Reverse-engineering a password in a Wi-Fi-driven WeMo light switch by using the decryption code from the device is among the security debacles uncovered by IoT security hardware solution firm Bitdefender.To add insult to injury, Bitdefender told the device maker about the discovered vulnerability last fall, when it discovered the problem, and as of February, it still hadn’t been fixed, Bitdefender says in its study Risks in the Connected Home.And the WeMo wasn’t the only IoT device Bitdefender found lacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Only the iPhone 5c running iOS 9 can be unlocked by the tool the FBI bought to crack the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers.The tool does not work on the iPhone 5s or 6, so it only addresses a "narrow slice" of iPhones, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said late Wednesday at Kenyon College.The government is considering whether it should disclose to Apple the flaw that aided the hack: "We just haven't decided yet," he said at the Ohio college's Center for the Study of American Democracy.A court in California ordered Apple to help the FBI to hack by brute force the passcode of the iPhone 5c. The government was concerned that, if an auto-erase feature was activated on the phone, the data that the FBI was looking for would be automatically erased after 10 unsuccessful attempts, so it wanted a workaround from Apple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics’ flagship Galaxy S7 smartphones and sales of its mid-range devices in emerging markets have likely helped the company boost its operating profit in the first quarter.The South Korean company forecast Thursday that its operating profit for the quarter was likely to be 6.6 trillion won (US$5.7 billion), an over 10 percent increase from close to 6 trillion won in the same quarter last year.Revenue likely increased 4 percent in the quarter to 49 trillion won, according to the company’s guidance.Samsung has been in the past sandwiched between Apple’s iPhone at the high end and products from Chinese vendors at the mid-range and low end. But its flagship Galaxy S7 and the curved-screen version, the Galaxy S7 edge, launched commercially in March, appear to have made deep inroads into the high-end market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It didn't take long for Nvidia's monstrous Tesla P100 GPU to make its mark in an ongoing race to build the world's fastest computers.Just a day after Nvidia's CEO said he was "friggin' excited" to introduce the Tesla P100, the company announced its fastest GPU ever would be in a supercomputer called Piz Daint. Roughly 4,500 of the GPUs will be installed in the supercomputer, which will be built at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Switzerland.Piz Daint will a deliver peak performance of 7.8 teraflops, which would make it the seventh-fastest computer in the world. The fastest in the world is the Tianhe-2 in China, which delivers a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops, according to the Top500 list released in November.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google and Rackspace are designing a server based on IBM's upcoming Power9 processor, a sure sign that Intel is no longer the only game in town for cloud service providers.The companies announced plans for the system, which they call Zaius, at IBM's OpenPower Summit in Silicon Valley on Wednesday. It's one of several new Power servers on show at the event.They plan to submit the design to the Open Compute Project, meaning other companies will be able to use the design as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After a multi-week battle that saw Apple and the FBI duke it out both in court and in the court of public opinion, the FBI finally managed to access a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Ultimately, the FBI reportedly relied upon an exploit from an Israeli software forensics company called Cellebrite to bypass the iPhone's built-in security mechanisms.While one might reasonably assume that this spells the end for what proved to be a contentious issue, that couldn't be farther from the truth. For starters, the DOJ has indicated that it won't think twice about seeking help from device manufacturers in future cases.A DOJ statement on the matter reads:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s not everyday you could have the opportunity to buy a piece of space – but Christie’s London auction house will on April 20 offer about 80 meteorite pieces and a bunch of space rock paraphernalia to go along with them.+More on Network World: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space+The meteorite collection is made up of a variety of sample space rocks from private and public collections with some items expected to fetch over a million dollars at the auction.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Meg Whitman doesn't shy away from a challenge. She led eBay from tiny startup to household name, ran for governor of California and, nearly five years ago, took the helm at Hewlett Packard and stabilized an organization stumbling badly from a variety of very public missteps. Having engineered the split of the Silicon Valley icon into consumer tech (HP, Inc.) and corporate-focused Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Whitman is now HPE's Chief Executive Officer. The IT market is undergoing fundamental and rapid change owing to cloud, mobile and other powerful drivers. The competitive landscape in which this $50 billion startup plays is also shifting dramatically, with a slew of emerging players and the prospect of the largest-ever tech merger of Dell and EMC. No sweat, right? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Business process management (BPM) systems are essential to creating an efficient organization, but many CIOs today are more focused on trendier topics such as data analytics and CRM, according a report by Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
More organizations are moving their data out of their data centers and into the cloud, which complicates IT’s efforts to keep track of applications in use. With the new Microsoft Cloud App Security within Microsoft Azure, IT and security teams can step up application discovery and apply controls in line with existing security, privacy, and compliance policies.Most enterprises rely on cloud applications, whether or not they are officially sanctioned. Shadow IT is pervasive, with employees signing up for SaaS applications on their own without first going through IT. According to Microsoft’s statistics, an employee uses 17 cloud applications on average, and an organization shares 13 percent of its files externally, of which a quarter are shared publicly. Business units do what they must to get the job done, but IT is left in the dark about what applications employees use and where corporate data is stored.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There have been rumors floating among Microsoft enthusiast sites that the company plans to replace its Lumia brand with a Surface branded phone, bringing it at least into name parity with the more successful tablet line.Now Windows Central, which has a decent track record on mobile news, saysthat there will be a Surface Phone line, but not until next year. In the meantime, there would be a marginal effort with the Lumia, a $7.7 billion mistake that can be blamed on the prior CEO. WC theorizes this is to continue Windows 10 Mobile development, give OEM partners time to make new hardware and give Microsoft time to come back with a bang.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oh man, what a shame, Italy’s Hacking Team had its global export license revoked and now it can’t sell its spyware outside of Europe without getting special approval.It’s not even been a year since the Hacking Team became the Hacked Team, but after being pwned the company apparently didn’t crawl off and die. The Hacking Team’s newest woes, which were first reported by the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, means the company can’t easily conduct business as usual by selling its Remote Control Software to just anyone who wants it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Photive's PH-BTE70 Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds are designed to be sweatproof, and to stay in your ears while you're busy being active. It currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 1,180 people on Amazon (see reviews).
The PH-BTE70 has a 33ft extended wireless range and delivers up to 6 hours of music on a single charge. Reviewers indicate that they are comfortable, stylish, and deliver very good sound quality for the price -- which right now is discounted 69%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the major announcements from Microsoft's Build developer conference last week was that the company was bringing the popular Bash command line interface to Windows 10 with a new Linux subsystem. Now, developers can give it a shot with a new beta build of the operating system, which Microsoft released Wednesday morning.People on the Windows Insider Program's fast ring will get access to the build, which includes a wide variety of other new features, too. Foremost among them are a set of new Cortana features that link their Windows or Android phones with users' PCs in a variety of ways.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Vivaldi springs forthWhile the trend in modern browsers is to provide as streamlined an experience as possible, with simplicity and ease of use as the guiding principles, there are plenty of users who want powerful, rich feature sets, instead. The team behind Vivaldi, including Opera browser co-creator Jon von Tetzchner, is hoping that their new browser’s blend of throwback functionality and modern tech will catch on. You can download Vivaldi here on Macs, Windows or Linux, but first check out the highlights in our slideshow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security researchers have recently observed a large application-layer distributed denial-of-service attack using a new technique that could foil DDoS defenses and be a sign of things to come for Web application operators.The attack, which targeted a Chinese lottery website that used DDoS protection services from Imperva, peaked at 8.7Gbps. In a time when DDoS attacks frequently pass the 100Gbps mark, 8.7Gbps might not seem much, but it's actually unprecedented for application-layer attacks.DDoS attacks target either the network layer or the application layer. With network-layer attacks, the goal is to send malicious packets over different network protocols in order to consume all of the target's available bandwidth, essentially clogging its Internet pipes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft wants to make the Raspberry Pi 3 computer easier to use for people who want to be device makers but haven't worked with hardware before.Microsoft is developing the Seeed Windows 10 IoT Core Grove Kit with China-based Seeed Studio. The kit has all the hardware and software needed to start creating cool new devices.Contents of the kit include the Raspberry Pi 3, a breakout board, connectors, cables and a smartphone-like screen. The kit will be available in the summer, though the companies didn't immediately provide a price."If you're interested in getting started with software, you know your hardware ... but you're scared of plugging in your hardware and electrocuting yourself, this kit is for you," said Daniel Rosenstein, lead principal program manager at Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Federal Trade Commission is warning of “a new twist” on the old tech-support scam.From an FTC blog post:
Lately, we’ve heard reports that people are getting calls from someone claiming to be from the Global Privacy Enforcement Network. Their claim? That your email account has been hacked and is sending fraudulent messages. They say they’ll have to take legal action against you, unless you let them fix the problem right away.If you raise questions, the scammers turn up the pressure – but they’ve also given out phone numbers of actual Federal Trade Commission staff (who have been surprised to get calls). The scammers also have sent people to the actual website for the Global Privacy Enforcement Network. (It’s a real thing: it’s an organization that helps governments work together on cross-border privacy cooperation.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple has reportedly fixed a vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to bypass the passcode on iPhone 6s and 6s Plus running iOS 9.3.1 in order to access the address book and photos.The bypass technique was discovered by researchers from German security firm Evolution Security and takes advantage of Siri's integration with apps like Twitter or Facebook and the new 3D Touch feature that's only available on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models.On a locked device, attackers can call up Siri and ask to search for items that contain @ tags using Twitter, Facebook or Yahoo. Then they can locate a string like an email address and use the 3D Touch hard push to bring out the context menu for it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The transition of 3.7 million Verizon landline customers in California, Florida and Texas to Frontier Communications, as announced on April 1 of all days, continues to be a mess due to a combination of technical and communications issues.Unhappy landline phone, broadband FiOS Internet and video-on-demand customers have vented to Frontier support, including on social media sites, to express their frustration. Some have blamed Verizon as well, for not ensuring its residential, small/medium business and enterprise customers would receive a smooth transition after grabbing its $10.54 billion in the sale and shifting 9,400 of its employees to Frontier. (Though Verizon has blamed uncertainty round federal Internet regulation (i.e., net neutrality) for forcing it to sell the assets in the first place.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here