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All US Postal Service employees’ personal data exposed by hackers

Barbara Krawcowicz All United States Postal Service (USPS) employees’ personal data—including names, addresses, social security numbers—has been exposed as the result of a hack believed to have originated from China. According to its own tally, USPS employs over 600,000 people. “We began investigating this incident as soon as we learned of it, and we are cooperating with the investigation, which is ongoing,” David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, wrote in a statement (PDF) on Monday. “The investigation is being led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and joined by other federal and postal investigatory agencies. The intrusion is limited in scope and all operations of the Postal Service are functioning normally.” The USPS does not believe that in-store customer data was exposed, but customers who contacted the agency via e-mail or phone between January 1 and August 16, 2014 may have been. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All US Postal Service employees’ personal data exposed by hackers

WTF, Russia’s domestic Internet traffic mysteriously passes through Chinese routers

Dyn Research Domestic Internet traffic traveling inside the borders of Russia has repeatedly been rerouted outside of the country under an unexplained series of events that degrades performance and could compromise the security of Russian communications. The finding, reported Thursday in a blog post published by Internet monitoring service Renesys , underscores the fragility of the border gateway protocol (BGP), which forms the underpinning of the Internet’s global routing system. In this case, domestic Russian traffic was repeatedly routed to routers operated by China Telecom, a firm with close ties to that county’s government. When huge amounts of traffic are diverted to far-away regions before ultimately reaching their final destination, it increases the chances hackers with the ability to monitor the connections have monitored or even altered some of the communications. A similar concern emerged last year, when Renesys found big chunks of traffic belonging to US banks, government agencies, and network service providers had been improperly routed through Belarusian or Icelandic service providers . The hijacking of Russian traffic is linked to last year’s peering agreement between Russian mobile provider Vimpelcom and China Telecom. The pact allowed the firms to save money by having some of their traffic carried over the other’s network rather than through a more expensive transit operator. On multiple occasions since then, according to Renesys, communications destined for Russia has followed extremely round-about routes that take the traffic into China before sending it on to its final stop. Doug Madory, director of internet analysis in Renesys research arm Dyn wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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WTF, Russia’s domestic Internet traffic mysteriously passes through Chinese routers

400 Tor-anonymized domains tracked down and seized in global crackdown

Thursday’s takedown of the Silk Road 2.0 drug website was part of a much bigger crackdown by police in a dozen countries that seized more than 400 darknet domains, it was widely reported Friday. Operation Onymous, as the coordinated international effort was dubbed, confiscated $1 million in bitcoins, $250,000 in cash, and a variety of drugs, gold, and silver, the Associated Press reported . In all, according to Wired , police seized 414 .onion domains, the Web addresses that use the Tor anonymity service to hide the physical location where they’re hosted. At least 17 people were arrested. Sites besides Silk Road 2.0 that were taken down included Hydra, Cloud Nine, Pandora, and Blue Sky. In all, some 55 different markets will be shut down once Operation Onymous is completed. Sites Agora and Evolution aren’t among them. The rise of underground bazaars selling illicit drugs and services has continued despite last year’s arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road who has pleaded not guilty and continues to fight the criminal charges in court. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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400 Tor-anonymized domains tracked down and seized in global crackdown

37,000-year-old Russian skeleton has Neanderthal DNA that’s gone missing

Stew Dean Another week, another ancient human genome. We just recently covered the oldest modern human genome yet described . Now, another paper takes a look at the DNA from a different modern human genome and comes to similar conclusions: interbreeding with Neanderthals was already deep in the past as of 37,000 years ago. But researchers were able to find stretches of the Neanderthal genome that are no longer present in any modern human populations that we’ve sampled. The skeleton in this case comes from the European area of Russia; it was found at a site called Kostenki-Borshchevo north of the Black Sea. The team behind the new paper (which does not include Svante Pääbo, who has pioneered ancient genomics) was only able to get a rough draft of the individual’s genome, on average sequencing every base 2.4 times. Thus, the sequence is likely to include a large number of errors and gaps. These make the conclusions a bit more tenuous than previous work but shouldn’t bias them in any particular direction. One thing the results make clear is that humanity’s migration out of Africa was complicated. K-14, as the skeleton is called, shares very few of the DNA differences that are associated with East Asian populations, as has been the case with the Siberian modern human skeletons we’ve looked at. All of which suggests that East Asians and Eurasians split off early and may even have engaged in separate migrations out of Africa or the Middle East. K-14 also lacks common variants found in Native Americans, leaving a single Siberian skeleton as the only one that has an affinity to them. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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37,000-year-old Russian skeleton has Neanderthal DNA that’s gone missing

Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update

Even this DSL-loving turtle thought Comcast’s service was too slow this week. Comcast Comcast attempted to update its X1 cable platform this week, but it ended up causing a lengthy outage for many customers. The company apologized yesterday and promised to issue credits to compensate customers for the time they weren’t able to use their TV service. Customer reports suggest that Internet service went down as well. “We know some of our customers may have missed their favorite shows off and on over the past few days and were unable to easily reach our customer care representatives for assistance… and we’re really sorry,” Comcast Senior VP Charlie Herrin wrote . Herrin’s new job is fixing Comcast’s disappointing customer service. His announcement yesterday, titled, “Our mistake: making it right for customers,” continues: In the process of upgrading the X1 platform with new services and features, a technical issue arose that caused problems for our customers. We’re working now to identify the customers who were impacted to personally apologize and proactively give them credits which we plan to have out to them within the next two weeks. This issue was our fault and we want to make it right. So what happened? While we were deploying an upgrade to the X1 platform, we discovered an issue in the way the software that updates X1 was configured. We immediately stopped the deployment, and our engineers began working to identify the root cause and fix the issue. While service has returned to normal for most X1 customers, our engineers are now going back over this issue and taking extra steps to prevent it from happening again. The fix we’ve put in place should be automatic—customers don’t need to do anything (such as rebooting or unplugging the box). Thanks to our customers who have been patient with us, and to our employees who have been working around the clock on this. Outages were reported  in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and other cities. According to customer reports at DownDetector.com, more customers experienced Internet outages than TV outages, with 10 percent reporting a “total blackout.” We’ve asked Comcast whether the faulty update also caused Internet outages but haven’t received an answer yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update

GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

The 2015 Cadillac ATS coupe with integrated LTE. It’s basically a big red smartphone. Ron Amadeo Harman International, the car infotainment manufacturer, recently spilled the beans on a “next-gen” infotainment system it is building for General Motors.  Automotive News  has quotes from the company’s CEO, Dinesh Paliwal, who describes an Android-based system with an app store and “instant” boot up. The report says that Harman is “working closely” with Google to make the system a reality. This system isn’t Android Auto. Unlike regular Android, Android Wear, and Android TV, Android Auto isn’t an operating system. It doesn’t live on the car’s computer, it doesn’t control peripherals, and it doesn’t have an app store. Like Apple’s CarPlay, Android Auto is just a “casted” interface. Your plugged-in smartphone sends a custom interface to the car’s screen and receives touch events, but the car still has to run some other operating system. Harman won a $900 million contract from GM to build the system, and judging by the Harman CEO’s description, this is an actual embedded Android system that will power the entire infotainment setup. That typically includes the audio system, air conditioning, navigation, voice recognition, phone calls, reverse cameras, and Internet access. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

Underscoring just how broken the widely used MD5 hashing algorithm is, a software engineer racked up just 65 cents in computing fees to replicate the type of attack a powerful nation-state used in 2012 to hijack Microsoft’s Windows Update mechanism. Nathaniel McHugh ran open source software known as HashClash to modify two separate images—one of them depicting funk legend James Brown and the other R&B singer/songwriter Barry White—that generate precisely the same MD5 hash, e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338. The exercise—known in cryptographic circles as a hash collision—took just 10 hours and cost only 65 cents plus tax to complete using a GPU instance on Amazon Web Service. In 2007, cryptography expert and HashClash creator Marc Stevens estimated it would require about one day to complete an MD5 collision using a cluster of PlayStation 3 consoles . The MD5 hash for this picture—e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338—is precisely the same for the one below. Such “collisions” are a fatal flaw for hashing algorithms and can lead to disastrous attacks. The practical ability to create two separate inputs that generate the same hash is a fundamental flaw that makes MD5 unsuitable for most purposes. (The exception is password hashing. Single iteration MD5 hashing is horrible for passwords but for an entirely different reason that is outside the scope of this post.) The susceptibility to collisions can have disastrous consequences, potentially for huge swaths of the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

iOS 8.1.1 said to address iPhone 4S and iPad 2 performance problems

Have an iPhone 4S running iOS 8? You’re due for a speed increase. Andrew Cunningham Late yesterday, Apple released the first beta build of iOS 8.1.1 to developers . The first update to iOS 8.1 will include customary bug fixes, but the preliminary release notes suggest a far more interesting development: the update promises to improve performance on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 , two of the oldest devices that support iOS 8. This would address one of our biggest criticisms of iOS 8, which in our testing was significantly slower on these older devices than iOS 7 was. Apps took longer to launch, and the user interface was often jerky and inconsistent in ways that it wasn’t before. Apple has a long history of speeding up new iOS versions on old hardware post-release— iOS 4.1 on the iPhone 3G , iOS 7.1 on the iPhone 4 , and now iOS 8.1.1. It would be nice if performance on older hardware was better optimized in the first place, but newer hardware obviously takes precedence. When the final version of iOS 8.1.1 is released, we’ll throw it on an iPhone 4S and iPad 2 to see how much the performance really improves. Although they’re not mentioned by name in the release notes, we’d also expect the improvements to help the original iPad Mini and the fifth-generation iPod Touch, which are internally similar to the 4S and iPad 2. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iOS 8.1.1 said to address iPhone 4S and iPad 2 performance problems

In Detroit and other cities, nearly 40 percent go without Internet

It may be hard to believe, but there are big cities in the US where 30 to 40 percent of residents have no Internet access at all. And among those who are online in America’s worst-connected cities, a sizable percentage get by with only cellular Internet. That’s according to 2013 census data compiled by Bill Callahan, director of  Connect Your Community 2.0 , a group promoting Internet access for residents of Cleveland, OH, and Detroit, MI. Callahan published charts on his blog yesterday  showing how many households lack Internet access in the 25 worst connected cities in the US (out of 176 that have at least 50,000 households). In Laredo, TX, 40.2 percent of the 65,685 households have no Internet access, not even mobile broadband on a phone. Detroit was second in this list with 39.9 percent of households lacking Internet. In all 25 cities, at least 29.8 percent lacked Internet access. The 25 cities varied in size from 52,588 households (Kansas City, KS) to 255,322 households (Detroit). Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GTA V’s new console/PC re-release to add optional first-person view

Since its launch as a top-down, sprite-based crime simulator in 1997, the Grand Theft Auto series has always taken place strictly from a third-person perspective. That’s set to change on November 18, as the previously announced re-release of Grand Theft Auto V hits the Xbox One and PS4 with a series-first optional first-person perspective. The new first-person mode goes a lot farther than unofficial mods that have tried to add a behind-the-eyes perspective to GTA games in the past. “You have to change pretty much everything,” GTA V animation director Rob Nelson told IGN in a promotional interview talking about the new feature. “I mean, if you want to do it right. We have a very solid third-person animation system, but you don’t just put the camera down there and expect to see the guns, aim, and shoot. All those animations are new when you switch to first-person, because it all has to be animated to the camera, to make it feel like a proper first-person experience that I think people would expect. All the timings have to be re-evaluated.” Other little details added for the benefit of the new view include recoil on weapons, view-restricting goggles and helmets when piloting certain vehicles, and a cell phone menu that your character now actually holds in front of his face. The official trailer for the new mode seems to show the perspective automatically swiveling around to view important story and character moments. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GTA V’s new console/PC re-release to add optional first-person view