Man gets ransomware porn pop-up, goes to cops, gets arrested on child porn charges

A man from just outside of Washington, DC turned himself in to local police—with his computer in tow—after receiving a pop-up message from what he believed was an “FBI Warning” telling him to click to pay a fine online, or face an investigation. While specific details on the case are scant as of yet, it appears that the suspect here fell victim to a type of ransomware that has been proliferating for years now—raking in millions for the scammers behind it. Police said Jay Matthew Riley, 21, of Woodbridge, Virginia, walked into Prince William’s Garfield District Station on July 1, 2013 to “inquire if he had any warrants on file for child pornography.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Man gets ransomware porn pop-up, goes to cops, gets arrested on child porn charges

Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

It’s been a rough year for Zynga, which ousted founder Mark Pincus earlier this month. Fortune Live Media In its latest earnings statement filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zynga reported the number of daily average users (DAU) dropped to 39 million in the second quarter of 2013—the lowest ever since the company began keeping track. Last quarter, the DAU fell to the then-lowest record,   52 million users . The fall to 39 million means that 25 percent of its daily user base stopped using Zynga products in just one quarter. Not surprisingly, Zynga’s bottom line fell too. The company sustained a net loss of $15.8 million in Q2 2013. (Last quarter, the gaming firm profited just $4.1 million.) The market wasn’t too thrilled with these numbers: in after-hours trading, Zynga’s stock price plummeted by nearly 15 percent. The once top-dog has gone through a bit of a rough patch during the last year. In the summer of 2012, the company quickly  lost  a bunch of executives and managers. That October, the company  announced that it had overpaid for OMGPOP (maker of  Draw Something ). More recently, Mark Pincus, the company’s founder, was  ousted  as CEO in early July 2013. Then Zynga  suddenly shut down OMGPOP  last month as well. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

Poker player who won $1.5 million charged with running Android malware ring

A man who has won about $1.5 million in poker tournaments has been arrested and charged with running an operation that combined spam, Android malware, and a fake dating website to scam victims out of $3.9 million, according to Symantec. Symantec worked with investigators from the Chiba Prefectural Police in Japan, who earlier this week “arrested nine individuals for distributing spam that included e-mails with links to download Android.Enesoluty —a malware used to collect contact details stored on the owner’s device, ” Symantec wrote in its blog . Android.Enesoluty is a Trojan distributed as an Android application file. It steals information and sends it to computers run by hackers. It was discovered by security researchers in September 2012. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Poker player who won $1.5 million charged with running Android malware ring

Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

If you don’t follow the often-shady world of Bitcoin , you may not be familiar with Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST), a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam. BTCST shut down in August 2012, and on Wednesday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged its founder, Trendon Shavers, with running a Ponzi scheme. In a statement , the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700, 000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” The government’s financial regulator alleges that Shavers violated a number of federal financial regulations. In court documents , the SEC wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a ” supercomputing powerhouse ” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ e-mail? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology. “There’s no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately, ” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic, ” she added. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails

UK gov’t approves autonomous cars on public roads before year’s end

The British government has announced that it will approve testing of driverless cars on public roads in the United Kingdom before the end of 2013. According to a new 80-page report published on Tuesday entitled “Action for Roads: A network for the 21st century, ” a team at Oxford University and Nissan have already begun work but have only been testing in private areas. The plan comes less than a year after Florida , California , and Nevada have approved similar testing. Michigan is not far behind, either. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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UK gov’t approves autonomous cars on public roads before year’s end

ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

American Chris Cassidy and Italian Luca Parmitano were forced to call off this morning’s planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station when Parmitano suddenly reported that there was water inside of his suit helmet. “My head is really wet and I have a feeling it’s increasing, ” he radioed about an hour into the spacewalk. Video of the aborted EVA, starting with the discovery of the water. The call to terminate EVA comes at 12:45. Station airlock opens at 44:48. The EVA, designated EVA-23, was one of the ones that Ars watched astronauts Cassidy and Parmitano train for late last year. That was during our visit to  NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory , the giant swimming pool where NASA simulates spacewalks in microgravity. According to NASASpaceFlight’s recounting of events , Parmitano was in the process of running data cabling to connect the as-yet-unlaunched Russian Nauka module when the water began to make itself apparent. The quantity of liquid in Parmitano’s helmet rapidly increased, with Parmitano noting that it had begun to enter his eyes, nose, and mouth. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

$99 ARM-based PC runs either Ubuntu or Android

A new ARM-based Linux PC with a host of capabilities—including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and five USB ports—goes on sale next month starting at $99. ” Utilite , ” offered by Israeli company CompuLab, won’t be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi , but the specs justify the cost. With dimensions of 5.3” × 3.9” × 0.8”, Utilite comes with a Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chip with a single-, dual-, or quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor (which uses 3-8 watts of power). It will have up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory, up to 512GB of SSD storage, and a microSD slot allowing another 128GB. The PC can be purchased with either Ubuntu Linux or Android. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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$99 ARM-based PC runs either Ubuntu or Android

USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

PCs that use Thunderbolt are rare, and they’re getting rarer. Chris Foresman For Thunderbolt fans hoping that the high-speed interface will catch on, we’ve got more bad news: an Acer representative talking to CNET  has said that the company has no plans to support Thunderbolt in its PCs this year. Acer’s Aspire S5 Ultrabook was one of the few Windows laptops to include Thunderbolt support when it was introduced in early 2012. “We’re really focusing on USB 3.0—it’s an excellent alternative to Thunderbolt, ” said the Acer spokesperson. “It’s less expensive, offers comparable bandwidth, charging for devices such as mobile phones, and has a large installed base of accessories and peripherals.” By itself, the news of one company distancing itself from Thunderbolt might not be a big deal, but this is just another example of the trouble that Thunderbolt faces two-and-a-half years after its public introduction in the 2011 MacBook Pro. A Newegg search reveals a handful of high-end desktop motherboards that support it (five boards, all above $150), but the complete list of non-Apple prebuilt systems that have ever supported the interface is pretty short . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico

A Southern California woman who mocked American authorities via Twitter—after having fled the country—was finally arraigned on Monday in a San Diego courtroom. Wanda Lee Ann Podgurski, 60, was arrested in Rosarito, Mexico on July 4, 2013. This was a month after she tweeted “ Catch me if you can , ” seemingly directed at San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis , apparently the only person Podgurski followed on Twitter at the time. A superior court judge sentenced Podgurski in absentia on June 21, 2013 to 20 years and four months in state prison. She was  convicted (PDF) of 29 felony counts stemming from an insurance fraud scam. Podgurski worked as a clerk for Amtrak and held health insurance policies with six different companies, then she filed claims with all of them after she declared that she was disabled from supposed fall in her home in August 2006. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico