Month: August 2018

Enlarge / A sign for the Sinclair Broadcast buildings seen on October 12, 2004 in Hunt Valley, Maryland. (credit: Getty Images | William Thomas Cain)

Tribune Media Company today terminated its merger agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group and sued Sinclair for breach of contract.

Tribune's move to kill the merger comes three weeks after the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously against approving Sinclair's proposed acquisition of Tribune Media.

There was still a slim chance that Sinclair could save the merger because the FCC referred the deal to an administrative law judge. But Tribune announced today "that it has filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court against Sinclair for breach of contract. The complaint seeks compensation for all losses incurred as a result of Sinclair's material breaches of the merger agreement."

(credit: Steve Rhodes)

Apple will continue to allow the InfoWars mobile app on its App Store even after removing almost all of the podcast episodes associated with Alex Jones' conspiracy-theory website from its platforms. The iPhone maker released a statement to BuzzFeed News explaining its decision to allow the InfoWars app to remain downloadable from its store.

"We strongly support all points of view being represented on the App Store, as long as the apps are respectful to users with differing opinions, and follow our clear guidelines, ensuring the App Store is a safe marketplace for all," the company's statement said. "We continue to monitor apps for violations of our guidelines and if we find content that violates our guidelines and is harmful to users we will remove those apps from the store as we have done previously."

The decision comes after Apple removed five out of the six InfoWars podcasts from iTunes and its other platforms for violating its hate-speech rules. Apple did not host the InfoWars content, but anyone with an Apple device could find and download the podcast episodes through Apple services. However, after that removal, some were perplexed when Apple didn't remove the InfoWars app as well.

Enlarge (credit: Emergency Vehicles)

In late 2016, security researcher Justin Shattuck was on assignment for an organization that was under a crippling denial-of-service attack by a large number of devices, some of which appeared to be hosted inside the network of a large European airport. As he scanned the airport’s network from the Internet—and later, with the airport operators’ permission, from inside the network—he was eventually able to confirm that the devices were indeed part of several previously unseen botnets that were delivering record-setting denial-of-service attacks on websites.

One of the infected devices was a wireless gateway from Sierra Wireless. Authorized IT administrators used it to connect to the airport network in the event that primary connection methods failed. Surprised that such a sensitive piece of equipment could become a foot soldier in a denial-of-service attack, Shattuck began to investigate. What he found shocked him. Not only did an Internet scan show that 40,000 such gateways were running in other networks, but a large percentage of them were exposing a staggering amount of sensitive data about the networks they were connected to.

Affecting human life

Worse still, it turned out that many of the unsecured gateways were installed in police cars, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles. Not only were the devices openly broadcasting the locations of these first responders, but they were also exposing configurations that could be used to take control of the devices and, from there, possibly control dash cameras, in-vehicle computers, and other devices that relied on the wireless gateways for Internet connections.