Month: February 2016

Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a "blood meal" (credit: US Department of Health and Human Services)

Zika, the mosquito-spread virus sparking outbreaks across the Western Hemisphere and suspected of causing birth defects and neurological problems, has been transmitted through sexual contact in the United States, the Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) reported Tuesday.

A patient was infected via sexual contact with a person who had recently traveled to Venezuela, a country currently experiencing a Zika outbreak, the health department said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the sexual transmission. There is still no evidence that Zika is spreading in US mosquito populations.

“Now that we know Zika virus can be transmitted through sex, this increases our awareness campaign in educating the public about protecting themselves and others,” Zachary Thompson, DCHHS director, said in a press release.

(credit: T-Mobile)

T-Mobile USA has matched Verizon Wireless in a series of crowdsourced speed tests but still trails both Verizon and AT&T in overall network coverage.

The findings come from the company OpenSignal and are based on 377 million data samples from 182,000 users of the OpenSignal Android and iOS apps during the last three months of 2015.

"Verizon is still the operator to beat when it comes to network reliability, but T-Mobile is squaring off against the super-carrier in download speed," OpenSignal wrote. "Nationally both operators are averaging 4G [LTE] connections of 12Mbps, and in a speed comparison in the 11 largest US cities, T-Mobile just barely edged out Verizon. AT&T and Sprint hardly even factored in the contest."

A Maryland judge who ordered a deputy to remotely shock a defendant with a 50,000-volt charge pleaded guilty (PDF) to a misdemeanor civil rights violation in federal court Monday, and he faces a maximum of 1 year in prison when sentenced later this year.

The incident happened in July 2014 during jury selection of case concerning a man accused of carrying a loaded handgun during a police stop the year before, according to a plea agreement with former Charles County Circuit Court Judge Robert Nalley.

Robert Nalley.

Before jurors were brought in, the judge was asking the defendant if he had questions to submit to prospective jurors, who were not yet in the courtroom. Delvon King, the 25-year-old defendant acting as his own attorney, refused to answer several times.

The Electron, an Arduino-compatible controller that just happens to have a GSM cellular connection built in. (credit: Particle)

Particle, a company that makes development kits for wireless Internet of Things applications—formerly known as Spark Devices—is preparing to ship a new board-based computer that will allow developers to use Arduino code to build mobile wireless devices based on GSM cellular connections. The Electron will allow developers to build Internet of Things devices that can connect nearly anywhere in the world where there's a 2G or 3G mobile wireless network.

Electron is the followup to Particle's Photon, a Wi-Fi based device with similar capabilities. Both Photon and Electron can use Arduino "sketch" code or code written in Particle's own development tool. And Particle offers a cloud service that allows developers to scale up their devices to full-production deployments of more than 100,000 devices.

Part of the appeal (and the business model) for Electron is that it comes with its own global data plan. Using an IoT SIM that works on cellular networks in over 100 countries, the Electron's basic data plan starts at $2.99 per month for 1 megabyte of data and 99 cents for each additional megabyte. That's not a lot of data, but Electron is intended mostly for "machine to machine" (M2M) applications, where relatively small messages are sent between the device and the cloud—not for things like streaming video or more consumer-type broadband cellular applications.

With about six months left on Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade promotion, Redmond is stepping up its efforts to get Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users to upgrade to its newest operating system.

Windows Update has three classes of update: important, recommended, and optional. The first category is always downloaded and (if preferred) installed automatically. The last category always requires manual downloading and installation. The middle, "recommended," is by default treated the same as "important," but users can also opt to treat it as equivalent to "optional."

As announced last October, the free Windows 10 update has been promoted from an "optional" update to being a "recommended" one. This means that with the default Windows Update settings, the new operating system will be downloaded automatically, and its installer will be started.

(credit: Jeremy Brooks )

An open source network utility used by administrators and security professionals contains a cryptographic weakness so severe that it may have been intentionally created to give attackers a surreptitious way to eavesdrop on protected communications, its developer warned Monday.

Socat is a more feature-rich variant of the once widely used Netcat networking service for fixing bugs in network applications and for finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities. One of its features allows data to be transmitted through an encrypted channel to prevent it from being intercepted by people monitoring the traffic. Amazingly, when using the Diffie-Hellman method to establish a cryptographic key, Socat used a non-prime parameter to negotiate the key, an omission that violates one of the most basic cryptographic principles.

The Diffie-Hellman key exchange requires that the value be a prime number, meaning it's only divisible by itself and the number one. Because this crucial and most basic of rules was violated, attackers could calculate the secret key used to encrypt and decrypt the protected communications. What's more, the non-prime value was only 1,024 bits long, a length that researchers recently showed is susceptible to cracking by state-sponsored attackers even when prime numbers are used.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals on laptops, desktops, and accessories to share today. One of them makes Black Friday prices look steep—you can get a Dell Inspiron 3000 desktop computer with 16GB of RAM and a 2TB hard drive for just $599. That's nearly half of its original list price of $1,032. Now's the time to upgrade if you're in need of a new desktop, because this price definitely won't last long.

Check out the full list of deals below as well.

Featured

(credit: 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals)

A federal appeals court is upholding lifetime GPS monitoring of a convicted felon, in this instance a Wisconsin pedophile who served time for sexually assaulting a boy and a girl. The court upheld the constitutionality of a Wisconsin law that, beginning in 2008, requires convicted pedophiles to wear GPS ankle devices for the rest of their lives.

A federal judge had sided with the offender, Michael Belleau, now 72. Wisconsin appealed to the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled (PDF) in the state's favor Friday and derided the lower court's ruling as "absurd." Among other things, Belleau said the GPS device violated his privacy because he had served his time and was not on post-prison supervision. The three-judge appeals court did not agree, saying:

When the ankleted person is wearing trousers the anklet is visible only if he sits down and his trousers hike up several inches and as a result no longer cover it. The plaintiff complains that when this happens in the presence of other people and they spot the anklet, his privacy is invaded, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, because the viewers assume that he is a criminal and decide to shun him. Of course the Fourth Amendment does not mention privacy or create any right of privacy. It requires that searches be reasonable but does not require a warrant or other formality designed to balance investigative need against a desire for privacy; the only reference to warrants is a prohibition of general warrants.

The court's reasoning, however, could apply to other criminals who have a propensity to reoffend. The court said that the burden on privacy "must in any event be balanced against the gain to society from requiring that the anklet monitor be worn. It is because of the need for such balancing that persons convicted of crimes, especially very serious crimes such as sexual offenses against minors, and especially very serious crimes that have high rates of recidivism such as sex crimes, have a diminished reasonable constitutionally protected expectation of privacy."