Tag: security

Is the Tablet Market In Outright Collapse? Data Suggests Yes

Nerval’s Lobster writes Is the tablet market rapidly collapsing? Mobile-analytics firm Flurry doesn’t come to quite that stark a conclusion, but things aren’t looking too good for touch-screens that don’t qualify as “phablets.” According to Flurry’s numbers, full-sized tablets accounted for only 11 percent of new devices in 2014, a decline from 2013, when that form-factor totaled 17 percent of the new-device market; small tablets experienced a smaller decline, falling from 12 percent to 11 percent of new devices between 2013 and 2014. (Meanwhile, phablets expanded from 4 percent of new devices in 2013 to 13 percent this year.) Boy Genius Report, for its part, looked at those numbers and decided that the tablet market is doomed: “Consumers happy with compact smartphones are not switching to larger iPhones for now, but former tablet buyers are.” That’s not to say people will stop using tablets, but the onetime theory that they would one day cannibalize all PCs looks increasingly nebulous. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Is the Tablet Market In Outright Collapse? Data Suggests Yes

NVIDIA Breached

jones_supa writes: Another day, another corporate network intrusion. NVIDIA has reportedly been breached in the first week of December, with the attack compromising personal information of the employees. There is no indication that other data has been compromised. This is according to an email sent out by the company’s privacy office and Nvidia’s SVP and CIO Bob Worwall on December 17th. It took NVIDIA a couple of weeks to pick up all the pieces and assess the incident. It appears that the issue was pinned down by an employee or several employees getting their personal data compromised outside of the company network. After that, the information was used to gain unauthorized access to the internal corporate network. NVIDIA’s IT team has taken extensive measures since then to enhance the security of the network against similar attacks in the future. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NVIDIA Breached

Proscutors Raid LG Offices Over Alleged Vandalism of Samsung Dishwashers

As reported by Reuters, Korean manufacturing giant LG’s Seoul headquarters have been raided over allegations that LG employees sabotaged dishwashers made by rival Samsung. The Samsung machines were “on display at two stores in September ahead of the IFA electronics show in Berlin.” From the article: On Friday, investigators searched the Seoul offices of LG Elec’s home appliance head, Jo Seong-jin, and others and secured documents and computer hard disks related to the IFA fair, Yonhap News Agency said. They also combed through LG Electronics’ home appliance factory in the southeastern city of Changwon, the report said. … Samsung sued LG Electronics employees after the incident in Germany, and LG said the company has counter-sued Samsung employees on Dec. 12. Media reports have earlier said prosecutors banned LG’s Seong-jin from leaving the country ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held January 6-9. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Proscutors Raid LG Offices Over Alleged Vandalism of Samsung Dishwashers

Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

An anonymous reader sends word that Rackspace has recovered from a severe distributed denial of service attack. “Over on the company’s Google+ page Rackspace warned of ‘intermittent periods of latency, packet loss, or connectivity failures when attempting to reach rackspace.com or subdomains within rackspace.com.’ The company’s status report later confirmed it had ‘… identified a UDP DDoS attack targeting the DNS servers in our IAD, ORD, and LON data centers [North Virigina, Chicago and London]. As a result of this issue, authoritative DNS resolution for any new request to the DNS servers began to fail in the affected data centers. In order to stabilize the issue, our teams placed the impacted DNS infrastructure behind mitigation services. This service is designed to protect our infrastructure, however, due to the nature of the event, a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure may be inadvertently blocked. Our teams are actively working to mitigate the attack and provide service stability.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

TripAdvisor Fined In Italy For Fake Reviews

mpicpp writes with news that TripAdvisor, a travel website filled with user-generated reviews, has been hit with a €500, 000 ($611, 000) fine for “misleading customers” by failing to cull fake reviews from their list. “The regulator complained that people reading TripAdvisor Italy were unable to distinguish between genuine and fake reviews posted on the site. It said both were presented by TripAdvisor as ‘authentic and genuine in nature.’ Demanding payment of the fine within 30 days, the ICA also accused the travel company of failing to provide proper checks to weed out bogus postings.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TripAdvisor Fined In Italy For Fake Reviews

Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

Zanadou writes On December 9 The Pirate Bay was raided but despite the rise of various TPB clones and rumors of reincarnations, thepiratebay.se domain remained inaccessible, until today. This morning the Pirate Bay’s nameservers were updated to ones controlled by their domain name registrar binero.se . A few minutes later came another big change when The Pirate Bay’s main domain started pointing to a new IP-address (178.175.135.122) that is connected to a server hosted in Moldova. So far there is not much to see, just a background video of a waving pirate flag (taken from Isohunt.to) and a counter displaying the time elapsed since the December 9 raid. However, the “AES string” looks promising. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

Samsung Announces Production of 20nm Mobile LPDDR4, Faster Than Desktop DDR4

MojoKid writes Samsung announced today that it has begun volume production of its 8Gb LPDDR4 memory chips, with expected commercial shipments in 2015. The announcement is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, one of the most important characteristics of a modern mobile device is its battery life, and moving to a new memory standard should significantly reduce the memory subsystem’s power consumption. Second, however, there’s the clock speed. Samsung is claiming that its LPDDR4 will hit 3.2GHz, and while bus widths on mobile parts are significantly smaller than the 64-bit channels that desktops use, the higher clock speed per chip will help close that gap. In fact, multiple vendors have predicted that LPDDR4 clock speeds will actually outpace standard DDR4, with a higher amount of total bandwidth potentially delivered to tablets and smartphones than conventional PCs will see. In addition, the power savings are expected to be substantial. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Announces Production of 20nm Mobile LPDDR4, Faster Than Desktop DDR4

North Korea’s Internet Is Totally Screwed Right Now 

Following several days of continuous connectivity problems , an internet researcher is reporting that North Korea’s internet has gone dark . Whether it’s a cyber attack or a routine outage remains unclear. Read more…

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North Korea’s Internet Is Totally Screwed Right Now 

Satellite Captures Glowing Plants From Space

sciencehabit writes About 1% of the light that strikes plants is re-emitted as a faint, fluorescent glow—a measure of photosynthetic activity. Today, scientists released a map of this glow as measured by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a NASA satellite launched in July with the goal of mapping the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The map reveals that tropical rainforests near the equator are actively sucking up carbon, while the Corn Belt in the eastern United States, near the end of its growing season, is also a sink. Higher resolution fluorescence mapping could one day be used to help assess crop yields and how they respond to drought and heat in a changing climate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Satellite Captures Glowing Plants From Space

Manufacturer’s Backdoor Found On Popular Chinese Android Smartphone

Trailrunner7 writes that researchers at Palo Alto Networks have found a backdoor in Android devices sold by Coolpad. “A popular Android smartphone sold primarily in China and Taiwan but also available worldwide, contains a backdoor from the manufacturer that is being used to push pop-up advertisements and install apps without users’ consent. The Coolpad devices, however, are ripe for much more malicious abuse, researchers at Palo Alto Networks said today, especially after the discovery of a vulnerability in the backend management interface that exposed the backdoor’s control system. Ryan Olson, intelligence director at Palo Alto, said the CoolReaper backdoor not only connects to a number of command and control servers, but is also capable of downloading, installing and activating any Android application without the user’s permission. It also sends phony over-the-air updates to devices that instead install applications without notifying the user. The backdoor can also be used to dial phone numbers, send SMS and MMS messages, and upload device and usage information to Coolpad.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Manufacturer’s Backdoor Found On Popular Chinese Android Smartphone