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Secret backdoors found in firewall, VPN gear from Barracuda Networks

A variety of firewall, VPN, and spam filtering gear sold by Barracuda Networks contains undocumented backdoor accounts that allow people to remotely log in and access sensitive information, researchers with an Austrian security firm have warned. The SSH, or secure shell, backdoor is hardcoded into “multiple Barracuda Networks products” and can be used to gain shell access to vulnerable appliances, according to an advisory published Thursday by SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab. “This functionality is entirely undocumented and can only be disabled via a hidden ‘expert options’ dialog,” the advisory states. The boxes are configured to listen for SSH connections to the backdoor accounts and will accept the username “product” with no Update: a “very weak” password to log in and gain access to the device’s MySQL database. While the backdoors can be accessed by only a small range of IP addresses, many of them belong to entities other than Barracuda. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Secret backdoors found in firewall, VPN gear from Barracuda Networks

All backscatter “pornoscanners” to be removed from US airports

Bloomberg is reporting that the TSA will be removing all of the remaining backscatter X-ray machines from US airports. The removal isn’t because of health concerns—instead, the machines’ manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems , failed to meet a US Congress-imposed deadline for altering the machines’ software to produce “generic passenger images,” according to the report. TSA assistant administer for acquisitions Karen Shelton Waters, speaking on behalf of the agency, noted that Rapiscan Systems would absorb the cost for the scanners’ removal, and that the removal is unrelated to Rapiscan’s alleged falsification of the machines’ abilities to protect passengers’ privacy. Nor does the removal appear to be related to ongoing questions about the safety of the backscatter X-ray technology. The CEO of OSI systems, Rapiscan’s parent company, says that rather than pitching the expensive machines into the garbage bin, the TSA will be relocating them to other government agencies. In total, there are 174 Rapiscan backscatter X-ray machines that will be pulled from airports and relocated, on top of the 76 that were  removed last year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All backscatter “pornoscanners” to be removed from US airports

Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

This metamaterial is the aperture of the new microwave imaging device. John Hunt Add image compression to the list of nifty applications for metamaterials. Metamaterials guide light waves to create “ invisibility cloaks ” and bend sound waves to make theoretical noise reduction systems for urban areas. But these materials are tuned to particular wavelengths; some invisibility cloaks don’t work at all visible wavelengths because they leak those wavelengths of light. Now researchers have capitalized on that leakiness to build a new functional device: a microwave imaging system that compresses an image as it’s being collected—not afterward as our digital cameras do. Every pixel in a picture from our digital cameras corresponds to a pixel of information recorded on the detector inside the camera. Once a camera collects all the light intensity information from a scene, it promptly discards some of it and compresses the data into a JPEG file (unless you explicitly tell it to save raw data). You still end up with a decent picture, though, because most of the discarded data was redundant. Compressive sensing aims to ease this process by reducing the amount of data collected in the first place. One way to do this is with a single pixel camera , developed in 2006. These devices capture information from random patterns of pixels around the image, essentially adding the light intensity values of several pixels together. If you know something about the structure of that image—say clusters of bright stars set against a dark sky—you’ll be able to capture that image with fewer measurements than a traditional camera. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

New features, new fixes: OS X Server’s six-month checkup

It has now been roughly half a year since the release of Mountain Lion . If Apple sticks to its new yearly release cadence for new OS X versions, that means we’re probably about halfway to OS X 10.9. That doesn’t mean the OS has stood still, though—two point updates have since tweaked the operating system’s functionality and stability, and this is even more true of OS X’s buttoned-up cousin, OS X Server . While Windows Server rarely picks up major new features outside of service packs, OS X Server is like the client version of OS X in that it sometimes takes a couple of point updates for its features to stabilize. Since July, we’ve received two point updates for OS X Server, and they’ve changed things around enough that it merits revisiting our original guide and pointing out what has changed. We’ll be focusing on the major user-facing changes here, but for a complete list of everything that has been changed and fixed you may also want to look at the complete release notes for OS X Server 2.1.1 and 2.2 . Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New features, new fixes: OS X Server’s six-month checkup

Is Dell looking to kill PCs with “Project Ophelia”?

Dell’s Project Ophelia: an Android-based thin client that you can put in your pocket for around $50, eventually. Dell Dell is reportedly investigating a move to take the company private in a leveraged buy-out to clear the decks for a radical repositioning of the company. And according to a report from Atlantic Media’s Quartz , that includes relaunching Dell’s desktop and mobile business around a brand-new product: a computing device the size of a thumb-drive that will sell for about $50. Dell announced its pocket client PC, called ” project Ophelia ,” on January 8, and demonstrated it at CES. Developed by Dell’s Wyse unit, Ophelia uses a Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) to draw power to boot from an HDTV display, or it can be powered off a USB port. It has integrated Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability for connecting to a keyboard, a mouse, and the network, and it runs the Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) operating system with all of the functionality of a tablet. It can also be used to power virtual instances of other desktop operating systems on a remote server or in the cloud. In other words, it’s a fusion of Wyse’s thin client technology modeled after the capabilities of a Google Chromebook—except it can be carried in a pocket. The main drawbacks are that few HDTVs currently support MHL—though such support can be found in a number of Dell flat-panel displays. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Is Dell looking to kill PCs with “Project Ophelia”?

Microsoft releases emergency update to patch Internet Explorer bug

Microsoft has released an emergency update to patch a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is being exploited in attacks aimed at government contractors and other targeted organizations. The patch fixes a “use after free” bug in versions 6, 7, and 8 of the Microsoft browser and will be automatically installed on affected machines that have automatic updating enabled, Dustin Childs, the Group Manager of the company’s Trustworthy Computing program wrote in a blog post published Monday . The unscheduled release comes just six days after Microsoft’s most recent monthly Patch Tuesday batch of security updates, but it was pushed out to counter an experienced gang of hackers who have infected websites frequented by government contractors to exploit the vulnerability. Monday’s update came hours after Oracle released an unscheduled patch to fix a critical vulnerability in its Java software framework. As Ars reported last week , the zero-day Java exploits were added to a variety of exploit kits that criminals use to turn compromised websites into platforms for silently installing keyloggers and other malware on the machines of unsuspecting visitors. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases emergency update to patch Internet Explorer bug

Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Not to be outdone by Nvidia’s Tegra 4 announcement and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800-series announcement, Samsung took to the stage today to announce the next processor in its Exynos 5 lineup: the Exynos 5 Octa is an eight-core SoC destined for tablets and high-end smartphones. Not all of these CPU cores are created equal: four of them are high-performance Cortex-A15 cores, the very same found in the Exynos 5 Dual that powers the Nexus 10 and Samsung’s ARM Chromebook . The other four are Cortex-A7 CPU cores—these have the same feature set and capabilities as the A15 cores, but are optimized for power efficiency rather than performance. This makes the Exynos 5 Octa one of the first (if not  the first) products to actually use ARM’s big.LITTLE processor switching technology, something we outlined back in October of 2011 . The SoC is designed to dynamically split the workload between the high-performance and the high-efficiency CPU cores based on the task at hand—less strenuous activities like browsing an app store or checking e-mail might be done on the A7 cores, for instance, while gaming and number crunching could be handed off to the A15 cores. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Starting this Friday, Walmart will be selling the iPhone for use with wireless provider Straight Talk, which is offering a $45-per-month contract with unlimited voice, data, and texting. This sale will make it one of the cheapest ways —as measured over a two-year period—to get a prepaid iPhone. Walmart says it will offer $25-per-month financing for the phone itself if customers use a Walmart credit card. Straight Talk, which uses AT&T’s towers as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), is becoming an increasingly popular option for prepaid customers who want to use an iPhone without paying high prices. (Full disclosure: I am a Straight Talk customer, and have been since April 2012.) “We believe customers shouldn’t have to choose between saving money and having the latest technology,” said Seong Ohm, senior vice president of Entertainment for Walmart US, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Now customers can have the coveted iPhone with unlimited talk, text, and data without a contract for $70 a month thanks to our exclusive Straight Talk plan and industry first financing offer.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Adobe almost does something amazing by accident

It seemed like an intriguing deal. An old version of Adobe Creative Suite—the 2005 vintage CS2, to be precise—became freely downloadable from Adobe, with nothing more than a free-to-create Adobe ID required from users. Although basically useless for Mac users, as CS2 is only available for PowerPC, for Windows users this is a powerful, if not quite cutting edge, suite of graphics apps. This looked like a clever move from Adobe. Photoshop is widely held to be one of the most routinely pirated applications there is. In making an old but still servicable version of the software it appeared that Adobe was offering a good alternative to piracy: instead of using a knock-off copy of CS6, just use CS2. A free CS2 would also go some way toward starving alternative applications of oxygen. Given the choice between a free copy of CS2 and downloading, say, the GIMP, one imagines that many users would plump for the commercial application. It’s more of a known quantity, with a more polished user interface. And Photoshop is, frankly, the gold standard of bitmap image editing. Even an older version has a prestige that GIMP doesn’t. This is not to say that CS2 is necessarily superior to the GIMP; it may or may not be. It doesn’t really matter; Photoshop has a reputation and respect that the GIMP doesn’t have, and even if some might argue that it was undeserved, it influences the decisions users make. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe almost does something amazing by accident

“Neuristor”: Memristors used to create a neuron-like behavior

A cartoon showing spikes of activity traveling among neurons. UC Berkeley Computing hardware is composed of a series of binary switches; they’re either on or off. The other piece of computational hardware we’re familiar with, the brain, doesn’t work anything like that. Rather than being on or off, individual neurons exhibit brief spikes of activity, and encode information in the pattern and timing of these spikes. The differences between the two have made it difficult to model neurons using computer hardware. In fact, the recent, successful generation of a flexible neural system required that each neuron be modeled separately in software in order to get the sort of spiking behavior real neurons display. But researchers may have figured out a way to create a chip that spikes. The people at HP labs who have been working on memristors have figured out a combination of memristors and capacitors that can create a spiking output pattern. Although these spikes appear to be more regular than the ones produced by actual neurons, it might be possible to create versions that are a bit more variable than this one. And, more significantly, it should be possible to fabricate them in large numbers, possibly right on a silicon chip. The key to making the devices is something called a Mott insulator. These are materials that would normally be able to conduct electricity, but are unable to because of interactions among their electrons. Critically, these interactions weaken with elevated temperatures. So, by heating a Mott insulator, it’s possible to turn it into a conductor. In the case of the material used here, NbO 2 , the heat is supplied by resistance itself. By applying a voltage to the NbO 2 in the device, it becomes a resistor, heats up, and, when it reaches a critical temperature, turns into a conductor, allowing current to flow through. But, given the chance to cool off, the device will return to its resistive state. Formally, this behavior is described as a memristor. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Neuristor”: Memristors used to create a neuron-like behavior