parsely-root – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Marriott tentatively backs off Wi-Fi blocking plans

In a brief statement on Wednesday evening , hotel chain Marriott International said that it would not block any personal Wi-Fi devices belonging to its customers. Marriott International listens to its customers, and we will not block guests from using their personal Wi-Fi devices at any of our managed hotels. Marriott remains committed to protecting the security of Wi-Fi access in meeting and conference areas at our hotels. We will continue to look to the FCC to clarify appropriate security measures network operators can take to protect customer data, and will continue to work with the industry and others to find appropriate market solutions that do not involve the blocking of Wi-Fi devices. Despite that pledge, Re/Code reports that the company is not rescinding a request for rulemaking that it submitted to the Federal Communications Commission late last year, in which it asked for the Commission’s blessing to block personal hotspots. In October, Marriott was fined $600,000 by the FCC following a complaint that one of its Nashville, Tennessee branches was interfering with and disabling personal Wi-Fi hotspots set up by its customers. Marriott agreed to pay the fine but remained defiant, asking the FCC to allow it to resume its practice. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Silk Road stunner: Ulbricht admits founding the site, but says he isn’t DPR

Once they got the chance, it took prosecutors less than a minute to point the finger—literally—at Ross Ulbricht. The jury of six men and six women were assembled in Manhattan’s federal courthouse to hear a story about a “dark and secret part of the Internet,” government lawyer Timothy Howard explained. The story was about “a website called Silk Road, where anybody, anywhere could buy and sell dangerous drugs with the click of a mouse.” “That man,” Howard said, turning to look straight at Ulbricht and extending his arm towards him. “The defendant—Ross Ulbricht— he was the kingpin of this criminal empire.” Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Silk Road stunner: Ulbricht admits founding the site, but says he isn’t DPR

Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken, and what you can do to fix it

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the current state of Apple’s software quality. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with development knows that bugs are par for the course, and most people aren’t bothered by small, day-to-day bugs that are fixed within a reasonable timeframe. Obviously, like everyone else, Apple’s software has its share of those. But there’s another category of bug—glaring, perplexing bugs that couldn’t possibly have escaped the attention of the software engineers in question, let alone the quality assurance department. Such issues exist, and sometimes they go unfixed for months. Or years. Or ever. Hopefully, the set of network issues with OS X 10.10 described below won’t fall into this column, but they do raise an obvious question: why? For 12 years, the mDNSResponder service managed a surprisingly large part of our Mac’s networking, and it managed this task well. But as of OS X 10.10, the mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd, which does the same thing. Mostly. Here are some strange networking problems we’ve observed since installing 10.10: Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken, and what you can do to fix it

Bitcoin investor who renounced US citizenship now can’t get back in

A well-known entrepreneur, often dubbed “Bitcoin Jesus”—who famously renounced his American citizenship last year—was denied a visa on Tuesday to re-enter the United States to attend an upcoming Bitcoin conference in Miami. According to Roger Ver’s tweets, it was his third attempt to re-enter in eight days. Ver, who on occasion wears a T-shirt that reads “borders are imaginary lines,” lambasted consular officials at the US Embassy in Barbados, where he made his application. @iamsunbird , The @USEmbassyBbdos staff specifically told me it was because I didn’t prove I have strong enough ties outside of the USA. — Roger Ver (@rogerkver) January 7, 2015 @tom_sharkey the most recent rejection was this morning. It was my third attempt in 8 days. They claim I secretly intend to live in the USA — Roger Ver (@rogerkver) January 6, 2015 In or out? Ver has been a citizen of the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis since February 2014. For the last 30 years, St. Kitts has offered citizenship through its “Citizenship by Investment” program. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin investor who renounced US citizenship now can’t get back in

North Korean defector to airdrop DVD, USB copies of The Interview

A well-known North Korean defector has announced that he will launch 100,000 DVDs and USB sticks with copies of The Interview as part of his regularly scheduled balloon launches into the Hermit Kingdom. Sony Pictures pulled the theatrical release of the film in the wake of hacks against its corporate networks . In an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, Park Sang-hak said that his next launch is planned for late January and will be in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation, which did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. “North Korea’s absolute leadership will crumble if the idolization of leader Kim breaks down,” Park told the AP, which noted that the dispatched versions will have Korean subtitles. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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North Korean defector to airdrop DVD, USB copies of The Interview

HP sells Palm trademarks; brand could be resurrected with new smartphones

Palm, the legendary smartphone and PDA company, might seem dead and gone, but it’s now looking like the name “Palm” will rise again as a zombie brand. For a quick refresher: HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010. HP killed the Palm brand after about a year of ownership and stopped making WebOS devices entirely about a year-and-a-half after the acquisition. Since then, Palm has been pretty dead. Lately, though, the brand has started to stir. The diehards over at WebOS Nation have been keeping a close eye on Palm.com , which recently stopped redirecting nostalgic visitors to hpwebos.com and started sending people to mynewpalm.com . The page shows a looping video of a Palm logo along with the text “Coming Soon” and “Smart Move.” No one was sure who was behind the site resuscitation until this document was found, which shows the transfer of the Palm trademark from Palm, Inc (still a subsidiary of HP) to a company called Wide Progress Global Limited. Wide Progress Global Limited doesn’t seem to be a company with any kind of real purpose—it’s just a shell meant to hide the true buyer. The person signing the paperwork for Wide Progress Global Limited is Nicolas Zibell, who also just happens to hold the title “President Americas and Pacific” at Alcatel One Touch. Couple that with the fact that the “Smart Move”—the text that appears on the new Palm site—is Alcatel One Touch’s slogan, and it’s pretty clear that Alcatel One Touch bought the Palm brand. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HP sells Palm trademarks; brand could be resurrected with new smartphones

Apple automatically patches Macs to fix severe NTP security flaw

Most OS X security updates are issued alongside other fixes via the Software Update mechanism, and these require some kind of user interaction to install—you’ve either got to approve them manually or tell your Mac to install them automatically. Apple does have the ability to quietly and automatically patch systems if it needs to, however, and it has exercised that ability for the first time to patch a critical flaw in the Network Time Protocol (NTP) used to keep the system clock in sync. This security hole became public knowledge late last week . When exploited, the NTP flaw can cause buffer overflows that allow remote attackers to execute code on your system. If you allow your system to “install system data files and security updates” automatically (checked by default), you’ve probably already gotten the update and seen the notification above. If not, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite users should use Software Update to download and install the update as soon as possible. The flaw may exist in Lion, Snow Leopard, and older OS X versions, but they’re old enough that Apple isn’t providing security updates for them anymore. While this was the first time this particular auto-update function has been used, Apple also automatically updates a small database of malware definitions on all Macs that keeps users from installing known-bad software. That feature, dubbed “XProtect,” was introduced in Snow Leopard in response to the Mac Defender malware and has since expanded to include several dozen items . Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Watching lava fight with snow in Kamchatka

Depending on the context, volcanic eruptions are either terrifying or transfixing—sometimes both, but rarely neither. The opportunity to safely view the otherworldly spectacle of lava rarely fails to ignite a child-like, giddy wonder. The damage currently being done by a lava flows in the Cape Verde Islands , on the other hand, is heart-breaking. We study these things because they are both lovely and terrible. We want to see a lava flow spill across a snowfield out of curiosity, and we want to better understand the hazards surrounding snow-capped volcanoes out of caution. Benjamin Edwards of Dickinson College and Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova of Russia’s Institute of Volcanology and Seismology got the opportunity to witness one of these events last year in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. For nine months, Tolbachik spewed basaltic lava flows that ultimately covered 40 square kilometers, reaching as far as 17 kilometers from their source. The lava flows came in two flavors , known to geologists by Hawaiian names. (While frozen Kamchatka doesn’t exactly evoke coconuts and grass skirts, these lavas are similar to those of the Hawaiian volcanoes.) First there’s ‘a’a (pronounced as a staccato “AH-ah”), which ends up a chunky, blocky crumble of basalt. The other is pahoehoe (roughly “puh-HOY-hoy”, which is how volcanologists answer the phone), which flows more like thick batter and can solidify into a surface resembling a pile of ropes. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Watching lava fight with snow in Kamchatka

EFF: Feds can’t get around Fourth Amendment via automated data capture

OAKLAND, Calif.—A federal judge spent over four hours on Friday questioning lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and from the Department of Justice in an ongoing digital surveillance-related lawsuit that has dragged on for more than six years. During the hearing, US District Judge Jeffrey White heard arguments from both sides in his attempt to wrestle with the plaintiffs’ July 2014 motion for partial summary judgment . He went back and forth between the two sides, hearing answers to his list of 12 questions that were published earlier this week in a court filing. That July 2014 motion asks the court to find that the government is “violating the Fourth Amendment by their ongoing seizures and searches of plaintiffs’ Internet communications.” The motion specifically doesn’t deal with allegations of past government wrongdoing, nor other issues in the broader case. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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EFF: Feds can’t get around Fourth Amendment via automated data capture

NASA just e-mailed a wrench to space

When International Space Station Commander Barry Wilmore needed a wrench, NASA knew just what to do. They “e-mailed” him one. This is the first time an object has been designed on Earth and then transmitted to space for manufacture. Made In Space, the California company that designed the 3D printer aboard the ISS, overheard Wilmore mentioning the need for a ratcheting socket wrench and decided to create one. Previously, if an astronaut needed a specific tool it would have to be flown up on the next mission to the ISS , which could take months. This isn’t the first 3D-printed object made in space , but it is the first created to meet the needs of an astronaut. In November astronauts aboard the ISS printed a replacement part for the recently installed 3D printer. A total of 21 objects have now been printed in space, all of which will be brought back to Earth for testing. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NASA just e-mailed a wrench to space