The one thing that helped me combat my irritation at being at an airport was the knowledge that airports are the great social equalizer: generally, it doesn’t matter who you are—rich, poor, famous, normal, whatever—you still have to check-in, go through security and get on the moving sidewalks to your gate. It sucks… Read more…
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LAX’s New Private Luxury Terminal For The Rich Is The Most Obnoxiously LA Thing Ever
When Amazon and Comixology first announced Unlimited last year, two of the biggest comics publishers around were conspicuously absent from the list of comics available in the read-what-you-want service: Marvel and DC. But today, one of them has finally gotten on board. Read more…
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Marvel Joins Comixology’s All-You-Can Read Subscription Service
An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children’s books surged 16%. The same trend is on display in the U.S., where ebook sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%… Sales of e-readers declined by more than 40% between 2011 and 2016, according to consumer research group Euromonitor International. “E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiraled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets, ” Euromonitor said in a research note. The article includes an even more interesting statistic: that one-third of adults tried a “digital detox” in 2016, limiting their personal use of electronics. Are any Slashdot readers trying to limit their own screen time — or reading fewer ebooks? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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As Print Surges, Ebook Sales Plunge Nearly 20%
An anonymous reader writes: “Mobile applications that open ports on Android smartphones are opening those devices to remote hacking, claims a team of researchers from the University of Michigan, ” reports Bleeping Computer. Researchers say they’ve identified 410 popular mobile apps that open ports on people’s smartphones. They claim that an attacker could connect to these ports, which in turn grant access to various phone features, such as photos, contacts, the camera, and more. This access could be leveraged to steal photos, contacts, or execute commands on the target’s phone. Researchers recorded various demos to prove their attacks. Of these 410 apps, there were many that had between 10 and 50 million downloads on the official Google Play Store and even an app that came pre-installed on an OEMs smartphones. “Research on the mobile open port problem started after researchers read a Trend Micro report from 2015 about a vulnerability in the Baidu SDK, which opened a port on user devices, providing an attacker with a way to access the phone of a user who installed an app that used the Baidu SDK, ” reports Bleeping Computer. “That particular vulnerability affected over 100 million smartphones, but Baidu moved quickly to release an update. The paper detailing the team’s work is entitled Open Doors for Bob and Mallory: Open Port Usage in Android Apps and Security Implications, and was presented Wednesday, April 26, at the 2nd IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy that took place this week in Paris, France.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Open Ports Create Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones
A US online pet store has exposed the details of more than 110, 400 credit cards used to make purchases through its website, researchers have found. From a report on ZDNet: In a stunning show of poor security, the Austin, TX-based company FuturePets.com exposed its entire customer database, including names, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, and plain-text passwords. Several customers that we reached out to confirmed some of their information when it was provided by ZDNet, but did not want to be named. The database was exposed because of the company’s own insecure server and use of “rsync, ” a common protocol used for synchronizing copies of files between two different computers, which wasn’t protected with a username or password. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A Database of Thousands of Credit Cards Was Left Exposed on the Open Internet
Reddit’s default design is a throwback to simpler times on the internet. However, moderators on the site’s numerous subreddits put a bunch of work into making sure their communities stand out from each other by employing CSS (cascading style sheets) to change everything from banner images, fonts, icons and other aspects of the user interface. Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman said that’s going to change, as the massive discussion board is undergoing an overhaul. Among his reasons — CSS being difficult to learn, and it not translating to mobile where Reddit apparently gets over half its traffic — Huffman also says that the site using the coding language has impeded growth and change. “CSS causes us to move slow, ” he said. “We’d like to make changes more quickly. You’ve asked us to improve things, and one of the things that slows us down is the risk of breaking subreddit CSS (and third-party mod tools).” In the next few months, the site will begin transitioning away from CSS. From the sounds of it, though, a lot of the CSS-powered customization features are going to be built into the site proper. Community calendars and “a lot of the functionality” from sidebars will be available via widgets. The redesigned site will run in parallel with the current version as the changes are implemented. Huffman said the ultimate goal is to replicate what’s already available, and that the dev team will make it easier to use and viewable on the go. Speaking directly to the last point, Huffman said that header images and flair colors will render on both desktop and mobile after the changes. As for mod tools, Huffman said that Reddit is in talks with the developers of third-party mod-tool provider Toolbox to port its functionality into the redesign. Perhaps unexpectedly, Reddit’s users aren’t too excited about the new direction. The big worry is that the changes will strip Reddit’s mods of some of their creative control for their respective communities and that everything is going to look a bit more boring as a result. That might be taking the announcement a little too far. For all we know, there’s a chance that the changeover won’t affect much. Or there’s the other possibility: Reddit will realize how big of an undertaking this is and abandon the refresh — something Huffman hinted at in the comments of his post. Replying to a mod who asked what incentive there was to keep working while the changes were coming, Huffman had this to say: “I would advice [sic] to continue developing until the new stuff is real. Who knows, maybe we’ll screw it up and never release it..” So long as r/CrappyDesign (above) can keep its intentionally awful Comic Sans UI and layout, we’ll be happy. Via: The Verge Source: Reddit
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Reddit plans to make big changes to how the site looks
Enlarge (credit: Countercept ) After Microsoft officials dismissed evidence that more than 10,000 Windows machines on the Internet were infected by a highly advanced National Security Agency backdoor , private researchers are stepping in to fill the void. The latest example of this open source self-help came on Tuesday with the release of a tool that can remotely uninstall the DoublePulsar implant. On late Friday afternoon, Microsoft officials issued a one-sentence statement saying that they doubted the accuracy of multiple Internet-wide scans that found anywhere from 30,000 to slightly more than 100,000 infected machines. The statement didn’t provide any factual basis for the doubt, and officials have yet to respond on the record to requests on Tuesday for an update. Over the weekend, Below0day released the results of a scan that detected 56,586 infected Windows boxes, an 85-percent jump in the 30,626 infections the security firm found three days earlier. Both numbers are in the conservative end of widely ranging results from scans independently carried out by other researchers over the past week. On Monday, Rendition Infosec published a blog post saying DoublePulsar infections were on the rise and that company researchers are confident the scan results accurately reflect real-world conditions. Rendition founder Jake Williams told Ars that the number of infected machines is “well over 120k, but that number is a floor.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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NSA backdoor detected on >55,000 Windows boxes can now be remotely removed
Chain mail was an essential tool for medieval warriors hoping to avoid a quick (or slow) death by a sword. But NASA engineers hope a similar material , with a few modern upgrades, could prove to be just as useful for spacecraft and astronauts looking to survive the rigors of outer space. Read more…
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NASA Is Developing 3D-Printed Chain Mail to Protect Ships and Astronauts
Enlarge (credit: BoatingWithTR.com ) BrickerBot, the botnet that permanently incapacitates poorly secured Internet of Things devices before they can be conscripted into Internet-crippling denial-of-service armies, is back with a new squadron of foot soldiers armed with a meaner arsenal of weapons. Pascal Geenens, the researcher who first documented what he calls the permanent denial-of-service botnet, has dubbed the fiercest new instance BrickerBot.3. It appeared out of nowhere on April 20, exactly one month after BrickerBot.1 first surfaced. Not only did BrickerBot.3 mount a much quicker number of attacks—with 1,295 attacks coming in just 15 hours—it used a modified attack script that added several “fork bomb” commands designed to more completely shock and awe its targets. BrickerBot.1, by comparison, fired 1,895 volleys during the four days it was active, and the still-active BrickerBot.2 has spit out close to 12 attacks per day. “Just like BrickerBot.1, this attack was a short but intense burst,” Geenens told Ars. “Shorter than the four days BrickerBot.1 lasted, but even more intense. The attacks from BrickerBot.3 came in on a different honeypot than the one that recorded BrickerBot.1. There is, however, no correlation between the devices used in the previous attack versus the ones in this attack.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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BrickerBot, the permanent denial-of-service botnet, is back with a vengeance
It isn’t only the junk processor that makes a really cheap computer slow. Or the memory or the video card (or lack of video card). The primary reason your cheap laptop loudly chugs along at glacial speeds is because of the hard drive. Cheap laptops use cheap hard disk drives, which are much slower than the solid state… Read more…
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Intel’s Optane Memory Makes Cheap Hard Drives as Fast as Expensive SSDs