Tag: newsletters

New anti-speech low: buyer sued over negative eBay feedback

Ratings are important on eBay. Lots of buyers use them to assess the quality and reliability of particular sellers, and lots of sellers will go to great lengths to keep perfect or near-perfect ratings. But an Ohio company named Med Express has shown it’s willing to go further than other sellers: it’s willing to litigate. When Med Express got its first piece of negative feedback, it filed a lawsuit , insisting that the feedback be removed from eBay. Amy Nicholls paid $175 for a microscope light, as well as $12 for shipping. She was annoyed when she had to pay an extra $1.44 in postage due and left feedback complaining about that inconvenience. Med Express asked her to remove the feedback and she refused. The company complained that because it offered to refund her the $1.44, she should have taken down the feedback, which had the potential to hurt its business. (In the past six months, Med Express has 142 pieces of positive feedback and only one negative review.) Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New anti-speech low: buyer sued over negative eBay feedback

“Syrian Electronic Army” hacks NPR publishing system, edits articles

NPR’s Web publishing system and several of the news agency’s Twitter accounts were hacked yesterday by a group supportive of the Syrian government that calls itself the “Syrian Electronic Army.” “Late Monday evening, several stories on the NPR website were defaced with headlines and text that said ‘Syrian Electronic Army Was Here,'” an NPR statement published in a NPR.org news story on the incident said. “Some of these stories were distributed to and appeared on NPR Member Station websites. We have made the necessary corrections to those stories on NPR.org and are continuing to work with our Member Stations. Similar statements were posted on several NPR Twitter accounts. Those Twitter accounts have been addressed. We are closely monitoring the situation.” Sophos’s Naked Security blog published a summary of the hack , including a screenshot of a Google search showing some of the headlines edited by the Syrian Electronic Army: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Syrian Electronic Army” hacks NPR publishing system, edits articles

Google Glass specs: 16GB SSD, “full-day” battery, and no 3rd-party ads

Google The Google Glass team yesterday released a list of tech specs for the upcoming augmented reality glasses. They will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity; 16GB of flash memory, with 12GB usable (synced with Google cloud storage); a 5MP camera for photos and 720p for video; a battery providing a full day of typical usage; and an HD display that will be “the equivalent of a 25 inch high definition screen from eight feet away.” The optimal resolution for photos and video will be 640×360, according to a separate document prepared for developers. Developers using the Google Mirror API to create applications for Glass have also been told not to serve up any advertisements. “You may not serve or include any advertisements in your API Client,” the Mirror API terms of service state. “You may not use user data from your API Client for advertising purposes. You may not sell or transmit any user data received from your API Client(s) to a third-party ad network or service, data broker, or other advertising or marketing provider. For the avoidance of doubt, user data from the API Client(s) may not be used for Third-Party Ad Serving.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass specs: 16GB SSD, “full-day” battery, and no 3rd-party ads

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

CloudFlare Security analysts have detected an ongoing attack that uses a huge number of computers from across the Internet to commandeer servers that run the WordPress blogging application. The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using more than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses. “These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, wrote in a blog post describing the attacks. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

Microsoft tells Windows 7 users to uninstall faulty security update (Updated)

Microsoft has pulled a Windows 7 security update released as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday after discovering it caused some machines to become unbootable. Update 2823324 , which was included in the MS13-036 bulletin , fixed a “moderate-level vulnerability” that requires an attacker to have physical computer access to be able to exploit a targeted computer, Dustin Childs, a group manager in the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing group, wrote in a blog post published Thursday evening. The company has now pulled it from the bulletin and is advising at least some Windows users who have installed it to uninstall the update following the guidance here . MS130-26 was one of nine bulletins released on Monday to fix 13 separate vulnerabilities. “We’ve determined that the update, when paired with certain third-party software, can cause system errors,” Childs wrote. “As a precaution, we stopped pushing 2823324 as an update when we began investigating the error reports, and have since removed it from the download center.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft tells Windows 7 users to uninstall faulty security update (Updated)

BlackBerry wants SEC to investigate “false reports” of Z10 returns

Yesterday, brokerage firm Detwiler Fenton claimed that more people were returning BlackBerry Z10s than had bought them at retail in the first place. Today, BlackBerry responded , saying not only that the Detwiler report was incorrect, but that it was going to ask the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US and the Ontario Securities Commission in Canada to review the report. Of the reports, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said, “Return rate statistics show that we are at or below our forecasts and right in line with the industry. To suggest otherwise is either a gross misreading of the data or a willful manipulation. Such a conclusion is absolutely without basis and BlackBerry will not leave it unchallenged.” The smartphone company also noted that Detwiler refused to make its report or methodology available. How more phones could be returned than were sold isn’t clear. Detwiler Fenton is the same firm that predicted that Microsoft would sell 2-3 million Surface Pro units in the fourth quarter of 2012, despite the fact that Microsoft explicitly said the device wouldn’t ship until three months after the Surface RT’s October launch. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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BlackBerry wants SEC to investigate “false reports” of Z10 returns

A beginner’s guide to building botnets—with little assembly required

Original photo by Michael Kappel / Remixed by Aurich Lawson Have a plan to steal millions from banks and their customers but can’t write a line of code? Want to get rich quick off advertising click fraud but “quick” doesn’t include time to learn how to do it? No problem. Everything you need to start a life of cybercrime is just a few clicks (and many more dollars) away. Building successful malware is an expensive business. It involves putting together teams of developers, coordinating an army of fraudsters to convert ill-gotten gains to hard currency without pointing a digital arrow right back to you. So the biggest names in financial botnets—Zeus, Carberp, Citadel, and SpyEye, to name a few—have all at one point or another decided to shift gears from fraud rings to crimeware vendors, selling their wares to whoever can afford them. In the process, these big botnet platforms have created a whole ecosystem of software and services in an underground market catering to criminals without the skills to build it themselves. As a result, the tools and techniques used by last years’ big professional bank fraud operations, such as the ” Operation High Roller ” botnet that netted over $70 million last summer, are available off-the-shelf on the Internet. They even come with full technical support to help you get up and running. Read 63 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A beginner’s guide to building botnets—with little assembly required

Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

If Intel gets its way, old-school server racks will go the way of the dinosaurs. David Monniaux Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that’s capable of 100Gbps. “We are developing a rack-scale architecture,” Lisa Graff, VP and general manager of Intel’s data center marketing group, said in a briefing with reporters last week. “We’re working with end users, OEMs, and ISVs to drive common standards in a reference architecture.” Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more

Crucial announced in a press release this morning that it has begun selling its latest round of consumer-grade solid-state disks (SSDs), the M500 . The 2.5-inch SATA III SSDs are the follow-up to Crucial’s M4 SSDs, which are a pretty popular choice for people adding SSDs to existing systems (I think I have four or five M4s scattered in computers around my house). The drives use 20nm MLC NAND sourced from Micron (and if you’re not sure what MLC NAND is, we’ve got a great SSD primer right here ), along with a Micron-provided SSD controller. Performance for the M500 drives is what you’d expect from a drive in this class: sequential read and write speeds of 500MB per second and 400MB per second. But the big news about the announcement is the capacities. The M500 is available in standard pedestrian capacities of 120GB and 240GB, as well as a large capacity of 480GB, but the top-end SKU is the exciting one: 960GB for just $599.99 (62¢ per raw GB). The MSRPs for the smaller capacities are $129.99 for the 120GB (about $1 per raw GB), $219.99 for the 240GB (about 91¢ per raw GB), and $399.99 for the 480GB (about 83¢ per raw GB). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more