lucky-modern – Page 16 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

How we built a DIY book scanner with speeds of 150 pages per minute

Bookshelves today are simply not as appealing as they used to be, and there’s no shortage of people looking to digitize their own book collections. Fortunately, we now have easy and relatively inexpensive ways to digitize those books. You don’t have to slave away at your copier or scanner, either—we’re talking about building a book scanner of your very own. We’re not talking about the numerous book scanning services that have popped up in the last few years, offering book digitization at the cost of only a few cents per page. Nor are we talking about chopping off the binding of your book and feeding the pages into a copier or scanner, or purchasing a commercial book scanner for upwards of $10,000 (that just isn’t going to happen for most). No, we’re talking toolbelts, paint cans, bike brakes, and digital cameras—doing it yourself. For two law students interested in the legal and policy discussions surrounding copyright and technology, deciding to build a DIY Book Scanner was never just a project to digitize our own textbooks (however practical that might be). Instead, it gave us the opportunity to experience these issues first hand. Plus, we wanted to see what it would take to build one. Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments

How alleged crooks used ATM skimmers to compromise thousands of accounts

Federal authorities have charged two men suspected of running an international operation that used electronic devices planted at automatic teller machine locations to compromise more than 6,000 bank accounts. The operation—which targeted Capital One, J. P. Morgan Chase, and other banks—netted, or attempted to net, about $3 million according to an indictment filed in Manhattan federal court. It allegedly worked by obtaining payment card readers from Hungary and other countries and installing them on top of card readers already located on ATMs and doors to ATM vestibules. The fraudulent readers were equipped with hardware that recorded the information encoded onto a card’s magnetic stripe each time it was inserted. A hidden pinhole camera with a view of the ATM keypad then captured the corresponding personal identification number. Antonio Gabor and Simion Tudor Pintillie allegedly led a gang of at least nine other people who regularly planted the skimming devices in the Manhattan, Chicago, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas, prosecutors said. They would later revisit the ATM to retrieve the information stored on the skimming devices and cameras. Gang members would then encode the stolen data onto blank payment cards and use the corresponding PINs to make fraudulent purchases or withdrawals. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How alleged crooks used ATM skimmers to compromise thousands of accounts

Cause of Super Bowl blackout was installed to prevent Super Bowl blackout

Entergy New Orleans, the utility that provides power to the Mercedes SuperDome in New Orleans, announced today that its technicians had determined the cause of the partial blackout during the Super Bowl last Sunday: an electrical relay the company had installed to prevent blackouts. The relay was supposed to trip switches to redirect power in the event of a line fault over one of the cables connecting Entergy’s switching gear to the stadium. In a statement , the company said that “the relay functioned without issue during a number of high-profile events—including the New Orleans Bowl, the New Orleans Saints-Carolina Panthers game, and the Sugar Bowl.” But on Super Bowl Sunday, the device instead triggered when there was no fault, signaling a switch to open shortly after the second half began. The relay has now been pulled, and Entergy is evaluating other equipment. “While some further analysis remains,” said Entergy New Orleans President and CEO Charles Rice in the prepared statement, “we believe we have identified and remedied the cause of the power outage and regret the interruption that occurred during what was a showcase event for the city and state.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cause of Super Bowl blackout was installed to prevent Super Bowl blackout

Adobe issues emergency Flash update for attacks on Windows, Mac users

Adobe Systems has released a patch for two Flash player vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited online to surreptitiously install malware, one in attacks that target users of Apple’s Macintosh platform. While Flash versions for OS X and Windows are the only ones reported to be under attack, Thursday’s unscheduled release is available for Linux and Android devices as well. Users of all affected operating systems should install the update as soon as possible. The Mac exploits target users of the Safari browser included in Apple’s OS X, as well as those using Mozilla’s Firefox. That vulnerability, cataloged as CVE-2013-0634, is also being used in exploits that trick Windows users into opening booby-trapped Microsoft Word documents that contain malicious Flash content, Adobe said in an advisory . Adobe credited members of the Shadowserver Foundation , Lockheed Martin’s Computer Incident Response Team, and MITRE with discovery of the critical bug. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe issues emergency Flash update for attacks on Windows, Mac users

How Yahoo allowed hackers to hijack my neighbor’s e-mail account

Reflected XSS vulnerabilities in action Aspect Security When my neighbor called early Wednesday morning, she sounded close to tears. Her Yahoo Mail account had been hijacked and used to send spam to addresses in her contact list. Restrictions had then been placed on her account that prevented her from e-mailing her friends to let them know what happened. In a blog post published hours before my neighbor’s call, researchers from security firm Bitdefender said that the hacking campaign that targeted my neighbor’s account had been active for about a month. Even more remarkable, the researchers said the underlying hack worked because Yahoo’s developer blog runs on a version of the WordPress content management system that contained a vulnerability developers addressed more than eight months ago . My neighbor’s only mistake, it seems, was clicking on a link while logged in to her Yahoo account. As someone who received one of the spam e-mails from her compromised account, I know how easy it is to click such links. The subject line of my neighbor’s e-mail mentioned me by name, even though my name isn’t in my address. Over the past few months, she and I regularly sent messages to each other that contained nothing more than a Web address, so I thought nothing of opening the link contained in Wednesday’s e-mail. The page that opened looked harmless enough. It appeared to be an advertorial post on MSNBC.com about working from home, which is something I do all the time. But behind the scenes, according to Bitdefender, something much more nefarious was at work. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Office 365 Home Premium Edition’s lineup of software, ready to stream to your PC today. Today, Microsoft releases Office 2013—the first full release of Microsoft’s latest-generation productivity suite for consumers. Office 2013 has already made a partial debut on Microsoft’s Windows RT tablets, though RT users will get a (slight) refresh with the full availability of the suite. The company gave consumers an open preview of Office last summer, which we reviewed in depth at the time of the suite’s announcement. So there aren’t any real surprises in the final versions of the applications being releasing today, at least as far as how they look and work. Today’s release, however, marks the first general availability of Microsoft’s new subscription model under the Office 365 brand the company has used for its hosted mail and collaboration services for businesses. While the applications in Office are being offered in a number of ways, Microsoft is trying hard to steer consumer customers to Office 365 Home Premium Edition, a service-based version of the suite that will sell for $100 a year. And just as Windows 8’s app store started to fill up as the operating system approached release, the same is true of Office’s own app store—an in-app accessible collection of Web-powered functionality add-ons for many of the core Office applications based on the same core technologies (JavaScript and HTML5) that power many of Windows 8’s interface-formerly-known-as-Metro apps. Now, the trick is getting consumers to buy into the idea of Office as a subscription service and embracing Microsoft’s Office “lifestyle,” instead of something they buy once and hold onto until their computers end up in the e-waste pile. Read 28 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

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

New report shows Congress’ favorite BitTorrent downloads

Congress has become gun-shy about putting together Internet-related legislation after the attempt to pass SOPA generated unprecedented public outrage, but Internet piracy is still on its radar. Still, it turns out that digital copies of pirated movies and TV shows aren’t just the subject of committee debates on Capitol Hill—they’re also being downloaded onto Capitol Hill computers. A post today in US News & World Report’s tech blog published new information from anti-piracy forensics company ScanEye , a company that offers BitTorrent monitoring services in the name of fighting piracy. The ScanEye report [ PDF ] shows apparently pirated movie files being downloaded via IP addresses associated with the US House of Representatives. Congressional employees downloaded episodes of Glee , CSI , Dexter , and Home and Away in October and early November. There are more TV episodes downloaded than movies, but the report also shows downloads of films, such as Iron Sky , which was downloaded by a Congress-owned computer on Oct. 4; Life of Pi , downloaded on Oct. 27; and the Dark Knight Rises , downloaded on Oct. 25. Another download listed is Bad Santa 2 , a movie which has not been released yet. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

Wilocity’s wireless chips allow 4.6Gbps transmission over the 60GHz band. Wilocity In a quiet suite removed from the insanity of the Consumer Electronics Show expo floor, a company aiming to build the fastest Wi-Fi chips in the world demonstrated its vision of wireless technology’s future. On one desk, a laptop powered a two-monitor setup without any wires. At another, a tablet playing an accelerometer-based racing game mirrors its screen in high definition to another monitor. Across the room, a computer quickly transfers a 3GB file from a wireless router with built-in storage. The suite was set up in the Las Vegas Hotel by Wilocity , a chip company specializing in wireless products using 60GHz transmissions, which are far faster than traditional Wi-Fi. Avoiding the show floor is a good idea if you’re worried about Internet connectivity, because thousands of vendors are clogging the pipes. But that’s not why Wilocity was here—they’d be able to perform the demo even in the busiest parts of CES without interference because they’re not relying on the congested bands used by regular Wi-Fi. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

AMD puts brakes on chip manufacturing as sales plummet

Windows 8 and the holidays have failed to give PC makers the usual yearly bump in sales, and now Advanced Micro Devices is paying the price. The company announced yesterday that it has reduced its chip manufacturing orders for the last three months of the company’s 2012 fiscal year by more than 75 percent, and it will pay a heavy penalty for the changes. In a new agreement signed with manufacturing partner GlobalFoundries , AMD reduced its promised silicon wafer purchases to just $115 million, down from $500 million, while agreeing to pay a $320 million penalty for the order change over the next year. AMD spun off GlobalFoundries in 2009, and in March of 2012 it sold off its remaining stake in the company , leaving an investment arm of the government of the United Arab Emirates as the company’s sole owner. The move is part of an emergency plan to keep AMD’s cash on hand up as revenues continue to slide. On a conference call yesterday, AMD interim Chief Financial Officer Devinder Kumar said, “Liquidity and cash management remain a key focus for AMD.” The chipmaker is still looking for a permanent CFO to fill the gap left by Thomas Seifert, who bailed on the company in September “to pursue other interests.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments