Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

greyweed Recently discovered malware targeting Android smartphones exploits previously unknown vulnerabilities in the Google operating system and borrows highly advanced functionality more typical of malicious Windows applications, making it the world’s most sophisticated Android Trojan, a security researcher said. The infection, named Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a, isn’t very widespread at the moment. The malware gives an idea of the types of smartphone malware that are possible, however, according to Kaspersky Lab expert Roman Unuchek in a blog post published Thursday . Sharply contrasting with mostly rudimentary Android malware circulating today, the highly stealthy Obad.a exploits previously unknown Android bugs, uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections to spread to near-by handsets, and allows attackers to issue malicious commands using standard SMS text messages. “To conclude this review, we would like to add that Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a looks closer to Windows malware than to other Android trojans, in terms of its complexity and the number of unpublished vulnerabilities it exploits,” Unuchek wrote. “This means that the complexity of Android malware programs is growing rapidly alongside their numbers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan

Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

OS X 10.8.4 comes with a long list of fixes. Andrew Cunningham After several weeks of beta testing, Apple has released OS X version 10.8.4 for all Macs running Mountain Lion. The update fixes a long list of minor issues  and some security bugs as the OS nears its first birthday. Those hoping for major changes to OS X will have to wait until Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week, at which Apple is widely expected to show off Mountain Lion’s successor. Quite a few of 10.8.4’s fixes are aimed at businesses. There are fixes that will help Calendar work better with Microsoft Exchange servers, compatibility and speed improvements to OS X’s Active Directory integration, improvements to compatibility with “certain enterprise Wi-Fi networks,” and fixes to issues with the SMB and NFS network sharing protocols. As ever, Apple is annoyingly nonspecific about the exact problems these updates solve, but network administrators with OS X clients may find something to like about the new update. Other squashed bugs will be of more interest to consumers. For example, there’s an iMessage fix that will prevent out-of-order messages, a fix for a FaceTime issue that would prevent calls to international numbers, and an update to Safari (now at version 6.0.5) that “improves stability for some websites with chat features and games.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple issues OS X 10.8.4 update, includes iMessage and FaceTime fixes

France removes Internet cut-off threat from its anti-piracy law

This street art in eastern France reads: “Hadopi: The French Internet is under control!” mathias France finally put an end to the most extreme measure of its famous “three strikes” anti-piracy regime: no one will face being cut off from the Internet. The law is better known by its French acronym, Hadopi. In the last few years under the law, the Hadopi agency famously set up a system with graduating levels of warnings and fines . The threat of being cut off entirely from the Internet was the highest degree, but that penalty was never actually put into place. “Getting rid of the cut-offs and those damned winged elephants is a good thing. They’re very costly,” Joe McNamee, of European Digital Rights, quipped to Ars. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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France removes Internet cut-off threat from its anti-piracy law

Sony, Lego team up to create programmable, interactive Lego bricks

A newly revealed partnership seeks to bring the interactivity of Sony’s video games to the world of Lego’s physical bricks and characters. At a 25th anniversary open house for Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories in Japan , the companies showed off Toy Alive, a prototype project that uses simple Lego bricks with embedded microchips that can be controlled with a PC or a DualShock gamepad. The Toy Alive team is currently showing off a tiny, remote-controlled platform that can be controlled with a DualShock gamepad to play a chase game monitored by a webcam and computer software. Other bricks use translucent red plastic and built-in, computer-controlled LEDs to make a Lego house look like it’s on fire or to activate an actuator that causes Lego models to explode into pieces. The team is even experimenting with tiny wireless cameras that can give a minifig-eye view of a scene for a bit of augmented reality. Lego has long supported interactivity in its toys through its Mindstorms line of robotics aimed at programmers and students. But with Toy Alive, the team is trying to “keep the pieces small and simple so that children can use them with other toys,” according to associate researcher Alexis Andre, who has been working on the project for about a year. “It’s a mixture of video games and toys, and how do you make toys more interactive? How do you provide a platform for the children to do whatever they want to do?” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony, Lego team up to create programmable, interactive Lego bricks

Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

The Asus Transformer Book Trio takes the dockable tablet concept to the next level. Asus Asus has long offered a line of Android tablets that slot into keyboard docks, but at its Computex press conference it announced it would be taking this concept one step further. Its new Transformer Book Trio is a tablet running Android (an unspecified version of Jelly Bean, to be a bit more precise); when docked, it becomes a Haswell-equipped Windows 8 Ultrabook. The laptop contains all the ingredients for a standard Ultrabook in its base: a 4th-generation Haswell CPU, 1TB of storage, an unspecified amount of RAM, and a 33WHr battery. Behind the 11.6-inch 1080p display is an entirely separate computer based on Intel’s Clover Trail+ Atom platform: the 2GHz Atom Z2580, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of solid-state storage, and a 19WHr battery. When the laptop is docked, Engadget reports that a button press will switch between the Windows 8 installation in the base and the Android installation in the lid. Undocking the lid switches the tablet to a full-time Android tablet, though since the hardware is x86-based, one wonders if Windows 8 couldn’t be installed on it with some effort. The device combines a couple of concepts that Asus is already using elsewhere. Its Transformer Pad tablets have long been keyboard-dockable, and the Transformer AiO also uses a detachable screen to double as a tablet (though in that case the tablet’s hardware is ARM-based). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Two CPUs, two batteries, two OSes: Asus announces Transformer Book Trio

Seat of Power: the computer workstation for the person with everything

MWE Lab’s Emperor 1510 LX—don’t call it a chair. MWE Labs Science fiction is filled with cherished seats of power, workstations that put the universe a finger-touch or a mere thought away. Darth Vader had his meditation pod, the Engineers of Prometheus had their womb-like control stations, and Captain Kirk has the Captain’s Chair. But no real-life workstation has quite measured up to these fictional seats of power in the way that Martin Carpentier’s Emperor workstations have. The latest “modern working environment” from Carpentier’s Quebec City-based MWE Lab is the Emperor 1510 LX. With a retractable monitor stand that can support up to five monitors (three 27-inch and two 19-inch), a reclining seat with thigh rest, a Bose sound system, and Italian leather upholstery, the Emperor 1510 LX looks more like a futuristic vehicle than a workstation.  And it’s priced like a vehicle, too—it  can soon be yours for the low, low price of $21,500. Tale of the Scorpion In 2006, Carpentier was slaving away as a web designer when he reached a breaking point. He was tired of his tangle of cables, the struggle to manage multiple monitors, and the horrible ergonomics that came with a standard computer desk. Inspired by the emperor scorpion, Carpentier modeled his workstation after its tail, with the monitors suspended at the stinger. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Seat of Power: the computer workstation for the person with everything

Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs

Intel is announcing the first of its fourth-generation Core processors based on the “Haswell” architecture. Intel Intel has been releasing information about Haswell, its next-generation CPU architecture, for months now. Our coverage has already been fairly extensive—we’ve already got a nice overview of Haswell’s CPU architecture itself, along with a primer on its brand-new integrated GPUs . All we need to know now is specific product information, and Intel is finally giving us our first official taste of that today. This morning’s announcements revolve around high-end quad-core chips in the Core i7 and Core i5 families, 12 for desktops and ten for laptops. If you’re looking for specific information about U- and Y- series low-voltage chips for Ultrabooks or anything belonging to the Core i3, Pentium, or Celeron families, you’ll have to wait a little while longer. We’ll be sure to pass that information along as we have it. What we’ll do here is present a high-level recap of the CPU, GPU, and chipset enhancements Intel is introducing in Haswell. After that, we’ll break down the specific CPUs that Intel is announcing today, and the kinds of systems you’re likely to find them in. Note that all of this information is coming directly from Intel—they’re not going to out-and-out make things up, but they’re definitely going to present their CPUs in the best possible light. We’ll be putting all of the below performance claims to the test as we begin to review Haswell-based systems later this summer. Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs

iCloud users take note: Apple two-step protection won’t protect your data

A diagram showing how Apple’s two-step verification works. Apple If you think your pictures, contacts, and other data are protected by the two-step verification protection Apple added to its iCloud service in March , think again. According to security researchers in Moscow, the measure helps prevent fraudulent purchases made with your Apple ID but does nothing to augment the security of files you store. To be clear, iCloud data is still secure so long as the password locking it down is strong and remains secret. But in the event that your account credentials are compromised—which is precisely the eventuality Apple’s two-factor verification is intended to protect against—there’s nothing stopping an adversary from accessing data stored in your iCloud account. Researchers at ElcomSoft—a developer of sophisticated software for cracking passwords—made this assessment in a blog post published Thursday . “In its current implementation, Apple’s two-factor authentication does not prevent anyone from restoring an iOS backup onto a new (not trusted) device,” ElcomSoft CEO Vladimir Katalov wrote. “In addition, and this is much more of an issue, Apple’s implementation does not apply to iCloud backups, allowing anyone and everyone knowing the user’s Apple ID and password to download and access information stored in the iCloud. This is easy to verify; simply log in to your iCloud account, and you’ll have full information to everything stored there without being requested any additional logon information.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iCloud users take note: Apple two-step protection won’t protect your data

Unprecedented e-mail privacy bill sent to Texas governor’s desk

Gov. Rick Perry is expected to sign the e-mail privacy bill, which passed both houses of the state legislature without a single “nay” vote. Gov. Rick Perry Assuming that Texas Governor Rick Perry does not veto it, the Lone Star State appears set to enact the nation’s strongest e-mail privacy bill , requiring state law enforcement agencies to get a warrant for all e-mails, regardless of the age of the e-mail. On Tuesday, the Texas bill ( HB 2268 ) was sent to Gov. Perry’s desk, where he has until June 16, 2013 to sign it or veto it—if he does neither, it will pass automatically, taking effect on September 1, 2013. The bill would give Texans more privacy over their inbox to shield against state-level snooping, but the bill would not protect against federal investigations . The bill passed both houses of the state legislature earlier this year without a single “nay” vote. This new bill, if signed, will make Texas law more privacy-conscious than the much-maligned (but frustratingly still in effect) 1986-era Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), where federal law enforcement agencies are only required to get a warrant to access recent e-mails before they are opened by the recipient. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Unprecedented e-mail privacy bill sent to Texas governor’s desk

FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month

Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS’ “unlimited” data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone. “I have never heard of this happening to anyone,” the 27-year-old Californian—who uses the screen name houkouonchi and would prefer not to be identified by name—wrote in a post on DSLreports.com entitled ” LOL VZ called me about my bandwidth usage Gotta go Biz. ” “But I probably use more bandwidth than any FiOS customer in California, so I am not super surprised about this.” Curious about how one person could generate that kind of traffic, Ars reached out to houkouonchi and spoke with him via instant message. As it turns out, he’s the ultimate outlier. His problem is more that he’s violated Verizon’s terms of service than his excessive bandwidth usage. An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, houkouonchi has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month