Month: October 2016

Enlarge (credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images News)

Hundreds of people in Mumbai, India have been detained in relation to a massive telephone scam where fake callers "from the IRS" targeted Americans. In said calls, scammers tried to convince recipients that they were from the IRS in order to con victims into forking over thousands of dollars payable via prepaid credit cards.

According to The Guardian, 200 Indian police officers raided nine locations across one of India’s largest cities.

"Seventy workers have been formally arrested and around 630 others are being investigated," Paramvir Singh, the police commissioner of Thane, told the British newspaper. "We expect that many more people will be arrested."

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Update 2: Google agrees! The company told Ars "OS updates and monthly security patches will be updated on all Pixel devices (Verizon and non-Verizon versions) simultaneously."

Update: A Verizon spokesperson has reached out to Ars with the following corrections about its version of the Pixel:

"First and foremost, all operating system and security updates to the Pixel devices will happen in partnership with Google. In other words, when Google releases an update, Verizon phones will receive the same update at the same time (much like iOS updates). Verizon will not stand in the way of any major updates and users will get all updates at the same time as Google.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to share ahead of Columbus Day next week. Now you can get a Dell XPS tower desktop, featuring a Core i7 processor and support for a full size video card up to 225W, for just $705. There's also a great deal on an Alienware laptop: you can get the Alienware 15 R2 laptop with 4K support and GTX 980 graphics for $1,399, which is the lowest price we've seen on a laptop of this kind.

Check out the full list of deals below, which includes 4K TVs, laptops, games, smart home devices, and more.

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Fake bear dump. (credit: Stewart Butterfield)

A pattern of mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and outright alteration of breached data has emerged in two of the latest headline-grabbing batches of hacked files. Investigators discovered that recently published data from anti-doping testing at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro had been altered by parties connected to a Russia-based hacking group behind the breach, according to a report issued by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) yesterday.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) dump, released by a group calling itself "Fancy Bears," was found by WADA's incident response team to contain altered information. "WADA has determined that not all data released by Fancy Bear (in its PDF documents) accurately reflects [Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS)] data," a spokesperson for WADA wrote in a post on the investigation. The attackers gained access by stealing ADAMS credentials through "spear phishing" e-mails sent to IOC officials who owned the accounts. The attack was similar to the e-mails sent to DNC and Clinton campaign officials earlier this year.

This fits into a pattern tied to recent hacks by "Fancy Bear" and other groups—organizations that researchers and government authorities believe are connected in some way to the Russian intelligence community—being used for misinformation. Some of the data in the initial Democratic National Committee "dump" by the entity calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 was revealed to have been altered, and that leaked metadata indicated files had been edited by someone who spoke Russian. While the latest "leak" from Guccifer 2.0 allegedly against the Clinton Foundation's network contains no such smoking guns, the metadata does exist and suggest data came from previous "Fancy Bear" breaches at the DNC and other organizations that used the DNC's network.

Enlarge (credit: Carl Court / Getty Images News)

SAN FRANCISCO—In a Thursday hearing, a federal judge appeared greatly skeptical that Airbnb and other short-term rental websites should be able to halt a new local law imposed by the city and county of San Francisco that would require the company to verify listings with the city first.

"How does facilitating the rental of an unregistered short-term unit constitute a lawful transaction?" US District Judge James Donato asked of Jonathan Blavin, an attorney representing Airbnb.

As Ars reported previously, the new 2016 San Francisco law expands upon a previous ordinance that Airbnb itself helped initially draft. That ordinance requires hosts to have registration numbers and pay a $50 fee for the privilege. (According to NBC Bay Area that fee will rise to $250 next month.) The ordinance is designed to provide the city with additional revenue and to help regulate housing stock in a city where the median one-bedroom apartment rent is over $3,800—one of the highest in the nation.

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Imagine a futuristic society in which robots are deployed to everybody's house, fulfilling a mission to scan the inside of each and every residence. Does that mental image look far-off and futuristic? Well, this week's Yahoo e-mail surveillance revelations perhaps prove this intrusive robot scenario has already arrived in the digital world.

Days ago, Reuters cited anonymous sources and reported that Yahoo covertly built a secret "custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming e-mails for specific information." Yahoo, the report noted, "complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI."

Reuters then followed up, saying Yahoo acted at the behest of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Not to be outdone, The New York Times reported Yahoo used its system designed to scan for child pornography and spam to search for messages containing an undisclosed "signature." The Times said a FISA judge found probable cause to believe that this digital signature "was uniquely used by a foreign power." The scanning has ceased, the report noted, but neither of the news agencies said how long the search lasted and when it began.

Enlarge / A Fujitsu Lifebook. (credit: Fujitsu)

Japanese media are reporting that Chinese PC giant Lenovo is in talks with Fujitsu to buy its ailing PC business.

In the early 2000s, Fujitsu was one of the top 5 PC makers globally. Today, it's a loss-making enterprise that's seen its market eroded by smartphones and tablets. The margins have squeezed, and IT conglomerate Fujitsu has been working to offload its non-core businesses and improve profitability. The company spun off its PC division as a separate business in February, a move that's typically a precursor to a sale or other major restructuring option.

Fujitsu was initially hoping for a three-way merger with Vaio (Sony's former PC business, split off in 2014) and Toshiba's PC division. These talks collapsed after none of the companies involved wanted to hold a controlling stake, leading Fujitsu to enter discussions with Lenovo. The Beijing firm is promising to maintain existing factories and jobs, which will see around 2,000 people making the move to the Chinese company.