October 2018 – Page 93 – news.buyenne.com

Major US telecom was infiltrated by backdoored Supermicro hardware, Bloomberg says

As skepticism reaches a fever pitch, news service reports new supply-chain attack.

Five days after Bloomberg stunned the world with still-unconfirmed allegations that Chinese spies embedded data-sniffing chips in hardware used by Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies, the news organization is doubling down. Bloomberg is now reporting that a different factory-seeded manipulation from the previously described one was discovered in August inside the network of a major US telecommunications company.

Bloomberg didn't name the company, citing a non-disclosure agreement between the unnamed telecom and the security firm it hired to scan its data centers. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile all told Ars they weren't the telecom mentioned in the Bloomberg post. Verizon and CenturyLink also denied finding backdoored Supermicro hardware in their datacenters, Motherboard reported.

Tuesday’s report cites documents, analysis, and other evidence provided by Yossi Appleboum, who is co-CEO of a hardware security firm called Sepio Systems. Bloomberg said that, while Sepio was scanning servers belonging to the unnamed telecom, the firm detected unusual communications from a server designed by Supermicro. Supermicro, according to last week’s Bloomberg report, is the hardware manufacturer whose motherboards were modified in the factory to include a tiny microchip that caused attached servers to come under the control of a previously unreported division of China’s People’s Liberation Army. Supermicro told Bloomberg it had no knowledge of the implant, marking the second time the hardware maker has denied knowing anything about the reported manipulations.

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Daily Deals (10-09-2018)

Google’s new Pixel Slate tablet and Pixel 3 smartphones are on their way… and so is the company’s first smart display, the upcoming Google Home Hub. The $149 Home Hub is a smart speaker with a touchscreen display that can provide visu…

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Google’s newest $35 Chromecast supports 60fps video, multi-room audio

As expected, Google is giving its entry-level Chromecast media streamer a small spec bump. The 2018 Chromecast is a little faster than the model Google has been selling since 2015 and it adds a few new features. But the $35 media streamer may be a bit …

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Google launches Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL for $799 and up

Google’s new smartphones are up for pre-order today. The Google Pixel 3 features a 5.5 inch display with an 18:9 aspect ratio and a starting price of $799, while the Pixel 3 XL has a 6.3 inch display with an 18.5:9 aspect ratio, a notch, and an $…

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Google Call Screening: a personal robot that talks to, hangs up on spam calls

Launching on Pixel 3 family in US, coming to other Pixel phones “next month.”

As expected, Google's Tuesday hardware announcement event came with a few announcements of software- and AI-driven features and products. One of those, like last year's Duplex, sees Google handling phone calls on your behalf. This time, instead of targeting businesses and restaurants, Google is aiming its robots' lasers at robocalls and phone spam.

Google Call Screening, which will debut on the new Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL phones in the US, has been announced as an "on-device" feature (as opposed to something driven by Duplex) that phone users can turn on when a phone call arrives from an unrecognized number. This will pick up the call and have a Google Assistant voice speak a prompt:

"Hi, the person you're calling is using a screening service from Google, and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name, and why you are calling."

Whatever the caller says in response will appear as a voice-to-text translation on the phone screen. At that point, Pixel phone users can elect to pick up the call, offer a robo-spoken response like "who is this?" or "I'll call you back," or mark the caller's number as spam. In the demo's case, the caller describes a contest for an "all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii." The demo didn't appear to offer any context-sensitive responses to the spam in question.

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$79 Google Pixel Stand turns Pixel 3 into a smart display (while charging it)

Google’s new Pixel Stand is a wireless charging accessory for the company’s new Pixel 3 series smartphones. But charging your phone is only the tip of the iceberg. When a Pixel 3 is charging in its stand, you can also use the phone like a s…

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Pixel 3 und Pixel 3 XL im Hands on: Googles Smartphones mit verbesserten Kamerafunktionen

Google hat das Pixel 3 und das Pixel 3 XL vorgestellt. Bei beiden neuen Smartphones legt das Unternehmen besonders hohen Wert auf die Kamerafunktionen. Mit viel Software-Raffinessen sollen gute Bilder auch unter widrigen Umständen entstehen. Die ersten…

Voice-Phishing: Telefonbetrug wird immer ausgefeilter

Einen warnenden Anruf der Bank, unter der echten Telefonnummer, kann auch Menschen mit technischem Hintergrund zur Preisgabe sensibler Daten bringen. Der Journalist Brian Krebs berichtet von mehreren Fällen. (Phishing, Onlinewerbung)

Share With Care: Danish ISP Blocks Point ‘Pirates’ to Legal Alternatives

In Denmark, prominent Internet providers are blocking access to hundreds of pirate sites. With an updated blocking page that launched today, ISPs, rightsholders, and the authorities hope to convert more pirates to legal consumers. The “Share With Care” campaign now adds a dedicated film search engine, pointing visitors to legal sources.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Denmark was among the first countries where The Pirate Bay was blocked, now more than ten years ago.

A lot has changed since then. At the moment, major Danish ISPs are preventing subscribers from accessing roughly 300 pirate sites, and this list is far from complete.

Aside from expanding the list of sites, the parties involved also realized that blocking is not the end goal. Ideally, pirates should be directed toward legal services. This way they can still enjoy the content, with more money flowing to the makers.

To facilitate this process several stakeholders, including the Danish Ministry of Culture, anti-piracy group RettighedsAlliancen, the Telecom Industry Association, and the Confederation of Danish Industry, are introducing a new landing page for blocked users today.

The new landing page coincides with the relaunch of the “Share With Care” campaign, which now includes the custom film and TV search engine FilmFinder. This offers blocked users the option to easily find legal alternatives, if these are available.

RettighedsAlliancen CEO Maria Fredenslund informs TorrentFreak that it’s a top priority to protect the rights of creators, but that this effort doesn’t stop at simply blocking pirates.

“Through the promotion of legal services, the goal of Share With Care is not only to stop traffic to illegal pages but also to move them to legal services. Today, there are plenty of legal services and products that offer the experiences users are searching for,” she says.

The new landing page

According to estimates from SimilarWeb, there were nearly 600 million Danish visits to pirate sites in 2017. This shows that the pirate audience is still massive. With the “Share With Care” campaign the parties hope to curb this trend.

Jakob Willer, Director of the Telecom Industry Association, notes that Internet providers prefer this educational approach over the legal threat campaigns that swept the country earlier this year.

“We do not believe that wagging index fingers or threats of lawsuits work. The role of telecommunications companies, therefore, is to guide our users toward legal content, while we vigilantly safeguard that blocking takes place on a clear juridical foundation.

“With the Share With Care campaign, we have found good, balanced path based on cooperation among the most important stakeholders in the field,” Willer adds.

While the new landing page and the FilmFinder site are certainly educational, the question is whether they will prove sufficient.

There is no denying that there are a lot of legal options out there, but with the increased fragmentation of online video, people may need to sign up with more than a handful of services to access everything.

Many pirates are avid legal consumers already, but legal options have their limits when it comes to affordability and convenience, especially when compared to pirate alternatives.

We have highlighted this several times in the past and just recently it was suggested as a potential explanation for why BitTorrent traffic is making a comeback.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Google Pixel Slate coming this year for $599 and up

Google has unveiled its first new tablet since the 2015 Pixel C… except this time it’s not an Android tablet, it’s a Chrome OS tablet (that also happens to run Android apps). The Google Pixel Slate is a premium tablet with a 3,000 x 2…

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