Latest Technology News & Updates

A pair of Comcast customers has sued the company for turning Xfinity Internet routers into public Wi-Fi hotspots, saying Comcast’s actions pose risks to subscribers and are taken without seeking their authorization. Plaintiff Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris of Alameda County, California, filed the suit on December 4 (PDF) in US District Court in Northern California, seeking class action status on behalf of all Comcast customers who lease wireless routers that broadcast Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots. “Without authorization to do so, Comcast uses the wireless routers it supplies to its customers to generate additional, public Wi-Fi networks for its own benefit,” the complaint states. The plaintiffs seek financial damages and an order preventing Comcast “from using residential customers’ wireless routers to create Xfinity Wi-Fi Hotspots without first obtaining authorization.” The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the lawsuit yesterday. Also yesterday, the court issued a summo...

Researchers have uncovered an extremely stealthy trojan for Linux systems that attackers have been using to siphon sensitive data from governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world. The previously undiscovered malware represents a missing puzzle piece tied to "Turla," a so-called advanced persistent threat (APT) disclosed in August by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec. For at least four years, the campaign targeted government institutions, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies in more than 45 countries. The unknown attackers—who are probably backed by a nation-state, according to Symantec—were known to have infected several hundred Windows-based computers by exploiting a variety of vulnerabilities, at least two of which were zero-day bugs. The malware was notable for its use of a rootkit that made it extremely hard to detect. Now researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have detected Linux-based malware used in the same campaign....

Microsoft's fight against the US position that it may search its overseas servers with a valid US warrant is getting nasty. Microsoft, which is fighting a US warrant that it hand over e-mail to the US from its Ireland servers, wants the Obama administration to ponder a scenario where the "shoe is on the other foot." "Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany," Microsoft said. "They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter's box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei." In a Monday legal filing with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, Microsoft added that the US government would b...

Although dark energy is all the rage these days, dark matter still has enough mystery to keep physicists entertained. We don't actually know what dark matter is. Yes, we know that it hangs around in galaxies, modifying their rates of rotation. We know that without dark matter in the early Universe, there would have been insufficient gravitational attraction to generate the Universe we observe today. We have even seen dark matter that's physically independent of normal matter out there in the Universe. But we really want to get a hold of it and find out how it fits with the pantheon of particles we do know about. Doing this will require some experimental ingenuity and possibly all sorts of new approaches. Currently, our experiments are silent on what dark matter actually is. Even worse, dark matter doesn't fit into the Standard Model—the theory that tells us about everything from quarks and neutrinos to where all the missing socks are. Extensions to the Standard Model...

About 100,000 or more websites running the WordPress content management system have been compromised by mysterious malware that turns the infected sites into attack platforms that can target visitors, security researchers said. The campaign has prompted Google to flag more than 11,000 domains as malicious, but many more sites have been detected as compromised, according to a blog post published Sunday by Sucuri, a firm that helps website operators secure their servers. Researchers have yet to confirm the cause of the infection, but they suspect it's related to a vulnerability in Slider Revolution, a WordPress plugin, that was disclosed in early September. Update: In a new blog post published after Ars went live with this brief, Sucuri says it has confirmed the so-called "RevSlider" vulnerability is the culprit. The code causes pages to download the malicious payload from hxxp://soaksoak.ru/xteas/code. Judging from some of the reader comments, some administrators wer...

Adobe today announced that it has acquired Fotolia, a popular marketplace for stock photography and video, for approximately $800 million in cash. The idea is to integrate the service into Adobe’s Creative Cloud and make it easier for Creative Cloud members to use (and purchase) the over 34 million images and videos in the company’s portfolio. “The acquisition of Fotolia will reinforce Creative Cloud’s role as the preeminent destination for creatives,” said David Wadhwani, the senior vice president for Digital Media at Adobe in a canned statement today. “Creative Cloud is becoming the go-to marketplace for the creative community to access images, videos, fonts and creative talent, through critical creative services like Fotolia and our new Creative Talent Search capabilities.” Adobe’s Creative Cloud now has over 3.4 million members, as the company also today announced. It’s unclear how exactly Adobe’s subscribers will be able to access Fotolia’s content, but in a phone interview ...

Some ideas are ahead of their time. There is no question that the wearables market is taking off with the proliferation of health monitors, pedometers and activity trackers like Fitbit, Jawbone, Nike Fuelband, etc. And next year the Apple Watch will likely make the wearable watch the next big thing. Gartner boldly predicted that companies using Glass and similar wearable gadgets could save up to $1 billion a year within the next three to five years. However, the consumer electronics space can be a funny thing. Consumers tend to buy in herds. They will buy the next best gadget, only when they actually see others with the gadget. One of the problems with products like Google Glass is that it was released in limited fashion as part of the “Explorers” beta program, (meaning you needed a private invite), which limited distribution. With a price tag of $1,500 very few consumers could afford to try out Google Glass. It takes a much lower price tag to drive consumer interest. Th...

The current smartwatch and fitness device space is stagnant. The offerings and the devices are a commoditized mess with companies competing for the same consumers – with the same features. There must be more available from these devices than just tracking steps, miles walked, sleep and general activity, right? Most of these devices, like Jawbone’s Up and Fitbit, have a closed sensor system; however, opening these sensors to third-party developers holds enormous potential. We’re just now beginning to see the glimmer of the benefits as some of the major electronics manufacturers like Microsoft and Samsung enter the space. The new sensors on smartwatches and fitness bands will enable insight into a user’s heart rate, VO2 max, sympathetic nervous response, blood glucose level, EKG, temperature and more. We’re moving into a world where people will be wearing always-on body-monitoring systems. We’re standing at a frontier where we’re pulling laboratory science outside of the laboratory...

More than 12 million routers in homes and small offices are vulnerable to attacks that allow hackers anywhere in the world to monitor user traffic and take administrative control over the devices, researchers said. The vulnerability resides in "RomPager" software, embedded into the residential gateway devices, made by a company known as AllegroSoft. Versions of RomPager prior to 4.34 contain a critical bug that allows attackers to send simple HTTP cookie files that corrupt device memory and hand over administrative control. Attackers can use that control to read plaintext traffic traveling over the device and possibly take other actions, including changing sensitive DNS settings and monitoring or controling Web cams, computers, or other connected devices. Researchers from Check Point's malware and vulnerability group have dubbed the bug Misfortune Cookie, because it allows hackers to determine the "fortune" of an HTTP request by manipulating cookies. They wr...

We have become blasé about technology. The modern smartphone, for example, is in so many ways a remarkable feat of engineering: computing power that not so long ago would have cost millions of dollars and filled entire rooms is now available to fit in your hand for a few hundred bucks. But smartphones are so widespread and normal that they no longer have the power to astonish us. Of course they're tremendously powerful pocket computers. So what? This phenomenon is perhaps even more acute for those of us who work in the field in some capacity. A steady stream of new gadgets and gizmos passes across our desks, we get briefed and pitched all manner of new "cutting edge" pieces of hardware and software, and they all start to seem a little bit the same and a little bit boring. Even news that really might be the start of something remarkable, such as HP's plans to launch a computer using memristors for both longterm and working memory and silicon photonics interconne...

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has convinced a court that a company that offers homeopathic remedies was "misleading and deceptive" when it tried to argue that said remedies provide a viable alternative to the pertussis vaccine. The case dates back to early 2013. The company, Homeopathy Plus, posted a series of three articles that claimed (among other things) that the vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough) is unreliable and ineffective. Literature currently at the site criticizes vaccines more generally, while promoting homeopathy as effective in preventing "malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, leptospirosis, and meningococcal disease." As noted in that article, the whooping cough articles drew the ire of Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration Advertising Complaint Resolution Panel and Therapeutic Goods Administration, which sought a retraction of the published claims. Homeopathy Plus, however, declined to obey these order...

It’s been quite a year for Viber, and now the mobile messaging company is seeing out 2014 with arguably its most significant release to date: the launch of a social games platform. Viber, which was bought by Japan’s Rakuten for $900 million back in February — right before Facebook acquired WhatsApp — is taking a leaf from the Asian messaging app playbook with the launch of an initial three games. It isn’t a global launch however. These titles will be available for iOS and Android users in five markets initially — Belarus, Malaysia, Israel, Singapore and the Ukraine — with the company planning to roll them out to all Viber users worldwide in January 2015. Earlier this year, founder Talmon Marco said Viber would introduce games before the end of 2014, and the company has just about stuck to that timeline. Just about. Like other chat apps, linking a Viber account to the games platform will allow users to tap their social graph to do things like send gifts to friends, check social-...

The computer science gender gap struggle in Silicon Valley is real. A mere 17 percent of Google’s tech workers are women. It’s 15 percent at Facebook. Similar stats can be found at most of the larger tech companies. Girls Who Code is trying to reverse those digits with an announcement of a major expansion in partnerships today. The non-profit organization that aims to close the gender gap in technology will grow its Summer Immersion Program from 19 sessions reaching 375 girls to 60 sessions reaching 1,200 girls this year. The 7-week program pairs girls interested in computer science education with field trips to top tech companies such as Twitter and Square. The program recruits and trains  teachers and assistants, provides the curriculum, recruits the girls, curates guest speakers, manages field trips and offers mentorship to the girls during the course of each summer session. The program needs to expand in order to reach more young women. This means partnering with more ...

If there’s one part of a PC that doesn’t get enough love, it’s the fan. These small plastic spinning pieces cost almost nothing and keep hundreds or thousands of dollars of advanced technology from cooking itself. The only time anyone talks about a computer’s fans is when we notice them doing their jobs. “I can’t go on YouTube without them winding up, making a bunch of noise!” For many, these fans are becoming increasingly unnecessary. Chips built for phones, tablets and even some laptops are designed to use small enough amounts of power than they can dissipate heat without blowing a bunch of air all over everything. But for users who demand power — gamers, video editors and the like — fans are still a reality that has to be dealt with every day. CoolChip Technologies is working to redesign fans to be less of a nuisance. While there are alternatives (like liquid cooling) for those who simply cannot stand the presence of fans, CoolChip’s work doesn’t require significantly chan...

Several of Google’s Android apps and services have become deeply woven into our lives over the years. Others are familiar only to dedicated Google fans. Some of these lesser-known offerings are highly experimental or target only a limited number of people, but they’re all genuinely cool. Here are five of them. 1. Google Cardboard You’ve heard about Google Glass. Whether you can afford a pair or not, it’s probably not something you want to spend $1,500 on. I hear you. But that’s not Google’s only attempt at augmenting reality. It has another experiment in the works that takes a significantly more immersive approach, and it does so for much less money. As in, it’s free. Google Cardboard debuted at this year’s Google I/O. Think of it as a do-it-yourself take on the Oculus Rift. Instead of buying a pricey product, you go to the website and follow the instructions to build your own pair of goggles out of cardboard. Google Apps Cardboard   5 Lesser Known Google Made Android Ap...

We probably all use our computers every day, but do you really know everything about them? There might be many simple and helpful tricks that you’re not aware of. There’s much more to Windows than first meets the eye – you can be a power user for years and still not realise the full potential of the operating system. Let’s run through some Windows features that aren’t highly advertised and which can help you be more productive. Remember to share your own in the comments below! Shake It Off Have you got loads of windows open at once and find your screen too cluttered? In Windows 7 and up, click and hold on the title bar of the window you’re interested in and give it a shake back and forth with your mouse. All other windows will shrink to the taskbar, leaving the window you’ve made dizzy remaining open. This feature is known as Aero Shake. You can get Aero features in Windows Vista or XP using third party applications. Wallpaper Slideshow Deciding on a single wallpaper to ...

Although it's no longer 2012, apparently people are still watching the YouTube video for Korean pop star Psy's smash hit song Gangnam Style. The irritatingly catchy tune has racked up so many views that Google has been forced to upgrade YouTube's infrastructure to cope. When YouTube was first developed, nobody ever imagined that a video would be watched more than 2 billion times, so the view count was stored using a signed 32-bit integer. The maximum value of this number type, 2,147,483,647, is well known to C programmers as INT_MAX. Once INT_MAX is reached, attempting to record another view will normally roll over to -2,147,483,648. YouTube isn't the only software that this number is a problem for. Unix systems record time values as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970. 32-bit systems use a signed 32-bit integer for this, so they will wrap around 2,147,483,647 seconds after that date. Two billion seconds is about 68 years; on January 19,...

Another day, another Arduino project. This time it’s something called SuperDuino, a tiny touchscreen powered by a coin cell battery and backed up by a tiny Arduino-Like processor. The kit can be used to build smartwatches and other mini devices and costs about $25 for the entire system. You can add microSD readers, Bluetooth, and wireless connectivity to the SuperDuino, as well. What can you do with it? As you can see above you can embed the device into a watch or use it as a mini-display for a sensor. It can also work as a mini oscilloscope and, most important, it runs Flappy Bird. Created by Mohsin Farooq the project has already surpassed its funding goal and has about 23 days left before the end of crowdfunding. It’s a clever, cool little product and could be useful for wearables experimenters and micro-Flappy Bird fans.

Here you have it – our ultimate list of must-have Mac apps. From email clients to system utilities, time savers to productivity boons; on this page you’ll find the best Mac software used by MakeUseOf staff and readers alike. This list is updated on a regular basis, so be sure to add your favourites in the comments and we’ll consider them the next time we update this page. Last updated: November 30, 2014 Navigation: Audio, Browsers, Email, News, Virtualization, Photos & Images, Productivity, Code & Text Editors, Writing, Timesavers, Security & Privacy, System Tools, Video & Others Audio Audacity An open-source, cross-platform audio editor that can handle most common audio tasks without breaking the bank. Soundflower A completely free kernel extension for OS X that allows you to pass audio between applications, by acting as a virtual audio device. Essential for recording system audio when paired with Audacity (above). Spotify Read More

A new advance in credit card theft technology has hit the streets and it’s pretty clever. The ATM hackers are now drilling a small hole near the card reader and inserting a bit of electronics that connects to the ATM’s innards. The hole is then covered by a decal and the skimmer fished out once the thieves are ready to take in their haul. Discovered by the European ATM Security Team, the new skimmers are not physically attached to the outside of the machine and instead are hidden inside, out of sight. Writes Brian Krebs: I sought clarification from EAST about how the device works. Most skimmers are card slot overlay devices that work by using a built-in component which reads the account data off of the magnetic stripe when the customer inserts the card. But Lachlan Gunn, EAST’s executive director, suggested that this device intercepts the card data from the legitimate card reader on the inside of the ATM. He described the wiretapping device this way:“It’s where a tap is attache...