Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak admits he has enjoyed many adventures in hacking often for the sake of pranks on friends and family, especially back in his college days and during the early years of working on computers and the Internet. "I like to play jokes," Wozniak said jovially as he addressed his audience of thousands of security professionals attending the ASIS Conference in Chicago last week. The famed admitted he also had some fun with lighthearted forays into hacking computer and telecommunications networks several decades ago back in his college years and while learning about electronics and computers. People with imagination in engineering are naturally drawn to the idea of finding ways to bypass security controls as part of the process of discovering how things work, and Wozniak said this was especially true of himself. "But I never once hacked a computer for real," he told his audience, meaning his break-ins and intrusions were done in the spirit of exploration, never for profit or malice. One youthful prank involved some experimentation into a shared computer system several where he left nine pages of Polish jokes that were dumped on users.
A criminal group exploiting the recently discovered Internet Explorer browser zero-day vulnerability has been linked to the Chinese hackers who earlier this year. The connection between the two groups is in the command and control infrastructure used, says security vendor FireEye. Within the two infrastructures were similar malware, IP addresses, and email addresses used to register domains. The latest attack, which FireEye has appears to target manufacturers, government entities and media organizations in Japan, said Darien Kindlund, manager of FireEye Threat Intelligence. The group hid IE exploits on three Japanese news sites, hoping to compromise visitors' PCs. The compromised sites recorded more than 75,000 page views before the exploits were discovered. The attackers apparently were casting a wide net in looking for systems belonging to the desired targets. The exploit would have worked on all versions of IE, starting with IE 6.
Google last week started rolling out a for Chrome, making good on a promise from last month when it offered the revamp to users running rougher-edged versions of its browser. Most users gave the new look a failing grade. "Fail, fail, fail," said Philip Wright, one of those who commented on the announcement. Google characterized the addition as a way to speed up search. "We're rolling out a feature that can make searching faster and simpler with a streamlined New Tab page," said the Chrome team on its page. "If you use Google as your default search engine, the next time you open a new tab in Chrome the search bar will be front and center ... [and] you'll also be able to check out current Google Doodles."
The Chinese government may be about to ease up on its policy of censoring its citizens. The and The New York Times, will be unblocked in one area of Shanghai. The government, according to the report, is lifting the Internet access ban in Shanghai's free-trade zone and is set to accept bids from foreign telecommunications companies for licenses that would allow them to within the special economic zone. "In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home," said an unnamed source in the Post report. "If they can't or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China."
The Swedish Svea Court of Appeal has overturned a verdict against Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg for intrusion and fraud against Nordea bank, but has upheld the verdict finding him The Court of Appeal has rejected a District Court's judgment against Svartholm Warg in which he was found guilty of involvement in fraud and However, it agreed with the District Court that Svartholm Warg should be sentenced for participation in the hack against Logica. The total sentence was reduced from two years to one. In its verdict, the Court of Appeal made a different assessment than the District Court in regard to the theory that Svartholm Warg's computer may have been remotely controlled during the intrusions. The court put a lot of emphasis on expert witness Jacob Appelbaum, who was a new witness during the appeals trial. Applebaum showed the court that the firewall on Svartholm Warg's computer was configured in such a way that it could have been controlled remotely, via a server written in Python, for example.
Microsoft on Friday launched yet another trade-in program to convince consumers to switch to a Windows device, this time aimed at iPhone owners. On its smartphones—the 2011 and 2012 editions, respectively—and pay a minimum of $200 for each. The Redmond, Washington technology company will issue the funds as a gift card good for purchases at the Microsoft Store. As in the that debuted two weeks ago, customers must bring their used iPhones to a retail outlet in the U.S., Canada or Puerto Rico—trade-ins are not supported online—where a sales representative will evaluate the device and decide on the dollar amount. Microsoft has 77 stores in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. "Microsoft Store gift-card value ... is subject to Microsoft's discretion and manager approval," the website said. "All trade-ins are final. Cannot be redeemed for cash. Limit 1 per customer."
Krebs on Security recently revealed that of three of the biggest data mining companies on the planet. LexisNexis, Dunn & Bradstreet, and Kroll Background America Inc. have been systematically plundered by hackers, most likely from Eastern Europe, who have stolen millions of personal and business records and are A site called SSNDOB has been selling names, social security numbers, birthdates, and more culled from these sites via a botnet attack last spring. According to Brian Krebs, you . A background check would run you $12; a drivers license record $4, and assorted other bits of highly personal info costs 50 cents to $1.50 per.
Cybercriminals still make extensive use of known vulnerabilities, even as zero-day attacks continue to rise. In joint research carried out by Kaspersky Lab and Outpost24, unpatched loopholes continue to be a popular means of carrying out attacks. "The results are a wake-up call for those searching for tailored security solutions that cover the 'threats of tomorrow,'" he said. "It highlighted that training your staff to be prudent is just as important."
Is it time to finally ship the Xi3 Piston game console? The modular computing company on Friday promised that "the wait is over". On Monday, Sept. 30, at 11 a.m. MT (10 a.m. PT), the Salt Lake City-based company promises "additional details" on the new Piston console, which everyone will be a Steambox or Steam Machine, powered by Valve Software' new SteamOS. Valve announced a week ago that it would have , an oddly-shaped controller that chose to use touchscreens, rather than analog joysticks, as a controller. So far, Xi3 has never explicitly stated that the Piston would be Steam powered; in fact, the company has previously avoided using Valve's name and the Steam service, even though Valve has invested in the hardware maker.
Ricky Gervais has a new mockumentary on Netflix, and his fellow standups bring the funny too.
Hackers backed by Iran have penetrated an unclassified U.S. Navy network in one of the most serious incidents of cybercrime yet by the Middle East nation, according to a report Friday. The U.S. doesn’t believe important data was stolen, but the attacks showed a new level of Iranian hacking power, including the ability to access military data, U.S. officials told . Either agents working directly for the Iranian government or an outside group with Iran’s approval allegedly carried out the attacks. The attacks came just as U.S. and Iranian officials tried to restart negotiations over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hasan Rouhani spoke by phone on Friday. Cybersecurity experts have said China and Russia have more sophisticated hacking abilities than Iran or North Korea but the smaller countries are , seeking retaliation rather than economic gain.
Judges and police investigators are on track to submit about the same number of requests to Microsoft for end user data this year as they did in 2012, according to figures released Friday. Microsoft received 37,196 such requests worldwide in the first six months of the year, meaning it’s on track to field about the same number of requests as last year, when just over 75,000 were submitted. Microsoft disclosed the figures in its for the first half of 2013. Five countries accounted for almost three-quarters of the requests: the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Turkey.
Imagine a rain-slicked parapet, thunder roaring like the shouts of gods—and a Nokia smartphone, whose battery has run dry. Now imagine holding that phone to the sky, screaming defiance, as a bolt hurtles itself at your outstretched hand. —and you walk away unscathed, with the phone charged to maximum. Today, that’s a pretty great way to get yourself killed. Tomorrow, too. But Nokia, together with the University of Southampton, has taken the first steps to “harnessing the power of lightning for personal use.” Check out the video below, where Nokia creates an artificial high-voltage arc to demonstrate how a smartphone could eventually be charged by lightning. “That the Nokia Lumia 925 could withstand this sort of experiment is testament to the renowned high quality and durability of Nokia’s devices and the company’s continuing research to increase the already outstanding reliability of its products,” the company said.
Let me tell you the moment I was sold on Shadow Warrior. I was sitting in an air-conditioned trailer in Los Angeles, during E3, and the opening cutscene was playing. Lo Wang, dressed in a well-pressed suit, cranked up the radio and blasted Stan Bush's “You've Got the Touch.” Then he...started singing along. Horribly. Spouting off short lines like, “Oh yeah,” whenever there was a break in the lyrics. And then he lit up a cigarette, settled back in the driver's seat, and kept singing. This is the type of dumb I like.
Several recent IPOs and eBay’s $800 million cash offer for payments startup BrainTree this week highlight what looks like a burgeoning market for tech initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions. On Friday, for example, Violin Memory, a flash storage maker, and RingCentral, a provider of cloud-business communications products, both went public. Last week, Benefitfocus, a provider of cloud-based benefits software solutions, and FireEye, which offers a virtual machine-based security platform, went public. Meanwhile, Twitter announced that it plans to go public, and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group will also pursue an IPO in the U.S. On the M&A front, following to enhance parent company PayPal’s mobile capabilities.
. about an ambitious new project he was embarking on. ”Free Unix!” began the missive. ”Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed,” he wrote.
Shares of solid-state storage vendor Violin Memory plunged more than 17 percent on the company’s first day of trading Friday, but analysts said the market for flash storage remains hot. Violin raised just over $160 million in an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange, which the company will use primarily to expand its global sales and marketing capabilities. But the shares, which the company had priced at $9 per share, started trading far below that and closed at $7.11, down $1.89, or 21 percent. The weak result came on a gloomy day overall, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the tech-heavy Nasdaq both down. The market’s lukewarm response to Violin’s IPO doesn’t spell gloom for flash storage, which is still a young and fast-growing technology, industry analysts said. Enterprises are buying flash to speed up access to their data, and the price premium for the solid-state media versus spinning disks is shrinking. Violin makes all-flash arrays for enterprises, designed to accelerate applications such as databases and online transaction processing. The market for those products is growing by about 60 percent per year, IDC analyst Jeff Janukowicz said.
Facebook wants to make its ads less annoying to users by only showing them what they want to see, even if it means a dip in ad exposure for some marketers. The company is changing its ads algorithms to provide users with advertisements that are more relevant, and desirable, to them, it said Friday. Facebook already takes information both from marketers and end users into account when deciding how to place advertisements. But the social network will now put more emphasis on feedback from users to decide which ads to show them. .
You're done with the hashtags and retweets, and it's time to go for good.
A looming U.S. government shutdown could mean smaller paychecks for some government IT workers and contractors, as well as renegotiated contracts for some IT vendors. The possible shutdown is scheduled to happen next Tuesday unless President Barack Obama and congressional leaders can agree on a continuing budget resolution to keep agencies open. Many congressional Republicans want to cut funding for the huge health-care program known as Obamacare and approved in the 2010 , in exchange for passing a government funding bill, but Obama has refused to negotiate. With little time for Congress to avoid a government shutdown, some IT workers should prepare to be furloughed, said Trey Hodgkins, senior vice president for global public sector government affairs at TechAmerica, a large tech trade group. Many government IT systems will continue to run during a shutdown, and systems administrators will likely need to continue to work, but some IT workers, such as desktop support staff, may have an unpaid vacation during a shutdown, he said. IT workers who install new desktops won’t be needed if there aren’t many workers on the job, he said. “Those things can probably wait for a week” until the issues surrounding a shutdown are resolved, Hodgkins said.
One of the easiest ways to speed up your computer is to add a solid state drive (SSD). Though expensive, an SSD quickly pays for itself by greatly improving your efficiency and productivity. But what you gain in speed, you lose in storage because the 128GB or 256GB capacities of the more affordable SSDs just don't cut it for today’s storage requirements. But don’t fret. Below are some low cost ways to free additional space on your SSD (or even hard disk drive) to maximize its use. The most obvious method to maximize space on your SSD is taking advantage of cloud storage. Archiving old documents and files in the cloud can free precious space on your SSD, while allowing them to be easily accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection when necessary. .
It may be the world's largest PC vendor, but Lenovo isn't exactly a household name in the U.S. That could change over the next few years as the company builds up its brand and sells more product to U.S. consumers. But in its home market of China, Lenovo long ago finished the task of making its name known, and is reaping the benefits.In the U.S., you won't find one single Lenovo store. But walk around anywhere in China, and chances are you'll come across one of its 18,000 retail outlets in the country.The company's presence can especially be felt in Beijing, where Lenovo shops and company advertisements can be easily found across the city.
Google faces financial sanctions in France after failing to comply with an order to alter how it stores and shares user data to conform to the nation's privacy laws. , said Friday on its website. Google was ordered in June by the CNIL to comply with French data protection laws within three months. But Google had not changed its policies to comply with French laws by a deadline on Friday, because the company said that France's data protection laws did not apply to users of certain Google services in France, the CNIL said. The company "has not implemented the requested changes," the CNIL said.
I'll confess, I'm no RTS savant; my strategy generally involves surrounding my base with defense turrets and sending wave after wave of disposable units at foes until I lose or, well, I lose. But that didn't stop me from donning my commander fez when some of the minds behind classics like came to Kickstarter and pitched a brand new real-time strategy game, involving massive armies and a few large robots causing a ruckus. Oh how time flies—Planetary Annihilation is here (in Beta form), available to Kickstarter backers and through Steam’s Early Access program. If you didn’t back it on Kickstarter, getting in early will set you back $60. Sixty bucks. For a beta. Yikes. The early access release will give you a fairly solid impression of what’s coming down the pipe, with plenty of explosions and resources to gather and scads of tanks and robots charging across barren wastelands spitting rockets and the like. But the controls are a bit confusing, documentation is non-existent, and the occasional graphical and unit selection glitches can be a bit of a bother. There’s no single-player campaign, which leaves the action to online multiplayer matches—playing against AI opponents is possible, though the AI isn’t firing on all cylinders yet and can make for a subpar experience. Paying for early access nets you a few perks and this is shaping up to be an awesome game, but… sixty bucks, to essentially be a playtester on an unfinished product. Hrmm. So Planetary Annihilation: it pretty much does what it says on the tin. There isn’t much in the way of lore yet, but that’s never really been especially necessary in the RTS genre. You’ll start by picking a landing site for your massive Commander robot. These guys are special, being the only units in the game capable of building things and fighting. But lose them and you’ll lose the match, so bringing their firepower to bear will likely be restricted to the extremely skilled (or desperate). Things unfold in typical RTS fashion: send your Commander out to build metal extractors on metal nodes and plop down some power plants to get the resources flowing in. Then build your first factory, and fabrication units—these little tykes can take over construction tasks, so your sluggish Commander doesn’t have to trudge around so much. There are Air, Ground, and Sea variants for military and fabrication units, each with their respective merits and drawbacks—loading up on Air fabricators will let you cover more ground, by even rookies like myself will have scout planes buzzing the map, using their anti-air capabilities to pick off fragile, unescorted units.
Google finally zapped a scary and disconcerting glitch that caused its IM apps to route messages to the incorrect recipients. Although Google said it repaired the delivery malfunction early Thursday morning, the company didn’t declare the problem fully solved until Friday at 2 p.m. EDT, more than 36 hours after the bug struck users of Talk, Chat, and Hangouts. It’s not clear how many people were affected, but the bug is chilling because of its potential for personal and professional embarrassment and harm to people’s privacy. posted to the Apps Status site, Google stated simply: “The problem with Google Talk should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”
! Feel free to print out this article and use it as a handkerchief to cry in, all you Half-Life 3 faithful. Okay, now that you’re over your disappointment, let’s talk about what this thing is. While Microsoft and Sony’s upcoming consoles use refined versions of their previous dual-analog stick controllers, the “Steam Controller” looks to be a completely different experience. Rather than sticks for movement and camera control, Valve’s gamepad employs dual high-precision trackpads. “Steam gamers, who are used to the input associated with PCs, will appreciate that the Steam Controller’s resolution approaches that of a desktop mouse,” says Valve’s announcement page.
Evernote is hosting its third annual Evernote Conference—aptly dubbed “EC3”—in San Francisco this week. Evernote introduced a variety of partnerships and new features yesterday, many of which are very cool, but what you get with an Evernote Premium subscription doesn’t offer nearly as much bang for the buck as an Office 365 subscription. At face value, those two things don’t go together. It seems like saying that a McDonald’s cheeseburger isn’t as good a value as a Schwinn bicycle. However, Office 365 includes Evernote’s biggest rival—OneNote—along with an array of other products and features that Evernote doesn’t offer. with licenses for up to five separate individuals or devices. .
With new DDR4 memory, computers will be faster next year but users will likely pay a premium on the price of the technology. DDR4 will first go into servers early next year and then into clients like laptops and desktops in 2015, said Mike Howard, principal analyst at IHS iSuppli. DDR4 will succeed DDR3 SDRAM, which ships with most computers today. Laptops will get longer battery life and be faster with DDR4 memory. DDR4 has 50 percent more bandwidth than its predecessor, and also provides 35 percent power savings. The voltage supplied to DDR4 memory is 1.2 volts compared to 1.5 volts for DDR3. The DDR4 bus clock speed will top out at 3200MHz, an improvement from 2400MHz for DDR3. Buyers will pay a 30 percent or higher premium for DDR4 memory compared to DDR3 next year, though the price differential is expected to decline to around 10 percent in 2015, Howard said. Starting in 2016, DDR4 shipments will outpace DDR3, which will ultimately fade away just like the older DDR2 memory.
Out of all the apps on your PC, which one would you say you use the most? If you are in the habit of making quick notes and lists, it's probably WordPad. There's nothing wrong with WordPad , but it is rather basic: You can’t open multiple documents, the find feature is weak, and coordinating and carrying your saved notes from computer to computer is a hassle. It doesn't have to be this way, though. There are plenty of Notepad alternatives that offer more features while still keeping the program small and efficient. They also offer portable versions, so you don't always have to install apps on a computer Whether you're writing code or a shopping list, there are free portable alternatives out there that can do the job better than the standard Notepad app can. They can be run from a cloud storage solution such as Dropbox or Google Drive or from a USB stick, and they offer a much wider range of features. If you'll pardon the pun, with cloud apps, the sky really is the limit.
A recently announced and yet-to-be-patched vulnerability that affects all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) has been exploited in targeted attacks against organizations in Taiwan since the beginning of July, according to security researchers. about the vulnerability, which is identified as CVE-2013-3893, on Sept. 17 and warned users that it is "aware of targeted attacks that attempt to exploit this vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9. that customers can manually download and install in order to mitigate the vulnerability. However, no patch has yet been released through Windows Update. as part of an attack campaign dubbed "Operation DeputyDog" that started on Aug. 19. They believe that this is the same group that managed to break into the computer network of security firm Bit9 as part of a different attack campaign in February and used one of its systems to digitally sign several pieces of malware.
