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An anonymous reader sent in word that the Obama administration is threatening to veto CISPA in its current form because “The Administration, however, remains concerned that the bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information (PDF) when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities. Citizens have a right to know that corporations will be held accountable — and not granted immunity — for failing to safeguard personal information adequately. The Administration is committed to working with all stakeholders to find a workable solution to this challenge.” Ars has a few more details, the EFF urges U.S. citizens to oppose the bill, and one of the sponsors tweeted that those opposed to the bill are basement dwelling fourteen year olds. Note that the Administration still wants there to be some kind of comprehensive data sharing law in the name of cybersecurity, so this may very well rear its head again in the coming months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

chicksdaddy writes “Social Media Widget, a free plug-in for the WordPress blogging platform with more than a million downloads, was restored to WordPress’s official plugin directory on Thursday, days after it was found injecting WordPress websites with spam links to web sites offering Pay Day Loans. In a post on a support forum for Social Media Widget (SMW), Samuel Wood, a WordPress administrator, said that WordPress was willing to give SMW and its owner a second chance after he claimed to have been the victim of a contract developer gone rogue. ‘Naturally we do take a very hard line on spam, and obviously an author putting malicious code into a plugin is enough grounds for us to bring down the ban hammer,’ Wood wrote on Friday. ‘But there are natural circumstances where an author may not be at fault.’ SMW appears to be such a case. It is one of the 20 most popular WordPress add-ons and allows WordPress web site operators to include links to their other social media accounts. Brendan Sheehan, the owner of SMW, said, ‘We trusted the wrong people with our plugin code and take full responsibility. We are a marketing company at heart and are not actually developers, so in order to provide major updates and improvements, we had to seek outside help. Some of these people deceived us and abused our trust and naivety…We will not make this mistake again.’ Wood said the folks at WordPress decided to accept that story — but that they’re watching SMW closely. ‘Basically, the current maintainer is not a professional programmer, and put his trust in the wrong freelancers to do the coding work for him…We’ll be watching the plugin for changes,’ he said. ‘The plugin is back up for now, and as long as it stays clean, it’s fine.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

Things haven’t been going very well for The Pirate Bay recently ever since the notorious file-sharing website had to scrap its plans to shift hosting responsibilities from the Swedish Pirate Party to the Norwegian Pirate Party after a local copyright enforcement group threatened the Norwegian Pirate Party with a lawsuit. In a recent desperate attempt to find a host, the site tried migrating to servers in Greenland, but now The Register reports that The Pirate Bay has been booted out of Greenland less than 48 hours after settling down on its frozen tundra. Apparently Greenlandic telecom company Tele-Post “decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” which put a quick end to the website’s adventures in the enormous northern landmass. We have no idea where The Pirate Bay will go next for a home but it wouldn’t surprise us if the site really did give North Korea a try at this rate.

SOURCE Boy Genius Report

When Google comes to your door – or your digital door – and tells you they’d like you to join their collective, generally you say yes, let’s do it! That’s what Behavio has announced they’ve done this week. Behavio is a company that was Knight Foundation funded and aimed to develop apps that would accurately detect social and behavioral trends of you, your friends, and everyone around you.

While it’s not entirely clear where the funding bits Behavio has received thus far will be funneled, we do know that the team remains highly thankful to both the Knight Foundation and SXSW Accelerator. This group won the 2012 SXSW Accelerator competition and gained additional publicity because of it. The video below, found by TechCrunch, shows a speech made by Behavio’s Nadav Aharony for the Knight Foundation as they presented for the 2012 Knight News Challenge.

According to the Knight Foundation, the folks at Behavio had already begun bringing the heat back over a half a year ago – and they certainly didn’t start there.

“Behavio is an open-source platform that turns phones into smart sensors of people’s real world behavior – from how they use their phones to how they communicate with others. Funding will be used to help programmers build apps with smarter sensors, create tools for journalists that uncover trends in community data and launch a mobile application that allows individuals to explore data about their lives.”

The Behavio Team has been clear in their announcement of their integration with Google that they’re going to continue to maintain their Funf open source project as they work their way into the heart of the Google complex. As they aimed to make “smartphone apps [that] are actually smart”, so too did they call upon their Funf buddies to do the same – Open Sensing Framework is what it was and is all about at Funf.

“We are very excited to announce that the Behavio team is now a part of Google! At Behavio, we have always been passionate about helping people better understand the world around them. We believe that our digital experiences should be better connected with the way we experience the world, and we couldn’t be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google.” – The Behavio Team

Above you’ll see the beginning of a touching letter posted today by the Behavio Team announcing their jumping in with Google. What we’re to understand is that Google will, as always, be using the team to create wonderful new projects as they continue to strengthen those they’re already pushing solidly.

We can’t wait to see what the developers and forward-thinking minds at Behavio will bring to the Googleplex! Nadav Aharony, Alan Gardner, and Cody Sumter are names you’re going to hear again in the future – keep them in mind!

Google acquires Behavio: social prediction connects with the big G is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

SOURCE SlashGear

msm1267 writes “Microsoft announced last night that it has stopped pushing a security update originally released on Patch Tuesday because the fix is causing some PCs to blue-screen. Microsoft recommends users uninstall the patch, which is also causing compatibility issues with some endpoint security software. MS13-036 was part of this week’s Patch Tuesday update. It addressed three vulnerabilities in the Windows Kernel-Mode Driver, which if exploited could allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on a compromised machine. Users began reporting issues earlier this week with some systems failing to recover from restarts, or applications failing to load, after the patch was installed.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

Reader Kimaroo noticed that something was amiss with the with the single-serve bottle of maple syrup she receives with her French toast at Cracker Barrel. Not only did it seem smaller, she could have sworn that the bottle used to contain 100% maple syrup instead of “100% Pure Natural Syrup.” Fortunately, she had another bottle from a different Cracker Barrel visit stashed at home, and was able to compare the ingredients. Indeed, her maple syrup had been hit by the Grocery Sugar Ray: nearly half of its mapley goodness has been replaced with cane syrup.

I just wanted to alert you to another case of the Grocery Shrink Ray, but this time… at Cracker Barrel. When I eat French Toast at Cracker Barrel, I don’t use the syrup because it comes with powdered sugar and that is sweet enough for me. So I make a habit of bringing the syrup bottle home with me because we use it later on other foods.

So tonight I went to Cracker Barrel and noticed that the syrup now says “100% Pure Natural Syrup” and while I was sitting there I could have sworn that it used to be 100% Maple Syrup, because, frankly, I wouldn’t bother saving tiny bottles of non-maple syrup.

I used part of the syrup at the table tonight, but I cleaned it up and brought it home to make sure that I wasn’t just seeing things or remembering wrong.

I brought out my little bottle from the pantry and we compared to the new bottle from tonight. The differences aren’t just the level of maple syrup! Shockingly the size has also shrank!

The differences are:

Old: 100% Pure Maple Syrup 1.7oz
New: 100% Pure Natural Syrup 55% Pure Maple Syrup / 45% Cane Syrup 1.5oz

I remember from a about 6 months ago, we happened to catch a peek in the kitchen. A large sign was posted that said “REMEMBER: EACH SYRUP COSTS $1.50, GIVE ONLY ONE” or something similar to that. I guess they couldn’t keep the syrup machine going without having to scale back in both quality and quantity.

Also, note that the word “Vermont” has been removed from the front label.

Having to scale back their syrup generosity is understandable, especially with rising syrup prices. At least they didn’t switch to maple-flavored sugar syrup years ago.

SOURCE Consumerist

Hugo Teso, a security consultant who also happens to be a trained commercial pilot, says he’s developed an Android app that can make an airliner “dance to his tune” by attacking its flight management systems. The hack was demoed at this year’s Hack In The Box conference in Amsterdam, where Teso showed how the app — called PlaneSploit — can seek out targets from the ground by infiltrating radio broadcasts between aircraft and air traffic control, and then use a second communication system to send malicious messages to that could “take full control of the plane” or indirectly affect the pilot’s behavior. PlaneSploit is proof-of-concept software, designed to work in a closed virtual environment, so it’s not like we’re going to see it pop up on Google Play any time soon, but just the fact it exists will hopefully help to keep the puppet masters out of real-world planes. And no, there’s no Windows Phone version.

Filed under: Transportation, Internet, Alt

Comments

Via: Net Security, Computerworld

Source: Aircraft Hacking: Practical Aero Series (PDF)

SOURCE Engadget RSS Feed

Angered over Aereo’s recent win in Appeals court, News Corp is threatening to cancel its free Fox TV network and switch it completely to a subscription-based service. Many other networks are also frustrated with Aereo, which takes over-the-air broadcast signals with its thousands of little antennas and feeds them to its subscribers’ computers, phones, and tablets. Many networks that have fought against Aereo include Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Univision, and more.

Chase Carey, Chief Operating Officer of News Corp, stated,

Aereo is stealing our signal. We believe in our legal rights. We’re going to pursue those legal rights fully and completely, and we believe we’ll prevail. But we want to be clear. If we can’t have our rights properly protected through legal and political avenues, we will pursue business solutions. One such business solution would be to take the network and turn it into a subscription service.

Carey also stated,

“One option could be converting the Fox broadcast network to a pay channel, which we would do in collaboration with both our content partners and affiliates.”

Because Aereo has individual antennas picking up the broadcast signals, the court ruled that Aereo wasn’t retransmitting signals. It stated that Aereo was merely offering subscribers an option that they could already do with their own antennas. If the court did rule that Aereo was retransmitting the broadcast signals, it would most likely have to pay a fee to the TV networks.

Retransmission fees add up to billions of dollars in total each year, and are usually paid by companies that want to redistribute the networks’ programming to their subscribers. The court says that like Cablevision’s web-based RS-DVR, Aereo isn’t a video-on-demand service and isn’t retransmitting signals. It is merely storing individual copies of TV shows and providing them to the user who had requested them.

If Fox is converted to a subscription-based network, many popular TV shows, like American Idol, Glee, Family Guy, and X-Factor, will see a drastic hit in viewers. All of those shows are what made Fox so popular, so limiting the number of viewers who have access to them may backfire on Fox. Aereo charges a fee for its services. Fees range from $8-$12 monthly, and $80 for the entire year. We’ll keep you posted on how this case turns out.

[via Fox News]

News Corp threatens to cancel its free Fox TV network if Aereo isn’t banned is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

SOURCE SlashGear

A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.

SOURCE Threat Level

Anonymized mobile phone location data produces a GPS fingerprint that can easily be used to identify a user based on little more than tracking the pings a phone makes to cell towers, a new study shows.

SOURCE Threat Level