reprints – Page 40 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

California top court says red light camera photos are evidence

A red light camera at the intersection of Sylvan and Coffee in Modesto, California. Cyrus Farivar On Thursday, the California Supreme Court upheld the admissibility of images taken from red light cameras as evidence of traffic violations in the Golden State. The unanimous decision in the case, known as The People of California v. Goldsmith , marks the end of a five-year-old legal odyssey. Fines issued as the result of a red light camera in California are by far the highest nationwide ($436 in this case)—typically they’re in the $100 range in the rest of the country. The decision (PDF) comes amid a flurry of challenges to the red light cameras before other state high courts: the Louisiana Supreme Court recently declined to hear such a case, letting stand a lower court ruling that challenged cameras in New Orleans. The Illinois Supreme Court heard oral arguments against such cameras in Chicago in May 2014. A decision in a similar case currently before the Ohio Supreme Court is expected before the end of the year. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California top court says red light camera photos are evidence

Microsoft: Software update unlocks more GPU bandwidth on Xbox One

The system update does not turn the system white… only the employee models do that. The June system update rolling out to Xbox One system worldwide this week includes surface-level features like external hard drive support, as we mentioned this morning . But Microsoft says the new firmware will also help developers extract more power from the system’s Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), even though the base hardware in the system is obviously staying the same. Microsoft didn’t trumpet this news in a press release or blog post, but threw it out there in a tweet from Microsoft’s new executive in charge of Xbox, Phil Spencer: “June #XboxOne software dev kit gives devs access to more GPU bandwidth. More performance, new tools and flexibility to make games better.” As far back as last October, Microsoft was publicly acknowledging how Kinect and system processing took “a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation… for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode.” Back then, the company promised it would be opening up that slice of processing time to game developers in the future in a way that didn’t impact the system’s background performance. That appears to be what has come to pass with the system’s latest software update. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft: Software update unlocks more GPU bandwidth on Xbox One

Meet “Cupid,” the Heartbleed attack that spawns “evil” Wi-Fi networks

A packet capture showing Cupid attacking a wireless network. SysValue It just got easier to exploit the catastrophic Heartbleed vulnerability against wireless networks and the devices that connect to them thanks to the release last week of open source code that streamlines the process of plucking passwords, e-mail addresses, and other sensitive information from vulnerable routers and connected clients. Dubbed Cupid, the code comes in the form of two software extensions. The first gives wireless networks the ability to deploy “evil networks” that surreptitiously send malicious packets to connected devices. Client devices relying on vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL cryptography library can then be forced to transmit contents stored in memory. The second extension runs on client devices. When connecting to certain types of wireless networks popular in corporations and other large organizations, the devices send attack packets that similarly pilfer data from vulnerable routers. The release of Cupid comes eight weeks after the disclosure of Heartbleed , one of the most serious vulnerabilities to ever hit the Internet. The flaw, which existed for more than two years in OpenSSL, resides in “heartbeat” functions designed to keep a transport layer security (TLS) connection alive over an extended period of time. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet “Cupid,” the Heartbleed attack that spawns “evil” Wi-Fi networks

OS X Yosemite unveiled at WWDC, features big UI overhaul

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 This morning at Apple’s 2014 Worldwide Developer’s Conference, Apple SVP Craig Federighi gave us our first official look at the upcoming version of the Macintosh desktop operating system. This is the tenth formal release of OS X (which is pronounced “oh ess ten,” never “oh ess ecks”); Apple’s naming convention uses “OS X” as the brand, separate from the version, and so the brand and version of this release is indeed “OS X 10.10″—”oh ess ten ten dot ten” (or “ten point ten,” if you insist). Starting with OS X 10.9, though, Apple has given the OS California-themed names—10.9 was “OS X Mavericks,” after a famous surfing location, and this new version is “OS X Yosemite,” named after California’s Yosemite National Park. Mavericks’ branding and banners were all wave-related, after the surf theme; Yosemite’s desktop features the famous slab-sided southwest face of Half Dome , one of the park’s most recognizable rock formations. (PC gamers who cut their teeth in the late 80s and 90s will also recognize Half Dome from its role as the logo of the legendary adventure gaming company Sierra On-Line .) Translucency and new Dock icons. “Translucency” is the name of the day, with trandlucent panels and sidebars popping up all in all windows. The icons in the Dock have also gotten a big overhaul, gaining a very iOS-like appearance across the board. “You wouldn’t believe how much time we spent crafting that trash can,” joked Federighi. The revised interface can also be shifted to a “dark” mode, where windows and menus shift to light text on a smoky background instead of the Mac’s more typical black-on-white. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X Yosemite unveiled at WWDC, features big UI overhaul

Payback time: First patent troll ordered to pay “extraordinary case” fees

FindTheBest CEO Kevin O’Connor and Director of Operations Danny Seigle. FindTheBest When Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest (FTB) was sued by a patent troll called Lumen View last year, it vowed to fight back rather than pay up the $50,000 licensing fee Lumen was asking for. Company CEO Kevin O’Connor made it personal, pledging $1 million of his own money to fight the legal battle. Once FindTheBest pursued the case, the company dismantled the troll in short order. In November, the judge invalidated Lumen’s patent, finding it was nothing more than a description of computer-oriented “matchmaking.” At that point, FindTheBest had spent about $200,000 on its legal fight—not to mention the productivity lost in hundreds of work hours spent by top executives on the lawsuit, and three all-company meetings. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Prosecutors: ex-LulzSec hacker “Sabu” helped authorities stop 300+ cyberattacks

The much delayed sentencing of former LulzSec hacker-turned-FBI informant Hector “Sabu” Monsegur is set to take place next week. But before any decisions are made public, new court documents (PDF) show Monsegur has helped the feds disrupt more than 300 attacks against targets ranging from the US military to NASA, Congress to private companies. “The amount of loss prevented by Monsegur’s actions is difficult to fully quantify, but even a conservative estimate would yield a loss prevention figure in the millions of dollars,” the document stated. The tale of Sabu’s arrest and LulzSec’s fall: FBI still needs Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, sentencing delayed (again) “Literally” the day he was arrested, hacker “Sabu” helped the FBI LulzSec leader “Sabu” worked with FBI since last summer FBI names, arrests Anon who infiltrated its secret conference call Inside the hacking of Stratfor: the FBI’s case against Antisec member Anarchaos All the latest on the unmasking of LulzSec leader “Sabu,” arrests Stakeout: how the FBI tracked and busted a Chicago Anon Doxed: how Sabu was outed by former Anons long before his arrest Anonymous attacks security firm as revenge for LulzSec arrests “Everything incriminating has been burned”: Anons fight panic after Sabu betrayal Monsegur assisted in high-profile hacks of security firm HBGary and others as a member of LulzSec, a sect of Anonymous. He began cooperating with the FBI in June 2011 after his arrest at the Jacob Riis public housing complex in New York City. His work for the feds began immediately . Eventually Monsegur helped the government build cases against numerous Anonymous hackers, including Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond . He apparently also assisted the government in its investigation of Wikileaks . According to the New York Times , prosecutors filed the new documents because they are asking Judge Loretta A. Preska for leniency in light of Monsegur’s “extraordinary cooperation.” Sentencing in Monsegur’s case is currently scheduled for Tuesday in a Federal District Court in Manhattan. But while some of the other hackers in the LulzSec saga have faced steep penalties (for example, Hammond is serving a 10-year sentence), the government has asked for Monsegur to only be sentenced to time served— just seven months . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prosecutors: ex-LulzSec hacker “Sabu” helped authorities stop 300+ cyberattacks

Apple will fix iMessage bug that makes it harder to leave the service

Andrew Cunningham iPhone users (and ex-iPhone users) attempting to sign out of Apple’s iMessage service recently began running into a nasty bug. Signing out of iMessage means that iPhones trying to text your number should seamlessly switch back to using SMS. However, this hasn’t been happening lately—instead, these iMessages continue to be sent as iMessages. They never actually make it to their destination, and neither the sender nor the receiver is given any indication that the message has failed. Apple acknowledged the bug in a statement to Re/code this morning , noting that it has “recently fixed a server-side iMessage bug which was causing an issue for some users,” and that an additional software update was being planned to fix more problems. Signing out of the iMessage service has always been more difficult than enabling it, and I say that as someone who recently disabled iMessage to make jumping between iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and other mobile operating systems easier. In my case, iMessages sent to my newly disconnected number would simply fail to send, and the problem only worked itself out after I changed my Apple ID password (thereby signing all of my devices out of the service), disassociating my phone number from my Apple ID, and then calling Apple support about the problem. This new bug sounds worse, since message senders don’t even know that the texts aren’t arriving at their destination. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple will fix iMessage bug that makes it harder to leave the service

Sailor convicted of hacking websites from aboard aircraft carrier

The USS Harry S. Truman apparently had adequate Internet bandwidth for a sailor to hack websites in his spare time. US Navy A 27-year old now-former sailor pleaded guilty in a federal court in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 20 to charges of conspiracy after leading a band of hackers in the US and Canada from onboard an aircraft carrier . Nicholas Paul Knight, who was the system administrator for the USS Harry S. Truman’s nuclear reactors department, was caught trying to hack into a Navy database while at sea. Knight and a co-defendant—Daniel Kreuger of Salem, Illinois—were part of “Team Digi7al,” a collective of hackers who attacked at least 24 websites in 2012 in search of personal identifying information. Knight himself hacked the Navy’s Smart Web Move website , a system for sailors to manage household moves during transfers between stations; that hack included about 220,000 service members’ Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and other personal data. Other sites attacked by the group included ones operated by the Department of Homeland Security, the Library of Congress, Stanford University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Toronto Police Service, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sailor convicted of hacking websites from aboard aircraft carrier

California approves test of self-driving cars on public roads

Terrence Lui On Tuesday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) officially approved rules to allow the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads. The rules will take effect September 16, 2014. The move has been a long time coming , with the DMV promising back in December 2013 that it would post regulations for public use of self-driving cars and then holding a public hearing in January to address concerns about them. These new rules will set a statewide standard for all manufacturers. (Although Google has been running pilot programs in Mountain View and elsewhere, it’s not the only company pursuing an automated vehicle—Nvidia told Ars last week that Audi has plans to incorporate a “cruise control for stop-and-go traffic” feature in one of its cars come 2015.) Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), told Ars that the new rules could change how manufacturers proceed with their testing. “The DMV has a really, really difficult task, and I was impressed with the thoughtfulness of their approach,” he said. “I would say that anyone who is reading these documents will have to read very closely.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California approves test of self-driving cars on public roads

Wi-Fi networks are wasting a gigabit—but multi-user beamforming will save the day

Aurich Lawson Wi-Fi equipment based on the new 802.11ac standard—often called Gigabit Wi-Fi —has been on the market for nearly two years. These products offer greater bandwidth and other improvements over gear based on the older 802.11n specification, but they don’t implement one of the most impressive features of 11ac. It was simply too complicated to deploy all the upgrades at once, hardware makers say. As a result, 11ac networks actually waste a lot of capacity when serving devices like smartphones and tablets. This shortcoming should be fixed over the next year with new networking equipment and upgrades to end-user devices. Once everything is in place, Wi-Fi networks will be better able to serve lots of devices at once, particularly the mobile devices that every single person in the US seemingly has in his or her hands every minute of the day.The soon-to-be-deployed technology is called MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple-input and multiple-output), which is like a wireless “switch” that sends different data to different receivers at the same time. It’s powered by multi-user beamforming, an improvement over the single-user beamforming found in first-generation 11ac products. MU-MIMO will let wireless access points send data streams of up to 433Mbps to at least three users simultaneously, for a total of 1.3Gbps or more. First-generation 11ac equipment without MU-MIMO could send those streams of data simultaneously, but only to one device—and only if that device was capable of receiving multiple streams. Many computers could handle the influx of data, but smartphones and tablets generally couldn’t. That meant they could only receive one stream (occasionally two) because of power limitations. Read 37 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wi-Fi networks are wasting a gigabit—but multi-user beamforming will save the day