Author: Nick Farrell

Conservative social network killed by trolls

Posted on August 1, 2014 by - News

ronald_reaganAn attempt by US conservatives to set up a social networking site has collapsed under a sea of trolls and spam.

Ohio Republican Janet Porter pre-launched ReaganBook – “Facebook for Patriots”. The move was a reaction against employees from the better known social media site took part in a LGBT rights demonstration in San Francisco.

To be fair it was more a reaction to those “evil homosexuals” thing rather than an attempt at a real site. But several “left-leaning sites” (for European readers that is the same as centre right) gave the site more attention than it was read for.

Soon the real social network’s members were drowned out by a flood of phony accounts including Vladimir Putin, Sarah Palin, and Manuel Noriega and more sock puppets than a Muppet Theme Park.

Even Conservative blogger Amy Jo Clark thought the idea was half baked. She said that they should not have used Reagan as a brand.

Many users posted profane criticisms of former President Ronald Reagan, while others posted pornographic images.

Porter, who is president of the anti-abortion group Faith2Action, pledged to cull out all the duff posts.

She is claiming that what users saw was actually the pre-launch which gave the site the chance to tighten our security for the real launch.

Porter said that the fact that so many leftists have invested so much time in the site, “it provides confirmation that we’re on the right track,” she said.

We would have thought that actually all she has done is given “leftists” an avenue to give conservatives a good kicking.

Attempts to weed out the trolls and socks proved a little different. In the end it looks like Porter gave up. The site was taken offline by Wednesday afternoon. All this happened about 24 hours after the site launched.

Without a shred of understanding the PR implications, Porter asked users to be patient while we make the necessary changes to keep the site free from obscenity, pornography, and “those intent on the destruction of life, liberty, and the family”.

She promised that when the site opened it would have additional protections in place. “As Reagan taught us, trust, but verify,” the site said.

Lords want end to online anonymity

Posted on August 1, 2014 by - News

house of lordsThe British House of Lords is gearing up for a campaign to remove online anonymity.

The Communications Committee of the House of Lords has now issued a report concerning “social media and criminal offenses” in which they basically recommend scrapping anonymity online.

What it wants is for web services to be required to collect real names at signup, but then could allow those users to do things pseudonymously or anonymously.

It means that their actions could then easily be traced back to a real person if the “powers that be” deemed it necessary.

The Lord’s report said it would be reasonable to require the operators of websites first to establish the identity of people opening accounts.

However it is also reasonable to allow people thereafter to use websites using pseudonyms or anonymously.

“There is little point in criminalising certain behaviour and at the same time legitimately making that same behaviour impossible to detect,” the Lord’s report said.

The report notes that the findings are “tentative” and that these recommendations might possibly “be an undesirably chilling step towards tyranny.” but they do not seem that concerned about it, or they would not have made the general recommendation in the first place.

If the scheme goes ahead it will mean that most people will be anonymous, but armed with a court order, or a warrant, the authorities, or libel lawyers can find out who you are.

Jesse Jackson calls for technology diversity

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

Reverend_Jesse_JacksonUS civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has called on the government to investigate the tech industry’s lack of diversity.

Jackson told USA Today  that the government has a role to play” in ensuring that women and minorities are fairly represented in the tech workforce.

He said the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission needs to examine Silicon Valley’s employment contracts.

Jackson said that the tech industry’s demands for foreign workers need to be silenced after data shows Americans have the skills and should have first access to high-paying tech work.

There was no talent shortage, but an an opportunity shortage and Silicon Valley “far worse” than many others such as car makers that have been pressured by unions.

Tech giants have largely escaped scrutiny by a public dazzled with their cutting-edge gadgets, Jackson said.

Jackson has lobbied nearly two dozen tech companies to disclose hiring data, and about a dozen have done so.

According to the figures, men make up 62 per cent to 70 per cent of the staffs of Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn, while whites and Asians comprise 88 per cent to 91 per cent.

Their dominance is highest in computer programming and other tech jobs that tend to pay the most.

Jackson said that work equality was the next step in the civil rights movement. Minorities represent a sizable share of tech consumers but not its workers. Of Twitter’s U.S. employees, only 3 per cent are Hispanic and 5 per cent black, but those groups along with Asian Americans account for 41 per cent of its US users.

 

 

London student possesses another’s body

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

ExorcistYifei Chai, a student at the Imperial College London, has worked out how to use virtual reality and 3D modelling hardware to “possess” another person.

Chai’s method does not involve vomit or turning heads, or even an invocation to the Prince of Darkness. One person wears a headmounted, twin-angle camera and attaches electrical stimulators to their body. Meanwhile, another person wears an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset streaming footage from their friend’s camera/view.

A Microsoft Kinect 3D sensor tracks the Rift wearer’s body. Chai’s system then shocks the appropriate muscles to force the possessed person to lift or lower their arms.

The person wearing the Rift looks down and sees another body, a body that moves when they move—giving the illusion of possessing another’s body.

It is all a bit rough at the moment. Watching the video there is a noticeable delay between action and reaction, which lessens the illusion’s effectiveness.

You can only control 34 arm and shoulder muscles and Chai’s thinks that he can improve it with high-definition versions of the Oculus Rift and Kinect to detect subtler movements.

One thing he thinks the idea might be used for is to encourage empathy by literally putting us in someone else’s shoes. A care worker, for example, might be less apt to become frustrated with a patient after experiencing their challenges first-hand.

 

Swap noise for a ginger afro

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

silentpowerThe Silent Power PC has swapped  its noisy electric fans in favour of a copper afro.

In place of a conventional fan, the unit uses an open-air metal foam heatsink that boasts an enormous surface area thanks to the open-weave filaments of copper. It looks like a Brillo Pad, or that the unit secretly wants to audition for the lead role in a 1970’s version of Shaft.

The Silent Power creators say that the circulation of air through the foam is so efficient in dissipating heat that the exterior surface temperature never rises above 50° C.

The rest of the kit is conventional enough. It has an Intel quad-core i7-4785T 2.2 GHz processor, 8 or 16 GB of RAM, Nivida GTX 760 graphics card, and the usual array of USB, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, HDMI, DVI, and audio ports, along with Windows 8.1 as standard

But the whole thing is kept fanless by using a copper base, which is in direct contact with the CPU and GPU via thermal paste, forms the top of the chassis and absorbs heat and releases it evenly to the copper foam on top.

The difference is that its heat dissipation is 500 times greater than that offered by conventional fin-type heatsink systems and is more than sufficient to maintain adequately low operating temperatures. The CPU and GPU are on the top of the stack, rather than in the bottom of the case to help keep it cool.

It is not a big machine either – Just 6.2x 4x 2.75 inches. It does need an external power supply but you have to lose something when you get that small.

Installed in the machine is a sensor that the team says can detect movement to wake the unit up from standby as the user approaches. Conversely, if the user leaves the proximity of the device, the sensor detects the lack of movement and automatically locks the system.

The machine is only a prototype, German startup Silent Power is running its own crowdfunding campaign with a goal of €45,000 (US$60,000) to get the unit into production.

Pre-ordering of one of three versions of the PC for $930 gets you the base 8 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD version. If you splash out $1,030 you will get the 26 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD model and the top of the range $1,550 model will have 16 GB RAM, 1,000 GB SSD PC. Of course, you will have to wait until spring of 2015 to pick it up.

 

Government hackers take down Tor

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

glastonbury-torOne of the last refuges of dissidents in oppressive regimes has been taken down by hacker agencies working for the US government.

The Tor system, which was often the only way that dissidents could communicate in repressive regimes or that whistle blowers could leak their information, warned that many of its users might have been identified by government-funded researchers.

Tor Project leader Roger Dingledine said the service had identified computers on its network that had been altering Tor traffic for five months in an attempt to unmask users connecting to what are known as “hidden services.”

Dingledine said it was “likely” the attacking computers were operated on behalf of two researchers at the Software Engineering Institute, which is housed at Carnegie-Mellon University, but funded mainly by the US Department of Defence. The computers have been removed from the network, but the damage has already been done.

The pair had been scheduled to speak on identifying Tor users at the Black Hat security conference next month. After Tor developers complained to Carnegie-Mellon, officials there said the research had not been cleared and cancelled the talk.

Dingledine said that users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected.

Those navigating to ordinary websites should be in the clear.

Hidden services include underground drug sites such as the shuttered Silk Road, as well as privacy-conscious outfits such as SecureDrop, which is designed to connect whistle blowers with media outlets.

Dingledine said the physical locations where the hidden services were housed could have been exposed, although probably not the content on them that was viewed by a visitor.

All that matters now is if the spooks will just pop around to the researchers with a warrant and ask that they hand over all the details.

The FBI had no immediate response to questions about whether it would seek the data and the Defence Department was not sure if it had the right to raw research from the Institute.

Dingledine advised users to upgrade to the latest version of its software, which addresses the vulnerability that was exploited. He warned that attempts to break Tor were likely to continue.

 

 

 

Man beat Apple 42 times

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

gala_appleA 24 year old managed to scam the fruity cargo cult Apple more than 42 times – at least in Florida.

The Tampa Bay Times  said that Sharron Laverne Parrish tricked Apple Store employees in 16 states starting around December 2012 into accepting fake authorisation codes to buy $309,768 worth of Apple goods.

He was arrested by the US Secret Service special agents working alongside Apple and Chase Bank security. US spooks often get involved in cases involving currency scams.

Parrish visited Apple Stores and tried to buy products with four different debit cards, which were all closed by the banks. When his debit card was inevitably declined by the Apple Store, he would protest and offer to call his bank.

He did not call the bank, of course. He would just give the Apple Store employees a fake authorisation code with a certain number of digits, which is normally provided by credit card issuers to create a record of the credit or debit override.

What Parrish had worked out was that as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself does not matter.

However because Apple employees overrode the initial declination against the instructions of Chase Bank, Apple suffered the loss because of this fraud.

Applied Micro Circuits frightens Intel

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

godApplied Micro Circuits has begun shipping a new kind of low-power server chip that might cause its rival Intel a headache in the data centre business.

Applied Micro Circuits announced it is shipping its new X-Gene “microserver” 64-bit chips, made with ARM designs. X-Gene is being touted as a Server-on-a-Chip which combines 10/40g mixed signal I/O with top-of-class, ARMv8 64-bit cores running at up to 2.4 Ghz, with an enterprise-class memory subsystem.

The company said that it has already made a million dollars from the chips and expects “meaningful” revenue from the chips in the quarters ending in December and March as shipments build.

Chief Executive Officer Paramesh Gopi told analysts on a conference call that there was a backlog for X-Gene, both in the September quarter and December quarter, as well as the March quarter.

Microservers have yet to be meaningfully adopted, but the belief is that data centres can be made more cost effective and energy efficient by using them.

Chipzilla will lose shedloads if the server market moves towards such technology and cannot lose even a few percentage points of market share.

Intel spokesman Bill Calder said that while Intel was not taking the competition lightly, he thought that the much-hyped threat of ARM servers getting any significant market segment share any time soon has been vastly overplayed.

Microservers will probably end up in data centres run by major Internet companies and for use in high-performance computing.

Intel executives in the past have said microserver chips being developed by Applied Micro Circuits, Advanced Micro Devices and other small rivals were unproven and not a serious threat to its server chip business.

In the past couple of years, Intel has launched its own low-power chips, designed with its own architecture, in anticipation of a potential move toward microservers.

Hackers hack Amazon’s cloud

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

Amazon-Cloud-OutageHackers have worked out a way to break into Amazon’s cloud and install DDoS malware.

The hole is thanks to a vulnerability in distributed search engine software Elasticsearch which is a popular open-source search engine server. The software was  developed in Java that allows applications to perform full-text search for various types of documents through a REST API (representational state transfer application programming interface).

Elasticsearch is commonly used in cloud environments and is used on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and other cloud platforms.

Versions 1.1.x of Elasticsearch have support for active scripting through API calls in their default configuration. For some reason this does not require authentication which is how the malware writers have broke into the systm.

Elasticsearch’s developers have not released a patch for the 1.1.x branch, but starting with version 1.2.0, released on May 22, dynamic scripting is disabled by default.

Kaspersky Lab has found variants of Mayday, a Trojan program for Linux that’s used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

One of the new Mayday variants was found running on compromised Amazon EC2 server instances.

Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner said that it was not the only victim. The attackers break into   virtual machines run by Amazon EC2 customers by exploiting the CVE-2014-3120 vulnerability in Elasticsearch 1.1.x, which is still being used by some organisations in active commercial deployments despite being superseded by Elasticsearch 1.2.x and 1.3.x.

Baumgartner saw the early stages of the Elasticsearch attacks and that the hackers modified publicly available proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2014-3120 and used it to install a Perl-based Web shell. This gave them a backdoor script that allows remote attackers to execute Linux shell commands over the Web. The script, downloads the new version of the Mayday DDoS bot, detected as Backdoor.Linux.Mayday.g.

Microsoft’s Nokia plans as clear as mud

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

cunning-planFor a while we had been wondering what Microsoft was doing with its Nokia purchase. For the last week, Vole has been doing its best to slim down the former maker of rubber boots, but there did not seem to be much logic to it.

When the shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve “there is a kind of hush” Ballmer wrote a $7 billion cheque for the company we all wondered how an elephant like Vole was going turn around a giant Lemming like Nokia.

Nokia cost Microsoft eight cents from its earnings per share last quarter, but the costs are starting be contained.

CEO Satya Nadella, who replaced Steve Ballmer in February expects Nokia to break even by 2016.

The plan appears to be to focus on high and low cost Windows smartphones, suggesting a phasing out of feature phones and Android smartphones.

Two business units, smart devices and mobile phones, would become one, thereby cutting overlap and overhead. Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland.

It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary; shift to lower cost areas like Manaus, Brazil and Reynosa, Mexico; and reduce manufacturing in Beijing and Dongguan, China.

Expected to die will be the Nokia X Android phones, Asha and Series 40 phones.

Nadella said that devices, he said, “go beyond” hardware and are about productivity. “I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognised and into OneNote in searchable fashion. There is a lot we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity.”

It would seem that Redmond wants the sale of a smartphone to mean other sales.

This all makes sense when you factor in Microsoft’s goal to have the next generation of Windows, Windows 9 as a single operating system.

This would mean then that while Nokia might lose the smartphone market it will have a new role driving network access to corporate cloud systems.

Chinese regulators gun for Microsoft

Posted on July 29, 2014 by - News

microsoft-in-chinaIt seems that after claiming the rump of Qualcomm, the Chinese antitrust regulators want to take a bite out of Microsoft.

Apparently representatives from China’s State Administration for Industry & Commerce (SAIC) popped in for a quiet chat to the Microsoft offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu.

No one is actually saying what the conversation was about, but it is not thought that the Chinese water torture was used at this point of the investigation.

SAIC is not just in charge of antitrust matters, it also takes the lead in any bribery and corruption investigations as well as intellectual property rights abuse cases,

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company was happy to answer the government’s questions but did not say what those questions were.

Qualcomm is facing penalties that may exceed $1 billion in one such Chinese antitrust probe, following accusations of overcharging and abusing its market position.

Needless to say this is getting the US jolly cross. It favours letting businesses do whatever they like or senators are not going to get their usual Christmas presents from their favourite lobby group.

The US Chamber of Commerce earlier this year urged Washington to get tough with Beijing on its use of anti-competition rules, and warned that “concerns among U.S. companies are intensifying”.

Microsoft has been having a little bit of trouble in Big China lately. Earlier this month, activists said Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service were being disrupted.

In May, central government offices were banned from installing Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system, on new computers. This ban has not been lifted, as multiple procurement notices since then have forbidden the use of Windows 8.

Linus Torvalds wades into the GCC 4.9.0 compiler

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

torvaldsAn Open Source compiler has been blasted by Linus Torvalds as being ‘pure and utter s***’ and ‘terminally broken’ after a random panic was discovered in a load balance function in Linux 3.16-rc6.

GCC was designed by Open Source Pope Richard Stallman to provide a free software compiler for open saucy projects. It has been through many different incarnations and the latest hit the streets earlier this month.

The new version has upset the King of Linux, Linus Torvalds, after it appeared to break the 3.16-rc kernel. Torvalds did not mince his words at his disgust describing the compiler as retarded as a sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby.

In a rant which is vaguely like a John Cleese parrot sketch  Torvalds said that: “Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a constant. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn’t have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We’re talking “sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby” level retardation levels.”

Torvalds said there is no way that the problem is within his kernel, and claims that the compiler is creating broken code while also warning that those testing the kernel shouldn’t compile it with gcc-4.9.0.

He said that the problem is in the latest version, because the compiler was reliable until now.

 

 

Linux in Spain causes Microsoft pain

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

ValenciaIt has been a couple of bad weeks for Microsoft as more anti-Volish governments have been announcing successful open source operations.

Last week we had the British cabinet office moving away from Microsoft’s open document standard, and this week we have the Spanish praising Linux.

The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) has been waxing lyrical about Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution.

Lliurex is used on more than 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says.

The Lliurex distribution is managed through the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. During installation, users can choose between several variants, tailored for example for use at home, in schools or by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Sofia Bellés, Director General of the region’s Information Technologies Department said that the new version will ease maintenance and management of PC equipment in schools in the region.

The software has also been optimised to save time in creating PC labs and is allowing better control over printing, reducing printing costs.

Liurex is one of several free software projects used by Valencia. It is using LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity applications, is used on all the 120,000 desktop PCs of the administration, including schools and courts. Using LibreOffice will help save the administration 1.5 million euro per year, the government said last year.

Last week, the administration of Extremadura, another Spanish region, revamped the website of its Linex distribution, also used in schools. Linex is installed on about 70,000 PCs and laptops in schools.

 

Russian scientists save spaced out randy lizards

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

Tlizardhe Russian space agency Roscosmos has managed to gain control over a satellite crewed by randy lizards who are keen to test out sex in zero gravity.

Mission control said that it has manage to gain positive control over the agency’s orbiting Foton-M4 satellite. Launched a week ago, Foton-M4 carries a primarily biological payload made up of geckos, flies, plant seeds, and various micro-organisms which was supposed to test out how lower orders of life bonk when there is no gravity.

The satellite made headlines late last week when just a few days after launch, ground control lost communication with the satellite and could no longer send it commands.

Apparently the satellite’s five-gecko crew, four females and one male, were sent aloft by Russian scientists in order to study the effects of microgravity on sex and reproduction are safe. Scientists are spying on the geckos and then slice up the randy couples when the satellite returns to Earth at the conclusion of its two-month mission.

If they had not fixed Foton-M4 it would remain in its 357-mile orbit for about four months—two months longer than the provisions for its biological payload would last. The Geckos having bonked themselves to exhaustion would have run out of food and begun to eat each other, and not in a good way. The survivors would have been burnt to a crisp on re-entry.

Now that the spacecraft is functioning normally, the lizards can get to it safe in the knowledge that their death will not take place until they are safely in a Russian lab back on the planet.  Now all that can go wrong is a reptile dysfunction.

 

 

 

 

Apple misses a Beats. Buys lemon

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

head10When Apple bought the groovy headphone maker Beats for $3 billion, legions of fanboys in the press rushed to claim that it was the deal of the century.

It seems that Apple might have bought itself a bag of pain after Bose filed a lawsuit that accuses the headphone maker of infringing upon several of its patents.

The suit claims that Bose lost sales because Beats nicked its patented noise-cancelling technology in its Studio and Studio Wireless headphone lines.

To make matters worse, Beats advertises that the technology “can also be used for noise cancellation when no music is played” which is something Bose has a patent on. “Thus, Beats specifically encourages users to use the infringing functionality. Beats advertises no method to turn off features that cause end users to directly infringe.”

Apple appears to have bought a company whose products infringe on five US patents: patent 6,717,537, titled “Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems;” patent 8,073,150, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Signal Processing Topology;” patent 8,073,151, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Filter Block Technology;” patent 8,054,992, which specifies a method for high frequency compensating; and patent 8,345,888, which covers “Digital High Frequency Phase Compensation.”

Bose never mentions Apple in the 22-page complaint, and the Tame Apple Press insists that the lawsuit has come about because Jobs’ Mob paid such a high price.

Some magazines have even implied that Bose is being a patent troll saying that this is not the first time Bose has sued a competitor over patents. It sued Able Planet last year over its noise-cancelling headphones, and reached a settlement. In April, Bose sued Monster for selling headphones that infringe a Bose patent related to “fit and retention characteristics” of their in-ear headphones. That case is in its early stages.

Bose has also filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission against Beats over the same infringement claims. That means the patent lawsuit filed in federal court will be stayed while the ITC case gets resolved first.

Either way this is going to get messy for Apple. It already paid what many considered was too much for Beats and it is going to have another expensive court battle to fight.