Author: Nick Farrell

Apple faces firestorm over celeb hacking

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

lawrrenceIt appears that the Tame Apple Press are finally giving up on Jobs’ Mob and admitting that the leak of racy celebrity photos was actually caused by a security fault on Apple’s iCloud.

Earlier this week it looked like Apple was going to avoid any mention in the hack as the press insisted that such an attack on the iCloud was impossible because it had this magical thing called “encryption.” Apple even went as far as denying that the iCloud was breached by hackers who posted nude pictures of celebrities.

Photos from the celebrities were stolen individually, the company said. The celebrity accounts were “compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that is all too common on the Internet,” Apple insisted.

However by yesterday it was clear that Apple was not going to get away with that. Journalists were starting to ask real security experts about how hackers got the information and it was fairly clear that there was a bit of a tiny weeny hole in the iCloud.

Reuters, which normally spins pro-Apple adverts pretending to be news, sheepishly admitted that the highly public affair remains potentially one of Apple’s worst public crises in years. Speculation continues to spread on blogs about flaws in the iCloud service.

Brandwatch, a company that analyses sentiment on social media, blogs and other sites, found Apple had received 17,000 mentions on Twitter were related to the security breach and the negative words associated Apple’s iCloud service include “violation,” “disgusting violation,” “criminality,” “failure,” “glitch” and “disappointment”.

What is worrying Reuters is that it could upset Apple’s coming launch of the iPhone 6 which actually includes features that use the iCloud for mobile payments. After all, if you are in the middle of a security crisis the last thing you want is to tell potential customers that the same technology which handed over naked pictures of beautiful celebs to the paparazzi can be doing the same thing with your credit card information.

“This could be a scary time publicly for Apple,” JD Sherry, vice president of cybersecurity provider Trend Micro wrote in a Tuesday blogpost. “They haven’t had many, Antennagate and Apple Maps come to mind, and this would most likely trump those.”

 

Russian sex mad geckos die in space

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

lizardA team of sex mad geckos who were sent by the Russians to see what they could do in zero gravity returned to earth stone dead.

The geckos were sent aboard Russian satellite Foton M-4 to study effects of zero gravity on reproductive systems.

According to officials at the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, the geckos – four females and one male died a week before the landing.

Apparently the satellite’s other randy cargo, the fruit flies were still alive and bred like crazy in space.

As the Foton satellite was not equipped to transmit live feeds back, Russian scientists will have to pick apart the 44 days of footage to know when exactly and why the geckos met their death.

Other than the fruit flies the entire experiment was a disaster. The Foton-M4 satellite was launched on 19 July, 2014 from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan. Though slated for two months, the capsule was recalled after 44 days following problems that began a few days after the launch.

Celebrity leak was Apple cock up

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

lawrrenceThe coverage of the leak of celebrity photos from Apple’s iCloud has been surprisingly free of blaming Job’s Mob for the leak.  

In fact, some of the coverage has even praised Apple’s security for its magical encryption which apparently absolved Jobs’ Mob of all the blame for the hack.

The large-scale hacking found snaps on the accounts of Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, Cara Delevingne, Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice and Selena Gomez.

However Next Web has found proof hat the leaks were caused by a breach in Apple’s iCloud service.

A Python script emerged on GitHub that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find My iPhone service.

The vulnerability allegedly discovered in the Find My iPhone service appears to have let attackers use this method to guess passwords repeatedly without any sort of lockout or alert to the target. Once the password has been eventually matched, the attacker used it to access other iCloud functions.

The tool was published for two days before being shared to Hacker News and Apple has moved to actually fix the hole.

Find My iPhone  has been used before for such attacks.  It that case hackers were holding victims ransom, locking their phones and demanding money in exchange for giving their phone back.

The Independent reported that Apple has “refused to comment” on any security flaw in iCloud today. So the Tame Apple press can go on telling users that Apple security is perfect.

US tech companies rally against China

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

55_Days_at_Peking-633098393-largeUS companies are moaning that Chinese regulators are ganging up on Western tech outfits in a bid to shut them out.

The American Chamber of Commerce in China is fuming about a series of investigations scrutinising at least 30 foreign firms, as China enforces its 2008 anti-monopoly law.

According to the Chamber, multinational firms are under “selective and subjective enforcement” using “legal and extra-legal approaches,” the Chamber said in a report.

A survey of 164 members showed 49 percent of respondents felt foreign companies were being singled out in recent pricing and anti-corruption campaigns, compared to 40 percent in a late 2013 survey of 365 members. Twenty-five percent said they were uncertain, or did not know, and 26 percent said no.

Lester Ross, vice chairman of the chamber’s policy committee, said the expansion of the enforcement was welcome in principle, but regulators were using “extra-legal” means to conduct investigations.

“They have taken what are, in many instances, vague or unspecified provisions in the law and moved to enforce them, and sought to enforce those means through processes that do not respect the notion of due process or fairness,” Ross said.

The Chamber wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and asked them to get tough with Beijing on its use of anti-competition rules.

China is using competition law to advance industrial policies that nurture domestic companies, the U.S. Chamber, based in Washington, said in the letter.

It is not just the Americans who are concerned. The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China in August expressed its concern over the antitrust investigations, saying China was using strong-arm tactics and appeared to be unfairly targeting foreign firms.

The Chinese argue that some business operators in China have not adjusted their practices in accordance with the anti-monopoly law.  Others have a clear understanding of the laws, but they take the chance that they may escape punishment.

Anti-trust watchdogs have bitten Qualcomm’s local subsidiary after it said in February the company was suspected of overcharging and abusing its market position in wireless communication standards.  Yesterday Microsoft was given 20 days to reply to queries on the compatibility of its Windows operating system and Office software suite.

Microsoft defies judge’s cloud ruling

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

cloud 1A US judge has demanded that software giant Microsoft hand over emails which are stored on a foreign server to the government. Microsoft however has refused to do so until its appeal is heard in another court.

Apparently, the emails are sitting on a server in Ireland. If the ruling stands then it means that Microsoft could fall foul of EU law, where the emails are stored and if Redmond does allow the data to fall into US government hands, it can kiss good-bye to billions of EU cloud business.

Practically it means that if you have your data stored in a cloud owned by a US company you are effectively giving that data to US spooks. In fact, the US government could then sell on that data to US business rivals.

Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the US District Court in Manhattan had on July 31 upheld a magistrate judge’s ruling on the emails.  It is not clear why the government wants to read the emails just that it applied for a warrant.

Microsoft has been desperate to prove to customers that it does not allow the US government unchallenged access to personal data on its servers.

Preska had delayed enforcement of the government’s search warrant so Microsoft could appeal.

But prosecutors later said that because her order was not a “final, appealable order” and because Microsoft had yet to be held in contempt, there was no legal reason to enforce the stay.

Preska agreed, saying her order “merely confirmed the government’s temporary forbearing of its right to stay enforcement of the order it secured.”

Microsoft is still refusing to comply with the judge’s order, pending attempts to overturn it. A spokesVole said that everyone agreed this case can and will proceed to the appeals court. This is simply about finding the appropriate procedure for that to happen,

This appears to be the first case in which a corporation has challenged a US search warrant seeking data held abroad. It is backed by AT&T, Apple, Cisco Systems and Verizon.

 

 

Microsoft. Explain yourself!

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

bad-dogThe Chinese government has told Microsoft to explain to its finest antitrust watchdogs why it is an imperialist software outfit hell bent on playing monopoly behind the bamboo curtain.

It is giving Microsoft 20 days to come up with an answer which does not involve a dog eating its homework, the monopoly was being played when Microsoft got there, or the Chinese antitrust laws were chewed by Steve Ballmer who thought they were food.

A Chinese antitrust regulator is apparently concerned that Windows operating system and Office software suite is not compatible with other forms of software, which is a surprising new thing that no one appeared to have noticed given that the nation has run on pirated Windows XP for decades.

The State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) repeated that it suspected the company has not fully disclosed matters relating to the compatibility of the software and the operating system.

In a statement, Microsoft said it was “serious about complying with China’s laws and committed to addressing SAIC’s questions and concerns”.

Microsoft is one of at least 30 foreign companies which have been put under the Chinese water torture as the government seeks to enforce its six-year old antitrust law. Critics say the law is being use to kick foreign businesses out of the country, while it builds its own homegrown IT industry.

Last month, a delegation from chipmaker Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O), led by company President Derek Aberle, met officials at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

NDRC claimed the US chipmaker is suspected of overcharging and abusing its market position in wireless communication standards.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is expected to make his first visit to China as chief executive later this month and will probably tell the Chinese what is going on.

Anonymous takes the Nintendo

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

urinalsNever mind pouring buckets of ice on your head, a group of Anonymous protestors have been literally taking the wee when it comes to complaining about British spying.

A video has been posted online that appears to show activists from the We Are Anonymous group drinking their own urine in protest at GCHQ.

The police refused to accept a potty full of urine on behalf of GCHQ so activists ceremoniously drank it.

People taking part in the four-day-long peaceful protest were warned by the long arm of the law that they were not allowed to take snaps of GCHQ spies as they popped inside for a meeting with Moneypenny and M.

Activists who are angry at reports that GCHQ and its American sister agency NSA have developed large programmes of mass surveillance of phone and internet traffic, organised the protest over the weekend.

Gloucestershire Police told protesters that there was a small matter of legality standing in the way of them snapping pictures of staff based at Cheltenham.

Other than the potty protest, the rest of the weekend was a bit of a damp squib. The protest got off to a slow start yesterday with confusion over when the protests would take place and only a handful of people turned up.

 

Samsung teams up with Nokia

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

arr_treasureSamsung and Nokia have signed an agreement to bring Nokia’s HERE mapping service to Samsung’s shiny toys.

Apparently HERE for Android will be initially exclusive to Samsung’s Galaxy smartphone line, and it will also be bringing a mini version of HERE to Samsung’s Tizen-based smartwatches, including the newly-announced Samsung Gear S.

HERE was the love child of Nokia’s Ovi mapping service and Navteq, which was another purchase from the former rubber boot maker. HERE is one of the main competitors to Google Maps and powers Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, Amazon Maps, and Garmin GPS devices.

For those who came in late this deal has nothing to do with Microsoft, which only bought Nokia’s “Devices & Services” division. The remaining parts of the company deal with maps, cellular networking technology, and R&D.

But the move will take Samsung further away from the Google ecosystem. Nokia’s business model is to charge for access to the map data, which presumably is what Samsung is doing, plus a little more to get HERE for Android as an exclusive.  However Samsung loses money for every user of its map app, while Google makes money from flogging its adverts.

 

Grand Ayatollah blasts high-speed internet

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

Detail showing fleeing Persians (King Darius centre) from an AncThe nation which once led the world with its technological expertise is now blasting high-speed internet connections as against its religion.

A Grand Ayatollah in Iran has been looking up his copy of the Koran and decided that access to high-speed and 3G Internet is “against Sharia” and “against moral standards”.

Writing in his bog, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, one of the country’s highest clerical authorities, issued a fatwa, stating: “All third generation and high-speed internet services, prior to realisation of the required conditions for the National Information Network, is against Sharia and against moral and human standards.”

Internet access has been an ongoing struggle between Iran’s hardliners, who retain key bases of power in the judicial, intelligence and security branches of government and wish to maintain strict censorship and control over all information. The problem is that more than half of the country’s 42 million Iranians use the internet.

Authorities frequently slow the speed of the internet as a means to render it effectively useless, thereby depriving the citizenry of the online access it needs for professional, educational, and commercial use. But at least their souls are safe and no one can get the information needed to question authority.

The Grand Ayatollah’s ruling might cause a few problems for president Hassan Rouhani who has said that Iranian people deserve better than to wait for information on the internet.

Conservative, religious, and security organisations and officials are terrified that they will lose control of their population if a faster internet is introduced. The also want the development of the National Information Network, (National Intranet) which was begun under the previous Ahmadinejad administration and will give the government total control over Internet access inside Iran.

Public face of Red Hat quits

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

8th_Doctor_FezRed Hat has announced that its long serving CTO Brian Stevens is quitting after 13 years in the job.

Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat made the announcement and gave a brief line of thanks for Steven’s years of service. In the interim, the office of the CTO will be managed by Paul Cormier, President of products and technologies at Red Hat.

On the surface there appears nothing untoward about the exit, other than the fact no-one at Red Hat saw it coming.

There have been some dark rumours that all is not well under the cappello rosso and some are saying that Stevens may have left because of friction between Stevens and Cormier. Stevens office had been moved out from underneath Cormier’s control and there might be some feuding going on.

Stevens, whose Red Hat page was taken down minutes after the news was released, had been with Red Hat since 2001. Before that he had been the CTO at Mission Critical Linux, and a senior architect at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he worked on Digital’s UNIX operating system. He is best known for his work on the X Window System, the foundation of UNIX and Linux graphic systems.

Stevens was often the public face of Red Hat and t Gigaom Structure on Red Hat and OpenStack. In April  he laid out Red Hat’s future technology plans at Red Hat Summit.

He has been a key player in Red Hat’s march to the cloud. Red Hat was not among the early adopters of OpenStack when it got started in July 2010 and it was Stevens, who got the company involved. Today Red Hat is the top code contributor to OpenStack.

Software errors cause Euro GPS to get lost

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

gallioEurope’s global positioning satellite project is not off to a good start after software was blamed for placing the satellites in the wrong orbit.

It does not bode well when a software project which is supposed to help Europeans find themselves to within 10 feet, can’t place its own satellites in the correct orbit, but that is exactly what has happened.

To be fair, the problem was not with the European Union’s Galileo satellites but  software errors in the Fregat-MT rocket’s upper-stage.

According to a Russian newspaper Izvestia a nonstandard operation of the integrated management system was likely caused by an error in the embedded software. As a result, the upper stage received an incorrect flight assignment, and, operating in full accordance with the embedded software, it has delivered the units to the wrong destination.

Both the upper-stage and the software for it were developed by a Moscow-based government-owned corporation, the Academician Pilyugin Scientific-production Centre of Automatics and Instrument-Making, or the Academician Pilyugin Centre.

The Arianespace satellite launch company, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos are currently investigating the incident.  It just seems a pity that the Europeans did not have a rival to the Russian or American mapping systems.

 

Sexist trolls force feminist gamer out of her house

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

Ricostruzione_homo_neanderthal (1)Desperate to prove that there is no such thing as sexism in the gaming community a bunch of misogynistic socially retarded trolls have managed to scare a feminist gaming campaigner out of her house with death threats.

Earlier this week, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest in a series of crowdfunded videos called Tropes vs. Women. The videos analyse games which portray women as damsels in distress, ornamental eye candy, incidental victims, and other archetypes that tend to be written in service of and subordinate to male players and characters.

Sounds harmless enough but some male gamers clearly felt deeply threatened and launched an incessant, deeply paranoid campaign against Tropes vs. Women generally and Sarkeesian.

This included a flood of violent comments and emails, videos documenting ways in which she is not a “real gamer.” Someone wrote a game where you can punch her in the face, and a proposed documentary devoted to exposing the “lies” and “campaign of misinformation” from what is, again, a collection of opinions about video games.

Now it seems that they have got so carried away with themselves they now think it is ok to kill Sarkeesian as a warning to other women who dare to stand up to men.  How very Saudi Arabian of them.

Sarkeesian spent the night with friends after contacting law enforcement about “some very scary threats” against her and her family. She’s published a page of extremely violent sexual threats from the person who apparently drove her to call the police; in it, the user mentions the location of her apartment and threatens to kill her parents, who the user names and claims to be able to find.

Apparently most of the vitriol is coming because Sarkeesian is actually succeeding and  is getting high profile support from popular developers and media figures. Joss Whedon and William Gibson, among others, mentioned it, and Tim Schafer of Double Fine urged everyone in game development to watch it “from start to finish.”

Having read some of the death threats and posts, you cannot help but wonder how these gamers are missed a court-imposed therapy for views about women with make Leviticus look like a pro-feminist tract. It is so retarded and so out of control that it contaminates the gaming community and gives them an excuse to attack women.

Fortunately, for the sake of humanity the trolls have not heard of the Streisand effect and not twigged that their over the top attacks on Sarkeesian have propelled Tropes vs. Women to a level of visibility it would not otherwise had had.

It is also weakening their argument that “misogyny is a lie propagated by Sarkeesian and other “social justice warriors” when you actively give it such an overt demonstration.

Samsung shows off Tizen watch

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

samsung_gear_s_pure_white_2_storySamsung has opened the kimono in its new Tizen based watch which has a curved 2-inch Super AMOLED display.

Although the Gear S smartwatch will not be much different from its predecessors, it will be the first Samsung smartwatch to offer 3G support. This means there will be no need for a Bluetooth connection to sync the wearable with a smartphone, though Bluetooth and WiFi support will still be there.

The Gear S has a dual-core 1GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM along with 4 GB of internal storage. It will also have GPS support and will serve for navigation purposes using Nokia’s HERE maps. Samsung says the wearable will have up to 2 days of battery life which it puts down to the use of Tizen.

It has the usual standard features like a heart rate sensor, a compass, an ambient light sensor will also be included. For the health-savy, all the S Health offerings will be there and Nike+ will be supported as well.

The device will go on sale this October and no word on the price yet.

 

 

Ohio wants to limit science teaching

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

BiM65CpIYAAdb-PThe US state of Ohio is considering restricting the teaching of science, in a move which might bring in a  Christian fundamentalist education system.

The bill, currently under consideration by the Ohio Assembly, is intended to revoke a previous approval of the Common Core educational standards, includes sections devoted to science and social studies.

The Common Core standards are based in core existing disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics; incorporate grade-level mathematics and be referenced to the mathematics standards; focus on academic and scientific knowledge rather than scientific processes; and prohibit political or religious interpretation of scientific facts.

This sounds reasonable but actually, the new law means that teachers will be forbidden to teach the scientific process. They might learn scientific facts, but will not be taught how scientists reached those facts.

The law prohibiting “political or religious interpretation of scientific facts” actually prevents educators from pointing out any evidence that says that the earth is more than 10,000 years old.

Republican Andy Thompson told The Columbus Dispatch that the bill would open the door to instruction on intelligent design. For those who came in late, Intelligent Design is a quasi-scientific way of saying that the world was created 10,000 years ago by a specific god in seven days.

Thompson however is not consistent in his statement of intent. He told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the bill does nothing to put creationism into the classroom what it prevents is politicised science.

That naturally includes the issue of climate change in which he quotes some fake science to say it is untrue and therefore “political.”

Where this will leave IBM which has a big plant in Ohio is anyone’s guess.  It will only be able to find workers who believe you can create data centre class servers by praying to God for them.

 

Michael J Fox teams up with Intel

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

back-to-the-futureStar of Back to the Future Michael J. Fox is teaming up with Intel to use the Internet of Thongs to find a cure for Parkinson’s Disease.

Fox’s plan involves using gear like the Pebble Watch to help in the fight.

Patients in phase one of the Parkinson’s study are being given Pebble watches which are paired with a smartphone. “The setup monitored daily movements and securely uploaded data to the cloud, letting researchers seamlessly keep tabs on multiple patients without disrupting their schedules.”

The smartwatch maker is excited to see its technology being used in medical research and perhaps ultimately helping to bring a change.

Chipzilla’s involvement using a new big data analytics platform that detects patterns in participant data collected from wearable technologies used to monitor symptoms.

Todd Sherer, PhD, CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation said that data science and wearable computing hold the potential to transform the ability to capture and objectively measure patients’ actual experience of disease, with unprecedented implications for Parkinson’s drug development, diagnosis and treatment.

The potential to collect and analyse data from thousands of individuals on measurable features of Parkinson’s, such as slowness of movement, tremor and sleep quality, could enable researchers to assemble a better picture of the clinical progression of Parkinson’s and track its relationship to molecular changes.

Wearables can unobtrusively gather and transmit objective, experiential data in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With this approach, researchers could go from looking at a very small number of data points and burdensome pencil-and-paper patient diaries collected sporadically to analyzing hundreds of readings per second from thousands of patients and attaining a critical mass of data to detect patterns and make new discoveries.

The idea was trailed earlier this year to evaluate the usability and accuracy of wearable devices for tracking agreed physiological features from participants and using a big data analytics platform to collect and analyze the data. The participants (16 Parkinson’s patients and nine control volunteers) wore the devices during two clinic visits and at home continuously over four days.

Intel data scientists are now correlating the data collected to clinical observations and patient diaries to gauge the devices’ accuracy, and are developing algorithms to measure symptoms and disease progression.

Later this year, Intel and MJFF plan to launch a new mobile software that enables patients to report their medication intake as well as how they are feeling. The effort is part of the next phase of the study to enable medical researchers to study the effects of medication on motor symptoms via changes detected in sensor data from wearable devices.