How a banner ad for H&R Block appeared on apple.com—without Apple’s OK

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R66T, pronounced “Root 66” and intended as a play on the famous American highway Route 66, describes itself as “one of the nation’s leading publisher of targeted content, information and advertising to private Wi-Fi and High-Speed Internet Access (HSIA) networks, conducting tens of millions of individual user sessions—approaching one-billion user-minutes per month.” The company says that it supports Wi-Fi networks at places like airports, hotels, coffee shops, and malls, often providing free access in exchange for showing “hyperlocal” advertisements.

via How a banner ad for H&R Block appeared on apple.com—without Apple’s OK | Ars Technica.

This might be a good opportunity to mention that everyone should use AdBlock Plus, a plugin available for many web browsers, which will block these kind of advertisements.  Blocking ads is also a good PC security measure since ads provide a vector for a lot of malware to inject themselves.

iPad and file systems: failure of empathy

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The easiest decision is no decision. Let’s have two user interfaces, two modes: The easy mode for my mother-in-law, and the pro mode for engineers, McKinsey consultants, and investment bankers. Such dual-mode systems haven’t been very popular so far, it’s been tried without success on PCs and Macs. (Re-reading this, I realise the Mac itself could be considered such a dual-mode machine: Fire up the Terminal app, and you have access to a certified Unix engine living inside)

via iPad and file systems: failure of empathy | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Google Uses Reputation To Detect Malicious Downloads

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Unlike Microsoft’s solution, CAMP attempts to detect locally whether any downloaded file is malicious, before passing characteristics of the file to its server-based analysis system. First, the system checks the binary against a blacklist–in this case, Google’s Safe Browsing API. If that check returns no positive result and, if the file has the potential to be malicious, CAMP will check a whitelist to see if the binary is a known good file.

via Google Uses Reputation To Detect Malicious Downloads – Dark Reading.

CAMP’s 99-percent success rate trounced four antivirus products, which individually only detected at most 25 percent of the malicious files and collectively detected about 40 percent, the researchers stated.

Linux Friendly Video Streaming?

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For quite some time I just resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to boot into windows or use some other poor method to get my netflix on… then Erich Hoover arrived with a heroic flast to his eye, chin thrust forward and proclaimed, “Do not go gentle into that sudo shutdown -r now! Rage, rage against the needlessness of these cursed reboots!

Here is how to install the Netflix Desktop App on Ubuntu. Open a terminal and run these commands:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install netflix-desktop

More info here: http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/ppa-for-netflix-desktop-app.html [iheartubuntu.com]

via Ask Slashdot: Linux Friendly Video Streaming? – Slashdot.

After Snapchat, Disappearing Messages are Everywhere

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Disappearing messages could prove popular beyond social sharing, and could also be profitable, if businesses can be persuaded to pay for the services. Another company, Gryphn, which released a free Android app in February (an iPhone version is coming out shortly), is seeing a lot of interest from paying enterprise users—including hospitals, a police department, and a financial institution.

via After Snapchat, Disappearing Messages are Everywhere | MIT Technology Review.

How long before we have an app that stores these “disappearing” messages at the receiving end?

Rackspace sues “most notorious patent troll in America”

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Rackspace’s dispute is with an IP Nav unit called Parallel Iron, which says it has three patents that cover the open source Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). But remarkably, Rackspace didn’t even know that at first; IP Nav contacted Rackspace and told the company it infringed some patents while refusing to even reveal the numbers or the owners of the patents, unless Rackspace signed a “forbearance agreement” to not sue first. (Sometimes companies threatened by patent trolls can file a “declaratory judgment” lawsuit, which can help them win a more favorable venue.)

via Rackspace sues “most notorious patent troll in America” | Ars Technica.

Grading Essays at College Level

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EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

via New Test for Computers – Grading Essays at College Level – NYTimes.com.

Massive data leak exposes offshore financial secrets

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The files contain information on over 120,000 offshore entities — including shell corporations and legal structures known as trusts — involving people in over 170 countries. The leak amounts to 260 gigabytes of data, or 162 times larger than the U.S. State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010.

via Massive data leak exposes offshore financial secrets – World – CBC News.

Top 8 Tools For Linux / Unix Memory Forensics Analysis

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Memfetch

It is a simple utility to dump all memory of a running process, either immediately or when a fault condition is discovered. It is an attractive alternative to the vastly inferior search capabilities of many debuggers and tracers – and a convenient way to grab “screenshots” from many types of text-based interactive utilities. To install memfetch:

## FreeBSD ##
pkg_add -r -v memfetch

## other *nix user download it from the following url ##
wget http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/soft/memfetch.tgz
tar xvf memfetch.tgz
cd memfetch && make

via Top 8 Tools For Linux / Unix Memory Forensics Analysis.

This looks like a useful tool.  From the README file:

Debuggers like gdb are pretty good for examining small sections
of code or memory, but are pretty much useless for massive  comparison, sophisticated searches and such. It’s good to be able to retrieve full memory image to run it thru grep, strings, your favorite viewer or any other tool. Quite obviously, I developed this code not because it’s extremely difficult to do it on your own, but because it is a valuable shell utility for all kinds of deep hacking activities that simply saves you time.

Memfetch is a convenient screenshot grabber for ssh or screen sessions, by  the way 😉

I chose memfetch from the eight since it seemed the most intuitive and simple.  The downloadable tarball contains a single .c file and a make file.  Unfortunately the installation isn’t as easy as portrayed in the above blurb.  On Fedora 14 I needed to futz with the C_INCLUDE_PATH and add the kernel…/asm-generic into the path.  I also had to symbolic link an asm to asm-generic in the kernel source include directory because the program wanted a asm/path.h file.  Things have changed since 2007 when this program was last updated.  But it works and it may prove useful.   I’m sure Backtrack 5 must have this tool, or tool like this, pre installed.

‘Robo-reporter’ computer program raises questions about future of journalists

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Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data — this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California — compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication.

via ‘Robo-reporter’ computer program raises questions about future of journalists.