Need your Mt. Gox bitcoins back? Steer clear of this website

Empty-handed customers of bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox are being targeted in a ploy likely intended to distributed malware.

A spam message with the awkward phrase "Mt. Gox return to customers the bitcoins" in the subject line has been seen circulating, according to a Reddit user.

The bait targets the hundreds of thousands Mt. Gox customers locked out of their accounts when the company said 750,000 customer bitcoins, plus 100,000 of its own, disappeared, likely due to fraud. The company filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo District Court on Friday, leaving customers in a limbo.

The message includes a link to a website that clones the format of The Wall Street Journal although the domain name doesn't try to spoof the publication. The Web page shows a video box with a prompt to install Adobe System's Flash Player.

Fake versions of Flash Player have long been used by hackers, who hope victims will install whatever substitute program they're offering.

"Sites offering a faint ray of hope in the form of 'Mt. Gox is going to fix it all and please install this file, thanks' could well add more misery to an already considerable pile," wrote Chris Boyd, a malware intelligence analyst with Malwarebytes, who took at look at the site. "As always, steer clear."

Although Malwarebytes hasn't done a full analysis of the file behind the Flash Player facade, Boyd wrote a ".rar" file is downloaded.

"The infection rate for this one may end up being quite low, as one would imagine that anybody versed in the art of bitcoins is not likely to bother unzipping a .rar file to extract some random files," Boyd wrote.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

Sears says it finds no evidence yet of data breach

Sears Holdings said a review of its systems does not show evidence yet of a data breach as retailers continue to stay on guard in the light of payment card terminal hacking at Target and Neiman Marcus.

The department store chain, with 2,500 stores in the U.S. and Canada, is the latest company to say it is investigating a possible breach, following the hotel management company White Lodging Services and the arts and crafts chain Michaels.

"There have been rumors and reports throughout the retail industry of security incidents at various retailers, and we are actively reviewing our systems to determine if we have been a victim of a breach," wrote Howard Riefs, director of corporate communications at Sears Holdings, in an email.

Target and Neiman Marcus said payment card terminals, known as point-of-sale devices, were infected with malicious software that collected payment card details located on the magnetic stripe on the back of cards.

Target said up to 40 million credit and debit cards were stolen. Neiman Marcus initially said 1.1 million cards may have been affected, but downgraded the estimate to around 350,000 cards on Feb. 21.

Hackers capitalized on a weakness in point-of-sale systems where unencrypted card details are briefly held in a computer's memory. In Target's breach, the malware eventually transmitted the card details to servers outside of the company. Some of the data became available in underground cybercrime forums.

The incidents marked a startling progression by hackers, illustrating continuing weaknesses in a years-long effort to shore up security around payment cards with an industry guideline known as the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

US appeals court permits YouTube to display anti-Muslim video with changes

Google has been allowed by a court to keep a controversial film trailer that mocks the Prophet Muhammad on YouTube, but the video has to be scrubbed to remove the performance of actress Cindy Lee Garcia, who claims infringement of her copyright.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld its earlier order, asking Google to take down and prevent new uploads of the trailer, but did not preclude the posting or display of any version of 'Innocence of Muslims' that does not include Garcia's performance.

The court had earlier ruled that YouTube should take down the controversial video which sparked off protests in a number of countries in 2012. Garcia had argued that the video would cause her irreparable harm if there wasn't an injunction on it, as she was subject to death threats.

Google last week asked the court to allow it to retain the trailer online until the disposition of its upcoming petition for a full-court rehearing of the earlier decision.

The company had said in its filing that it has complied with the court's order to take down the trailer, "but in light of the intense public interest in and debate surrounding the video, the video should remain accessible while Google seeks further review."

Google, YouTube, and the public would suffer irreparable harm to their First Amendment and other constitutional freedoms if the company was not immediately granted a stay on the order, it said in the filing.

"Protected speech on a matter of broad public interest is undoubtedly being gagged, because the panel has suppressed the entire trailer, even though Garcia only claims to hold a copyright in the five seconds where she appeared," it said.

Google and Garcia's counsel could not be immediately reached for comment.

The appeal is the latest in a long-standing bid by Garcia to get Google to take down the YouTube video which she said included a performance by her for another movie that wasn't released, and was dubbed over to include offensive remarks about the Prophet.

Garcia has alleged previously that she was cast in a film titled "Desert Warrior" and that defendant Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, also known as Sam Bacile, a resident of Los Angeles county, told her it was an adventure film about ancient Egyptians. Instead, Garcia's scene was used in an anti-Islamic film titled "Innocence of Muslims," according to court records.

In a petition in 2012 before the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Garcia stated that she had not assigned the rights to the copyrighted work to anyone, and was asking YouTube to remove the video as its copyright holder. The plea for an injunction was rejected, leading to the appeal.

Garcia does not claim copyright interest in the trailer, but claims that her performance within the film is independently copyrightable and that she retained an interest in that copyright, the appeals court ruled in a 2-1 decision.

Google, in contrast, claimed that an acting performance like Garcia's cannot be copyrighted and that the Copyright Act makes a distinction between a copyrightable work and its performance. The majority decision by the court can throw up situations where bit performers could under certain conditions have the authority to demand the removal of YouTube videos, it said.

"Most of the millions of amateur filmmakers who upload their videos and other creative works to YouTube presumably do not have written agreements with those who appear in their videos," Google said in the filing. "That means anyone who appears in those videos—even for five seconds—will now have independent authority to contact YouTube and demand their removal."

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

China's Windows XP users to still get security support

Microsoft is making a special exception in the way it retires Windows XP in China, and will continue offering security support for the OS to users in the nation.

To do so, the U.S. software giant is partnering with China's leading Internet security vendors, Microsoft said in a Sunday posting on its official account with Sina Weibo, a top social networking site in the country.

Outside of China, Microsoft is dropping support of Windows XP on April 8, meaning that users of the OS will no longer receive security patches meant to fix vulnerabilities in the software.

To stay protected, Microsoft has urged users of the old OS to upgrade their PCs to the latest version of Windows. In markets such as the U.S., Windows XP is gradually being phased out by PC users. But in China, the software remains one of the top operating systems.

Among China's Internet users, about 57 percent rely on Windows XP systems to go online, according to analytics site CNZZ.com. The OS can still be found in use at Internet cafes, businesses and schools.

A major reason why the 12-year-old OS is so popular in China is because it has been widely pirated. For years, Microsoft has tried repeatedly to convince consumers and businesses in the nation to buy official copies, pointing to the rampant security vulnerabilities found in bootleg versions. But the operating system's high price has been one factor that's turned potential buyers away.

The retiring of Windows XP, however, is giving China's security vendors a chance to fill the void with their own security products. Among the Chinese security vendors helping Microsoft provide support to the OS is Tencent, one of China's largest Internet firms.

It's unclear how the protection will be delivered, but the security support may not even matter to most Windows XP users in the country.

In its Sunday post, Microsoft noted that 70 percent of China's Windows XP users had in the last 13 years never chosen to install the company's security updates.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

China boosts cybersecurity efforts, strives to become 'Internet power'

China is bolstering its efforts on cybersecurity with a new high-level committee that aims to turn the nation into an "Internet power," the country's official state media said last week.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is leading the new government body, which first met on Thursday. Xi was quoted as stating that cybersecurity and information technology had become a matter of national security.

"Without cybersecurity there is no national security, without information technology there is no modernization," Xi added.

Increasingly, China has found itself embroiled in cybersecurity issues. Over the years, the nation has fended off accusations that it carries out state-sponsored hacking attacks. Those allegations reached fever pitch last year when a U.S. security firm claimed it had documented evidence that China's military had spearheaded cyberattacks against the U.S.

The issue was complicated some months later by revelations from Edward Snowden, a former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, who claimed in press interviews that the U.S. had been hacking into institutions based in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Chinese officials have said the nation is a major victim of cyberattacks. Many of them come from the U.S., but some also originate from South Korea and Germany.

Besides cybersecurity, China's new committee will cover "online content management," the latest sign that the nation is not letting up on its strict censorship of the Internet.

Last November, the government indicated that China would step up regulation of domestic social networking sites, citing possible threats to the nation's stability.

Chinese officials have long been concerned with the way social networking sites can easily spread information, and incite criticism of the government. In response, authorities have launched campaigns cracking down on alleged rumors found on the sites, even jailing users in some case.

Over the long term, China will need to innovate the way online information is disseminated to properly guide online discussion, Xi said according to official media. The committee will also be led by China's Premier Li Keqiang and propaganda chief Liu Yunshan.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

Custom server makers find a niche in volatile market

The demand for custom servers is growing as buying trends change, with more companies designing servers in-house instead of buying from well-established vendors such as Hewlett-Packard or Dell.

Server market revenue in the fourth quarter last year was $14.2 billion, dropping by 4.4 percent compared to the same quarter in 2012, according to a survey released by IDC. The survey showed that sales from smaller white-box server makers—called "ODM Direct" by IDC—collectively growing at the fastest rate of 47.2 percent year over year.

The group of white-box server makers includes Quanta and Inventec, which make servers for companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which have mega-datacenters and deploy servers by the thousands. Those companies design servers in-house, which are designed to handle the growing flow of search and social networking requests.

The custom servers are also being plugged into hyperscale environments, where servers can be easily added to meet growing computing demands. Hyperscale environments are also being used for a growing number of public and private cloud deployments, which need to be flexible on computing and storage requirements.

The custom servers direct from white-box system makers are also attractive as they are less expensive, IDC said in a statement.

The growth of home-grown servers is hurting the top three server makers IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell, who sell servers based on proprietary designs and system management technologies. The top spot was shared by HP, whose server revenue grew by 5.7 percent and IBM, whose server revenue dropped by 28.5 percent. In third place was Dell, whose server revenue dropped by 2.4 percent in the quarter. One exception was Cisco, whose server revenue went up by 34.5 percent. Oracle, sharing the fourth place with Cisco, recorded a drop of 2.2 percent.

Most custom servers use x86 chips from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices. Revenue for x86 servers was $10.7 billion worldwide, growing by 7.8 percent. Unit shipments of x86 servers during the fourth quarter was 2.5 million units, growing by 8.6 percent.

The Unix server market took a hit with the growth in x86 server sales, IDC said in a statement. Growth in the hyperscale server segment is hurting the growth of servers with proprietary chips like IBM's Power, Oracle's Sparc and Intel's Itanium. Intel this month introduced the new Xeon E7 v2 x86 chip, which is expected to push Itanium close to its end of life, analysts have said.

The customized server market is receiving a boost from the Open Compute Project, which is making reference designs for servers, data centers, networking and storage equipment. Many companies, including financial organizations like Goldman Sachs, are warming to OCP server designs, which reduce the reliance on proprietary server designs. Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and others are making chips, motherboards and components that fit into these barebones servers. One specification called Group Hug will make it possible to put x86 and ARM chips in the same socket.

HP and Dell continue to introduce new servers, but are also making an effort to fit into the custom server market. Dell is refocusing the efforts of its Data Center Solutions (DCS) to build custom servers. But IBM is heading out of the x86 server market as in January it agreed to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

5 favorite Hollywood tech flubs

Hollywood loves data center cameos. In many feature films, a guy sneaks into the server room and place a diabolical gadget next to a server. Usually, he grabs a random patch cable, connects it directly into his laptop and fires off a piece of malware.

Most of the time, these scenes build tension. But for these five movies, they just look comical. Here are five favorite misrepresentations of technology as envisioned by Hollywood, featuring the filmmakers' idea of of how a data center looks and operates.

Paranoia(2013)

Gaffe: A character sneaks into a data center to steal secrets.

Liam Hemsworth isn't the only fatal flaw in this low-rated tech thriller. There are several suspect scenes involving biometrics, such as "lifting" a fingerprint image from an iPad that was scanned from a spoon. Then the protagonist (Hemsworth's Adam Cassidy) flashes a few images from his phone to gain entry into a secret room; that seems unlikely. He even pushes a button on his watch to shut down power in the building; someone even yells "Get our IT guy on the line!" in a panic. At least the servers in the data center look somewhat realistic - and easy to access from one main aisle.

Entrapment (1999)

Gaffe: The main characters start plugging into network ports to download funds.

Near the end of this Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones heist thriller, the main characters sneak into the server room/vault and break open a cabinet. They quickly use patch cables to reroute traffic for a stock exchange without having to deal with any encryption. The Zeta-Jones character, Virginia Baker, pulls what looks like an ethernet cable from her laptop and, suddenly, sets off an alarm. If anything, it's when you hack into something that you trigger an alert.

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

Gaffe: A henchman plugs in one cable to get the video feed of an entire casino.

Here's one of the classic data center cameos from the past decade. One of the criminals in the movie (Livingston Dell, played by Eddie Jemison) sneaks into a casino data center. He clips a device to an ethernet cable, which magically provides access - major spoiler alert here - to a video stream of casino security cameras. Never mind the fact that the intruder has to write directions on his hand to find the server room and, as a result, seems unlikely to find the right server cabinet and cable. Even if you could re-route the video that easily, the signal would still have encryption to block outside access.

Tron: Legacy (2010)

Gaffe: The data center has no hot aisles, and the protagonist plugs directly into a server.

One thing's for sure about this data center cameo: It sure looks futuristic. The main issue: You'd think the programming geniuses who created the virtual world would know about hot aisles and cold aisles, but instead each server is spaced event apart like checkerboard pieces. That, of course, which would make it difficult to connect them. Plus, the main character (Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund) jacks into a server using what looks like a futuristic Nokia phone. You'd think he'd at least be using an iPhone.

Hackers (1995)

Gaffe: The data center servers are clear gleaming blue boxes with lasers.

You might have a fond memory of watching Hackers back in the 90s, but the scenes showing a high-tech data center are laughably unrealistic. The servers look like something out of Tron: Gleaming blue pillars made of glass rows of text, cheesy sound effects and lasers. In reality, even the most high-tech data centers are purposefully designed to be bland: The goal is to make sure the data is secure, handled efficiently and accessible easily.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

Jolla shows its Sailfish mobile OS running on Android phones

Low operating costs combined with a differentiated operating system and close communication with users will help Jolla survive in the cutthroat smartphone market, according to CEO Tomi Pienimäki.

The last two weeks have been busy for Finnish company Jolla, which last week announced that it had shipped a commercial version of its Sailfish OS and then headed for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Being a small company trying to compete with giants like Apple and Samsung has both its ups and downs, according to Pienimäki. One advantage is that low operating costs mean it doesn't have to sell many phones to survive.

"The market is huge and we don't need a large share. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of phones yearly, but not more than that,"

Regardless of the size, the skill and knowledge within a company is what's important.

"Luckily, we have a lot of talent within this company, simply because all the best people from the MeeGo project are with us. We are capable of doing things that even the bigger guys don't know how to do," he said.

Jolla was founded in 2011 by a group of former Nokia employees who wanted to continue the development work the phone maker had done on the MeeGo operating system.

Having a steady supply of quality components is one problem of being a small manufacturer. To minimize that issue, Sailfish has been built to be compatible with Android hardware.

That means it and potential future hardware partners can use processors, cameras and displays that have been developed for Google's operating system, which lowers the cost and increases the range of compatible components, according to Pienimäki.

That also means Sailfish can run on existing Android phones. At Mobile World Congress, Jolla demonstrated its OS running on Android-based smartphones and tablets from Samsung, Google and Chinese company Xiaomi.

"We are coming to the point when you as consumer can install Sailfish on your device. We are not yet there but we will be soon. If I ask the guys: can you put the OS on this and this it typically takes 24 hours and it works," Pienimäki said.

When Jolla's first phone went on sale last year it came with a beta version of the Sailfish OS, and all the drawbacks that come with any software that's still under development. Even if charging people for a phone that's under development isn't ideal, it was something Jolla had to do.

"It was a small group of people that developed Sailfish and we needed feedback from consumers," Pienimäki said.

The feedback from users helped get the first version out the door and will also play an important role in what features are added to Sailfish. Since the launch, Jolla has updated the OS four times to improve battery life and the camera, and to add a landscape mode.

"Because we are a small company, it's very easy for us to be agile. We really look at what users on together.jolla.co are asking for; they want this, this and this and then we simply do it," Pienimäki said.

Some of the most voted for features on Friday were offline map-data and turn-by-turn navigation in Maps; support for CalDev-based calendars and the possibility to configure what is shown on the lock screen.

One of the biggest trend at this year's Mobile World Congress was the growing interest in low-end smartphones, but that segment of the market isn't what Jolla is aiming for.

"We are providing a unique user experience, and its not our game to try to build the cheapest mobile phone," Pienimäki said.

However, that doesn't mean someone else can't take Sailfish and use it on a smartphone that's much cheaper than Jolla's phone, which costs €399 (US$550), including VAT. Pienimäki didn't specify hardware requirements, but its heritage is in the MeeGo platform, which was available on the Nokia N9, which is no longer sold. Even though that smartphone is powered by a single core processor, it is capable of running Sailfish.

Still, Pienimäki would prefer to see Sailfish run on more advanced devices, he said.

When Microsoft's deal to acquire Nokia's handset business becomes final before the end of March, Jolla will become the largest Finnish mobile phone manufacturer.

"I have to say as a Finn it's obviously sad what has happened to Nokia. But we will be proud to be the biggest Finnish phone maker," Pienimäki said.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

HP breaks Autonomy IDOL into discrete services

Developers seeking to embed some advanced text processing capabilities into their applications might want to take a look at a beta service that the Autonomy software unit of Hewlett-Packard is fielding, tentatively called IDOLOnDemand.

The platform as a service (PaaS) will, over time, offer most all of the functionality of HP Autonomy's IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) search and content processing platform, which had been available only in an enterprise software package.

"If we want to be successful as a platform today, we have to do more than create a large installable product. We have to enable it so developers can use it," said Robert Youngjohns, senior vice president and general manager of HP Autonomy.

The service will expose most of the IDOL features as discrete services, accessible through APIs (application programming interfaces). HP is hoping that enterprise developers use the service to embed IDOL functionality into their own applications.

HP announced the initiative in December and plans to formally launch the service in April or May.

In preview mode, the company already offers a number of services on a trial basis, such as barcode reading, language detection, format conversion, entity extraction, face detection, text extraction from images, and sentiment analysis.

Over the course of the next few months, HP will add more functions, such as geolocation lookup and API discovery. IDOL has about 400 functions centered around the searching, filtering and packaging of unstructured data.

"Rather than have all these functions in a homogenous product, why not expose them individually as Web services?" Youngjohns said.

The PaaS approach provides an easy way for a developer to build a software program without writing all the components from scratch, or importing third-party libraries.

For instance, a developer trying to parse a large amount of customer feedback could have the IDOL sentiment analysis function analyze the feedback and return an estimation of how many comments were positive and how many were negative, freeing managers from having to read through all the comments themselves.

The IDOL services will fall into two broad categories, stateless APIs and those that maintain a persistent state within the HP Cloud, where the services are run.

HP is first working on building the stateless APIs, where the service request along with the required data is submitted and the results are returned.

Over time, the company will also offer stateful services, where users can store their data in an object store hosted by HP. The current version of IDOL, the recently released IDOL 10.5, will serve as the basis for the service offering.

"Sometime in the future, we will have all of our services in IDOL exposed this way," Youngjohns said. The company will also introduce a policy manager that will work with these services.

"A lot of what we do is about how you apply policy to data," Youngjohns said.

HP competitor IBM has a similar idea. This week, IBM announced that it would be offering much of its middleware software portfolio as cloud services.

HP has not decided yet on how pricing will work with these services.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

AT&T seeks trials to move all customers off wired phone service

A rural Alabama town and a suburban area of Florida may be on the cutting edge of a historic shift away from traditional circuit-switched phone service, if AT&T wins approval to run trials in those areas.

The carrier plans to test a transition from its circuit-switched TDM (time-division multiplexing) phone network to wireless and Internet Protocol services in Carbon Hill, Alabama, and West Delray Beach, Florida. It will need FCC approval to begin the trials.

AT&T and other incumbent wireline carriers are still required to provide traditional TDM phone service even though many U.S. residents no longer use it. They want to move to alternative services over the IP-based wired and wireless networks they are building now and eliminate the cost of maintaining the old networks. AT&T wants to complete its transition by 2020.

The trials would take several years and would be only one step toward phasing out TDM, but AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said last year that the carrier was anxious to get approval to start them. On Friday, AT&T announced where it wants to run those experiments. Carbon Hill is a town of about 2,000 in northwestern Alabama with a coal-mining history, and West Delray Beach is a suburban area on the Atlantic coast of southern Florida near Palm Beach.

For the trials, AT&T wants to switch its customers from TDM services to its U-Verse wireline voice and Internet offerings, or to wireless home phone and data services offered through AT&T Mobility. The wireless services would serve subscribers who live outside the reach of the U-Verse network. The old copper networks will remain in place throughout the trials. The purpose of the trials, which will be conducted under FCC supervision, is to identify the technical, operational and logistical raised by the transition.

AT&T says 70 percent of its residential customers have dropped traditional phone service for VoIP (voice over IP) or only using wireless. In some areas of the 22 states where AT&T is the incumbent carrier, less than 20 percent of households are still connected to the traditional circuit-switched services, the company said.

Verizon Communications has also tried to move away from TDM services. After Hurricane Sandy heavily damaged parts of the New York and New Jersey shorelines in 2012, Verizon sought to offer residents a wireless voice service called VoiceLink rather than replace damaged copper phone lines. Hundreds of customers complained, saying VoiceLink couldn't deliver Internet service or work with fax machines or some alarm systems.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More