Tag: vanity-fair

Man gets 10 years in prison after perpetrating website sales scam

A California man was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison after engaging in a years-long scheme to defraud people who responded to his ads selling domain names and websites that he claimed continually generated revenue. Federal prosecutors alleged that John Winston Boone scammed 18 people for approximately $1.3 million—providing false PayPal records to his victims to illustrate this profitability. Initially, Boone plead not guilty, but later changed his plea in late 2013. United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II, who was the same judge in a 2013 Los Angeles Prenda hearing , called the defendant’s conduct “cruel and callous.” Judge Wright also noted that Boone “showed a lack of humanity that was so base and so depraved.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man gets 10 years in prison after perpetrating website sales scam

Silk Road stunner: Ulbricht admits founding the site, but says he isn’t DPR

Once they got the chance, it took prosecutors less than a minute to point the finger—literally—at Ross Ulbricht. The jury of six men and six women were assembled in Manhattan’s federal courthouse to hear a story about a “dark and secret part of the Internet,” government lawyer Timothy Howard explained. The story was about “a website called Silk Road, where anybody, anywhere could buy and sell dangerous drugs with the click of a mouse.” “That man,” Howard said, turning to look straight at Ulbricht and extending his arm towards him. “The defendant—Ross Ulbricht— he was the kingpin of this criminal empire.” Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Silk Road stunner: Ulbricht admits founding the site, but says he isn’t DPR

Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken, and what you can do to fix it

Recently, there has been a lot of  discussion about the current state of Apple’s software quality. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with development knows that bugs are par for the course, and most people aren’t bothered by small, day-to-day bugs that are fixed within a reasonable timeframe. Obviously, like everyone else, Apple’s software has its share of those. But there’s another category of bug—glaring, perplexing bugs that couldn’t possibly have escaped the attention of the software engineers in question, let alone the quality assurance department. Such issues exist, and sometimes they go unfixed for months. Or years. Or ever. Hopefully, the set of network issues with OS X 10.10 described below won’t fall into this column, but they do raise an obvious question: why? For 12 years, the mDNSResponder service managed a surprisingly large part of our Mac’s networking, and it managed this task well. But as of OS X 10.10, the mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd, which does the same thing. Mostly. Here are some strange networking problems we’ve observed since installing 10.10: Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken, and what you can do to fix it

Red light camera vendor Redflex freaked out it may lose contracts

In a new Friday filing with the Australian Securities Exchange, Redflex, a prominent red light camera vendor, said that it could be facing an immediate net book value loss of $3.2 million if it permanently loses contracts in New Jersey and Ohio. In November 2014, the company told investors that the North American market is a “low/no-growth market.” Since 2009, the Garden State has operated a pilot program with Redflex cameras, but that program expired on December 16, 2014. The New Jersey Department of Transportation is now set to analyze its five years’ worth of data, write a report, and recommend whether to permanently halt the program or resurrect it. Meanwhile, in Ohio, even after the state’s Supreme Court upheld their use, Governor John Kasich signed into law in December 2014 a new bill that requires a police officer’s physical presence for tickets that are issued from traffic cameras. The law takes effect 90 days after the governor’s signature, and it could mean that cities will have less of a reason to maintain their camera systems. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Red light camera vendor Redflex freaked out it may lose contracts

Cable lobby says Google Fiber doesn’t need Title II to get pole access

The top cable lobby group says Google is blowing smoke when it comes to Title II and pole attachment rights. Google told the Federal Communications Commission that reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act would help Google and other companies gain access to infrastructure controlled by utilities. Section 224 of Title II covers pole attachments, and Google urged the FCC to enforce this section if it does move broadband under Title II. But that isn’t even necessary, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA)  argued in a filing today , saying that “Google already can avail itself of pole attachment rights under Section 224, notwithstanding its assertions to the contrary. Google’s letter states that Google Fiber ‘lacks federal access rights pursuant to Section 224’ because it offers an ‘Internet Protocol video service that is not traditional cable TV.’ But as NCTA has explained on numerous occasions… the law is clear that facilities-based providers of Internet Protocol television (‘IPTV’) services do qualify as cable operators under the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (‘the Act’). The Act defines ‘cable operator’ as one who ‘provides cable service over a cable system,’ without any reference to the technology (IP-based, QAM-based, or otherwise) used to provide such service.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cable lobby says Google Fiber doesn’t need Title II to get pole access

Only 25Mbps and up will qualify as broadband under new FCC definition

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler today is proposing to raise the definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. As part of the Annual Broadband Progress Report mandated by Congress , the Federal Communications Commission has to determine whether broadband “is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” The FCC’s latest report, circulated by Wheeler in draft form to fellow commissioners, “finds that broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, especially in rural areas, on Tribal lands, and in US Territories,” according to a fact sheet the FCC provided to Ars. The FCC also gets to define what speeds qualify as broadband, or “advanced telecommunications capability,” as it’s called in policy documents. The FCC last updated that definition in 2010 , raising it from 200Kbps to the current 4/1 standard. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 said that advanced telecommunications capability must “enable users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.” Wheeler’s proposed annual report says the 4/1 definition adopted in 2010 “is inadequate for evaluating whether broadband capable of supporting today’s high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video is being deployed to all Americans in a timely way.” (Despite the annual requirement, this would be the first such report since 2012 .) Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Only 25Mbps and up will qualify as broadband under new FCC definition

Comcast just upped its cable modem rental fee from $8 to $10 per month

Comcast users in various parts of the country have already gotten (or may soon get) a lovely holiday present from their ISP—a seemingly inexplicable increase in the cable modem rental fee, from $8 to $10 per month. Eric Studley, of Boston, who posts on reddit as Slayer0606, first pointed out the increase on Tuesday. After reading Studley’s post, Ars encouraged readers who rent Comcast modems to check their bills and found that the increases seem to have taken place as far back as October 2014, while others took effect as of December 20, 2014 and January 1, 2015. The company did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast just upped its cable modem rental fee from $8 to $10 per month

HP sells Palm trademarks; brand could be resurrected with new smartphones

Palm, the legendary smartphone and PDA company, might seem dead and gone, but it’s now looking like the name “Palm” will rise again as a zombie brand. For a quick refresher:  HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010. HP killed the Palm brand after about a year of ownership and stopped making WebOS devices entirely about a year-and-a-half after the acquisition. Since then, Palm has been pretty dead. Lately, though, the brand has started to stir. The diehards over at WebOS Nation have been keeping a close eye on  Palm.com , which recently stopped redirecting nostalgic visitors to hpwebos.com  and started sending people to mynewpalm.com . The page shows a looping video of a Palm logo along with the text “Coming Soon” and “Smart Move.” No one was sure who was behind the site resuscitation until this document was found, which shows the transfer of the Palm trademark from Palm, Inc (still a subsidiary of HP) to a company called Wide Progress Global Limited. Wide Progress Global Limited doesn’t seem to be a company with any kind of real purpose—it’s just a shell meant to hide the true buyer. The person signing the paperwork for Wide Progress Global Limited is Nicolas Zibell, who also  just happens to hold the title “President Americas and Pacific” at Alcatel One Touch. Couple that with the fact that the “Smart Move”—the text that appears on the new Palm site—is Alcatel One Touch’s slogan, and it’s pretty clear that Alcatel One Touch bought the Palm brand. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HP sells Palm trademarks; brand could be resurrected with new smartphones

Pope to push for action on climate change

Over the weekend, The Guardian reported that Pope Francis will issue an encyclical urging Catholics to push for action on climate change. The push will coincide with the efforts to follow up on the Lima agreement in the hope that they will lead to binding agreements for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Although the Vatican has not confirmed that the document is in the works, the article quotes several authorities by name, and they speak as if it is a done deal. The document would be in keeping with the Pope’s messages on environmental stewardship; the article quotes Francis as telling an audience in Latin America, “Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.” It’s also consistent with his general high regard for scientific findings. The Pope will join a variety of voices pushing for action next year and will undoubtedly add to the political pressure for an agreement. A more relevant question may be whether Francis can sway anyone who wasn’t already interested in seeing progress made on the climate. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Pope to push for action on climate change

Apple automatically patches Macs to fix severe NTP security flaw

Most OS X security updates are issued alongside other fixes via the Software Update mechanism, and these require some kind of user interaction to install—you’ve either got to approve them manually or tell your Mac to install them automatically. Apple does have the ability to quietly and automatically patch systems if it needs to, however, and it has exercised that ability for the first time to patch a critical flaw in the Network Time Protocol (NTP) used to keep the system clock in sync. This security hole became public knowledge late last week . When exploited, the NTP flaw can cause buffer overflows that allow remote attackers to execute code on your system. If you allow your system to “install system data files and security updates” automatically (checked by default), you’ve probably already gotten the update and seen the notification above. If not, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite users should use Software Update to download and install the update as soon as possible. The flaw may exist in Lion, Snow Leopard, and older OS X versions, but they’re old enough that Apple isn’t providing security updates for them anymore. While this was the first time this particular auto-update function has been used, Apple also automatically updates a small database of malware definitions on all Macs that keeps users from installing known-bad software. That feature, dubbed “XProtect,” was introduced in Snow Leopard in response to the Mac Defender malware and has since expanded to include several dozen items . Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple automatically patches Macs to fix severe NTP security flaw