wired – Page 20 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Hacked French network exposed its own passwords during TV interview

While French authorities continued investigating how the TV5Monde network had 11 of its stations’ signals interrupted the night before, one of its staffers proved just how likely a basic password theft might have led to the incident. In an interview with French news program 13 Heures , TV5Monde reporter David Delos unwittingly revealed at least one password for the station’s social media presence. That’s because he was filmed in front of a staffer’s desk—which was smothered in sticky notes and taped index cards that were covered in account usernames and passwords. Delos’s segment revealed the usernames and passwords for TV5Monde’s Twitter and Instagram accounts, but they were too difficult to read in an archived video of the broadcast . That wasn’t the case for the YouTube information, however; Twitter user pent0thal confirmed that account’s displayed password was “lemotdepassedeyoutube,” which translates in English to “the password of YouTube.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hacked French network exposed its own passwords during TV interview

Eighth-grader charged with felony for shoulder-surfing teacher’s password

A 14-year-old Florida boy has been charged with felony computer intrusion after shoulder-surfing his school’s computer network password and using it to play a prank on a teacher. Domanik Green, an eighth-grader at Paul R. Smith Middle School in Holiday, Florida, was charged with an offense against a computer system and felony unauthorized access, according to a report published Thursday by The Tampa Bay Times . In late March, the youth allegedly used the administrative-level password without permission to log in to the school’s network and change the images displayed on a teacher’s computer to one of two men kissing. One of the computers accessed allegedly contained encrypted questions to the FCAT, short for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test . While the factual allegations laid out in the article seem to indicate the youth perpetrated some form of trespass, they also alleged a litany of poor practices on the part of school administrators. These practices include weak passwords, entering passwords in front of others, and widespread unauthorized access, possibly that went undetected. From the report: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Eighth-grader charged with felony for shoulder-surfing teacher’s password

Descent Underground Kickstarter crosses $600,000 finish line

It’s no doubt been a long day for Eric “Wingman” Peterson and the other folks at Descendent Studios , but their crowdfunded reboot of the six-degrees-of-freedom shooter Descent is now over the $600,000 mark and will receive its funding, which will allow Peterson and team to buckle down and get to work on the title—once the post-Kickstarter partying is over, of course. Though the funding campaign got off to a good start, pledges slowed over the last week of the campaign. However, backers donated more than $200,000 of the $600,000 goal in the past four days, with $70,000 of donations coming in today, on the campaign’s final day. With about two hours left on the clock, the donation mark stands at just a bit over $602,000. Descent Underground engine demo running on an Oculus Rift DK2. Our stomachs lurch in anticipation! Peterson and his team (which includes several former members of the Austin branch of Cloud Imperium, which is currently focusing on building Star Citizen’s persistent universe) have set their sights on resurrecting the Decent series of games, which reached the height of their popularity in the late 1990s and cast players as the pilot of a fast, maneuverable spaceship blasting killer robots in underground mines. The game’s hook was that unlike other FPS titles, Descent allowed full movement along all axes—you could move up, down, left right, forward, backward, and rotate in any direction. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Next Windows Server offer new even smaller “Nano Server” footprint

Microsoft is adding even more features to Windows Server to diversify and strengthen its support for virtualization and containerization on its platform. The next Windows Server will include an even more stripped down, lightweight install mode called Nano Server. Windows Server already has a shrunk install option, Server Core, that omits various features to reduce the memory and disk footprint, and to shrink its exposure to security flaws. Nano Server strips back the operating system further still, dropping things like the GUI stack, 32-bit Win32 support, local logins, and remote desktop support. Nano Server is designed for two kinds of workload; cloud apps built on runtimes such as .NET, Java, Node.js, or Python, and cloud infrastructure, such as hosting Hyper-V virtual machines. Compared to the full Server install, Microsoft claims that Nano Server shrinks the disk footprint by 93 percent, the number of critical security bulletins by 92 percent, and the number of reboots by 80 percent. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Next Windows Server offer new even smaller “Nano Server” footprint

Large Hadron Collider restarts after 2 years of maintenance

After being shut down for two years, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back online, CERN announced Sunday. “Today at 10:41am [local time], a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometer ring, followed at 12:27pm by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research reported in a statement . “These beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV. Over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing energy of the beams.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Large Hadron Collider restarts after 2 years of maintenance

Man beats child porn rap by proving unintentional downloading

Every day, the popular uTorrent client is used by the masses to legally or illegally download all manner of torrent files. With that comes the risk of computer infections or a lawsuit from a copyright holder. A suburban Illinois man got way more than what he bargained for after the history buff downloaded files on World War II ordnance. What 40-year-old Wocjciech Florczykowski of Schaumburg got in 2011 was an extreme visit from the FBI and ultimately a charge of child-porn possession. “The FBI descended on his home with bomb-sniffing dogs and a diffusing team and the whole shebang,” his attorney, Lawrence Lykowski, told Ars on Friday. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man beats child porn rap by proving unintentional downloading

Google Chrome will banish Chinese certificate authority for breach of trust

Google’s Chrome browser will stop trusting all digital certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Center following a major trust breach last week that led to the issuance of unauthorized credentials for Gmail and several other Google domains . The move could have major consequences for huge numbers of Internet users as Chrome, the world’s most widely used browser, stops recognizing all website certificates issued by CNNIC. To give affected website operators time to obtain new credentials from a different certificate authority, Google will wait an unspecified period of time before implementing the change. Once that grace period ends, Google engineers will blacklist both CNNIC’s root and extended-validation certificates in Chrome and all other Google software. The unauthorized certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings , an intermediate certificate authority that operated under the authority of CNNIC. MCS used the certificates in a man-in-the-middle proxy, a device that intercepts secure connections by masquerading as the intended destination. Such devices are sometimes used by companies to monitor employees’ encrypted traffic for legal or human resources reasons. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Chrome will banish Chinese certificate authority for breach of trust

“Unquestionable greed,” the startup CEO who stole $765k from his friends

SAN FRANCISCO—Dressed in matching yellow scrubs from the nearby Alameda County Jail, Jon Mills looked resigned to his fate. After taking a plea deal on two felony counts of wire fraud, the young former startup CEO appeared in federal court Tuesday afternoon for sentencing. Mills had moved to California five years ago with a dream to hit it big in Silicon Valley. The company he founded, Motionloft , uses small sensors to perform analytics on in-store foot traffic. Everything worked. The company continues to succeed, and celebrity venture capitalist Mark Cuban remains its sole investor. But that success wasn’t enough. In early 2013, Mills told at least five people that if they gave him relatively small amounts of money, they would own stakes in the company. He claimed that a Cisco acquisition worth hundreds of millions of dollars was supposedly imminent, so Mills and all Motionloft shareholders others would stand to make a tidy profit. In reality, Mills knew the deal didn’t exist. Read 52 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Unquestionable greed,” the startup CEO who stole $765k from his friends

Google kills 200 ad-injecting Chrome extensions, says many are malware

Google is cracking down on ad-injecting extensions for its Chrome browser after finding that almost 200 of them exposed millions of users to deceptive practices or malicious software. More than a third of Chrome extensions that inject ads were recently classified as malware in a study Google researchers carried out with colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. The Researchers uncovered 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users. Google officials have since killed those extensions and incorporated new techniques to catch any new or updated extensions that carry out similar abuses. The study also found widespread use of ad injectors for multiple browsers on both Windows and OS X computers. More than five percent of people visiting Google sites have at least one ad injector installed Within that group, half have at least two injectors installed, and nearly one-third have at least four installed. Google officials don’t bar such ad injectors outright, but they do place restrictions on them. Terms of service for Chrome extensions , for instance, require that the ad-injecting behavior be clearly disclosed. Customers of DoubleClick and other Google-operated ads services must also comply with policies barring unwanted software . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Uber driver arrested for trying to burglarize passenger’s house

An Uber driver was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of attempting to break in to the residence of a woman he had just brought to the Denver International Airport. Gerald Montgomery The 51-year-old driver, Gerald Montgomery, allegedly used what the police described as “burglary tools” to try to open the back door of the Colorado woman’s house. The victim’s roommate was home and confronted Montgomery, the Denver Police Department said. Uber said it has “deactivated” Montgomery’s “access to the platform, pending a full investigation.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Uber driver arrested for trying to burglarize passenger’s house