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For Do Not Call violations, Sprint will pay FCC $7.5M in largest ever settlement

Hunter Edwards On Monday, Sprint agreed to pay the Federal Communications Commission $7.5 million to resolve violations of the Do Not Call registry—the largest settlement payout ever. The program first began in 2003 as a way to allow Americans to opt out of unsolicited sales calls. According to the FCC, Sprint will also put into effect a “robust compliance plan,” designate a new senior manager to deal with compliance, retrain its employees, and report any further noncompliance to the agency, among other necessary actions. “We expect companies to respect the privacy of consumers who have opted out of marketing calls,” said Travis LeBlanc, acting chief of the Enforcement Bureau, in a statement . “When a consumer tells a company to stop calling or texting with promotional pitches, that request must be honored. Today’s settlement leaves no question that protecting consumer privacy is a top enforcement priority.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Aurich Lawson / PCCare247 Sitting in front of her PC, the phone in her hand connected to a tech support company half a world away, Sheryl Novick was about to get scammed. The company she had reached, PCCare247, was based in India but had built a lucrative business advertising over the Internet to Americans, encouraging them to call for tech support. After glimpsing something odd on her computer, Novick did so. “I saw some sort of pop-up and I don’t know if there’s a problem,” she told a PCCare247 tech named Yakeen. He offered to check the “management part” of her computer for possible problems. Read 61 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Samsung We’ve previously talked about Samsung’s “flood the market” strategy for phones, but the company applies the same tactic to tablets, too. After releasing the Note 10.1 seven months ago and an entire line of NotePro and TabPro tablets in February, the company has announced yet another tablet event planned for June 12. According to the invite, this event is for the Samsung Galaxy Tab line. While it’s frankly getting harder and harder to try to nail down just what tablet goes where in the Samsung spectrum (which one is the flagship?) the Tabs are usually the mid-range/mainstream devices. This event location would suggest otherwise, though, as it’s being held in The Theater at Madison Square Garden, the former site of the NFL Draft. The event will even be livestreamed on Samsung’s YouTube channel . Rumor has it that this run of tablets will be the first to incorporate Samsung’s AMOLED displays. Samsung’s AMOLED manufacturing has so far not been up to the task of producing a panel large enough or cheaply enough to fit into a tablet, forcing the company’s older devices to use LCDs. Samsung’s AMOLED panels on phones are so mature that it’s difficult to tell the difference between them and LCD, so we aren’t sure how significant this change will be to consumers. The invite seems to confirm the change to AMOLED displays, which shows a top-down view of the new tablets with light gushing from the screen onto the colored background. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

A former Subway sandwich shop franchisee pled guilty to taking part in a scheme to hack point-of-sale terminals for at least 13 stores and obtaining gift cards worth $40,000. Shahin Abdollahi, who also ran a business that sold and maintained point-of-sale terminals, sold the computerized checkout registers to the Subway shops that were illegally accessed, according to federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. He set up the terminals with software from LogMeIn , which allows people to remotely log in to PCs over the Internet. Abdollahi and other conspirators then used the software to repeatedly access the Subway terminals without authorization, usually early in the morning, when the restaurants were closed. Once logged in, they loaded gift cards with credit totaling $40,000. Co-conspirator Jeffrey Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, would then advertise the cards for sale on eBay and Craigslist and hand deliver them to buyers. On Wednesday, Abdollahi 46, of Lake Elsinore, California, pled guilty in federal court in Massachusetts to one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and wire fraud and one count of wire fraud. He is scheduled to be sentenced on for August 6. Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, pled guilty in February and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 28. It’s not the first time Subway point-of-sale terminals have been illegally accessed by crooks for purposes of skimming the till. In 2012, two men pled guilty to participating in an international conspiracy that hacked into credit-card payment terminals at more than 150 Subway franchises and racked up more than $10 million in losses. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

“I just need to write about this Murloc rush deck. For work.” Aurich Lawson Apple is planning to add a split-screen multitasking mode to its iPads in iOS 8, according to “sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development” speaking to 9to5Mac . The feature will supposedly allow two applications to run side-by-side while the tablet is in landscape mode, not unlike the similar Snap feature in Windows 8.1 or the multi-window mode supported on many of Samsung’s phones and tablets . iPad applications have always used the tablet’s entire screen, which keeps things simple but can feel restrictive for heavy multitaskers. Though 9to5Mac’s sources have been accurate in the past, as with all rumors, this report should be taken with a continuous stream of salt until you actually see Apple get up on stage and announce it. If it’s true, this new display mode implies big changes to the way that iPad apps are designed and the way that they interact with each other, and we wanted to take a look at the hurdles in iOS and the iPad hardware that would have to be dealt with to make this feature a reality. We’ll also be making some informed guesses about how Apple might jump over them. Resolution independence Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service “vital” to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM . “PRISM has a new collection capability: Skype stored communications,” a previously confidential NSA memo from 2013 declared. “Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection.” The data includes buddy lists, credit card information, call records, user account data, and “other material” that is of value to the NSA’s special source operations. The memo, which was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released Tuesday by Glenn Greenwald to coincide with the publication of his book No Place to Hide , said the FBI’s Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit had approved “over 30 selectors to be sent to Skype for collection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

If you’re a news junky, you probably use an RSS reader like Feed.ly to keep up with stuff on the Web. One of the nicest ways to consume YouTube subscriptions was to use an RSS feed of new videos, allowing them to show up just like news articles do. You might not have noticed yet, but Google quietly shut down this feature a few days ago. The RSS feed, which used to be http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/[username]/newsubscriptionvideos, now throws out a “403 Forbidden” error. Previously, the URL would provide a publicly accessible feed of new subscriptions from any YouTube account, provided users didn’t choose to turn off public subscription retrieval. The feed was part of the YouTube Data API v2, which was deprecated in March of this year. The replacement—predictably named YouTube Data API v3—doesn’t offer a comparable data stream. Bug reports filed for this regression as early as January 2013 have gone unanswered, save for a single response in January 2014 (yes, a year later) saying, “Patch is in the works, however we can’t comment on the expected date.” Now it’s five months later, the feature is gone, and there’s no solution in sight. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more

At TechEd in Houston today, Microsoft announced a wide range of updates to its Azure cloud platform. As has become customary for Azure updates, the new features announced today include a mix of previews of brand-new capabilities, and general availability releases of features previously only in preview. In the general availability bucket are a set of new networking options for connectivity to Azure. Currently, Azure users connect to Azure through a mix of public Internet addresses and private VPNs, with all traffic going over the Internet. The new ExpressRoute capability provides a third option: direct private connections to Azure, either through exchange providers, or by connecting Azure to existing corporate WANs. ExpressRoute will be offered with a 99.9 percent SLA and four bandwidth tiers: 200Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, and 10Gbps. Though now generally available, the connectivity is currently limited to connections via two US sites—Silicon Valley and Washington, DC—and London. Microsoft intends to make it available in 13 further locations by the end of the year. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more

Router company that threatened a reviewer loses Amazon selling license

The Medialink router that was reviewed. Mediabridge Update 5/8/2014 19:44 CT: On Thursday, Mediabridge Products posted an official statement about this incident to its Facebook page, clarifying its position and saying that Amazon has revoked its selling privileges. (Thanks to PrimalxConvoy for the tip). In the statement, the company says that it did not actually sue the Amazon reviewer, but that it did insist that the reviewer’s “untrue, damaging, and disparaging statements” be taken down. “It’s our sincere belief that reasonable people understand that not only is it within our rights to take steps to protect our integrity, but that it should be expected that we would do so when it is recklessly attacked,” Mediabridge Products wrote. “The reviewer has since changed his review completely to remove the libelous statements, but unfortunately not before having an army attack us on the internet.” The company did not give any clue as to the terms of Amazon’s rescinding of Mediabridge’s selling license, but only said at the end of its statement “Unfortunately, as a result of our attempt to get this reviewer to do the right thing & remove his untrue statements about our company, Amazon has revoked our selling privileges. Many hard-working employees whose livelihood depended on that business will likely be put out of a job, by a situation that has been distorted & blown out of proportion.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Epic announces crowdsourced dev model for next Unreal Tournament

It’s been a long six-and-a-half years since we’ve gotten a new Unreal Tournament game (not counting expansion packs), but today marks the beginning of the end for that wait. Epic announced that work on a new game, simply titled Unreal Tournament , begins today for PC, Mac, and Linux, and the process will heavily involve participation from the modding and player community from the get go. While a “small team of UT veterans” at Epic will be spearheading the development of the game, everything from design decisions to art direction will primarily “happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans, and [Unreal Engine 4] developers,” Epic says. The developers are inviting everyone from regular players to experienced modders from sites like Polycount to sign up at the Unreal Engine forums and use an official wiki to take direct part in driving the game’s direction. Already, mere minutes after the announcement, those forums are filled with players discussing everything from series maps and weapons they’d like to see return to things like VR headset compatibility. Epic says it will be “many months” until the game is in any sort of playable state, but when it is playable it “will be free. Not free to play, just free.” Source code will be made available directly from GitHub as it is updated, and modders will even be able to fork their own builds if they want to take the project in a new direction. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic announces crowdsourced dev model for next Unreal Tournament

Ken May

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