reprints – Page 11 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

(credit: From court records in Good Morning to You v. Warner/Chappell) More than two years after a documentary filmmaker challenged the copyright to the simple lyrics of the song “Happy Birthday,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the copyright is invalid . The result could undo Warner/Chappell’s lucrative licensing business around the song, once estimated to be $2 million per year. The company is likely to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. US District Judge George King held that the two sisters who authored the song, Patty and Mildred Hill, gave the melody and piano arrangements to Summy Co., which was eventually acquired by Warner/Chappell. But King wrote that there’s no evidence they ever transferred a copyright on the words. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Online backup provider Backblaze is branching out today with a new business: an infrastructure-as-a-service-style cloud storage API that’s going head to head with Amazon’s S3, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Storage. But where those services charge 2¢ or more per gigabyte per month, Backblaze is pricing its service at just half a cent per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s business is cheap storage. We’ve written about the company’s hard disk reliability data a few times over the years ; the company has found that regular consumer hard drives are more than up to the demands of providing cloud storage, though there is substantial variation between the different manufacturers and models. Backblaze has designed (and documented ) its storage hardware for the lowest possible cost, using software to provide the necessary protection against failures. It currently has more than 150 petabytes of storage. This low-cost storage means that the company can offer its $5/month unlimited size backup plan profitably. Now the company plans to sell that same cheap storage to developers. Its new B2 product is very much in the same vein as Amazon’s S3: cloud storage with an API that can be used to build a range of other applications. And the price difference is significant. Amazon S3’s cheapest online storage—reduced redundancy, for customers storing more than 5 petabytes—costs 2.2¢ per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s B2 storage costs 0.5¢ per gigabyte per month, with the first 10GB free. This is cheaper even than Amazon’s Glacier and Google’s Nearline storage, at 1¢ per gigabyte per month, neither of which supports immediate access to data. Bandwidth costs are the same; inbound bandwidth is free, outbound is charged at 5¢ per gigabyte. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Samsung’s 950 Pro M.2 SSD pairs NVMe with V-NAND for eye-popping performance

The Samsung 950 Pro SSD—the follow up to the legendary Samsung 850 Pro SSD—has been unveiled by the company at its annual SSD summit in Seoul, Korea. The 950 Pro will be available at retail in October, with MSRPs of $199.99 (probably ~£150) for the 256GB version, and $349.99 (~£280) for the 512GB version. UK pricing is yet to be confirmed. Based on Samsung’s V-NAND technology and available in 512GB and 256GB capacities, the 950 Pro shuns the common 2.5-inch form factor and SATA interface for cutting-edge M.2 2280 and PCIe 3.0 x4. It also makes use of the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface, better known as NVMe. Most SSDs still make use of the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, which was originally developed for spinning platter SATA hard drives back in 2004. While AHCI works fine for traditional hard drives, it was never designed for low latency NAND chips. As flash speeds have increased, AHCI has become a performance bottleneck. NVMe exploits both the PCIe bus and NAND flash memory to offer higher performance and lower latency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

France tells Google to remove search results globally, or face big fines

Public domain. Google’s informal appeal against a French order to apply the so-called “right to be forgotten” to all of its global Internet services and domains, not just those in Europe, has been rejected. The president of the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection authority, gave a number of reasons for the rejection , including the fact that European orders to de-list information from search results could be easily circumvented if links were still available on Google’s other domains. CNIL’s president also claimed that “this decision does not show any willingness on the part of the CNIL to apply French law extraterritorially. It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non European players offering their services in Europe.” As you’ve probably gathered, Google disagrees with CNIL’s stance. In a July blog post regarding the case, the company’s global privacy chief, Peter Fleischer, wrote: “If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place. We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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France tells Google to remove search results globally, or face big fines

Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam

A few months after Valve officially launched Steam for Linux in 2013, Gabe Newell gave his LinuxCon keynote crowd a bit of music for their ears. “It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming,” the Valve head-man said. “It’s sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.” Linux gaming was by no means a new endeavor, but 2013 stands as a major year for the open-source platform’s gaming prospects with Valve announcing Linux-based Steam Machines and the arrival of SteamOS . When we looked at the state of Linux gaming after its 12-month Valve anniversary, we found nearly 1,000 professional, commercially distributed games available as of February 2015. But this weekend there’s an even bigger numeric milestone to celebrate according to the Linux site Phoronix —1,500 Linux titles are currently available through Steam. Phoronix notes Steam has been adding roughly 100 Linux titles per month throughout the summer. And while the total number of Steam Linux offerings still pales in comparison to competing platforms—Phoronix cites Windows at 6,464 games and OS X at 2,323—the statistical growth in such a short period of time is undeniable. Anecdotal evidence supporting Steam’s Linux gaming growth looks rosy as well. The five most popular Linux titles for Steam include major developer offerings like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordo r (the rest of the top five according to Phoronix includes ARK: Survival Evolved , Team Fortress 2 , and Dota 2). And this summer, a small indie game called Don’t Be Patchman even became the first Linux-exclusive launch on Steam. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Some men wearing Google Glass. Glass Collective The Google Glass team is still alive inside of Google. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the group has a new name, “Project Aura,” and has recently picked up a few engineers from Amazon. That’s “Project Aura,” not to be confused with ” Project Ara ,” another struggling group inside Google that’s trying to build a modular smartphone. “Project Aura” seems to still have all of the previous Google Glass management in place. Ivy Ross, former chief marketing officer of Art.com, is still leading the project. She still reports to Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest. This group is all part of Google Glass’ “reboot” team. They’re charged with taking the original version of Google’s face-mounted computer and turning it into something appealing; we’ve yet to see a product from this revamped group. According to the report, the group has been hiring engineers, software developers, and project managers from Amazon’s Lab126, a hardware division that was most recently responsible for the Amazon Fire Phone. After the Fire Phone flopped, Amazon fired “dozens” from the Lab126 group, and Google swooped in to pick up some new employees. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

ZMap.io The highly clandestine attacks hitting Cisco Systems routers are much more active than previously reported. Infections have hit at least 79 devices in 19 countries, including an ISP in the US that’s hosting 25 boxes running the malicious backdoor. That discovery comes from a team of computer scientists who probed the entire IPv4 address space for infected devices. As Ars reported Tuesday, the so-called SYNful Knock router implant is activated after receiving an unusual series of non-compliant network packets followed by a hardcoded password. By sending only the out-of-sequence TCP packets but not the password to every Internet address and then monitoring the response, the researchers were able to detect which ones were infected by the backdoor. Security firm FireEye surprised the security world on Tuesday when it first reported the active outbreak of SYNful Knock. The implant is precisely the same size as the legitimate Cisco router image, and it’s loaded each time the router is restarted. It supports up to 100 modules that attackers can tailor to the specific target. FireEye found it on 14 servers in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Ukraine. The finding was significant, because it showed an attack that had long been theorized was in fact being actively used. The new research shows it’s being used much more widely, and it’s been found in countries including the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and China. The researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Software bugs that allow attackers to bypass smartphone lockscreens are common enough for both Android and iOS devices, but like a fender bender on the highway, many of us can’t resist the urge to gawk anyway. There’s a newly disclosed way for someone who has a few uninterrupted moments with a handset running most versions of Android 5.x to gain complete control of the device and all the data stored on it. The hack involves dumping an extremely long string into the password field after swiping open the camera from a locked phone. Unless updated in the past few days, devices running 5.0 to 5.1.1 will choke on the unwieldy number of characters and unlock, even though the password is incorrect. From there, the attacker can do anything with the phone the rightful owner can do. The following video demonstrates the attack in action. The technique begins by adding a large number of characters to the emergency call window and then copying them to the Android clipboard. (Presumably, there are other ways besides the emergency number screen to buffer a sufficiently large number of characters.) The hacker then swipes open the camera from the locked phone, accesses the options menu, and pastes the characters into the resulting password prompt. Instead of returning an error message, vulnerable handsets unlock. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Apple announces iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, with 3D Touch and A9 SoC

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple has officially unveiled its newest iPhones, the 6S and 6S Plus. Like the 3GS, 4S, and 5S before them, the phones are visually similar to their predecessors, and the devices focus mainly on internal upgrades and tweaks. The new phones will be available for preorder on September 11 and will officially launch on September 18. The new phones are built out of the same 7000-series aluminum used in the Apple Watch, a change which should make them sturdier and less prone to bending. The phones retain their 4.7- and 5.5-inch screens, though, as well as the TouchID sensor and button layout used in the iPhone 6. A new color option joins the line-up, too: Rose Gold. This brings the iPhone more in line with the Apple Watch’s exterior appearance options (especially important if you’re the kind of person who clutches their pearls at the idea of your phone’s color not coordinating with your watch). Unlike the Apple Watch,though, the iPhone’s Rose Gold is just annodized aluminum, not actual-for-real Apple Gold . The front of the devices has been given a new type of glass—one which Apple calls “dual ion-exchange” glass. Behind the new face, the phones’ also have Force Touch-style pressure sensitivity, which is called “3D Touch.” The new devices also provide tactile feedback via a Taptic Engine similar to the one in the Apple Watch. In the Apple Watch, Force Touch is usually used to bring up menu items, and 3D Touch provides similar functionality on the new iPhones. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple announces iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, with 3D Touch and A9 SoC

Bitcoin cyberextortionists are blackmailing banks, corporations

A number of large UK corporations and institutions, such as Lloyds Bank and BAE systems, have reported a “marked increase” in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from the Bitcoin extortionist group DD4BC, which has been operational since last year . The increased aggressions appears concurrent with reports from other organisations. A cybersecurity case study released by Akamai identified 114 DD4BC attacks against the company’s customers since April 2015, with 41 cases taking place in June alone. In comparison, there were only 5 attacks in January and February 2015. “The latest attacks—focused primarily on the financial service industry—involved new strategies and tactics intended to harass, extort and ultimately embarrass the victim publicly,” said Akamai Security Division executive Stuart Scholly in a press release. 58% of DD4BC’s targets are financial institutions, according to Akamai. The group begins with ransom emails that state their demands, which vary anywhere between 1 and 100 bitcoins (about £160 to £16,000), a deadline for compliance, and warning of a “small, demonstrative attack.” Should the victim prove uncooperative, the figure is raised and a more forceful show of force is made. This technique is particularly effective against financial institutions as DD4BC threatens to publicise their attacks, negating the institution’s reputation and trustworthiness. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin cyberextortionists are blackmailing banks, corporations