style-details – Page 15 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

16-cent E-rate phone fee hike will fund $1.5 billion in school broadband

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is proposing an extra $1.5 billion in annual spending on broadband for schools and libraries, all to be funded by a 16-cent increase on the monthly bills of phone customers. Under Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan , announced yesterday and scheduled for a vote on December 11, the E-rate program’s annual spending cap would rise from $2.4 billion to $3.9 billion. Wheeler tried to make the increased cost to ratepayers sound as small as possible. “If the FCC reaches the maximum cap recommended, the estimated additional cost to an individual rate payer would be approximately 16 cents a month, about a half a penny per day, or about $1.90 a year—less than a medium-sized soda at a fast food restaurant or a cup of coffee,” a fact sheet released yesterday says . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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16-cent E-rate phone fee hike will fund $1.5 billion in school broadband

Prosecutors drop key evidence at trial to avoid explaining “stingray” use

p | m In a Baltimore trial courtroom on Monday, a local judge threatened to hold a police detective in contempt of court for refusing to disclose how police located a 16-year-old robbery suspect’s phone. Once the Baltimore Police were able to locate Shemar Taylor’s phone, they then searched his house and found a gun as well. But rather than disclose the possible use of a stingray, also known as a cell site simulator, Detective John L. Haley cited a non-disclosure agreement, likely with the Harris Corporation, since the company is one of the dominant manufacturers of such devices. Stingrays can be used to determine a phone’s location, and they can also intercept calls and text messages. Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams retorted, “You don’t have a nondisclosure agreement with the court,” according to the Baltimore Sun . Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prosecutors drop key evidence at trial to avoid explaining “stingray” use

High-res Rosetta pics catch little Philae lander bouncing across comet

The European Space Agency’s decade-old Rosetta mission managed to do what no mission has done before—successfully rendezvous a probe with a comet and then land on it . Even if things didn’t go entirely as planned with the landing, the lion’s share of the mission’s science was always slated to be carried out by the Rosetta probe itself rather than by the Philae lander, so plenty of experiments will still be carried out over the next year. A mosaic assembled by ESA scientists showing Philae’s first bounce across Comet 67P. ESA In fact, one of the Rosetta probe’s instruments managed to capture some remarkable imagery last week during Philae’s landing. In a blog post that went live this morning, the ESA posted pictures from the spacecraft’s OSIRIS imager (that’s Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) showing Philae’s initial approach and first “bounce” off of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on November 12. Philae was supposed to have anchored itself to Comet 67P with a pair of harpoons, but those harpoons didn’t fire on touchdown. Philae actually rebounded away from the comet (67P has a small but appreciable amount of gravity, although its escape velocity is only 0.5 meters per second). It was during the first of two “bounces” that Rosetta’s OSIRIS imager captured a series of frames showing the lander’s parabolic journey across the comet’s face. The exact location of Philae’s final resting place remains as yet undetermined. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

One of world’s largest landslide deposits discovered in Utah

The Markagrunt gravity slide in Utah includes most of the area between Beaver, Cedar City, and Panguitch. Google Earth Some things can be too big to notice, as our flat-Earth-believing ancestors can attest, having failed to work out that the surface of the Earth curves around a sphere. Or, as the saying goes, you can focus on the details of some fascinating trees and miss interesting facts about the forest as a whole. In southwest Utah, geologists had noticed some pretty cool “trees.” The area had been volcanically active between 21 and 31 million years ago, building up a host of steep, volcanic peaks. A number of huge blocks of rock from these peaks, up to 2.5 square kilometers in area and 200 meters thick, are obviously out of place—they’ve been interpreted by geologists as the result of many landslides around the volcanoes. In a recent paper in Geology , David Hacker , Robert Biek , and Peter Rowley show that rather than being the result of many individual landslides, these are actually all part of one jaw-droppingly large event. The deposit, called the Markagunt gravity slide, covers an area about 90 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide and is hundreds of meters thick. During the event, all of this slid 30 kilometers or more. The scale puts run-of-the-mill landslides—as terrifying and deadly as they can be—to shame. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Lync rebranded as “Skype for Business” in 2015 release

Microsoft’s Lync communications server is to be rebranded. The next version, due to be released next year, will be named instead Skype for Business . It will retain Lync’s infrastructure—the ability to use on-premises servers, optional federation with external communications networks, and so on and so forth—but the branding and client design will closely match those of Microsoft’s consumer communication platform. The Skype and Lync development teams have been working together since shortly after Microsoft bought the popular Skype platform for $8.5 billion in 2011. Skype for Business will further improve interoperability with regular Skype. While voice and instant messaging are already interoperable between Lync and Skype, the next version will add video messaging and access to the Skype user directory. This will mean that, should administrators choose to enable it, the Skype for Business client software will serve as a fairly fully featured Skype client, too. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lync rebranded as “Skype for Business” in 2015 release

“DarkHotel” uses bogus crypto certificates to snare Wi-Fi-connected execs

DeviantArt user: Tincho555 Researchers have uncovered a seven-year-old malware operation that combines advanced cryptographic attacks, zero-day exploits, and well-developed keyloggers to target elite executives staying in luxury hotels during business trips. The attackers behind “DarkHotel,” as the advanced persistent threat has been dubbed, appear to know in advance when a targeted exec will check in and check out of a hotel. Victims are infected through a variety of methods, including bogus software updates for Adobe Flash, Google Toolbar, or other trusted software that are presented when the exec uses the hotel’s Wi-Fi or wired Internet access. In many cases, the attack code is signed with a trusted digital certificate that the attackers were able to clone by factoring the underlying 512-bit private key. While factoring weak 512-bit keys has been practical for several years, the crypto attack nonetheless is an “advanced” capability, particularly a few years ago. Taken together, the characteristics are an indication the operators have some sophistication, said researchers from Kaspersky Lab, the Russia-based security firm that disclosed the campaign. “The fact that most of the time the victims are top executives indicates the attackers have knowledge of their victims whereabouts, including name and place of stay,” the researchers wrote in a report published Monday . “This paints a dark, dangerous web in which unsuspecting travelers can easily fall. While the exact reason why some hotels function as an attacker vector are unknown, certain suspicions exist, indicating possibly a much larger compromise. We are still investigating this aspect of the operation and will publish more information in the future.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“DarkHotel” uses bogus crypto certificates to snare Wi-Fi-connected execs

All US Postal Service employees’ personal data exposed by hackers

Barbara Krawcowicz All United States Postal Service (USPS) employees’ personal data—including names, addresses, social security numbers—has been exposed as the result of a hack believed to have originated from China. According to its own tally, USPS employs over 600,000 people. “We began investigating this incident as soon as we learned of it, and we are cooperating with the investigation, which is ongoing,” David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, wrote in a statement (PDF) on Monday. “The investigation is being led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and joined by other federal and postal investigatory agencies. The intrusion is limited in scope and all operations of the Postal Service are functioning normally.” The USPS does not believe that in-store customer data was exposed, but customers who contacted the agency via e-mail or phone between January 1 and August 16, 2014 may have been. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All US Postal Service employees’ personal data exposed by hackers

400 Tor-anonymized domains tracked down and seized in global crackdown

Thursday’s takedown of the Silk Road 2.0 drug website was part of a much bigger crackdown by police in a dozen countries that seized more than 400 darknet domains, it was widely reported Friday. Operation Onymous, as the coordinated international effort was dubbed, confiscated $1 million in bitcoins, $250,000 in cash, and a variety of drugs, gold, and silver, the Associated Press reported . In all, according to Wired , police seized 414 .onion domains, the Web addresses that use the Tor anonymity service to hide the physical location where they’re hosted. At least 17 people were arrested. Sites besides Silk Road 2.0 that were taken down included Hydra, Cloud Nine, Pandora, and Blue Sky. In all, some 55 different markets will be shut down once Operation Onymous is completed. Sites Agora and Evolution aren’t among them. The rise of underground bazaars selling illicit drugs and services has continued despite last year’s arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road who has pleaded not guilty and continues to fight the criminal charges in court. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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400 Tor-anonymized domains tracked down and seized in global crackdown

37,000-year-old Russian skeleton has Neanderthal DNA that’s gone missing

Stew Dean Another week, another ancient human genome. We just recently covered the oldest modern human genome yet described . Now, another paper takes a look at the DNA from a different modern human genome and comes to similar conclusions: interbreeding with Neanderthals was already deep in the past as of 37,000 years ago. But researchers were able to find stretches of the Neanderthal genome that are no longer present in any modern human populations that we’ve sampled. The skeleton in this case comes from the European area of Russia; it was found at a site called Kostenki-Borshchevo north of the Black Sea. The team behind the new paper (which does not include Svante Pääbo, who has pioneered ancient genomics) was only able to get a rough draft of the individual’s genome, on average sequencing every base 2.4 times. Thus, the sequence is likely to include a large number of errors and gaps. These make the conclusions a bit more tenuous than previous work but shouldn’t bias them in any particular direction. One thing the results make clear is that humanity’s migration out of Africa was complicated. K-14, as the skeleton is called, shares very few of the DNA differences that are associated with East Asian populations, as has been the case with the Siberian modern human skeletons we’ve looked at. All of which suggests that East Asians and Eurasians split off early and may even have engaged in separate migrations out of Africa or the Middle East. K-14 also lacks common variants found in Native Americans, leaving a single Siberian skeleton as the only one that has an affinity to them. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update

Even this DSL-loving turtle thought Comcast’s service was too slow this week. Comcast Comcast attempted to update its X1 cable platform this week, but it ended up causing a lengthy outage for many customers. The company apologized yesterday and promised to issue credits to compensate customers for the time they weren’t able to use their TV service. Customer reports suggest that Internet service went down as well. “We know some of our customers may have missed their favorite shows off and on over the past few days and were unable to easily reach our customer care representatives for assistance… and we’re really sorry,” Comcast Senior VP Charlie Herrin wrote . Herrin’s new job is fixing Comcast’s disappointing customer service. His announcement yesterday, titled, “Our mistake: making it right for customers,” continues: In the process of upgrading the X1 platform with new services and features, a technical issue arose that caused problems for our customers. We’re working now to identify the customers who were impacted to personally apologize and proactively give them credits which we plan to have out to them within the next two weeks. This issue was our fault and we want to make it right. So what happened? While we were deploying an upgrade to the X1 platform, we discovered an issue in the way the software that updates X1 was configured. We immediately stopped the deployment, and our engineers began working to identify the root cause and fix the issue. While service has returned to normal for most X1 customers, our engineers are now going back over this issue and taking extra steps to prevent it from happening again. The fix we’ve put in place should be automatic—customers don’t need to do anything (such as rebooting or unplugging the box). Thanks to our customers who have been patient with us, and to our employees who have been working around the clock on this. Outages were reported in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and other cities. According to customer reports at DownDetector.com, more customers experienced Internet outages than TV outages, with 10 percent reporting a “total blackout.” We’ve asked Comcast whether the faulty update also caused Internet outages but haven’t received an answer yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update