Colin Neagle
Author Archives: Colin Neagle
- Home → Author's archive:
Colin Neagle
0
U.S. intelligence chief touts IoT as a spying opportunity
In a brief aside during a Senate testimony on overall national security this week, U.S. director of national intelligence James Clapper justified the privacy and security advocates who have warned of the implications of the Internet of Things (IoT) since before it was a buzzword."In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," Clapper said, according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
How long will consumers put up with the IoT’s failures?
A recurring theme undercutting the enthusiasm surrounding the Internet of Things and smart home at CES this week has been how the shortcomings of the technology could hold back the market. How long will consumers put up with products that don't work, fail to connect to the network, or put their privacy at risk?A panel of IoT support experts speaking at CES today explained that, while some of the better-known products, like Google's Nest thermostat, are designed with easy setup and connectivity, many others fall short in important areas. Since consumers aren't always necessarily equipped to resolve these issues on their own, these concerns threaten to hold the IoT market back from reaching its lofty projections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Bernie Sanders campaign claims DNC voter data was leaked multiple times
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has suspended the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign from access to its database of Democratic voter information after a staffer on the Sanders campaign improperly accessed proprietary data belonging to the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Washington Post reported today.The Sanders campaign announced that it has fired the staffer over the incident. However, the campaign has also insisted that the data in the DNC database had been exposed on other occasions during the campaign.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Bernie Sanders campaign claims software vendor NGP VAN exposed voter data multiple times
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has suspended the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign from access to its database of Democratic voter information after a staffer on the Sanders campaign improperly accessed proprietary data belonging to the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Washington Post reported today. The Sanders campaign announced that it has fired the staffer over the incident. However, the campaign has also gone on the offensive, insisting not only that the software vendor, NGP VAN, was responsible for this incident, but has failed to prevent unauthorized access to campaign data in the past.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
How ISIS could use video games, messaging apps to evade surveillance
A new report sheds some light on how terrorists, particularly those with the Islamic State (ISIS) involved in last week's deadly attacks in Paris, manage to communicate in an age when most communications tools are susceptible to government surveillance.The most interesting is how the group can use video game platforms, specifically Sony's PlayStation 4, to relay messages between members. A Buzzfeed News report quoted Belgium's federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon, who had explained at an event prior to the Paris attacks that communications on a device like the PlayStation 4 could be more difficult to monitor than those on encrypted messaging apps, such as WhatsApp.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Top tech turkeys of 2015
Turkey timeJust in time for Thanksgiving, here’s our annual rundown of the tech industry’s “turkeys” for the year.Looking back: Top tech turkeys 2014Top tech turkeys 2013To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
What does Donald Trump have to say about technology? Not much
Donald Trump isn't much of a technophile. The surprise frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election said he hadn't adopted email as late as 2007, and was only using it "very rarely" by 2013, according to The New York Times, which published these admissions among many other revealing statements Trump has made under oath in depositions over the past decade.Trump still reads hard-copy news and magazine articles, and even dictates his oft-controversial Tweets to a team of PR underlings who send them out on his account, according to The Washington Post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Lyft’s CTO accused of hacking Uber
Uber recently submitted new court filings seeking more information on an IP address believed to be involved in a hack that was made public in February, in which the names and email addresses of 50,000 of its drivers were stolen. And two anonymous sources reportedly told Reuters that the IP address points to Chris Lambert, the chief technology officer of Uber's main competitor, Lyft.In court papers, Uber claims the Comcast IP address was used to access a security key in the breach, and is seeking more information to identify who was using the address. U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler has said that the information Uber is seeking with the subpoena is "'reasonably likely' to help reveal the 'bad actor' responsible for the hack," according to Reuters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Fiber bandits: FBI hunting serial fiber-cutting vandals in California
AT&T recently announced a $250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday. The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014. USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when "someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo," according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Fiber bandits: FBI hunting repeated fiber-cutting vandals in California
AT&T recently announced a $250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday. The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014. USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when "someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo," according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Smart refrigerator hack exposes Gmail login credentials
A team of hackers recently discovered a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in a Samsung smart refrigerator that can be exploited to steal Gmail users' login credentials, The Register reported this week.Hackers from security company Pen Test Partners discovered the flaw while participating in an Internet of Things (IoT) hacking challenge at the Def Con security conference earlier this month. The smart refrigerator, Samsung model RF28HMELBSR, is designed to integrate the user's Gmail Calendar with its display. Samsung implemented SSL to secure the Gmail integration, but the hackers found that the device does not validate SSL certificates, opening the opportunity for hackers to access the network and monitor activity for the user name and password used to link the refrigerator to Gmail.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Comcast planning nationwide gigabit broadband in 2 years. What will it cost?
A Comcast executive says the company is currently testing technology based on the DOCSIS 3.1 standard, which can transmit data at rates up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) in ideal environments, and is aiming to deploy the technology on a nationwide basis by 2018, according to a Fierce Cable article published last week. Comcast vice president of network architecture Robert Howald told Fierce Cable that the technology will enable the company to offer customers broadband speeds of 1 Gbps "and higher." From the article:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Facebook axes a future intern for exposing a privacy flaw
After being accepted for an internship at Facebook, Harvard University student Aran Khanna continued to embrace the same entrepreneurial spirit that helped launch the site on the very same campus over a decade ago. Ironically, his efforts cost him his chance at working at the company.Khanna discovered a privacy flaw in the default settings of Facebook's Messenger app for Android that automatically shared users' detailed location data. To draw attention to the flaw, Khanna launched an Android app called Marauder's Map that mapped Facebook users' locations based on their activity on Messenger in May, according to Boston.com. The app showed that the location sharing was accurate to within a three-foot distance and shared users' location data even with Facebook users they were not Friends with.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
With ‘recall,’ Fiat Chrysler makes its car hack worse
After Wired showed two hackers remotely gain access and immobilize a moving Jeep by exploiting software vulnerabilities last week, Fiat Chrysler responded by patching the vulnerability in several Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler models that were equipped with the Uconnect software that was hacked. How they went about issuing the patch, however, may just put the company's customers further at risk.Rather than simply treating the software patch as a traditional recall (i.e. requiring them to visit a service center and have an expert make the fix), Fiat Chrysler is mailing a USB thumb drive to owners of the affected cars. From there, the cars' owners can plug the USB drive into the cars' USB port to patch the software vulnerability. This seems like a convenient way to issue a recall for something that car owners can fix themselves. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Watch hackers immobilize a car while it’s traveling on a highway
One brave Wired journalist agreed to drive a Jeep on a St. Louis highway while two hackers hacked it remotely, taking control of everything from the air conditioning to the transmission.The entire ordeal was captured on video, which you can view with the article at Wired. The hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, had just two years earlier performed a similar hack while the same journalist drove a car slowly in a parking lot. The bigger difference that time was that the hack was performed through a laptop that was hardwired to the car's onboard diagnostic port, and which the hackers controlled from the backseat. In that case, they limited their exploits to toying with the seatbelt and honking the horn.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Watch hackers remotely immobilize a car while it’s traveling on a highway
One brave Wired journalist agreed to drive a Jeep on a St. Louis highway while two hackers hacked it remotely, taking control of everything from the air conditioning to the transmission. The entire ordeal was captured on video, which you can view with the article at Wired. The hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, had just two years earlier performed a similar hack while the same journalist drove a car slowly in a parking lot. The bigger difference that time was that the hack was performed through a laptop that was hardwired to the car's onboard diagnostic port, and which the hackers controlled from the backseat. In that case, they limited their exploits to toying with the seatbelt and honking the horn.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Why incumbent ISPs should be worried about the broadband market
The broadband market has been rocked by a handful of major unexpected developments over the past few years, from Google suddenly stepping into the market with significantly faster broadband at much lower prices to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) removing nearly all legal barriers to municipal broadband projects.The fallout from the FCC's ruling is beginning to gain some steam, with a 101-city coalition called Next Century Cities aiming to smooth the path for municipalities to bring affordable, gigabit-speed broadband to their cities.See also: Inside the bold plan to bring gigabit fiber to Detroit While the success stories are much more well-known, such as Chattanooga, Tennessee's long-running municipal gigabit fiber network, others have failed in spectacular fashion, like the city of Provo, Utah, whose municipal broadband project struggled before the city ultimately sold its existing fiber to Google for $1. This nationwide group could help provide access to information and expertise on broadband deployment to ensure the taxpayer money devoted to such a project doesn't go to waste.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
A ‘black market’ for wireless cell service has popped up in Canada
Two articles at iPhoneInCanada.ca and AlphaBeatic.com tell the story of one enterprising Canadian who takes advantage of a loophole to provide substantially cheaper wireless cell service for a one-time $100 payment.How exactly he does it appears to be unclear, but it involves pricing discrepancies in Canada, where lower-populated provinces like Manitoba and Saskatchewan see much cheaper cell service. Basically, the scheme involves signing up for an account in one of these regions, where Canadian wireless service provider Koodo offers a 5GB monthly data plan for $48, then selling the account to people who live in more populated regions of the country, where the same plan typically costs at least $90, according to the reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Apple Watch sales down 90% from opening week, report says
Since its first week on the market, during which Apple sold about 1.5 million Apple Watches, the company has seen a 90% decline in sales of its smartwatch, according to a MarketWatch article on data collected by Slice Intelligence.On a daily basis, Apple is now selling fewer than 20,000 Apple Watch units, and occasionally fewer than 10,000, according to the report. That's down from an estimated 200,000 sales per day in the first week the device was on the market.Slice, which often releases data on estimated sales of Apple products, also says that the lower-cost (starting at $349) Sport model has accounted for about two-thirds of Apple Watch sales. To date, Apple has sold fewer than 2,000 units of its gold, Edition model Apple Watch, which are priced at $10,000 and higher, according to the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Inside the bold plan to bring gigabit fiber to Detroit
When discussing the ongoing revitalization efforts in Detroit, it's hard to miss the name Dan Gilbert. The founder of Quicken Loans, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and a Detroit native himself, Gilbert's investment firms have funded dozens of tech startups in the city and turned its defunct old buildings into shiny new workspaces that look like Silicon Valley transplants.Until last year, what Detroit lacked in this daunting task to become a tech hub was access to affordable, high-speed broadband, the kind that Google Fiber was famously bringing to other cities around the country. So, rather than pray for Google to arrive or incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to spontaneously change their pricing and services, Gilbert invested in two Quicken Loans employees who were crazy enough to suggest building a fiber network themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here