reprints – Page 41 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

For Do Not Call violations, Sprint will pay FCC $7.5M in largest ever settlement

Hunter Edwards On Monday, Sprint agreed to pay the Federal Communications Commission $7.5 million to resolve violations of the Do Not Call registry—the largest settlement payout ever. The program first began in 2003 as a way to allow Americans to opt out of unsolicited sales calls. According to the FCC, Sprint will also put into effect a “robust compliance plan,” designate a new senior manager to deal with compliance, retrain its employees, and report any further noncompliance to the agency, among other necessary actions. “We expect companies to respect the privacy of consumers who have opted out of marketing calls,” said Travis LeBlanc, acting chief of the Enforcement Bureau, in a statement . “When a consumer tells a company to stop calling or texting with promotional pitches, that request must be honored. Today’s settlement leaves no question that protecting consumer privacy is a top enforcement priority.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Urine and the bladder are not sterile, contain bacteria

Gray’s Anatomy No, urine is not sterile, according to a study presented this week by researchers from the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University. Instead, the bodily excretion does contain a diverse array of bacteria that can vary depending on bladder condition. Up until now, the types of bacteria present have been hard to detect because they don’t grow in urine cultures. That urine is not sterile is not actually news; the same medical school reported findings in 2012 suggesting that urine can contain bacteria when drawn directly from the bladder. But the study may surprise many due to the deeply entrenched belief , even in the medical community, that urine is bacteria-free and thus safe to use in a number of activities, from drinking to rinsing wounds in a pinch. A commonly traded rule of thumb is that, while the initial part of a stream of urine contains bacteria washed from the urethra, the “mid-stream” is safely sterile. This is not so, or at least it’s not entirely reliable information. The two studies, from 2013 and 2012, looked only at samples from women. The 2013 study compared samples from women with and without overactive bladder disorder (OAB) and found different types of bacteria in both types of samples, including Streptococcus and Staphylococcus. The authors of the study suggested that the presence of certain types of bacteria in women with OAB could be causing their symptoms, and treating their presence could help with their condition. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Urine and the bladder are not sterile, contain bacteria

Intel CEO: Delayed next-gen Broadwell CPUs will be here for holidays

One of the few looks we’ve gotten at a Broadwell CPU so far. Intel New CPUs and chipsets from Intel normally go hand-in-hand, but earlier this month when the company announced its 9-series chipsets , all we got was a slightly faster clock speed bump to Haswell . News of truly new CPUs based on the upcoming “Broadwell” architecture was nowhere to be found, and we’ve generally heard very little about Broadwell aside from an announcement of a delay into the second half of 2014. There are many months in the second half of 2014, but Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich got a little more specific in a statement to Reuters today . “I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday,” said Krzanich. “Back to school—that’s a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That’s going to be tough.” This means we’ll most likely see Broadwell chips (and, more importantly, new devices from OEMs that can use Broadwell chips) sometime between September and early December. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Aurich Lawson / PCCare247 Sitting in front of her PC, the phone in her hand connected to a tech support company half a world away, Sheryl Novick was about to get scammed. The company she had reached, PCCare247, was based in India but had built a lucrative business advertising over the Internet to Americans, encouraging them to call for tech support. After glimpsing something odd on her computer, Novick did so. “I saw some sort of pop-up and I don’t know if there’s a problem,” she told a PCCare247 tech named Yakeen. He offered to check the “management part” of her computer for possible problems. Read 61 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

A former Subway sandwich shop franchisee pled guilty to taking part in a scheme to hack point-of-sale terminals for at least 13 stores and obtaining gift cards worth $40,000. Shahin Abdollahi, who also ran a business that sold and maintained point-of-sale terminals, sold the computerized checkout registers to the Subway shops that were illegally accessed, according to federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. He set up the terminals with software from LogMeIn , which allows people to remotely log in to PCs over the Internet. Abdollahi and other conspirators then used the software to repeatedly access the Subway terminals without authorization, usually early in the morning, when the restaurants were closed. Once logged in, they loaded gift cards with credit totaling $40,000. Co-conspirator Jeffrey Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, would then advertise the cards for sale on eBay and Craigslist and hand deliver them to buyers. On Wednesday, Abdollahi 46, of Lake Elsinore, California, pled guilty in federal court in Massachusetts to one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and wire fraud and one count of wire fraud. He is scheduled to be sentenced on for August 6. Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, pled guilty in February and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 28. It’s not the first time Subway point-of-sale terminals have been illegally accessed by crooks for purposes of skimming the till. In 2012, two men pled guilty to participating in an international conspiracy that hacked into credit-card payment terminals at more than 150 Subway franchises and racked up more than $10 million in losses. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant

NSA techs perform an unauthorized field upgrade to Cisco hardware in these 2010 photos from an NSA document. A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide details how the agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they’re delivered. These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being “some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.” The document, a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department (S3261) includes photos (above) of NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task. The NSA manager described the process: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant

Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

Last month’s Patch Tuesday was meant to bring with it the final ever updates for Windows XP. However, Microsoft went ahead and released another patch for the ancient operating system to fix a flaw that was being exploited in the wild. This month’s Patch Tuesday looks like it’s going to play out a little differently. Microsoft released a critical update for Internet Explorer addressing a flaw in every version from 6 to 11. Although the company says that it’s aware of in-the-wild exploitations of the flaw, this time it says it won’t fix Windows XP. Promise . Of course, last month’s end of support should have meant the same thing, and for no particularly good reason, it didn’t. Microsoft cited the “proximity” of the previous flaw to the end of support as its rationale for issuing the update, but this month’s bugs seem barely less proximal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

Watch out for data caps: Video-hungry cord cutters use 328GB a month

Free Press The average cord cutter—a person who watches online video instead of subscribing to a cable TV package—isn’t all that far away from going over the typical data usage limits enforced by Internet service providers. Not all ISPs enforce caps. But Comcast, the nation’s largest broadband provider, is rolling out 300GB monthly limits in parts of its territory with $10 charges for each additional 50GB. Time Warner Cable, which Comcast is trying to acquire, offers an optional plan with a measly 30GB cap in exchange for a $5 monthly discount, but almost everyone sticks with the unlimited plan. Sandvine’s latest Global Internet Phenomena report released today, based on measurements in March, says that Internet users in the United States who appear to be cord cutters “consume on average 212GB a month, more than seven times the usage of a typical subscriber. These ‘cord cutters’ consume an average of 100 hours of video a month and account for 54 percent of total traffic consumed each month.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service “vital” to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM . “PRISM has a new collection capability: Skype stored communications,” a previously confidential NSA memo from 2013 declared. “Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection.” The data includes buddy lists, credit card information, call records, user account data, and “other material” that is of value to the NSA’s special source operations. The memo, which was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released Tuesday by Glenn Greenwald to coincide with the publication of his book No Place to Hide , said the FBI’s Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit had approved “over 30 selectors to be sent to Skype for collection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

If you’re a news junky, you probably use an RSS reader like Feed.ly to keep up with stuff on the Web. One of the nicest ways to consume YouTube subscriptions was to use an RSS feed of new videos, allowing them to show up just like news articles do. You might not have noticed yet, but Google quietly shut down this feature a few days ago. The RSS feed, which used to be http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/[username]/newsubscriptionvideos, now throws out a “403 Forbidden” error. Previously, the URL would provide a publicly accessible feed of new subscriptions from any YouTube account, provided users didn’t choose to turn off public subscription retrieval. The feed was part of the YouTube Data API v2, which was deprecated in March of this year. The replacement—predictably named YouTube Data API v3—doesn’t offer a comparable data stream. Bug reports filed for this regression as early as January 2013 have gone unanswered, save for a single response in January 2014 (yes, a year later) saying, “Patch is in the works, however we can’t comment on the expected date.” Now it’s five months later, the feature is gone, and there’s no solution in sight. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions