Obama pushes tech startup community for more diversity

WASHINGTON -- If startups in the tech sector and other high-growth industries are going to continue to emerge and thrive, the business landscape must become a more inclusive environment, one that is more welcoming of women, minorities and regions outside major urban and university centers, the White House is warning."We've got to make sure that everybody is getting a fair shot," President Obama said this week in remarks at the White House. "The next Steve Jobs might be named Stephanie or Esteban. They might never set foot in Silicon Valley. We've got to unleash the full potential of every American -- not leave more than half the team on the bench."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Black Hat: Hackers urged to protect Internet freedom

Las Vegas -- Security researchers need to fight for the rights to study, modify and reverse engineer Internet hardware and software or the general population risks losing Internet freedom, the Black Hat 2015 conference was told. Jennifer Granick “The dream of Internet freedom is dying,” warned Jennifer Granick, the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society during the conference keynote. Four things are killing it: centralization, regulation, globalization and loss of “the freedom to tinker,” she says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Good Works

As some one says, “The Devil used to try to prevent people from doing good works, but he has now learned a new trick worth two of that: he organizes them instead.”
C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

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Struggling HTC sees promise in virtual reality, fitness devices

Continuing to struggle in the smartphone industry, HTC is hoping its upcoming products in virtual reality and wearables can pull in some sales.The Taiwanese company’s earnings took a big dive in the second quarter, with a NT$8 billion (US$257 million) loss. This came as revenue dropped by almost half year over year to NT$33 billion.The weak earnings could continue into the next quarter. On Thursday, HTC estimated that its revenue in the third quarter would reach between NT$19 billion to NT$22 billion. Compared to last year, that could amount to another 50 percent decrease in revenue.Its latest flagship product, the HTC One M9, has so far failed to buoy sales. The phone itself hasn’t been a big enough upgrade from the last generation, according to some reviewers, and this may have prevented it from standing out in the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Risky Business #377 — Wassenaar back to drawing board, latest from BlackHat

On this week's show we discuss the BIS decision to ditch its car-a-zay plans for Wassenaar regulation, the latest car hacking news and more.

We also check in with Trey Ford in this week's feature slot. Trey was the General Manager of the BlackHat conference, these days he works at Rapid7, and he joins us to talk about the vibe in Vegas at this year's conference.

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Tech industry objects to terrorist activity reporting section in US legislation

Powerful tech industry groups have asked the U.S. Senate to drop a plan to require Internet companies to report terrorist activity on their platforms, as the provision could potentially raise privacy issues for users.Section 603 of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 would require Internet services companies, who obtain ”actual knowledge of any terrorist activity,” to provide to the appropriate authorities the “facts or circumstances” of the alleged activities.Describing “any terrorist activity” as a vague and overbroad term, the Internet Association, Reform Government Surveillance and Internet Infrastructure Coalition have in a letter Wednesday warned that the provision could result in “overbroad reporting to the government, swamping law enforcement with useless information, and potentially raising First Amendment and privacy concerns for the user who posted the item.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ICANN resets passwords after website breach

The overseer of the Internet’s addressing system said Wednesday that someone obtained information related to user accounts for its public website, although no financial information was divulged.ICANN, short for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said user names, email addresses, encrypted passwords and other data, such as bios, interests and newsletter subscriptions, were contained in the accounts.Despite the breach, the accounts as well as internal ICANN systems do not appear to have been accessed, the organization said in a post on its website.Although an investigation continues, ICANN said the “encrypted passwords appear to have been obtained as a result of unauthorized access to an external service provider.” It did not name that provider.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Attackers could use Internet route hijacking to get fraudulent HTTPS certificates

Inherent insecurity in the routing protocol that links networks on the Internet poses a direct threat to the infrastructure that secures communications between users and websites.The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used by computer network operators to exchange information about which Internet Protocol (IP) addresses they own and how they should be routed, was designed at a time when the Internet was small and operators trusted each other implicitly, without any form of validation.If one operator, or autonomous system (AS), advertises routes for a block of IP addresses that it doesn’t own and its upstream provider passes on the information to others, the traffic intended for those addresses might get sent to the rogue operator.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android device makers to release monthly security fixes

Google, Samsung and LG will start to issue monthly security patches for Android devices, taking a cue from the PC industry after critical vulnerabilities put hundreds of millions of smartphone users at risk.Security experts have warned for years that Android devices receive critical updates from manufacturers either too slowly or not at all. Phones and tablets have been increasingly targeted by hackers looking to steal data or defraud users.Google’s Nexus devices will get monthly over-the-air security patches, said Adrian Ludwig, lead engineer for Android security, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.“Nexus devices will continue to receive major updates for at least two years and security patches for the longer of three years from initial availability, or 18 months from last sale of the device via the Google Store, he wrote in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reddit bans racist communities, ‘quarantines’ other offensive talk

Reddit is removing several racist communities from its website, as well as other offensive discussion topics, part of an ongoing effort to clean up the most toxic content on its site.Among those now banned are the subreddits /r/CoonTown and /r/bestofcoontown—as well as others with even more racist names—and also content related to “animated” child pornography, said Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, in a post on Wednesday.Reddit is trying to strike a balance between honoring its heritage as a place for free-wheeling free speech while also restricting hateful or harassing content. It’s a tough balance, though, and some of its longtime users have criticized what they see as censorship of the site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM launches new services to help enterprises embrace Macs

IBM's year-long partnership with Apple took a new turn on Wednesday with the PC giant's announcement of new cloud services designed to help large companies incorporate Macs into their IT infrastructures.With the new offering, which is part of IBM's MobileFirst services portfolio, clients can order Macs and have them delivered directly to their employees without the need for any additional setup, imaging or configuration. Employees can then quickly and securely gain network access, connect to email and download business applications, IBM said.The services can also accommodate employees' own, personal Macs in corporate "bring-your-own-device" settings. They are delivered via the cloud as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product but are also available on-premises in clients' data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security Benefits of Open Source and Open Development

Gregory Pickett of Hellfire Security reached out to me last Wednesday about some interesting research he is presenting tomorrow at Black Hat USA. There are two parts to his research: a security bug in Cumulus Linux (that we already patched) and other network operating systems, and a serious design issue with how all network switches are designed and built.

The security bug was the easy part: it is not exploitable in our default configuration, and Gregory politely gave us a heads up well ahead of time, so we put the fix out last Friday to protect customers who have modified their sudoers configuration in a way that exposed them to the vulnerability. You can see the details in our security fix announcement from last Friday. (If you’re interested in being notified about future security fixes in Cumulus Linux, please sign up for our security mailing list.)

The much more serious issue he will present is the exploitability of firmware in all network switches. This same exploitability has been known about in servers, laptops and PCs for years (and in some cases mitigated with technologies like Trusted Platform Modules), but its application to networking devices is new.

This issue means Continue reading

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