TechEye |  |
- MacKeeper helps cyber crims clean up
- Churches install face-tracking software
- US and British spy on French
- Android does not play nice with IPv6
- Microsoft to up Windows licensing fees
- New display set to blow your mind away
- Nearly everyone’s going to work from home
- Panel market hit by notebook slump
- Let IBM cook you a dinner
| MacKeeper helps cyber crims clean up Posted: 24 Jun 2015 03:26 AM PDT
BAE's cyber security unit said that MacKeeper, which has been downloaded over 20 million times, was quick to patch the hole after it had been notified of the virus. However until users update their software they are still at risk of being attacked via the Remote Code Execution (RCE) bug. Hackers directed targets to an infected webpage, and using a single line of JavaScript they would send a command script to MacKeeper, which would then process it. The download alert mimicked a malware report from MacKeeper and requested the user's administrative password, giving the virus control over the entire system. Lead security researcher Sergei Shevchenko said that it took only a few days after the flaw and proof of concept were disclosed for cyber crooks to begin injecting the malware via MacKeeper. The malware enables remote power over commands, uploads and downloads, and setting execution permissions. The bot can also gain access to system information such as details of VPN connections, user names, and lists of processes and statuses. Apple users have been warning in their support communities not to download Mackeeper long before the error was discovered because of its malware marketing efforts 1. |
| Churches install face-tracking software Posted: 24 Jun 2015 02:23 AM PDT
More than 24 churches installed a facial-recognition system to monitors which members of the flock have actually shown up for the Sunday sermon. The system is called Churchix and was ironically developed by Israeli software company, Face-six. It continually scans the CCTV feed and matches congregation members to a pre-existing database of their faces — reportedly with 99 percent accuracy. Basically it means that if the priest meets someone in the street and tells you "I didn't see you in church on Sunday", it is because he has an app to tell him that. Face-Six CEO Moshe Greenshpan told Churchmag said that church events are the church way to interact with its members, and naturally the attendance to those events is very important. “Event attendance stats help the church to measure the success of each event, see what event types are more popular than others and also track the attendance of specific members.” That way, church officials can monitor everything from the gender ratios of attendees at specific events to ensure that elderly or infirmed church-members haven’t suddenly stopped coming around. Needless to say there are a few people who have a problem with this. Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, told the Mirror, “This is a clear example of completely over-the-top use of technology. Churches have managed to note who is in their congregation for hundreds of years without resorting to highly intrusive means.” True but then they also relied on God rather than technology and he does tend to move in mysterious ways. |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2015 02:23 AM PDT
Apparently both organisations spied on French presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande. According to WikiLeaks documents first reported in French daily Liberation and on news website Mediapart, the NSA spied on the presidents during a period of at least 2006 until May 2012, the month Hollande took over from Sarkozy. WikiLeaks said the documents derived from directly targeted NSA surveillance of the communications of Hollande, Sarkozy and Chirac, as well as French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the U.S. Sarkozy was spied on because he was considering restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks without US involvement and Hollande because he feared a Greek euro zone exit back in 2012. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in the statement that the French people have a right to know that their elected government is subject to hostile surveillance from a supposed ally. He is clearly planning to milk the document leak by staggering their release. The documents include summaries of conversations between French government officials on the global financial crisis, the future of the European Union, the relationship between Hollande’s administration and Merkel’s government, French efforts to determine the make-up of the executive staff of the United Nations, and a dispute between the French and U.S. governments over U.S. spying on France. The documents also contained the mobile phone numbers of numerous officials in the Elysee presidential palace including the direct cell phone of the president, WikiLeaks said. Last week, WikiLeaks published more than 60,000 diplomatic cables from Saudi Arabia and said on its website it would release half a million more in the coming weeks. “Hollande stressed that the meeting would be secret,” WikiLeaks quoted an NSA intercept from May 22, 2012 as saying of talks he requested with “appropriate ministers” in his cabinet to discuss possible fall-out on France’s economy and banks if Greece exited the euro zone. Ironically the Sarkozy leak is beneficial to the pint sized former president. In France he was widely considered in France to be a pro-American puppet who propped up the US film industry so he and his nice wife could go to Hollywood parties. However these leaks showed him being critical of the U.S. government’s handling of the financial crisis and blamed many of the current economic problems on mistakes made by the US government. |
| Android does not play nice with IPv6 Posted: 24 Jun 2015 02:22 AM PDT
While the rest of the world is moving to support DHCPv6 including Windows, OS X, iOS, and most of the Linux distributions, Google is sitting on its hands. Writing in his bog, Google developer and noted IPv6 authority Lorenzo Colliti claims that the reasons for the lack of DHCPv6 implementation is that it might break legacy apps that rely on IPv4 and force developers to adopt IPv6 network address translation (with negative app performance consequences). At the same time DHCPv6 address assignment imposes these disadvantages on users, but doesn’t actually seem to provide any advantages to users, he wrote. However that is hacking off many business users who want to move to IPv6 but can't because many of their mobile users are on Android. It is also starting to backfire on Google because DHCPv6 is so important to companies that they are bar Android devices that can't use the system from corporate networks by their legal departments. Legal requirements for identifying the sources of traffic, including the DMCA, made DHCPv6 crucially important. All this is having a knock on effect on the development of BYOD because many of the devices that are using this tech are android based. |
| Microsoft to up Windows licensing fees Posted: 23 Jun 2015 07:29 AM PDT
According to a report in Taiwanese wire Digitimes, this is not making the vendors – such as HP, Dell, Acer, and Asustek very happy. The notebook market is currently faltering as people move to smartphones and to tablets, and margins are already tight for the manufacturers. But with Windows 10 due out at the end of July, the additional licensing fees that Microsoft will levy will leave the vendors between a rock and a hard place. Prices are already at rock bottom for many models of Windows based notebooks and the only way the vendors can sell high end models is if they take the hit, as the world+dog won't way to pay more than they need to for an already expensive machine. Microsoft is offering free upgrades to Windows 10 for people using Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 in a bid to move minds and hearts of a somewhat disillusioned user base. The free upgrade will expire after a year, and Microsoft hasn't yet indicated what it will charge people then. |
| New display set to blow your mind away Posted: 23 Jun 2015 07:04 AM PDT
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies said it uses natural ambient light for its approach, which also reduces the power sucked up by conventional LCD screens. The design, said the firm, can also provide “always on’ display functions and better viewing, even in bright light outside. The invention uses a mirror with a thin absorbing layer that has a precise gab with an absorbing layer filtering out a narrow slice of the spectrum. John Hong, a scientist at Qualcomm MEMS said: "The incredibly efficient display is able to create a rich palette of colours using only ambient light for viewing, much like the way we would read and view printed material." Hong estimates that power savings compared to existing backlit displays will be 10 fold. A prototype uses a panel 1.5 inch across that holds 149,000 pixels, but the resolution and area of the display can be scaled. Making a display panel can be done in one piece, with the MEMS, upper layer and lower layer using the same deposition, lithography and etching processes used to create LCD panels. Qualcomm MEMS didn't say when we'd see such panels widely available. |
| Nearly everyone’s going to work from home Posted: 23 Jun 2015 06:47 AM PDT
Right now, there are 96.2 million mobile workers in the USA, but that figure is set to rise to 105.4 million by 2020. A whole heap of things are accelerating the trend including cheaper smartphones and tablets, the acceptance by employers of bring your own devices (BYOD), biometric readers, voice control, near field communications (NFC) and augmented reality. IDC said 69.1 percent of the enterprises it surveyed saw a reduction in costs through implementing BYOD programmes. Healthcare workers are the biggest segment of the mobile workforce, followed by manufacturing and construction. In fact, non office based mobile workers make up two thirds of the total mobile worker population. Bryan Bassett, a research analyst at IDC said that mobility has become synonymous with productivity both inside and outside the workplace. |
| Panel market hit by notebook slump Posted: 23 Jun 2015 06:38 AM PDT
Generally speaking, the second quarter of the year is a healthy one for the manufacturers as companies gear up their offerings for the third and fourth calendar quarters. But, according to a survey from Trendforce, that doesn't seem to be happening. The survey showed that for the notebook sector there's no demand for panels even given the traditionally healthy back to school sales. Nor has the industry see demand for Windows 10 generate additional orders. In fact, there's a glut of inventory in the channel, meaning that prices for panels have actually fallen in June. Sales of monitors are not helping the panel manufacturers either. Trendview said there was a "significant" decline in shipments in the first quarter this year, and the second and third quarter look to be gloomy too. Here too prices have dropped. The other sector that generates profits for the manufacturers are TV panels but there's a price war there, particularly on the popular 32-inch size. |
| Posted: 23 Jun 2015 06:25 AM PDT
The app was co-developed by Big Blue and Bon Appetit and will think up all sorts of interesting flavour combinations which you might like or might not like quite so much. The app, powered by IBM's Watson technology includes 10,000 recipes from a Bon Appetit database and offers the opportunity of gazillions of ingredient combinations. If you hate cabbage, broccoli or cauliflower you can exclude them so that Mr Chef Watson doesn't dish up, for example, broccoli ice cream. Watson, according to IBM, is good at finding patterns and relationships hidden in data. According to the company, it's not just cooking that Watson is good at – it's being used by fashionistas and life sciences. You can check out the cook's ideas here. |
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