Tag: privacy-rights

Google Play Movies & TV comes to iOS, minus the store and offline support

Google loves itself some iOS apps. Its newest addition to Apple’s platform is Google Play Movies & TV , Google’s video content store. To call the app a “store” on iOS is a bit of a misnomer, as buying content from the iOS app isn’t possible, thanks to Apple’s restrictions. What it  can do is play existing content that you’ve purchased on an Android device or through the Google Play Web interface . There isn’t much to the app. Movies and TV shows are broken out into separate categories, and everything is displayed as a large thumbnail. The individual content pages show a short description, a minimal list of credits, and the all-important “play” button. The app supports Google’s Chromecast via a button in the top right corner, and that’s about it. It’s simple, but a movie player doesn’t really need to be complicated. Compared to the Android version, there are a few things missing. The lack of a store means Google’s recommendation engine is missing too, which leads to of a lot of blank-looking pages. The biggest omission is offline support—there is no way to download a video for later offline viewing, so make sure you have a great Internet connection before pressing “play.” In fact, the app doesn’t work over a cellular connection at all—Wi-Fi is required. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Play Movies & TV comes to iOS, minus the store and offline support

Creator of PGP e-mail encryption making secure Android “Blackphone”

Blackphone Phil Zimmerman, creator of PGP e-mail encryption , is leading a team of security industry executives building an Android phone with a variety of built-in privacy tools. “I’ve been interested in secure telephony for longer than I’ve been interested in secure e-mail,” Zimmerman said in a video on so-called Blackphone ‘s website. “I had to wait for the rest of the technology infrastructure to catch up to make it possible to do secure telephony. PGP was kind of a detour for me while waiting for the rest of the technology to catch up to make really good secure telephony possible.” The narrator of the Blackphone video ominously says, “Technology was supposed to make our lives better. Instead we have lost our privacy—we have become enslaved.” The Blackphone website says the phone will use “PrivatOS,” an Android-based operating system, while letting users “make and receive secure phone calls; exchange secure texts; exchange and store secure files; have secure video chat; browse privately; and anonymize your activity through a VPN.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Creator of PGP e-mail encryption making secure Android “Blackphone”

Critical Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle updates: Like dental floss for your PC

drueckert.com I was still wiping the sleep from my eyes this morning when the nagging voice kicked in: before trawling the Internet for news, you better install yesterday’s security updates. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, given the raft of patches released yesterday by Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle for a variety of products. But as someone who has covered computer security for eight years, I’ve come to make updating a top priority. And for good reason. A large percentage of the booby-trapped websites that surreptitiously install malware on visitors’ machines exploit vulnerabilities that have already been patched. The recent hack on Yahoo’s ad network , for instance, targeted two security flaws in the Java software framework that Oracle had fixed 17 and 24 months ago, Trend Micro reported in a blog post . Those who visited compromised Yahoo servers with up-to-date systems were immune to those attacks. By contrast, people using unpatched software were exposed to malicious payloads that installed the Dorkbot and Gamarue trojans, as well as malware that turned visitors’ machines into Bitcoin miners. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Critical Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle updates: Like dental floss for your PC

New DoS attacks taking down game sites deliver crippling 100Gbps floods

Online gamers such as these ones often stream their play in real time. Twitch Recent denial-of-service attacks taking down League of Legends and other popular gaming services are doing more than just wielding a never-before-seen technique to vastly amplify the amount of junk traffic directed at targets. In at least some cases, their devastating effects can deprive celebrity game players of huge amounts of money. As Ars reported last week, the attacks are abusing the Internet’s Network Time Protocol (NTP), which is used to synchronize computers to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time . A command of just 234 bytes is enough to cause some NTP servers to return a list of up to 600 machines that have previously used its time-syncing service. The dynamic creates an ideal condition for DoS attacks. Attackers send a modest-sized request to NTP servers and manipulate the commands to make them appear as if they came from one of the targeted gaming services. The NTP servers, which may be located in dozens or even hundreds of locations all over the world, in turn send the targets responses that could be tens or hundreds of times bigger than the spoofed request. The technique floods gaming servers with as much as 100Gbps, all but guaranteeing that they’ll be taken down unless operators take specific precautions ahead of time. Among the targets of this new type of attack are game servers used by celebrity players who broadcast live video streams of their gaming prowess that are viewed as many as 50,000 times. In some cases, the massive audiences translate into tens of thousands of dollars per month, as ads are displayed beside video feeds of the players blowing away opponents in Dota 2 and other games. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New DoS attacks taking down game sites deliver crippling 100Gbps floods

DoS attacks that took down big game sites abused Web’s time-sync protocol

69 percent of all DDoS attack traffic by bit volume in the first week of January was the result of NTP reflection. Black Lotus Miscreants who earlier this week took down servers for League of Legends, EA.com, and other online game services used a never-before-seen technique that vastly amplified the amount of junk traffic directed at denial-of-service targets. Rather than directly flooding the targeted services with torrents of data, an attack group calling itself DERP Trolling sent much smaller-sized data requests to time-synchronization servers running the Network Time Protocol (NTP). By manipulating the requests to make them appear as if they originated from one of the gaming sites, the attackers were able to vastly amplify the firepower at their disposal. A spoofed request containing eight bytes will typically result in a 468-byte response to victim, an increase of more than 58 fold. “Prior to December, an NTP attack was almost unheard of because if there was one it wasn’t worth talking about,” Shawn Marck, CEO of DoS-mitigation service Black Lotus , told Ars. “It was so tiny it never showed up in the major reports. What we’re witnessing is a shift in methodology.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DoS attacks that took down big game sites abused Web’s time-sync protocol

Imagination Technologies boosts GPU speeds by 50 percent with Series 6XT

Imagination Technologies While most companies are withholding their big phone and tablet-related news until Mobile World Congress next month, this year’s CES is shaping up to be a busy one for mobile chip designers. Nvidia unveiled the latest version of its Tegra SoC last night, and this morning Imagination Technologies took the wraps off of some new graphics IP for mobile chips. There are two new designs being announced today, both relatives to the PowerVR Series 6 GPUs that are beginning to ship in phones and tablets today. At the top-end is the new PowerVR Series 6XT , which promises a 50 percent performance improvement and better power consumption compared to Series 6. These improvements come entirely from architectural optimizations, not more execution resources—the new GX6250, GX6450, and GX6460 parts use two, four, and six of Imagination’s “computer clusters,” the same number available in Series 6 GPUs. There’s also a GX6240 part, which uses two clusters but is “area-optimized” to take up less space in an SoC die. Like Series 6, Series 6XT supports DirectX 10, OpenGL ES 3.0 , and OpenCL 1.x on the API side. The Series 6XT GPU. The other GPU design being announced today is the Series 6XE series, which are being targeted to especially inexpensive or small SoCs. The G6050 and G6060 are both “half-cluster” parts—the two chips are identical aside from the G6060’s PVIRC2 lossless image compression support. The G6100 and G6110 are single cluster parts, again differentiated by PVIRC2 support in the G6110. The GPUs support only DirectX 9 shader model 3, a step down from the Series 6 and Series 6XT parts, but still support OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.x. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Imagination Technologies boosts GPU speeds by 50 percent with Series 6XT

Researchers warn of new, meaner ransomware with unbreakable crypto

Security researchers have uncovered evidence of a new piece of malware that may be able to take gigabytes’ worth of data hostage unless end users pay a ransom. Discussions of the new malware, alternately dubbed PrisonLocker and PowerLocker, have been occurring on underground crime forums since November, according to a blog post published Friday by Malware Must Die, a group of researchers dedicated to fighting online crime. The malware appears to be inspired by CryptoLocker, the malicious software that wreaked havoc in October when it used uncrackable encryption to lock up victims’ computer files until they paid hundreds of dollars for the decryption key. PowerLocker could prove an even more potent threat because it would be sold in underground forums as a DIY malware kit to anyone who can afford the $100 for a license, Friday’s post warned. CryptoLocker, by contrast, was custom built for use by a single crime gang. What’s more, PowerLocker might also offer several advanced features, including the ability to disable the task manager, registry editor, and other administration functions built into the Windows operating system. Screen shots and online discussions also indicate the newer malware may contain protections that prevent it from being reverse engineered when run on virtual machines. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Researchers warn of new, meaner ransomware with unbreakable crypto

AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock AT&T today confirmed a long-rumored plan to monetize wireless data caps by charging content providers for the right to serve up video and other media without chewing up consumers’ monthly data limits. Sometimes called 1-800-DATA, AT&T billed the plan as “a new way for eligible 4G customers to enjoy mobile content and apps over AT&T’s wireless network without impacting their monthly wireless data plan.” Basically, the price of data is being charged to content providers instead of consumers. The rates for consumers and business will be similar. “We will offer AT&T Sponsored Data providers a wide range of options,” an AT&T spokesperson told Ars. “Customers will be billed according to usage, with costs varying by amounts of usage. Rates are comparable to consumer rates.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers

Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

With all the pieces of my master plan falling into place, Ars will soon be silly with Likes. Facebook is being sued by two users for intercepting the “content of the users’ communications,” including private messages, with the intent to “mine user data and profit from those data by sharing them with third parties—namely, advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators.” The plaintiffs argue in a December 30 class action complaint that Facebook’s use of the word “private” in relation to its messaging system is misleading, given the way the company treats the info contained within those messages. Many of the allegations in this case are based on research done in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal  for a series of articles about digital privacy. Facebook is far from the first company to use private messages to mint money. Gmail continues to be dinged for creating text ads based off of the content of e-mails  ten years after the ads were first introduced. (And Gmail has been sued for that, too.) This is from 2010, but without the “with” that is no doubt just beyond the crop, it’s still relevant. MoneyBlogNewz Facebook goes to lengths to clearly distinguish its messaging feature as “private,” even calling it “unprecedented” in terms of the privacy controls, the filing alleges. “Facebook never intended to provide this level of confidentiality. Instead, Facebook mines any and all transmissions… in order to gather any and all morsels of information it can about its users.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

Windows 8.x breaks 10 percent, Internet Explorer 11 makes a splash

Net Market Share In 2013, Internet Explorer reversed some of its historic losses, Google released of Chrome for Android, and Windows 8 surpassed OS X and Windows Vista to become the third most widely used desktop operating system. Net Market Share Net Market Share Compared to last month, Internet Explorer actually fell slightly, declining by 0.45 points. Firefox, Safari, and Opera also fell, down 0.19, 0.08, and 0.06 points, respectively. The month’s winner was Chrome, which picked up 0.78 points. Over the course of the entire year, Internet Explorer was up 3.14 points on 2012. Firefox was down 1.47 points. Chrome was also down by 1.82 points. Safari rose 0.58 points. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8.x breaks 10 percent, Internet Explorer 11 makes a splash