privacy-rights – Page 49 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

11 high school students expelled for keylogging teachers’ computers

Corona del Mar sits on an idyllic part of the Orange County coastline. Mark Weston A hacking scandal involving keyloggers and electronic grade-changing at a high school in Newport Beach, a well-to-do area of Southern California, has resulted in the expulsion of 11 students. The Orange County Register reported Wednesday that six of those students had already left the district, but five had been transferred to another local school. “The Board’s action imposes discipline upon these students for the maximum allowed by the Education Code for what occurred at Corona del Mar High School,” Laura Boss, the Newport Mesa Unified School District spokesperson wrote in a statement on Wednesday. US News and World Report ranked the high school in question as the 46 th best within California. Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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11 high school students expelled for keylogging teachers’ computers

Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

We’re apparently not the only ones who forgot AppUp was a thing—the store closes in March. Intel Intel’s AppUp store for Windows apps has been around since January of 2010, though you could be forgiven for forgetting about it. Intel apparently wants to forget, too: the company announced today that the AppUp store will be closing its doors on March 11, 2014, “after which no new content or apps will be available for download.” An extensive FAQ about the closing covers most of the important facts. E-mail support for AppUp apps will be available until June 15, 2014. The AppUp client application and some apps will continue to function after the store closes, but many applications “require communication with the AppUp client and may not work after May 15, 2014.” Apps purchased through AppUp will no longer receive updates once the store closes, nor will Intel be able to send product keys for keyed apps after March 11. If you want to download the AppUp client and install it now, you’ll either need to find it from another download source or contact Intel customer service. Intel is offering refunds for some paid apps here , but that page isn’t yet functional, and it’s not clear what criteria a purchase will need to meet to be eligible for a refund. Refunds will only be available between now and December 19, 2014. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

Amazon mulling price hike for Amazon Prime shipping and streaming service

Amazon has just reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2013 . According to The Verge , Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak mentioned that the company is considering a price increase for its Amazon Prime customers in the US. The decision hasn’t been made, but high shipping costs could prompt a price increase of between $20 and $40 a year for the service. Prime began life as a service that offered free two-day shipping on many items for a flat, $79-a-year fee. As Amazon has branched out into tablets and streaming media, perks like the Instant Video service and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library have been added to sweeten the deal. The potential price increase would be the first since Prime was introduced in the US in 2005. Amazon reported income of $239 million on sales of $25.59 billion for the fourth quarter of 2013, lower than analysts had expected. The company’s guidance for the first quarter of 2014 projects sales between $18.2 and $19.9 billion and expects income to be somewhere between a profit of $200 million and a loss of $200 million. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Amazon mulling price hike for Amazon Prime shipping and streaming service

Mass hack attack on Yahoo Mail accounts prompts password reset

Yahoo said it is resetting passwords for some of its e-mail users after discovering a coordinated effort to compromise accounts. Attackers behind the cracking campaign used usernames and passwords that were probably collected from a compromised database belonging to an unidentified third party, according to Jay Rossiter, Yahoo senior vice president of platforms and personalization products, who wrote an advisory published Thursday . A large percentage of people use the same password to protect multiple Internet accounts, a practice that allows attackers holding credentials taken from one site to compromise accounts on other sites. There’s no evidence the passwords used in the attack came from Yahoo Systems. “Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts,” Rossiter wrote. “The information sought in the attack seems to be names and e-mail addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent e-mails.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mass hack attack on Yahoo Mail accounts prompts password reset

AT&T plan to shut off Public Switched Telephone Network moves ahead at FCC

PhotoAtelier On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to take its first major step toward letting AT&T and other carriers replace the country’s traditional phone system with one that works entirely over Internet Protocol networks. AT&T has argued that the technology transition should be accompanied by deregulation that would strip the company of most of its monopoly-era obligations. AT&T likely won’t get everything it wants, though. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wrote in a blog post last November that he intends to “ensure the continuation of the Network Compact” with universal service for all Americans, consumer protections, public safety services, and competition.In other words, AT&T can’t stop maintaining the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) without a plan to preserve current service levels. This is not as simple as just making sure phone calls get through, although solving the rural call completion problem by itself is a challenge. It also means maintaining access to 911 services, fire alarms, fax machines, medical alert systems, anything that relies on the phone network. Not everything is to be decided this week. The FCC vote is on an AT&T petition to launch customer trials of new IP-based networks. While AT&T’s petition is expected to be granted, the FCC’s proposed order is written to ensure continuation of the four values (universal service, consumer protection, public safety, and competition) as Wheeler emphasized, an FCC official told Ars on condition that he not be named. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

PlayStation Plus not required to play Elder Scrolls Online on PS4

You will need to pay $15/month to see vistas like this in The Elder Scrolls Online . Bethesda Softworks parent company Zenimax Media has confirmed that its upcoming MMO The Elder Scrolls Online won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription to be played on the PS4. Xbox One players, on the other hand, will have to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription in order to play the game. All versions of The Elder Scrolls Online , including PC and Mac editions due for release on April 4, will require a $15 monthly fee, in addition to a purchase of the $60 base game. But Xbox One owners will also be required to purchase the $60-per-year Xbox Live Gold subscription that is generally required for all online games on the system. That subscription is also required to use entertainment apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus on the Xbox One, as well as services like Skype and Internet Explorer. Sony doesn’t require PlayStation Plus to use similar entertainment apps on the PS4. In a change from its policy with its previous consoles, Sony generally requires a $50-per-year PlayStation Plus subscription to play most online games on the PS4, though free-to-play MMOs such as Warframe and DC Universe Online have been specifically exempted from this requirement. Sony has also confirmed that the upcoming PS4 release of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn also won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription on top of that game’s $13+ monthly fee (that title is not coming to any Microsoft consoles). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Gretar Ívarsson Can enormous heat deep in the Earth be harnessed to provide energy for us on the surface? A promising report from a geothermal borehole project that accidentally struck magma—the same fiery, molten rock that spews from volcanoes—suggests it could. The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP , has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland. But in 2009 a borehole at Krafla, Northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma. The molten rock was intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below at searing temperatures of 900 to 1000 degrees Celsius. This borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells drilled by the IDDP in Iceland looking for usable geothermal resources. A special report in this month’s Geothermics journal details the engineering feats and scientific results that came from the attempt to harness the incredible geothermal heat. (The only previous case like this was in Hawaii in 2007, but that well was sealed in concrete.) Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Amazon cuts cloud storage prices, Microsoft immediately follows suit

Yesterday, Amazon announced that it would be cutting the prices of both its S3 and EBS cloud-based storage. Today, Microsoft announced that it too was cutting the cost of its cloud storage. The software giant promised last April that it would match Amazon’s prices for commodity cloud services: storage, bandwidth, and computation. Amazon’s pricing varies from region to region, and the price cuts range from 6 percent if you’re storing between 1 and 50 terabytes of data, to up to 22 percent—though you’ll need to be storing at least 5 petabytes to take advantage of this. Microsoft says that not only is it going to match these prices, making cuts of up to 20 percent itself, but it will also charge the same amount in every region . This means that Azure storage will in some parts of the world as much as 10 percent cheaper than the Amazon equivalent. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Microfluidics panel could add physical buttons to a touch screen

Tactus Technology Tactus Technology has created a microfluidics panel that could be overlaid on touchscreens to produce “buttons,” per a report from CNET. The panel would allow smartphones to create a bunch of nubs over the keyboard keys on touch screens to help guide typists’ fingers. Some smartphone users are still lamenting the loss of tactile keys like those on a Blackberry, but QWERTY keyboards are hard to justify in terms of real estate when a touch screen can use that space better. A keyboard add-on is a possibility, but one pretender to the Blackberry throne, the Typo, has gotten a mixed reception . Tactus Technology Tactus’ system would put a 0.75 to 1 millimeter-thick microfluidics panel over a device’s LCD instead of glass or plastic. A sub-layer of the panel would be punctured with 200-nanometer holes, through which fluid would be pressed to raise the flexible surface of the screen when the operating system called up some buttons. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microfluidics panel could add physical buttons to a touch screen

Supreme Court will hear case on police search of cell phones

On Friday, the Supreme Court said that it would weigh in on whether it is legal for police officers to search the contents of a suspect’s cell phone when they are arrested. Specifically, the high court will take up two cases from California and Massachusetts, both arising from criminal prosecutions, that have brought to question the admissibility of evidence obtained through a search of the suspect’s phone after arrest. The legal decision will come down to whether searching cell phones without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Earlier court precedent has allowed police officers to search all the items that a person has on them at the time of arrest. But as phones have grown to include e-mail, bank history, and location data, the potential problems with the old standards have become more apparent. A Supreme Court ruling, at least, would give some clarity as to how such situations should be handled. Reuters notes that 91 percent of Americans now have cellphones, and over half of those can connect to the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments