Two companies face fines of nearly $ 5 million for allegedly making millions of artificial voice messages without consumers’ prior consent. [Read more]
CNET News
Tag Archives: cracks
FCC cracks down on campaign robocalls to cell phones
Posted by Gsurface
on March 18, 2013
No comments
Self-Healing Concrete Uses Sunlight to Fix Its Own Cracks
Posted by Gsurface
on March 7, 2013
No comments
Researchers have demonstrated a way to give concrete surfaces the ability to heal when small cracks appear, an advance that could allow bridges and other structures to last longer.
Even the tiniest cracks on the surfaces of concrete structures can lead to big problems if they aren’t immediately repaired. Now researchers have demonstrated a sunlight-induced, self-healing protective coating designed to fix cracks on the surface of concrete structures before they grow into larger ones that compromise structural integrity.
Panic cracks open Lightning Digital AV Adapter, makes unexpected discovery
Posted by Gsurface
on March 2, 2013
No comments
Over at Panic, a mystery developed as the folks there attempted to do a little bit of video capture via “various iOS device.” Apple‘s digital Lightning AV adapter for the iPad mini and the iPhone 5 is supposed to be capable of full 1080p, but when utilizing the device, they discovered its maximum resolution was
ElcomSoft Tool Cracks BitLocker, PGP, TrueCrypt In Real-Time
Posted by Gsurface
on December 20, 2012
No comments
An anonymous reader writes “Russian firm ElcomSoft on Thursday announced the release of Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor (EFDD), a new forensic tool that can reportedly access information stored in disks and volumes encrypted with desktop and portable versions of BitLocker, PGP, and TrueCrypt. EFDD runs on all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, as well as Windows 2003 and Windows Server 2008.” All that for $ 300.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Makerbot Cracks Down On 3D-Printable Gun Parts
Posted by Gsurface
on December 20, 2012
No comments
Sparrowvsrevolution writes in with a story at Forbes about Makerbot deleting gun component blueprints on Thingiverse. “In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, the 3D-printing firm Makerbot has deleted a collection of blueprints for gun components from Thingiverse, its popular user-generated content website that hosts 3D-printable files. Though Thingiverse has long banned designs for weapons and their components in its terms of service, it rarely enforced the rule until the last few days, when the company’s lawyer sent notices to users that their software models for gun parts were being purged from the site. Gun control advocates were especially concerned about the appearance of lower receivers for semi-automatic weapons that have appeared on Thingiverse. The lower receiver is the the ‘body’ of a gun, and its most regulated component. So 3D-printing that piece at home and attaching other parts ordered by mail might allow a lethal weapon to be obtained without any legal barriers or identification. Makerbot’s move to delete those files may have been inspired in part by a group calling itself Defense Distributed, which announced its intention to create an entirely 3D-printable gun in August and planned to potentially upload it to Thingiverse. Defense Distributed says it’s not deterred by Makerbot’s move and will host the plans on its own site.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA’s deep-space Orion capsule cracks under pressure
Posted by Gsurface
on November 27, 2012
No comments
The FTC’s Privacy Cop Cracks Down
Posted by Gsurface
on June 26, 2012
No comments
Washington’s consumer protection agency is making sure that Internet “privacy” lives up to its name.
The job of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is to protect consumers from deceptive and unfair business practices. And lately, “deceptive and unfair” has started to sound like a good description of the treatment consumers find on the Internet.
Fujitsu Cracks 300,000 Year Crypto Problem in Days
Posted by Gsurface
on June 20, 2012
No comments
Pairing-based crypto is supposed to be the basis of next-generation crytography systems.
A consortium of Japanese institutions used a cluster of 21 PCs (252 cores in total) to crack a 278 digit cryptographic key in just 148 days. This doesn’t mean that pairing-based cryptography, which is rapidly becoming a go-to standard in crypto, is now useless. (It’s to be used in everything from securing government networks to locking down financial systems.) Rather, the research is intended to establish just how long keys need to be in order to be reasonably secure against attacks by efficient algorithms and powerful computers.
Facebook Finally Cracks Down On Auto-Sharing Spam With “10-Second Rule”
Posted by Gsurface
on June 1, 2012
No comments
If you hate accidental auto-sharing, you’re in luck. Now you have to be watching or reading something for at least 10 seconds before Facebook apps can auto-share the activity to your Timeline. That should drastically reduce the amount of crappy click-bait articles and video clips you see in the news feed and ticker.
Video apps must also now inform you that they auto-share and provide an option to opt out on the page where a video is watched. These rules could deflate the user counts of apps like Viddy and Socialcam.
It also recently added more requirements to its comprehensive checklist auto-sharing apps must follow. The debate rages on about whether “frictionless sharing” is the future of discovery or the death of curation, but at least Facebook is taking decisive steps to keep the worst content from spreading friend to friend.
TechCrunch
DigiMo Cracks The Code: Mobile Payments With No Point Of Sale Changes
Posted by Gsurface
on February 29, 2012
No comments
DigiMo, is a mobile payments platform that actually makes sense to me. When I sat down with CEO Yossi Yarkoni and VP of Marketing Nir Shimony at the Mobile World Congress to hear about their concept, which is piloting in Israel right now, the first thing I thought was “wow, why didn’t somebody think of this before”. It’s a pretty good idea and solves many of the problems that plague mobile, face-to-face payments.
It actually works with existing infrastructure and requires no Point Of Sale hardware changes by merchants. Really. No NFC terminals to buy. No new card readers needed. This is a major sticking point for merchant adoption of new mobile payments platforms.
TechCrunch
New tool cracks Apple iWork passwords
Posted by Gsurface
on February 10, 2012
No comments
Russian cryptography company ElcomSoft has developed a tool that makes cracking iWork document passwords easier.
CNET News
F-BOMB $50 surveilance computer hides in your CO detector, cracks your WiFi
Posted by Gsurface
on January 28, 2012
No comments
What happens when you take a PogoPlug, add 8GB of flash storage, some radios (WiFi, GPS) and perhaps a few sensors, then stuff everything in a 3D-printed box? You get the F-BOMB (Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors), a battery-powered surveillance computer that costs less than $ 50 to put together using off-the-shelf parts. The 4 x 3.5 x 1-inch device, created by security researcher Brendan O’Connor and funded by DARPA‘s Cyber Fast Track program, is cheap enough for single-use scenarios where costly traditional hardware is impractical. It can be dropped from an AR Drone, tossed over a fence, plugged into a wall socket or even hidden inside a CO detector. Once in place, the homebrew Linux-based system can be used to gather data and hop onto wireless networks using WiFi-cracking software. Sneaky. Paranoid yet? Click on the source link below for more info.
F-BOMB $ 50 surveilance computer hides in your CO detector, cracks your WiFi originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
$350 Hardware Cracks HDMI Copy Protection
Posted by Gsurface
on November 25, 2011
No comments
New submitter LBeee writes “German Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum built an FPGA board-based man-in-the-middle attack against the HDCP copy protection used in HDMI connections. After the leak of an HDCP master key in 2010, Intel proclaimed that the copy protection was still secure, as it would be too expensive to build a system that could conduct a real-time decryption of the data stream. It has now been proven that a system can be built for around $ 350 (€200) to do the task. However, the solution is of no great practical use for pirates. It can easily be used to burn films from Blu-ray discs, but receivers which can deliver HDTV recordings are already available — and they provide the data in compressed form. In contrast, recording directly from an HDMI port results in a large amount of data.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cracks Signal Massive Iceberg Forming In Antarctica
Posted by Gsurface
on November 6, 2011
No comments
Several readers have submitted news (as covered by an AFP article carried by the Sydney Morning Herald) that a massive iceberg is forming in the Antarctic. The rift in the PIne Island Glacier “is widening at a rate of two metres a day, said NASA project scientist Michael Studinger. When the ice breaks apart, it will produce an iceberg more than 880 square kilometres, said Mr Studinger, who is part of the US space agency’s IceBridge project. But the process is not a result of global warming, he said.” Also at the BBC.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stanford program cracks text-based CAPTCHAs, shelters the replicants among us
Posted by Gsurface
on November 3, 2011
No comments
CAPTCHAs. In the absence of a Voigt-Kampff apparatus, they’re what separate the humans from the only-posing-to-be-human. And now three Stanford researchers have further blurred that line with Decaptcha, a program that uses image processing, anti-segmentation and a spell-checker to defeat text-based CAPTCHAs. Elie Bursztien, Matthieu Martin and John Mitchell pitted Decaptcha against a number of sites: it passed 66% of the challenges on Visa’s Authorize.net and 70% at Blizzard Entertainment. At the high end, the program beat 93% of MegaUpload’s tests; at other end, it only bested 2% of those from Skyrock. Of the 15 sites tried, only two completely repelled Decaptcha’s onslaught — Google and reCaptcha. So what did the researchers learn from this? Randomization makes for better security; random lengths and character sizes tended to thwart Decaptcha, as did waving text. How long that will remain true is anyone’s guess, as presumably SkyNet is working on a CAPTCHA-killer of its own.
Stanford program cracks text-based CAPTCHAs, shelters the replicants among us originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Softpedia, ITWorld | 
Elie Bursztein | Email this | Comments
Engadget
Microsoft Cracks Down On Spammy Windows Phone App Submissions
Posted by Gsurface
on September 29, 2011
No comments
There may be more than 20,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace now, but it seems as though some “developers” are intent on fiddling with the cool-to-crap ratio. As low-quality, low-functionality apps flood the marketplace, Microsoft will be limiting developers to 10 app submissions per day starting tomorrow.
TechCrunch
China cracks down on makers of fake iPhones, report says
Posted by Gsurface
on September 29, 2011
No comments
Chinese police in Shanghai have five people in custody for allegedly building and selling near-perfect copies of Apple’s iPhone in China.
CNET News.com
Recent Comments