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California poised to implement first electronic license plates

Advocates say that electronic license plates can be used to display messages, like EXPIRED. Compliance Innovations This week, the California State Senate approved a bill that would create the nation’s first electronic license plate. Having already passed the state’s assembly, the bill now goes to Gov. Jerry Brown (D) for his signature. The idea is that rather than have a static piece of printed metal adorned with stickers to display proper registration, the plate would be a screen that could wirelessly (likely over a mobile data network) receive updates from a central server to display that same information. In an example shown by a South Carolina vendor, messages such as “STOLEN, ” “EXPIRED, ” or something similar could also be displayed on a license plate. The bill’s language says that for now, the program would be limited to a “pilot program” set to be completed no later than January 1, 2017. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Tor Project Researchers have found a new theory to explain the sudden spike in computers using the Tor anonymity network: a massive botnet that was recently updated to use Tor to communicate with its mothership. Mevade.A, a network of infected computers dating back to at least 2009, has mainly used standard Web-based protocols to send and receive data to command and control (C&C) servers, according to researchers at security firm Fox-IT. Around the same time that Tor Project leaders began observing an unexplained doubling in Tor clients , Mevade overhauled its communication mechanism to use anonymized Tor addresses ending in .onion. In the week that has passed since Tor reported the uptick, the number of users has continued to mushroom. “The botnet appears to be massive in size as well as very widespread, ” a Fox-IT researcher wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “Even prior to the switch to Tor, it consisted of tens of thousands of confirmed infections within a limited amount of networks. When these numbers are extrapolated on a per country and global scale, these are definitely in the same ballpark as the Tor users increase.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sudden spike of Tor users likely caused by one “massive” botnet

Lenovo’s new Yoga 2 Pro has the same flexible hinge, 3200×1800 display

The new Yoga 2 Pro is a high-res follow-up to one of the better convertible laptop designs on the market. Lenovo The original IdeaPad Yoga was one of our favorite early convertible laptops, not least because the “convertible” part didn’t ruin the “laptop” part. Its many contortions were also genuinely useful, even if the weight and exposed keyboard made it a bit too awkward to use as a dedicated tablet. We got a belated 11-inch version of the original Yoga a bit earlier this year, but today at IFA, Lenovo has formally announced a pair of true sequels that look to improve the design without radically altering its formula. From the folding hinge to the bright “clementine orange” color, the Yoga 2 Pro is very much a successor to the first Yoga. It loses some weight and some thickness, dropping to 0.61 inches thick and 3.06 pounds from the 0.68 inches and 3.4 pounds of the original. It also includes Intel’s new Haswell processors (and its new integrated GPUs—there’s no dedicated graphics option available), but the biggest upgrade is the 13.3-inch 3200×1800 touchscreen. At 276 PPI, this is a substantial upgrade over the 1600×900 display of the original, though the (included) Windows 8.1 Pro can have some issues with high-PPI displays . Like the older Yoga, the new one is indistinguishable from a regular laptop most of the time. Lenovo The other specs are a mixed bag—you’ve got 8GB of DDR3L, standard 128, 256, and 512GB SSDs, a backlit keyboard, and Bluetooth 4.0 (all good), but there’s only one USB 3.0 port (the other is USB 2.0) and a frustratingly low-end 2.4GHz-only 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter. We understand laptops that don’t ship with 802.11ac yet, since that’s still a new standard and many people won’t have upgraded to a compatible router just yet. But to ship a high-end laptop without dual-band 802.11n seems like a seriously missed opportunity. The laptop also promises around six hours of battery life, which would have been on the low end of average for an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook but is a bit disappointing for a Haswell model. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lenovo’s new Yoga 2 Pro has the same flexible hinge, 3200×1800 display

Feds plow $10 billion into “groundbreaking” crypto-cracking program

Wikimedia The federal government is pouring almost $11 billion per year into a 35, 000-employee program dedicated to “groundbreaking” methods to decode encrypted messages such as e-mails, according to an intelligence black budget published by The Washington Post. The 17-page document, leaked to the paper by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, gives an unprecedented breakdown of the massive amount of tax-payer dollars—which reached $52 billion in fiscal 2013—that the government pours into surveillance and other intelligence-gathering programs. It also details the changing priorities of the government’s most elite spy agencies. Not surprisingly, in a world that’s increasingly driven by networks and electronics, they are spending less on the collection of some hard-copy media and satellite operations while increasing resources for sophisticated signals intelligence, a field of electronic spying feds frequently refer to as “SIGINT.” “We are bolstering our support for clandestine SIGINT capabilities to collect against high priority targets, including foreign leadership targets, ” James Clapper, director of national intelligence, wrote in a summary published by the WaPo . “Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Amazon and Microsoft, beware—VMware cloud is more ambitious than we thought

vCloud Hybrid Service integrates with on-premises VMware deployments. VMware VMware today announced that vCloud Hybrid Service , its first public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, will become generally available in September. That’s no surprise, as we already knew it was slated to go live this quarter. What is surprising is just how extensive the cloud will be. When first announced, vCloud Hybrid Service was described as infrastructure-as-a-service that integrates directly with VMware environments. Customers running lots of applications in-house on VMware infrastructure can use the cloud to expand their capacity without buying new hardware and manage both their on-premises and off-premises deployments as one. That’s still the core of vCloud Hybrid Service—but in addition to the more traditional infrastructure-as-a-service, VMware will also have a desktops-as-a-service offering, letting businesses deploy virtual desktops to employees without needing any new hardware in their own data centers. There will also be disaster recovery-as-a-service, letting customers automatically replicate applications and data to vCloud Hybrid Service instead of their own data centers. Finally, support for the open source distribution of Cloud Foundry and Pivotal’s deployment of Cloud Foundry will let customers run a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in vCloud Hybrid Service. Unlike IaaS, PaaS tends to be optimized for building and hosting applications without having to manage operating systems and virtual computing infrastructure. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon and Microsoft, beware—VMware cloud is more ambitious than we thought

In surveillance era, clever trick enhances secrecy of iPhone text messages

Creative Heroes A security researcher has developed a technique that could significantly improve the secrecy of text messages sent in near real time on iPhones. The technique, which will debut in September in an iOS app called TextSecure, will also be folded into a currently available Android app by the same name. The cryptographic property known as perfect forward secrecy has always been considered important by privacy advocates, but it has taken on new urgency following the recent revelations of widespread surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. Rather than use the same key to encrypt multiple messages—the way, say PGP- and S/MIME-protected e-mail programs do—applications that offer perfect forward secrecy generate ephemeral keys on the fly . In the case of some apps, including the OTR protocol for encrypting instant messages , each individual message within a session is encrypted with a different key. The use of multiple keys makes eavesdropping much harder. Even if the snoop manages to collect years worth of someone’s encrypted messages, he would have to crack hundreds or possibly hundreds of thousands of keys to transform the data into the “plaintext” that a human could make sense of. What’s more, even if the attacker obtains or otherwise compromises the computer that his target used to send the encrypted messages, it won’t be of much help if the target has deleted the messages. Since the keys used in perfect forward secrecy are ephemeral, they aren’t stored on the device. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

Substantial news out of Redmond this morning: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is retiring within the next 12 months. Ballmer has been a prominent fixture at Microsoft since joining the company in 1980. Prior to becoming the CEO, Ballmer was active in a number of Microsoft divisions, with a particular focus on the sales side of the house. He took over chief executive duties when Bill Gates stepped down in January 2000. Though much pilloried in the tech press for Microsoft’s more recent missteps, including Windows RT and, most famously, Windows Vista, Ballmer’s tenure as CEO has been a positive one for Microsoft—at least from a revenue perspective. Under his leadership, Microsoft’s net income has increased to $23 billion, with annual revenue climbing from $25 billion to $70 billion, with an average annual profit growth of over 16 percent. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

After “technical glitch” halts Nasdaq for hours, trading finally resumes

Trading was halted on the Nasdaq stock market for a few hours on Thursday after what was described as a “technical glitch.” No other detailed technical information has been released other than that the snafu involved a problem with the “quote dissemination system” and a “data feed issue.” The exchange , on which many major tech stocks are traded, re-opened later in the afternoon. As the modern stock market operates almost entirely by computer and happens with crazy-fast speed, this problem is troubling, particularly when there have been a few major technological problems in recent years. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After “technical glitch” halts Nasdaq for hours, trading finally resumes

Someone beat the Vikings into the North Atlantic by 500 years

The rugged coast of the Faroe islands don’t lend themselves to easy colonization. Flickr user Stig Nygaard The Faroe Islands, a remote archipelago between Scotland and Iceland, could have been inhabited 500 years earlier than was previously thought, according to a startling archaeological discovery. The islands were thought to have been colonized by the Vikings in the 9th century AD. However, dating of peat ash and barley grains has revealed that humans had actually settled there somewhere between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. The Faroes were the first stepping stone beyond the Shetland Islands for the dispersal of European people across the North Atlantic. The findings therefore allow speculation as to whether Iceland, Greenland, and even North America were reached earlier than previously thought. The Faroes are in the North Atlantic, roughly equidistant between Iceland, Norway, and the UK. Mike Church from the University of Durham said he and his research partner, Símun V. Arge from the National Museum of the Faroe Islands, had not expected to find such evidence. “Símun and myself sampled the site in 2006 to take scientific samples for environmental archaeological analysis from the medieval Viking settlement, “ he said. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Someone beat the Vikings into the North Atlantic by 500 years

FBI director calls on private sector to man up, help with cyber threat

Robert Mueller, FBI Director, says Keith and John are his BFFs. FBI FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, CIA Director John Brennan, and National Security Agency (NSA) Director Gen. Keith Alexander shared the stage on August 8 at the International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS), an event cohosted by the FBI and Fordham University in New York. The three spoke on a panel about the future of cybersecurity. Mueller spoke about the Lulzec case and how the FBI caught Hector “Sabu” Monsegur , along with how it will deal with increasingly sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. Key to the bureau’s success, he said, was “focusing on the individuals behind the keyboards”—with the help of the NSA, CIA, and private industry. “I do believe that in the future, the cyber threat will equal or even eclipse the terrorist threat, ” Mueller said in his opening remarks. “And just as partnerships have enabled us to address the terrorist threat, partnerships will enable us to address the cyber threat. But the array of partners critical to defeating the cyber threat is different. In this case, the private sector is the essential partner.” Getting into hackers’ heads “In the years to come, we will encounter new intrusion methods, hacking techniques, and other unpleasant surprises, ” Mueller said in his prepared remarks for the panel. “And in response, our nation will continue to develop—as we must—the technical skills and tools to prevent these intrusions and limit their damage.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ken May

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