texas – Tech Today w/ Ken May

2017’s biggest cybersecurity facepalms

2017 was a year like no other for cybersecurity. It was the year we found out the horrid truths at Uber and Equifax, and border security took our passwords . A year of WannaCry and Kaspersky , VPNs and blockchains going mainstream, healthcare hacking , Russian hackers , WikiLeaks playing for Putin’s team , and hacking back . In 2017 we learned that cybersecurity is a Lovecraftian game in which you trade sanity for information. Let’s review the year that was (and hopefully will never be again). Moscow mules This was the year Kaspersky finally got all the big press they’ve been angling for. Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t for their research. The antivirus company spent an uncomfortable year in the headlines being accused of working with Russia’s FSB (former KGB) . Eventually those suspicions got it banned from use by US government agencies. Kaspersky’s alleged coziness with Putin’s inner circle has made the rounds in the press and infosec gossip for years. But it came to a head when an NSA probe surfaced, the Senate pushed for a ban, and — oddly — the Trump administration came with the executioner’s axe. Obviously, Kaspersky — the company, and its CEO of the same name — denied the accusations, and offered to work with the US government. They offered up their code for review and filed suit when the ban passed. At this point, the only thing that might save Kaspersky’s reputation in the US is finding us that pee tape. Fingers crossed. Be still my backdoored heart A ransomware attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in 2016 put health care hacking center stage, but in 2017 it turned into a true nightmare. The WannaCry ransomware attack spread like wildfire, locking up a third of the National Health Service (NHS) in England. That was followed by other worms, like Petya/NotPetya, which hit US hospitals in June. The security of pacemakers was exposed as being awful, specifically in the case of medical device manufacturer St. Jude Medical (now rebranded as Abbott). A lot of people hated on researcher Justine Bone and MedSec for the way they went about exposing pacemaker flaws, but they were right . The FDA put a painful pin in it when it notified the public of a voluntary recall (as a firmware update) of 465, 000 pacemakers made by St. Jude Medical. Meanwhile, white hat hackers put together the first Cyber Med Summit — a doctor-run, hacker boot camp for medical professionals. That the Summit exists is a tiny bit of good news in our medical mess, but it also proved that you should probably make sure your doctor keeps a hacker on staff. Medical staff at the Summit got a wake-up call about medical devices exploits, and concluded they need to add “hacking” to their list of possible problems to assess and diagnose. I’m not crying, you’re crying On May 12, over 150 countries were hit in one weekend by a huge ransomware crimewave named WannaCry . The attack was derived from a remote code execution vulnerability (in Windows XP up through Windows Server 2012) called “EternalBlue, ” found in the April Shadow Brokers/NSA dump. Those who did their Windows updates were not affected. WannaCry demanded $300 in Bitcoin from each victim and among those included were the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). The ransomworm was stopped in its tracks by the registration of a single domain that behaved like a killswitch. The creators apparently neglected to secure their own self destruct button. Researcher MalwareTech was the hero of the day with his quick thinking, but was sadly repaid by having his identity outed by British tabloids. Adding injury to insult, he was later arrested on unrelated charges as he attempted to fly home after the DEF CON hacking conference in August. Two weeks after the attack, Symantec published a report saying the ransomware showed strong links to the Lazarus group (North Korea). Others independently came to the same conclusion. Eight months later, and just in time for his boss’ warmongering on North Korea, Trump team member Thomas P. Bossert wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the U.S. today publicly attributes the massive “WannaCry” cyberattack to North Korea.” Maybe he’s just a backdoor man US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in October introduced the world to the new and totally made-up concept of ” responsible encryption ” — and was promptly laughed out of the collective infosec room. “Responsible encryption is effective secure encryption, coupled with access capabilities, ” he said . He suggested that the feds won’t mandate encryption backdoors “so long as companies can cough up an unencrypted copy of every message, call, photo or other form of communications they handle.” Even non-infosec people thought his new PR buzzwords were suspect. “Look, it’s real simple. Encryption is good for our national security; it’s good for our economy. We should be strengthening encryption, not weakening it. And it’s technically impossible to have strong encryption with any kind of backdoor, ” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) at The Atlantic’s Cyber Frontier event in Washington, D.C. Politico wrote : It’s a cause Rosenstein has quietly pursued for years, including two cases in 2014 and 2015 when, as the US attorney in Maryland, he sought to take companies to court to make them unscramble their data, a DOJ official told POLITICO. But higher-ups in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department decided against it, said the official, who isn’t authorized to speak to the news media about the cases. To everyone’s dismay, Rosenstein doubled down on his “responsible encryption” campaign when he capitalized on a mass shooting (using as his example the phone of Devin Patrick Kelley who opened fire on a congregation in Texas, killing 26 people). He said , “Nobody has a legitimate privacy interest in that phone … But the company that built it claims that it purposely designed the operating system so that the company cannot open the phone even with an order from a federal judge.” Like Uber, but for Equifax If there was some kind of reverse beauty pageant for worst look, worst behavior, and best example of what not to do with security, we’d need a tiebreaker for 2017. Equifax and Uber dominated the year with their awfulness. Equifax was forced to admit it was hacked badly in both March and July, with the latter affecting around 200 million people (plus 400, 000 in the UK). Motherboard reported that “six months after the researcher first notified the company about the vulnerability, Equifax patched it — but only after the massive breach that made headlines had already taken place… This revelation opens the possibility that more than one group of hackers broke into the company.” Shares of Equifax plummeted 35% after the July disclosure. And news that some of its execs sold off stock before the breach was made public triggered a criminal probe. Which brings us to the “unicorn” that fell from grace . In late November Uber admitted it was hacked in October 2016, putting 57 million users and over half a million drivers at risk. Uber didn’t report the breach to anyone — victims or regulators — then paid $100K to the hackers to keep it quiet, and hid the payment as a bug bounty. All of which led to the high-profile firing and departures of key security team members. Just a couple weeks later, in mid-December, the now-notorious ‘Jacobs letter’ was unsealed, accusing Uber of spying and hacking . “It was written by the attorney of a former employee, Richard Jacobs, and it contains claims that the company routinely tried to hack its competitors to gain an edge, ” Engadget wrote , and “used a team of spies to steal secrets or surveil political figures and even bugged meetings between transport regulators — with some of this information delivered directly to former CEO Travis Kalanick.” The letter was so explosive it’s now the trial between Uber and Waymo — so we can be sure we haven’t seen the last of Uber’s security disasters in the news. Images: Getty Images/iStockphoto (Wannacry); D. Thomas Magee (All illustrations)

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2017’s biggest cybersecurity facepalms

California is set to hit its green-energy goals a decade early

California is both the nation’s leading renewable-energy proponent and one of the few states to actually put its power where its mouth is. In November, the California Energy Commission released its annual Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) report which found that the state’s three investor-owned utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — are on track to collectively offer 50 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020. That’s a full decade faster than anyone had anticipated. Reports like these have been used to promote clean-energy production throughout the US and the rest of the world since the 1970s. However, it wasn’t until 2002 that California codified the practice . But despite being in effect for only 15 years, California’s mandatory reporting has become a potent tool in fighting greenhouse-gas emissions throughout the state. Arnold Schwarzenegger and CA Governor Jerry Brown at the One Planet Summit, Dec ’17 “We’ve got to realize that we are here today because of oil — oil and gas, to a lesser extent, coal, ” California Gov. Jerry Brown told the press at a 2015 signing ceremony, where he increased the state’s renewable goal to 50 percent. There, he pointed out that California is still the third-most-oil-producing state in the union, behind Texas and North Dakota. “What has been the source of our prosperity has become the source of our ultimate destruction, if we don’t get off of it, ” he added. And get off it we have. As of last year, 32.9 percent of PG&E’s power came from renewable resources, as did 28.2 percent from SoCal Edison and a whopping 43.2 percent from San Diego Gas — granted, SDG&E is by far the state’s smallest investor-owned utility. And, despite critics’ complaints that moving to renewables would stymie economic growth and increase the electric bills of customers throughout the state, it’s actually been quite the opposite. In the last seven years, California has seen a massive construction boom in the solar- and wind-energy sectors. The price of solar power has dropped to under $30 in 2016 from around $136 per megawatt-hour in 2008, while wind power prices have fallen to $51 in 2015 from $97 per megawatt-hour in 2007, per the report. Over the same period, the state has seen greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity generation decrease nearly every year. Jerry Brown speaks at the launch event at the US climate action center And despite the Trump administration’s quixotic quest to make coal happen, California has ratcheted up its own climate-change-response efforts. Of course, California isn’t the only state to do so. Hawaii recently passed legislation dictating that a full 100 percent of its electricity generation come from renewables by 2045, while Vermont is aiming to hit 75 percent by 2032. Granted, both of those states are home to far fewer people than California and therefore require far less energy, so the Golden State is uniquely situated to lead the renewable energy revolution. “California in a lot of ways is a blessed state, ” said Dr. Austin Brown, executive director of the UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and Economy. “We have a wealth of both wind and solar, a lot of historically built hydro that we can use.” That said, California is not — and cannot be — in this effort alone. While the state does often produce an excess of solar power in the mornings and early afternoons, utilities often have to resort to gas-powered plants during the evening hours and during times of peak demand. As such, Brown explained, “hydropower is great because it can be used to fill in the peaks and valleys.” The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System “We have an interconnected grid so I think it would have been foolish to say, ‘It all has to be done in California, ‘” Brown continued. “One of the benefits of the grid is that we’re able to trade power — bring hydro down from the Northwest, bring wind in from Wyoming. These are all really good things.” California’s aggressive policies toward renewables also deserve credit. “People want to cast it as a choice between policy or technology as a solution but those should exist hand-in-hand, ” Brown said. “We would have never gotten renewable energy prices where they are today without really ambitious public policy.” Since 2002, both Gov. Brown and his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, have continually sought to push the clean-energy standards forward. “It shows the importance of bold goals, ” Brown declared. “When you put a marker way out there and say, ‘We’re going to go achieve that, we’re going to write this down as a matter of policy and then go do it, ‘ you can accomplish an enormous amount.” And now that California is on pace to hit 50 percent renewable by 2020, the state could soon set an even loftier goal: 80 percent by 2050, according to Brown. “When you get it right, it’s this virtuous cycle where policy improves technology and that allows us to go for greater ambition without increasing prices and continuing to reduce unintended consequences, ” Brown said. Of course, setting goals and actually achieving them are two very different things. Indeed, the path to 80 percent renewables will pose its own unique challenges. The effects of diminishing returns will soon come into play, Brown explained. “Once we get to about 50 percent, we’re going to start to run into new challenges — the second 50 percent will be trickier than the first 50 percent.” Should we continually produce renewable energy at times when there is already excess generation, the value of that energy will decrease, Brown notes. Tesla Powerpack Units at the SoCal Edison Mira Loma Substation Yes, we could incorporate battery technology such as Tesla’s Power Cells or the 50 MW hybrid peaker plant system that installed this past April, but Brown thinks there might be an easier, less expensive alternative. “Storage is probably not the first option you want to talk about when you discuss grid integration just because batteries are still pretty expensive compared to other technologies, ” he said. Instead, Brown suggested methods such as pre-cooling buildings during times of low demand so as to not place additional strain on the grid during peak hours, or increasing grid flexibility — that is, increasing the ability to pass power around without congesting transmission lines. “When you look at it, storage works, but it’s probably the last thing in the stack that we want to go to, ” Brown concluded. The effects of global warming will pose their own unique set of challenges. With California’s temperate climate, residents don’t typically need to run their A/C or heaters for months on end as they do in other parts of the country, though that could change as the planet continues to warm. Daytime energy demands will likely increase throughout California and the Southwest due to the higher temperatures, thereby increasing air-conditioning usage, Brown explained. To a lesser degree, the colder winters should similarly increase heating demands. Brown also fears that we’ll see a “significant increase in heat-related injuries and death” as well as other dangerous trends such as the prolonged drought the state recently emerged from and the massive wildfires it currently faces. Burbank, California, residents fleeing the La Tuna Canyon Fire Energy production will also feel the impacts of climate change. “Solar is dependent on the amount of cloud cover, ” Brown said. “Wind power obviously depends on wind, and we might see shifting wind patterns in a changing climate, ” though he’s not entirely certain what those changing patterns will look like. Conventional power plants will also feel the effects. As Brown points out, a number of nuclear- and fossil-fuel plants have been temporarily knocked offline in the past few years because the of the heat that knocks their water-cooling systems offline. “It’s a threat multiplier, ” he said. “It takes all the things that are problematic now and makes them much more common.” And while achieving 100 percent renewable energy production is a noble goal, it may not be the most important one for California to focus on. “I think of 100 percent [renewable production] as a bit of a red herring, ” Brown explained. “If you want 100 percent it should be 100 percent zero-carbon electricity. Climate change is the existential threat, and I don’t want to waste time arguing about what’s renewable or not. You have to get the carbon out of the energy system as quickly as possible.” Images: Getty (All)

Budweiser offers 150,000 free Lyft round trips

If you’re on the lookout for a designated driver this holiday season, a brewery can save the day. Starting today, Budweiser is offering up to 150, 000 free round-trip Lyft rides (worth up to $10 each way) with its “Give a Damn” program until the end of the year. Every Thursday at 2 PM ET, Budweiser will share a code on its Facebook and Instagram channel that you can use Thursday, Friday and Saturday night (in the US only). The program, which Budweiser piloted in New York, Colorado, Illinois and Florida last year , will also be available in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Texas, Georgia and Washington, D.C. this year. When you claim the code, the funds will be transferred to your Lyft account, but only for the three-day period. This year’s program offers round-trips instead of the one-way trips offered during the pilot, which makes a lot more sense. Obviously, Budweiser is offering the rides to gain some feel-good PR and let customers freely consume its product without fear of repercussions. There’s no reason you can’t, say, drink whiskey and still use the codes, though. Budweiser plays no favorites in the ride-sharing game. Working with Uber’s Otto trucking division, it transported 8, 000 cases of Bud over a 120-mile distance, the first such delivery for an autonomous semi-truck. Somehow it makes sense that Uber is delivering the beer, and Lyft is bringing the drunk customers home safely.

Researchers find coral reefs in a place they shouldn’t exist

While the waters of the North Atlantic and South Pacific tend to have what hard corals need to survive, the North Pacific doesn’t, and it has been thought that deep-sea coral reefs were a near impossibility in that part of the ocean. But researchers at Florida State University and Texas A&M University have discovered a few reefs in the North Pacific that don’t seem to be following the rules. Their findings were recently published in Scientific Reports . One factor that prevents reef formation is the aragonite saturation horizon, which refers to the ocean depth where levels of the mineral aragonite drop off. Hard corals need aragonite to form their skeletons, so when there isn’t a lot of it around, coral reefs tend not to form. Additionally, coral skeletons are more prone to dissolve in the North Pacific compared to other areas. “Even if the corals could overcome low aragonite saturation and build up robust skeletons, there are areas on the reefs that are just exposed skeleton, and those should be dissolving, ” Amy Baco-Taylor, an author of the study, said in a statement , “Even if the species could survive in the area, we shouldn’t be finding an accumulation of reef.” But they did find reef accumulation, six of them in fact, near the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Emperor Seamount Chain despite everything we know about coral reefs saying they shouldn’t exist. Most of them exist below the aragonite saturation horizon and in areas with high dissolving rates. The researchers found a couple of factors that might contribute to the reef formation. For one, the aragonite saturation horizon does get deeper along the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, but the depth of the discovered reefs doesn’t seem to follow the aragonite levels, suggesting that’s not the main contributor to the growth. They also measured higher levels of chlorophyll — meaning more food and, therefore, more energy to help overcome low aragonite levels — and ocean currents that might boost reef formation. But those don’t fully explain the reefs’ existence. “Neither the chlorophyll nor the currents explain the unusual depth distributions of the reefs, why they actually get shallower moving to the northwest along the seamounts. There’s still a mystery as to why these reefs are here, ” said Baco-Taylor. Overall, how these reefs were able to form and survive isn’t yet understood, but figuring it out will be important in light of ongoing climate change -induced reef loss . “If more of these reefs are there, that would run counter to what ocean acidification and carbonate chemistry dictates, ” said Baco-Taylor, “It leaves us with some big questions: Is there something that we’re not understanding? How is this possible?” Source: Scientific Reports

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Researchers find coral reefs in a place they shouldn’t exist

Researchers will attempt to ‘reanimate’ a corpse with stem cells

Brain death may no longer be a life sentence if one Philadelphia-based biomedical startup has its way. The company, Bioquark, plans to initiate a study later this year to see if a combination of stem cell and protein blend injections, electrical nerve stimulation, and laser therapy can reverse the effects of recent brain death. They’re literally trying to bring people back from the dead. “It’s our contention that there’s no single magic bullet for this, so to start with a single magic bullet makes no sense. Hence why we have to take a different approach, ” Bioquark CEO, Ira Pastor, told Stat News . As Pastor told the Washington Post last year, he doesn’t believe that brain death is necessarily a permanent condition, at least to start. It may well be curable, he argued, if the patient is administered the right combination of stimuli, ranging from stem cells to magnetic fields. The resuscitation process will not be a quick one, however. First, the newly dead person must receive an injection of stem cells derived from their own blood. Then doctors will inject a proprietary peptide blend called BQ-A into the patient’s spinal column. This serum is supposed to help regrow neurons that had been damaged upon death. Finally, the patient undergoes 15 days of electrical nerve stimulation and transcranial laser therapy to instigate new neuron formation. During the trial, researchers will rely on EEG scans to monitor the patients for brain activity. This isn’t the first time that Bioquark has attempted this study. Last April, the company launched a nearly identical study in Rudrapur, India. However, no patients enrolled and the study wound up getting shut down that November by the Indian government over clearance issues with India’s Drug Controller General. Bioquark is reportedly nearing a deal with an unnamed Latin American country to hold a new trial later this year. Whether the treatment will actually work is an entirely different matter. Bioquark admits that it has never actually tested the regimen, even in animals, and the various component treatments have never themselves been applied to brain death. They’ve shown some promise in similar cases like stroke, brain damage and comas but never actually Lazarus-ing a corpse. “I think [someone reviving] would technically be a miracle, ” Dr. Charles Cox, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, told Stat News . “I think the pope would technically call that a miracle.” Source: Stat News

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Researchers will attempt to ‘reanimate’ a corpse with stem cells

HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years Of Development

HandBrake, popular open source video transcoder, has finally hit version 1.0.0 affter spending roughly more than 13 years in development. HandBrake 1.0.0 brings tons of new presets and support for more devices and file types. From a report: HandBrake 1.0.0 comes with new web and MKV presets. The official presets from HandBrake 0.10.x can be found under ‘Legacy.’ New Jason-based preset system, including command line support, has been added. The additional features of HandBrake are title/chapter selection, queuing up multiple encodes, chapter markers, subtitles, different video filters, and video preview. Just in case you have a compatible Skylake or later CPU, Intel QuickSync Video H.265/HEVC encoder support brings performance improvements. HandBrake 1.0.0 also brings along new online documentation beta. It’s written in a simple and easy-to-understand language.You can download it here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years Of Development

Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs

Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don’t weigh a lot. An anonymous reader shares an article on Slashgear (edited): For streaming content, Netflix largely relies on H.264/AVC to reduce the bandwidth, but for downloading content, it uses VP9 encoding. VP9 can allow better quality videos for the same amount of data needed to download. The challenge is that VP9 isn’t supported by all streaming providers — it is supported on Android devices and via the Chrome browser. So to get around that lack of support on iOS, Netflix is offering downloads in H.264/AVC High whereas streams are encoded in H.264/AVC Main on such devices. Netflix chooses the optimal encoding format for each title on its service after finding, for instance, that animated films are easier to encode than live-action. Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs

He must be serious about Mars: Elon Musk invests $2 billion in carbon fibers

(credit: SpaceX) SpaceX appears to be betting big on carbon fiber composites, which could increase the capacity of its future rockets to get people and supplies into space—and eventually to the surface of Mars. According to a report in Nikkei Asian Review , SpaceX has signed an agreement with Toray Carbon Fibers estimated to be worth $2 billion to $3 billion. The total price and delivery dates have yet to be finalized. It is not immediately clear exactly when, and in which launch vehicles, these lightweight composites will be employed by SpaceX. But the company is not alone in its interest—NASA and other aerospace companies have been experimenting with the materials because they have the potential to increase the amount of payload that can be carried by a rocket. They could also lower overall manufacturing cost. The scale of the deal seems telling, however. If the value of the deal as reported is correct, in the billions of dollars, it seems probable that the carbon fiber composites would be used in SpaceX’s proposed Mars Colonial Transporter rocket. This is the very large (but still under development) rocket the company plans to use to transport humans to Mars. SpaceX is already far along in the production of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which is based on the Falcon 9 core stage. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX has successfully been landing this year, has tank walls and domes built from an aluminum lithium alloy. (Ars has reached out to SpaceX for comment on this story and will update accordingly). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Six Flags adds a gaming twist to its VR roller coasters

Six Flags first announced that it was teaming up with Samsung to outfit roller coaster riders with Gear VR headsets back in the spring. The theme park company is taking its virtual reality project to another level though, adding a gaming component to the immersive visuals. Before now, the addition of VR to rides just added a different visual experience to the ride itself. With the new “Rage of the Gargoyles, ” riders take flight in an Apache-style helicopter to battle “blood-thirsty” beasts. How do you control the game? Well, the Gear VR headset does all of the work so you can keep your hands tightly wrapped around whatever handle the ride offers. As Six Flags explains it, riders aim at the gargoyles by looking in their direction to aim the helicopter’s Gatling guns. Once a target is locked on, the weapon fires automatically. Based on the details the company offered, it sounds like there’s a HMD (Head Mounting Display) UI to guide you through the whole thing. There’s no word on if you’ll be able to keep score and compete against fellow riders. If you’re planning to take a road trip before summer officially comes to a close, “Rage of the Gargoyles” will be available on nine VR-equipped coasters at Six Flags parks in the US and Canada. Those locations and rides include Demon at Six Flags Great America, Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure, Shock Wave at Six Flags Over Texas, Kong at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Dare Devil Dive at Six Flags Over Georgia, Goliath at La Ronde, Ninja at Six Flags St. Louis and Steamin’ Demon at The Great Escape. What’s more, there are sure to be new VR adventures at the parks in the future as Six Flags touts the setup’s versatility. “One of the most exciting things about this technology is that we have the ability to change the storylines to offer our guests new thrills and new reasons to visit our parks, ” said Six Flags president and CEO John Duffey. Rage of the Gargoyles virtual reality comes to the Demon https://t.co/xrpg9JzIYH — SF Great America (@SFGreat_America) August 5, 2016 Source: Six Flags (Business Wire)

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Six Flags adds a gaming twist to its VR roller coasters

Facebook Messenger Hits 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All VoIP Calls

Speaking of instant messaging and VoIP call apps, Facebook announced on Wednesday that Facebook Messenger has hit the 1 billion monthly active users milestone. The company adds that Messenger is just more than a text messenger — in addition to the ambitious bot gamble, a digital assistant, and the ability to send money to friends — Messenger now accounts for 10 percent of all VoIP calls made globally. Messenger’s tremendous growth also underscores Facebook’s mammoth capture of the world. The social network is used by more than 1.6 billion people actively every month. WhatsApp, the chat client it owns, is also used by more than one billion people. TechCrunch has a brilliant story on the growth of Messenger from the scratch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Messenger Hits 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All VoIP Calls