Posted on January 26th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Facebook has teamed up with the Washington Attorney General to put real resources toward getting rid of spam on the social network — starting with a lawsuit.
“Security is an arms race, and that’s why Facebook is committed to constantly improving our consumer safeguards while pursuing and supporting civil and criminal consequences for bad actors,” Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot said in a statement.
The two have filed lawsuits against affiliate network Adscend Media, which Facebook says is known to support “clickjacking” schemes, and other forms of tricking users into giving up personally identifiable information or money.
Clickjacking schemes involve hiding code in a link, or under a picture in the browser that otherwise would be a normal click-through point. In Facebook’s case, this exists as enticing links to see a weird video, or find out what cool thing happened on your birthday. The code in the link, however, executes a download or may redirect a user to an undesirable website. Other scams include creating a fan page that lures users into accessing a web page and inputting personal information or signing up for a scam. This kind of spam is more in line with phishing scams.
Full Story Via Venturebeat
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Posted on January 25th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
The Apple iPhone 4S’ super-tough A5 processor has had hard-working hackers stumped. After 10 months of efforts, however, they’ve released a free jailbreaking download.
The Chronic Dev Team, a group of iOS hackers, has unveiled its GreenPois0n toolkit, a free download enabling Apple iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners to jailbreak their devices. The download came at the cost of “thousands of hours of brain power and effort from a legion of world-renowned hackers,” the group said in a celebratory blog post.
Apple dictates which applications can run on its devices and would very much like its operating systems to go un-manipulated. Jailbreaking is the process by which the system and user interface are opened up to user changes. Particularly alluring, jailbreaking enables devices to copy files without accepting the iTunes end-user agreement.
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Posted on January 21st, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Apple announced that it was “reinventing the textbook” using the iPad, its iBooks bookstore and a new kind of book creation tool. But despite the tremendous success of the iPad in recent years, and despite the biggest partners in educational publishing, does the company have the ability to effect real change? Or is Apple ignoring some serious obstacles? Content providers and education experts are torn.
During a press event on Thursday, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller explained that the “iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools” and that the brand-new iBooks 2 app will offer students an interactive way to learn using a device they may already be familiar with.
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Posted on January 21st, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Windows’ contribution last quarter to Microsoft’s revenue hit its lowest point since Vista’s swan song more than two years earlier, according to figures released by the company Thursday.
For the quarter ending Dec. 31, the Windows division accounted for 22.7% of the company’s total sales, its lowest share since the 20.3% that the group recorded during the third quarter of 2009, at the end of Vista’s reign and just weeks before Windows 7 launched.
“Microsoft’s Windows division continued to slide,” said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research, in an email late Thursday. “This marked the fifth consecutive quarter of incremental or negative revenue growth for the division.”
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Posted on January 16th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Current England long jump champion and London 2012 hopeful J.J. Jegede attempts an exhibition jump over three Limited edition 2012 MINIs on September 28, 2011, in London, England. (Julian Finney/Getty Images for BMW)
BMW announced on Monday the recall of nearly 89,000 of its Mini and Mini Cooper cars in U.S. and more than 235,000 worldwide.
The company said a water pump that cools the turbocharger in some models has a circuit board that can malfunction and overheat.
“In an extreme case this overheating can lead to a smoldering of the water pump and eventually can create a vehicle fire,” said BMW spokeswoman Nathalie Bauters.
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Posted on January 12th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Are there too many smartphones on the market?
That and other provocative questions were posed during a CES panel discussion Thursday between journalists for the The Verge and managers for Windows Phone at Microsoft and smartphone makers HTC and Samsung.
The question of whether there are too many smartphone variations on the market was partly incited by Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha’s comment at CES that the company plans to make fewer phones in 2012.
The HTC and Samsung officials agreed there is a profundity of smartphone choices with little to distinguish some of them, but they also argued that competition and demands from users have led to the proliferation of devices. Add in frequent OS changes and the need to have devices at different prices, and the result is a surfeit of phones on the market, they said.
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Posted on January 10th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
The main theme of the Consumer Electronics Show this year, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock this week, is the ultrabook. These lightweight laptops are chasing after the MacBook Air, trying to undercut Apple’s $1,000 price tag and add their own flair to the lineup of super-slim devices. Intel, the company behind the chips that make the devices “ultra,” has been pushing this newly named genre hard, announcing in its Monday keynote that at least 75 models are on their way.
There are three main distinguishing features of an ultrabook. First, they’re light and thin — really thin. Acer’s Aspire S5 Ultrabook is just .6 inches thick at its widest point, and the HP Envy Spectre 14 is .8 inches thick. Ultrabook makers favor solid-state hard drives that start up quickly and don’t add nearly as much weight to a device as a traditional laptop. Design is the key factor for any ultrabook, and many of the laptops mirror Apple’s devotion to slender, simple, shiny computers. Second, despite their light frames, they’re still most closely related to laptops than to tablets and run full versions of Windows operating systems instead of mobile software. Finally, they have a fairly agreeable price point, though I’d hesitate to call them “cheap.” Most more or less match the MacBook Air, ranging from around $900 to $1,500. Read more »
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Posted on January 6th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
A computer worm that has traditionally targeted the financial industry has set its sights on social networking, recently stealing over 45,000 Facebook login credentials, according to security firm Seculert.
In a statement, Facebook said the majority of the login credentials were outdated, but it was still notifying the affected users.
The worm, known as Ramnit, dates back to April 2010, and is described as a multi-component malware family that infects Windows executable and HTML files, stealing sensitive info like stored FTP credentials and browser cookies, Seculert said in a blog post.
A July 2011 report (PDF) from Symantec said Ramnit was responsible for 17.3 percent of all new malicious software infections.
Ramnit started going after financial institutions in August 2011, possibly merging with ZeusS “to create a ‘Hybrid creature’ which was empowered by both the scale of the Ramnit infection and the ZeuS financial data-sniffing capabilities,” Seculert said.
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Posted on January 5th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.
Consider a few key metrics. Despite the disappearance of competitors including Circuit City, the company is losing market share. Its last earnings announcement disappointed investors. In 2011, the company’s stock has lost 40% of its value. Forward P/E is a mere 6.23 (industry average is 10.20). Its market cap down to less than $9 billion. Its average analyst rating, according to The Street.com, is a B-.
Those are just some of the numbers, and they don’t look good. They bear out a prediction in March from the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column, which forecast “the worst is yet to come” for Best Buy investors. With the flop of 3D televisions and the expansion of Apple’s own retail locations, there was no killer product on the horizon that would lift it from the doldrums. Though the company accounts for almost a third of all U.S. consumer electronics purchases, analysts noted, the company remains a ripe target for more nimble competitors.
But the numbers only scratch the surface. To discover the real reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.
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