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Mass hack attack on Yahoo Mail accounts prompts password reset

Yahoo said it is resetting passwords for some of its e-mail users after discovering a coordinated effort to compromise accounts. Attackers behind the cracking campaign used usernames and passwords that were probably collected from a compromised database belonging to an unidentified third party, according to Jay Rossiter, Yahoo senior vice president of platforms and personalization products, who wrote an advisory published Thursday . A large percentage of people use the same password to protect multiple Internet accounts, a practice that allows attackers holding credentials taken from one site to compromise accounts on other sites. There’s no evidence the passwords used in the attack came from Yahoo Systems. “Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts,” Rossiter wrote. “The information sought in the attack seems to be names and e-mail addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent e-mails.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mass hack attack on Yahoo Mail accounts prompts password reset

AT&T plan to shut off Public Switched Telephone Network moves ahead at FCC

PhotoAtelier On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to take its first major step toward letting AT&T and other carriers replace the country’s traditional phone system with one that works entirely over Internet Protocol networks. AT&T has argued that the technology transition should be accompanied by deregulation that would strip the company of most of its monopoly-era obligations. AT&T likely won’t get everything it wants, though. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wrote in a blog post last November that he intends to “ensure the continuation of the Network Compact” with universal service for all Americans, consumer protections, public safety services, and competition.In other words, AT&T can’t stop maintaining the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) without a plan to preserve current service levels. This is not as simple as just making sure phone calls get through, although solving the rural call completion problem by itself is a challenge. It also means maintaining access to 911 services, fire alarms, fax machines, medical alert systems, anything that relies on the phone network. Not everything is to be decided this week. The FCC vote is on an AT&T petition to launch customer trials of new IP-based networks. While AT&T’s petition is expected to be granted, the FCC’s proposed order is written to ensure continuation of the four values (universal service, consumer protection, public safety, and competition) as Wheeler emphasized, an FCC official told Ars on condition that he not be named. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

PlayStation Plus not required to play Elder Scrolls Online on PS4

You will need to pay $15/month to see vistas like this in The Elder Scrolls Online . Bethesda Softworks parent company Zenimax Media has confirmed that its upcoming MMO The Elder Scrolls Online won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription to be played on the PS4. Xbox One players, on the other hand, will have to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription in order to play the game. All versions of The Elder Scrolls Online , including PC and Mac editions due for release on April 4, will require a $15 monthly fee, in addition to a purchase of the $60 base game. But Xbox One owners will also be required to purchase the $60-per-year Xbox Live Gold subscription that is generally required for all online games on the system. That subscription is also required to use entertainment apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus on the Xbox One, as well as services like Skype and Internet Explorer. Sony doesn’t require PlayStation Plus to use similar entertainment apps on the PS4. In a change from its policy with its previous consoles, Sony generally requires a $50-per-year PlayStation Plus subscription to play most online games on the PS4, though free-to-play MMOs such as Warframe and DC Universe Online have been specifically exempted from this requirement. Sony has also confirmed that the upcoming PS4 release of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn also won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription on top of that game’s $13+ monthly fee (that title is not coming to any Microsoft consoles). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Soylent gets tested, scores a surprisingly wholesome nutritional label

Soylent It’s official: all-in-one meal supplement (or replacement) Soylent has a nutrition label . In a blog post two weeks ago, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart noted that the company had decided to produce a single 2,000-kilocalorie version for their initial production run; beta versions (including the 0.89 Beta formula we tried) came in male and female variants. The single launch formula means that a single nutritional label can be applied to all the packages of Soylent going out the door. In its shipping form, a three-serving bag of Soylent clocks in at 2,010kcal, with 630kcal from fat—that’s with the combined package of canola and fish oil added into the mix. All together, a full day’s worth of Soylent 1.0 will give you 1,050mg of sodium, 3,465mg of potassium, 252 total grams of carbs (including 24g dietary fiber and 6g of sugars), and 114g of protein. There’s no cholesterol in the dry ingredients; the oil mix adds about 15 percent of your daily recommended cholesterol intake (specific numbers on the oil aren’t included as part of the label). Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Soylent gets tested, scores a surprisingly wholesome nutritional label

Streaming comes to Steam: run on your gaming rig, play on your laptop

Valve is not done redefining itself yet. The gaming juggernaut added ‘operating system developer’ to ‘games studio’ and ‘digital media distributor’ with the introduction of SteamOS. And now it’s adding ‘streaming service’ to its repertoire. The service , currently in beta, allows users to stream game play from one PC to any other PC in their home. Invited users run a beta version of the Steam client on their computers and have settings for adjusting the amount of bandwidth the stream consumes. Though work is in progress to make streaming an option from OS X and Linux machines, the service is primarily aimed at Windows PCs to start. The Windows focus may, in part, be a result of the relatively larger library of Windows games on Steam. Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS has one big limitation compared with the full Steam experience: it can only run games compatible with Linux. That limitation may be mostly put to rest when a Steam Box is now paired with a Windows PC, allowing users to run any game in the Steam library either natively in the Steam Box or streamed. The other key benefit to the new streaming option is convenience. Graphically rich games often suffer when run on thermally limited notebooks. Decoding a video stream requires drastically less computing power than rendering a 3D environment, so gaming on a modestly specced laptop could become much more satisfying. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

FBI: US court websites went down due to “technical problems,” not DDOS

Flickr user TexasGOPVote.com While the rest of us were fretting about the Gmail outage on Friday , lawyers and those involved in the United States judicial system were concerned that uscourts.gov and other federal courts’ sites had been hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Also suffering an outage was pacer.gov , the “Public Access to Court Electronic Records” (PACER), a common way for lawyers and journalists to access court documents online. (That site, which normally charges $0.10 per page for documents, also has a free online mirror , known as RECAP.) Initially, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the US Courts told Politico on Friday that it was indeed a denial-of-service attack. A group calling itself the “European Cyber Army” initially also claimed responsibility on Twitter . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI: US court websites went down due to “technical problems,” not DDOS

Investigation of password crackers busts site feds say hacked 6,000 accounts

An international law-enforcement crackdown on paid password cracking services has resulted in at least 11 arrests, including the operators of an alleged cracker-for-hire site in the US that prosecutors said compromised almost 6,000 e-mail accounts. Mark Anthony Townsend, 45, of Cedarville, Arkansas, and Joshua Alan Tabor, 29, of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, ran a site called needapassword.com, according to court documents filed this week in federal court in Los Angeles. The site accepted user requests to hack into specific e-mail accounts hosted by Google, Yahoo, and other providers, prosecutors alleged. According to charging documents, the operators would break into the accounts, access their contents and send screenshots to the users proving the accounts had been compromised. The men would then send passwords in exchange for a fee paid to their PayPal account, prosecutors said. “Through www.needapassword.com, defendant and others known and unknown to the United States Attorney obtained unauthorized access to over 5,900 e-mail accounts submitted by customers,” a criminal information filed against Townsend stated. During the time of Tabor’s involvement, needapassword.com broke into at least 250 accounts, a separate charging document claimed. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Investigation of password crackers busts site feds say hacked 6,000 accounts

Tivo lays off 5 hardware engineers but says it won’t abandon its boxes

The TiVo box itself got a slight aesthetic makeover… Something’s afoot at Tivo, and it started today with five lay-offs. Wired reporter Roberto Baldwin had the initial report , claiming that five layoffs from the company’s hardware division left “a skeleton crew of two engineers,” indicating an official exit from the hardware business. Baldwin’s sources within Tivo may have been overstating the situation, though. Subsequent reports feature comments from Tivo’s Vice President of Corporate Communication Steve Wymer, where he emphatically denies that Tivo is abandoning hardware. What Wymer doesn’t do, however, is deny the layoffs. An update to the original Wired piece indicates that Tivo will work with third-party designers for subsequent hardware. Tivo hardware has been a saga of gradual iterations, with each successive generation adding features and capabilities. Ars’ Nathan Matisse reviewed the company’s latest hardware, the Tivo Roamio, and had heaps of praise—after he went through the hellish setup process. At CES this year, Tivo didn’t have new consumer hardware, but instead met with network operators to discuss its new NDVR hardware, which moves the Tivo experience entirely to the cloud. Moving content recording, discovery, and delivery into the cloud has a lot of appeal for operators who want more control over viewers’ content. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tivo lays off 5 hardware engineers but says it won’t abandon its boxes

Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Steve Troughton-Smith One of the features Apple talked about when it unveiled iOS 7 at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) back in June was “iOS in the Car,” a vehicle integration feature that would let drivers with supported vehicles talk to Siri, listen to and respond to text messages, use Maps, and perform other tasks without removing their hands from the wheel. That feature was absent from the original iOS 7 release, but rumors suggest it will be supported in the iOS 7.1 update that’s currently in beta testing. While Apple’s promotional page for iOS 7 shows some early screenshots of what iOS in the Car might look like, new screenshots pulled from developer Steve Troughton-Smith’s Twitter feed and published by 9to5Mac purport to show off a refined version of the interface. Apple Maps is the only usable app as of this writing, suggesting that the screenshots were taken in the iOS Simulator that shipped with the XCode developer tools rather than on actual hardware, but we can still see the basic UI changes that Apple has made since the original demo. There’s a left-aligned bar with the time, connection status, and a software Home button that appears to be persistent across all of the screenshots, and the rest of the interface’s graphics, fonts, and buttons closely mirror those used throughout iOS 7. A safety warning screen like the one used in most GPSs. Steve Troughton-Smith The list of apps should grow once the feature is actually released. Steve Troughton-Smith For most people, iOS in the Car’s biggest drawback will be that it requires a new car to support all of its features. Though Apple says a number of automakers (including Acura, Chevy, Ferrari, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Opel) are interested in bringing the feature to some of their 2014 models, replacing a car to use a new feature is a bit more onerous than buying new cables or other accessories. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Supreme Court will hear case on police search of cell phones

On Friday, the Supreme Court said that it would weigh in on whether it is legal for police officers to search the contents of a suspect’s cell phone when they are arrested. Specifically, the high court will take up two cases from California and Massachusetts, both arising from criminal prosecutions, that have brought to question the admissibility of evidence obtained through a search of the suspect’s phone after arrest. The legal decision will come down to whether searching cell phones without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Earlier court precedent has allowed police officers to search all the items that a person has on them at the time of arrest. But as phones have grown to include e-mail, bank history, and location data, the potential problems with the old standards have become more apparent. A Supreme Court ruling, at least, would give some clarity as to how such situations should be handled. Reuters notes that 91 percent of Americans now have cellphones, and over half of those can connect to the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

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