Tag: wired

Fingerprint lock in Samsung Galaxy 5 easily defeated by whitehat hackers

SRLabs The heavily marketed fingerprint sensor in Samsung’s new Galaxy 5 smartphone has been defeated by whitehat hackers who were able to gain unfettered access to a PayPal account linked to the handset. The hack, by researchers at Germany’s Security Research Labs , is the latest to show the drawbacks of using fingerprints, iris scans, and other physical characteristics to authenticate an owner’s identity to a computing device. While advocates promote biometrics as a safer and easier alternative to passwords, that information is leaked every time a person shops, rides a bus, or eats at a restaurant, giving attackers plenty of opportunity to steal and reuse it. This new exploit comes seven months after a separate team of whitehat hackers bypassed Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner less than 48 hours after it first became available. “We expected we’d be able to spoof the S5’s Finger Scanner, but I hoped it would at least be a challenge,” Ben Schlabs, a researcher at SRLabs, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “The S5 Finger Scanner feature offers nothing new except—because of the way it is implemented in this Android device—slightly higher risk than that already posed by previous devices.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fingerprint lock in Samsung Galaxy 5 easily defeated by whitehat hackers

After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

Netflix’s decision to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the Comcast network has resulted in significantly better video streaming performance for customers of the nation’s largest broadband provider. Netflix has bemoaned the payment, asking the government to prevent Comcast from demanding such interconnection ” tolls .”But there’s little doubt the interconnection has benefited consumers in the short term. Average Netflix performance for Comcast subscribers rose from 1.51Mbps to 1.68Mbps from January to February, though the interconnection didn’t begin until late February. In data released today, Netflix said average performance on Comcast has now risen further  to 2.5Mbps , a 65 percent increase since January. Comcast’s increased speed allowed it to pass Time Warner Cable, Verizon, CenturyLink, AT&T U-verse, and others in Netflix’s rankings. Comcast remains slower than Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, Charter, and Google Fiber. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

Soon, you’ll be able to use Apple’s CarPlay without buying a whole new car. Apple So far, consoles compatible with Apple’s CarPlay feature have only been integrated into a handful of high-end cars. If you want to use the feature without buying an entirely new vehicle, Alpine Electronics will soon be able to hook you up—Nikkei reports that the company will begin selling a standalone CarPlay console in the US and Europe this fall. The console is “likely” to have a 7-inch display and will reportedly cost between $500 and $700. Alpine already sells a lineup of entertainment and navigation systems , and it’s possible that this new CarPlay-compatible version will offer similar features when there’s no iPhone connected to it. Current CarPlay-compatible vehicles offer the CarPlay interface when an iPhone is connected, but it’s available as an alternative to the automakers’ own software solutions rather than a complete replacement. CarPlay was first demonstrated as “iOS in the Car” at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year and was officially released earlier this year as part of the iOS 7.1 update . It provides access to Apple Maps’ turn-by-turn navigation features, your music and podcasts, and a handful of third-party streaming services approved by Apple; as of this writing, there’s no public API that developers can use to support the feature independently. CarPlay requires a compatible in-dash display and an iPhone 5, 5C, or 5S connected via a Lightning cable. Rumors of a wireless version of CarPlay persist, but it’s not clear whether these first CarPlay-compatible displays will be able to operate wirelessly when (and if) that capability arrives. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

Flowing salt water over graphene generates electricity

An image of graphene, showing defects in its single-atom thickness. UC Berkeley Hydroelectricity is one of the oldest techniques for generating electrical power, with over 150 countries using it as a source for renewable energy. Hydroelectric generators only work efficiently at large scales, though—scales large enough to interrupt river flow and possibly harm local ecosystems. And getting this sort of generation down to where it can power small devices isn’t realistic. In recent years, scientists have investigated generating electrical power using nano-structures. In particular, they have looked at generating electricity when ionic fluids—a liquid with charged ions in it—are pushed through a system with a pressure gradient. However, the ability to harvest the generated electricity has been limited because it requires a pressure gradient to drive ionic fluid through a small tube. But scientists have now found that dragging small droplets of salt water on strips of graphene generates electricity without the need for pressure gradients. In their study, published in Nature Nanotechnology , researchers from China grew a layer of graphene and placed a droplet of salt water on it. They then dragged the droplet across the graphene layer at different velocities and found that the process generated a small voltage difference. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Flowing salt water over graphene generates electricity

NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Citing two anonymous sources “familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg News reports that the National Security Agency has known about Heartbleed, the security flaw in the OpenSSL encryption software used by a majority of websites and a multitude of other pieces of Internet infrastructure, for nearly the entire lifetime of the bug—“at least two years.” The sources told Bloomberg that the NSA regularly used the flaw to collect intelligence information, including obtaining usernames and passwords from targeted sites. As Ars reported on April 9, there have been suspicions that the Heartbleed bug had been exploited prior to the disclosure of the vulnerability on April 5 . A packet capture provided to Ars by Terrence Koeman , a developer based in the Netherlands, shows malformed Transport Security Layer (TSL) Heartbeat requests that bear the hallmarks of a Heartbleed exploit. Koeman said the capture dates to November of last year. But if the NSA has been exploiting Heartbleed for “at least two years,” the agency would have needed to discover it not long after the code for the TLS Heartbeat Extension was added to OpenSSL 1.0.1, which was released on March 14, 2012. The first “beta” source code wasn’t available until January 3, 2012 . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Appeals court reverses hacker/troll “weev” conviction and sentence [Updated]

Self-portrait by Weev A federal appeals court Friday reversed and vacated the conviction and sentence of hacker and Internet troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer. The case against Auernheimer, who has often been in solitary confinement for obtaining and disclosing personal data of about 140,000 iPad owners from a publicly available AT&T website, was seen as a test case on how far the authorities could go under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that federal prosecutors were invoking against Aaron Swartz. But, in the end, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t squarely address the controversial fraud law and instead said Aeurnheimer was charged in the wrong federal court. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Appeals court reverses hacker/troll “weev” conviction and sentence [Updated]

DNA-based logic gates operate inside cockroach cells

DNA robots crawl across a surface made of DNA. Harvard DNA-based nanotechnology has been around for more than 30 years, but it really took off in 2006, when DNA origami was featured on the cover of Nature . This form of origami, the folding of DNA into 2D and 3D shapes, was more of an art form back then, but scientists are now using the approach to construct nanoscale robots. The basic principle of DNA origami is that a long, single-stranded DNA molecule will fold into a predefined shape through the base-pairing of short segments called staples. All that’s required is to ensure that each staple can find a complementary match to base-pair with at the right location elsewhere in the molecule. This approach can be used to create both 2D and 3D structures. The idea behind the new work is that a DNA origami robot can be programmed to have a specific function based on a key, which can be a protein, a drug, or even another robot. Once the right key and the right robot find each other, the key drives a conformational (structural) change in the robot. The new shape causes the robot to perform a programmed function, such as releasing a drug. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DNA-based logic gates operate inside cockroach cells

Heartbleed vulnerability may have been exploited months before patch

guthrieinator There’s good news, bad news, and worse news regarding the “Heartbleed” bug that affected nearly two-thirds of the Internet’s servers dependent on SSL encryption. The good news is that many of those servers (well, about a third) have already been patched. And according to analysis by Robert Graham of Errata Security, the bug won’t expose the private encryption key for servers “in most software” (though others have said several web server distributions are vulnerable to giving up the key under certain circumstances.) The bad news is that about 600,000 servers are still vulnerable to attacks exploiting the bug. The worse news is that malicious “bot” software may have been attacking servers with the vulnerability for some time—in at least one case, traces of the attack have been found in audit logs dating back to last November. Attacks based on the exploit could date back even further. Security expert Bruce Schneier calls  Heartbleed  a catastrophic vulnerability. “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he said in a  blog post today.  The bug affects how OpenSSL, the most widely used cryptographic library for Apache and nginx Web servers, handles a service of Transport Layer Security called Heartbeat—an extension added to TLS in 2012. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed vulnerability may have been exploited months before patch

Windows 8.1 Update halted to some enterprise users amid WSUS issues

Distribution of the Windows 8.1 Update, Microsoft’s hefty patch for Windows 8.1 that updates the user interface for desktop and mouse users , has been temporarily suspended for some enterprise users after the company  discovered  that patched systems are no longer able to receive future updates from Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) servers. The problem occurs when clients connect to WSUS  with HTTPS enabled, but without TLS 1.2. Windows 8.1 machines with the KB 2919355 update installed will no longer be able to receive future updates from those servers. Microsoft describes it primarily as an issue for WSUS  3.0 Service Pack 2, also known as WSUS 3.2, when run on Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, 2008, and 2008 R2; this version does not have HTTPS or TLS 1.2 enabled by default, but HTTPS is part of the recommended configuration. WSUS 4 on Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 is also technically affected, as the bug is client-side, but Windows Server enables TLS 1.2 by default, so issues are unlikely to arise in practice. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8.1 Update halted to some enterprise users amid WSUS issues

Intel expands 10Gbps “Thunderbolt Ethernet” capability to Windows

Thunderbolt 2 is picking up another feature. Chris Foresman If standard gigabit Ethernet isn’t cutting it for you, Intel will soon give you another option: this week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, the company announced a new feature called ” Thunderbolt Networking ” that will soon be available to all PCs with Thunderbolt 2 controllers. The feature, which will be enabled by an upcoming Windows driver update, will “emulat[e] an Ethernet connection environment” and provide a 10Gbps two-way link between two computers connected with a Thunderbolt cable. Since you’ll need to connect the two computers directly to each other, this solution obviously won’t scale as well as real 10Gbps networking equipment. But for now, that hardware remains relatively uncommon and expensive—well outside the price range of individuals and smaller businesses. Thunderbolt Networking is apparently not being enabled for older computers with first-generation Thunderbolt controllers. While the feature will be new to the Windows operating system, the ability to network two Thunderbolt Macs together was introduced back in Mavericks. It doesn’t appear to require Thunderbolt 2 on that platform, though as we experienced , configuring a Thunderbolt Bridge can make for fast but occasionally choppy transfer speeds. That test connected one Thunderbolt 2 Mac to an older model with a first-generation Thunderbolt controller, though—it’s possible that connecting Thunderbolt 2 Macs to each other results in a more stable connection however. This new Windows driver update will enable any two Thunderbolt 2 PCs and Macs to be connected, though to date the Windows laptops, workstations, and motherboards with integrated Thunderbolt 2 controllers have been few and far between. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Intel expands 10Gbps “Thunderbolt Ethernet” capability to Windows