Tag: yorker-vanity

Cops are freaked out that Congress may impose license plate reader limits

Despite the fact that no federal license plate legislation has been proposed, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has sent a pre-emptive letter to top Congressional lawmakers, warning them against any future restrictions of automated license plate readers. The IACP claims to be the “world’s   oldest and largest association of law enforcement executives.” As the letter, which was published  last week, states: We are deeply concerned about efforts to portray automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology as a national real-time tracking capability for law enforcement. The fact is that this technology and the data it generates is not used to track people in real time. ALPR is used every day to generate investigative leads that help law enforcement solve murders, rapes, and serial property crimes, recover abducted children, detect drug and human trafficking rings, find stolen vehicles, apprehend violent criminal alien fugitives, and support terrorism investigations. Sarah Guy, a spokeswoman for the IACP, told Ars that current state and local restrictions have made the police lobby group concerned at the federal level. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops are freaked out that Congress may impose license plate reader limits

Epic Google snafu leaks hidden whois data for 280,000 domains

Google leaked the complete hidden whois data attached to more than 282,000 domains registered through the company’s Google Apps for Work service, a breach that could bite good and bad guys alike. The 282,867 domains counted by Cisco Systems’ researchers account for 94 percent of the addresses Google Apps has registered through a partnership with registrar eNom. Among the services is one to shield from public view all personal information included in domain name whois records. Starting in mid 2013, a software defect in Google Apps started leaking the data, including names, phone numbers, physical addresses, e-mail addresses. The bug caused the data to become public once a registration was renewed. Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group discovered on February 19 and five days later the leak was plugged, slightly shy of two years after it first sprung. Whois data is notoriously unreliable, as is clear from all the obviously fake names, addresses and other data that’s contained in public whois records. Still, it’s reasonable to assume that some people might be more forthcoming when signing up using a privacy-enhancing service that promises to hide such data. Even in cases where people falsified records, the records might provide important clues about the identities of the people who made them. Often when data isn’t pseudo-randomized, it follows patterns that can link a person to a particular group or other Internet record. As Cisco researchers Nick Biasini, Alex Chiu, Jaeson Schultz, Craig Williams, and William McVey wrote: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic Google snafu leaks hidden whois data for 280,000 domains

Consumer SSDs benchmarked to death—and last far longer than rated

We last checked in with TechReport’s grand SSD torture test back in June , when the first drives in the six-drive roundup had failed. The drives to first fall victim to the unending barrage of data writes were the Intel 335, one of two Kingston HyperX 3Ks (the one tasked with an non-compressible workload to stymie its compression-happy Sandforce controller), and the Samsung 840. All three failed short of 1PB of writes, but it’s also important to note that all of them—even the TLC-equipped Samsung 840—far exceeded their manufacturers’ stated write lifetimes. But now the experiment has come to its grand conclusion : all the drives have finally gone silent, their controllers unresponsive, their NAND cells heavy with extra electrons . The TechReport’s post-mortem is glorious in its depth and detail, with tons of data points and charts describing the course of the experiment and the fate of each of the drives. Tech-savvy buyers who might be worried about SSD lifetime decreasing even as SSD capacity skyrockets should have their fears assuaged by the ridiculous number of writes the tested drives endured; the drive that survived the longest survived more than 2.4 petabytes worth of sustained writes. That’s probably about 240x as much writing as a typical consumer SSD would need to endure over its lifetime. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Consumer SSDs benchmarked to death—and last far longer than rated

Indian ISP’s routing hiccup briefly takes Google down worldwide

For a short time today, people all over the world trying to access Google services were cut off because of what Dyn Research Director of Internet Analysis Doug Madory identified as a “routing leak ” from an Indian broadband Internet provider. The leak is similar to a 2012 incident caused by an Indonesian ISP , which took Google offline for 30 minutes worldwide. Routing leaks occur when a network provider broadcasts all or part of its internal routing table to one or more peered networks via the Border Gateway Protocol, causing network traffic to be routed incorrectly. In this case, the Indian ISP Hathway’s boundary router incorrectly announced routing data for over 300 network prefixes belonging to Google to the Internet backbone via its provider Bharti Airtel. “Bharti in turn announced these routes to the rest of the world,” Madory wrote in a Dyn Research blog entry posted this morning, “and a number of ISPs accepted these routes.” In the US, Cogent and Level 3 accepted the routes; a number of overseas carriers, including Orange, were also affected. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Indian ISP’s routing hiccup briefly takes Google down worldwide

AT&T still throttles unlimited data, and FCC isn’t promising to stop it

How long will AT&T continue to get away with throttling unlimited data plans? Even after the Federal Communications Commission’s recent net neutrality ruling banned throttling, the FCC isn’t saying whether it will put a stop to it. All major US cellular carriers impose some form of throttling on unlimited data plans, but AT&T’s throttling seems most likely to fall afoul of the FCC’s rules. The big carriers generally reserve the right to slow down data speeds for customers with unlimited data plans after they hit a certain usage threshold each month, but they only do the actual throttling when the user is connected to a congested tower. AT&T, on the other hand, slows its unlimited LTE users down for the rest of the month once they’ve hit a 5GB threshold, and the throttling happens at all hours of the day and in all locations regardless of whether the user is connected to a congested tower. More than any other throttling policy enforced by a major carrier, this one seems designed to push customers with grandfathered unlimited data plans onto newer, more expensive plans that charge automatic overage fees when customers go over their caps. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T still throttles unlimited data, and FCC isn’t promising to stop it

Microsoft to step up the pace of delivering Windows 10 builds

Though the plan was to give Windows 10 preview a series of regular updates, there hasn’t been a new build since January. Windows 10 has two public release channels. The fast channel is meant to get more regular updates, and so get new features sooner, while the slow channel is meant to be more thoroughly tested and a little more stable. Both channels have been quiet lately. While there’s no immediate change on that front—a new public candidate build is in testing but it’s not done yet—testers of the new operating system should take note: the fast channel is due to get faster. Gabe Aul, a General Manager in Microsoft’s Operating Systems Group tweeted today the fast channel is going to go faster , and if you want a more stable situation, you should switch to the slow channel . Further, Aul says that the company may introduce additional channels, perhaps to offer even more cutting edge builds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft to step up the pace of delivering Windows 10 builds

CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files

Crypto-based “ransomware” has become a lucrative business for cybercriminals. Since the arrival of CryptoLocker on the scene last year, a number of copycat malware packages have appeared to compete in the cyber-extortion market, encrypting victims’ photos and other personal files with a key that will be destroyed if they don’t contact the malware’s operators and pay up. Recently, a new variant has emerged that seeks to raise the stakes with a particular class of victim by specifically seeking out files related to a number of popular PC games, as well as Valve’s Steam gaming platform. The malware, which is a variant of the crypt-ransomware called TeslaCrypt, superficially looks like CryptoLocker. But according to a number of security researchers who have analyzed the malware, it shares little code with CryptoLocker or its more well-known successor CryptoWall. And while it will also will target photos and documents, as well as iTunes-related files, as Bromium security researcher Vadim Kotov noted in an analysis on Bromium Labs’ blog , TeslaCrypt also includes code that specifically looks for files related to more than 40 specific PC games, gaming platforms, and game developer tools. The games include both single player and multiplayer games, though it isn’t clear how targeting some of the multiplayer games would affect users other than requiring a re-install. The games targeted include a mix of older and newer titles— for example, Blizzard’s StarCraft II and WarCraft III real-time strategy games and its World of Warcraft online game are targeted. Also on TeslaCrypt’s hit list: Bioshock 2, Call of Duty, DayZ, Diablo, Fallout 3, League of Legends, F.E.A.R, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Minecraft, Metro 2033, Half-Life 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Resident Evil 4, World of Tanks, Metin 2, and The Elder Scrolls (specifically, Skyrim-related files), as well as Star Wars: The Knights Of The Old Republic. There’s also code that searches for files associated with games from specific companies that affect a wide range of titles, including a variety of games from EA Sports, Valve, and Bethesda, and Valve’s Steam gaming platform. And the game development tools RPG Maker, Unity3D and Unreal Engine are targeted as well. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files

reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

SAN FRANCISCO—Interim reddit CEO Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, finally took the stand today in the high-profile gender discrimination case that she brought against the firm three years ago. Pao maintained a firm tone throughout the day, even looking at the jury occasionally while answering questions from her lawyer about her early days at Kleiner. It’s the first opportunity that Pao has taken to elaborate on the gender discrimination claims she made in 2012. And the questioning started by going all the way back to the day Pao was hired at Kleiner Perkins. Pao, a Mandarin-speaking, Princeton-educated engineer with law and business degrees from Harvard, applied to Kleiner Perkins in 2005. At the time, the firm was looking to expand its investments in China. She seemed like a perfect fit, her lawyer Therese Lawless said. In addition to Pao’s language skills, she had years of experience working with 90’s startups like WebTV, Tell Me Networks, and Danger Research (whose team went on to join the team that created Android). She also spent time with bigger companies like Microsoft and BEA Systems. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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reddit CEO Ellen Pao: harassment complaints fell on deaf ears at Kleiner Perkins

Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

SAN FRANCISCO—iOS 8.2 has been in development for several months now, and today Apple is formally releasing the update to the public. It’s available as an over-the-air update or through iTunes for any device running iOS 8, including the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6, and 6 Plus; all iPads except the first-generation model; and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. The biggest feature update is support for the Apple Watch. The device will work with the iPhone 5 and newer models, but it will not work with iPads or iPods. Once you’ve tethered a watch to your phone, a new companion app will allow you to change the watch’s settings, organize its Home screen, and make other changes. We’ll take a longer look at this companion app when the time comes to review the Apple Watch itself. For those of you with other iDevices and/or no particular interest in the Apple Watch, there are still plenty of reasons to install the update. HomeKit will allow users to control devices at home Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.2 today with Apple Watch support and plenty of bug fixes

Water droplets bounce off these new self-cleaning surfaces

Every day, we interact with a myriad of surfaces ranging from soft fabrics to hard metals. Inevitably, this means we have to spend our time cleaning them. A class of self-cleaning materials would certainly make our lives easier. Previous attempts to create these materials have focused on developing surfaces that are rough and waxy; these cause water droplets to roll along the surface, picking up dirt and dust due as it goes. These materials have been relatively successful, but they have many limitations. For example, they’re easily worn away and easily contaminated by oils like those found on our skin. Luckily, scientists have now developed a waterproof, self cleaning coating that can be applied to materials that are as soft as cotton and as hard as glass. This coating is composed of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles with two size distributions, delivered as a suspension in ethanol containing the chemical perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane. After application, the ethanol is allowed to evaporate for 180 seconds before the coating is ready for use. This coating can be sprayed, dipped, or painted onto a surface, and it maintains its performance after several types of damage. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Water droplets bounce off these new self-cleaning surfaces