Month: March 2019

Enlarge / A smartphone connected to the Xfinity Mobile service. (credit: Comcast)

A bad security decision by Comcast on the company's mobile phone service made it easier for attackers to port victims' cell phone numbers to different carriers.

Comcast in 2017 launched Xfinity Mobile, a cellular service that uses the Verizon Wireless network and Comcast Wi-Fi hotspots. Comcast has signed up 1.2 million mobile subscribers, but took a shortcut in the system that lets users switch from Comcast to other carriers.

To port a phone line from Comcast to another wireless carrier, a customer needs to know his or her Comcast mobile account number. Carriers generally use PINs to verify that a customer seeking to port a number actually owns the number. But Comcast reportedly set the PIN to 0000 for all its customers, and there was apparently no way for customers to change it. That means that an attacker who acquired a victim's Comcast account number could easily port the victim's phone number to another carrier.

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Amazon reportedly feels confident enough in its grocery-store quests to branch out into new ventures. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon plans to open dozens of new grocery stores that will be distinctly different from the company's Whole Foods Market stores. The retail giant has reportedly already signed leases for some locations and plans to open the new grocery stores in cities across the country, including San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington DC.

But the first city to get a new Amazon grocery store will be Los Angeles. The report claims that Amazon will open that store by the end of this year. Although Amazon has some leases signed already, it doesn't guarantee that the company will open stores in all of those leased locations.

It appears Amazon wants to grab a larger sector of the market by offering a wider variety of items in these new grocery stores than it currently offers at Whole Foods locations. Although the grocer has expanded its offerings since Amazon bought it back in 2017 for $13.7 billion, Whole Foods is generally considered an upper-scale grocery store chain and it continues to have strict food quality standards for the items it carries (no artificial flavor, colors, preservatives, sweeteners, etc).

Enlarge / HBO CEO Richard Plepler at the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, July 11, 2018 in Sun Valley, Idaho. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer)

HBO CEO Richard Plepler announced his resignation yesterday, less than a year after AT&T completed its acquisition of HBO and the rest of Time Warner Inc.

In a company-wide memo available in this Hollywood Reporter story, Plepler told employees that he made the "difficult decision" to leave at "an inflection point in the life of this wonderful company."

Plepler worked at HBO for nearly 28 years, serving as chairman and CEO since 2013 and as co-president from 2007 to 2013. He struck a positive tone in his memo. "Thanks to all of you, we are today churning on all cylinders both creatively and as a business," he wrote. "Thanks to all of you, I can move on to the next chapter of my life knowing that the best team in the industry remains here to carry on our continued progress and success."