Tag: reprints

Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

As most observers  expected , Sprint has finally made a formal offer to acquire the rest of Clearwire. On Thursday, Sprint said it would pay $2.1 billion for the remaining 49.7 percent of Clearwire that it does not currently control. As we reported yesterday , the move is widely seen as a play for Sprint to acquire Clearwire’s valuable 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it would use to offer LTE and strengthen its position against Verizon and AT&T. The bid works out to $2.90 per share—higher than the company’s closing price on Wednesday—but analysts say the offer may not be good enough. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

How Windows tech support scammers walked right into a trap set by the feds

Aurich Lawson Three weeks ago, Jack Friedman got a call from a man with an Indian accent claiming to be from the Windows technical team at Microsoft. Friedman, a Florida resident who is my friend Elliot’s grandfather, was told by “Nathan James” from Windows that he needed to renew his software protection license to keep his computer running smoothly. “He said I had a problem with my Microsoft system,” Friedman told me. “He said they had a deal for $99, they would straighten out my computer and it will be like brand new.” Friedman’s three-year-old Windows Vista computer was running a bit slow, as many PCs do. Friedman is often suspicious of unsolicited calls, but after talking with Nathan on the phone and exchanging e-mails, he says, “I figured he was a legitimate guy.” Friedman handed over his Capital One credit card number, and the “technician” used remote PC support software to root around his computer for a while, supposedly fixing whatever was wrong with it. “I could see my arrow going all over the place and clicking different things on my computer,” Friedman said. But that $99 Capital One credit card charge turned into a $495 wire transfer. Then Bank of America’s fraud department called Friedman, and said, “somebody is trying to get into your account.” Whoever it was had entered the wrong password multiple times, and as a precaution Friedman’s checking account was shut down. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Windows tech support scammers walked right into a trap set by the feds

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

Pro-Iranian hackers stole data from UN atomic agency’s server

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency has admitted that data from a retired server at its Vienna headquarters was stolen and posted to a hacker website. A group calling itself Parastoo allegedly stole the data in an effort to draw attention to Israel’s nuclear weapons program and as a protest against attacks on Iran’s nuclear efforts—including the use of the Stuxnet worm and assassinations of Iranian nuclear researchers. A Pastebin posting on November 25 by someone purporting to represent the group (which takes its name from the Farsi name for the swallow) listed the e-mail addresses of physicists and other experts that had consulted with the IAEA. The message urged the people whose addresses were listed to petition the IAEA to investigate “activities at Dimona”—the site of Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center, which is widely believed to be the center of Israel’s nuclear weapons production efforts. “We would like to assert that we have evidences [sic] showing there are beyond-harmful operations taking place at this site and the above list who technically help IAEA could be considered a partner in crime should an accident happen there,” the statement read. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Pro-Iranian hackers stole data from UN atomic agency’s server

Internet Explorer 10 finally comes to Windows 7

The tenth major version of Internet Explorer has been available to users of Windows 8 for months , in both the operating system’s pre-release days and since it hit retail on October 26. But while Microsoft declared IE10 ready to go for Windows 8, users of Windows 7 could not download the browser—until today. Even now, Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is only available in a ” Release Preview .” It’s the first preview of IE10 to be usable on Windows 7 since last year’s Platform Preview . But what’s available today is a version of IE10 that is presumably ready for daily use, as installing it replaces the user’s previous version of Internet Explorer. IE10 is only for Windows 7 and Windows 8. The reason for the staggered releases hasn’t been confirmed, but as we noted in an article last month , “The extra time required for Windows 7 may be due to underlying platform differences—Windows 8 supports Direct3D 11.1, compared to 11.0 on Windows 7, for example. So if Internet Explorer 10 depends on Direct3D 11.1 features, either that dependence has to be removed, or Direct3D 11.1 has to be ported to Windows 7.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 finally comes to Windows 7

Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

As of Monday, well-known BitTorrent tracker Demonoid is back online . Three months ago, the tenacious tracker was chased out of its Ukrainian host, likely under pressure from American authorities. It may also have been driven offline due to a denial of service attack. According to the IP address linked to the tracker, the new host appears to be physically located in Hong Kong . The website, meanwhile, remains down. TorrentFreak points out that in previous closures, Demonoid’s tracker appeared before its website came back online, indicating that the site’s return may be coming soon. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

Apple’s @me and @mac e-mail users now have @icloud, too

Owners of @me.com and @mac.com e-mail addresses—relics of Apple’s past attempts at offering cloud services—now own an @icloud address too. The company began sending out e-mails to those who have accounts on the old domains on Tuesday, letting them know they can now take advantage of Apple’s latest e-mail service in the form of iCloud. But worry not: if you’ve been using your old addresses but moved your account to iCloud earlier this year, you’ll still be able to keep using them (whether or not you choose to use the new @icloud.com address). The move was foreshadowed earlier this year as part of an iOS 6 prerelease beta to developers. In the iOS 6 Beta 3 changelog, Apple stated those signing up for new Apple IDs, as well as those enabling Mail on iCloud for the first time, would automatically receive an @icloud.com address. But if you had an existing @me.com address from the MobileMe days, or even a @mac.com address from the .Mac days, you would receive an iCloud address that matched the username you previously had. That appears to be the case now with Apple alerting users to the change. As pointed out by our friends at TidBITS , there’s no difference in implementation—if you want to make use of the new address, you just have to add it to your mail client. If you don’t want to use the new address, however, you don’t have to. You can stick to the old ones, as long as you weren’t one of the stubborn few who didn’t move your MobileMe account to iCloud before the beginning of August. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple’s @me and @mac e-mail users now have @icloud, too

Kim Dotcom now plans to give New Zealand free broadband pipe to US

The route of the proposed trans-Pacific fiber link. Pacific Fibre On the heels of the announcement of Megaupload’s pending resurrection as Me.ga , Kim Dotcom has come up with a yet another way to promote himself, annoy the US and New Zealand governments, and rally public support in his battle to stop his extradition and end the copyright infringement case against him: he wants to give everyone in New Zealand free broadband service. The core of the plan is to revive the failed Pacific Fibre , an effort to create a broadband link from Australia and New Zealand directly to the US by way of a submarine cable to Los Angeles. The effort went bankrupt in August before reaching its goal. Dotcom’s plan is to complete the link, and to sell high-speed connections to government, businesses and foreign telecommunications companies—while giving New Zealand ISPs free access to provide connectivity for individual residents. “For every foreign user downloading from NZ (paid),” Dotcom posted on Twitter, “a Kiwi can download from outside NZ (free). The key: Storing data foreign users want in NZ.” Dotcom contends that the high-speed link would make New Zealand an attractive location for data centers; the country’s current shortage of global connectivity makes it an “Internet backwater,” he said. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Kim Dotcom now plans to give New Zealand free broadband pipe to US

How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)

Aurich Lawson On October 24, the country of Georgia took an unusual step: it posted to the Web a 27-page writeup  (PDF), in English, on how it has been under assault from a hacker allegedly based in Russia. The paper included details of the malware used, how it spread, and how it was controlled. Even more unusually, the Georgians released pictures of the alleged hacker—taken with his own webcam after the Georgians hacked the hacker with the help of the FBI and others. The story itself, which we covered briefly earlier this week , is fascinating, though it remains hard to authenticate and is relayed in a non-native English that makes for some tough reading. But what caught my eye about the whole cloak-and-dagger tale is the broader points it makes about hacking, jurisdiction, and the powerful surveillance devices that our computers have become. It’s also an example of how hacks and the alleged hackers behind them today play an increasing role in upping geopolitical suspicions between countries already wary of one another. Georgia and Russia have of course been at odds for years, and their conflict came to a head in a brief 2008 war; Russia still maintains a military presence in two tiny breakaway enclaves that Georgia claims as its own. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker (and why it matters)