Tag: user agreement

Comcast acquires full ownership of NBCUniversal ahead of schedule

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, will consolidate its control over NBCUniversal by buying out the 49 percent of the media company that it doesn’t already own. Comcast will pay General Electric $16.7 billion for the shares and shell out $1.4 billion for related real estate, including the iconic 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Under a deal announced in 2009, General Electric spun NBC, Universal Studios, and various other media properties off into a new joint venture and sold 51 percent of the shares, and effective control, to Comcast. The merger was intensely controversial. Critics charged that the acquisition would further cement Comcast’s already dominant position in the cable market, making it impossible for competitors such as Netflix to compete on a level playing field. But regulators decided not to challenge the merger, settling for a long list of regulatory concessions. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Comcast acquires full ownership of NBCUniversal ahead of schedule

How alleged crooks used ATM skimmers to compromise thousands of accounts

Federal authorities have charged two men suspected of running an international operation that used electronic devices planted at automatic teller machine locations to compromise more than 6,000 bank accounts. The operation—which targeted Capital One, J. P. Morgan Chase, and other banks—netted, or attempted to net, about $3 million according to an indictment filed in Manhattan federal court. It allegedly worked by obtaining payment card readers from Hungary and other countries and installing them on top of card readers already located on ATMs and doors to ATM vestibules. The fraudulent readers were equipped with hardware that recorded the information encoded onto a card’s magnetic stripe each time it was inserted. A hidden pinhole camera with a view of the ATM keypad then captured the corresponding personal identification number. Antonio Gabor and Simion Tudor Pintillie allegedly led a gang of at least nine other people who regularly planted the skimming devices in the Manhattan, Chicago, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas, prosecutors said. They would later revisit the ATM to retrieve the information stored on the skimming devices and cameras. Gang members would then encode the stolen data onto blank payment cards and use the corresponding PINs to make fraudulent purchases or withdrawals. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Taken from:
How alleged crooks used ATM skimmers to compromise thousands of accounts

Securing your website: A tough job, but someone’s got to do it

In 2006, members of a notorious crime gang cased the online storefronts belonging to 7-Eleven, Hannaford Brothers, and other retailers. Their objective: to find an opening that would allow their payment card fraud ring to gather enough data to pull off a major haul. In the waning days of that year they hit the mother lode, thanks to Russian hackers identified by federal investigators as Hacker 1 and Hacker 2. Located in the Netherlands and California, the hackers identified a garden-variety flaw on the website of Heartland Payment Systems, a payment card processor that handled some 100 million transactions per month for about 250,000 merchants. By exploiting the so-called SQL injection vulnerability, they were able to gain a toe-hold in the processor’s network , paving the way for a breach that cost Heartland more than $12.6 million. The hack was masterminded by the now-convicted Albert Gonzalez and it’s among the most graphic examples of the damage that can result from vulnerabilities that riddle just about any computer that serves up a webpage . Web application security experts have long cautioned such bugs can cost businesses dearly, yet those warnings largely fall on deaf ears. But in the wake of the Heartland breach there was no denying the damage they can cause. In addition to the millions of dollars the SQL injection flaw cost Heartland, the company also paid with its loss of reputation among customers and investors. Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original article here:
Securing your website: A tough job, but someone’s got to do it

To prevent hacking, disable Universal Plug and Play now

Security experts are advising that a networking feature known as Universal Plug and Play be disabled on routers, printers, and cameras, after finding it makes tens of millions of Internet-connected devices vulnerable to serious attack. UPnP, as the feature is often abbreviated, is designed to make it easy for computers to connect to Internet gear by providing code that helps devices automatically discover each other over a local network. That often eliminates the hassle of figuring out how to configure devices the first time they’re connected. But UPnP can also make life easier for attackers half a world away who want to compromise a home computer or breach a business network, according to a white paper published Tuesday by researchers from security firm Rapid7. Over a five-and-a-half-month period last year, the researchers scanned every routable IPv4 address about once a week. They identified 81 million unique addresses that responded to standard UPnP discovery requests, even though the standard isn’t supposed to communicate with devices that are outside a local network. Further scans revealed 17 million addresses exposed UPnP services built on the open standard known as SOAP, short for simple object access protocol. By broadcasting the service to the Internet at large, the devices can make it possible for attackers to bypass firewall protections. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
To prevent hacking, disable Universal Plug and Play now

Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Office 365 Home Premium Edition’s lineup of software, ready to stream to your PC today. Today, Microsoft releases Office 2013—the first full release of Microsoft’s latest-generation productivity suite for consumers. Office 2013 has already made a partial debut on Microsoft’s Windows RT tablets, though RT users will get a (slight) refresh with the full availability of the suite. The company gave consumers an open preview of Office last summer, which we reviewed in depth at the time of the suite’s announcement. So there aren’t any real surprises in the final versions of the applications being releasing today, at least as far as how they look and work. Today’s release, however, marks the first general availability of Microsoft’s new subscription model under the Office 365 brand the company has used for its hosted mail and collaboration services for businesses. While the applications in Office are being offered in a number of ways, Microsoft is trying hard to steer consumer customers to Office 365 Home Premium Edition, a service-based version of the suite that will sell for $100 a year. And just as Windows 8’s app store started to fill up as the operating system approached release, the same is true of Office’s own app store—an in-app accessible collection of Web-powered functionality add-ons for many of the core Office applications based on the same core technologies (JavaScript and HTML5) that power many of Windows 8’s interface-formerly-known-as-Metro apps. Now, the trick is getting consumers to buy into the idea of Office as a subscription service and embracing Microsoft’s Office “lifestyle,” instead of something they buy once and hold onto until their computers end up in the e-waste pile. Read 28 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit site:
Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

“PlayStation 4K” and “Xbox Durango” will be key to Ultra HD adoption

Joseph Dumary Next-gen TV—with a 4K “Ultra HD” picture resolution—was this year’s hot topic at CES . But its success may be in the hands of console gamers. With leaked details of octal-core processor banks paired with 8GB of RAM, the PlayStation 4 “Orbis” is sounding powerful (just for comparison of RAM alone, the 8GB of system memory is roughly 32 times more than the current model). But to see where 4K comes in, it’s worth taking a trip back seven years. In 2005, very few people had an HDTV. According to one study , there were “as many” as 10 million homes with high-definition screens—globally. The problem, according to many commentators, was the lack of HD content: nobody wanted to buy an HDTV because there was little HD content; very little HD content was made because there were very few people to sell it to. Classic catch-22. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read this article:
“PlayStation 4K” and “Xbox Durango” will be key to Ultra HD adoption

Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste

Step one: incite panic. MyCleanPC.com Maybe you’ve seen the ads on the Internet or on TV in the wee hours of the morning. They make lofty promises: get rid of blue screens and error messages! Increase your speed! Clean up your system! But even when these PC cleanup apps aren’t just malware in disguise, the things they’re doing for your PC are often dubious. Many either replicate tasks that can be handled by built-in utilities or do things that could cause more problems than they solve. To highlight just why you and your loved ones should never let these applications anywhere near your PC, we picked one that we’d recently seen ads for: MyCleanPC. It’s the archetypal Windows cleanup app—and you probably shouldn’t install it. Intimidation tactics The standard ad for a PC cleanup app follows the same basic format as this ad from MyCleanPC.com . These ads for PC cleanup products often follow the same basic formula: appeal to people with slow or buggy PCs, throw in a few shots of an operating system that looks kind of like Windows, tack on some “customer testimonials,” and offer a free diagnosis that will make all the problems go away. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste

Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password

Comparison of the size of password search space when treating the password as a sequence of characters or words, or as words generated by grammatical structure. Rao,et al. When it comes to long phrases used to defeat recent advances in password cracking, bigger isn’t necessarily better, particularly when the phrases adhere to grammatical rules. A team of Ph.D. and grad students at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm that targets passcodes with a minimum number of 16 characters and built it into the freely available John the Ripper cracking program. The result: it was much more efficient at cracking passphrases such as “abiggerbetter password” or “thecommunistfairy” because they followed commonly used grammatical rules—in this case, ordering parts of speech in the sequence “determiner, adjective, noun.” When tested against 1,434 passwords containing 16 or more characters, the grammar-aware cracker surpassed other state-of-the-art password crackers when the passcodes had grammatical structures, with 10 percent of the dataset cracked exclusively by the team’s algorithm. The approach is significant because it comes as security experts are revising password policies to combat the growing sophistication of modern cracking techniques which make the average password weaker than ever before . A key strategy in making passwords more resilient is to use phrases that result in longer passcodes. Still, passphrases must remain memorable to the end user, so people often pick phrases or sentences. It turns out that grammatical structures dramatically narrow the possible combinations and sequences of words crackers must guess. One surprising outcome of the research is that the passphrase “Th3r3 can only b3 #1!” (with spaces removed) is one order of magnitude weaker than “Hammered asinine requirements” even though it contains more words. Better still is “My passw0rd is $uper str0ng!” because it requires significantly more tries to correctly guess. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password

MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

The general approach to storing a binary file as DNA, described in detail below. Goldman et al., Nature It’s easy to get excited about the idea of encoding information in single molecules, which seems to be the ultimate end of the miniaturization that has been driving the electronics industry. But it’s also easy to forget that we’ve been beaten there—by a few billion years. The chemical information present in biomolecules was critical to the origin of life and probably dates back to whatever interesting chemical reactions preceded it. It’s only within the past few decades, however, that humans have learned to speak DNA. Even then, it took a while to develop the technology needed to synthesize and determine the sequence of large populations of molecules. But we’re there now, and people have started experimenting with putting binary data in biological form. Now, a new study has confirmed the flexibility of the approach by encoding everything from an MP3 to the decoding algorithm into fragments of DNA. The cost analysis done by the authors suggest that the technology may soon be suitable for decade-scale storage, provided current trends continue. Trinary encoding Computer data is in binary, while each location in a DNA molecule can hold any one of four bases (A, T, C, and G). Rather than using all that extra information capacity, however, the authors used it to avoid a technical problem. Stretches of a single type of base (say, TTTTT) are often not sequenced properly by current techniques—in fact, this was the biggest source of errors in the previous DNA data storage effort. So for this new encoding, they used one of the bases to break up long runs of any of the other three. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

All backscatter “pornoscanners” to be removed from US airports

Bloomberg is reporting that the TSA will be removing all of the remaining backscatter X-ray machines from US airports. The removal isn’t because of health concerns—instead, the machines’ manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems , failed to meet a US Congress-imposed deadline for altering the machines’ software to produce “generic passenger images,” according to the report. TSA assistant administer for acquisitions Karen Shelton Waters, speaking on behalf of the agency, noted that Rapiscan Systems would absorb the cost for the scanners’ removal, and that the removal is unrelated to Rapiscan’s alleged falsification of the machines’ abilities to protect passengers’ privacy. Nor does the removal appear to be related to ongoing questions about the safety of the backscatter X-ray technology. The CEO of OSI systems, Rapiscan’s parent company, says that rather than pitching the expensive machines into the garbage bin, the TSA will be relocating them to other government agencies. In total, there are 174 Rapiscan backscatter X-ray machines that will be pulled from airports and relocated, on top of the 76 that were  removed last year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Excerpt from:
All backscatter “pornoscanners” to be removed from US airports