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Manufacturer’s Backdoor Found On Popular Chinese Android Smartphone

Trailrunner7 writes that researchers at Palo Alto Networks have found a backdoor in Android devices sold by Coolpad. “A popular Android smartphone sold primarily in China and Taiwan but also available worldwide, contains a backdoor from the manufacturer that is being used to push pop-up advertisements and install apps without users’ consent. The Coolpad devices, however, are ripe for much more malicious abuse, researchers at Palo Alto Networks said today, especially after the discovery of a vulnerability in the backend management interface that exposed the backdoor’s control system. Ryan Olson, intelligence director at Palo Alto, said the CoolReaper backdoor not only connects to a number of command and control servers, but is also capable of downloading, installing and activating any Android application without the user’s permission. It also sends phony over-the-air updates to devices that instead install applications without notifying the user. The backdoor can also be used to dial phone numbers, send SMS and MMS messages, and upload device and usage information to Coolpad.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Manufacturer’s Backdoor Found On Popular Chinese Android Smartphone

Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS

schwit1 sends this report from The Verge: Most anti-piracy tools take one of two paths: they either target the server that’s sharing the files (pulling videos off YouTube or taking down sites like The Pirate Bay) or they make it harder to find (delisting offshore sites that share infringing content). But leaked documents reveal a frightening line of attack that’s currently being considered by the MPAA: What if you simply erased any record that the site was there in the first place? To do that, the MPAA’s lawyers would target the Domain Name System that directs traffic across the internet. The tactic was first proposed as part of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2011, but three years after the law failed in Congress, the MPAA has been looking for legal justification for the practice in existing law and working with ISPs like Comcast to examine how a system might work technically. If a takedown notice could blacklist a site from every available DNS provider, the URL would be effectively erased from the internet. No one’s ever tried to issue a takedown notice like that, but this latest memo suggests the MPAA is looking into it as a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against piracy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS

Apple and Samsung Already Working On A9 Processor

itwbennett writes According to a report in Korean IT Times, Samsung Electronics has begun production of the A9 processor, the next generation ARM-based CPU for iPhone and iPad. Korea IT Times says Samsung has production lines capable of FinFET process production (a cutting-edge design for semiconductors that many other manufacturers, including AMD, IBM and TSMC, are adopting) in Austin, Texas and Giheung, Korea, but production is only taking place in Austin. Samsung invested $3.9 billion in that plant specifically to make chips for Apple. So now Apple can say its CPU is “Made in America.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple and Samsung Already Working On A9 Processor

Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

MojoKid writes Seagate’s just-announced a new ‘Archive’ HDD series, one that offers densities of 5TB, 6TB, and 8TB. That’s right, 8 Terabytes of storage on a single drive and for only $260 at that. Back in 2007, Seagate was one of the first to release a hard drive based on perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that was required to help us break past the roadblock of achieving more than 250GB per platter. Since then, PMR has evolved to allow the release of drives as large as 10TB, but to go beyond that, something new was needed. That “something new” is shingled magnetic recording. As its name suggests, SMR aligns drive tracks in a singled pattern, much like shingles on a roof. With this design, Seagate is able to cram much more storage into the same physical area. It should be noted that Seagate isn’t the first out the door with an 8TB model, however, as HGST released one earlier this year. In lieu of a design like SMR, HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted

TaleSlinger sends this news from Space.com: Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe. While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster. “The signal’s distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges, ” [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. “With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations, ” added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted

IsoHunt Unofficially Resurrects the Pirate Bay

An anonymous reader writes: Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content. This is much more than just a working archive of The Pirate Bay; it has a functioning search engine, all the old listings, and working magnet links. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IsoHunt Unofficially Resurrects the Pirate Bay

BGP Hijacking Continues, Despite the Ability To Prevent It

An anonymous reader writes: BGPMon reports on a recent route hijacking event by Syria. These events continue, despite the ability to detect and prevent improper route origination: Resource Public Key Infrastructure. RPKI is technology that allows an operator to validate the proper relationship between an IP prefix and an Autonomous System. That is, assuming you can collect the certificates. ARIN requires operators accept something called the Relying Party Agreement. But the provider community seems unhappy with the agreement, and is choosing not to implement it, just to avoid the RPA, leaving the the Internet as a whole less secure. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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BGP Hijacking Continues, Despite the Ability To Prevent It

The da Vinci 1.0 AiO Is The Future Of All-In-One 3D Printers

As we enter the second half of this, the Decade of 3D Printing, we are coming to a crossroads. On one hand the Rebel open source RepRap crowd are clamoring to keep 3D printing free, man, while the Imperial forces of 3D Systems and Stratasys – along with countless imitators all attempting to commercialize 3D printing and create the first popular home printer – are locked in a race… Read More

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The da Vinci 1.0 AiO Is The Future Of All-In-One 3D Printers

New “Shingled” Hard Drives Hold Terabytes For Pennies A Gig

While the last time most of us thought of shingles was when we were itchy in eighth grade, Seagate has been thinking of them as a way to store data. Called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives, Seagate’s new drives can store eight terabytes of data for about 3 cents a gigabyte. The catch? These are great back-up drives but they’re not very fast. At 5, 900 RPM and an average… Read More

Fraud Bots Cost Advertisers $6 Billion

Rambo Tribble writes A new report claims that almost a quarter of the “clicks” registered by digital advertisements are, in fact, from robots created by cyber crime networks to siphon off advertising dollars. The scale and sophistication of the attacks which were discovered caught the investigators by surprise. As one said, “What no one was anticipating is that the bots are extremely effective of looking like a high value consumer.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fraud Bots Cost Advertisers $6 Billion