Optimize Your Tablet For Movies on The Go

[ This sponsored article was written by IDG Creative Lab, a partner of PCWorld, and not by PCWorld's editorial staff. ]

Your tablet isn't just a way to be productive on the go, it's also a portable portal for watching movies and other video entertainment. Upgrade the viewing experience for maximum satisfaction on any Intel-powered tablet with these seven tips.

1. Pack the Right Apps

Many videos can be watched in a web browser or played directly from your hard drive, but having a good resource for fresh content can help make sure you don't get stuck with the same old stuff. There are plenty of apps out there that cumulatively give you access to a massive video library right from your tablet. On Android devices, check out Netflix, Crackle, and Hubi. The Windows store also features Netflix and Crackle, plus reliable apps like Hulu Plus and Vevo. Your cable provider may have a proprietary app too, which may let you stream content or download it for offline viewing.

2. Analyze the Angles

While most tablet screens look great from a wide range of viewing angles, you'll get the best results if your tablet is positioned directly in front of your face, with your neck and head in a comfortable position. With a slate-style tablet like the Acer Iconia A1-830, this is best achieved by adding a separate stand that can adjust to a variety of angles. (You'll find a wide range of stands available from your favorite electronics retailer, or on Amazon.) A convertible tablet device like the 2 in 1 HP Pavilion x360 also lets you adjust the screen to any angle by rotating the keyboard backward and using it as a stand. Either way, the powerful Intel processors are designed to deliver super-smooth video, even at full HD quality. 

3. Choose the Right Resolution

When selecting the resolution of your video, match it as closely as you can to that of your tablet's screen for the best results. Watch out – because screen resolution can vary greatly for every source (online, DVD, smartphone) and from device to device. For example, the Toshiba Encore 8 tablet features a resolution of 1280x800 pixels, while the portable All-in-One Dell XPS 18 offers a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. Choosing the proper video resolution will help to eliminate video artifacts, including jagged and blocky images.

4. Reduce Glare

Your best bet for keeping screen glare to a minimum is to carefully choose where you position yourself in relation to bright light sources. Try to keep windows to your side, rather than behind you (which will create lots of glare) or directly in front of you (which will wash out your tablet and leave you squinting). If you're watching video outside, make sure you're positioned in the shade. Also, a screen protector with a matte surface (as opposed to glossy) will help keep some of that sunlight from bouncing back into your eyes.

5. Upgrade Your Audio

Audio is half the picture. If you're not hearing all the sound, you're not going to enjoy the movie as much as you could. Many tablets feature impressive sound, like the Dolby Home Theater surround sound speakers on the portable All-in-One Lenovo IdeaCentre Flex 20, but you'll get an even better experience if you plug in a set of quality earphones, simply to help block out other sounds around you.

6. Improve Streaming Quality

Streaming a movie from the web? Certain tablets let you stream video over a cellular data connection, but connecting over Wi-Fi will offer much faster service. Make sure you're positioned where you have a strong Wi-Fi signal to ensure the highest quality video is delivered to your tablet and to avoid dropouts and buffering – which always seems to hit right before the big action scene arrives. A quick ping at a site like speedtest.net can show you how well your network is performing.

7. Keep Distractions at Bay

It's finally movie time – so how do you keep life's various distractions from interrupting the fun? If possible, orient yourself to face away from walkways and other thoroughfares so the constant flow of passing people doesn't interrupt your viewing. Your headphones are also a signal to the outside world that you're otherwise engaged. The bigger and more noticeable they are, the better. Finally, don't forget: Mute your cell phone. That rule isn't just for movie theaters; it's for anyone who wants to give every movie an opportunity to become their next favorite.

Any Intel-powered tablet or 2 in 1 device can be your portal to a world of entertainment. Just pick your favorite content and follow these simple guidelines to optimize your experience.

[ This sponsored article was written by IDG Creative Lab, a partner of PCWorld, and not by PCWorld's editorial staff. ]

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Backlash over Facebook's 'listening' feature is a problem of trust

Facebook will soon be listening to its users—literally—but some of them wish it would cover its ears.

The social network is in the doghouse again, this time for an upcoming feature that will allow it to listen in on its users via their smartphone's microphone. But the backlash might reveal more about people's declining trust in Facebook than about the feature itself.

Facebook said last week it will soon introduce "a new, optional way to share and discover music, TV and movies." If users allow Facebook to access their microphone while they're writing a status update, the company will identify the content playing in the background and automatically include it.

"That means if you want to share that you're listening to your favorite Beyoncé track or watching the season premiere of Game of Thrones, you can do it quickly and easily, without typing," Facebook said at the time. The feature will be made available on Android and iOS in the coming weeks.

Some users were quick to flag it as a potential privacy violation and shared warnings—on Facebook, naturally—about its impending arrival. An online petition has also circulated, urging Facebook to kill the feature. It had received more than 500,000 signatures by Friday afternoon, according to a counter on the site. That's a lot of concerned people, though a fraction of Facebook's total base of 1.2 billion.

The petition claims the app will allow Facebook to "listen to our conversations and surroundings through our own phones' microphone." It calls it a "Big Brother move," a "threat to our privacy" and "downright creepy."

But the protest may say more about people's confidence in Facebook than about the technology itself. There are already popular apps like Shazam and SoundHound that use the smartphone microphone to identify songs, but those apps haven't been subject to a similar backlash.

For sure, Facebook's app goes further. It identifies a broader range of content, including TV shows and movies. And it will share what people are listening to or watching in their status update—if they ask it to.

But Facebook insists it has no interest in recording what you're saying. In response to the concerns, it updated its blog post this week to clarify that "Facebook isn't listening to or storing your conversations."

The company says the feature records only a 15-second clip, that it converts to an "audio fingerprint" and sends to its servers where it tries to match it to fingerprints of movies and TV shows. "By design, we do not store fingerprints from your device for any amount of time," Facebook said. And the fingerprints don't include enough data to convert them back into the original audio, it added.

It emphasized that the feature is optional: "Nothing changes about the way Facebook works if you choose not to use it," a spokeswoman said Friday.

Facebook will keep a log of the songs or TV shows it matches on its servers, but they won't be connected to people's profiles, the company said.

The social network needs to gather as much information about its users as it can, because it allows it to target advertisements more precisely. But the backlash is a reminder that privacy missteps it made in the past have caused some users to be skeptical of its motives.

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AppliedMicro to crank up mobile chips to 16 cores for servers

AppliedMicro plans to put ARM mobile chips with 16 cores in servers, but is approaching the market cautiously following the abrupt shutdown of ARM server pioneer Calxeda late last year.

AppliedMicro will talk about its faster and more power-efficient processors called X-Gene 2 and X-Gene 3, which has 3D transistors and 16 cores, at a forum in Taipei hosted by Digitimes Friday, ahead of next week's Computex trade show. The company's first 64-bit X-Gene low-power chip is based on ARM architecture and will be in servers by the end of this year.

There is an interest in ARM chips for Web hosting. Their low-power consumption could help cut data-center electric bills. But only a handful of 32-bit ARM servers are available from companies like Mitac and Boston Ltd. More 64-bit ARM servers are expected to come out by the end of this year.

With the X-Gene 2 and 3 chips, AppliedMicro wants to pack more horsepower in dense and rack servers. Around 20 server makers have expressed interest in using the first X-Gene chip, said Gaurav Singh, vice president in technical strategy at AppliedMicro.

Hewlett-Packard has said it will use X-Gene in its Moonshot dense servers, and Singh said more partners will be announced at the Taipei forum. The initial X-Gene servers are a start and a good look at how ARM stacks up against Intel's x86 chip, which dominates the server market, Singh said.

AppliedMicro has demonstrated the server chip running OpenStack, Memcached and other key Web applications. The company wants to ensure the relevant software and tools are ready when the servers arrive, Singh said.

"The whole benefit of ARM versus the incumbent, people can actually see it now," Singh said. "There's definitely excitement."

The X-Gene has eight customized 2.4GHz CPU cores made using the older 40-nanometer process. It has integrated networking and I/O modules, error correction and RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) features.

The successor X-Gene 2 chip could appear in servers in as soon as 12 to 18 months, but it could be later, Singh said. The chip will also have eight cores, but will deliver better performance-per-watt and be made using the advanced 28-nanometer process. Network and I/O enhancements will result in throughput improvements, which will allow processing cores in a server to exchange data faster. The chip will also reduce application latency so servers can create and terminate virtual machines faster.

Singh did not provide a release date for the X-Gene 3, but it will boast many power-efficiency and performance improvements with 3D transistors. The chip could have 16 cores and will be made using FinFET processors, which allows placing 3D transistors on chips.

"We are looking at an increased core count where it makes sense. What the market wants now is eight cores," Singh said. "There are still innovations from the microarchitecture that can come. We're focusing on that."

AppliedMicro's main ARM server challenger is Advanced Micro Devices, which is shipping a 64-bit ARM processor code-named Seattle to test customers. Cavium and Marvell are also developing ARM server chips.

AppliedMicro has first-mover advantage as it is the only company with a 64-bit chip based on a custom core, while others are using off-the-shelf parts like ARM's Cortex-A57 cores, said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

ARM's Cortex-A57 core will also be used in smartphones and tablets.

But the competition will pick up as AMD is planning a customized ARM core, Moorhead said. The ARM core, called K12, was recently announced by AMD as part of Project Skybridge, a series of products that will provide the plumbing for its ARM and x86 cores to be interchanged or combined on a single motherboard.

A road map of X-Gene 2 and 3 shows that AppliedMicro has future plans for ARM servers, Moorhead said. Showing commitment is important for chip makers, especially with questions lingering around ARM servers, Moorhead said.

AppliedMicro's Singh acknowledged the skepticism surrounding ARM servers and said the company is approaching the future cautiously. The failure of the first ARM server chip maker, Calxeda, raised eyebrows, but AppliedMicro learned some lessons.

"Calxeda was a very good exercise in validating. They were able to come out and show TCO [total-cost-of-ownership] benefits in using their parts," Singh said. "They were too early, and were not able to sustain the investments."

Calxeda started off with a 32-bit ARM server chip and had an innovative fabric, but server performance is critical and there was a demand for 64-bit chips, Singh said. AppliedMicro decided not to invest in 32-bit chips and started off with 64-bit server chips.

Though pitted against each other, ARM server chip makers have a common goal to dismantle Intel's dominance, Singh said. ARM server companies jointly defined 64-bit server architecture through ARM's Server Base System Architecture organization and worked on software development through the nonprofit Linaro.

But AppliedMicro believes it has an advantage because of the custom cores in X-Gene.

"There will be excitement," Singh said. "The first company out there gets feedback from the market."

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Massive Flash exploit campaign directed at Japan seeks financial data

An Adobe Flash player vulnerability is being used in attacks on a massive scale against Web users, mostly in Japan, to collect online banking details, according to new research from Symantec.

On Monday and Tuesday, Symantec detected more than 14,000 attacks against Japanese Web users using the flaw, wrote Joji Hamada on the company's blog. Although attacks have been detected elsewhere, 94 percent of those Symantec has seen were directed at Japan.

Why Japanese users seem to be targeted the most is unclear. Hamada wrote that the attack code exploiting the Flash vulnerability has been planted on legitimate websites that have been hacked, including a travel agency, a blog service and a video-sharing service.

"The attacks are typically carried out through drive-by download and leverage compromised legitimate websites to host malicious code," he wrote. "The websites then redirect traffic to a malicious site prepared by the attacker."

Adobe patched the vulnerability (CVE-2014-0515) on April 28, which was detected by a Kaspersky Lab researcher in mid-April after it was being used in attacks.

Hundreds of millions of computers run Flash worldwide. Adobe has tried to make patching easier for its users by prompting them to update the program when it releases updates. But users must still download the patch, close their browser and apply the update. Attackers are hoping people don't bother and dismiss the prompt.

Hamada wrote unpatched computers that fall into the trap are delivered Infostealer.Bankeiya.B, which is malicious software that runs on Windows XP, Vista and 7 operating systems. It collects online banking credentials by monitoring activity in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

"The malware can also update itself, enabling it to target more banks and add more capabilities in order to perform additional malicious actions," he wrote.

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Google starts accepting 'right to be forgotten' requests in Europe

Google has started accepting requests from Europeans wanting to remove search links to information on them that they find objectionable, following a controversial ruling earlier this month by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Asserting the people's right to be forgotten after a certain time, the court ruled that people who want search engines to forget them by removing search results referring to their names can file a request to do so directly with the operator of the search engine, which must then assess the merits of the request. A refusal by the operator can be appealed in a court.

Search engines can be asked to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed," the court ordered.

A removal request form was set up by Google on Friday, asking users to submit the URL (uniform resource locator) for each link referring to the person that appears in a Google search that the user would like removed. It allows users to submit requests on behalf of themselves and others they represent, but wants information on how the linked page is about the affected person, and why the URL in search results is "irrelevant, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate."

Google described the form as an initial effort and said it planned to work closely with data protection authorities and others over the coming months to refine its approach.

The EU court ruling has raised concerns that it could violate freedom of expression and the right of the public to know, as it could be used to prevent posts that criticize governments and other people in authority from appearing in search results.

"In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public's right to know and distribute information," Google wrote in the introduction to the form.

When evaluating a user request, the Internet company will check whether the results include outdated information about the person, as well as "whether there's a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials."

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Hackers put security tool that finds payment card data into their arsenal

Like a crowbar, security software tools can be used for good and evil.

Bootleg versions of a powerful tool called "Card Recon" from Ground Labs, which searches for payment card data stored in the nooks and crannies of networks, have been appropriated by cybercriminals.

This month, the security companies Trend Micro and Arbor Networks published research into point-of-sale malware, which has been blamed for data breaches at retailers such as Target and Neiman Marcus, sparking concerns over the security of consumer data.

Both companies found that unauthorized copies of Card Recon had been incorporated into a malware program and a toolkit designed for finding and attacking POS terminals.

"Card Recon looks to be a useful tool when wielded by an auditor or security staff, but it is clearly dangerous in the wrong hands," Arbor Networks wrote in its report.

Card Recon is intended for organizations seeking to comply with the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), a set of recommendations to safeguard payment card data.

The software tool scans all parts of a network to see where payment card data is stored. Often, companies find card details stashed in unlikely and unknown places. Card Recon compiles a thorough report, and companies can then move to secure the data.

The software requires license authorization before it will run, which prevents direct illegitimate use, said Stephen Cavey, Ground Labs' co-founder and director of corporate development, via email. But it's impossible to restrict access to Card Recon's software executable after a genuine customer has obtained it.

More than 300 security auditors worldwide and thousands of merchant companies use Card Recon, he said.

"This is the unfortunate reality for all software vendors: It is common for criminals to acquire a copy of commercial software via unauthorized means and then reverse engineer that software to circumvent the licensing mechanisms that are designed to prevent its unauthorized use," Cavey said.

Numaan Huq, a senior threat researcher for Trend Micro, wrote on Wednesday that a version of Card Recon dating from three years ago was being used to validate payment card details in a type of POS malware.

When Card Recon is scanning, it has to be able to separate 16-digit numbers and other random data it finds from valid 16-digit credit card numbers. Credit card numbers can be validated by using a checksum formula called the Luhn algorithm.

The malware Huq studied used Card Recon to validate and identify cards by brands such as Discover, Visa and MasterCard. Using Card Recon was faster than other validation methods, especially for large volumes of card data, he wrote.

Arbor Networks wrote in its report that the attack toolkit it observed contained two cracked copies of Card Recon. In that instance, it appears Card Recon was being used for its intended purpose—to find card numbers—but for cybercriminals.

If anything, the abuse of Card Recon strengthens a case for its legitimate use. Ground Labs' Cavey said the best defense is to remove sensitive data.

"They can't steal what is no longer there," he said.

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Samsung's new 1TB SSD is based on latest 3D technology

Samsung has raised the stakes in flash storage with a new 1TB solid-state drive based on its newest memory technology.The SSD is targeted at high-end PCs, and the drive is based on Samsung's second generation V-NAND technology, in which storage chips are stacked vertically. Samsung also announced 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacity SSDs.The 1TB drive could ratchet up SSD storage in laptops, which have so far largely topped off at 512GB. The new SSDs have two times the durability in writing data and are 20 percent more power efficient than conventional NAND-based SSDs in which storage modules are placed side by side, Samsung said in a statement. Prices for the SSDs were not immediately available.Samsung has improved on its original V-NAND technology, stacking 32 NAND storage layers in one chip package. The first-generation of V-NAND, announced in August last year, stacked 24 storage layers. The layers transfer data through a proprietary interconnect.Chip stacking is already found in memory chips and system-on-a-chip devices. Putting storage chips in a vertical structure is viewed as the new way to add storage capacity as devices get smaller and more power-efficient. Samsung later this year plans to announce new drives that are more reliable based on the new V-NAND technology, the company said.

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Iranian group created fake news organization as part of hacking campaign

A suspected Iranian hacker group seeded Facebook and LinkedIn with bogus profiles of attractive women and even created a fake online news organization to get digitally closer to more than 2,000 people whom it wanted to spy on.

Once they had befriended their targets through fake profiles, the people were emailed malicious links designed primarily to steal email account credentials, according to a report titled "The Newscaster Threat," released Thursday by iSight Partners, a security consultancy.

"If you can get into the corporate email client, there is a lot of intelligence gathering capability," said Patrick McBride, vice president of iSight's marketing and communications, in a phone interview.

The group is suspected to be in Iran, based on their working patterns and the location of their command-and-control infrastructure, said McBride said. Their activity is consistent with government-sponsored espionage campaigns, but "we don't have anything specific tying them back to the government," he said.

Those targeted were more than 2,000 U.S. military members, U.S. lawmakers, journalists based in Washington, D.C. U.S. and Israeli defense contractors and lobbyists for Israel, iSight said in its report, which it did not publicly release. It is believed the hackers wanted to obtain intellectual property or other sensitive information that would benefit Iran.

"We can certainly say it [the hackers' campaign] was successful," McBride said.

The campaign, which started around 2011, is notable for its low-tech but effective social-engineering methods, iSight said. The hackers slowly bolstered fake but credible-looking online personas on social networks, said Steve Ward, senior director for marketing. Profile photos, often of attractive women, were copied from random photos.

The credentials of some fake personas were also embellished on a fake online news website call "NewsOnAir.org," which was still online as of Wednesday night. The site copied news stories from legitimate publishers such as Reuters, the BBC and the AP.

Those profiles were used to befriend associates of the real target, who was eventually approached online. The victims were usually receptive to the social media invitations after seeing that the fake persona was already connected with existing friends.

Although the group used some malware, its primary method for compromising victims was merely tricking them into divulging login credentials for Web-based services.

The attackers would eventually approach their target, such as with a message with a link to YouTube. A victim would first be directed to a fake Google Gmail login page in an attempt to gather the person's credentials before being redirected to the video. In other instances, the attackers spoofed the Web-based login page for corporate email systems.

ISight Partners contracts with companies and government agencies for its subscription intelligence and analysis services, a lucrative field where it competes with companies such as FireEye, CrowdStrike and Dell SecureWorks. Its report was drawn from intelligence work it has done for customers and agencies, McBride said.

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How augmented reality wants to help you shop

Want to see how that coffee machine looks on your counter before you buy it? A crop of startups see a business in helping you visualize.

The companies are vying to provide new mapping and image recognition services to give better information to consumers before they click "buy." They are also working with businesses to help them see how products or displays will look in their stores before they place a bulk order from a wholesaler.

The companies, which include outfits like Augment and Cimagine, operate in the hot field known as "augmented reality." The term can be used broadly, to also describe certain products offered by Google, GE or Metaio. Companies' approaches differ, though the area usually involves "augmenting" what people are experiencing in their physical environment with other interactive information or media.

Cimagine's technology lets shoppers instantly visualize items in their current location.

In the case of Augment, the company provides a mobile app for both iOS and Android that lets businesses upload and share previously rendered 3D models of retail items or other product displays. Cimagine does something similar, providing a way for consumers to see how those products would look in different parts of their house.

The technology makes use of the camera in people's smartphones or tablets. Holding your iPad up in front of your kitchen counter, while viewing an item on a retailer's site, might super-impose the item on the counter, locked in place, even if you move your iPad around.

Big retailers like IKEA already provide ways to let consumers see how products might appear in their homes, by letting their catalog function as a marker that the smartphone's camera would recognize.

But more tech companies are trying to artificially bring retailers' products into people's environs, sometimes without needing markers for reference.

One of Augment's biggest customers is the French beauty company L'Oreal. Its sales reps use Augment's technology to help sell beauty products to stores, by showing how renderings of them would appear in the stores. Cimagine, meanwhile, lets consumers see how furniture items might look like in their homes.

One of the biggest problems in e-commerce right now, said Cimagine CEO Yoni Nevo, is that people have a hard time picturing how well the item will look in their home. "They want to know how it fits," he said.

ViewAR is another firm developing a similar technology for businesses and shoppers.

Those companies were just a few of many touting their services Wednesday at Augmented World Expo, a conference in Santa Clara, California, focused on augmented reality applications.

Much of the consumer interest around augmented reality has been focused on wearable devices like Google Glass or Oculus Rift, which take their own approaches to layering different types of media on top of what people see through the goggles.

But companies like Cimagine and Augment show that augmented reality is not just about geeky-looking glasses. If anything, the field may be gaining more traction among businesses now, who see the potential for making better connections with customers.

For some, 2014 even marks a tipping point in the growth of businesses around augmented reality. Total Immersion, an older player that provides 3D graphics and other services for brands, reported Wednesday that for the first time ever it had monthly recurring revenue with repeat customers.

When it comes to using the technology for shopping, it's not perfect. Items might hover in mid-air, or the tablet could get choked up trying to quickly process images from people's kitchens. And companies in the space are still far from providing a mass market service.

Robert Scoble, the technology blogger and guru who delivered Wednesday's keynote at the show, likened the field right now to the introduction of the Apple II computer in 1977. At that time, "It was called the year of the personal computer, even though personal computers didn't really arrive until 15 or 20 years later," he said.

Augmented reality's true heyday, he said, might also come later.

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China to crack down on mobile instant messaging apps

China is starting a month-long crack down on illegal content circulating through local instant messaging services.

The latest crackdown, announced Tuesday, comes after a terrorist attack in China's Xinjiang region killed 43 people. Police later arrested over 200 suspected militants, who had been chatting over local instant messaging services to organize their activities, according to the nation's state-controlled press.

Among the messaging services used were WeChat and QQ, two of the most popular in the nation and developed by local Internet giant Tencent.

China is targeting rumors, terrorism, and porn-related information as part of the operation. Specifically, authorities want to regulate the way the mobile instant messaging apps can spread information to the public.

"Some people are using these platforms to disseminate unhealthy or illegal and harmful information to the public," China's Xinhua News Agency said. In total, mobile instant messaging services in China have over 800 million users, the agency added.

Tencent did not immediately comment. Its WeChat app has 355 million monthly active users, most of which are in China.

The company has already been tightening restrictions around WeChat "public accounts", which any user can subscribe to. In March, Tencent shut down certain public accounts known for political writings, claiming that they had violated company policies.

Users, however, complained that the accounts had done nothing wrong, and some of the public accounts were later restored. But China's scrutiny over WeChat is not expected to stop. In November, the government named the product as among the social networking apps that could destabilize the nation if not properly controlled.

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No steering wheel. No pedals. Google gets serious about self-driving cars

So you're fascinated with self-driving cars, eh? Are you fascinated enough to try one that has no steering wheel and no pedals? That's the next, dramatic step for Google in its determination to create a fully autonomous car.

No matter how cool this all sounds, the thought of ceding all major control to the computer in the car is still a big conceptual leap for most people. That could be why Google's prototype for this evolutionary shift looks like a simplified Herbie the Love Bug. There's a cunning LiDAR hat on top, with round, friendly, faux headlights for eyes, what looks like an adorable cluster of sensors for its nose, and of course, a broad smile where a radiator might be (except this will be an electric car).

Inside, there'll be space for two people (seatbelted, Google hastens to emphasize), a few possessions, and a display to show the car's planned route.

Google's blog post confirms the company's ambitious goal for this prototype's fleet of test cars: "They won't have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don't need them. Our software and sensors do all the work." According to Google, the cars' sensors will eliminate blind spots and be able to detect everything within two football fields' distance all around.

Google's newest self-driving prototype looks and acts nothing like the Lexus-based experimental autonomous vehicle introduced in 2010. 

In a notable show of caution, however, these prototypes will have a top speed of 25 miles per hour. This is closer to the village-friendly speed of Induct's Navia self-driving shuttle than Google's first-gen autonomous driving vehicle.

Google's newest experimental car may be modest in ability, but not in scope. The company plans to build "about a hundred prototype vehicles" with manual controls to start testing in the summer. In "the next couple of years," a pilot program could launch in California. Google also mentioned working with partners "to bring this technology into the world safely."

We could all name some drivers of dubious merit whom we'd love to demote to a passive lump in a car like this—a car that knows better. It'll be fascinating to watch Google's progress with this experiment, but I have one nagging doubt: Are we all going to be on that list of demoted drivers someday?   

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Amazon 'not optimistic' about ending standoff with Hachette soon

Amazon.com defended the right of a retailer to promote a publisher's books differently, in the wake of a dispute with Hachette."A retailer can feature a supplier's items in its advertising and promotional circulars, 'stack it high' in the front of the store, keep small quantities on hand in the back aisle, or not carry the item at all, and bookstores and other retailers do these every day," the company said in a statement Tuesday.The dispute between Amazon and Hachette, in which the retailer is said to have delayed shipments of the publisher's books or listed them as unavailable, has led to allegations that the retailer is misusing its dominance of the online books business."Two summers ago, when the five publishers teamed with Apple to take a stand against Amazon's ebook dominance, the Justice Department went after the publishers, not Amazon, implicitly sanctioning Amazon's monopoly and allowing anti-competitive tactics like this to continue," wrote the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers.U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled last year that Apple and five major U.S. publishers including Hachette had conspired to raise prices in the ebook market to counter Amazon. Apple has appealed the order."We are currently buying less (print) inventory and 'safety stock' on titles from the publisher, Hachette, than we ordinarily do, and are no longer taking pre-orders on titles whose publication dates are in the future," Amazon wrote. These changes are related to the contract and terms between Hachette and Amazon, the online retailer said.Amazon said that despite much work from both sides, it and Hachette were unable to reach agreement on terms. Amazon said it is "not optimistic that this will be resolved soon," and recommended buying the affected titles from its third-party sellers or competitors.The retailer said it had offered to fund 50 percent of an author pool that Hachette could allocate to mitigate the impact of the dispute on author royalties, if Hachette agreed to fund the other half.Hachette could not immediately be reached for comment on Amazon's statement.

John Ribeiro , IDG News Service

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service.
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EBay flaw could be used to hijack accounts, researcher says

A security researcher who found a major vulnerability in eBay's website last week said a second flaw he found hasn't been fixed and could be used to hijack user accounts.

Jordan Lee Jones, a 19-year-old college student who lives in Stockton-on-Tees, U.K, said he notified eBay on Friday by email of the second vulnerability. It hadn't been fixed as of Monday, so he decided to publish details of it on his blog.

"Ebay should be on top of their stuff," he said in an instant message conversation late Monday. EBay officials couldn't be reached in the U.S. due to the long holiday weekend.

Jones and several other security researchers have been taking a close look at eBay's network since the company disclosed a data breach last Thursday.

The company said attackers gained log-in credentials for a small number of employees in late February and early March. They eventually stole customer names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers and birth dates.

Since it disclosed the breach, eBay has been criticized for not alerting customers more clearly and waiting for days to send a mass email advising customers to change their passwords.

The second vulnerability Jones found is a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw, where code from another source is executed within a website. He said the flaw could be used to grab cookies from logged-in eBay users who visit a page that has been injected with the attack code. The cookie would be emailed to the attacker, Jones said.

A cookie is a small data file stored in a Web browser that remembers certain data, such as if a person has already logged into the website. Cookies can be cleared from a Web browser or expire, but if a valid cookie is obtained by a hacker, it could potentially be used to gain access to a person's account.

The XSS attack code could also be injected into an auction listing page, Jones said, and its payload would affect whomever visits the particular listing.

Jones demonstrated how the XSS flaw could be used on eBay by displaying a pop-up reading "1337," which is hacker lingo for "leet," short for "elite."

Like many companies, eBay requests that security researchers withhold describing their findings publicly until a flaw is fixed, a policy known as "responsible disclosure." EBay's guidelines for researchers warn that "we take the security of our customers very seriously, however some vulnerabilities take longer than others to resolve."

Although companies can appeal to researchers to hold their findings, it's not illegal for researchers to disclose a vulnerability, and many do.

The first vulnerability Jones found allowed him to upload shellcode to eBay's network, which would have allowed him to deface part of the website or download the backend database. EBay took measures to defend against the vulnerability.

EBay thanked Jones for the finding and said it would add his name to a list of security researchers who have assisted the company, according to correspondence he shared with IDG News Service.

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Twitter users to grow 24.4 percent in 2014, US still largest market

Twitter users are expected to grow 24.4 percent this year to over 227 million with double-digit growth forecast to continue through 2018 when the number of users will be nearly 400 million, according to a report.

The US will continue to be the country with the largest number of individual Twitter users through 2018, eMarketer said on Tuesday. But its share of users, currently at 20 percent, will drop over the years and give Twitter the opportunity to grow its advertising revenue from outside the U.S.

The Asia-Pacific region increased its share of the number of Twitter users to 30.5 percent in 2013 in comparison to 26 percent for second-place North America. High growth countries in Asia-Pacific were Indonesia and India with 76.3 and 68.8 percent growth, respectively.

The research firm said its estimates are based on how many individual users log in or access Twitter each month within the calendar year. It said its figure differ from Twitter's reported figure for users because it uses consumer survey data to remove business accounts, multiple accounts for individual users and other sources of potential double-counting.

Twitter reported average monthly active users (MAUs) were 241 million as of Dec. 31, which increased to 255 million at the end of the first quarter.

The figure for Asia-Pacific does not include China which blocks Twitter, although users still access the social networking site using virtual private networks.

By 2018, the share of the Asia-Pacific region is forecast to reach 40.1 percent as the share of North America drops to 19 percent. If there are changes in China's policies towards foreign social networks, the share of Asia-Pacific could soar further, eMarketer said.

India and Indonesia are forecast to have the third and fourth-largest base of Twitter users in the world in 2014, with about 18 million and 15 million users, respectively.

The popularity of Twitter and other social media in India was reflected in the extensive use of these tools during the recently concluded federal elections in the country. The new prime minister Narendra Modi uses Twitter and Facebook frequently to communicate to literate users and has over 4.4 million followers on Twitter.

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Down on the factory-farm, Japan's electronics makers are turning over a new leaf

Sure, you could buy a laptop, tablet or cloud service from Toshiba. But how about some spinach?

The Tokyo-based conglomerate is joining other IT firms in Japan by getting into high-tech farming. The companies say there's demand for vegetables that are free of pesticides and other substances, as well as produce with specific nutritional profiles.

From July, Toshiba will begin shipping spinach, lettuce, baby leaf greens, sprouts and mizuna greens. They will be grown in a germ-free clean room at a factory that once made floppy disks.

The 1,969-square-meter facility in Yokosuka southwest of Tokyo had been lying idle, but it's being dusted off to grow vegetables that will be sold in supermarkets, convenience stores and restaurants. They will have an extended shelf-life compared to field-grown crops.

The agricultural technology installed includes fluorescent lighting that has a wavelength optimized for vegetable growth, monitoring systems to track the growth and a production management system based on methods used in semiconductor device manufacturing.

Japanese consumers want produce untainted by pesticides or other substances, according to Toshiba, which is aiming for annual sales of ¥300 million (US$2.9 million). It also plans to harvest vegetables that are rich in polyphenols and vitamin C.

"To meet these increasing demands, a closed-type plant factory that operates under almost aseptic conditions is ideal for production," a Toshiba spokeswoman said.

"Toshiba has all the integral technologies to achieve such a factory, including energy production and control, lighting, water and air control, ICT and a high level of production management. This is the major reason for us to enter the business."

Toshiba's move follows Fujitsu's production of lettuce grown in a sterile facility that was once used to make chips for mobile phones and other devices.

The leafy greens are raised in hydroponic racks with the help of sensors and cloud computing systems. They're also specially low in potassium and targeted at the more than 1 million Japanese who have chronic kidney disease. At about ¥500 per 90-gram bag, the lettuce is about twice the cost of regular lettuce in Japan, but it can be eaten without being washed.

"By using a clean room environment, virtually no contaminants will come into contact with the vegetables as dust that could be a breeding ground for bacteria is almost entirely nonexistent," said Koji Nomaki, a spokesman for group company Fujitsu Home & Office Services.

Fujitsu's cloud service for crops, dubbed Akisai, can help managers control factors such as internal air temperatures, humidity, CO2 levels, fertilizer levels, pH and electrical conductivity.

"If a product lot is unsatisfactory, the environmental factors of that particular lot can be confirmed and analyzed to develop countermeasures that prevent further occurrence of poor results," Nomaki said.

The manufacturers are betting on increasing demand for produce from plant factories. The market for farming facilities that only use artificial lights such as LEDs is expected to grow to ¥44 billion in 2025 from ¥3 billion last year, according to Yano Research Institute.

The IT farming trend, however, isn't restricted to vegetables or factories. Hitachi's GeoMation Farm is an IT agriculture-management system that can help forecast growth and determine the best harvest time for cereal crops such as wheat, which has an optimum harvest window in Japan of only one to two weeks.

A project called Nosho Navi, coordinated by Kyushu University, focuses on Japan's all-important rice crop. Farmers in Shiga Prefecture near Kyoto use smartphones to upload data on rice paddy watering to a cloud server that can give harvesting advice.

Sharp, meanwhile, is trying to grow Japanese strawberries in the Middle East.

"Japanese strawberries are large and delicate, and being close to the market will be advantageous for the production," said Miyuki Nakayama, a Sharp spokeswoman.

The strawberries can fetch a high price if they reach the Middle Eastern market before spoiling.

Sharp is using controlled LED lighting, its proprietary air-purifying technology and humidity and temperature monitoring systems to optimize strawberry growth in a small, 108-square-meter facility in Dubai.

NEC is also cultivating fruit. It has helped build a hydroponic greenhouse in Pune, India, that is remotely controlled from Japan to grow strawberries in coco peat.

Japanese IT companies are trying to cultivate new markets, bringing their IT manufacturing know-how and idled facilities to bear, but the move is part of a broader reform of Japan's protected agriculture sector, which is struggling with an aging population of farmers.

"Japanese farming has traditionally been a small-lot, family business," said Takeshi Ikeda, an enterprise networking and communications analyst at Gartner. "It's not automated, but some farmers are trying to do it in a smarter way by using IT power."

Other manufacturers and supermarket chains are part of the drive to make farming in Japan more efficient, Ikeda added, but a large proportion of farmers has yet to embrace IT solutions.

"They're more conservative and they don't want to change," he said.

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US seeks leniency for 'Sabu,' Lulzsec leader-turned-snitch

U.S. prosecutors say a hacking group's mastermind should be spared a long prison sentence due to his quick and fruitful cooperation with law enforcement.

The man, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York, is accused of leading a gang of international miscreants calling themselves "Lulzsec," short for Lulz Security, on a noisy hacking spree in 2011, striking companies such as HBGary, Fox Entertainment and Sony Pictures.

Lulzsec, an offshoot of Anonymous, led a high-profile campaign that taunted law enforcement, released stolen data publicly and bragged of their exploits on Twitter. Their campaign touched off a worldwide law enforcement action that resulted in more than a dozen arrests.

Monsegur, known as "Sabu," was secretly arrested by the FBI around June 2011. He pleaded guilty in August that year to a 12-count indictment outlining various fraud and hacking charges. He agreed to work with investigators, which resulted in several more arrests.

In a filing on Friday, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara wrote that Monsegur should only be sentenced to the seven months he has already served. He could face between 21 and 26 years in prison.

"Monsegur was an extremely valuable and productive cooperator," Bharara wrote.

After FBI agents went to Monsegur's home around June 7, 2011, he allegedly admitted to criminal conduct and immediately agreed to cooperate with law enforcement, according to the filing.

"That night, Monsegur reviewed his computer files with FBI agents and provided actionable information to law enforcement," it said.

In May 2012, Monsegur got in trouble after making "unauthorized online postings," and his bail was revoked. But he was released on a revised bail package in December 2012 and has remained free since, the filing said.

Monsegur's cooperation lead to the arrest of Jeremy Hammond, who at one time was the number one cybercriminal target. Hammond, of Chicago, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in November 2013 after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking. He also agreed to pay US$2.5 million in restitution.

Hammond admitted to participating in more than a half dozen attacks perpetrated in 2010 and 2011 by Anonymous and affiliated groups, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. All told, information supplied by Monsegur led to the arrest of seven other major figures, the filing said.

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Sony follows Microsoft into Chinese game consoles market

Sony is preparing to sell its PlayStation in China, joining Microsoft to compete in the country's fledgling gaming console market.

The Japanese company is setting up two joint ventures with local Chinese company Shanghai Oriental Pearl Culture Development, it said Monday. Both joint ventures, one focused on hardware and the other on software, will be established in a new free trade zone in Shanghai. China is allowing gaming console makers located in the zone to sell their systems to the rest of the country.

Sony will have a 49 percent stake in one of the joint ventures, and a 70 percent stake in the other, according to a Sunday stock exchange filing from Shanghai Oriental Pearl's parent company. The remaining stakes will be held by the Chinese company.

Sony declined to provide further details on its plans for the PlayStation in the country.

It is entering the market, after China recently ended its ban on foreign-made gaming consoles with the establishment of the new Shanghai free trade zone. The nation has a potentially large customer base, with 338 million online gamers, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

Microsoft has already announced its plans for China, and is slated to bring the Xbox One to the market in September, through its own joint venture. Chinese companies, such as Huawei Technologies, ZTE and TCL are also jumping on the gaming bandwagon, and releasing inexpensive Android-based consoles.

But selling the products won't be in easy. In the case of Microsoft and Sony, both companies' systems are priced at the high-end, with the PlayStation 4 starting at US$399. In addition, individual games usually cost around $50, putting the systems out of the price range many Chinese consumers are willing to pay.

The other difficulty is regulation. Although China is opening up the console market, games must first receive approval from authorities. This could mean that more violent titles will be banned.

Sony's joint ventures in China, however, will introduce appropriate gaming titles and even create original products for the PlayStation, according to the stock exchange filing.

"We are considering any possibilities to cooperate with the local game development community," Sony added in an email.

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Apple asks US court to order Samsung to remove infringing features

Following up on a jury verdict, Apple has asked a court in California to order Samsung Electronics to stop using features that were found to infringe three of its patents.

The company has also asked the court to review damages awarded by the jury or to order a retrial.

The injunction sought by Apple in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division would cover features such as 'slide-to-unlock' on phone home screens for unlocking a device, auto-correct for prompts on the spelling of words, and the so-called 'quick links' feature for scanning text to identify certain types of structures such as phone numbers, dates and email addresses.

A jury in the California court ruled earlier this month that Samsung should pay Apple about US$119 million for infringing the three patents. The patent on auto-complete while typing had already been found to infringe, and the jury was only to calculate a damages award for that one. Some Apple products were also found to infringe a Samsung patent.

In a filing Saturday, Apple said it was not asking the court to bar entire product lines from the marketplace, but for an injunction that proposes to stop Samsung from further use of the specific features that the jury found to infringe Apple's three patents, and those features not more than "colorably different."

Apple has proposed a one-month "sunset period" for delay in enforcement. During this period, Samsung can "swap-in the non-infringing alternatives that it claims are already available and easy to implement," according to the redacted public version of the filing. Having represented that it can design around Apple's patents completely and quickly, Samsung cannot complain that Apple's narrowly-tailored injunction will deprive the public of a single Samsung product, it added.

"After the jury rejected Apple's grossly exaggerated damages claim, Apple is once again leaning on the court to push other smartphones out of the market. If granted, this would stifle fair competition and limit choice for American consumers," Samsung said in an emailed comment on Apple's request for an injunction.

Apple had requested the court for $2.2 billion in damages for what it alleged was massive infringement of five of its patents. In the wake of the far smaller damages awarded to it by the jury, the company is now also asking in a separate motion for higher damages for the patents Samsung was found to have infringed and a judgment that Samsung infringed the two other patents in the case.

The company has as an alternative asked for a new trial on infringement of the two patents that the jury found Samsung's products had not infringed and a new trial on damages for all five of Apple's asserted patents. Samsung did not comment on Apple's second motion.

A report in a South Korean newspaper had suggested that Samsung and Apple had recently agreed to begin talks to settle patent disputes out of court, citing people directly involved with the matter. In the court, though, the companies recently blamed each other for the failure of court-initiated negotiations to settle their dispute.

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Facebook sues alleged scammer over sex and Jennifer Lopez ads

Facebook is suing a former advertiser on its site, claiming he ran multiple ad accounts to promote sexual content and used a simple trick to scam the social network out of US$340,000.

The lawsuit, filed this week, asks a federal court in San Francisco to ban Martin Grunin of Brooklyn, New York, from Facebook for life and to force him to pay back the money he allegedly owes.

According to the lawsuit, Grunin started placing ads on Facebook in early 2011 that "purported to offer casual dating services and included a picture of a woman with a sexually explicit and profane caption."

Grunin couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

The ads, which linked to sites that paid Grunin for the traffic he sent them, resulted in Facebook issuing a cease-and-desist letter that Grunin accepted, according to the complaint. But he continued to open new accounts and kept advertising.

A year later, in 2012, Grunin sold access to Facebook advertising accounts with large credit lines to which he had "procured access through unauthorized means," the complaint alleges.

In an online forum posting allegedly written by Grunin and reproduced in the lawsuit, he offers an account with a $30,000 daily spending limit affiliated with an animal charity fan page.

Later that year, the suit alleges, he began contacting Facebook's ad sales team from accounts that appeared to belong to legitimate advertising agencies in order to create new accounts.

One email used a domain name that appeared similar to a legitimate one—a common tactic of scammers—and Facebook was apparently duped by it. By the time it discovered the fraud, the accounts had run $40,000 of deceptive ads supposedly endorsed by celebrities Jennifer Lopez and Dr. Oz, Facebook says.

A similar scam began in February 2013 and opened accounts that ran $300,000 worth of ads before it was noticed.

The defendant appears to be the same Martin Grunin who attended St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. Last year, he was interviewed by the student newspaper and talked about trading more than $100,000 on financial markets in between doing school work, and chided other students for lacking ambition.

"I want to be a billionaire one day," he told the newspaper.

The article, which appears to have been taken offline but is still available through Google's cache, is accompanied by a picture of Grunin in a sports car.

He is also a prolific poster to YouTube, where he talks about stock trading schemes, and on the StockTwits message board.

On Thursday, in reply to a message on StockTwits that offers him support for "that FB thing," Grunin replied: "It's all baseless allegations."

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MIT tackled Earth's atmosphere to give the moon broadband

Four transmitting telescopes in the New Mexico desert, each just 6 inches in diameter, can give a satellite orbiting the moon faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get.

The telescopes form the earthbound end of an experimental laser link to demonstrate faster communication with spacecraft and possible future bases on the moon and Mars. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will give details about the system and its performance next month at a conference of The Optical Society.

The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) kicked off last September with the launch of NASA's LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer), a research satellite now orbiting the moon. NASA built a laser communications module into LADEE for use in the high-speed wireless experiment.

LLCD has already proved itself, transmitting data from LADEE to Earth at 622Mbps (bits per second) and in the other direction at 19.44Mbps, according to MIT. It beat the fastest-ever radio communication to the moon by a factor of 4,800.

NASA hopes lasers can speed up communication with missions in space, which use radio to talk to Earth now, and let them send back more data. Laser equipment also weighs less than radio gear, a critical factor given the high cost of lifting any object into space.

The project uses transmitting telescopes at White Sands, New Mexico, to send data as pulses of invisible infrared light. The hard part of reaching the moon by laser is getting through Earth's atmosphere, which can bend light and cause it to fade or drop out on the way to the receiver.

One way the researchers got around that was by using the four separate telescopes. Each sends its beam through a different column of air, where the light-bending effects of the atmosphere are slightly different. That increases the chance that at least one of the beams will reach the receiver on the LADEE.

Test results have been promising, according to MIT, with the 384,633-kilometer optical link providing error-free performance in both darkness and bright sunlight, through partly transparent thin clouds, and through atmospheric turbulence that affected signal power.

One reason it works is that there's plenty of signal power to spare. The transmission power from the Earth antennas totals 40 watts, and less than a billionth of a watt is received on the LADEE. But that's still 10 times the signal needed to communicate without errors, according to MIT. On the craft, a smaller telescope collects the light and focuses it into an optical fiber. After the signal is amplified, it's converted to electrical pulses and into data.

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Tech giants team up to take on US Government gag orders

As it stands now, tech companies can't disclose exact figures on how many national security-related user data requests they've received from the US Government. A group of major tech companies aren't happy about the current state of affairs, however, so they've decided to do something about it.

According to a report from the Washington Post, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo have filed papers with the 9th Circuit Court arguing against ongoing gag orders the Government has put in place to guard against disclosure of these data requests. According to the court papers, which were filed in April, the four companies see the gag orders as a form of prior restraint, and argue that they are therefore a violation of the First Amendment.

According to the Post, this isn't about revealing specifics about any given data request. In fact, the Post reports that, according to court documents, "[t]he companies do not want to disclose any information that would place specific investigations in jeopardy."

Instead, the companies in question want to be able to release additional statistics on the number of requests they've received, as well as a more detailed breakdown on the kinds of requests Government officials have made. They would also like to be able to provide this information on an ongoing basis instead of having to ask permission each time they want to disclose, as is the case right now.

A growing number of tech companies are working to increase transparency as it relates to government requests for user data. Earlier this month, for instance, Apple published guidelines that state what user information law enforcement can—and can't—request from the company. 

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Google preps mobile YouTube management app for creators

Google is developing a new mobile management app for people who post a lot of video to YouTube, part of an effort to help creators on the site get more out of the service.

The app is based on feedback from people who operate YouTube channels to connect with fans, build a brand and in some cases try to make a living. Google said it recognizes that some of those users have been frustrated with the service and it wants to keep them more up-to-date about what it's doing.

In the coming months it will release an app that provides access to management controls for YouTube channels that either weren't available on mobile or were hard to get at.

"We saw creators struggling a lot with not being able to do basic YouTube management stuff on their phones," an engineer says in a video preview of the new tools. It's collecting feedback via the comments, Google+ and Twitter about the features people want.

It's important for YouTube to keep its independent creators happy. They drive a lot of viewers to the site but it's sometimes hard for them to make money, while corporations and media companies are using the service successfully for marketing.

So Google will explore new business models to help content creators make more money. For instance, a lot of creators raise funds for their work offline, away from YouTube, so Google said it will introduce a feature to let fans contribute directly through the site.

Around 80 percent of YouTube's viewership is from outside the U.S., so it's also working on a "community captions project" to make content accessible overseas. It will also provide more royalty-free music and a way to collect revenue from popular music covers users make.

The Creator Preview is the first in a series of videos that YouTube will produce to keep people better informed about what it's up to.

Susan Wojcicki, a longtime ad executive at Google, was recently named the new chief executive of YouTube. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for roughly US$1.6 billion.

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Facebook sues alleged scammer over sex and Jennifer Lopez ads

Facebook is suing a former advertiser on its site, claiming he ran multiple ad accounts to promote sexual content and used a simple trick to scam the social network out of US$340,000.

The lawsuit, filed this week, asks a federal court in San Francisco to ban Martin Grunin of Brooklyn, New York, from Facebook for life and to force him to pay back the money he allegedly owes.

According to the lawsuit, Grunin started placing ads on Facebook in early 2011 that "purported to offer casual dating services and included a picture of a woman with a sexually explicit and profane caption."

Grunin couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

The ads, which linked to sites that paid Grunin for the traffic he sent them, resulted in Facebook issuing a cease-and-desist letter that Grunin accepted, according to the complaint. But he continued to open new accounts and kept advertising.

A year later, in 2012, Grunin sold access to Facebook advertising accounts with large credit lines to which he had "procured access through unauthorized means," the complaint alleges.

In an online forum posting allegedly written by Grunin and reproduced in the lawsuit, he offers an account with a $30,000 daily spending limit affiliated with an animal charity fan page.

Later that year, the suit alleges, he began contacting Facebook's ad sales team from accounts that appeared to belong to legitimate advertising agencies in order to create new accounts.

One email used a domain name that appeared similar to a legitimate one—a common tactic of scammers—and Facebook was apparently duped by it. By the time it discovered the fraud, the accounts had run $40,000 of deceptive ads supposedly endorsed by celebrities Jennifer Lopez and Dr. Oz, Facebook says.

A similar scam began in February 2013 and opened accounts that ran $300,000 worth of ads before it was noticed.

The defendant appears to be the same Martin Grunin who attended St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. Last year, he was interviewed by the student newspaper and talked about trading more than $100,000 on financial markets in between doing school work, and chided other students for lacking ambition.

"I want to be a billionaire one day," he told the newspaper.

The article, which appears to have been taken offline but is still available through Google's cache, is accompanied by a picture of Grunin in a sports car.

He is also a prolific poster to YouTube, where he talks about stock trading schemes, and on the StockTwits message board.

On Thursday, in reply to a message on StockTwits that offers him support for "that FB thing," Grunin replied: "It's all baseless allegations."

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

MIT tackled Earth's atmosphere to give the moon broadband

Four transmitting telescopes in the New Mexico desert, each just 6 inches in diameter, can give a satellite orbiting the moon faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get.

The telescopes form the earthbound end of an experimental laser link to demonstrate faster communication with spacecraft and possible future bases on the moon and Mars. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will give details about the system and its performance next month at a conference of The Optical Society.

The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) kicked off last September with the launch of NASA's LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer), a research satellite now orbiting the moon. NASA built a laser communications module into LADEE for use in the high-speed wireless experiment.

LLCD has already proved itself, transmitting data from LADEE to Earth at 622Mbps (bits per second) and in the other direction at 19.44Mbps, according to MIT. It beat the fastest-ever radio communication to the moon by a factor of 4,800.

NASA hopes lasers can speed up communication with missions in space, which use radio to talk to Earth now, and let them send back more data. Laser equipment also weighs less than radio gear, a critical factor given the high cost of lifting any object into space.

The project uses transmitting telescopes at White Sands, New Mexico, to send data as pulses of invisible infrared light. The hard part of reaching the moon by laser is getting through Earth's atmosphere, which can bend light and cause it to fade or drop out on the way to the receiver.

One way the researchers got around that was by using the four separate telescopes. Each sends its beam through a different column of air, where the light-bending effects of the atmosphere are slightly different. That increases the chance that at least one of the beams will reach the receiver on the LADEE.

Test results have been promising, according to MIT, with the 384,633-kilometer optical link providing error-free performance in both darkness and bright sunlight, through partly transparent thin clouds, and through atmospheric turbulence that affected signal power.

One reason it works is that there's plenty of signal power to spare. The transmission power from the Earth antennas totals 40 watts, and less than a billionth of a watt is received on the LADEE. But that's still 10 times the signal needed to communicate without errors, according to MIT. On the craft, a smaller telescope collects the light and focuses it into an optical fiber. After the signal is amplified, it's converted to electrical pulses and into data.

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Microsoft will patch IE zero day but doesn't give timeline

Microsoft said Thursday it plans eventually to patch a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that it's known about for seven months, but it didn't say when.

A security research group within Hewlett-Packard called the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) released details of the flaw on Wednesday after giving Microsoft months to address it. The group withholds details of vulnerabilities to prevent tipping off hackers but eventually publicizes its findings even if a flaw isn't fixed.

Microsoft said it had not detected attacks that used the vulnerability, which is a "use-after-free" flaw, which involves the handling of CMarkup objects.

The company did not give a reason for the long delay but said in a statement that some patches take longer to engineer and that "we must test every one against a huge number of programs, applications and different configurations."

"We continue working to address this issue and will release a security update when ready in order to help protect customers," it said.

To exploit the flaw, an attacker would have to convince a user to visit a malicious website. If the attack were successful, a hacker would have the same rights as the victim on the computer and could run arbitrary code.

Microsoft's next patch release, known as "Patch Tuesday," is scheduled for June 10. It occasionally issues an emergency patch if a vulnerability is being widely used in attacks.

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, wrote that exploit developers are probably studying ZDI's advisory to try to develop an attack.

"We do not know how quickly an exploit will be released, but the remaining time to Patch Tuesday is not that long," he wrote.

The Belgian researcher who found the flaw, Peter Van Eeckhoutte, wrote on his blog on Thursday that although Microsoft has known of the bug for a long time, "I don't believe this is an indication that Microsoft is ignoring bug reports or doesn't care about security at all, so let's not exaggerate things."

"In fact, Microsoft is doing an excellent job in handling vulnerability reports, issuing patches and crediting researchers," he wrote. "But I would be really worried if the bug was actively being exploited and left unpatched for another 180 days."

In its advisory, ZDI recommended that users set the Internet security zone settings in IE 8 to "high," which blocks ActiveX controls and Active Scripting. Also, using Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) would provide more defense, it wrote.

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Microsoft claims win over FBI, but agency still got its way

Microsoft claimed victory over an FBI bid to keep a request for customer data secret for national security reasons, but it appears the government gave up the fight after getting its way without the company.

The FBI issued a National Security Letter to Microsoft in 2013, which requested subscriber information about a single user account for one of the company's enterprise customers, according to documents unsealed on Thursday by a federal court in Seattle.

The letter had a nondisclosure provision that forbade Microsoft from disclosing the request to the company affected, which Microsoft concluded "was unlawful and violated our Constitutional right to free expression," wrote Brad Smith, the company's chief legal officer, in a blog post.

"It did so by hindering our practice of notifying enterprise customers when we receive legal orders related to their data," he wrote.

After Microsoft filed a petition challenging the NSL in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the "FBI withdrew its letter," Smith wrote.

But the unsealed documents showed the reason the FBI didn't challenge Microsoft's petition. The agency had obtained the information it sought directly from the Microsoft customer it had targeted in a way that maintained "the confidentiality of the investigation."

That reasoning would indicate the FBI might have fought Microsoft's petition if it hadn't achieved its aim of keeping the probe quiet.

Still, Smith considered it a victory for Microsoft. Although government requests for enterprise customer data are rare, "where we have received requests, we've succeeded in redirecting the government to obtain the information from the customer, or we have obtained permission from the customer to provide the data," he wrote.

"We're pleased with the outcome of this case, which validates our approach," Smith wrote.

Microsoft is one of many technology companies that have vowed to closely scrutinize U.S. government requests for data.

In January, the U.S. Justice Department reached an agreement with technology companies that would allow more details to be released on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders and NSLs, which often must be kept secret.

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Court approval sought for $324M settlement of tech workers anti-poaching suit

Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe Systems have agreed to pay US$324.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the companies of entering into secret agreements not to hire each others' workers, according to a filing seeking preliminary approval of the settlement.

The filing late Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division by lawyers for class representatives Mark Fichtner, Siddharth Hariharan, and Daniel Stover states that the companies will deposit an initial sum of $1 million from the settlement amount into an escrow account within 10 days of the preliminary approval, to be used for notice and administration costs.

The remaining $323.5 million will be paid into the account after the final approval of the settlement.

Class members who do not opt out will be eligible to receive a share of the settlement fund, based on a formula set on the basic salary paid during the relevant period.

Each of the named plaintiffs also get in addition "service award payments" of $80,000 for their services as class representatives. They worked in technical positions for the companies in the settlement, and "incurred the substantial risks and costs of taking on leadership roles in this visible litigation against seven of the most prominent technology firms in the world," according to the filing.

The attorneys' fees and reimbursement of costs and expenses are also to be paid from the settlement fund.

The four companies and the employees had informed the court of a settlement in a filing in April but had not disclosed the sum and other terms of the settlement.

One class representative Michael Devine has since objected to the settlement, stating that the amount was too small. In a letter to District Judge Lucy Koh, earlier this month, Devine wrote that he was not informed "that the most recent round of mediation that lead to the tentative settlement was even taking place until the day after Plaintiffs' and Defendants' counsel had already reached an agreement."

Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar had previously settled for about $20 million.

The complaint filed by five engineers alleged that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar, all high-tech companies with principal place of business in the San Francisco-Silicon Valley area of California, had engaged in an "overarching conspiracy" to fix and suppress employee compensation and to restrict employee mobility.

The companies were said to have set up "Do Not Call" lists, putting each firm's employees off-limits to the other companies, with instructions to recruiters not to "cold call" these employees.

The seven companies settled similar charges in 2010 with the U.S. Department of Justice while admitting no wrongdoing, but agreed not to ban cold calling and enter into any agreements that prevent competition for employees.

The employees held that the DOJ put an end to the allegedly illegal agreements, but the government was unable to compensate the victims of the conspiracy, which was the reason why they were filing a suit. Top tech executives including former Apple CEO and cofounder Steve Jobs were said to have monitored and enforced the anti-poaching agreements.

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Obama backs new surveillance legislation, but tech companies reject

A tech industry group that has Facebook and Google as participants has rejected the latest draft of a U.S. legislation that aims to put curbs on surveillance by the National Security Agency.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday said it supported swift passage of the USA Freedom Act by the U.S. House of Representatives, and urged the Senate to follow suit.

"Overall, the bill's significant reforms would provide the public greater confidence in our programs and the checks and balances in the system," the White House said in a statement.

But the tech companies, which also include Yahoo, AOL, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and LinkedIn, have said in a statement that the latest draft opens up an "unacceptable loophole that could enable the bulk collection of Internet users' data."

The tech companies coalition, called Reform Government Surveillance, said it could not support the bill as currently drafted and urged Congress to close the loophole to ensure meaningful reform. The legislation has moved in the wrong direction, it added. The group did not give details of the loophole it wants removed.

In December, the tech companies called for the reform around the world of government surveillance laws and practices, with the U.S. taking the lead. Some Internet companies were charged in disclosures last year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of providing to the agency real-time access to contents on their servers, which the companies denied. There were also reports that the agency was tapping into communications links between the data centers of Yahoo and Google.

Civil rights groups have also criticized the new turn in the legislation which is meant to end bulk collection of communications records by the NSA.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, is concerned about the new definition of "specific selection term," which describes and limits who or what the NSA is allowed to monitor.

The expression was originally defined in the legislation as "a term used to uniquely describe a person, entity, or account," wrote Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. The new definition, which refers to "a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device," could allow for the use of broad selection terms such as a zip code. It converts an exclusive list of unique identifiers into an unbounded list of discrete identifiers, while explicitly adding addresses and devices as types of identifiers, Bankston wrote in a blog post.

"Congress has been clear that it wishes to end bulk collection, but given the government's history of twisted legal interpretations, this language can't be relied on to protect our freedoms," EFF said in a post.

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Salesforce.com glitzes up its mobile app with 30 new features

Salesforce.com is moving quickly to enhance the new mobile application it unveiled at November's Dreamforce conference, with some 30 new features aimed at helping customers work through complex business processes in a single environment on their phone or tablet.

Some of the updates simply tie the mobile application deeper into Salesforce.com's CRM (customer-relationship-management) software, such as the ability to directly access reports and dashboards. The application also supports offline data access, giving salespeople a way to work when there's no Internet connection available.

Salesforce1 Mobile also has been integrated with Salesforce.com's Service Cloud software, said Michael Peachey, senior director of mobile products. That means a customer support representative can access knowledge bases and respond to customer inquiries by email or social channels, he said.

In addition, Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud has been more closely aligned with the mobile application, as marketers will be able to view data such as customer contacts and marketing collateral through it, according to a statement.

Another key component of Salesforce1 Mobile are partner applications. Partners can create a custom view of their software that runs inside Salesforce1 Mobile, or create custom actions that can be part of a multi-process workflow, Peachey said. More than 65 partners have taken part so far, according to a statement.

The mobile app already supported Apple iOS and Android devices, but the update introduces support for the Windows 8, BlackBerry Z10 and Good Access Secure mobile browsers. It also will deliver notifications to Samsung wearables, which is "just the first step" in that direction, Peachey said.

Salesforce1 Mobile is provided to subscribers at no additional charge and will be rolled out as part of Salesforce.com's Summer '14 release, which is set for later this year.

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Popular on Twitter? Your Klout score might soon get you a discount on a TV

It might be time to change the adage "the customer is always right" to, "the customer with the most followers is always right."

On Wednesday, Lithium, which provides services to help businesses navigate social media, held its annual conference in San Francisco and explained how it plans to make use of Klout, the "social influence" company it said it had acquired two months ago.

Part of that plan includes new products that will let big retailers such as Best Buy or Sony embed buttons, or widgets, into their websites through which customers can give feedback about their products.

That's where Klout comes in. If the person clicking on the widget has a high Klout score, the retailer might send that person a discount coupon for, say, a TV. After all, you want to keep your influential customers happy, and who knows what they might say about you if they enjoy your product.

Lithium CEO Robert Tarkoff said the company is building a "shared value network" in which both consumers and brands can benefit from Lithium's analytics.

To do that, "we had to increase our investment on the consumer side," he said, explaining why Lithium bought Klout. He announced several new products designed to give businesses better information about who they should connect with online.

For starters, a series of "action widgets" will begin appearing later this year on certain businesses' websites. The partner companies haven't been decided but they're likely to be in retail or entertainment, like many of Lithium's current clients.

In a demonstration, Lithium showed a Sony product page for an expensive television. Toward the top, where a Facebook "like" button might appear, was a button marked "Want." By clicking on it, a consumer could provide feedback such as, "I would buy this TV, if it were cheaper by $50." Or, "I would buy this, if it came in silver."

"It's a wish list on steroids," as Lithium Chief Product Officer Tapan Bhat put it.

If the consumer has an account on file, the retailer might send him an email for that exact discount—especially if they had a high Klout score.

The same could play out for customers who take to social media, like Twitter, to complain about poor customer service. Customers' Klout scores could be integrated into businesses' Lithium dashboards, making it easier to identify complaints from influential people.

Lithium is also developing a type of Klout score for products that consumers see on the retailer's site. The number would incorporate customer ratings from a new ratings widget, as well as chatter related to the product across social media.

This use of Klout scores for marketing purposes may irk its longtime users. Lithium and Klout, however, maintain it's part of a larger effort to identify the most "trusted" consumers.

Lithium's expanded set of tools come as many other businesses try to adapt to an online world overrun with social media chatter. Jive Software is another company that helps businesses leverage social media, as is Salesforce.

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Despite source code leak, Android malware fetches top $5,000 price

Despite a leak of its source code, an Android program aimed at compromising online bank accounts is still commanding US$5,000 per copy, one of the highest prices seen for a type of malware, according to research from Symantec.

Symantec and RSA published details on their blogs on Tuesday about iBanking, which is being used by two Eastern European cybercrime groups to intercept one-time SMS passcodes used for logging into bank accounts.

IBanking is notable for its wide range of features and defensive measures that thwart analysis by security researchers. It can steal just about any information on an Android device, record calls or forward calls to another phone, Symantec wrote.

The malware often appears in Android app marketplaces as a legitimate banking application. It appears victims who are targeted already have a separate type of malware installed on a desktop system, which prompts them to enter their phone number after navigating to their bank's website.

Then, an SMS code with a link to iBanking is sent to their phone. It alternatively displays a QR code that also leads victims to the malware, Symantec wrote.

Two gangs, which Symantec called the Neverquest crew and Zerafik, have used iBanking, with Zerafik targeting customers of the financial institution ING, Symantec wrote. In that case, iBanking was modified to appear to look like an official application from ING.

RSA found that iBanking's code is scrambled in a way to make it harder for malware experts to study, using techniques that have been seen on desktop-based malicious software but not widely on mobile malware.

IBanking sells for around $5,000 or for a cut of the proceeds from theft it facilitates, Symantec wrote. IBanking's source code was leaked in February after a hacker nicknamed "ReVOLVeR" found it while avenging a friend's loss of 65,000 bitcoins that were pilfered by the malware, Symantec wrote.

In the course of that quest, ReVOLVeR, believed to be Russian, also came across FTP login credentials for a server belonging to the broadcaster BBC, which he tried to sell.

IBanking's price should have dropped after its source code was released. But iBanking's developer, who is someone going by the nickname "GFF," has continued to develop it and provide support, which has sustained its marketability.

"Despite the availability of a free version, our research suggests that most of the large cybercrime actors are continuing to opt for the paid-for version," Symantec wrote. "They appear to be willing to pay a premium for the updates and support provided by GFF."

RSA wrote that its analysis of iBanking showed that it will shut itself down if it detects it is running in a virtual machine. Virtual machines are often used by malware analysts to study the behavior of an application.

Trying to halt analysts and security professionals "has been a standard among PC malware developers for quite a while but is far from standard practice in the mobile malware field," RSA wrote.

"The iBanking malware shows that mobile malware developers are becoming aware of the necessity to protect their bots against analysis and indicates a possible new trend in this new and evolving mobile malware space," the company wrote.

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