Tuesday, March 4, 2014

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Cameron's censorship mentor faces paedophile charges

Posted: 04 Mar 2014 02:04 AM PST

The bloke who encouraged Prime Minister David Cameron to censor the internet to protect kids from evil paedophiles has been arrested on child pornography charges.

Patrick Rock has been closely involved in drawing up Government policy on internet porn filters. It seems that while he was filling David's head with the terrors of paedophiles he was at the centre of a police probe over images of child abuse.

Detectives from the National Crime Agency even searched No 10 and examined IT systems and offices used by Rock who was the deputy director of the Downing Street policy unit.

According to the Daily Mail,  Rock was a protégé of Margaret Thatcher and has held a series of senior posts in the Conservative Party and was described as Cameron's 'policy fixer'. He was about to be rewarded with a Conservative peerage.

It is not the first time that Rock has been in trouble. He was also been the subject of a sexual harassment complaint from a civil servant working in Downing Street. That particular complaint was buried by Cameron's advisors which miffed the rest of the staff at Number 10.

Cameron's time with Rock goes back to the Home Office, where they both worked under Michael Howard in the 1990s. When Cameron brought him back into Downing Street in 2011, that move welcomed by critics as heralding the return of a 'grown up' to the centre of government.

Although Rock is innocent until proved guilty, his arrest has made Cameron's crusade against internet porn look more than a little stupid. There is a psychological theory which states that those who complain most about some something usually have something dark to hide about it. The thought that an anti-child porn law might have been drawn up by the very person it was designed to catch leads many to wonder if it was really designed to create a semblance of a law while never actually arresting real paedophiles. Rock was arrested under the old laws, which seemed to be working rather well. 

Android is lord of the tablets

Posted: 04 Mar 2014 02:02 AM PST

Figures from Gartner say that while tablet sales grew 68 percent in 2013 it appears that Android is the big winner.

Big G said that worldwide sales of tablets to end users reached 195.4 million units in 2013, a 68 percent increase on 2012.

Sales of iOS tablets grew in the fourth quarter of 2013, iOS's share declined to 36 percent in 2013. This is because tablet growth in 2013 was fuelled by the low-end smaller screen tablet market, and first time buyers rather than those who want to mortgage their house to buy another overpriced toy.

History will look back on 2013 and say it was the year that tablets became a mainstream phenomenon, with a vast choice of Android-based tablets being within the budget of mainstream consumers while still offering adequate specifications, Big G said.

Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner, said that as the Android tablet market becomes highly commoditised, in 2014, it was critical for vendors to focus on device experience and meaningful technology and ecosystem value. Otherwise, they are going to lose brand loyalty and improved margins, she said.

In 2013, the share of Apple's iOS dropped 16.8 percentage points as the market demand was driven by the improved quality of smaller low-cost tablets from branded vendors, and white-box products continued to grow in emerging markets.

Gartner analysts said emerging markets recorded growth of 145 per cent in 2013, while mature markets grew 31 percent.

"Apple's tablets remain strong in the higher end of the market and, Apple's approach will continue to force vendors to compete with full ecosystem offerings, even in the smaller-screen market as the iPad mini sees a greater share", Cozza said.

In 2013, Microsoft's tablet volumes improved but share remained small. Despite Microsoft now acting more rapidly to evolve Windows 8.1, its "egosystem" still failed to capture major consumers' interest on tablets.

"To compete, Microsoft needs to create compelling ecosystem proposition for consumers and developers across all mobile devices, as tablets and smartphones become key devices for delivering applications and services to users beyond the PC," said Cozza.

Microsoft is better in the ultramobiles market which are more productivity oriented, where its partners are ramping up new form factors and designs.

The tablet market has become a challenging environment for branded hardware-driven players. They are squeezed by service-driven and content-driven players, and aggressive prices from white-box vendors. In addition, a situation where the top two tablet vendors have captured 55 percent of the market in 2013 compounds the challenge, the report said.

Samsung exhibited the highest growth of the worldwide tablet vendors, at 336 percent, in 2013. The expansion and improvement of its Galaxy tablets, together with strong marketing and promotions, helped Samsung bridge the gap with Apple. 

How to use an NDA to track phones without a warrant

Posted: 04 Mar 2014 02:00 AM PST

Florida cops have worked out a natty way to get around needing a pesky court order to track a user's phone – they have been claiming that the manufacturer's NDA forbids them from getting one.

In Florida everyone knows that a manufacturer's NDA trumps the US constitution and that has allowed coppers to use their "stingray" mobile tracking gadget 200 times without ever telling a judge.

Their reason is that the device manufacturer made them sign a non-disclosure agreement that they say prevented them from telling the courts.

It all came to light during an appeal over a 2008 sexual battery case in Tallahassee in which the suspect also stole the victim's mobile. Using the stingray — which simulates a mobile phone tower in order to trick nearby mobile devices into connecting to it and revealing their location — police were able to track him to an apartment.

During the case, authorities revealed that they had used the equipment at least 200 additional times since 2010 without disclosing this to courts and obtaining a warrant.

According to Wired, Harris is the leading maker of stingrays in the US, and appears to have been loaning the devices to police departments throughout the state for product testing and promotional purposes. Police departments signed non-disclosure agreements with the vendor and used the agreement to avoid disclosing their use of the equipment to courts.

The government has claimed it doesn't need to obtain a probable-cause warrant to use the devices because they don't collect the content of phone calls and text messages but rather operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information.

According to the appellate court judges, after a young woman reported on September 13, 2008 that she had been raped and that her purse, containing a mobile phone, had been stolen, police tracked the location of her phone about 24 hours later to the apartment of Thomas' girlfriend.

Around 5 am, they knocked on the apartment door, but the suspect's girlfriend refused to let them in without a warrant. Instead, they forced their way in, ordered her and Thomas to exit, and then searched the apartment. After they found the victim's purse and mobile and arrested Thomas.

Authorities opted not to get a warrant either for the use of the Stingray or the search of the apartment, simply because they did not want to tell the judge what they were using to locate the suspect, a matter.

Judges are a little miffed too. When the government attorney tried to argue in court that the police had planned to obtain a warrant to enter the apartment, one of the judges pointed out that they had not done this on the other 200 times. 

London firm at centre of mass hack

Posted: 04 Mar 2014 01:57 AM PST

A London-registered outfit appears to be at the centre of a massive attack that's redirecting traffic from 300,000 routers.

UK Company 3NT Solutions has been named as being part of an attack which has control of consumer and small office/home office (SOHO) routers throughout Europe and Asia.

Florida-based security firm Team Cymru said claims to have uncovered a "SOHO pharming" campaign that had overwritten DNS settings on 300,000 routers. That allows attackers to redirect traffic to sites and domains controlled by them, "effectively conducting a man-in-the-middle attack".

Team Cymru spokesman Steve Santorelli told PC Pro  that the attack was very clever. The routers' DNS settings had been changed to two IP addresses, both of which are for machines that are physically in the Netherlands, but registered with UK company 3NT Solutions, he said.

3NT Solutions was offline at the time of writing and the company could not be reached for comment. Its registered address is a mailbox location in central London.

Security researcher Conrad Longmore wrote in his blog that there was a connection between Serbian web host inferno.name. He said that 3NT/Inferno.name as a "known bad actor" that ran malicious and "spammy" sites - and advised admins to "block all their IPs on sight".

Santorelli stressed that the router attack was serious. It's not new as a problem to the InfoSec community but this is one of the biggest he's seen recently as it's quite insidious.

He said that it was not the first time this kind of thing has been spotted, but it is certainly the biggest in recent memory.

The attack affects devices from several manufacturers, the firm said said, adding that "consumer unfamiliarity" with configuring routers and weak default settings makes the devices a "very attractive target".

Santorelli said the problem was not a hardware bug, but weaknesses in ZyXEL's widely used router firmware, ZynOS. 

Bill Gates is world's richest man again

Posted: 04 Mar 2014 01:54 AM PST

Former King of Software Sir William Gates III has regained the top spot as the world's richest man, despite spending a fortune to bump off the mosquito in Africa.

According to Forbes magazine's annual ranking of global billionaires, Gates' total net worth was estimated at $76 billion this year, up from $67 billion in 2013. This is despite giving most of his cash to charity.

His rise in wealth knocked Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim off the top spot into second place. In total, there were a record 1,645 billionaires.

To get into the top 20 you need to be worth $31 billion, up from $23 billion last year. This means we have a long way to go. Gates has been top of the list for 15 of the last 20 years.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg becoming the biggest gainer in net worth. His fortune more than doubled to $28.5 billion, boosted by a sharp rise in the price of the social network's shares.

The US continues to have the most billionaires, with 492. And Europe boasted the most billionaires outside the US, with 468 in total, closely followed by Asia, which had 444 billionaires.

Landlord Gerald Grosvenor and family were the richest British family to make the list, with a net worth estimated at $13 billion. Known formally as the 6th Duke of Westminster, he owns 190 acres in Belgravia, an area adjacent to Buckingham Palace and one of London's most expensive neighbourhoods. 
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