Author Archives: mea

Rudy Giuliani is an absurd choice to defend the US from hackers

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While it’s amusing to make fun of Giuliani, hiring people with little or no bona fide security experience to head up cybersecurity practices in government is sadly a tried and true pastime in Washington. Instead of tapping actual computer security experts, politicians in many cases continue to put their friends or people they know in charge of a monumental problem that requires expertise beyond having many political connections or relationships with donors.

Source: Rudy Giuliani is an absurd choice to defend the US from hackers | Trevor Timm | Opinion | The Guardian

From:  Trump’s cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient ‘easily hackable website’

“You can probably break into Giuliani’s server,” said Robert Graham of Errata Security. “I know this because other FreeBSD servers in the same data center have already been broken into, tagged by hackers, or are now serving viruses.

“But that doesn’t matter. There’s nothing on Giuliani’s server worth hacking.”

A potentially fatal blow against patent trolls

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If law firms think they may be forced to pay defendants’ enormous legal bills, it could undermine the entire business model of patent trolls.

Source: A potentially fatal blow against patent trolls

Patent trolls directly threaten the industry of ideas. They dilute the value of legitimate patents while making honorable companies suspicious of legitimate patent complaints. This was never what patents were all about. They were designed to protect inventors who came up with truly innovative ways of doing things.

Norway to switch off FM radio in risky, unpopular shift to digital

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Norway is set to become the first nation to start switching off its FM radio network next week, in a risky and unpopular leap to digital technology that will be closely watched by other countries considering whether to follow suit.

Source: Norway to switch off FM radio in risky, unpopular shift to digital

For the same cost, digital radio in Norway allows eight times more radio stations than FM.

The AI “Master” bested the world’s top Go players

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But now even Ke, the reigning top-ranked Go player, has acknowledged that human beings are no match for robots in the complex board game, after he lost three games to an AI that mysteriously popped up online in recent days.

The AI turned out to be AlphaGo in disguise.

Source: The AI “Master” bested the world’s top Go players—and then revealed itself as Google’s AlphaGo in disguise — Quartz

Configure Windows telemetry in your organization (Windows 10)

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Microsoft does not intend to gather sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, usernames and passwords, email addresses, or other similarly sensitive information for Linguistic Data Collection. We guard against such events by using technologies to identify and remove sensitive information before linguistic data is sent from the user’s device. If we determine that sensitive information has been inadvertently received, we delete the information.

Source: Configure Windows telemetry in your organization (Windows 10)

Cyanogen Inc shutting down CyanogenMod nightly builds and other services, CM will live on as Lineage

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The CyanogenMod team has posted an update of their own, confirming the shutdown of the CM infrastructure and outlining a plan to continue the open-source initiative as Lineage, which we suspected was going to be the case last week.

Source: Cyanogen Inc shutting down CyanogenMod nightly builds and other services, CM will live on as Lineage [Updated]

0-days hitting Fedora and Ubuntu open desktops to a world of hurt

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The exploit ending in .flac works as a drive-by attack when a Fedora 25 user visits a booby-trapped webpage. With nothing more than a click required, the file will open the desktop calculator. With modification, it could load any code an attacker chooses and execute it with the same system privileges afforded to the user. While users typically don’t have the same unfettered system privileges granted to root, the ones they do have are plenty powerful.

Source: 0-days hitting Fedora and Ubuntu open desktops to a world of hurt

Here’s a blurb from the researcher’s blog post about this:

Resolving all the above, I present here a full, working, reliable, 0day exploit for current Linux distributions (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Fedora 25). It’s a full drive-by download in the context of Fedora. It abuses cascading subtle side effects of an emulation misstep that at first appears extremely difficult to exploit but ends up presenting beautiful and 100% reliable exploitation possibilities.

Source: Redux: compromising Linux using… SNES Ricoh 5A22 processor opcodes?!

Wall Street Ponders Verizon, Comcast Merger Under Trump

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For example, the elimination of Verizon would result in significantly less competition for Comcast in the Northeast United States. Currently, the Northeast is becoming one of the last places in the country Comcast hasn’t deployed usage caps, thanks in large part to Verizon’s FiOS domination of the coast. The end result of most of Hodulik’s scenarios would be higher rates and worse service for most consumers as Comcast gained a total monopoly in many east coast markets. Then again, Trump telecom advisor and former Sprint lobbyist Mark Jamison doesn’t believe telecom monopolies are real.

Source: Wall Street Ponders Verizon, Comcast Merger Under Trump | DSLReports, ISP Information

PC market shows signs of recovery

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IDC expects PC vendors to ship a total of 258.2 million units this year, a figure which would be 6.4 percent lower than last year. The previous estimate was a 7.2 percent fall, which IDC announced in August. Growth will still be negative in 2017, but shipments are expected to decrease by just 2.6 percent compared to this year.

Source: PC market shows signs of recovery

Trump Telecom Advisor Doesn’t Think Telecom Monopolies Are Real

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Former Sprint lobbyist Mark Jamison was named this week as one of two telecom consultants guiding the Trump administration’s telecom policy. Alongside telecom-tied think tanker Jeffrey Eisenach, Jamison is tasked with choosing the next FCC boss, and the direction of the new Trump FCC.

But in an October blog post, Jamison indicates he doesn’t believe that telecom monopolies are even real, while making it very clear (as Eisenach has) that the over-arching goal is to gut the FCC completely:

Source: Trump Telecom Advisor Doesn’t Think Telecom Monopolies Are Real