Huawei – Jupiter Broadcasting

The company has since confirmed the news, and a press release states Amazon will pay $970 million in cash.

Amazon is clearly very keen to get into gaming. It created its in-house gaming studio back in 2012 and has made a few lightweight Facebook and mobile games since then. It signaled it was getting more serious with the acquisition of Killer Instinct developer Double Helix Games and hiring of Kim Swift, the designer behind the classic Portal game. The company’s new Fire TV offered a selection of games created by Amazon’s in-house team and even has a Amazon joystick you can buy separately, hinting at aspirations to compete with consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation.

For Twitch, being acquired was always about finding a partner that could help it keep up with its massive growth. As The Verge reported back in May, Twitch was being offered hundreds of millions in new funding from its previous investors, but felt that it simply couldn’t scale with capital alone. It needed a company with global infrastructure already in place that it could piggyback on. YouTube certainly fit the bill. But Amazon, with its Amazon Web Services (AWS), also has the kind of international presence to ensure Twitch can stream live video to millions across every continent. Twitch in turn could be the live-streaming platform that powers everything from gaming to concerts to sporting events that play on Amazon’s family of Fire devices.

Why would Twitch choose Amazon over Google? It wasn’t the money, with Amazon’s purchase price being equal or less than Google’s reported offer. Shear wouldn’t answer that question directly, but did provide detail on why Amazon was the best fit. “One of the things that really stood out about Amazon was their approach to acquisitions. We will be a wholly owned subsidiary and and I will remain CEO,” said Shear. “They have a long term vision about how to create big opportunities in the future by investing today.”

Reading between the lines a little, it sounds like Twitch felt at Google, it would have always been YouTube’s little brother. At Amazon, it has the chance to build something from scratch, as Amazon has no user-generated or live video offerings yet. A source familiar with the deal suggested Twitch felt Amazon would give it more autonomy and bigger role in growing the gaming business.

Amazon Pounces On Twitch After Google Balks Due To Antitrust Concerns

Google was unable to close the deal, said sources familiar with the talks, because it was concerned about potential antitrust issues that could have come with the acquisition. The Mountain View, Calif. company already owns YouTube, the world’s most-visited content streaming site, which competes with Twitch to broadcast and stream live or on-demand video game sessions. One source noted that because of the concerns, Google and Twitch could not come to an agreement on the size of a potential breakup fee in case the deal did not go through.

White House cybersecurity czar brags about his lack of technical expertise

Michael Daniel is the White House’s cybersecurity coordinator, the man who “leads the interagency development of national cybersecurity strategy and policy” for the president. And in a recent interview with GovInfoSecurity, he argued that his lack of technical expertise gave him an advantage in doing that job.

“You don’t have to be a coder in order to really do well in this position,” Daniel said, when asked if his job required knowledge of the technology behind information security. “In fact, actually, I think being too down in the weeds at the technical level could actually be a little bit of a distraction.”

“You can get taken up and enamored with the very detailed aspects of some of the technical solutions,” he explained, arguing that “the real issue is looking at the broad strategic picture.”

As Princeton computer scientist Ed Felten points out, it’s hard to imagine senior policymakers with responsibility for other technical subjects making this kind of claim. Imagine a White House economic advisor arguing that experience in the weeds of economic research would be a distraction, an attorney general making that claim about time in a courtroom, or a surgeon general bragging about never having set foot in an operating room.

Huawei’s Head of Business Group Sees no Future in Tizen

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen, Richard Yu, the head of Huawei’s consumer business group, talked about the future of the global smartphone industry and how Huawei will compete against Samsung and Apple.

Mr. Yu: We have no plans to use Tizen. Some telecom carriers are pushing us to design Tizen phones but I say “no” to them. In the past we had a team to do research on Tizen but I canceled it. We feel Tizen has no chance to be successful. Even for Windows Phone it’s difficult to be successful.

We have no plans to build our own OS. It’s easy to design a new OS, but the problem is building the ecosystem around it.

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The post Amazon Uncontrollably Twitching | Tech Talk Today 49 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Restores are Everything | TechSNAP 168

chris — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 14:45:11 +0000

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A company known for backup shuts down after their AWS account gets hacked, the Hedge fund thats under attack, how far you can get with a little cab data…

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Company shuts down after their AWS account compromised, all customer data deleted

Code Spaces, a source code hosting and backup service has ceased doing business
On June 17th the company came under a DDoS attack, which is apparently business as normal for them
Later, they found messages in their Amazon Web Services portal, urging them to contact a hotmail address
When contacted, the attacker demanded a large ransom
When Code Spaces attempted to change their passwords in the AWS control panel, additional administrator accounts added by the attacker were used to delete all EC2 virtual machines, S3 stores and EBS volumes in the account before all accessed could be revoked
The most embarrassing part of the situation is the text on the original Code Spaces website:
“Backing up data is one thing, but it is meaningless without a recovery plan, not only that [but also] a recovery plan—and one that is well-practiced and proven to work time and time again,” “Code Spaces has a full recovery plan that has been proven to work and is, in fact, practiced.”
It is not clear what the Code Spaces backup strategy was, but it seemed to involve the same Amazon account
In general, the idea with an “offsite” backup is to separate it from a failure of the primary. If you keep the backups for your database beside the database server and your office burns down, what good are the backups
What if Amazon suffered a catastrophic data loss? or what if your account is compromised?
The backups should have at least been in a different Amazon account that was very strictly controlled, or better yet, stored in some other service
It is still unclear how the account was compromised, but it seems likely that Code Spaces was not making use of the Amazon’s Multi-Factor Authentication service, which offers either a mobile phone app, or two different types of hardware authenticators (key fob and credit-card style)

Poorly anonymized NYC Taxi data, de-anonymized

Under an Open Data initiative, the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission released the anonymized GPS logs of all taxi trips in 2013 (173 million trips)
Chris Whong got a hold of this data and did some interesting stuff with it
When he was done with it, he posted the data for everyone
Developer Vijay Pandurangan took a look at the data and noticed that the medallion and hack numbers appeared to simply be MD5 hashes
In particular, the driver with ID# CFCD208495D565EF66E7DFF9F98764DA appeared to have an impossibly large number of trips
Turns out, that is the MD5 hash of “0”, cases where the data was unavailable
Realizing that the data was only anonymized using MD5, and knowing the structure of a drivers license # (5-7 characters, with specific characters being numbers or letters), he was able to brute force all 24 million combinations in only 2 minutes using a single CPU
Once this was done, he had the original un-anonymized data
Using other websites, it is possible to link the medallion and hack numbers to the owners names
Original Post
Additional Coverage – Ars Technica
To prevent this, there are a number of approaches, the fastest but weakest is a ‘secret key’. Instead of md5(hack#) just do md5(SUPERLONGSECRETKEYhack#), as long as the attacker doesn’t know the secret key, and it is long enough to make guessing it impractical, the data would remain anonymized
Another option is to use the md5 hash of the encrypted form of the value. However this eventually just relies on a secret key as well. However, if the data never needs to be anonymized, a very strong key can be used, and that key can then be destroyed, making decryption impossible.

Hackers attack hedge fund for monetary gain

BAE systems, a British defense contractor that also specializes in cyber security, was called in to investigate after computers at a hedge fund were hacked
The attackers somehow infiltrated the HFT (High Frequency Trading) system, and injected delays of several hundred microseconds into the order entry system
This causes the Hedge Fund to miss out on profits it could have made on the trades
It is suspected, that the attackers capitalized on this to make those profits themselves
“Hedge funds “really have inadequate cybersecurity as a whole” and the attacks threaten to undermine the systems used globally for high-speed trading, said Tom Kellerman, chief cyber security officer for Trend Micro Inc. ”

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