Author: Nick Farrell

Radio Shack customer data sold off

Posted on March 26, 2015 by - News

1980-radio-shack-catalogWho needs hackers? It turns out that all that personal data stored in US corporate servers can be sold off to the highest bidder anyway.

Radio Shack, which has been collecting customer data since the 1980s, is about to sell the lot to raise money to pay off some of its debts.

A list of RadioShack assets for sale includes more than 65 million customer names and physical addresses, and 13 million email addresses. The asset sale may include phone numbers and information on shopping habits as well.

Standard General, a hedge fund and RadioShack’s largest shareholder has bought the database but a bankruptcy court still has to approve the deal.

Needless to say some people have a problem with this and some customers have gone to court to block the sale.

As Bloomberg points out, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has argued that selling the data would be illegal under state law. Texas doesn’t allow companies to sell personal information in a way that violates their own privacy policies, and signage in RadioShack stores claims that “We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list.” Paxton believes that a data sale would affect 117 million people.

AT&T also wants RadioShack’s data destroyed for competitive reasons. AT&T doesn’t think RadioShack is entitled to the personal information it collected from wireless sales, and may be concerned that the data might fall into another carriers’ hands.

But there is precedent for allowing customer data to be auctioned off in bankruptcy proceedings. In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission allowed Borders to auction personal data if the same privacy policy applied, the buyer was in the same line of business, and the data was sold alongside other assets.

Standard General, which plans to keep some RadioShack stores open, may try to argue that it’s putting the data to similar uses.

Big Data man wins Turing award

Posted on March 26, 2015 by - News

Michael_Stonebraker_2MIT boffin Michael Stonebraker has won the Turing Award for his work on the field of database management systems (DBMSs).

The Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Turing Award, is the Nobel Prize of computing and comes with a Google-funded $1 million prize.

ACM said that Stonebraker “invented many of the concepts that are used in almost all modern database systems … and founded numerous companies successfully commercialising his pioneering database technology work”.

Stonebraker said he didn’t know what he was researching for more than 30 years until the people in marketing started talking about Big Data and that was when he realised that he’d been studying this thing for the better part of his academic life.

For more than 40 years Stonebraker has helped spur a multibillion-dollar “big data” industry that he himself has participated in, creating and leading nine separate companies, including VoltDB, Tamr, Paradigm4, and Vertica.

Stonebraker most influential systems, Ingres and Postgres, provided the foundational ideas and source code that spawned several contemporary database products, including IBM’s Informix and EMC’s Greenplum.

Ingres was one of the first relational databases, which provide a more organised way to store multiple kinds of entities and is the industry standard for business storage.

Stonebraker released many of his systems into the public domain, long before the idea of open source existed and ensured their widespread adoption and allowing other academics to build on his work.

Apple creates old lamps for new scheme in China

Posted on March 26, 2015 by - News

lampFruity cargo cult Apple thinks that the best way for punters behind the bamboo curtain to keep buying its expensive products is if they can trade them in like a car.

Jobs’ Mob plans to introduce a trade-in program for iPhones in China in association with Foxconn.

Under the deal, people will be able to exchange older iPhones at Apple stores in China for credit against the company’s products starting March 31.

Chinese demand for larger-screen iPhones helped fuel Apple’s record profit of $18 billion in the final quarter last year.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has said China is poised to overtake the United States as the company’s biggest market, and he is working to about double the number of stores in Greater China by the middle of next year.

The only problem is that most of Apple’s potential customers will have to sell a kidney, or body part to get enough cash to buy a phone.

Under the China programme, Foxconn will buy the iPhones directly, without Apple taking ownership, and repair the devices if needed before selling them on its e-commerce websites such as FLNet and on Alibaba’s online store.

Foxconn, a key Apple supplier, is also in talks to sell the older iPhones in physical stores and may take the trade-in program online in future.

Apple has a similar scheme in the US, where the company has started accepting non-Apple devices, Bloomberg reported.

Major US wireless carriers including Verizon Communications and Sprint last year offered subscribers schemes under which they could trade in their old iPhones for new ones.

Computers will be our overlords claims Woz

Posted on March 25, 2015 by - News

metropolisThe real brains behind the foundation of Apple, Steve Wozniak, said he has come to terms with the fact that computers will one day become the masters of humanity.

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review the new Australian permanent resident said he has started to feel a contradictory sense of foreboding about the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence, while still supporting the idea of continuing to push the boundaries of what technology can do

“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Woz said.

He long dismissed the ideas of writers like Raymond Kurzweil, who have warned that rapid increases in technology will mean machine intelligence will outstrip human understanding or capability within the next 30 years. But he has started to realise that those predictions might be right and that computing that perfectly mimicked or attained human consciousness would become a dangerous reality.

“Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,” Woz said.

It is not clear if humans will be the gods, the pets or the ants that get stepped on.
“When I got that thinking in my head about if I’m going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I’m going to treat my own pet dog really nice,” Woz said.

Wozniak said the negative outcome could be stopped from occurring by the likely end of Moore’s Law, the pattern whereby computer processing speeds double every two years.

The ever increasing speeds have happened due to the shrinking size of transistors, which mean more can be included in a circuit. But it has been suggested that Moore’s Law cannot continue past 2020 because, by then, the size of a silicon transistor will have shrunk to a single atom.

So unless scientists can start controlling things at sub-atomic level, by developing so-called quantum computers, humanity will be protected from perpetual increases in computing power.

“For all the time they’ve been working on quantum computing they really have nothing to show that’s really usable for the things we need … researchers can make predictions, but they haven’t been able to get past three qubits yet,” Woz said. .

Woz hopes they manage it  because it is about scientific exploring… but in the end we just may have created the species that is above us.

 

Disconnected computers can be hacked

Posted on March 25, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerFor years the most basic method of super security for a computer was to unplug it from the network or internet.

However a team of security experts from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have discovered a new method to breach air-gapped computer systems.

Dubbed “BitWhisper” the hack enables two-way communications between adjacent, unconnected PC computers using heat.

According to a paper penned by Mordechai Guri, computers and networks are air-gapped when they need to be kept highly secure and isolated from unsecured networks, such as the public Internet or an unsecured local area network. Typically, air-gapped computers are used in financial transactions, mission critical tasks or military applications.

According to the researchers, “The scenario is prevalent in many organisations where there are two computers on a single desk, one connected to the internal network and the other one connected to the Internet. BitWhisper can be used to steal small chunks of data (e.g. passwords) and for command and control.”

BGU’s BitWhisper bridges the air-gap between the two computers, approximately 15 inches (40 cm) apart that are infected with malware by using their heat emissions and built-in thermal sensors to communicate. It establishes a covert, bi-directional channel by emitting heat from one PC to the other in a controlled manner.

By regulating the heat patterns, binary data is turned into thermal signals. In turn, the adjacent PC uses its built-in thermal sensors to measure the environmental changes. These changes are then sampled, processed, and converted into data.

“These properties enable the attacker to hack information from inside an air-gapped network, as well as transmit commands to it… Only eight signals per hour are sufficient to steal sensitive information such as passwords or secret keys. No additional hardware or software is required. Furthermore, the attacker can use BitWhisper to directly control malware actions inside the network and receive feedback.”

 

Egyptians cloned Google security certificate

Posted on March 25, 2015 by - News

amumSearch engine Google is furious that an Egyptian networking company  managed to clone its security certificate.

According to Google’s bog, the search engine became aware of unauthorised digital certificates for several Google domains. The certificates were issued by an intermediate certificate authority apparently held by a company called MCS Holdings. MCS is a Value Added Distribution focusing on Networking and Automation businesses based near Cairo.

This intermediate certificate was issued by CNNIC.

CNNIC is included in all major root stores and it means that the misused certificates would be trusted by almost all browsers and operating systems. Chrome on Windows, OS X, and Linux, ChromeOS, and Firefox 33 and greater would have rejected these certificates because of public-key pinning, although misused certificates for other sites likely exist.

Google got on the blower to the CNNIC and other major browsers about the incident, and blocked the MCS Holdings certificate in Chrome with a CRLSet push.

CNNIC said that it had contracted with MCS Holdings on the basis that MCS would only issue certificates for domains that they had registered. But MCS installed it in a man-in-the-middle proxy which meant they could intercept secure connections by masquerading as the intended destination.

This was so that effectively it could use the certificate for customers who wanted to monitor their staff use of the world wide wibble.

“However CNNIC delegated its substantial authority to an organization that was not fit to hold it,” growled Google.

Chrome users do not need to take any action to be protected by the CRLSet updates. We have no indication of abuse and we are not suggesting that people change passwords or take other action. At this time we are considering what further actions are appropriate

Skylake desktop launch set for August

Posted on March 25, 2015 by - News

IMG0045566The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn claiming that that the silicon monster Intel is about to drop a clutch of Skylake desktop chips in August.

The rumour is based on the idea that every year Intel holds its Developers Forum in Mid-September but for reasons known only to the Gods has decided to change the date to Mid-August.

Fudzilla is certain that Intel plans to launch the desktop Skylake-S between August and October, while the production of dual-core and quad-core Skylake parts will start between June and July.

Skylake-S will launch as an unlocked desktop processor that will have TDPs from 65W to 95 W, but there will also be some 35W parts for All-in-One computers coming time (presumably in time fo Apple’s new iMacs).

For Fudz’ prediction to work, Broadwell 65W parts will have to be here in June and be announced at Computex. This will mean that the top Core i7 5775R SKU has a base clock of 3.3GHz, with a max turbo frequency of 3.8GHz, 6MB of cache, DDR3L 1600 MHz support and Iris PRO 6200 graphics.

Intel’s current Core i7 4790K is based on Haswell refresh core and it works at 4GHz and am 8MB cache, as well as Intel HD Graphics 4600. The Core i7 4790K has a TDP of 88W which is significantly more than 65W.

For Intel to make much impact with Skylight it will have to launch a Core i7 5770K variant that will works faster than the Core i7 4790K.

It also seems that Intel will go back on its word and bring in a new socket set based around 1364 pins. Intel was fond of saying that that Skylake will use the same LGA 1150 socket and this has lead some to suspect that there will be a socket 1150 version and an LGA 1364 version of the Skylake-S.

Software causes F-35 fighter headache

Posted on March 25, 2015 by - News

DF-SC-82-10542Trying to jack the latest networking tech under the bonnet of Lockheed Martin’s new F35 jet is causing the project some major headaches.

At the heart of the problem is the 2B software which sits at the heart of the $391 billion programme.
Lieutenant General Chris Bodgan said software testing in December revealed problems with the ability of the jets to fuse data about threats on the ground when four F-35s were flying at once. Rhis has lead to project delays.

The issue was being corrected and tested, he said, but the final version of the software would not be ready until early autumn instead of June.

As a result, Lockheed would likely forfeit some of the $300 million in incentive fees linked to completion of three separate software packages – 2B, 3I and 3F – for the jet, he said.

Bogdan said the current version of the software was safe for pilots to fly and the program office could have fixed the problem as part of the 3I software effort, but was pressing ahead now to avoid future delays.

For instance, the fusion problem did not occur when two jets shared data, which meant the Marines could fly two sets of two jets, instead of combining them into a four-jet set, he said.

The software was closely monitoring work on a computer-based logistics system, bulkhead issues with the B-model, and efforts to make the planes more reliable.

Despite all this, the Marines are happy with the programme which in other respects was doing well.

 

Italians about to charge Apple with tax evasion

Posted on March 24, 2015 by - News

iconItalian police are about to finger the collar of the fruity cargo cult Apple which owes the Italian government nearly a billion dollars in unpaid tax.

Italian prosecutors have wrapped up an investigation into allegations US tech giant Applefailed to pay corporate taxes to the tune of $964 million.

The investigation apparently now has enough evidence to ask a judge to drag Apple kicking and screaming into a court room.

The investigations, covering the period 2008-2013, involve two managers from the Italian subsidiary of Apple operations and one from its Irish-based subsidiary Apple Sales International, the sources said.

The probe claims that by having profits generated in Italy booked by the Irish subsidiary, Apple reduced its taxable income base and saved just under 900 million euros in the period, the sources said.

Apple said it was one of the largest tax payers in the world and paid every euro of tax it owed wherever it did business. Although that is a stretch of the truth. It might be obeying tax law by funnelling funds through Ireland or Luxemburg but it is certainly not paying every cent it should be paying.

It said the Italian tax authorities had audited Apple’s Italian operations in 2007, 2008 and 2009 and confirmed it was in full compliance with the OECD documentation and transparency requirements.

“These new allegations against our employees are completely without merit and we’re confident this process will reach the same conclusion,” it said.

Tax authorities have pledged to crack down on domestic and multinational companies in moves that could help shore up stretched public finances and sort out the country’s financial problems.

Boeing patents Star Trek shields

Posted on March 24, 2015 by - News

cheap_shields_03The US aircraft maker Boeing claims to have invented Star Trek style force fields even before it has built the US enterprise.

Everyone knows that the first Enterprise shipped with ablative plating and any defence involved charging the plating and real shielding did not come until much later.

However Boeing’s patent number 8,981,261 describes a force field that would use energy to deflect any potential damage.could provide a real-life layer of protection from nearby impacts to targets.

At the moment it will not protect from direct hits from a rifle, let alone a Klingon Bird of Prey.

The system can sense when a shock wave generating explosion occurs near a target. An arc generator then determines the small area where protection is needed from the shock waves.
It then springs into action by by emitting laser pulses that ionise the air, providing a laser-induced plasma field of protection from the shock waves.

“Explosive devices are being used increasingly in asymmetric warfare to cause damage and destruction to equipment and loss of life. The majority of the damage caused by explosive devices results from shrapnel and shock waves,” the patent says.

While Boeing may been granted the patent, it’s unclear how long it will be before the company deploys the real-life force fields.

Legal challenges mount against US net neutrality

Posted on March 24, 2015 by - News

1920s-telephone-advertUS Telcos and ISPs have started their first wave of legal attacks against the US’s attempts at net neutrality.

In the US the telcos have done all they can to make sure that they can charge their customers twice by insisting that the big internet users have to give them more money to use their tubes. The government has said twice that they can’t and asked the FCC to regulate ISPs and telcos which setup such schemes.

On Monday, US Telecom — a group that includes some of the nation’s largest Internet providers — filed suit in Washington, while Alamo Broadband sued the Federal Communications Commission in New Orleans.

US Telecom President Walter McCormick said in a statement that he did not believe the Federal Communications Commission’s move to utility-style regulation invoking Title II authority is legally sustainable.

Alamo alleges that the FCC’s net neutrality rules apply onerous requirements on it.

“Alamo is thus aggrieved by the order and possesses standing to challenge it,” the company’s lawyers wrote in the petition, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The challenges were expected, and it looks like any battle will be a show down between a democratically elected government and the bit corporates who really run things in the US.

However the legal challenges are coming much sooner than expected. Many analysts believed that Internet providers would have to wait until the FCC’s rules were officially published in the Federal Register before being eligible to appeal.

In a statement, the FCC called the petitions “premature and subject to dismissal.” It is unclear whether the FCC will be immediately asking for the cases to be thrown out.
Consumer advocacy groups that had pushed hard for the strong new rules said Title II was “the right law” and insisted that the FCC has a strong case.

Google Glass isn’t dead yet

Posted on March 24, 2015 by - News

gglassGoogle’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said that the technology behind his outfit’s Glass project is too important to throw away, and that the programme has been put under the control of Nest’s Tony Fadell to “make it ready for users”.

After Google stopped selling its wearable Glass device in January this year, many people speculated that the controversial gadget was on its way out for good. However Schmidt said that Google had only ended the Explorer programme and the press claimed that it had cancelled everything.

“Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it.” Schmidt added that Glass remains a “big and very fundamental platform for Google,” and that just like the company’s self-driving cars, the wearable device is a work in progress that will take years to come to fruition.

It’s like saying the self-driving car is a disappointment because it’s not driving me around now, said Schmidt.

Reports last December suggested that Google might be planning to launch a new, cheaper version of Glass this year, based around Intel parts with the updated model also reportedly offering a refreshed design and longer battery life.

However the list of “fixes” needed before Glass was viable was extremely long. However, Schmidt is suggesting that the company is committed to getting something like it into the shops.

 

Hutchison Whampoa to buy 02

Posted on March 24, 2015 by - News

oxygen_maskHutchison Whampoa is expected to finalise a deal to buy Telefonica British mobile unit O2 for $15.70 billion today.

The companies did not face any major issues during the two months of due diligence, which could allow the deal to be announced on Tuesday.

The deal could be announced as early as this morning, but there is some possibility that it might be delayed.

Hutchison is chatting with wealth funds including China Investment Corporation, Singapore’s Temasek and GIC, and one of Qatar’s big government-sponsored outfits to provide the cash.

The company has plans to sell stake worth about 3 billion pounds, which makes about 30 percent of the group to outside investors, the newspaper reported.

Hutchison Whampoa is owned by Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, and there might be those in the British government who are not that keen to have a British asset like O2 in the paws of the Chinese. However since no one minded when an Armada of Spanish financiers took the outfit out of British ownership, it is too late to bang Drake’s drum now.

UK spooks can spy on anyone anywhere

Posted on March 23, 2015 by - News

GCHQ buildingThere has been a gasp of horror after it was announced that US spooks wanted the power to spy on anyone, anywhere – but it turns out that their British counterparts have been doing that already.

The UK, granted similar powers to its own intelligence services and is now revealing it.

According to Privacy International , the British Government has admitted its intelligence services have the broad power to hack into personal phones, computers, and communications networks, and claims they are legally justifed to hack anyone, anywhere in the world, even if the target is not a threat to national security nor suspected of any crime.

The admission was was made in what the UK government calls its “Open Response” to court cases started last year against GCHQ.

Buried deep within the document, Government lawyers claim that while the intelligence services require authorisation to hack into the computer and mobile phones of “intelligence targets”, GCHQ is equally permitted to break into computers anywhere in the world even if they are not connected to a crime or a threat to national security.

The intelligence services are allowed to exploit communications networks in covert manoeuvres that severely undermine the security of the entire internet. This was how GCHQ hacked into Belgacom using the malware Regin, and targeted Gemalto, the world’s largest maker of SIM cards used in countries around the world.

Many people had assumed that this was the case. But court cases against the UK’s GCHQ are ferreting out numerous details that were previously secret. This shows the value of the strategy, and suggests it should be used again where possible.

 

Open saucers chase away the girls with DICSS gags

Posted on March 23, 2015 by - News

1024px-Musée_Picardie_Archéo_03Male open sourcers, with the sense of humour of 12 year olds, have managed to chase women from the work place by infecting software with jokes about their willies.

While it is mostly “brogrammers” threatening to rape women programmers which have been hitting he headlines apparently the medieval gags about a project called DICSS are getting out of hand.

For those who came in late there is a software hosting site GitHub called “DICSS”.
Github, if you remember, was under fire about a year over accusations of how a female employee was treated.

Offended people point out that this is exactly the sort of thing that makes tech unwelcoming to women, and not just because of the original project, but because of some of the comments that might take the joke too far.

Ironically the DICSS site was created by a bloke called Randy Hunt, who apparently managed to get around gags about his own name by running lots of “brohumour” projects.

Hunt said that the project started as a joke amongst coworkers, after a particularly impassioned argument between religious zealots for LESS, Sass, and Stylus, and why it’s suicide to pick an alternative when “my favourite” is clearly the best.

DICSS was “directly injected CSS” and it became an office joke around the office, that eventually manifested itself online and then in the comments of open sauce software.
It is the sort of thing that creates twitter wars and apparently there are a lot of DICSSHEADS out there.

Of course there is no such thing “directly injected CSS” Hunt was just playing around with the acronym.

As far as one liners go that sound have been the end of it but it seems Hunt could not resist Hunt thrusting his DICSS further.

He told Business Insider after he hacked off people with his Brototype project he thought he would do another wind up so he got his DICSS out publically.

Hunt claims that people want to be offended so when they see his DICSS they get out raged.
“It’s reverse privilege and that people should spend less time complaining about the community and more time encouraging people to push the boundaries of technology a bit and learn to see things in different ways.”

Apparently you can see things differently by looking at Randy’s DICSS.

“The point of all of my joke repo’s is that they’re actually useful code. They just happen to have funny names,” he said.

He denies he is a brogrammer and says he is just a fun guy – which his odd really because if you say that really fast it sounds like he is a fungi — get it?

Randy said that the only people that moaned were those who spend more time policing political correctness than they do making useful software.

True but really it cant be much fun to work with people who constantly make gags about their DICCS.