Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

This marks the first time Linux Mint has not used the newest version of Ubuntu for a release. But if you paid attention to the curious approach of Linux Mint 17.0, you'll know that was the plan all along. These days, Mint will not be changing its Ubuntu base again until the next LTS release—Ubuntu 16.04—arrives in 2016. And at first glance, it might seem like a bad thing.

The previously undiscovered malware represents a missing puzzle piece tied to "Turla," a so-called advanced persistent threat (APT) disclosed in August by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec... The malware was notable for its use of a rootkit that made it extremely hard to detect.

Now researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have detected Linux-based malware used in the same campaign.

Patents are intellectual monopolies, designed to give the patent-holder control over an invention by excluding others from using it without permission. That's a problem when standards include patented elements.

The companies announced Thursday that B&N will buy out the Windows maker's stake in Nook Media -- the corporation jointly owned by Microsoft and B&N -- for $62.4 million in cash and 2.7 million shares of B&N. In addition, all ties between the companies in Nook Media, including contractual obligations, commercial agreements and international content acquisition, will be revoked.

Microsoft and Barnes & Noble announced today that they were terminating their partnership that was in some way connected to the Nook e-reader.

Three months ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation inaugurated a monthly tradition in which they wrote about a "Stupid Patent of the Month." The first patent they publicized was basically a description of a doctor's "computer-secretary." Since then, they've highlighted a vague software patent owned by a serial litigant, a patent on filming a yoga class, and a patent with a formula for curing cancer (a combination of "sesame seeds, green beans, coffee, meat, evening primrose seeds," among other things.)

This month, EFF shines a light not on an off-the-wall lone inventor, but on a source that some may find surprising: a public research institution.

Back in May, we wrote about how, despite pretty much everyone agreeing on a (decent, if not amazing) patent reform bill in the Senate, the whole thing got shot down at the last minute. That was when the trial lawyers called Senator Harry Reid, asking him to kill the whole thing, which he did by telling Senator Patrick Leahy that he wouldn't allow the bill to go to the floor for a vote. This came after months of detailed negotiations, getting nearly everyone into agreement on the bill, which would have made life at least somewhat more difficult for patent trolls.

EFF recently learned about a patent that covered a method of filming a yoga class. We reviewed the patent and discovered that it was just as ridiculous as it sounded.

Motorola has announced that it is now officially under control of Lenovo, closing the deal that was announced at the beginning of the year.

Patrick O'Neill, over at The Daily Dot, has a scoop about Verizon getting directly into our game: tech blogging. It's launched a brand new tech news website, called SugarString, which apparently is supposed to compete with other tech news sites.

A couple of years ago, we wrote about an effort by the big broadband players to push the FCC away from using M-Lab to measure basic network diagnostics on the internet. M-Lab is a very interesting project, focused on collecting a huge amount of data about internet performance, and making that data widely available. In the past, for example, we've highlighted an M-Lab project showing which ISPs were throttling BitTorrent.

Now, M-Lab has released a new report, along with all of the data and a very nice tool to analyze it all, called the Internet Observatory, that looks at ISP interconnection and, most importantly, its impact on consumer internet performance.

A driver update from the Scottish electronics firm FTDI that intentionally “bricked” USB devices with counterfeit FTDI chips has been removed from Windows Update by the firm. The move follows an uproar from users who found devices they thought used the company’s chips disabled without warning. However, the company plans on re-releasing the update with code that “will still uphold our stance against devices that are not genuine, but do so in a non-invasive way that means there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected,” the company’s CEO said in a statement.

While the changes made in the firmware of chips affected by the driver’s counter-counterfeiting code can be reversed, there are questions about whether what FTDI did in the name of protecting the company’s intellectual property was ethical—or even legal.

Nine years ago, the US Supreme Court ruled in the Grokster case in favor of the movie studios, effectively expanding copyright law to include an "inducement" standard that is not present in the actual text of the law (in fact, Congress had just rejected an attempt to add some inducement language to copyright law in the form of the INDUCE Act). A big part of the reasoning by the Supreme Court was to pull from the inducement standard that was found in patent law, and say it applies to copyright law:

In October of 2004, a new Linux distro appeared on the scene with a curious name—Ubuntu. Even then there were hundreds, today if not thousands, of different Linux distros available. A new one wasn't particularly unusual, and for some time after its quiet preview announcement, Ubuntu went largely unnoticed. It was yet another Debian derivative.

Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. Those users span 240 countries, and they make Ubuntu the world's third most popular PC operating system. By Canonical's estimates, Ubuntu has roughly 90 percent of the Linux market. And Ubuntu is poised to launch a mobile version that may well send those numbers skyrocketing again.

Nintendo: it protects what it believes it owns with great vigor. The company has rarely missed an opportunity to make sure that other people are not allowed to alter or mess with the stuff Nintendo insists is Nintendo's. In an apparent effort to maximize the irony combo-meter, Nintendo also has been known to make sure that customers don't mess with or alter the properties those customers actually own, such as online support for games that Nintendo decided to alter long after purchase... just because.

But the cold grip of Nintendo's control over its customers' property is apparently no longer limited to games. Nintendo recently released an update for the Wii U that forces you to "agree" to a new end-user license agreement, or else it simply bricks the console altogether.

Telecom industry’s stealth campaign uses everything from art installations to LOLcats.

The problem with Shellshock is similar to problems that emerged after the Heartbleed bug and numerous other vulnerabilities—while organizations struggle to understand the disclosures, how they affect their systems, and how to successfully implement patches, others—including security researchers—race to build proof-of-concept attacks based on them to demonstrate exactly how dire they are. And those proofs of concept often get picked up by cybercriminals and others with bad intent before organizations can effectively patch them—using them to exploit systems in ways that are much longer-lasting than the vulnerability du jour.

I'd missed this one, but Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing points our attention to the fact that, last month, the Judicial Conference voted to make a little-noticed change in patent lawsuits that should serve to make life more difficult for patent trolls.

Google's official Android Lollipop announcement this morning originally didn't mention some older Nexus devices—namely, the Nexus 4 and the 2012 Nexus 7. However, Google has confirmed to us that those older devices will indeed be getting Android 5.0, as will the Nexus 5, 2013 Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and the Google Play Edition devices.

The attack depends on the fact that most Web servers and Web browsers allow the use of the ancient SSL version 3 protocol to secure their communications. Although SSL has been superseded by Transport Layer Security, it's still widely supported on both servers and clients alike and is still required for compatibility with Internet Explorer 6. SSLv3, unlike TLS 1.0 or newer, omits validation of certain pieces of data that accompany each message. Attackers can use this weakness to decipher an individual byte and time of the encrypted data, and in so doing, extract the plain text of the message byte by byte.

As with previous attacks of this kind against SSL, the most vulnerable application is HTTP. An example attack scenario would work something like this. ...