Category: Uncategorised

No muni broadband for you. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Tennessee lawmakers have defeated a proposal to expand municipal broadband, with one state representative accusing fellow elected officials of caving to pressure from lobbyists. "It's a testament to the power of lobbying against this bill and not listening to our electorate," Rep. Kevin Brooks (R-Cleveland) told reporters after the vote, according to a Times Free Press article yesterday.

Brooks didn't name lobbyists for any specific companies but said, "I heard they hired 27 lawyers to fight."

Sen. Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) last month blamed AT&T for leading efforts to kill the bill. "We're talking about AT&T," Gardenhire said at the time. "They're the most powerful lobbying organization in this state by far."

Enlarge / By default, Mac OS X allows applications to run only if they are signed with a valid certificate.

There are lots of ways to ensure the success of an advanced hacking operation. For a gang called Suckfly, one of the keys is having plenty of stolen code-signing certificates on hand to give its custom malware the appearance of legitimacy.

Since 2014, the group has used no fewer than nine separate signing certificates from nine separate companies to digitally sign its hacking wares, according to a blog post published Tuesday by security firm Symantec. Company researchers first came upon the group last year when they identified a brute-force server message-block scanner that was signed with a certificate belonging to a South Korean mobile software developer. When the researchers searched for other executable files that used the same credential, they eventually uncovered three more custom tools from the same group of black-hat hackers.

After tracing the hacking group's traffic to IP addresses in Chengdu, China, Symantec researchers ultimately identified a much larger collection of custom-developed backdoors and hacking tool that were signed by nine different certificates from nine different companies. Curiously, all nine of the compromised companies are located within a few miles of each other in Seoul. While the physical proximity is suspicious, the researchers ultimately speculated it was coincidental, and that the certificate theft was most likely the result of the owners being infected with malware that had the ability to search for and extract signing certificates.

This image, first made for the PSN hacking case back in 2011, kind of works for this story, too. Right?

After Monday's surprise announcement that Microsoft was opening the Xbox One up to wider cross-platform play, the only thing standing between a more-unified console multiplayer future is Sony. Now, the PlayStation maker has responded to Microsoft's offer, but in an incredibly vague and hard-to-read way.

"PlayStation has been supporting cross-platform play between PC on several software titles starting with Final Fantasy 11 on PS2 and PC back in 2002,” the company said in a statement issued to Gamespot. “We would be happy to have the conversation with any publishers or developers who are interested in cross-platform play."

On the surface, that statement suggests that Sony is willing to open the doors to the PlayStation Network at least a crack, even if it's not willing to throw those doors as wide open as Microsoft. It sounds like PSN cross-platform access will be granted on a case-by-case basis—perhaps the standards will be different for niche indie titles and the big-budget shooters that really drive PSN's network effects.