hash – Page 27 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Indian ISP’s routing hiccup briefly takes Google down worldwide

For a short time today, people all over the world trying to access Google services were cut off because of what Dyn Research Director of Internet Analysis Doug Madory identified as a “routing leak ” from an Indian broadband Internet provider. The leak is similar to a 2012 incident caused by an Indonesian ISP , which took Google offline for 30 minutes worldwide. Routing leaks occur when a network provider broadcasts all or part of its internal routing table to one or more peered networks via the Border Gateway Protocol, causing network traffic to be routed incorrectly. In this case, the Indian ISP Hathway’s boundary router incorrectly announced routing data for over 300 network prefixes belonging to Google to the Internet backbone via its provider Bharti Airtel. “Bharti in turn announced these routes to the rest of the world,” Madory wrote in a Dyn Research blog entry posted this morning, “and a number of ISPs accepted these routes.” In the US, Cogent and Level 3 accepted the routes; a number of overseas carriers, including Orange, were also affected. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Indian ISP’s routing hiccup briefly takes Google down worldwide

CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files

Crypto-based “ransomware” has become a lucrative business for cybercriminals. Since the arrival of CryptoLocker on the scene last year, a number of copycat malware packages have appeared to compete in the cyber-extortion market, encrypting victims’ photos and other personal files with a key that will be destroyed if they don’t contact the malware’s operators and pay up. Recently, a new variant has emerged that seeks to raise the stakes with a particular class of victim by specifically seeking out files related to a number of popular PC games, as well as Valve’s Steam gaming platform. The malware, which is a variant of the crypt-ransomware called TeslaCrypt, superficially looks like CryptoLocker. But according to a number of security researchers who have analyzed the malware, it shares little code with CryptoLocker or its more well-known successor CryptoWall. And while it will also will target photos and documents, as well as iTunes-related files, as Bromium security researcher Vadim Kotov noted in an analysis on Bromium Labs’ blog , TeslaCrypt also includes code that specifically looks for files related to more than 40 specific PC games, gaming platforms, and game developer tools. The games include both single player and multiplayer games, though it isn’t clear how targeting some of the multiplayer games would affect users other than requiring a re-install. The games targeted include a mix of older and newer titles— for example, Blizzard’s StarCraft II and WarCraft III real-time strategy games and its World of Warcraft online game are targeted. Also on TeslaCrypt’s hit list: Bioshock 2, Call of Duty, DayZ, Diablo, Fallout 3, League of Legends, F.E.A.R, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Minecraft, Metro 2033, Half-Life 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Resident Evil 4, World of Tanks, Metin 2, and The Elder Scrolls (specifically, Skyrim-related files), as well as Star Wars: The Knights Of The Old Republic. There’s also code that searches for files associated with games from specific companies that affect a wide range of titles, including a variety of games from EA Sports, Valve, and Bethesda, and Valve’s Steam gaming platform. And the game development tools RPG Maker, Unity3D and Unreal Engine are targeted as well. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files

reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

SAN FRANCISCO—Interim reddit CEO Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, finally took the stand today in the high-profile gender discrimination case that she brought against the firm three years ago. Pao maintained a firm tone throughout the day, even looking at the jury occasionally while answering questions from her lawyer about her early days at Kleiner. It’s the first opportunity that Pao has taken to elaborate on the gender discrimination claims she made in 2012. And the questioning started by going all the way back to the day Pao was hired at Kleiner Perkins. Pao, a Mandarin-speaking, Princeton-educated engineer with law and business degrees from Harvard, applied to Kleiner Perkins in 2005. At the time, the firm was looking to expand its investments in China. She seemed like a perfect fit, her lawyer Therese Lawless said. In addition to Pao’s language skills, she had years of experience working with 90’s startups like WebTV, Tell Me Networks, and Danger Research (whose team went on to join the team that created Android). She also spent time with bigger companies like Microsoft and BEA Systems. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

SAN FRANCISCO—iOS 8.2 has been in development for several months now, and today Apple is formally releasing the update to the public. It’s available as an over-the-air update or through iTunes for any device running iOS 8, including the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6, and 6 Plus; all iPads except the first-generation model; and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. The biggest feature update is support for the Apple Watch. The device will work with the iPhone 5 and newer models, but it will not work with iPads or iPods. Once you’ve tethered a watch to your phone, a new companion app will allow you to change the watch’s settings, organize its Home screen, and make other changes. We’ll take a longer look at this companion app when the time comes to review the Apple Watch itself. For those of you with other iDevices and/or no particular interest in the Apple Watch, there are still plenty of reasons to install the update. HomeKit will allow users to control devices at home Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

Apple becomes part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, AT&T gets the boot

Dow Jones has issued a press release this morning announcing that as of March 19, there will be a change to the list of companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average: AT&T is out, and Apple is in. According to the press release, the change is due in part to Visa’s upcoming 4:1 stock split, which will effectively lower Visa’s stock price and its effect on the index. To balance this reduction in Visa’s price—which the press release says can have “a material impact on sector representation”—Apple is being added to the index. The DJIA membership is fixed at thirty stocks , and so in order to add a company to it, one must be removed. The Dow has chosen to drop AT&T, leaving telecommunications to be represented on the index by AT&T’s rival Verizon—which, the release explains, is very similar to AT&T but has a higher market capitalization. The last time any membership changes were made to the DJIA was in September 2013, when Goldman Sachs, Nike, and Visa were added. AT&T has been a member of the DJIA since November 1999. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple becomes part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, AT&T gets the boot

Enormous Martian ocean evaporated into space

NASA scientists have published details of a huge ocean that once covered half of Mars’ northern hemisphere but was lost to space over millennia. Writing in the journal Science, the astronomers explained how they used the ratio of two different kinds of water to estimate how wet the red planet was 4.5 billion years ago. “Early Mars (4.5 billion years ago) had a global equivalent water layer at least 137 meters deep,” they say. Martian water molecules are just like those on Earth—they’re made of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. But there are two kinds of hydrogen—the normal type, and one that’s a little heavier, called deuterium. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Enormous Martian ocean evaporated into space

Water droplets bounce off these new self-cleaning surfaces

Every day, we interact with a myriad of surfaces ranging from soft fabrics to hard metals. Inevitably, this means we have to spend our time cleaning them. A class of self-cleaning materials would certainly make our lives easier. Previous attempts to create these materials have focused on developing surfaces that are rough and waxy; these cause water droplets to roll along the surface, picking up dirt and dust due as it goes. These materials have been relatively successful, but they have many limitations. For example, they’re easily worn away and easily contaminated by oils like those found on our skin. Luckily, scientists have now developed a waterproof, self cleaning coating that can be applied to materials that are as soft as cotton and as hard as glass. This coating is composed of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles with two size distributions, delivered as a suspension in ethanol containing the chemical perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane. After application, the ethanol is allowed to evaporate for 180 seconds before the coating is ready for use. This coating can be sprayed, dipped, or painted onto a surface, and it maintains its performance after several types of damage. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Water droplets bounce off these new self-cleaning surfaces

Tech support scammer threatened to kill man when scam call backfired

Tech support scammers should probably just hang up the phone when a scam call goes wrong. But one scammer took things to a new level by threatening to kill a man who pointed out that the scammer was trying to steal money. As we’ve reported numerous times , scammers pretending to work for Microsoft tech support call potential victims, tell them their computers are infected, convince them to provide remote access, and then charge them hundreds of dollars to fix imaginary problems. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tech support scammer threatened to kill man when scam call backfired

Now you can easily send (free!) encrypted messages between Android, iOS

On Monday, Open Whisper Systems announced the release of Signal 2.0 , the second version of its app for iOS. What makes this latest release special is that it allows users to send end-to-end encrypted messages, for free, to users of Redphone and TextSecure, Android apps supported by Open Whisper Systems that encrypt calling and text messages, respectively. Previously, this kind of cross-platform secure messaging cost money in the form of a monthly subscription fee that both the sender and the receiver of the message had to pay. (Or, encrypting messages cost considerable time and effort to implement without a dedicated app.) Signal and its Android counterpart TextSecure are unique in that they use forward encryption, which generates temporary keys for each message, but still allow asynchronous messaging through the use of push notifications and “prekeys.” Ars reported on the implementation details in 2013 . Open Whisper Systems has pulled ahead of other privacy apps by making its interface easy for a person who doesn’t know too much about encryption to use. It’s also open source, so it can be vetted by experts, and its open encryption protocol can be adopted by other messaging apps. In fact, last November, messaging platform Whatsapp deployed Open Whisper Systems’ protocol for its 500 million Android users . Still, until now communicating with iOS users from an Android phone has been much more challenging. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Now you can easily send (free!) encrypted messages between Android, iOS

Remote valet mode and revolutionized parking: Ford’s Smart Mobility

Ford has a plan to help cut car emissions, and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with batteries, hybrid powertrains, or clever engine technology. Instead, the company is focusing on improving the parking experience, and its answer involves a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country, and remote control vehicles enabled by off-the-shelf commercial 4G LTE. At first glance that might not sound like it has much to do with reducing vehicle CO 2 emissions, but according to Ford, their data shows that hunting for parking spaces in urban environments can account for between 20 and 30 percent of a vehicle’s emissions. To find out more about what Ford has been working on, we spoke with Mike Tinskey, director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure at Ford. He told Ars about a pair of research projects that the car maker has been working on as part of a larger program called Smart Mobility. Smart Mobility involves 25 different experiments and pilot studies around the world, but these two have both been developed in conjunction with a team at Georgia Tech here in the US; Ford has had a long-running relationship with the group, which Tinskey describes as being analogous to the company’s research and advanced modeling arm for sustainability. According to Tinskey, Smart Mobility exists at the intersection of mobility and sustainability, with the overall goal of finding novel ways to reduce CO 2 . “When you look for places to do that, you start looking at antiquated things like parking, where people waste a lot of time, and a lot of CO 2 ,” he said. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments