Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Following the Megaupload bust, the feds took more than 1,000 servers belonging to Carpathia Hosting. The servers, now offline in a climate-controlled facility, held more than 25 petabytes of data. (credit: Getty Images)

It's been more than five years since the government accused Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom of criminal copyright infringement. While Dotcom himself was arrested in New Zealand, US government agents executed search warrants and grabbed a group of more than 1,000 servers owned by Carpathia Hosting.

That meant that a lot of users with gigabytes of perfectly legal content lost access to it. Two months after the Dotcom raid and arrest, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion in court asking to get back data belonging to one of those users, Kyle Goodwin, whom the EFF took on as a client. Goodwin ran OhioSportsNet, and he used Megaupload to store the digital video he recorded of high school sports games. He paid €79.99 ($87.49) for a two-year premium subscription.

Years have passed. The US criminal prosecution of Dotcom and other Megaupload executives is on hold while New Zealand continues with years of extradition hearings. Meanwhile, Carpathia's servers were powered down and are kept in storage by QTS Realty Trust, which acquired Carpathia in 2015.

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After Microsoft officials dismissed evidence that more than 10,000 Windows machines on the Internet were infected by a highly advanced National Security Agency backdoor, private researchers are stepping in to fill the void. The latest example of this open source self-help came on Tuesday with the release of a tool that can remotely uninstall the DoublePulsar implant.

On late Friday afternoon, Microsoft officials issued a one-sentence statement saying that they doubted the accuracy of multiple Internet-wide scans that found anywhere from 30,000 to slightly more than 100,000 infected machines. The statement didn't provide any factual basis for the doubt, and officials have yet to respond on the record to requests on Tuesday for an update. Over the weekend, Below0day released the results of a scan that detected 56,586 infected Windows boxes, an 85-percent jump in the 30,626 infections the security firm found three days earlier.

Both numbers are in the conservative end of widely ranging results from scans independently carried out by other researchers over the past week. On Monday, Rendition Infosec published a blog post saying DoublePulsar infections were on the rise and that company researchers are confident the scan results accurately reflect real-world conditions. Rendition founder Jake Williams told Ars that the number of infected machines is "well over 120k, but that number is a floor."

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

AT&T's deployment of fiber-to-the-home in California has been heavily concentrated in higher-income neighborhoods, giving affluent people access to gigabit speeds while others are stuck with Internet service that doesn't even meet state and federal broadband standards, according to a new analysis.

"Because there is no regulatory oversight of AT&T’s fiber-to-the-home deployment, AT&T is free to choose the communities in which it builds its all-fiber GigaPower network," UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society wrote in a report released today. "Our analysis finds that AT&T has built its all-fiber network disproportionately in higher income communities. If this pattern continues, it has troubling consequences for low- and moderate-income Californians, leaving many without access to AT&T’s gold standard all-fiber network and exacerbating the digital divide."

California households with access to AT&T's fiber service have a median income of $94,208, according to "AT&T's Digital Divide in California," in which the Haas Institute analyzed Federal Communications Commission data from June 2016.

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With Windows 10, Microsoft shook up the long-standing Windows patching model. Instead of producing individual hotfixes for each security flaw and infrequent updates to address non-security issues, Windows 10 has two monthly packages. There's a Security Update—a single update that contains all of a given month's security fixes—and a Cumulative Update that contains all of the security and non-security fixes for a given version of Windows 10.

Microsoft has also retroactively applied this updating approach to Windows 7 and 8.1; those operating systems also have a third package containing only the Internet Explorer security fixes.

With the Creators Update, Microsoft is now adding another monthly package. Starting with Windows 10 1703 only, the company will also offer a cumulative non-security update. This will contain all the non-security fixes released for a given version.

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With Windows 10, Microsoft shook up the long-standing Windows patching model. Instead of producing individual hotfixes for each security flaw and infrequent updates to address non-security issues, Windows 10 has two monthly packages. There's a Security Update—a single update that contains all of a given month's security fixes—and a Cumulative Update that contains all of the security and non-security fixes for a given version of Windows 10.

Microsoft has also retroactively applied this updating approach to Windows 7 and 8.1; those operating systems also have a third package containing only the Internet Explorer security fixes.

With the Creators Update, Microsoft is now adding another monthly package. Starting with Windows 10 1703 only, the company will also offer a cumulative non-security update. This will contain all the non-security fixes released for a given version.

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UPDATE April 27: United Airlines and the roughed-up passenger have agreed to an undisclosed, out-of-court settlement.

Original story from April 25:

Aviation authorities late Monday released police reports about the Kentucky doctor who was violently removed from a United Airlines flight earlier this month. The officers involved painted a picture that differs from the viral videos of the incident taken by other passengers.