privacy-rights – Page 22 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

The Ambassador who worked from Nairobi bathroom to avoid State Dept. IT

The current scandal roiling over the use of a private e-mail server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is just the latest in a series of scandals surrounding government e-mails. And it’s not the first public airing of problems with the State Department’s IT operations—and executives’ efforts to bypass or work around them. At least she didn’t set up an office in a restroom just to bypass State Department network restrictions and do everything over Gmail. However, another Obama administration appointee—the former ambassador to Kenya—did do that, essentially refusing to use any of the Nairobi embassy’s internal IT. He worked out of a bathroom because it was the only place in the embassy where he could use an unsecured network and his personal computer, using Gmail to conduct official business. And he did all this during a time when Chinese hackers were penetrating the personal Gmail inboxes of a number of US diplomats. Why would such high-profile members of the administration’s foreign policy team so flagrantly bypass federal and agency regulations to use their own personal e-mail to conduct business? Was it that they had something they wanted to keep out of State’s servers and away from Congressional oversight? Was it that State’s IT was so bad that they needed to take matters into their own hands? Or was it because the department’s IT staff wasn’t responsive enough to what they saw as their personal needs, and they decided to show just how take-charge they were by ignoring all those stuffy policies? Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Ambassador who worked from Nairobi bathroom to avoid State Dept. IT

Enormous Martian ocean evaporated into space

NASA scientists have published details of a huge ocean that once covered half of Mars’ northern hemisphere but was lost to space over millennia. Writing in the journal Science, the astronomers explained how they used the ratio of two different kinds of water to estimate how wet the red planet was 4.5 billion years ago. “Early Mars (4.5 billion years ago) had a global equivalent water layer at least 137 meters deep,” they say. Martian water molecules are just like those on Earth—they’re made of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. But there are two kinds of hydrogen—the normal type, and one that’s a little heavier, called deuterium. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Enormous Martian ocean evaporated into space

DNS enhancement catches malware sites by understanding sneaky domain names

A researcher at OpenDNS Security Labs has developed a new way to automatically detect and block sites used to distribute malware almost instantaneously without having to scan them. The approach, initially developed by researcher Jeremiah O’Connor, uses natural language processing and other analytics to detect malicious domains before they can attack by spotting host names that are designed as camouflage. Called NLPRank , it spots DNS requests for sites that have names similar to legitimate sites, but with IP addresses that are outside the expected address blocks and other related data that hints at sketchiness. The practice of using look-alike domain names as part of an effort to fool victims into visiting websites or approving downloads is a well-worn approach in computer crime. But recent crafted attacks via “phishing” links in e-mails and social media have gone past the well-worn “typo-squatting” approach by using domain names that appear close to those of trusted sites, registered just in time for attacks to fly under reputation-scoring security tools to make blacklisting them harder. Fake domain names such as update-java.net and adobe-update.net, for example, were used in the recently discovered “Carbanak” attacks on banks that allowed criminals to gain access to financial institutions’ networks starting in January 2013 and steal over $1 billion over the next two years. Many security services can screen out malicious sites based on techniques such as reputation analysis—checking a centralized database to see if a site name has been associated with any malware attacks. But because attackers are able to rapidly register new domains with scripted systems that look relatively legitimate to the average computer user, they can often bypass reputation checks—especially when using their specially crafted domain names in highly targeted attacks. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DNS enhancement catches malware sites by understanding sneaky domain names

Tech support scammer threatened to kill man when scam call backfired

Tech support scammers should probably just hang up the phone when a scam call goes wrong. But one scammer took things to a new level by threatening to kill a man who pointed out that the scammer was trying to steal money. As we’ve reported numerous times , scammers pretending to work for Microsoft tech support call potential victims, tell them their computers are infected, convince them to provide remote access, and then charge them hundreds of dollars to fix imaginary problems. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tech support scammer threatened to kill man when scam call backfired

In major goof, Uber stored sensitive database key on public GitHub page

Uber is trying to force GitHub to disclose the IP address of every person that accessed a webpage connected to a database intrusion that exposed sensitive personal data for 50,000 drivers. The court action revealed that a security key unlocking the database was stored on a publicly accessible place, the online equivalent of stashing a house key under a doormat. Uber officials have yet to say precisely what information was contained in the two now-unavailable GitHub gists . But in a lawsuit filed Friday against the unknown John Doe intruders, Uber lawyers said the URLs contained a security key that allowed unauthorized access to the names and driver’s license numbers of about 50,000 Uber drivers . The ride-sharing service disclosed the breach on Friday, more than two months after it was discovered. “The contents of these internal database files are closely guarded by Uber,” the complaint stated. “Accessing them from Uber’s protected computers requires a unique security key that is not intended to be available to anyone other than certain Uber employees, and no one outside of Uber is authorized to access the files. On or around May 12, 2014, from an IP address not associated with an Uber employee and otherwise unknown to Uber, John Doe I used the unique security key to download Uber database files containing confidential and proprietary information from Uber’s protected computers.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In major goof, Uber stored sensitive database key on public GitHub page

Intel unveils its next mobile maneuver: Atom x3, x5, and x7

BARCELONA, Spain—At Mobile World Congress 2015, Intel has unveiled its latest in a very long line of attempts at securing a beachhead in the mobile market: the Atom x3, Atom x5, and Atom x7 SoCs. As the naming implies, the Atom x3 is a low-end part that is probably destined for developing markets in countries such as India and China. The Atom x5 and x7, however, are quad-core 14nm Cherry Trail chips with Broadwell-class Intel HD graphics. Performance-wise, the x5 and x7 chips should be pretty good—but right now we only have Intel’s own benchmarks to go on. There’s also no word from Intel on the power consumption of the new chips, which is rarely a good sign when you’re trying to break into a highly competitive, entrenched market. Let’s start at the bottom. Atom x3 is essentially rebranded SoFIA, but now along with a 3G version there is a new chip (the x3-C3440) with an integrated LTE modem. Rather unusual despite its use of the Atom brand name, the x3 is a 28nm chip that isn’t being built at Intel’s own fabs. Instead, Intel is using a foundry (most likely TSMC or Rockchip), primarily because it isn’t cost effective for Intel to build chips with integrated modems on its own bleeding-edge 14nm node. The top-end Atom x3, the x3-C3440, has a quad-core CPU and Mali 720 MP2 GPU (yes, that’s a GPU designed by ARM Holdings). We probably won’t see the Atom x3 in Western markets; it will be cheaply fabricated in Asia, and it will be used in very cheap phones and tablets. We have asked Intel what CPU core is being used by Atom x3, but the company hasn’t yet responded. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel unveils its next mobile maneuver: Atom x3, x5, and x7

Hands-on with the fastest LTE network in Europe: 400Mbps down, 45Mbps up

LONDON—Today, I got to play around with Europe’s (and probably the world’s) fastest LTE network: when I opened up Speedtest.net, depending on how many people were standing in the room, my download speed was between 350 and 400Mbps, my upload speed was around 45Mbps, and my ping latency was just 20ms. Funny enough, beyond Speedtest.net, it is actually quite hard to use 400Mbps of bandwidth. When I loaded up a 4K video from YouTube, I only used around 40Mbps, or 10 percent, of my wireless uber-pipe. Ars Technica certainly loaded very quickly indeed. As it stands today, there are very few websites or services that will let you pull data down at 400Mbps, or where being able to download at 400Mbps even makes much sense. If we’ve learned anything from the last few decades of telecoms and networking, however, it’s that Internet usage will always expand until every last inch of available bandwidth is consumed. So while 400Mbps might seem a little bit over the top today, in five years you’ll probably wonder how you ever survived with anything less. For some background, I had a 400Mbps LTE connection at my disposal because I had been invited to Wembley Stadium in London to try out the first deployment of Category 9 LTE in the UK. It was a “live” deployment in that it used commercially available hardware, but it was still very much a tech demo—the Cat 9 base station only covered a small portion of the stadium, and there were only a handful of devices in the world configured to connect to this specific LTE network. The LTE network was operated by EE (one of the UK’s big four wireless carriers), the LTE base station was made by Huawei, and the mobile device that I used was a smartphone powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC . Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Remote valet mode and revolutionized parking: Ford’s Smart Mobility

Ford has a plan to help cut car emissions, and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with batteries, hybrid powertrains, or clever engine technology. Instead, the company is focusing on improving the parking experience, and its answer involves a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country, and remote control vehicles enabled by off-the-shelf commercial 4G LTE. At first glance that might not sound like it has much to do with reducing vehicle CO 2 emissions, but according to Ford, their data shows that hunting for parking spaces in urban environments can account for between 20 and 30 percent of a vehicle’s emissions. To find out more about what Ford has been working on, we spoke with Mike Tinskey, director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure at Ford. He told Ars about a pair of research projects that the car maker has been working on as part of a larger program called Smart Mobility. Smart Mobility involves 25 different experiments and pilot studies around the world, but these two have both been developed in conjunction with a team at Georgia Tech here in the US; Ford has had a long-running relationship with the group, which Tinskey describes as being analogous to the company’s research and advanced modeling arm for sustainability. According to Tinskey, Smart Mobility exists at the intersection of mobility and sustainability, with the overall goal of finding novel ways to reduce CO 2 . “When you look for places to do that, you start looking at antiquated things like parking, where people waste a lot of time, and a lot of CO 2 ,” he said. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10

It’s a shame that Windows 8’s interface was so divisive. The UI dominated the conversation around the OS to the extent that its other, subtler changes got buried. People who stuck with Windows 7 never saw these updates at all. Windows 10, as we’ve covered, is Microsoft’s effort to repackage Windows 8’s improvements in a way that will be more appealing to Windows 7 loyalists. As if to drive that point home, Microsoft is giving current Windows 7 users a whole year after launch to hop on the Windows 10 train at no charge . Microsoft has made a bunch of changes to Windows in the last two years that have nothing to do with the new user interface. This list doesn’t have anything new on it, but if you’re still running Windows 7 and you decide to upgrade to Windows 10, it’ll be new to you, and you’ll get to use it all without having to figure out how to live life without a Start menu. (If you’re interested in seeing some of the UI stuff that you’ll be sidestepping, ZDNet’s Ed Bott recently published this piece about Windows 8 features that got cut from Windows 10). Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10

Linux has 2,000 new developers and gets 10,000 patches for each version

Nearly 2,000 developers started contributing to Linux in the past 15 months, making up nearly half of all developers writing code for the open source operating system kernel. The new developers are helping fuel an ever-bigger Linux community, according to the latest Linux Kernel Development report, which will be released today by the Linux Foundation. The report is expected to be available at this link . “The rate of Linux development is unmatched,” the foundation said in an announcement accompanying the report. “In fact, Linux kernel 3.15 was the busiest development cycle in the kernel’s history. This rate of change continues to increase, as does the number of developers and companies involved in the process. The average number of changes accepted into the kernel per hour is 7.71, which translates to 185 changes every day and nearly 1,300 per week. The average days of development per release decreased from 70 days to 66 days.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Linux has 2,000 new developers and gets 10,000 patches for each version