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Angry Jesus writes:

The Federal Trade Commission is still pushing the data broker industry to open up about its practices. After announcing an inquiry two years ago that focused on nine notable data collection companies, the FTC has now released a new report in an effort to push Congress to make the industry more transparent to consumers.

Data stalking of the population has become such a big business that Oracle recently acquired BlueKai, one of the most well-known companies in the industry.

AnonTechie writes:

Police at the door? Hit the PANIC button to erase your RAM. The Panic button is a new Python app called "Centry Panic" and was developed to mitigate cold boot and direct memory access attacks on Windows, Mac and Linux that could be used by forensics professionals to capture information from memory.

Cold boot attacks allow the fading contents of RAM to be preserved for reading after a target machine is shut down. Direct memory access side-channel attacks allow crypto keys to be yanked by attackers with access to the physical memory address space of a target machine. Both attacks work after a computer's chips are chilled by about ten degrees centigrade, as doing so noticeably delays memory fade on systems running DDR1 and DDR2, according to a paper (pdf) published last year on the feasibility of cold boot attacks. However the short window of time available to pull meaningful data in cold boot attacks coupled with the technique's failure to target DDR3 RAM raised doubts that the attacks were feasible. Academics said the lower voltage, higher integration density and resulting lower charges in DDR3 ram cells could explain the failure.

https://github.com/0xPoly/Centry

Blackmoore writes:

Ars Technica brings us back to the Prenda Law Lawsuit saga with Appeals court slams Prenda Law's mass-copyright lawsuit strategy

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has dealt a blow to the legal strategy used by Prenda Law, a "copyright troll" that sued thousands of users over allegations of downloading porn movies over BitTorrent.

The decision is more than just another setback for Prenda, which has been on the defensive since last year when it was sanctioned for its conduct and referred to criminal investigators. It's a ruling from an appeals court against the joining of many defendants together in a single copyright lawsuit based on their use of BitTorrent. As such, it will likely have effects on other companies that are still active in the mass-lawsuit space, like Malibu Media.

The opinion goes on to use an analogy offered by Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Corinne McSherry, describing a casino blackjack table that has different players come and go over time. Two BitTorrent users who download a file months apart are like players at the same blackjack table at different times.

Prenda shell company AF Holdings previously argued that it should be allowed to sue more than 1,000 people in the same lawsuit, because they were all part of the same BitTorrent "swarm" sharing the same file, an adult movie called Popular Demand, over a 5 month period. The judges made clear that if AF Holdings identified users who were in the same swarm at the same time, it would have been amenable to joinder - but not otherwise.

So far; so good - outside of kneecapping the Prenda Lawyers; they have to keep pressing the case.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

Samsung is taking another swing at the smart watch market, this time with a watch that, according to reports, is going to be a wrist phone instead of an accessory to your existing smartphone. From the article:

This new watch, which it will allegedly unveil in June or July, according to the Wall Street Journal's sources, will be able to make and receive phone calls without tethering to a smartphone, take photos, send emails, and will have GPS, Bluetooth, and a heart monitor, according to the Journal.

Angry Jesus writes:

Dimple is a sticker that contains 2 or 4 NFC buttons that can be attached to android phones and tablets. They don't need batteries, apparently they charge by induction and must be attached very close to the device's NFC antenna. They've already hit their first couple of Indiegogo stretch goals and intend to ship in August 2014. Not a solyvertisement, just something I could really use on my own phone.

freetown writes:

The verdict is out and it is what many had asserted. Google Glass is a failure: BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones.

The concern is that this product has been in the hands of developers for a year now but on the Glassware store, there are still only around 60 apps. I have seen various demos of what look like exciting augmented reality apps - services that overlay information on what you see through Glass - but so far these have not appeared in the store.

It would have been nice to have something like what Lumus is doing: Wearable Display without the usual 3D HMD problems but alas, they don't take orders from individual nobodies.

janrinok writes:

A bug in an e-voting application halted the release of European, federal and regional election results in Belgium, the country's interior ministry said Monday.

On Sunday, problems occurred when counting votes made on older voting machines in around 20 of the country's 209 cantons, the ministry said. The voting machines in question are x86 PCs from the DOS era, with two serial ports, a parallel port, a paltry 1 megabyte of RAM and a 3.5-inch disk drive used to load the voting software from a bootable DOS disk. A bug in the voting software used at canton headquarters where the votes are counted caused "incoherent" election results when it tried to add up preferential votes from those machines, ministry spokesman Peter Grouwels said. The application counted the results in different ways that should always get the same outcome but that wasn't the case, he said, adding that the release of the results was immediately stopped when this was discovered.

The fault appeared in the system despite the fact that the application was especially developed for these elections, was "tested thousands of times" and was certified by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he said. Halfway through the night the developer of the voting application, Stesud, came up with a solution for the problem, said Grouwels. Stesud declined to comment. The solution allowed the cantons to resume the count and send the results to the ministry that can now proceed to allocate the seats, Grouwels said. Some cantons already managed to send the results to the ministry because the heads of the cantons stayed up to wait for the problem to be solved or came back, others however went to bed and are dealing with the issue on Monday, he added.

The problematic voting machines are one of two kinds in use in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Since 2012, other parts of Flanders have been voting on a Linux-based e-voting system made by Venezuelan company Smartmatic. In Wallonia, the French-speaking part of the country, about 80 percent of the municipalities vote using paper and pencil.

Voters that use the old system receive a magnetic stripe card that they feed into the computer before using a light pen to select candidates from a list shown on a CRT (cathode ray-tube) screen. The vote is then loaded onto the magnet stripe card, which the voter places into an "electronic urn" that reads the stripe and sends the result to the main computer in the polling station.

After the elections are over the results are loaded on a 3.5-inch floppy disk and shipped to the canton headquarters where the disks are fed into another computer that adds up the votes before sending the results to the ministry. It was there that the problem occurred, the spokesman said, adding that the votes that ended up on the disks were correct.

Angry Jesus writes:

The Firefox OS Flame reference phone is now available for pre-order with shipment expected within 4 weeks. Price is US$170 for an unlocked GSM phone. It is intended as a standard development platform representative of mid-tier Firefox OS phones. Specs include:

• Qualcomm MSM8210 Snapdragon, 1.2GHz Dual core processor
• 4.5" screen (FWVGA 854x480 pixels)
• Cameras: Rear: 5MP with auto-focus and flash / Front: 2MP
• Frequency: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
• UMTS 850/900/1900/2100MHz
• 8GB memory
• 256MB 1GB RAM (adjustable by developer)
• A-GPS, NFC
• Dual SIM Support
• Battery capacity: 1,800 mAh
• WiFi: 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, Micro USB, MicroSD
• No network lock
• No bootloader lock

frojack writes:

For over 50 years mankind has understood the meaning of the Bee Waggle Dance. Though first decoded by Karl von Frisch, dancing behavior in bees had been observed and described multiple times prior, around 100 years before Frisch's discovery. The waggle dance is accompanied by release of chemical signals from the bees. The dance movements are thought to indicate the direction and distance to the food source found while foraging. Now, in a report in the Pacific Standard, University of Sussex researchers describe how they interpreted bee waggle dances to create a useful environmental map.

By plotting the indicated direction and distance signals embedded in the dance, they have created a map of areas with a high probability of bee foraging. Then the scientists overlaid these map with information about land use, and have come up with information that satellite surveys and other remote surveys will not reveal: the presence of pollinators. The maps indicate pollinator preference for different land use types, and different crops. They can also indicate the greatest distance that hives must be placed from crops and still provide pollination services. (Paywalled Details here. After adjusting for the bees preference for shorter distances, the researchers were able to determine hot-zones of high bee interest, and areas that didn't interest the bees at all. Oddly, areas managed under the UK's Organic Stewardship programs were less desirable than lands managed to a broader EU standard.

broggyr writes:

So, whereas Spotify was limited to one user, the forums at Avast has been compromised and the details of 400,000 users is at risk.

http://betanews.com/2014/05/27/avast-hacked-400000 -user-details-stolen/

anubi writes:

PC World reports:

Hackers appear to be exploiting Apple's "Find My iPhone" service to lock up phones and tablets and send ransom demands to their owners.

A number of reports on Apple's support forum tell of devices displaying messages that they have been hacked by "Oleg Pliss" and demanding payment of a US$100 ransom via PayPal to unlock them. Most of the reports were from Australians but there were also reports from a Briton and a Canadian.

DrMag writes:

We've probably all said that Wikipedia should never be used as a primary source in any study. A recent publication [jaoa.org] gives that philosophy teeth, finding that in 9 of the Wikipedia articles about the 10 most costly diseases, there are significant errors that are contradictory to actual published literature.

Since its 2001 launch, Wikipedia has become the most popular general reference site on the Internet, ranking 6th globally based on Internet traffic.

Wikipedia's prominence has been made possible by its fundamental design as a wiki, or collaborative database, allowing all users the ability to add, delete, and edit information at will. However, it is this very feature that has raised concern in the medical community regarding the reliability of the information it contains.

Despite these concerns, Wikipedia has become a popular source of health care information, with 47% to 70% of physicians and medical students admitting to using it as a reference. In actuality, these figures may be higher because some researchers suspect its use is underreported. Although the effect of Wikipedia's information on medical decision making is unclear, it almost certainly has an influence.

janrinok writes:

Beneath the calm waters of Lake Kivu lie vast but deadly reserves of methane and carbon dioxide, which Rwanda is tapping both to save lives and provide a lucrative power source. Plans are in place to pump out enough gas for power that would nearly double Rwanda's current electricity capacity, as well as reducing the chance of what experts warn could be a potentially "catastrophic" natural disaster.

AnonTechie writes:

From Computer World:

New banking Trojan 'Zberp' offers the worst of Zeus and Carberp. The malware, targets customers of 450 financial institutions, security researchers from Trusteer said.

The new threat, dubbed Zberp by security researchers from IBM subsidiary Trusteer, has a wide range of features. It can gather information about infected computers including their IP addresses and names; take screen shots and upload them to a remote server; steal FTP and POP3 credentials, SSL certificates and information inputted into Web forms; hijack browsing sessions and insert rogue content into opened websites, and initiate rogue remote desktop connections using the VNC and RDP protocols.

The Trusteer researchers consider Zberp a variant of ZeusVM, a recent modification of the widely used Zeus Trojan program whose source code was leaked on underground forums in 2011. ZeusVM was discovered in February and stands out from other Zeus-based malware through its authors' use of steganography to hide configuration data inside images.

More information can be found at SecurityIntelligence.com from Dana Tamir, Director of Enterprise Security at Trusteer.

Fluffeh writes:

A day after the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit in the UK got the domain name of Torrentz.eu suspended, the leading torrent search engine is back in action. The site's Polish registrar restored the domain name's DNS entries after Torrentz' legal team pointed out that the suspension was unlawful. The Poland-based company Nazwa, had suspended the Torrentz.eu domain. This drastic step was taken after they received a letter from the UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

In a long letter the lawyer explained that the domain can't simply be held hostage based on a third-party request. Among other things, this argument is based on an earlier decision by ICANN's Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy panel which concluded that a court order is required to take such drastic action. While the registrar has not yet replied to the letter, the fact that the old DNS entries have been restored suggests that they admit that the suspension was in error.