Month: December 2016

Jurors in a Charleston, South Carolina, courtroom said Friday they were deadlocked on whether to convict a white South Carolina police officer on trial for shooting an African-American man in the back. The video taken last year by a passerby was viewed online millions of times.

Michael Slager (credit: YouTube)

Defense attorneys for Michael Slager, a 35-year-old North Charleston officer, called for a mistrial in the murder case, while the judge has ordered the 12-member panel to continue deliberating. All the while, a single juror wrote a note to the presiding judge that he or should could not, "in good conscience, approve a guilty verdict."

"You have a duty to make every reasonable effort to reach a unanimous verdict," Judge Clifton Newman told panelists, who began hearing the case a month ago. The jury began deliberating Wednesday.

Enlarge / Tom Price, R-Ga., speaks at a signing ceremony for the "Restoring Americans Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015" at the US Capitol in Washington in 2016. Rep. Price, who is also a physician, is the sponsor of the legislation, which is designed to eliminate key parts of President Barack Obama's health care law and stop taxpayer funds from going to Planned Parenthood. (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly )

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of six-term Congress member Tom Price (R-Ga.) for secretary of health and human services has inflamed the medical community bigly this week, causing widespread and bitter infighting.

Price is not a particularly shocking pick by Trump—the Congressman is one of the fiercest Obamacare critics, and Trump vowed during his campaign to quickly repeal and replace the mammoth healthcare law. Beyond that, Price, a former orthopedic surgeon, has maintained strong conservative positions on healthcare policy. He opposes abortion rights and regulations on tobacco, for instance. But he also belongs to a small, fringe, ultra-conservative and conspiracy-laden group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). Among other things, this group decries evidence-based medicine, Medicare, and Medicaid, plus it has peddled discredited, dangerous notions including that vaccines cause autism.

In light of some or all of those facts, many in the medical community were left aghast and fuming by support of Price’s nomination from top medical associations, namely the powerful American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). In the past few days, thousands of doctors have signed letters and petitions, condemned the groups’ support, and publicly quit the AMA. The hashtag #NotMyAMA has gathered steam on Twitter.

Enlarge (credit: ellenm1)

For almost three months, Internet-of-things botnets built by software called Mirai have been a driving force behind a new breed of attacks so powerful they threaten the Internet as we know it. Now, a new botnet is emerging that could soon magnify or even rival that threat.

The as-yet unnamed botnet was first detected on November 23, the day before the US Thanksgiving holiday. For exactly 8.5 hours, it delivered a non-stop stream of junk traffic to undisclosed targets, according to this post published Friday by content delivery network CloudFlare. Every day for the next six days at roughly the same time, the same network pumped out an almost identical barrage, which is aimed at a small number of targets mostly on the US West Coast. More recently, the attacks have run for 24 hours at a time.

While the new distributed denial-of-service attacks aren't as powerful as some of the record-setting ones that Mirai participated in, they remain plenty big, especially for an upstart botnet. Peak volumes have reached 400 gigabits per second and 200 million packets per second. The attacks zero in on level 3 and level 4 of a target's network layer and are aimed at exhausting transmission control protocol resources.

Enlarge / The iPad Air 2 and Mini 4. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's Activation Lock feature, introduced in iOS 7 in 2013, deters thieves by associating your iPhone and iPad with your Apple ID. Even if a thief steals your device, puts it into Recovery Mode, and completely resets it, the phone or tablet won't work without the original user's Apple ID and password. This makes stolen iDevices less valuable since they become more difficult to resell, and it has significantly reduced iPhone theft in major cities.

The feature has been difficult to crack, but a new exploit disclosed by Vulnerability Lab security analyst Benjamin Kunz Mejri uses a buffer overflow exploit and some iPad-specific bugs to bypass Activation Lock in iOS 10.1.1.

When you're setting up a freshly-reset iPad with Activation Lock enabled, the first step is to hit "Choose Another Network" when you're asked to connect to Wi-Fi. Select a security type, and then input a very, very long string of characters into both the network name and network password fields (copying and pasting your increasingly long strings of characters can speed this up a bit). These fields were not intended to process overlong strings of characters, and the iPad will gradually slow down and then freeze as the strings become longer. During one of these freezes, rotate the tablet, close its Smart Cover for a moment, and then re-open the cover. The screen will glitch out for a moment before displaying the Home screen for a split second, at which point a well-timed press of the Home button can apparently bypass Activation Lock entirely (but it will have to be extremely well-timed, since the first-time setup screen will pop back up after a second).

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's 12 days of deals holiday season promotion starts at 12am Pacific on Monday, December 5. Each day has a different special offer, and some of the savings sound pretty big.

On two different days, including the opening Monday, certain systems will be discounted by as much as $1,000. Certain Dell machines will be discounted by as much as 40 percent on the 11th day of the promotion, and on the last day, Microsoft is cutting up to $200 off the Surface Pro 4 while throwing in a free $159 Type Cover.

There will be promotions covering tablets, laptops, Xbox One consoles, games, and even the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift VR headsets at various times through the month. Offers will be available online and in-store while stocks last, with the promotion of the day changing at midnight Pacific each day.