by Alex Goldman
Have your customers been hit? A Russian criminal gang is promising to pay cash to people who cash checks for them – but the checks are skillful forgeries. Details of the operation emerged this week at the Black Hat conference.
Also at Black Hat: a smartphone snooping demo and how to read RFID passports from over 200 feet away.
Perhaps the most talked about Black Hat demo: how to “jackpot” an ATM.
More Black Hat coverage is available from a variety of sources, including Sean Michael Kerner’s blog.
How secure is the smart grid? A SCADA system’s password has been widely available on the internet for years – and that password is hard coded into the system.
Millions have downloaded an app that steals key information on Android phones and sends the data to China.
A pizza chain in New Zealand (called Hell Pizza) suffered a massive data theft.
Business
Ask.com is wisely accepting its role as a niche player answering specific questions.
A FiOS war is coming. A Wall Street Journal blog called FiOS “pretty small” (h/t CG). Elsewhere, the Journal reports that cable is planning big anti-FiOS ad campaigns. FiOS will fight back with better TV offerings. “If as seems likely, Verizon stalls around 30 percent penetration, it will have a hard time competing with big cable and satellite rivals. And that can only reinforce questions about long-term returns on the $23 billion FIOS investment,” the Journal wrote.
A mid-sized cable deal: Knology will buy Sunflower Broadband.
Qwest has a new low price DSL promotion.
Speed tester Ookla has begun ranking ISPs.
Netflix is growing.
What if … Oracle acquired every open source company?
You know that the newspaper business is dead when … the only bullish investor in the industry wants to use old content as fodder for copyright lawsuits.
A searchable directory of 100 million Facebook profiles has been published on Bit Torrent, highlighting Facebook’s ongoing privacy issues. But Facebook users may not care if they don’t value privacy highly. New research suggests that those who have privacy value it, but those who lack it would not pay money to get it.
A lawsuit seeks to ban technology used by major websites such as ESPN and MTV to rebuild deleted cookies by storing them in Adobe’s Flash Player.
Government
The Obama administration wants increased warrantless access to ISP records. Meanwhile, notes Karl Bode, FBI agents are accused of widespread cheating on a test designed to measure their understanding of how to do these warrantless wiretaps legally.
The FCC’s broadband plan must be judged a failure until it enables competition, writes Karl Bode.
The UK’s telco regulator reports that users aren’t getting the speed they pay for. Does the regulator understand the meaning of “best effort”?
The government has re-funded the BIP and BTOP (h/t Victoria Proffer).
Tags: business, government, hacker
