Last month, it was alleged that the Internal Revenue Service had been using Stingray devices to track people by scraping their phone metadata. Now, it’s admitted as much—and gone so far as to say that it wants another of the units, too. Read more…
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IRS Admits to Using the Same Spy Tech as the FBI to Track 37 Phones
A telephone regulator has warned that festive decorations can spoil your festive internet fun. Here’s the science. Read more…
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Can Christmas Lights Really Play Havoc With Your Wi-Fi?
Uber is partnering with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and—as the slogan goes—they’ll pick you up! By “they” I mean the poor schmucks who sign up to pay around $1000 a month to work for Uber. Read more…
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Uber Launches Insane "Pay-to-Work" Car Rental Program
An anonymous reader writes: The city of Los Angeles is considering a new plan to fight prostitution: sending letters to men who solicit prostitutes in the hopes that the letters are seen by family members. Why not just arrest them while they’re doing it? Because these letters aren’t being sent to the houses of men who were convicted, or even arrested. Instead, automated license plate readers would scan the cars driving down streets known to have a prostitution problem, and the letters would be sent to the address associated with those vehicles. An article about the plan says, “There isn’t ‘potential’ for abuse here, this is a legislated abuse of technology that is already controversial when it’s used by police for the purpose of seeking stolen vehicles, tracking down fugitives and solving specific crimes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Los Angeles Flirts With Pre-Crime
The Raspberry Pi Zero is absurdly small . So small, in fact, that DIYer Terence Eden decided to stuff it inside an Xbox controller and make a little emulation machine. Read more…
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Stuff a Raspberry Pi Zero Into an Xbox Controller for On-Demand Emulation Anywhere
An anonymous reader writes: From January 2016, Adobe Flash will be renamed to ‘Adobe Animate CC’, killing one of the most unfortunate names in web security as the company pushes the product further and further to HTML5 output. Adobe’s release about the update, which will form part of the annual Creative Cloud upgrade, states that a third of all material output from the program is now HTML5. The transitional HTML5 Adobe animation program Edge Animate will be replaced by the renamed Flash product. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name
The latest details about a recent security breach at a kids’ toy company are in, and they are disturbing. A couple weeks ago, hackers successfully broke into the servers of connected toy maker Vtech and stole the personal information of nearly 5 million parents and over 200, 000 kids. What we didn’t know until now: The hackers stole pictures of kids, too. Read more…
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The Horrifying Vtech Hack Let Someone Download Thousands of Photos of Children
(credit: Wired) The Pi Zero—the new £4 Raspberry Pi —has sold out in under 24 hours. The Raspberry Pi Foundation says that around 20,000 individual Pi Zeroes have been sold in the last day, along with a further 10,000 copies of the MagPi magazine which had a Pi Zero on the front. “You’d think we’d be used to it by now, but we’re always amazed by the level of interest in new Raspberry Pi products,” said Eben Upton, the founder of the foundation. “Right now it appears that we’ve sold every individual Zero we made… people are scouring the country for the last few Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Smiths branches that haven’t sold out [of the MagPi magazine],” Upton told Wired . Upton said they are producing more Zeroes “as fast as we can” at its factory in Pencoed, Wales, but didn’t specify when more stock would be available. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Raspberry Pi Zero sells out within 24 hours
An anonymous reader writes: Emsisoft has launched a new tool capable of decrypting files compromised by the DecryptorMax (CryptInfinite) ransomware. The tool is quite easy to use, and will generate a decryption key. For best results users should compare an encrypted and decrypted file, but the tool can also get the decryption key by comparing an encrypted PNG with a random PNG downloaded off the Internet. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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DecryptorMax/CryptInfinite Ransomware Decrypted, No Need To Pay Ransom
Right now, astronauts have to subsist on supplies they take with them to space. But a new project is set to test whether sugar-growing bacteria could create sustenance for space travellers in low-gravity situations. Read more…
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Sugar-Producing Bacteria To Be Tested in Space as Food Source for Astronauts