Tag: password

California top court says red light camera photos are evidence

A red light camera at the intersection of Sylvan and Coffee in Modesto, California. Cyrus Farivar On Thursday, the California Supreme Court upheld the admissibility of images taken from red light cameras as evidence of traffic violations in the Golden State. The unanimous decision in the case, known as The People of California v. Goldsmith , marks the end of a five-year-old legal odyssey. Fines issued as the result of a red light camera in California are by far the highest nationwide ($436 in this case)—typically they’re in the $100 range in the rest of the country. The decision  (PDF) comes amid a flurry of challenges to the red light cameras before other state high courts: the Louisiana Supreme Court recently declined to hear such a case, letting stand a lower court ruling that challenged cameras in New Orleans. The Illinois Supreme Court heard oral arguments against  such cameras in Chicago in May 2014. A decision in a similar case currently before the Ohio Supreme Court is expected before the end of the year. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California top court says red light camera photos are evidence

Comcast charged $2,000 for alarm system that didn’t work—for 7 years

Houston resident Lisa Leeson says she paid Comcast nearly $2,000 over seven years for an alarm system, only to find out that it never worked. Comcast, it turns out, installed the alarm system improperly. Even though the alarm made a sound indicating that it was active when Leeson and her family set it each day, “It was unable… to actually call the police and/or Comcast once it was activated,” Leeson told KPRC Local 2 Houston . What did Comcast do after the problem was finally discovered? At first, the company offered only a $20 credit, before eventually agreeing to refund all of the money. “When Davis called Comcast’s corporate office, a spokesman apologized, but not before he pointed to a line in Leeson’s alarm agreement where she agreed to ‘test her system’ on ‘a regular basis,'” the news station reported. “Chances are your alarm company requires the same, putting the onus back on you to make sure your system is functioning properly.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast charged $2,000 for alarm system that didn’t work—for 7 years

Meet “Cupid,” the Heartbleed attack that spawns “evil” Wi-Fi networks

A packet capture showing Cupid attacking a wireless network. SysValue It just got easier to exploit the catastrophic Heartbleed vulnerability against wireless networks and the devices that connect to them thanks to the release last week of open source code that streamlines the process of plucking passwords, e-mail addresses, and other sensitive information from vulnerable routers and connected clients. Dubbed Cupid, the code comes in the form of two software extensions. The first gives wireless networks the ability to deploy “evil networks” that surreptitiously send malicious packets to connected devices. Client devices relying on vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL cryptography library can then be forced to transmit contents stored in memory. The second extension runs on client devices. When connecting to certain types of wireless networks popular in corporations and other large organizations, the devices send attack packets that similarly pilfer data from vulnerable routers. The release of Cupid comes eight weeks after the disclosure of Heartbleed , one of the most serious vulnerabilities to ever hit the Internet. The flaw, which existed for more than two years in OpenSSL, resides in “heartbeat” functions designed to keep a transport layer security (TLS) connection alive over an extended period of time. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet “Cupid,” the Heartbleed attack that spawns “evil” Wi-Fi networks

Wireless broadband can reach the moon, and maybe Mars

Prescott Pym Aside from air, water and fresh vegetables, what would need to survive on the moon? One thing that would likely of feature high on the list is a decent, reliable wireless internet. And thanks to a group of researches from MIT and Nasa this kind of connectivity could be within the realms of possibility. Between them, the two organizations have demonstrated for the first time that data communication technology is capable of providing those in space with the same kind of connectivity we enjoy on Earth, and can even facilitate large data transfers and high-definition video streaming. To do this it uses four separate telescopes based at a ground terminal in New Mexico to send the uplink signal to the moon. A laser transmitter that can send information as coded pulses of invisible infrared light feeds into each of the telescopes, which results in 40 watts of transmitter power. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wireless broadband can reach the moon, and maybe Mars

Apple will fix iMessage bug that makes it harder to leave the service

Andrew Cunningham iPhone users (and ex-iPhone users) attempting to sign out of Apple’s iMessage service recently began running into a nasty bug. Signing out of iMessage means that iPhones trying to text your number should seamlessly switch back to using SMS. However, this hasn’t been happening lately—instead, these iMessages continue to be sent as iMessages. They never actually make it to their destination, and neither the sender nor the receiver is given any indication that the message has failed. Apple acknowledged the bug in a statement to Re/code this morning , noting that it has “recently fixed a server-side iMessage bug which was causing an issue for some users,” and that an additional software update was being planned to fix more problems. Signing out of the iMessage service has always been more difficult than enabling it, and I say that as someone who recently disabled iMessage to make jumping between iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and other mobile operating systems easier. In my case, iMessages sent to my newly disconnected number would simply fail to send, and the problem only worked itself out after I changed my Apple ID password (thereby signing all of my devices out of the service), disassociating my phone number from my Apple ID, and then calling Apple support about the problem. This new bug sounds worse, since message senders don’t even know that the texts aren’t arriving at their destination. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple will fix iMessage bug that makes it harder to leave the service

Sailor convicted of hacking websites from aboard aircraft carrier

The USS Harry S. Truman apparently had adequate Internet bandwidth for a sailor to hack websites in his spare time. US Navy A 27-year old now-former sailor pleaded guilty in a federal court in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 20 to charges of conspiracy after leading a band of hackers in the US and Canada from onboard an aircraft carrier . Nicholas Paul Knight, who was the system administrator for the USS Harry S. Truman’s nuclear reactors department, was caught trying to hack into a Navy database while at sea. Knight and a co-defendant—Daniel Kreuger of Salem, Illinois—were part of “Team Digi7al,” a collective of hackers who attacked at least 24 websites in 2012 in search of personal identifying information. Knight himself hacked the Navy’s Smart Web Move website , a system for sailors to manage household moves during transfers between stations; that hack included about 220,000 service members’ Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and other personal data. Other sites attacked by the group included ones operated by the Department of Homeland Security, the Library of Congress, Stanford University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Toronto Police Service, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sailor convicted of hacking websites from aboard aircraft carrier

Airbnb gives up customer data to NY attorney general

Airbnb Home renting company Airbnb announced Wednesday that under pressure from the New York attorney general’s office, it will hand over the anonymized personal data of its New York hosts to the state. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed three years’ worth of data in 2013 in an effort to suss out whether Airbnb users are running “illegal hotels” and to determine if Airbnb’s business model and platform comply with the law. Schneiderman stated his suspicions in April that Airbnb hosts in New York operate residences or parts of their homes like hotels—but without the fire, safety, and tax regulations normally applied to hotels. Airbnb hosts could also be in violation of a 2010 law that prohibits New Yorkers from renting entire apartments for less than 29 consecutive days. Schneiderman claimed that Airbnb sells itself to investors as a hotel network, but it attempts to keep that pitch out of the public sphere for fear of incurring legal hotel status. The New York Supreme Court rejected Schneiderman’s subpoena request on May 13, “but the judge’s ruling also made it clear that he would accept a new, narrower subpoena and require Airbnb to turn over personal information about hosts if the Attorney General’s Office made some changes to their demands,” wrote Airbnb in its blog post Wednesday. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Airbnb gives up customer data to NY attorney general

California approves test of self-driving cars on public roads

Terrence Lui On Tuesday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)  officially approved rules to allow the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads. The rules will take effect September 16, 2014. The move has been a long time coming , with the DMV promising back in December 2013 that it would post regulations for public use of self-driving cars  and then holding a public hearing in January to address concerns about them. These new rules will set a statewide standard for all manufacturers. (Although Google has been running pilot programs in Mountain View and elsewhere, it’s not the only company pursuing an automated vehicle—Nvidia told Ars last week that Audi has plans to incorporate a “cruise control for stop-and-go traffic” feature in one of its cars come 2015.) Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), told Ars that the new rules could change how manufacturers proceed with their testing. “The DMV has a really, really difficult task, and I was impressed with the thoughtfulness of their approach,” he said. “I would say that anyone who is reading these documents will have to read very closely.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California approves test of self-driving cars on public roads

Missing features we’d like to see in the next version of OS X

It’s only been about seven months since Apple  released OS X 10.9,  the latest and greatest version of its Mac operating system. But the yearly upgrade cycle means that unless something unexpected happens, Apple will tell us about OS X 10.10 at the traditional keynote next month on the first morning of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The operating system is over 13 years old and it’s come a long way since those first versions , but it’s still not perfect. What areas do we think Apple should focus on in 10.10? Think of the SSDs Isn’t it time our modern hard drives got a modern filesystem? The latest Macs may have solid state drives that can read and write over 700 megabytes per second over a direct PCI Express connection, but all that data is still organized by a file system from the previous millennium: HFS+. There’s something to be said for using stable, battle-hardened code for the file system, which is probably the most critical part of the operating system. Unfortunately, Apple’s current HFS+ implementation isn’t as stable as it should be, much to the chagrin of Ars’ OS X reviewer extraordinaire John Siracusa. With the introduction of a logical volume manager—Core Storage—it looks like Apple has found a way to innovate in the area of storage without having to replace HFS+. One of the big missing features in HFS+ is snapshots . Time Machine, for example, works per-file. Changing a few bytes in the middle of a large file means that the entire file is copied during the next backup. With snapshots, that’s not necessary: multiple snapshots share the unmodified disk blocks. As such, snapshots could be implemented in Core Storage rather than in the file system. This would allow Time Machine backups to be much faster and more efficient. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Missing features we’d like to see in the next version of OS X

Urine and the bladder are not sterile, contain bacteria

Gray’s Anatomy No, urine is not sterile, according to a study presented this week by researchers from the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University. Instead, the bodily excretion does contain a diverse array of bacteria that can vary depending on bladder condition. Up until now, the types of bacteria present have been hard to detect because they don’t grow in urine cultures. That urine is not sterile is not actually news; the same medical school reported findings in 2012  suggesting that urine can contain bacteria when drawn directly from the bladder. But the study may surprise many due to the deeply entrenched belief , even in the medical community, that urine is bacteria-free and thus safe to use in a number of activities, from drinking to rinsing wounds in a pinch. A commonly traded rule of thumb is that, while the initial part of a stream of urine contains bacteria washed from the urethra, the “mid-stream” is safely sterile. This is not so, or at least it’s not entirely reliable information. The two studies, from 2013 and 2012, looked only at samples from women. The 2013 study compared samples from women with and without overactive bladder disorder (OAB) and found different types of bacteria in both types of samples, including Streptococcus and Staphylococcus. The authors of the study suggested that the presence of certain types of bacteria in women with OAB could be causing their symptoms, and treating their presence could help with their condition. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Urine and the bladder are not sterile, contain bacteria