BeWifi lets you steal your neighbor’s bandwidth when they’re not using it

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The way Telefonica has made this happen in a practical way is to build its own routers that can be installed in houses within a neighborhood. So far these have had to be installed by engineers, but the next generation are plug-and-play, and eventually all that will be needed is an over-the-air software update to customers’ existing routers. According to Rodriguez, the software “creates a mesh to aggregate the capabilities [of the routers].” Pooling all of the bandwidth from these routers allows anyone within the network to take advantage of it at home, and they can also connect to any BeWifi network they come across on their mobile devices when out and about.

via BeWifi lets you steal your neighbor’s bandwidth when they’re not using it | Ars Technica.

The title is a bit dramatic using the term “stealing” as if something as ephemeral as unused bandwidth, which disappears never to be used by anyone ever as time passes, is an asset that could be considered “stolen” if taken or used by someone else.  The victim of this kind of “theft” does not wake in the morning and see something missing unless they’re subscribed to some kind of data cap.  Most home installations do not have caps.

Telefonica is currently looking towards developing economies and its huge customer base of over 200 million households in 14 countries in South America as the places in which BeWifi could have a real impact.

How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages

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These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010. That DOJ suit became the basis of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of over 100,000 tech employees whose wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied attempts by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the lawsuit tossed, and gave final approval for the class action suit to go forward. A jury trial date has been set for May 27 in San Jose, before US District Court judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the Samsung-Apple patent suit..

via The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages | PandoDaily.

Burden of proof of infringement on patent holder

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the decision of the district court, stating that it holds that “when a licensee seeks a declaratory judgment against a patentee to establish that there is no infringement, the burden of proving infringement remains with the patentee.”

via US Supreme Court: Burden of proof of infringement on patent holder | ITworld.

A new transparent display system could provide heads-up data

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The secret to the new system: Nanoparticles are embedded in the transparent material. These tiny particles can be tuned to scatter only certain wavelengths, or colors, or light, while letting all the rest pass right through. That means the glass remains transparent enough to see colors and shapes clearly through it, while a single-color display is clearly visible on the glass.

via Seeing things: A new transparent display system could provide heads-up data – MIT News Office.

What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

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At the end of 2013, we had 27,134 consumer-grade drives spinning in Backblaze Storage Pods. The breakdown by brand looks like this:

Hard Drives by Manufacturer
Brand Number
of Drives		 Terabytes Average
Age in Years
Seagate 12,765 39,576 1.4
Hitachi 12,956 36,078 2.0
Western Digital 2,838 2,581 2.5
Toshiba 58 174 0.7
Samsung 18 18 3.7

via Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?.

Why do we have the drives we have? Basically, we buy the least expensive drives that will work

There are a lot of numbers tossed around in this article that are difficult to summarize.  The above table shows the data set they worked from.

BT and Alcatel-Lucent Claim Fastest Real World Fibre Optic Speed of 1.4Tbps

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Admittedly some of you might look at this and point out that Alcatel-Lucent has already successfully transmitted data at the staggering speed of 31Tbps (Terabits per second) over a single long-haul 7200km optical fibre cable (here). Similarly a UK team managed to push 73.7Tbps down a hollow fibre optic cable (here). But the difference here is that BT has pulled off an impressive improvement using an existing link in a real-world environment with commercial grade hardware. ISPs will be happy to hear that.

via BT and Alcatel-Lucent Claim Fastest Real World Fibre Optic Speed of 1.4Tbps – ISPreview UK.

Ad blockers: A solution or a problem?

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Existing users of ad blocking software may be a lost cause. Once consumers decide to block ads and experience the cleaner Web pages and faster load times that ad blocking delivers as it filters out bandwidth-hungry animations, video and other advertising content, they’re less likely to want to give it up.

But will mainstream consumers in the U.S. turn to ad blockers in a big way? “The numbers have not reached the point where publishers are panicked,” says Chapell. “But if those products were on 80% of computers, we’d be having a very different conversation.”

via Ad blockers: A solution or a problem? – Computerworld.

Wake up, Rosetta!

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Rosetta was launched in 2004 and has since travelled around the Sun five times, picking up energy from Earth and Mars to line it up with its final destination: comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. For the coldest, loneliest leg of the mission, as Rosetta travelled out towards the orbit of Jupiter, the spacecraft was put into deep-space hibernation.

In 2014, Rosetta will complete its cruise towards the comet, rendezvousing with it in August, before putting its Philae lander onto the comet’s surface in November, as it begins its journey closer to the Sun.

via Wake up, Rosetta! / Rosetta / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA.

Rosetta will arrive at 67P in August 2014, where it will become the first spacecraft to orbit the nucleus of a comet and, later in the year, the first to land a probe – Philae – on a comet’s surface. It will also be the first mission to escort a comet as it journeys around the Sun.

VPN Related Vulnerability Discovered on an Android device

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In this video we demonstrate the vulnerability via the following steps:

  1. We present a regular Android device (in this case it is the popular Samsung S4 device). Behind it we display a screen with packet capturing tool, showing the traffic that flows through that computer.
  2. Now the user runs the malicious app and clicks on the Exploit button which takes advantage of the vulnerability in the phone’s system.

via VPN Related Vulnerability Discovered on an Android device – Disclosure Report | Cyber Security Labs @ Ben Gurion University.

The exploit vector requires a user to do something.

A First Look at the Target Intrusion, Malware

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Target has yet to honor a single request for comment from this publication, and the company has said nothing publicly about how this breach occurred. But according to sources, the attackers broke in to Target after compromising a company Web server. Somehow, the attackers were able to upload the malicious POS software to store point-of-sale machines, and then set up a control server within Target’s internal network that served as a central repository for data hoovered by all of the infected point-of-sale devices.

via A First Look at the Target Intrusion, Malware — Krebs on Security.