ASUS – Jupiter Broadcasting

The White house announces and executive order allowing sanctions against cyber war threats, some downsides of the Galaxy S6 Edge, an April Fools roundup & more!

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A New Tool Against Cyber Threats — Medium

It’s one of the great paradoxes of our Information Age — the very technologies that empower us to do great good can also be used by adversaries to inflict great harm. The same technologies that help keep our military strong are used by hackers in China and Russia to target our defense contractors and systems that support our troops. Networks that control much of our critical infrastructure — including our financial systems and power grids — are probed for vulnerabilities by foreign governments and criminals.

Cyber intrusions and attacks — many of them originating overseas — are targeting our businesses, stealing trade secrets, and costing American jobs. Iranian hackers have targeted American banks. The North Korean cyber attack on Sony Pictures destroyed data and disabled thousands of computers. In other recent breaches that have made headlines, more than 100 million Americans had their personal data compromised, including credit card and medical information.

Living life on the S6 Edge | The Verge

The Galaxy S6 Edge also doesn’t play too nicely with Google’s Material Design. Samsung has my eternal appreciation for following Google’s lead in moving to a cleaner, more minimalist interface, but Material Design emphasizes flatness and geometric regularity, which the Edge’s warping side screens disturb. They create a sort of vignette effect on white pages and are a hindrance rather than a help when editing photos.

Meet the Asus Chromebook Flip, a $249 Chrome OS tablet with a 360-degree hinge | PCWorld

The Chromebook Flip squeezed an adequate supply of connectivity into its slender profile. On one side, you’ll see two USB 2.0 ports, an SD card slot, HDMI, and an audio jack. On the other, you’ll see power and volume buttons, plus the DC power port.

Under the hood you’ll find 2GB of RAM and the Rockchip 3288 CPU. Rockchip, a new partner for Google, brings less expensive, more power-efficient CPUs to the Chromebook lineup. Google also announced new Chromebooks from Haier and Hisense with the same chip. Benchmarks from our hands-on with the new Hisense Chromebook indicate that this processor holds up well compared to older ARM chips.

Google pushes Chrome OS software, with or without Chromebooks – CNET

To that end, one of Google’s newest additions to the lineup of devices, the Chomebit, hawks Chrome OS without even trying to sell a Chromebook laptop.

RadioShack co-branding of stores with Sprint wins court approval | Reuters

A plan to salvage RadioShack Corp’s RSHCQ.PK business by co-branding most of its 1,740 surviving stores with cellular phone provider Sprint Corp (S.N) earned U.S. bankruptcy court approval on Tuesday, ending four days of contested court hearings.

The stores are what survived of more than 4,000 outlets after RadioShack went bankrupt in February. Founded in 1921, the chain was a go-to retailer for electronics before becoming increasingly irrelevant in the digital age.

Gentoo announces total website makeover – Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux today announced the launch of its new totally revamped and more inclusive website which was built to conform to the CGA Web(tm) graphics standards.

Smartbox by Inbox: the mailbox of tomorrow, today – YouTube

We’re excited to introduce Smartbox—a better, smarter mailbox that fuses physical mail with everything you love about the electronic kind.

Smartbox is currently in field trial—stuck in the ground, in a field—for Inbox by Gmail customers. If you’re not yet using Inbox, simply email inbox@google.com any time before April 2 to be invited, and to reserve your spot on the Smartbox waitlist.

The post Sanction IT | Tech Talk Today 151 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Road Ahead | CR 30

chris — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 13:44:43 +0000

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Mike’s got his hands on some new Windows RT devices, and shares his thoughts, challenges, and hopes.

Plus we discuss the Super Meat Boy vs Canonical drama, share our predictions for what’s to come in 2013, and answer some emails.

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Ouya errata
Wayland writes in to ask if we think AAA games will ever come to Linux
Brett writes:

“Hi Chris Michael,

Just wondering what your thoughts are on learning/doing desktop apps compared to say web apps. Where do you see the shift or direction in programming going? Do you see more options for website/internet programming (Ruby,Perl, ASP, Javascript etc. ) or is it better to learn a system \”desktop application\” type language such as (Python, C#, Java etc.)

Is Desktop applications still a worthwhile cause?

Thank you for the tips and knowledge.

Tzadik wonders if Michael has seen Java Was Strongly Influenced by Objective-C and asks if we will ever do an Objective-C episode.
Raymii asks if I’ve noticed that e-mail is “stupid to parse” and asks if we think he should take a shot selling his super duper e-mail backing up Python script and, if so, should he use Paypal or the processor that Michael uses for Code Journal
NoPriv.py – Easy IMAP email backup to HTML archive. – Raymii.org

Hoopla

Christmas Goodies!

[asa]B009F1INL8[/asa]
Asus Vivo Tab RT
[asa]B009ESF2L6[/asa]
HTC 8X

The post The Road Ahead | CR 30 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Failure Cascade | TechSNAP 68

chris — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:35:21 +0000

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The failure of Google Talk takes down several other Google services including GMail and then as a result even Twitter, we got the details. Plus how to determine if your WordPress site has been hacked, and some dangerous new Mac malware.

And a batch of audience questions, and our answers.

All that and more in this week’s episode of TechSNAP.

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Show Notes:

Google Talk Outage

This morning at 06:40 EDT (10:40 UTC) GoogleTalk experienced an outage for nearly all users
Users were able to access GoogleTalk but would receive an error, and not be able to communicate with other users
This interrupted a lot of business users who use Google Apps as an integrated document management and messaging platform
Google reported the issue resolved at 11:25 EDT (15:25 UTC)
Google Apps Status Page for this Outage
Google has not released any details about the cause of or the resolution to the outage
A large number of users took to Twitter to complain about the outage
This was followed shortly by an outage at twitter, possibly caused by the increased traffic generated by the google outage

OSX/Crisis drive-by malware/rootkit for OS X 10.6 and 10.7

The malware is installed silently, and does not require any user interaction
The malware detects if it is being run as a privileged user, in which case it also installs a rootkit to hide its existence, if run as a regular user, a different less dangerous payload is used
Once installed, the malware phones home to a UK Linode instance (I would expect this to be shut down soon, if it hasn’t been already), where it would receive further instructions and/or participate in a botnet (common activities include sending spam, advertising click-fraud, scanning and infecting other computers or websites)
The payload also attempts to spy on the user’s activities in Firefox, Safari, Adium and Skype (likely stealing passwords and key strokes, and possibly spreading to other mac users via IM and file transfer from trusted contacts)

Asus releases first ‘USB Attached SCSI Protocol’ (UASP) Devices

The new protocol replaces the standard USB BOT (‘Bulk Only Transfer’) mode which is plagued by high command latency and a lack of parallelism
UASP also allows up to 64k commands to be queued (BOT standard is to send the next command only once the current command completes), and allows commands to complete out of order
UASP requires a specialized USB controller on both the motherboard and the USB device (hard drive drive enclosures are the target market here)
However, UASP does not require any specific hard drive, and will work with any off the shelf HDD or SSD (although the performance gains are harder to see with a spinning drive)
While this is great news, there is still better news, Asus’s devices also support ‘Turbo Mode’ (Optimized BOT, send the next command before the first is acknowledged) that is compatible with many existing USB 3.0 Controllers (Intel, NEC) and offers most of the speed improvement of UASP without replacing your motherboard

7500 Blackhat Conference Attendees get password reset email

It appears that a volunteer working with ITN International, the company that handles the on-site registration and check in for the blackhat conference, accidentally sent a password reset email to all registered users
The emails include the username, and a new password in plain text (it would probably be much better to direct users to a password reset page, establish their identity with some other bit of information, and then store a new password using a proper cryptographic hashing algorithm, but this is a system by a conference management company, not the Blackhat attendees)
The email also included a URL to sign in to the Blackhat conference system, which uses an unqualified hostname that only works on the Blackhat registration network
This caused ZDNet’s tech writer to assume that this was a very poor phishing attempt (neglecting to consider how a phisher would have gotten the attendees email addresses), noted that the url was ‘not even real’, and that the from address was not spoofed
Official Explaination and Appology

Bryan’s RadicalBreeze.com got hacked

RadicalBreeze.com was running wordpress 2.9.1
The current version of WordPress is 3.4.1
Despite Bryan’s rant – ‘Google doesn’t want people to know about better software’ , this was not google claiming that Illumination Software Creator was malware, nor was it a false positive or mistake by Google, but an automated detection of a compromised site
The compromise was entirely Bryan’s fault, for running an incredibly old version of wordpress, subject to a number of vulnerabilities
The particular malware that has infested his site appears to be related to some vulnerabilities in Plesk , that were fixed in February 2012 and July 2012 that allowed the automated script to compromise his site and modify the files to inject the iframe
It is unclear that this time if any customer data was compromised, it very likely could have been, but the attack seems automated rather than targeted
Google Safe Browsing Report
Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including dynapass.ru/
1 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including sqqkemzgshwnkkrk.waw.pl/
Google’s “How did this happen?”
In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message

Feedback

Round Up

The post Failure Cascade | TechSNAP 68 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Linux Action Show! Season 10 Episode 5

chris — Sun, 24 May 2009 11:00:30 +0000

This week on The Linux Action Show!

We give you our thoughts on ASUS serving Linux a big TURD sammich with their new “It’s Better With Windows” campaign, THEN we step things up a notch with Android on a Netbook! Want to know the latest on the GP2x? GOOD, we’ll TELL YA!

Then – We review a new HP Linux Desktop!

PLUS SO MUCH MORE!

Thanks for using our code LINUX when you checkout at GoDaddy.com!

All this week on, The Linux Action Show!

ASUS – Jupiter Broadcasting

The Cottonwood Disaster | LINUX Unplugged 471

Distro in the Rough | LINUX Unplugged 405

Linux Action News 178

Secret Modem Sounds | LINUX Unplugged 381

Machine Learning Magic | TechSNAP 417

Supply Chain Attacks | TechSNAP 400

Handmade Desktop Linux | LINUX Unplugged 280

Linux Action News 67

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Episode Links: linuxactionnews.com/67

Queso the Mondays | TTT 243

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KICKSTARTER OF THE WEEEAAAAK:

Sanction IT | Tech Talk Today 151

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The Road Ahead | CR 30

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Hoopla

Christmas Goodies!

Failure Cascade | TechSNAP 68

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Round Up

The Linux Action Show! Season 10 Episode 5

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linuxactionnews.com/67