privacy-rights – Page 69 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Lenovo talks up new 27-inch “table PC” at CES

Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon 27 Lenovo Lenovo is just one of the many PC makers bringing new designs to CES this week. Many of these will simply be refreshed or refined versions of the first round of Windows 8 computers—either convertible laptops or more traditional desktops and laptops with integrated touchscreens—but a few particularly interesting designs may yet rise above that fray. One of these PCs is Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon 27, a 27-inch all-in-one desktop PC with an integrated battery and 1080p ten-point touchscreen. Lenovo is marketing the device as a “table PC.” Sure, a kickstand can be unfolded to allow the computer to sit on a desk as would any all-in-one. But this PC can also be laid flat on a table for use by multiple people, or mounted on the pictured roller table for use while standing. (We’ve previously stated a touchscreen all-in-one makes the most sense ergonomically while positioned at about waist height on a standing person.) Enlarge / A roller table will change the Horizon into a standing workstation, when needed. Lenovo In concept the Horizon is quite similar to Sony’s Tap 20 , a smaller all-in-one that also included an integrated battery and foldable kickstand allowing it to be laid flat on a table. The Horizon’s larger size will mean more people can gather around it at once (and the roller table may make it more useful for people who prefer to stand at their desks), but the two machines are definitely cut from the same cloth. Like the Tap 20, multiplayer touch-enabled games figure heavily into Lenovo’s promotional material for the device. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

flickr / BestBoyZ GmbH A Pittsburgh jury found that hard drive control chips made by Marvell Semiconductor infringe two patents owned by Carnegie Mellon University. Following a four-week trial in federal court, nine jurors unanimously held that Marvell should have to pay $1,169,140,271 in damages—the full sum that CMU’s lawyers had asked for. If the verdict holds up on appeal, it would wipe out more than a year of profits at Marvell, which made a bit over $900 million in 2011. It would also be the largest patent verdict in history, beating out this summer’s $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung for infringing patents and trademarks owned by Apple. The two CMU patents describe a way of reducing “noise” when reading information off hard disks. The jury found that Marvell’s chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180 . At trial, Marvell hotly contested that CMU had invented anything new; they argued that a Seagate patent , filed 14 months earlier, describes everything in CMU’s invention. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor

“Neuristor”: Memristors used to create a neuron-like behavior

A cartoon showing spikes of activity traveling among neurons. UC Berkeley Computing hardware is composed of a series of binary switches; they’re either on or off. The other piece of computational hardware we’re familiar with, the brain, doesn’t work anything like that. Rather than being on or off, individual neurons exhibit brief spikes of activity, and encode information in the pattern and timing of these spikes. The differences between the two have made it difficult to model neurons using computer hardware. In fact, the recent, successful generation of a flexible neural system required that each neuron be modeled separately in software in order to get the sort of spiking behavior real neurons display. But researchers may have figured out a way to create a chip that spikes. The people at HP labs who have been working on memristors have figured out a combination of memristors and capacitors that can create a spiking output pattern. Although these spikes appear to be more regular than the ones produced by actual neurons, it might be possible to create versions that are a bit more variable than this one. And, more significantly, it should be possible to fabricate them in large numbers, possibly right on a silicon chip. The key to making the devices is something called a Mott insulator. These are materials that would normally be able to conduct electricity, but are unable to because of interactions among their electrons. Critically, these interactions weaken with elevated temperatures. So, by heating a Mott insulator, it’s possible to turn it into a conductor. In the case of the material used here, NbO 2 , the heat is supplied by resistance itself. By applying a voltage to the NbO 2 in the device, it becomes a resistor, heats up, and, when it reaches a critical temperature, turns into a conductor, allowing current to flow through. But, given the chance to cool off, the device will return to its resistive state. Formally, this behavior is described as a memristor. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Using Windows 8’s “hidden” backup to clone and recover your whole PC

The blue screen of bringing your PC back to life. When it comes to backing up and restoring your PC, Windows 8 took a few steps forward and a few steps back. Your settings and apps in the new tablet-y interface (yeah, we’re still calling it Metro ) are automatically backed up if you use a Microsoft account. That means when you restore your PC, all of the Metro stuff comes back exactly the way you remember it. This has limitations—your desktop applications, anything that wasn’t downloaded from the Windows Store, are wiped when performing the most easily accessible type of restore in Windows 8. Beyond Metro, all you get is a file on your desktop listing the applications you’ve lost. There’s also a new backup tool on the desktop side of things, but this has its limits too. Called File History, it lets you automatically back up files to a network drive or cable-connected external hard drive every 10 minutes. As Peter Bright explained in an article last summer, File History’s arrival was paired with the exit of Shadow Copies. This was a useful tool that let users revert to previous versions of files without needing to connect an external drive, and now it’s gone. Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Using Windows 8’s “hidden” backup to clone and recover your whole PC

How to bring down mission-critical GPS networks with $2,500

Enlarge / The phase-coherent signal synthesizer with its top cover removed. The $2,500 device can be used to severely disrupt mission-critical GPS equipment used by the military and private industry. Nighswander et al. Scientists have devised a series of novel and inexpensive attacks that can severely disrupt mission-critical global positioning systems relied on by the military and a variety of industrial players, including airlines, mining companies, and operators of hydroelectric plants and other critical infrastructure. Unlike previous GPS attacks, the one developed by a team of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and a private navigation company exploits software bugs in the underlying receivers. That allows the attacks to be stealthier and more persistent than earlier exploits, which primarily relied on signal jamming and spoofing. Prototype hardware that cost only $2,500 to build is able to cause a wide variety of GPS devices within a 30 mile radius to malfunction. Because many of those devices are nodes on special networks that make GPS signals more precise, the attacks have the effect of disrupting larger systems used in aviation, military, and critical infrastructure. The PCSS, or phase-coherent signal synthesizer, that they developed simultaneously receives and transmits civil GPS signals. It carries out many of the same things done by spoofers used in earlier GPS attacks. But instead of merely providing false information designed to compromise the accuracy of the GPS readings, it includes data that exploits weaknesses in the firmware of nearby receivers, many of which use the Internet to share their readings with other machines. The success of the PCSS is the result of an almost complete lack of authentication in the devices that send and receive GPS signals. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to bring down mission-critical GPS networks with $2,500

Seattle announces its own gigabit Internet service

This map only shows some parts of the city that Seattle Gigabit aims to serve. Gigabit Seattle One day after Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, proclaimed Google Fiber was ” not an experiment ,” the Emerald City decided that it too wants in on some of that sweet gigabit speed . On Thursday, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city reached an agreement with Gigabit Squared and the University of Washington to bring 1 Gbps connections, taking advantage of the city’s own underused fiber. Seattle abandoned its plan for a municipal network last summer. A connected city wireless network, which would obviously be slower, is also in the works. “The plan will begin with a demonstration fiber project in twelve Seattle neighborhoods and includes wireless methods to deploy services more quickly to other areas,” the city wrote in an online statement . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Seattle announces its own gigabit Internet service

FBI snares $850 million Butterfly botnet ring with help of Facebook

On Tuesday, the FBI announced that it had arrested ten people connected to a botnet that had spread through Facebook. Spread by a virus targeting Facebook users, the botnet caused over $850 million in losses to financial institutions, infected over 11 million computers, and stole credit card and bank account data. The botnet itself was shut down in October, according to an FBI statement. This is the second major outbreak of botnets based on the Butterfly (aka Mariposa) bot tool. The first incarnation, discovered in December 2008 and shut down a year later, infected over 12 million PCs worldwide and was spread primarily through file-sharing and instant messaging attacks. It also harvested financial information from over 800,000 victims. In the latest incarnation of Butterfly, the botnet spread itself using variants of Yahos, a virus that spreads itself by sending links via social networks and instant messaging. Victims clicked on the link, launching Yahos’ attack. The malware, which in some variants disguised itself as an NVIDIA video driver , then downloaded and installed the botnet controls and browser exploits that captured users’ credit card and bank account information. The spread of viruses like Yahos prompted Facebook to partner with McAfee in 2010 to provide tools to users to clean infected systems. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI snares $850 million Butterfly botnet ring with help of Facebook

California law enforcement moves to buy drones, draws controversy

UAV set up for Wylye intersection. QinetiQ group Since Congress passed legislation in February ordering the Federal Aviation Administration to fast-track the approval of unmanned aerial vehicles—more colloquially known as drones—for use by law enforcement agencies, police and sheriff departments across the country have been scrambling to purchase the smaller, unarmed cousins of the Predator and Reaper drones which carry out daily sorties over Afghanistan, Yemen, and other theaters of operation. Alameda County in California has become one of the central battlegrounds over the introduction of drones to domestic police work. Earlier this year , Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern raised the hackles of local civil libertarians (and there are quite a few of those in the county, which encompasses Berkeley and Oakland) by declaring his intention to purchase a drone to assist with “emergency response.” According to Ahern, Alameda Sheriff’s personnel first tested a UAV in fall 2011 and gave a public demonstration of the machine’s usefulness for emergency responses during the Urban Shield SWAT competition in late October. Were Alameda County to purchase a drone, it would set a precedent in California, which has long been an innovator in law enforcement tactics: from SWAT teams (pioneered in Delano and Los Angeles) to anti-gang tactics such as civil injunctions. The first documented incident of a drone being used to make an arrest in the United States occurred in North Dakota in June 2011, when local police received assistance from an unarmed Predator B drone that belonged to US Customs and Border Protection . The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration have also reportedly used drones for domestic investigations. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California law enforcement moves to buy drones, draws controversy

Windows 8 takes 1 percent of Web usage as Internet Explorer gains

Enlarge Net Marketshare November saw Firefox climb back up above 20 percent, Internet Explorer grow further still, and Chrome apparently suffer a surprisingly sharp drop. Enlarge Net Marketshare Enlarge Net Marketshare Internet Explorer was up 0.63 points at 54.76 percent, its highest level since October 2011. Firefox was up 0.45 points to 20.44 percent, all but erasing the last six month’s losses. Chrome, surprisingly, was down a whopping 1.31 points to 17.24 percent, its lowest level since September 2011. We’ve asked Net Applications, the source we use for browser market share data, if it has made any change in its data collection that might account for this large Chrome drop. The company attributed this in part to the exclusion of Chrome’s pre-rendering data. It estimates that 11.1 percent of all Chrome pageviews are a result of pre-rendering (where Chrome renders pages that aren’t currently visible just in case the user wants to see them) and accordingly excluded this from its figures. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8 takes 1 percent of Web usage as Internet Explorer gains

Google, Microsoft, PayPal, other Romanian sites hijacked by DNS hackers

For a brief time, people trying to visit google.ro on Wednesday were connected to this page instead. Kaspersky Labs Romanian websites for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal, and other operators were briefly redirected to a rogue server on Wednesday. The redirect is most likely a result of a decade-old hacking technique that underscores the fragility of the Internet’s routing system. For a span of one to several hours on Wednesday morning, people typing Google.ro , Yahoo.ro , and Romanian-specific addresses for other sites connected to a website that was purportedly run by an Algerian hacker, according to numerous security blog posts, including this one from Kaspersky Lab. Researchers said the most likely explanation for the redirection is a technique known as DNS poisoning, in which domain name system routing tables are tampered with, causing domain names to resolve to incorrect IP addresses. DNS poisoning first came to light in the mid-1990s when researchers discovered that attackers could inject spoofed IP addresses into the DNS resolvers belonging to Internet service providers and large organizations. The servers would store the incorrect information for hours or days at a time, allowing the attack to send large numbers of end users to websites that install malware or masquerade as banks or other trusted destinations. Over the years, DNS server software has been updated to make it more resistant to the hack, most recently in 2008, when numerous providers introduced fixes to patch a DNS cache poisoning vulnerability discovered by researcher Dan Kaminsky. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google, Microsoft, PayPal, other Romanian sites hijacked by DNS hackers