Tag: vanity-fair

Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z, one of the hardiest and most svelte tablets we’ve seen. Sony Sony is unveiling a new Android tablet, the Xperia Tablet Z, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday. Sony claims the tablet is not only the “world’s thinnest 10.1-inch tablet” at 6.9 millimeters, but it’s apparently waterproof in up to three feet of water for 30 minutes. Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z has a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 1920×1200 display running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. (Sony has gone scouts-honor that the tablet will be updated to 4.2 “after launch.”) The tablet weighs 495 grams (1.05 pounds) and it has an 8-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front camera, plus 16GB/32GB storage configurations with a microSD slot than can take up to a 64GB card. The tablet also contains an IR blaster that works with a special version of an app Sony has created called TV SideView. TV SideView integrates with a user’s cable provider and allows users to browse the program guide as well as currently airing content. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original post:
Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

Server hack prompts call for cPanel customers to take “immediate action”

The providers of the cPanel website management application are warning some users to immediately change their systems’ root or administrative passwords after discovering one of its servers has been hacked. In an e-mail sent to customers who have filed a cPanel support request in the past six months, members of the company’s security team said they recently discovered the compromise of a server used to process support requests. “While we do not know if your machine is affected, you should change your root level password if you are not already using SSH keys,” they wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail posted to a community forum . “If you are using an unprivileged account with ‘sudo’ or ‘su’ for root logins, we recommend you change the account password. Even if you are using SSH keys we still recommend rotating keys on a regular basis.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
Server hack prompts call for cPanel customers to take “immediate action”

Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them

Police in Singapore have issued an alert citing a dramatic rise in the number of “cyber blackmail” cases being reported. But unlike many cases that target women or teenagers , this latest rash of crimes targets men through social media sites. The Singapore Police Force reports that there have been more than 50 reported cases in the last year where “foreign” women have lured men through invitations on social networks, such as Facebook and Tagged.com, into video sex sessions that are recorded for blackmail purposes. The women “initiate cybersex” with the men over video chat, stripping for them and then encouraging them to do the same. The men are told to perform sex acts on camera for the women, and the video feeds are recorded. The men are then contacted later and told that the videos will be posted in public if the victims don’t wire money to the scammers. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them

Adobe ships new features, new apps, exclusively to cloud subscribers

Adobe today shipped the first public preview of Edge Reflow. First shown off last September , the new application for responsive Web design is designed to make it easier for developers to produce webpages that alter their layout in response to changes in screen size, enabling the same page to be used on both desktop and portable devices. The company is also shipping an update for three other tools. It’s adding direct support for using the free Edge Web Fonts to its Web development app Dreamweaver and its timeline-based animation software Edge Animate. Edge Animate is also picking up new support for CSS gradients. Finally, the Edge Code HTML editor, currently available as a preview, is being updated to support live previewing and a quick edit mode that allows scripts and styles to be edited where they’re used even when they’re stored in separate files. The new Edge Reflow app looks handy for those interested in responsive Web design, and the other improvements are pleasant if incremental. The most significant thing is not the updates themselves, however, but the fact that they’re being made exclusive to Creative Cloud subscribers. Buyers of the traditional perpetually licensed versions of Creative Suite are excluded. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Excerpt from:
Adobe ships new features, new apps, exclusively to cloud subscribers

A world of hurt after McAfee mistakenly revokes key for signing Mac apps

Travis Nep Smith A McAfee administrator accidentally revoked the digital key used to certify desktop applications that run on Apple’s OS X platform, creating headaches for customers who want to install or upgrade Mac antivirus products. A certificate revocation list  [CRL] hosted by Apple Worldwide developer servers lists the reason for the cancellation as a “key compromise,” but McAfee officials said they never lost control of the sensitive certificate which is used to prove applications are legitimate releases. The revocation date shows as February 6, meaning that for seven days now, customers have had no means to validate McAfee applications they want to install on Macs. “We were told that as a workaround, we should just allow untrusted certificates until they figure it out,” an IT administrator at a large organization, who asked that he not be identified, told Ars. “They’re telling us to trust untrusted certs, and that definitely puts us at risk.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View the original here:
A world of hurt after McAfee mistakenly revokes key for signing Mac apps

How we built a DIY book scanner with speeds of 150 pages per minute

Bookshelves today are simply not as appealing as they used to be, and there’s no shortage of people looking to digitize their own book collections. Fortunately, we now have easy and relatively inexpensive ways to digitize those books. You don’t have to slave away at your copier or scanner, either—we’re talking about building a book scanner of your very own. We’re not talking about the numerous book scanning services that have popped up in the last few years, offering book digitization at the cost of only a few cents per page. Nor are we talking about chopping off the binding of your book and feeding the pages into a copier or scanner, or purchasing a commercial book scanner for upwards of $10,000 (that just isn’t going to happen for most). No, we’re talking toolbelts, paint cans, bike brakes, and digital cameras—doing it yourself. For two law students interested in the legal and policy discussions surrounding copyright and technology, deciding to build a DIY Book Scanner was never just a project to digitize our own textbooks (however practical that might be). Instead, it gave us the opportunity to experience these issues first hand. Plus, we wanted to see what it would take to build one. Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
How we built a DIY book scanner with speeds of 150 pages per minute

Spanish police bust alleged “ransomware” ring that took in $1.34M annually

Spanish authorities announced Wednesday that they had arrested 10 people who were allegedly involved in a massive “ransomware” ring. The European Cybercrime Centre estimated that the criminal operation “affected tens of thousands of computers worldwide, bringing in profits in excess of €1 million euros ($1.34 million) per year.” The Spanish Ministry of the Interior described (Google Translate) the lead suspect as a “a 27-year-old citizen of Russian origin who was arrested in December in the United Arab Emirates,” and now awaits extradition to Spain. The newly arrested 10 were  linked to the financial cell of the ransomware operation, and include six Russians, two Ukrainians, and two Georgians. The Ministry added that the operation remains “open,” suggesting that more arrests could be forthcoming. (Spanish authorities posted a video (RAR) of the new arrests and raid.) Madrid dubbed  the ransomware used by the ring a “police virus” because it throws up a notice that appears to come from law enforcement. The malware requires the user to pay €100 ($134) as a “fine” from a false accusation of accessing child pornography or file-sharing websites. When the victims submit their payment details, European authorities added , the “criminals then go on to steal data and information from the victim’s computer.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original:
Spanish police bust alleged “ransomware” ring that took in $1.34M annually

Zero-day attack exploits latest version of Adobe Reader

FireEye A previously undocumented flaw in the latest version of Adobe Systems’ ubiquitous Reader application is being exploited in online hacks that allow attackers to surreptitiously install malware on end-user computers, a security firm said. The attacks, according to researchers from security firm FireEye, work against Reader 11.0.1 and earlier versions and are actively being exploited in the wild. If true, the attacks are notable because they pierce security defenses Adobe engineers designed to make malware attacks harder to carry out. Adobe officials said they’re investigating the report . “Upon successful exploitation, it will drop two DLLs,” FireEye researchers Yichong Lin, Thoufique Haq, and James Bennett wrote of the online attacks they witnessed. “The first DLL shows a fake error message and opens a decoy PDF document, which is usually common in targeted attacks. The second DLL in turn drops the callback component, which talks to a remote domain.” DLL is the researchers’ shorthand for a file that works with the Microsoft Windows dynamic link library. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Taken from:
Zero-day attack exploits latest version of Adobe Reader

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

Apple releases iOS 6.1.1 for iPhone 4S users with 3G issues (Updated)

Update : Apple has now released the iOS 6.1.1 update mentioned in our original writeup. The update is specifically for the iPhone 4S and “fixes an issue that could impact cellular performance and reliability for iPhone 4S.” This is most likely to address the 3G issues experienced by some users, though it doesn’t sound like iOS 6.1.1 does anything to improve battery life as of yet. Original story : iOS 6.1.1 may be making its way into consumers’ hands sooner than we expected. The first beta of iOS 6.1.1 was only released to Apple’s developer network last week, but the update is reportedly being “rushed” out to customers in order to address 3G performance bugs, according to German iPhone site iFun . It is also said to address other problems like reduced battery life. The software is said to have undergone some carrier testing, though it’s still unclear exactly when Apple plans to publish the update. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Original post:
Apple releases iOS 6.1.1 for iPhone 4S users with 3G issues (Updated)