Widow Told To Get Court Order For Apple Password

A widow who wanted to use her dead husband's Apple account to play games on her iPad was told that she could not have the password without getting a court order.

Dutch arrest 10 men suspected of using Bitcoin to launder money

Ten men suspected of using the digital currency Bitcoin to launder up to 20 million euros ($22 million) of criminal money made from online drug deals have been arrested in the Netherlands, Dutch prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Insight: Electric vehicle sales fall far short of Obama goal

Back in 2008, with gas prices averaging nearly $4 a gallon, President Barack Obama set a goal of getting one million plug-in electric vehicles on the roads by 2015.
Since then, his administration has backed billions of dollars in EV subsidies for consumers and the industry.

Microsoft launches wearable technology in Australia targeting Fitbit, Apple and Samsung

THE world’s biggest software company will launch wearable technology in Australian stores tomorrow, and it has the big names in fitness tracking and smartwatches in its sights.

Report Links Tech Firms to Child Labor

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), children as young as seven are reportedly put to work in "perilous conditions," mining cobalt for use in lithium-ion batteries.
"The glamourous shop displays and marketing of state-of-the-art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks, and miners in narrow man-made tunnels risking permanent lung damage," Amnesty International researcher Mark Dummett said in a statement.

Man uses Fitbit to show how a break-up affected his heart rate

Israeli entrepreneur found his heart rate spiked right after his partner broke up with him

When Israeli entrepreneur Koby Soto answered a call from his partner, he wasn't expecting his relationship to end. But it did, and his Fitbit was able to capture his shock.

Turns out his heart responded to the traumatic event by spiking up to nearly 118 beats per minute. His resting heart rate that morning was 72 beats per minute, where lower resting heart rates usually imply greater cardiac efficiency.

Soto was able to track his spiked heart rate through his Fitbit Charge HR, which he has worn regularly for five months.

read more : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/12109825/Man-uses-Fitbit-to-show-how-a-break-up-affected-his-heart-rate.html

Largest ever prime number discovered has 22 million digits

1, which has 22 million digits.
A computer in Missouri has uncovered the world's largest prime number ever seen by humans. The number is 2

Even the least mathematical among us will likely remember that prime numbers are special. Their key characteristic is that they can only be divided by one and themselves. But they are also used as security keys in computer cryptography.

  There are an infinite amount of prime numbers, so there is no such thing as the biggest one - but the latest discovery is the largest known to man. Larger prime numbers are increasingly rare, which is why mathematicians are competing to find them.

Apple’s iOS 9.3 update tackles screen-related insomnia with ‘Night Shift’ [UPDATED]

Update: iOS 9.3 has begun showing up on the public beta channel. Even if you’re not a paying iOS developer, you can finally try out all of the new features in Apple’s latest preview build. And if everything goes smoothly, iOS 9.3 will likely make it to the stable branch in the next couple of weeks. The original article continues below.
Apple has released the first beta of iOS 9.3. Historically, the company has been slow to roll out user-facing features, but it seems that the folks at Cupertino are moving a bit faster these days. Not only will this point-release have a handful of meaningful tweaks to existing apps, but there are two new major features that could change how many of us use our phones and tablets.

Gadget Ogling: Baring Souls, Soaking Up Sound, and Tracking Babes

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that sips a warm cocoa while delving through the latest gadget announcements and recovering from the CES barrage.It seems most manufacturers went back into hibernation after revealing myriad new gadgets at CES, so here's a look at some of the other gizmos that caught my eye from the event: a tracker that counts the time you spend with others, an all-in-one soundbar, and a baby monitor you can check using a smartphone.
As always, the ratings denote only how much I'd like to try each. They are by no means reviews, as I haven't laid eyes on any of these items in the physical world.

Phishing Attack Could Net LastPass Credentials

Free E-Mail News Alerts from ECT News Network
Keep up with the latest breaking business and technology news from ECT News Network. Receive real-time alerts as stories break -- or a daily version dispatched once each day. Easily add or eliminate keywords and modify service right from your inbox. Target your news today!

LastPass has boosted security for its users after a security researcher alerted the company of a phishing attack he devised to steal users' login and two-factor authentication credentials.

Sean Cassidy, CTO of Praesidio, demonstrated the phishing attack, which he calls "LostPass," last week at ShmooCon.
LostPass works like this: Users are lured to a malicious website, at which time a bogus LastPass notification is displayed. It deceives users into believing they've logged off the service and requests they login again.
When users enter their master password and two-factor authentication data, if they have 2FA turned on, the fraudster captures the data and can control the account.
"We think this is a very serious problem for two main reasons," said Praesidio CEO Edgardo Nazario.
"First, LastPass is a very popular password manager," he told TechNewsWorld. "Second, the phishing attack we uncovered is fairly simple to implement and execute."

Security Bolstered

Once an account has been compromised, Nazario said, an attacker can download all of a user's information.
Moreover, the intruder can create a backdoor into the account through LastPass's emergency contact feature, as well as disable two-factor authentication and add to the account a trusted device that belongs to the attacker, he noted.
After consulting with Cassidy, LastPass made a number of changes to foil anyone trying to duplicate his work in the wild, among them changing its verification requirements when an account is being accessed from a new location or device.
Now email verification is the default for all users, including those with two-factor authentication activated. So if fraudsters do steal a user's credentials, they would still need to access the user's email account to complete the login process.
"By requiring verification for unknown locations or devices, we've ensured users are protected from this attack," LastPass Marketing Manager Amber Gott Steel told TechNewsWorld.

Familiar Vector

Broadly speaking, the LastPass phishing scheme is a familiar one.
"This is essentially like any phishing attack on a bank or other Web service," said Andrew Sudbury, co-founder and CTO of Abine. "You show people a fake login screen and get them to log in."
However, what makes this a little more difficult for users is that the login screen appears on top of a Web page and doesn't display a URL, "so it's not as easy to tell if there's something fishy about it," he told TechNewsWorld.
"Anything that tries to do authentication on top of a Web page is more vulnerable because it's harder to tell if it's coming from the right site," Sudbury added.
Although Cassidy chose LastPass to demonstrate his phishing attack, it could be modified easily to compromise users of other sites.
"In theory, every Web-based application can be the target of a similar attack, including other password managers," said Giovanni Vigna, co-founder and CTO of Lastline.

Savvy Fools

"As Web applications become more secure, cybercriminals switch their focus from hacking the application to hacking the user," he told TechNewsWorld.
Users who might fall victim to a LastPass attack are "sophisticated enough to use a password manager, but also not paranoid enough to catch the fake websites you must visit to fall into the LostPass trap," noted Jonathan Sander, vice president of product strategy for Lieberman Software.
Users should pay attention to where requests for sensitive information are coming from, Lastline's Vigna cautioned.
"Every time a browser requests security-critical information, the user should clearly determine the provenance of such a request. If provenance cannot clearly be determined, then the information should not be provided," he said.
"Of course, this is difficult to achieve, as we are always rushing through pages, prompts and pop-up boxes," Vigna added.

Browser Risks

The LastPass attack is an example of the expanding security risk Web browsers pose to consumers, Lieberman's Sander told TechNewsWorld.
"The same flexibility that's making the Internet grow is also creating risk," he said.
"People love that they can do more and more in their browsers," Sander observed, "but browser-based everything means attackers can use the browser people are so accustomed to as a way to fool them."

read more : http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Phishing-Attack-Could-Net-LastPass-Credentials-82999.html

In Apple patent spat, Samsung rides a new wave of support

Samsung's got some new friends in its legal battle against Apple -- including farmers, African American small businesses and an electronics retailer.
Legal experts, nonprofit organizations and technology companies have filed amicus, or "friend of the court," briefs in support of Samsung, urging the US Supreme Court to consider the patent-infringement case. They want the nation's highest court to better define design patents and limit the damages that can be awarded. And they're using Apple v. Samsung as the case that hopefully gets the federal government to enact patent reforms, preventing so-called patent trolls from cashing in on intellectual property.

Netflix shares jump as customers numbers surge

Video-streaming company Netflix said its customer numbers surged more than expected last quarter, sending its US-listed shares up as much as 8% in after hours trading.

The firm said it added a record 5.59 million customers in the three months to December, bringing total member numbers to 74.76 million.
However, it said it missed its forecast for US subscriber growth.
Earlier this month, the firm said it had expanded to 130 more countries.

Microsoft pledges ‘cloud computing for public good'

Computing giant Microsoft has pledged to provide $1bn-worth (£700m) of cloud computing resources to organisations it deems to be working for the "public good".

The resources will be shared out over the next three years to about 70,000 non-profits and 900 university research projects.
In simplest terms, cloud computing is the term given to storing data on the internet, rather than on a local computer.