Security firm sued for filing “woefully inadequate” forensics report

Hacked casino operator alleges breach continued while Trustwave was investigating.

(credit: ErrantX)

A Las Vegas-based casino operator has sued security firm Trustwave for conducting an allegedly "woefully inadequate" forensics investigation that missed key details of a network breach and allowed credit card thieves to maintain their foothold during the course of the two-and-a-half month investigation.

In a legal complaint filed in federal court in Las Vegas, Affinity Gaming said it hired Trustwave in October 2013 to investigate and contain a network breach that allowed attackers to obtain customers' credit card data. In mid January 2014, Trustwave submitted a report required under payment card industry security rules on all merchants who accept major credit cards. In the PCI forensics report, Trustwave said it had identified the source of the data breach and had contained the malware responsible for it. More than a year later after Affinity was hit by a second credit card breach, the casino operator allegedly learned from Trustwave competitor Mandiant that the malware had never been fully removed.

According to the December, 2015 complaint:

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Cock.li server seized again by German prosecutor, service moves to Iceland

Vincent Canfield: “I will definitely never host anything in Germany ever again.”

(video link)

The administrator of the cock.li e-mail hosting service told Ars on Friday that a second hard drive had been seized from his Bavarian data center by the district attorney for the City of Zwickau in eastern Germany. As a result, he has now moved the service out of Germany and is in the process of restoring it.

cock.li's Vincent Canfield said that he had initially chosen a German data host because the country has a reputation for "good data privacy laws."

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French drug trial turns disastrous, leaving 1 brain dead and 5 hospitalized

Investigation opened on trial involving previously healthy volunteers.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine, pictured, told reporters that she was overwhelmed by the distress of the harmed volunteers. "Their lives have been brutally turned upside down," she said. (credit: Journée Besoin de Gauche)

French authorities opened an investigation on Friday into an early-stage drug trial that went tragically awry, leaving one trial participant brain dead, five hospitalized, and several others with neurological disorders. Of the five hospitalized, three are suspected of having permanent brain damage.

The injured are among a group of otherwise healthy male volunteers participating in a phase I drug trial, which began in June. The trial was testing the safety of an oral medication made by Portuguese drug maker BIAL.

In a statement, BIAL described the drug as a pain medication, specifically an FAAH enzyme inhibitor, but the company provided little other details. Early reports by media suggest that the test drug may be compound BIA 10-2474, which BIAL describes as designed to treat “neurological and psychiatric pathologies.”

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Amazon gets permission to subcontract freight ships from China to the US

The company’s China arm wants to provide logistics—maybe even to third parties.

This week, Amazon China registered to become an “ocean freight forwarder” with the United States Federal Maritime Commission. That means Amazon, one of the largest online retailers in the world, would be able to subcontract companies to ship goods from China to the US.

Because this registration allows Amazon to sell shipment services, Reuters suggests that Amazon might be looking into providing logistics services for third-party companies.

A blog post by freight forwarding company Flexport notes it’s likely that Amazon China filed for this freight contracting registration because Chinese sellers are more enthusiastic about finding American buyers than American sellers are about finding Chinese buyers right now. In addition, American companies shipping to China wouldn’t want to share shipping data and wholesale prices with Amazon, since the company is viewed as a fierce competitor. But for Chinese companies, Amazon is less of a threat, and a freight service provided by Amazon might help them minimize costs when shipping abroad.

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Deals of the Day (1-15-2016)

Deals of the Day (1-15-2016)

Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle won Golden Globes for best actor and best TV show in the musical or comedy categories last weekend… so Amazon is celebrating this week with a promotion. Normally you need an Amazon Prime membership to stream the TV show, but tonight through Sunday night you can stream it for free. […]

Deals of the Day (1-15-2016) is a post from: Liliputing

Deals of the Day (1-15-2016)

Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle won Golden Globes for best actor and best TV show in the musical or comedy categories last weekend… so Amazon is celebrating this week with a promotion. Normally you need an Amazon Prime membership to stream the TV show, but tonight through Sunday night you can stream it for free. […]

Deals of the Day (1-15-2016) is a post from: Liliputing

Croatian cake pirates threatened with lawsuits

If you have Disney characters on your confections, you will be sued.

(credit: Vianey Campos)

As Harlan Ellison once said about Disney, "Nobody fucks with The Mouse." Even if you live in Zagreb, Croatia, the long hand of The Mouse can reach in and change your birthday party plans. That's what several bakers in Zagreb discovered when they received cease-and-desist letters warning them to stop making cakes featuring popular Disney characters from Star Wars, Frozen, and more.

According to Croatian paper Jutarnji, the letters came from a law firm representing the Zagreb chain Fun Cake Factory, which has an exclusive license to make Disney-themed cakes via its partnership with British confectioner Finsbury Food GroupAna Marcelić, a local Zagreb confectioner who received one of the cease-and-desist letters, told the paper it would be a "huge loss" for her financially and difficult to explain to customers requesting Disney-themed cakes.

Apparently Disney has been cracking down on copyright infringing cakes lately. In September of last year, the company hired a law firm to sue Michigan baker Wilson's Wild Cake Creations for making cakes that featured images of "Darth Vader and son." Julie Triedman notes in American Lawyer that Disney and LucasFilm called for the "seizure of 'any molds, screens, patterns, plates, negatives, machinery or equipment used for making' the offending images." The owners of Wilson's Wild Cake Creations filed for bankruptcy in October. That situation wasn't new. Way back in 1992, Disney threatened two Singapore bakeries with lawsuits unless they stopped making cakes based on Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

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Department of Transportation going full speed ahead on self-driving cars

Secretary Foxx wants to develop consistent autonomous car policies across the US.

The world as seen by a self-driving car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

We've been hitting the tech of self-driving cars pretty heavily this week, taking a look at what companies like Audi, BMW, Ford, QNX, and Tesla are doing in the field. But it's looking more and more likely that it's not going to be the technology itself that determines when we'll be able to buy a self-driving car for that morning commute. Instead, all the other stuff—regulations, laws, insurance questions, and society's comfort level—appear ready to own the issue of timing.

At this week's North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced that "in 2016, we are going to do everything we can to promote safe, smart and sustainable, vehicles. We are bullish on automated vehicles." Still, working out how to regulate self-driving cars is far from settled. Each state (well, OK maybe every state but Maryland) has a pretty good idea of how to test young drivers to determine whether they're ready to mix it with the rest of us in traffic. Figuring out how to apply that to a car itself is proving to be more of a challenge. California, for instance, is about to hold a couple of public workshops to get input into its draft regulations on the the matter, and DMVs in other states are being told by their respective legislatures to start working on the problem. Today, there's a real fear in the industry that we could end up with a patchwork of different state laws (something Cars Technica even talked about on the radio yesterday).

Then there's the federal government, where crafting policies, regulations, and guidances can be slow work. Take recent advances in headlight technology for example. Over in Europe, you can now buy cars that use LED lasers to supplement their high-beams. Those lights are intelligent enough to avoid blinding other cars on the road, and they represent a significant safety advantage. But the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for headlights in the US went into effect in 1968 and haven't been updated since. And because they don't make any allowances for anything other than a high beam and a low beam, such systems are illegal here in the US.

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On Wikipedia’s 15th birthday, Ars shares the entries that most fascinate us

From supranational European bodies to Waluigi.

Today is Wikipedia's 15th anniversary. The digital, collaborative encyclopedia has grown quickly and today boasts articles in hundreds of languages. Those articles are managed by 80,000 volunteers who make 15,000 edits an hour according to the site's own statistics.

Over its lifespan Wikipedia has naturally encountered its share of problems: teachers loathe it because it gives lazy students a chance to cut and paste, bias sneaks (or barges) into all manner of topics (as you might expect from a crowd-sourced fact book), and controversy is part of its behind-the-scenes culture. But from the time the site launched in 2001 to today, we've spent an endless amount of time with it. We've learned one thing for sure—Wikipedia remains a good way to get a quick summary on just about any topic you can think of. Thankfully it's also a great way to find references to more reliable sources on said topic.

To celebrate its latest milestone internally, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the launch of a new Wikimedia Endowment which will be used to support Wikipedia's continued growth. The foundation says it hopes to raise more than $100 million over the next 10 years.

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People Sued For Piracy in The U.S. Drops 84% Since 2010

There has been another increase in the number of copyright troll cases filed in the United States. In 2015 so-called John Doe litigation made up almost 58% of all copyright cases, with one company accounting for four out ten filed. However, since 2010 there has also been an 84% reduction in the number of people being targeted.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Faced with an Internet awash with copyrighted movies and music just a few clicks away, some rightsholders have decided to let piracy continue with a view to monetizing it.

One aspect of that approach is the rise of so-called John Doe lawsuits, copyright cases which target individuals said to be responsible for the unlawful sharing of content online. What copyright holders want from these people is a cash settlement, often to the tune of thousands of dollars.

Last year Matthew Sag, Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, published a report titled ‘IP Litigation in United States District Courts: 1994 to 2014′. It provided a review of all IP litigation in U.S. district courts over the past two decades to include copyright, patent and trademark lawsuits.

With 2016 now upon us, Professor Sag has provided an update to include stats from last year. As can be seen from the graph below, in 2010 suits against file-sharers were almost non-existent but year on year grew to dominate all copyright cases filed in the United States.

Indeed, following yet another rise in Doe cases during 2015, this year the record set by the RIAA in 2005 is at risk of being trumped.

johndoe-1

In 2015 John Doe litigation made up almost 58% of all copyright cases filed (2930 cases out of 5076) in the United States. And, in common with recent years, a tiny number of plaintiffs are driving the majority of the action.

“In 2015 [porn company] Malibu Media was still the most significant individual copyright plaintiff in the US; in fact, it filed more suits than ever last year,” the report finds.

Malibu Media accounted for 41.5% of all copyright suits filed in the United States in 2014, and just over 39% in 2015. The slight reduction in share was due to other plaintiffs filing more suits than before.

While Malibu Media’s overall share is impressive, their lawyer Michael Keith Lipscomb is involved in an even greater number of cases.

“Lipscomb also represents two of the other plaintiffs on the top five list for last year — Manny Film and Plastic The Movie Limited — as well as two of the top five from 2014 — Good Man Productions, Inc. and Poplar Oaks, Inc,” the report notes.

This consolidation of legal resources suggests a more cost-effective approach to the volume trolling process. Indeed, considering the number of cases now being filed an industrial approach to the business is almost certainly required.

As column two in the table below shows, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of John Doe suits filed in the past five years, from 77 in 2010 to a staggering 2930 in 2015.

johndoe-2

However, the massive number of suits filed has not resulted in an exponential growth in file-sharers being targeted, quite the opposite in fact. In 2010 a total of 43,124 ISP account holders were targeted in John Doe lawsuits yet last year that had dropped 84% to ‘just’ 6,700.

The report concludes that this fall is a symptom of increasing intolerance by courts towards single cases that target huge numbers of anonymous file-sharers.

“Filing suits [against thousands of IP addresses] enabled plaintiffs to economize on filing fees but courts have become significantly more skeptical of the legality and desirability of mass joinder in BitTorrent cases. Based on the data from 2015, it seems that the era of mass joinder is almost completely over.”

Nevertheless, by now it’s clear that copyright trolling is all about monetization of BitTorrent piracy and the report notes that despite having to file thousands more cases, the business model is still proving profitable for the plaintiffs.

“The filing fee for opening civil action in US district courts is now $400, so that means that plaintiffs associated with Mr Lipscomb have paid at least $936,800 in filing fees over the last year. Given the scale of this enterprise it seems reasonable to infer that Lipscomb and his clients have found a way to effectively monetize online infringement,” the report concludes.

johndoe-3

The report can be downloaded here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop

Google Android may have been developed as a smartphone operating system (and later ported to tablets, TVs, watches, and other platforms), but over the past few years we’ve seen a number of attempts to turn it into a desktop operating system. One of the most successful has been Remix OS, which gives Android a taskbar, […]

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop is a post from: Liliputing

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop

Google Android may have been developed as a smartphone operating system (and later ported to tablets, TVs, watches, and other platforms), but over the past few years we’ve seen a number of attempts to turn it into a desktop operating system. One of the most successful has been Remix OS, which gives Android a taskbar, […]

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop is a post from: Liliputing