Wi-Fi patent troll hit with racketeering suit emerges unscathed

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Innovatio deliberately avoided targeting the actual manufacturers of Wi-Fi equipment, preferring to sue end-users. But in October, Cisco, Netgear, and Motorola teamed up to file an 81-page lawsuit [PDF] seeking to shut down Innovatio’s patent-trolling project once and for all. Not only were the patents invalid, but the suit alleged Innovatio’s whole campaign was a violation of the RICO anti-racketeering law. That law is more commonly used against crime families than patent holders.

via Wi-Fi patent troll hit with racketeering suit emerges unscathed | Ars Technica.

PayPal, Lenovo Launch New Campaign to Kill the Password with New Standard from FIDO Alliance

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Under the standards put forward by the FIDO Alliance, the device a person is using to log in to an account would play a more central role in authentication. That would make it impossible to compromise accounts by stealing passwords, as hackers did in order to break into Twitter this month and LinkedIn last year.

via PayPal, Lenovo Launch New Campaign to Kill the Password with New Standard from FIDO Alliance | MIT Technology Review.

Requiring a person to offer both a password and a physically linked secondary proof is an approach known as “two-factor authentication.”

An App Called Moves Logs Every Step You Take

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Created by a startup called ProtoGeo, Moves is free and currently available only for the iPhone (the company plans to release an Android version but hasn’t said when). The app’s precision and power consumption need work, but I’m convinced its simplicity represents the future of self-tracking.

via Review: An App Called Moves Logs Every Step You Take—No Extra Effort or Hardware Required | MIT Technology Review.

Six months without Adobe Flash, and I feel fine

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Things I miss: most YouTube videos are Flash-based (although often if you find them embedded on a page, YouTube will provide an HTML5 version on the fly). HTML5 playback in addition is smoother than FLV videos ever were. There are fewer glitches, slowdowns, jitters and so forth.

via Six months without Adobe Flash, and I feel fine » Houston 2600 — Computer security, hacking, coding and mayhem.

Interesting read.  I went without Flash for awhile a few years ago on when 64 bit was new on the linux box because I couldn’t get it to work and it became too much of a PITA and a waste of time to figure out.  I hardly ever use YouTube however.

Intel Invests in Big Switch

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“There’s a clear trend toward white box — getting away from the model where everything comes pre-integrated from one vendor,” says Guido Appenzeller, Big Switch’s CEO. Any of the “hyperscale” Web/cloud players — the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services LLC — have “at least tried out white boxes in the data center,” he says.

via Light Reading – Intel Invests in Big Switch.

This is the first I heard of the term white box.  The article is very informative.  Here’s one more blurb that may help describe it better:

“You will see some of the largest customers in the world demanding some very specific mandates, one of which is standardization, which implies white boxes,” says Jason Matlof, Big Switch’s vice president of marketing.

The bottom line:  The largest customers want open standards  — probably to create a more competitive marketplace for the massive amount of boxes they need to buy.  More competition = lower prices or better features or simply lower total cost of ownership.

Security Firm Bit9 Hacked, Used to Spread Malware

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An hour after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, Bit9 published a blog post acknowledging a break-in. The company said attackers managed to compromise some of Bit9′s systems that were not protected by the company’s own software. Once inside, the firm said, attackers were able to steal Bit9′s secret code-signing certificates.

via Security Firm Bit9 Hacked, Used to Spread Malware — Krebs on Security.

Power company says Super Bowl blackout was caused by device designed to prevent power outages

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In a follow-up statement, Entergy said that tests conducted by S&C and Entergy on the two relays at the Superdome showed that one worked as expected, the other did not.

via Power company says Super Bowl blackout was caused by device designed to prevent power outages – The Washington Post.

I would hope most devices in the distribution of power are designed to prevent outages.

Samsung laptop bug is not Linux specific

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This is pretty obviously a firmware bug. Writing UEFI variables is expressly permitted by the specification, and there should never be a situation in which an OS can fill the variable store in such a way that the firmware refuses to boot the system. We’ve seen similar bugs in Intel’s reference code in the past, but they were all fixed early last year. For now the safest thing to do is not to use UEFI on any Samsung laptops. Unfortunately, if you’re using Windows, that’ll require you to reinstall it from scratch.

via mjg59 | Samsung laptop bug is not Linux specific.

The Linux Foundation Secure Boot Pre-bootloader Released

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The Linux Foundation started work on Secure Boot last year and announced back in October that its plan involved development of a pre-bootloader, which it will get signed by Microsoft. A signed pre-bootloader will allow for chain-loading of boot-loader of any other operating system thereby enabling users to install non-signed Linux distros on Windows 8 UEFI hardware. This signed pre-bootloader will greatly help smaller distributions that don’t have either the resources or time to get their own Microsoft-verified key.

via The Linux Foundation Secure Boot Pre-bootloader Released – ParityNews.com: …Because Technology Matters.