Android on the same PC doesn’t solve anyone’s problems

Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

With all the pieces of my master plan falling into place, Ars will soon be silly with Likes. Facebook is being sued by two users for intercepting the “content of the users’ communications,” including private messages, with the intent to “mine user data and profit from those data by sharing them with third parties—namely, advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators.” The plaintiffs argue in a December 30 class action complaint that Facebook’s use of the word “private” in relation to its messaging system is misleading, given the way the company treats the info contained within those messages. Many of the allegations in this case are based on research done in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal for a series of articles about digital privacy. Facebook is far from the first company to use private messages to mint money. Gmail continues to be dinged for creating text ads based off of the content of e-mails ten years after the ads were first introduced. (And Gmail has been sued for that, too.) This is from 2010, but without the “with” that is no doubt just beyond the crop, it’s still relevant. MoneyBlogNewz Facebook goes to lengths to clearly distinguish its messaging feature as “private,” even calling it “unprecedented” in terms of the privacy controls, the filing alleges. “Facebook never intended to provide this level of confidentiality. Instead, Facebook mines any and all transmissions… in order to gather any and all morsels of information it can about its users.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever

GOG.com’s Guillaume Rambourg giving Jenga advice. Digital games distribution site GOG (Good Old Games) has spent the last five years offering classic videogame titles DRM-free to its customers. Earlier in 2013, the site launched an indie publishing platform which allowed independent developers to submit their games for sale through GOG—an alternative to Steam’s contentious Greenlight initiative . Wired.co.uk spoke to Guillaume Rambourg, managing director of GOG.com, to discuss DRM, anti-sales, and why exactly the site was offering the original Fallout games free of charge. Wired.co.uk: What was the story behind setting up the GOG.com website? Rambourg: It all began in the mid-90s, when friends Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski started their business as retail distributors in Poland. Back then, Poland was a very highly pirated market, with most gamers using outdated hardware and not having too much money to spend on games. That’s a tough market to break into: one where people aren’t used to paying for games. Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever