Month: September 2016

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According to officials tasked with keeping the US homeland safe, tape should be the first supply atop everybody's safety list.

Tape made its modern-day US security debut in February 2003, when the George W. Bush administration raised the terror alert level to "orange." The Department of Homeland Security soon urged Americans to have plenty of duct tape and plastic sheeting on hand to seal their windows in the event a "dirty bomb" was discharged.

Today, that leftover tape can now help us stave off a webcam hack—at least an attack that secretly films unsuspecting computer users. That's what James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said Wednesday. In April, he told Americans that he puts tape on his webcam. Now it's your turn.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

In June, Microsoft started to make aggressive claims about the battery life of its Edge browser, especially in streaming media scenarios. Opera fought back, claiming that its battery saver mode pushed it ahead of Microsoft's browser. With the release of Chrome 53, Google is claiming substantial improvements in battery life, too.

Microsoft isn't willing to drop the battery life issue, however, and the company has published new scores that show the latest version of Edge in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update maintains a considerable advantage, at least in the company's Netflix-based streaming media test. Playing a video repeatedly, Edge lasted 527 minutes, compared to 429 minutes in Opera with battery saver, 365 in Chrome 53, and a measly 312 in Firefox 48.

The testing also suggested that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update itself may be helping computers use less power. The difference wasn't great, but Opera 39 on the Anniversary Update beat Opera 38 on the 2015 Fall Update, suggesting that the operating system is being more frugal.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

The two Republican members of the Federal Communications Commission have refused to give Congress documents needed to complete an investigation into the FCC's net neutrality rulemaking process, according to a lawmaker.

"Your refusal to cooperate with the Committee's request is unacceptable, it obstructs our investigation, and it prevents the Committee from having a complete or accurate understanding of the circumstances surrounding this rulemaking," US Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) wrote in a letter to FCC Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly yesterday.

There are "serious questions" about "Pai's efforts to organize opposition to the proposed rule with outside parties," Cummings' office said in a related press release.

(credit: Social media, via China Daily)

China's Mid-Autumn Festival started today, as much of the world now knows due to a runaway inflatable moon incident reported yesterday (as seen below). Celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Han calendar—corresponding to the full moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox—the holiday is commemorated in Chinese culture through the exchange and sharing of moon cakes.

The cakes are round pastries filled with lotus seed paste or red bean paste and occasionally the salted yolk of a duck egg surrounded by a thin crust. They are traditionally given as presents by businesses and are in huge demand in much of China and in Chinese communities around the world leading up to the festival. And that's likely what drove four employees of the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba to exploit a weakness in an internal company website offering discounted mooncakes to company staff.

Alibaba offered its employees one free mooncake each—complete with a plush Alibaba mascot hidden inside, rather than the traditional duck yolk. Additional cakes were sold at cost to employees for friends and family through an internal e-commerce page. But as China Daily reports, the four employees—software engineers at the company—were able to surreptitiously insert additional software into the website, directing extra mooncakes to themselves. Alibaba's internal security team detected the hack and found that the four were "cheating using technology" to amass 124 boxes of the cakes (with four cakes per box). All four employees were dismissed.